Without Google doesn't mean the same thing for everyone. I got a Motorola g moto stylus 2025 and have been running an experiment for almost a year now in which I use this device without ever logging into the device with a Google account. Fdroid and obtainium work flawlessly. Aurora Store works for the most part but some apps won't even let me open them without a play store signed in account which is sad.
My mind immediately went to take a photo of a page from a book and it didn't do so well. I stumbled through the website somehow as I don't speak German. The json looks huge, bigger than my image somehow but the markdown just gave up.
Is there a way to share my input image with the creators of this app? How?
Depending on jurisdiction and taxation, yes. Eg in many places owner-occupied housing is favoured, and might make sense to acquire, even though otherwise it's silly: a single lumpy usually highly levered position; no diversification; multiple times your networth and with very high transaction costs.
I found this just when I googled his name plus controversy
> Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke faced fierce online backlash in July 2026 after endorsing a social media proposal for a tax-tiered voting system that would strip voting rights from non-taxpayers and give multiple votes to high-income earners.
but if we go as far as to say
> If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out.
does it mean control or sponsored, for example ladybird web browser...
That vague posting is a bit frustrating to be honest.
Are you talking about the fact they do not accept pull requests? If yes, they had good reasons for doing so, LLMs make it really time consuming and exhausting to manage an open source community, I completely understand why they decided to stop accepting PRs for now
I know this is preaching to the choir but from the article on the person holding the skimmer
> Police can also use the cameras to surveil protestors and stalk ex-lovers—or strangers they find attractive.
I didn't believe police actually did this until a roommate's new classmate told me her story. She has recently moved in to the neighborhood (an HOA at that). She was walking her dog one evening when a police officer who also lives in the HOA greeted her by her full legal name which she swears she never uses anywhere so the only way someone would know it was if they looked her up. She was just a roommate at this new place so her name wouldn't be in any HOA papers.
The police (or any law enforcement) really should not have access to any kind of dragnet surveillance.
They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones but they want even more surveillance for what?
A little searching will find you all sorts of such hits, like an officer tracking her domestic partner [0], an officer stalking someone after meeting on a TV set* [1], another officer tracking his ex partner [2], another officer tracking his mistress [3]. This is just a random sample.
* Note this scenario was not with Flock, which is important: there's more than one player in this space. Kill Flock and others might roll in; something broader is needed like, oh, I don't know, constitutional protections or something.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that the quality of the average cop in the US has improved since the 1960s, at least by some measures. But they are a lot more heavily armed, so mistakes and malfeasance on their part is deadlier.
The big thing that's changed is that you're hearing about it. The second biggest thing is that we've given cops more and more access to automated systems that they can misuse.
Police are, in the most generous light, just as fallible and likely to abuse power as the rest of us.
You can loosely define power as “Effect minus repercussion”.
Massive effects like the nuclear football have massive repercussions like the end of civilization, so we tend to view them with a degree of balance. MAD has worked on this principle for decades pretty effectively. Even a tiny bit of Effect, with zero Repercussion, leads to unjust abuse, such as the diplomatic immunity issues in New York City.
Nearly everything we have given the police has huge Effect, mostly by necessity, but more every day with tools like flock and the stripping of our rights. Endless military hardware, etc.
Simultaneously we have ALSO been shrinking the repercussions for police. for decades. When sued the taxpayers pay for their defense. When they lose the lawsuits, the taxpayers pay the plaintiffs out and the police very very rarely face prison. Often times they can keep working in another department. They have extra protections nobody else has so they are less likely to lose those cases in the first place. There is next to ZERO oversight of all the tools we give them, to prevent the lawsuits. Federal police can remain anonymous when they commit obvious homicide or executions, apparently.
We are very close to an effectively infinite power situation because there are next to zero repercussions. Even IF cops had no firearms, no armored vehicles, no flock, no palantir. They could still bust the door down to their ex girlfriend’s place and beat up their new boyfriend for any kind of flimsy excuse. Because what are you going to do about it? Sue them? You’re just offering them a free vacation.
We were hearing during the Snowden era about the abuse of NSA systems like XKeyscore and others through what was termed jokingly LOVEINT. Anything that's built will get abused in some way - sometimes its even best not to build such databases at all.
