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TL;DR: yet another California city decides to dump Flock.

Here's a quote from their terms and conditions:

  Governing Law; Venue.
  All claims arising out of or relating to the AdSense
  Terms or the Services will be governed by California
  law, excluding California's conflict of laws rules,
  and will be litigated exclusively in the federal or
  state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA,
  and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction
  in those courts.
Okay, I do indeed live in Santa Clara County, California, so if I ever get in a situation where I might want to sue Google Ads, I might as well try and see how local courts work, especially if the claim is small enough for the small claims court. For those who do not live here, it might be a prohibitive requirement.

Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.

I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.

I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.

[1]: just a local example: https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/...


Most likely it will work. It will also look very LLM-generated, “claudish”, and people will be able to tell that they are looking at the vibe-coded frontend.

Inside, there will be dragons: you will probably learn that all your CSS and JS are inline in your HTML, and that each page has its own implementation of the header and the footer, and other things like that, but if you don't plan to support it as a real product, you probably won't care.


You can also guide the AI to organize the codebase according to some principles and attempt to untangle the mess.

But I totally agree on the fact that it will probably look like just any other frontend.


  > NEGOTIATE (A2A Network)
  > According to YC data, a B2B company needs
    an aggregate 800 cold emails (factoring open,
    response, and conversion rates) to secure a
    single customer, while spam thresholds tighten
    to 0.3%. We replace manual email ping-pong
    with direct Agent-to-Agent negotiation.
Absolutely nothing can possibly go wrong if you let an LLM agent negotiate for your business.


That snippet was from an earlier iteration before talking to actual users. I am trying to shift the focus right now. And you are totally right.

What do you think about an on-site agent acting as an LLM Search Console for your website?


The paper is basically like this (spoiler alert):

“Some random user on Reddit posted a picture claiming that this is the longest straight line path on water possible on the Earth. We implemented a smart algorithm to solve this problem, found the elevation data, ran our algorithm... yes, that random user was right. Also, here's the longest path on land.”

Thanks, I really enjoyed reading it, even though I hoped that they would disprove the original claim!

Edit: here are the gcmap links to the two paths: sea [1], land [2].

[1]: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=25%B017%27N+66%B040%27E-58%B037...

[2]: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=24%B033%27N+118%B038%27E-37%B02...


They only identify the Reddit user as "kepleronlyknows", but in the Reddit thread [1] he links to his video visualization [2], where his user name is Patrick Anderson.

Before he made the video visualization using Google Earth, he actually went to the library and used a string on a real globe. [3]

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/15mwai/the_longest...

2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpQwuGueeoA

3: https://imgur.com/a/great-circle-2hYFM


Adding: The two paths respectively are about 80% and 28% of the earth's circumference.


The Portugal to (approximately) Macao one is quite interesting, thanks for the links!


I opened Apple Maps in globe mode and I still have trouble visualizing the water path.


Does it help to point out that the water path looks suspiciously like the day/night line on a map?

Like this: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5477/


yes!! why is that ? :)


The day/light line is a great circle. The "straight line paths" are great-circle segments.


It's going South and then trying to close the loop from behind. It gets interrupted by land before the loop closes.

Hope it makes sense.


Open the linked paper and scroll down, they have images of the path on a globe as well as the flat map view.


Kudos to whoever built tiled clouds background on the gcmap site.


It's interesting that this piece stands well enough if you replace mathematics with probably any other intellectual profession, including software development or pretty much anything else.

  And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician.
  It is much easier to claim “I love learning the laws of life,”
  while literally handwaving, than it is for me to flashback to
  the twenty or so pivotal moments that lead to me walking out
  of Gainesville with a PhD in Arithmetic Geometry.
Since “normal” people mostly don't understand what the software development job is about, handwaving in response to regular questions: “what do you do at work?”, “what do you like about your job?” – is pretty normal. I think that most of us have some prepared answers ready to use.

  Mathematics is the thing you try to understand, don’t,
  get frustrated about, and then do.
Just like the software development. I truly believe that the only people who can survive a software job are those who can tolerate the constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons, and persevere in this environment to do the things you need to do.


A PhD in Arithmetic Geometry and a publication in a top tier journal is hardly mediocre in and of itself, as far the author is concerned. The equivalent for a software engineer is probably a leading AI engineer, with a strong publication count. I think a lot of people who are not mediocre are unaware of what mediocrity actually is. Yeah if you're only in the top .1% and comparing yourself to the literal best in the world, you will feel mediocre in that sense . A mid mathematician maybe publication in worse journals, teaching community college.


> A PhD in Arithmetic Geometry and a publication in a top tier journal is hardly mediocre in and of itself, as far the author is concerned.

It kinda is (sadly) because unlike engineering there aren't thousands of postdoc jobs in arithmetic geometry.

And ofc in a year because of AI all math PhDs will be mediocre by definition.


As a professional mathematician, if you’re not advancing your subfield of research consistently you are mediocre.


