First language: CBM Basic. Last language: FML
Joined December 2011
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Libercrat retweeted
It’s Never Been Cooler to Take Down a Flock Camera | Justin Caffier, Gizmodo
In such divided times, any issue on which the public can reach a relative accord is an achievement worth celebrating. Pretty much everyone (95%) agrees we’re in an affordability crisis. The share of Americans who believe ICE has “gone too far” has climbed to 65%. And then there’s the rapid shift in public opinion to abject hatred of AI and data centers. Who among us has not felt a swell of patriotic pride watching communities around the nation set aside their differences to ban data centers from their towns and punish the unscrupulous local politicians who attempted to surreptitiously approve their construction? Another such area of consensus seems to be percolating—one that’s in direct defiance of the tech oligarchs and politicians attempting to shape our world into a panopticon hellscape.
Backlash against the $7.5 billion startup Flock Safety—the maker of AI-powered, license plate-scanning, pole-mounted surveillance cameras—has gone from brewing to boiling over in recent weeks, much to the chagrin of the police state and its Silicon Valley boosters. Following significant pushback from activist groups, the LAPD announced this week that it would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire. Similar decisions to end contracts and take down existing cameras are coming from city councils elsewhere around the nation.
Privacy advocates like the EFF and ACLU warn that Flock and its competitors’ automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are tools of mass surveillance that offer access to a trove of illicitly gleaned data to any government agency with a contract, with few safeguards in place to prevent abuse. Though Flock alleges it doesn’t share its data with ICE, many fear the cameras can and will be used to aid Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Given that ICE is just one of the many federal agencies being used to carry out that agenda, local PDs have been tripping over themselves to assist those federal efforts, and side-door access to the data in the software is well-documented, Flock’s reassurance is little more than cold comfort.
Where local governments are failing to read the room and forging ahead to build a panopticon against the will of their constituents, a new breed of vigilante vandal has emerged to quite literally take matters into their own hands. These activists have taken to the streets to proactively destroy their local Flock camera poles, rather than wait for the slow pace of government to close the prying eyes at some indeterminate date in the future. Utilizing the open-source site deflock.org, which has already mapped out over 116,000 ALPRs, they pull up to the offending cameras armed with portable saws to cut through metal poles and high-powered green lasers (532 nm wavelength) to destroy camera sensors.
The anti-Flock activist’s nighttime demo missions echo the feats of the loom-smashing Luddites two centuries ago. But our vandals live in the digital age, so many of their exploits have been captured on smartphone cameras and posted to social media. Some of these clips, like this destruction montage posted on X, have gone viral.
Accordingly, the atomized anti-Flock activists have gradually coalesced into something of a community, with the 437,000 subscriber-strong subreddit r/FlockSurveillance serving as their quasi HQ. There, they fawn over fresh videos of camera wreckage, share strategies and resources, donate to defense fund GoFundMes for nabbed comrades, and of course, post memes.
But while Flock haters yuk it up over critically damaged surveillance tech on Reddit, Signal groups, and Discord servers, not everyone’s laughing. In a November 2025 interview with Forbes, Flock CEO Garrett Langley described the vandal activists and Deflock as a “terrorist organization” whose “primary motivation is chaos.” Unfortunately for Langley, another laugh soon joined the chorus mocking him and his company as Tom Brewster, the reporter interviewing him, broke into a chuckle and suggested Deflock might take umbrage at Langley’s melodramatic label.
gizmodo.com/its-never-been-c…
I hear Obsession is a good movie but I am not shelling out $20.
Looking at the 1978 production (original) of I Spit On Your Grave.
Any other recommendations?
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Libercrat retweeted
Following Lord Lindsey’s passing, Darline, Duchess of Charleston, ascended the High Chamber: crowned Baroness of the Palmetto Seat. Her brother's fiefdom and noble lineage are preserved. Long live the House of Graham and DEI! Aristocrats celebrate in Alexandria and Tel-Aviv.
Libercrat retweeted
“I never thought I’d live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment, and the left wing becoming the snivelling self-righteous twats, going around shaming everyone.”
- John Lydon, The Sex Pistols
Legend.
A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.
He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.
His name is Fabrice Bellard.
Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.
Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.
In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.
Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.
He was not done.
In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.
He kept going.
In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.
In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.
Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.
Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org
He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.
A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.
He is still shipping.
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I am going to focus on the frogs of Northwest Georgia for a bit.
They are in the trees.
They circle and swim my fountain.
They are in the yard.
And their songs go all night long. Real Rock n Rollers.
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