I disagree. This is the good part of capitalism. In an ideal world, a custom-designed housing unit should be achievable by anyone in the upper middle class. The combined property tax rate in Austin is around 1.8%-2.5% (according to https://lrgrealty.com/lrg-blog/property-taxes-in-austin-tx/), which is decently high and supports the community. ChatGPT says that they paid $52,142 in property taxes for 2025 on an assessed value of $3M.
In my opinion, the only immoral part of this is the “million dollars in profit” on the house in Palo Alto that he left which the author himself called out as ridiculous. This unearned increment is thanks to Palo Alto’s exclusionary zoning and Proposition 13’s low property taxes (around 1.25% at acquisition, but much lower for long-term investors). ChatGPT says that the author paid $11k/year and the new owner now pays $28k/year for the Palo Alto house now assessed at $2.3M.
The article is very one sided, implying without evidence that Flock is for recreational tracking of individuals. With San Francisco SFPD’s ALPR cameras at least, this would be an abuse of the cameras according to the policy linked from https://transparency.flocksafety.com/san-francisco-ca-pd. Here are the Authorized purposes:
Locate stolen, wanted, and or other vehicles that are the subject of investigation
To apprehend wanted persons subject to arrest warrants or who are otherwise lawfully sought by law enforcement.
To locate victims, witnesses, suspects, missing children, adults, and/or elderly individuals, including in response to Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts and others associated with a law enforcement investigation.
To assist with criminal investigations initiated by local, state and regional public safety departments by identifying
vehicles associated with targets of criminal investigations.
Counter-terrorism: Identify potential threats to critical infrastructure sites.
For other law enforcement purposes as authorized by law: Investigations of major crimes.
Which of these uses do people not like? Or which other policies are people concerned with in other jurisdictions?
The Dunwoody MJCC monitoring seems the worst incident in that Flock never issued a postmortem on how the terms of the sharing were violated.
Abuses in violation of policy are a problem like in any organization that can be reduced through auditing, discipline, etc. And it seems that the ones that have been caught (Jarmarus Brown of Orange City, FL; Asad Zahir of Shively, KY; Emily Pacheco of New Bedford, MA) have been disciplined and/or charged.
Insufficient security of devices is a problem but does not have to do with my comment about the intended uses.
Officers have to be trained about OCR errors, just like we have to know when to trust an LLM. The SFPD policy I linked says officers shall “Visually verify the alphanumeric characters on the plate” before stopping a car identified by ALPR. And like LLM hallucinations OCR errors will go down over time.
The unwarranted mass surveillance and dragnet part. We have a thing called the fourth Constitutional amendment here in the United States. We also have the first amendment, which the Supreme Court has ruled in the past must not be subject to a "chilling effect".
The Flock camera system, and any dragnet surveillance system, is a direct chilling effect to the rights to freedom of speech, freedom from religious persecution and freedom of assembly.
The inalienable aspect of these rights means that literally no example or rationalization you can provide would justify impacting those rights for even a single individual or group.
Two wrongs don't make a right. I have dealt with multiple incidents of police harassment and gross misconduct and I don't trust them with my location data any more than I do a national camera network that pervades neighborhoods and intimate spaces.
161 people in LA were stopped for bad data using flock cameras. The contract with them is canceled but the damn things are still up giving data to DHS probably.
In San Francisco, I’m not a fan of Aaron Peskin’s ban on algorithmic rent-setting (Admin Code 37.10C https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...) (which is probably similar to the other cities) because 1) it goes beyond antitrust law in just banning data gathering for no good reason, and 2) it rewards bounty hunters.
1. It goes beyond antitrust guidelines by banning rent prediction using any “non-public competitor data”, which is stricter than the former antitrust guidelines which prohibited sharing “competitively sensitive variables” (https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/dealings...). To the extent that it differs from banning competitively sensitive data, it is just banning the use of data to make rentals more efficient. If landlords are pricing accurately but not monopolistically, this should reduce turnover, reduce vacancy, and reduce the occasions where a listing gets a crowd of applicants, which is good for both landlord and tenant. It’s bad to try to ban accurate data.
