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Joined 7 days ago
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Cake day: January 7th, 2026

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  • It’s almost as if they’re seeking to replace these with technology. They’ve purposefully neglected social services and will continue to do so, to lower the bar for AI and grant themselves an excuse for the poor “substitute”. And this isn’t at all restricted to the UK, in The Netherlands we’re in the midst of it too: the same exact playbook. Modern surveillance cameras (like Axis’ for example) have NPU’s built in, or camera footage (even from legacy analog cameras, by use of encoders) is linked to either an onsite server, a cloud-service, or a combination of the two, facilitating the functionality. I hardly believe AI to be the limiting factor here, storage of footage is another story however. But I think they instead strategically place facial-recognition cameras, while the other cameras simply store abstractions from the footage. Of course if one of those cameras senses an event, which it recognizes might be of elevated relevance, it might store the raw footage. An example being: railways doing face-scanning for “depression detection”, instead of implementing ‘platform screen doors’ of course…







  • I don’t turn my face towards houses while I’m walking if I notice a doorbell camera

    I do that haha… In all seriousness, I’ve recently quit my job as mailman, in part because of this. Year after year I saw the number of doorbell cameras increase, and so grew my discomfort of my job requiring me to expose myself, to these privacy-hostile situations. The worst case scenarios were semi-detached houses: since the doors to the paired addresses are right beside another. Between the entries there’s often (decorative) separation, requiring some acrobatics to shortcut to the next address. If the second address would have a doorbell camera, while requiring me to sidestep between the obstructions, I could either: A) face the door and have my face right up to the camera, or B) turn my back to it and spin back into position. I did the latter, and I HATED having to adapt my seemingly simple job to this extend, just to protect my dignity.

    The Netherlands technically requires a sign which indicates camera surveillance, besides having to direct cameras in such a way that they cannot capture the public sphere. But have a guess at how much enforcement there is in this regard…








  • Why would governments, or any other organization, want to buy an entire pole assembly? If it was just an IoT device that could easily be implemented into existing infrastructure, I’d consider it a lot more compelling. Seems like just another “Smart City” startup, selling a dystopian sales-pitch; because that seems to sell these days… :)