If you say so.

Saying most tenured faculty at research 1 institutions are mediocre seems to be stretching the definition, though.


Who’s saying that?


It's still impressive, but it's not enough.


> And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician.

I prefer to say "I liked a girl" (because it's the truth)


My go-to is “It’s the only thing I was good at in school, I was hopeless at everything else,” which is only a slight exaggeration.


> constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons

That’s not a feature of software development, but a feature of working higher up in the stack and/or interfacing with lower-quality external systems. I am lucky to have been working on relatively self-contained systems for most of my career, where that experience hasn’t been a constant.


> “what do you like about your job?”

For software development, normal people will just assume it's money and probably not even ask...


They would not even be wrong.


Yeah seems like most programmers just do it for the money. I imagine only like 20% of us do it just because we enjoy it.


I feel like the number is higher for software work where I'm at, and lower for every other profession. Scary when you think that your doctor is in it for the money


You can be a software developer without any formal training and without any licensure. Not so for an MD.

It's going to attract more people who have the mentality of artists or musicians, i.e. people who do it for the love of the craft and as a creative outlet.


> You can be a software developer without ... any licensure.

Don't jinx it. We are extremely lucky in this regard, and it actually looks like a rare exception.


hopefully the MD that passes all the tests is still worth his salt even if he only chose the profession for the paycheck.

but as one of the nearby professors is famous for saying: "C students gotta go somewhere."

( and since this is HN - he didn't mean the programming language :D )


idk, a lot of American doctors I've met seemed to be in it because they like school and stability. Though perhaps a similar scary.


There are plenty of easier ways to make money than becoming a doctor.


They tend to be higher risk though. If you've got the capacity for memorizing all the stuff you need to become a doctor, there's not much risk involved in attaining your doctor salary.


I'd just say there are scores of people who like programing. But that's about it.


True. I like math and CS theory, but despise coding (pays well though). AI is finally taking over this soul-sucking occupation and all I can say - good riddance.


It's an awesome profession for those of us who love it.

Tbf coding with ai is still super fun though. I am hoping that engs who hate it like you will finally get kicked out as productivity increases from ai and it will finally go back to just us nerds.

It's kinda soul-sucking being around all you guys that just hate this work, please get out and go do farming or something lol.


> It's an awesome profession for those of us who love it.

Yes, by definition of "love" and "awesome".

> Tbf coding with ai is still super fun though.

Agree, it could be entertaining.

> I am hoping that engs who hate it like you will finally get kicked out

Ain't gonna happen, as I am pretty good at it.

> please get out and go do farming or something lol.

I thought about, but it is not well paid. I make money mostly from investments though, still do occasional coding stuff - for money.


For mathematicians in the US, it's because their parents like money.


ICQ? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time... a long time.


FWIW, ICQ was being discussed here less than a month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224443

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167258

OK, OK... to be fair "discussed" is an over statement. Let's say "ICQ was mentioned here less than a month ago. :-)


As TinCan phones are getting popular in my kid’s friend circle, I am getting second hand pride at her low number like I had (have?) for my ICQ number


ICQ and LiveJournal were the two greatest Russian psyops of the 1990s.

UIN: 279866


I think ICQ was from Israel.


> Originally developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, the client was bought by AOL in 1998, and then by Mail.Ru Group (now VK) in 2010.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ


Okay, Mossad then

My ICQ UIN was one of the few online accounts that I completely lost control of. Some "Russian hacker" took it over, by guessing the password, credential stuffing, or some other method, and I noticed that my profile had been usurped into a Cyrillic one. And that was long, long before 2010.


Actually, ICQ had no relation to Russia in 1990s.

It was acquired by AOL in 1998, went through several rounds of enshittification and protocol changes to defeat third party clients which did not show ads, and finally landed in Mail.Ru group in 2010. In about 2-3 years no one cared about ICQ anymore. Then, it slowly died.

I registered my account in 1998 (got a 7-digit number starting with 9) and the whole thing felt like a miracle back then. My first employer in 2003 used ICQ as a corporate messenger similar to how we now use Slack. Since I mostly used Linux back then, I was very happy to find centericq, then centerim, then finch. One of my first contributions to an open source project was a small patch to centericq, something about contacts panel resize if I remember correctly.

I believe the last time I actually launched any ICQ client was around 2012, and never since then.


The majority of the side projects I work on just because it's fun to work on something; if people actually use it then great, but if not, the project will just wait until someone eventually comes in. With this approach, it's not “marketing”, it's just working on a hobby project, which, besides the coding, may include marketing activities, SEO and whatnot.


Thanks, that's a good perspective. I like the idea of treating marketing as just another part of working on the project, rather than a separate task.


This is a long, but well written and very reasonable document. I especially like that they acknowledge that there cannot be one-size-fits-all approach to AI in education, that they recommend against regular AI detectors, and that they encourage AI use acknowledgements. Sounds like a healthy approach with no panic and no BS.


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