2. It provides a private right of action for tenants and nonprofits to sue, just like Proposition 65 (Known by the State of California to cause cancer) incentivizes bounty hunters to sue. The point seems to be to punish landlords more than it is to establish fair rules.
And it seems that these lawsuits are just piggybacking on the DOJ settlement by punishing anyone who uses RealPage as soon as the ordinance becomes effective in 30 days while RealPage was already working to settle federally. The complaints (e.g. the SF one https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73573242/gomez-v-greyst...) don’t have any new violations; just companies who are already settling. I don’t think that’s justice for a city to frontrun the federal settlement with new violations for the same program.
SF as a city has the fundamental problem that there's a huge part of the electorate will blame the housing shortage on absolutely anything they can find that's not the actual fundamental physical shortage of housing. That leads to an endless tangle of local laws and organizations supposedly trying to "do something about it", that are fundamentally just making the problem worse by adding marginal cost to every new already-difficult-to-pencil housing unit.
Yes, you would think that a city with such a rent crisis would be begging for development e.g. incentivizing homeowners to redevelop into townhouses and apartments. But instead, the so-called “Progressive” wing has very little interest in reducing market rents and prefers to chase fringe issues (to take one example, they spent the year 2015 very publicly attacking the “Moderate” David Chiu’s short-term rental law, only to arrive at substantively the same place that they started at the end of the year. And suddenly the issue disappeared).
There’s proportional punishment based on harm, and then there are abusive booby-traps. If a landlord uses a nonpublic dataset (e.g., a vendor’s model based on year-old data that would not harm competition under the antitrust settlement), then a tenant and nonprofit can each sue for civil penalties plus attorney fees even though there is no harm.
> If landlords are pricing accurately but not monopolistically, this should reduce turnover, reduce vacancy, and...
Ah yes one of my favorite lines of argument: "We don't need laws, if companies are just behaving properly and against their financial interests to behave in a way that harms legit market pricing..."
Except as we know companies won't behave well without incentives. Which is why we need laws on it.
> Ah yes one of my favorite lines of argument: "We don't need laws
That’s not my argument at all. We do have federal antitrust law. My question was what does the ordinance do that differs from antitrust. The answer is that the ordinance rewards bounty hunters chasing the same federal case, and also bans non-“competitively sensitive” datasets.
I just noticed a couple days ago that when I paste a tweet URL in claude.ai to ask to explain it, sonnet 5 knew to look it up in nitter and xcancel to get the tweet and its context automatically. Shutting down these aggregators allows twitter to drive a harder bargain with Anthropic and OpenAI directly. I wonder whether this was the impetus for the C&D.
There’s still other ways the agents will figure out. They’re playing a whack a mole trying to stop bots but you really can’t have a site that shows a page to wide internet and also lock it down. It does seem they’re moving towards a login required to view anything kinda site. That’ll just kill their search ranking though
> This is an unethical as a company may behave, short of killing people.
This is hysterical. No, format shifting old unwanted books is not unethical. The books still exist, in an internal digital library. If copyright law were to change to allow sharing orphan works some day, Anthropic could share them. But under current law, the books are preserved digitally and used for transformative uses that all Claude users benefit from.
> Like Amazon consuming and presumably destroying rare books should be enraging to everyone, regardless of political persuasion.
No, destroying collectible books would be a shame, not just any rare worthless books. But these are not collectible. The article tried to dance around it by saying maybe some books have a sentimental value to someone somewhere. But that doesn’t mean any library or collector wants it. Don’t fall for manufactured outrage!
Edit: Here’s an example of an extremely rare book. My great great grandfather published a book of sermons around 1920. That book has zero value to anyone other than my dad. Would I be outraged if it ended up at someone’s estate sale, then a used bookstore, and then an LLM consumed it to learn to read? No; I would have expected it to have been discarded by humans before the LLM even got to it. Most of what we leave behind is discarded.