Here's CNN discussing NSA analyst abuse from 13 years ago:
This is 10 years old, but in 2016 the Associated Press did a massive public records request for police departments across the country. Between 2013-2015, they found over 600 cases where the police department actually did an internal investigation, found this kind of misuse, didn't cover it up, and handed over the records. About half of those cases resulted in a firing, suspension, or resignation.
This is clearly an undercount, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 2016.
My only question is why you didn’t believe police could/would do this in the first place? My default perspective is that this is exactly what law-enforcement and other government officials would use this technology to do, especially if there are no guardrails or laws preventing them from abusing it.
> While Flock’s audit logs have been successful in bringing to light certain abuses, that very fact is likely to deter many officers from honestly describing the purposes of their searches moving forward. Take the controversial Texas abortion search. If the officer who logged, "had an abortion, search for female" had just left out the word "abortion” that story never would have seen the light of day. And there’s no doubt that the department — and police around the nation — realize that.
> Our ability to identify officers was clearly effective. In a direct attempt to stop us from providing transparency, Flock and police departments have dropped the unique IDs (UUIDs) in the transparency portals entirely. They now simply replace them with the word “redacted” in the public audit logs, effectively preventing oversight and individual accountability.
> Flock Safety updated the system on 12/11/2025 to protect officer safety and active investigations, Network Audit Logs no longer include officer names, license plate, or vehicle fingerprint information.
Audit logs are only useful if they are used to action abuses. The issue is that police departments protect abusers due to the “thin blue line” mentality.
I'm sure there is an audit log. But because, you know, computers, they'll probably charge you a few thousand dollars to process the FOIA request. If you could get the time cards and GPS tracks from police departments, how much detail and overtime fraud do you think you would find?
I was with you up until the very last line. Why do people imagine that the police are in the business of property retrieval? Once your stuff is stolen in almost all cases it's long LONG gone! Cars are sent to be broken down for parts, tools are sold to fences and so on. The typical thief isn't some mastermind who carefully holds on to what they stole, they rush to their nearest fence or dealer to trade it for what they need.
Police are there to report a crime and add that to area stats, and if the issue is more than a lone junkie then it eventually gets to a detective in whatever the local version of Robbery is.
"They didn't get my stuff back" isn't a realistic criticism, and it detracts from the many other points that are.
This scene from The Big Lebowski is how all cops treat personal property theft cases (They got us working in shifts!): https://youtu.be/N0rOe59wKAc
Save your time and don’t get laughed at behind your back. By all means, report your stolen car but anything smaller than that is a waste of your time and the cops time since they do not care at all.
With a few exceptions, like mob run baggage theft rings at big airports, criminals are not very smart and have pretty poor opsec. Solution rates could be a lot better than they are.
The sort of low-level thieves you're thinking off sold off their ill-gotten gains within a very short time for a fraction of their value, often in a direct trade for drugs. It would be very hard to justify the investment required to prevent that, track the route property takes through handoff networks, and recover it in a form the owner would accept. Given that society suffers from more serious crimes that's generally where effort goes, and that's the result of public demand.
People want to not pay a lot for police, they want them well trained and highly accountable, they want excellent 'customer service', and they want to defund the police all at the same time. Out of this incoherent mess of conflicting desires the compromise is to focus on crime prevention, fighting organized crimes, or crimes against people rather than property as the top priorities.
>They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones
Our local sheriff’s department used Apple’s FindMy to search for my parent’s iPad that had been stolen from their car during a smash and grab. In this case, he found it in the possession of a couple that had found it tossed on the side of the street after the thief had stripped it for cash and credit cards, but it saved them the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one.
Anyways, there’s nothing stopping PDs from searching for stolen electronics. Maybe you should talk to your local city council and ask why yours don’t?
Why don't they instead push for making abuses of law enforcement access illegal? That way we can both catch criminals and missing people along with avoiding abuse.
Those things are illegal, but it still happens because it is so easy and they usually aren't caught. We only hear about the rare instances where something actually happens to the cop doing it, most of the time it is never reported.
This isn't because police are inherently horrible people, it is because they are normal humans.
