Flock was seed round funded by YC, not "a YC company".
It's not like they control it, manage it, and what was pitched may be significantly different than what happened since then.
YC isn't perfect, but what words you use, and their order is important. And the way you're phrasing it, you make it sound as if they are a subsidiary of YC. Or as if YC is on the board.
If any of these things are true, you should plainly state them. Otherwise, what you're saying is incorrect.
Flock was seed round funded by YC, not "a YC company".
It's not like they control it, manage it, and what was pitched may be significantly different than what happened since then.
YC isn't perfect, but what words you use, and their order is important. And the way you're phrasing it, you make it sound as if they are a subsidiary of YC. Or as if YC is on the board.
If any of these things are true, you should plainly state them. Otherwise, what you're saying is incorrect.
YC funds companies and we are all aware of that so by saying it's a YC company because they gave them seed money is already exactly the correct wording
Holy conspiracy theorists. I surely was not expecting this amount of paranoia from a sound place like HN. Either way, drama is always welcome, for it is ultimately unavoidable, in one form or another.
I just don't like moral distortions. Is YC in control of Flock or responsible for their choices? Who are "them", what are we ignorant about and why is it Marxism?
But what are you saying? YC are to blame for the unsavory future directions of the companies they fund. Counterargument, no they're not, what are you banging on about.
Same thing on a smaller scale, and they never would have got venture capital funding if they didn't have an upward trajectory from HOAs. There's only one path upward from private HOA surveillance, and that's government surveillance.
I’m not making anything up any more than you are. Neither of us was there. My point: you don’t get YC funding unless you have a disruptive business idea. “Cameras, but to a niche HOA market” is not that.
> From the moment we started Flock Safety, we had an incredibly clear, boldly audacious mission ... We provide a life-or-death product, a mission-critical system for cities
An HOA has a lot more leeway to do whatever it wants than other local governments. They get to act as government sometimes, then as a corporation sometimes, and then as a group of amateur lawyers sometimes. They can both pass laws and try you for violating them without recourse. And IME only the most toxic people stay on the board for very long.
It started as license plate readers and expanded to include identifying people by clothing, body type, etc. storing it in a database that communicates with surveillance networks in other cities.
I don't really have a strong opinion either way on Flock but this is a strange objection. YC is a well-known startup accelerator that makes (pre-seed!) investments. I don't know if anyone has ever sincerely taken "YC company" to mean a subsidiary of YC. That's like confusing "a Sequoia company" as a subsidiary of Sequoia.
> When Demo Day was over, after we had booked meetings with investors and were well on our way to our first fundraising round, YC set the tone for scaling Flock doggedly, purposefully, and with consistent velocity, for years to come.
Damn, its almost like YC really set the stage for mass AI surveillance from the founders own mouth
I don't think there's a law mandating it, but CRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management) has been used and trained by all major airlines since the 1980s. The reason is simple: it doesn't really help to have two people in the cockpit if only one of them is making all the decisions.
And all Military air forces AFAIK. The military of course also takes rank very seriously, but there was existing understanding that Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about rank and so CRM makes sense in that same practical vein.
Also, you'll see that says "Crew" not just "Cockpit". Turns out that from the cockpit of an airliner you've not always got the best possible view of the problem. If the steward who has no idea how to fly a plane insists it's the right engine that is on fire, her input is valuable, from back where she's serving customers with coffee she can see the engines, the fire is on the right, whereas you're just looking at sensor outputs and you were maybe about to turn off the left engine.
I don’t think it’s required, but my friends who do flights for remote mining operations in SE Asia use the same concepts — so it really is pretty standard for commercial flying, even down to remote private operations.
A bad bump on a commercial plane can be hundreds of thousands to millions in damage + downtime + inspection/repairs. And tens or hundreds of millions if you wreck a big plane. Companies may be evil, but most would still prefer you waste $2k in go around fuel than $200k because you decided to set it down badly or $20M+ because you drove their plane off the runway.
Where I live in Canada, there's careless driving and dangerous driving. Dangerous driving is in the criminal code. Careless driving is a citation akin to speeding.
I've seen courts grant an exception from a license suspension, for normal (but a suspendable amount of) citations such as speeding or something of that ilk.
Those drivers licenses have special wording on them, that indicate the person may only drive to and from work, and often has the address the person has to drive to and from.
However I've also seen contractors allowed to drive to and from job sites, and directly home.
This is in a province of Canada, and dangerous driving or alcohol use, would invalidate that ability to get an exception.
This driver with the Waymo sounds like dangerous driving.
Unclear if in this US State the situation is similar.
I don't know what the parent poster means, but if you look at how LLMs are trained, and how it's trained on human communication, you should find it interesting that humans often correct themselves. They also often create facts out of nowhere, and do this crazy thing called dreaming.
If you're an LLM trying to symbolically emulate human behavior, especially when coding, you're going to see git commits, where people write a bunch of code and then go, oh wait, I should fix that!
From the perspective of an outside observer, making mistakes, and then correcting the mistakes, is how you code.
In fact, an outside observer might think that this is how you teach people to code. You make a mistake, then you say, oh, here's the mistake I made, and here's why, and then you fix it.
So I think true emergent behavior will be demonstrated, when an LLM says "Hey wait a minute! They're actually making real mistakes, and they're actually correcting, it's them not on purpose?!", and then stops hallucinating, and stops making mistakes as it codes.
The same is true of bug trackers. You submit a bug request and you often have a patch. Then people discuss it. From a MLM's perspective, you're supposed to write poor code, or code that's not perfect, and then have a conversation.
If I had the resources to train a large-scale LLM, I would clone, for example, GitHub. I would then remove everything where people are fixing broken code.
The outcome would be very interesting.
I've been looking at ways to make enhanced long-term memory stores for LLMs, and there's lots of problems with shifting symbolic relationships if you do it wrong, but definitely once there's true long-term memory, and adaptive behavio,r I think that's the only way you're going to get true real emergent behavior.
In general, I completely agree with you. Personally, as a human: I have fallible memory, beliefs that are not as sound as I may believe, and all of those notwithstanding, I may not correctly reason, even if my "inputs" were perfect. Let's not even get into cognitive biases, etc. I am acutely aware of my, and other humans' fallibilities.
I think when people are irritated by the "hallucination" aspect of LLMs, they are often running into something of a slightly different nature. I mean, firstly, there seems to be a higher-than-normal ratio of these "little mistakes". And secondly, there are some pretty odd ones - e.g. in my team, Claude regularly just straight up makes up Jira ticket numbers, and then refers to them with high confidence. I guess what I'm saying is that a human would probably not just make up an id, and run with it (they may be off by one, or mix two up, etc). In my opinion, these can be successfully treated, but I guess you can never fully eliminate the tendency that irks people.
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
In the Netherlands the Nazis were able to exterminate Jews much more thoroughly than they had in Germany, because the Netherlands kept such meticulous records of the name and address of every Jew.
And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.
On the Moon, this is what may be lacking.
On Earth, we can close loop recycle from drains. We can take sea water and desalinate. We can use osmosis and clean dirty ground water.
Is any of that cheap? Nope. But it's also not a blocker on having water to drink and bath with.
We will never run out of water, only "easy clean water".
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