This was my issue as well. It seems like they tip toed around it in one paragraph saying usually these are books with isbn numbers so not truly collectible or very rare and then in another paragraph plainly stated that it could be foreign language or low volume books that are rare. Rare expresses a different meaning to me and I think it amounts to exactly what you said, manufactured outrage.
You could donate that to the church archives of his denomination or the religious studies department of a university or at least some sort of local historical society.
I was in charge of a "lending library" ministry at my church for a few years. Let me tell ya.
We got started when another ministry moved out, and sort of from zero. My pastor's clear instructions to me were: make sure everything we carry is doctrinally sound.
So we inherited several full collections of books in rapid succession. Some had even belonged to priests and religious. Those gave me a fascinating time, because I could basically rubber-stamp every title that a priest had in his personal collection. But slowly the balance began to tip into rather esoteric volumes that normal laypeople couldn't really use. Literally books full of sermons and other arcane subjects!
I was tasked with discarding/recycling all the rejects. There were tons of rejects, believe me! So with every session when we had boxes full of donation, it was imperative to cull the bad stuff very fast, shelve the rest, and then find somewhere to dump the trash. The manager was encouraging me to recycle, or at least not tip them all into the Dumpster, but it turned out to be a logistical nightmare to find anyplace that would recycle books like that. Having no vehicle, I had to continually figure out ways to cart around heavy loads, just to get them out of church and into the trash somewhere. That was the worst part of my job.
Now it was clear that books were not a very hip or current medium, but there were plenty of elderly parishioners who did appreciate the resource and did compliment my work, but our church was not free of prejudice or judgementalism, and let me just say, there was an angel or entity whose purpose was only to jumble all the books while I wasn't watching, and leave a deliberately unorganized mess for me to confront every week. This made the task distinctly Sisyphean, in addition to the need to constantly discard rejected books.
I finally threw in the towel when large boxes of Spanish-language books were donated; there was no way at all for me to vouch or determine their orthodoxy, and the shelves were full anyways, and I was just tired of propping up a legacy ministry anyway. But it really drove home my opinions about books, hoarders, and that is why I have no troubles with the way books are currently being treated.
So it turns out your organization didn’t need so many donated books. The ideal outcome for your discards should still be sent somewhere to someone who wants to read or possess them, or barring that, to be scanned so their contents are at least preserved somewhere. It belongs in a library, even if incorporeal.
We recently had a post highly upvoted here that collected bus tickets from an earlier era. It showed the unique moment in time where such fares were highly detailed, unique pieces of art. Ultimately destined to be single use and largely extremely pedestrian.
We've also seen a website that collects old paper restaurant placemats from across the ages. Literally disposable, zero value items that were made to be discarded by the thousands.
And yet, when someone has an interesting idea that ties them together, makes us recollect or think about our past in some novel way, these useless uncommon things suddenly become quite interesting.
A book on sermons, o its own, from the 1920s is maybe not that interesting. A book of sermons selected from each decade? A collection that compares regional books of sermons? A compare and contrast of the 2020s and 1920s? I can imagine many interesting thesis where a book like that becomes interesting because of the context of other books that are juxtaposed to it.
A book on Detroit motorways and bus schedules from the 30s isn't interesting or valuable on its own. But when you contextualize it, suddenly it might be a way to understand our history, our path through development and redevelopment. Connecting our present moment to the past.
Yes, I collected a couple decades of Muni fast passes too and finally gave them to an artist to destructively turn into some project. I was sad that my “rare” tickets probably won’t be kept forever, but I’m glad that somebody got some use out of it. I feel the same way about LLMs. I’m glad that they are learning from old published materials. In my opinion, 404media is cynically inciting anti-tech anger; they don’t otherwise have any interest in the preservation ecosystem.
Those jobs aren't meant for you... they post in the classifieds with the hopes nobody responds. All to game the labor market test allowing their visa worker to get a green card.
