[ChrisMarshallNY]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.

However:

> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.

Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.

[maccard]

What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?

An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.

[handoflixue]

If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.

One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"

[jubilanti]

Bullshit. Show me how, today, an average person with no coding or ml background can go from 0 to their own ALPR tracking system in ONE DAY with Claude Code or Codex. Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them.

I'll wait.

LLMs can do some incredible things but the hype is astronomical.

[tough]

why wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

[jubilanti]

Oh honey, that's a just glorified OCR pipeline that extracts license plates from single images. That's the easy part, solved 20 years ago. Actually tracking unique vehicles across a region from terabytes of video data for an average person to be able to do it in ONE DAY is a lot different.

But HNers famously don't understand the difference between rsync and Dropbox

[tough]

Dropbox stock is trading at 50% of its initial price 5y ago when it went public, maybe the public markets also don't understand the difference between rsync and Dropbox.

[microgpt]

Yes, an ALPR is basically just a glorified [thing that an ALPR does]

[SR2Z]

I honestly can't tell if this is ragebait or you believe this.

My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION.

Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.

[therealdrag0]

You’re moving the goalposts. The original point of this thread is that Flock AI technology is hardly needed to efficiently search traditional video footage for license plates.

[handoflixue]

> Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them

Amazing how you can move the goalposts to make things impossible, isn't it? Where in the world did "without compute" come from? Are they not even allowed a decent desktop computer?

[IncreasePosts]

Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.

I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens

[erikerikson]

I think there's a limit to how misleading.

There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".

[TheRealPomax]

But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway."

Flock cameras are roughly that secure.

[lesuorac]

Isn't Flock more like a house sitter in the analogy though?

"I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there".

Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.

[llm_nerd]

What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.

Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.

Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.

[jkestner]

And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.

Privacy laws now.

[christoph]

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

- Benito Mussolini

[kamma4434]

Fascism was corporative, but in Italian the word has a very different meaning compared to the English one.

[microgpt]

Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.

[FireBeyond]

Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?

[sandworm101]

The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)

[TheRealPomax]

That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.

[cyanydeez]

>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.

Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.

[xnx]

What's an iffy data center?

[goatlover]

One that gets built over the public's objection because just maybe the company building it will create an AGI that will take everyone's jobs?