We all know people who would abuse the ability to track anyone they want. And we also have all seen times at work where employees ignore or cover for another employee breaking the rules, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes because the coworker is a friend, sometimes because of peer pressure, and sometimes just because we don't want the hassle and paperwork and stress of reporting someone for what seems at the time like a minor infraction. And then the next time it happens with a slightly worse infraction, you think, "Well, I didn't report them when the did X, and this isn't that much worse, so ill just keep my mouth shut"
That is just human nature, and it is why sometimes making something illegal isn't enough. You have to make it impossible.
> This isn't because police are inherently horrible people, it is because they are normal humans.
Well, you also have to remember that police aren't selected at random from the population. The kind of guy (or gal) who wants to be a cop is often attracted to the power that the job brings. This sets a culture, which is self-perpetuating, affecting the kind of person who they hire, and how people think once they get in.
A few bad apples spoil the bunch - and boy oh boy, we did not get rid of those bad apples in time. It's not a perfect metaphor, of course, but we've been dealing with constant police corruption issues for at least 50 years now. I feel like we gotta try something new.
Because in the United States, cops are de facto above the law. Either because of qualified (translation: total) immunity or because if you try to enforce the law on them they throw tantrums and work stoppages. Attempting to constrain their behavior with the law is basically useless, so it has to be done on the level of functional capabilities.
Qualified immunity is not total immunity and throwing a tantrum doesn't prevent you from being arrested. There is plenty of body cam footage that attests to that.
> Approximately 4,000 NYPD officers took part in a protest that included blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping over police barricades in an attempt to rush City Hall. Rioters were observed to be openly drinking, damaging cars, and physically attacking journalists from the New York Times on the scene. Rioters also chanted racial epithets towards the African-American Mayor Dinkins. The nearly 300 uniformed on-duty officers did little to control the riot.
> Of the nearly 10,000 participating officers, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly sanctioned 42 of them.
> In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike. Only managers and African-American officers remained on duty, with 45 officers and three fire trucks responsible for a city population of 700,000. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein pleaded Mayor Joseph Alioto to ask Governor Jerry Brown to call out the National Guard to patrol the streets, but Alioto refused. When enraged civilians confronted SFPD officers at the picket lines, the officers arrested them. The strike was joined by the city's firefighters. The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands. The Supervisors unanimously refused. Mayor Alioto immediately then declared a state of emergency, assumed legislative powers, and granted the strikers' demands. City Supervisors and taxpayers sued but the court found that a contract obtained through an illegal strike is still legally enforceable.
Police do not prevent crime and rarely catch criminals, in fact they are often _involved_ in crime. There are scientific approaches to solving crime and larger budgets for more cameras and police tanks is not it.
Also, he and Flock recently boasted on LinkedIn that they are not shipping face-tracking in some cities. Wow this makes them so much more secure and private right? No it's likely because most people are looking at their phones and they can more easily identify you via the way you walk, the clothes you wear, and the places you visit.
The Flock CEO Garret Langley called people that didn't want his unsecure surveillance state in their own communities "terrorists". A term that has a very loose meaning but is always used to invoke state violence. So he wants to create a strong police state and violence against regular people for money aka he's a fascist.
(but HN will flag me for "name-calling" a person promoting and creating violent state oppression)
Doing his job as a CEO he's making noises, desperately trying to move the overton window now that enough concerned citizens have been made aware of how much malfeasance his product enables, and how little safety it brings. I think at this point a few more inane statements from the guy are to be expected, desperately trying to shift the hate onto his well-protected person and away from his fragile electronic boxes & the malware they run.
It's way worse than that. It runs full stack top to bottom. Your local municipal clerk is using that shit to look up the Applebees manager that told them to shove it.
That’s the sad part. There was a nationwide trend to ignore misdemeanor theft so much so that now there is a new baseline and most police have taken this to heart and don’t even pretend to put an effort into misdemeanor theft -yes, I know many or perhaps most departments are understaffed but still. It’s irritating.
> With numbers like that I guess they have no reason to make flights more comfortable or convenient. I just did a cross country flight and back 2 weeks ago and I'm still recovering from it. I really hate flying now.
My expectations are low and yet airlines somehow manage to fail.
I made the mistake of booking a flight with frontier
and they "delayed" the flight several times before eventually canceling the whole flight.
All airlines do this. It’s frustrating, and it has to do with playing the game with the DOT. They are punished for cancelling flights, but not delaying them, so the game is to delay rather than cancel until there is truly no option but to cancel. It’s an area of regulation that needs more work.