On the one hand, the wishes of a donor should be respected to some degree. On the other hand, the government should be allowed to make the best use of land in its jurisdiction for the people who live there today, since “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and we should “preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain” as Thomas Jefferson might say. Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead.
And I am concerned that the purpose of slanted anti-datacenter coverage by the likes of 404media.co and perfectunion.us is to inspire memetic NIMBYism that has and will cause tremendous damage to the US.
> Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead.
This only came up because living people also care about it.
If you want to make it illegal to dictate how land is used, do so directly. I'd be fine with the state passing a new law, voted on by the people, stripping such deeds of their status. But until then, it doesn't seem good at all to ignore an existing law at the whims of local government.
And of course, at that point, don't be surprised when the people keep voting to toss data centers out - if individuals can't be expected to dictate what happens to their land, neither should corporations.
I disagree with you in principle. I think a town that accepts a donation of land for a specific purpose should be as bound as anyone else to the terms of the deed.
In practical terms, it’s not clear that an entity with the power of imminent domain can meaningfully be constrained by deeds.
In principle, I think there aught to be a rule against perpetuities. Including conservation easements. The community should be able to decide where their parks will be, not some former landowner. There is another 55-acre park (Fannie Robinson Park, 1009 E MLK Jr Blvd) about 1/2 mi down the street from the datacenter site (1601 E MLK).
It’s a shame that the deed was poorly granted. Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if it had been held privately and taxed as such.
And as far as newsworthiness is concerned, the actual deed lost its restriction in 2003, and the city transferred it to the Economic Development Corporation in 2008. It could have then been sold to any industrial purpose. This is not really a national story about datacenters. It is the story about a 2008 sale for industrial purposes. The fact that this is recirculated as a datacenter story is meant to poison the public on any mention of the word datacenter. I think this trend of biased news is intentional.
According to opus 4.8, here’s the chain of title for the 87.797‑acre Taylor tract:
1. 7/7/1999 — Bonnibel Bland Cromwell & family → Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation (deed carries the "held in trust… for parkland" restriction). Recorded #199947198. Consideration: $10 (charitable donation).
2. 10/7/2003 — Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation → Williamson County Park Foundation, Inc. Recorded #2003100356. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).
3. 11/20/2003 — Williamson County Park Foundation → City of Taylor. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).
4. 11/12/2008 — City of Taylor → Taylor Economic Development Corporation. Recorded #2008084718. Consideration: $15,000 cash + a land swap — the EDC also conveyed two tracts back to the City “by exchange” (a ~22.708‑ac tract in the Samuel Pharass Survey + a 16.658‑ac tract in the Coursey Survey); no dollar value stated for the swapped tracts.
5. 11/19/2024 — (Plat Map Recording Sheet; not a transfer)
6. 4/11/2025 — Taylor Economic Development Corporation → NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC (Blueprint Data Centers). Consideration on the deed: "Cash and other good and valuable consideration" — no figure stated; reported at ~$10 million in the press.
On the one hand, the wishes of a donor should be respected to some degree. On the other hand, the government should be allowed to make the best use of land in its jurisdiction for the people who live there today, since “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and we should “preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain” as Thomas Jefferson might say. Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead.
And I am concerned that the purpose of slanted anti-datacenter coverage by the likes of 404media.co and perfectunion.us is to inspire memetic NIMBYism that has and will cause tremendous damage to the US.
I think companies with valuable data to scrape (e.g. media companies) will eventually lock it behind APIs that verify Apple App Attest or Google Play Integrity. And deprecate websites which are easily scraped too. Then it will be useless to reverse engineer APIs used by apps and we will have to run the unmodified client on an unmodified OS.
In my opinion, the only immoral part of this is the “million dollars in profit” on the house in Palo Alto that he left which the author himself called out as ridiculous. This unearned increment is thanks to Palo Alto’s exclusionary zoning and Proposition 13’s low property taxes (around 1.25% at acquisition, but much lower for long-term investors). ChatGPT says that the author paid $11k/year and the new owner now pays $28k/year for the Palo Alto house now assessed at $2.3M.
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