I am a current airline pilot, and I end up flying on all of them in order to get to and from work. Trust me, they all do this. The impact to you may be less if it’s an airline with more flights, because that airline has more options to recover and fix your experience, but they all do it.
Maybe the thing to do is to NOT upgrade existing working panels but rather set up a different/separate entity with completely different accounts and new panels?
And about the washing, I wonder if it would be worth it to automate the process with a spray of water periodically? You can still wash the panels but I suspect it won't be necessary if there isn't too much dust accumulation? Isn't rain supposed to wash away the dust? What am I missing here?
It may also be worth spraying them with water when they are too hot. As they get hotter the efficiency drops a little. It's only a few percent, and usually it happens at the time you need the efficiency the least because it's sunny, but if you can combine cleaning and cooling and get a few extra w out if it, why not.
Solar panels are increasingly being oriented east or west instead of south, as while it reduces overall yield, it maximises power when it's needed the most - during morning and evening peaks.
I don't have numbers, but I suspect it alleviates issues with dust buildup and temperature.
The most interesting trackers to me, for DIY install in my yard, is a 2-axis tracker. Especially in summer, sunrise and sunset are quite a bit north of east and west, meaning a true south facing fixed set of panels wouldn't even see the sun yet.
Sadly, my investigations a few years back indicated that a suitably strong and robust 2-axis tracker that would withstand our local winds and snow loads is significantly more expensive than just buying more panels and facing some of them east/south/west to accomplish the same thing. Doing this on an existing shed also avoids some local zoning rules vs a dedicated ground mounted system.
I get the impression they are getting less viable because the extra cost and maintenance outweighs just putting more panels down. There are some calculations that suggest even mounting them on angled frames might not be worth the cost, depending on how dirty they get when you just lie them flat on the ground.
(This assumes that you have enough space, but for grid-scale solar this is not the limiting factor. The costs are roughly in order from most to least: the cost of the inverters and grid connection, the cost of installing the panels, the cost of the panels themselves, then the cost of the land to put them on)
I can speak to this somewhat. My panels are on adjustable frames. Typically I switch from flat (summer) to tilted (winter).
As always ymmv and depends somewhat on your location. I'm around 30 degrees from the equator.
During summer, lying flat gets a lot more power. And more importantly the start and end of the generating period is longer. Ie the panels get more sun in the morning and evening thankfully they were tilted.
In winter the sun is more "from one direction" and obviously is lower on the horizon.
The upcoming "balcony solar" legislations will allow up to a limit (iirc 1200W in Virginia) of solar to be directly be connected to the electricity outlets of a house to make our electricity costs lower without having to pay for a battery from what I understand.
Storage is one way to move time of supply to match time of demand. Offsetting the time of supply directly is simpler, although it probably doesn't offer a complete solution.
Yes, I meant I can get on board with automatically (periodically or based on some trigger or sensor) spraying the panels with water but I was hoping it isn't necessary to use Windex® or even dish soap on the panels themselves.
> You can still wash the panels but I suspect it won't be necessary if there isn't too much dust accumulation? Isn't rain supposed to wash away the dust? What am I missing here?
In places where solar panels are used the most, like the Southwest US, there isn't much rain to speak of. Panels get a lot of dust accumulation from Feb-Nov typically, just when they're needed the most.
The author had ground level access. In that case, A microfiber covered sponge on a pole with a 5 gallon bucket of soapy water is probably the easiest thing. Especially if you do it annually, the dust wouldn’t be completely caked on requiring scraping and excessive elbow grease.
I do a similar procedure for my house windows. I use a squeegee on those but probably not necessary for panels.
> President Trump has issued a pardon to his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and then recanted.
"Rules for thee but not for me" - isn't that beyond obvious now? The folks running things simply do not play by the rules you or I do (assuming you do).
please people, stop teaching newcomers short aliases. please teach them proper long terms --interactive is not much harder to type than -i. Why do we keep doing this? It isn't the 1970s anymore. even if we do this all day it will take what maybe 5 KiB more of ram or storage? if that? why teach people some Harry Potter incantations when we can teach them proper words?
Sure, if they want to they can later use `npm -g i` or whatever abomination they want but when we teach them, we should use full arguments, not aliases. please, people :(
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