Agreed. Flock has been a key contributor in solving numerous crimes. I'm happy for Flock to be in my county and would like the police to have more access to technology like this, not less.
Does your country also have a recurring problem of police shooting unarmed citizens? If not, it probably helps to understand the dynamics of why the police are not widely trusted here
County was not a typo. It's awful whenever there's an overuse of force in the USA. I'd recommend watching a few police bodycam videos on youtube before judging them wholesale though. The experience of a police officer in the United States seems to be long periods of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror and adrenaline. Anyone out there can have a gun and encounters can unexpectedly escalate to deadly violence in seconds. Some of them should not be police officers. There are many great officers out there just trying to protect their communities.
All it takes is one cop acting badly to ruin things for quite a lot of people though, and the fact that police uniformly circle ranks around any of their members who is accused of something regardless of the validity makes "well, not all of them are bad!" a pretty useless sentiment. I'll consider them individually when they start holding individuals accountable, but not before then.
I think you're making some hasty generalizations here. They don't "uniformly" cover for their colleagues. Do you expect the police service to be perfect and never make mistakes? Can you point me towards a single human-run service where that's the case?
I am not American, but in my extremely dangerous country we have many privately-operated cameras and I don’t know a single person who is against them. We also have strict privacy laws.
So I was disappointed by what felt like very weak arguments in the article. Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused. The solution is to fix the abuse problem.
I’d like to hear stronger arguments against these devices, so that I’m better informed locally.
> Basically seems to come down it “it can be abused”. But many things can be abused.
This isn't your life pro tip to get you some additional 20% discount on the next McDonald's order, or some ethical kind of abuse that gets you your needed treatment, because the healthcare system is just too nonexistent to care, though.
Any criticism against the use of surveillance technology needs to resort to the rhetoric of COULD, because any other choice of words would put the final nail in any surveillance companies' coffin, with evidence from either whistleblowers or circumvented security issues.
It's certainly hard to look behind the curtains - fair, but in a world where the top companies are selling advertisements by accumulating and correlating large-scale tracking information from every person on earth, regardless whether they're users of the products or not, it should be much harder to shrug off such a possibility as dystopian nonsense than to see it as the fucked up reality (circumvention of fundamental rights included) that it is.
No, the solution is to fix the societal issues leading people to resort to crime. Surveillance cameras are not a solution, they are a band-aid placed several steps away from the wound.
> Are we supposed to expose all entities and relationships and rely on row level security?
Yes. This may feel foreign, but we think it's one the best ways to do permissions. We were originally inspired by Facebook's EntPrivacy. When you have permissions at the object layer, you can be more confident that _any_ query you write would be allowed.
If by backend you mean functions, you are right, we don't support this just yet! We give you an Admin SDK, which you can run in frameworks like NextJS, or inside systems like CF workers. We are definitely thinking about bringing this as a first-class citizen.
We are similar to supabase in the sense that we support a relational database. We're different in that with us, you get real-time queries, offline mode, and optimistic updates out of the box.
We both offer a real-time queries out of the box. I am not 100% sure, I but think Convex also set up a multi-tenant database; so they can offer a good number of free projects well.
The way I would differentiate Instant:
With Convex you write your queries as Javascript functions. This means you have to do joins for example imperatively. With Instant, you can write queries declaratively.
As of today Convex doesn't work offline, and you have to write optimistic updates manually. Instant can run offline and comes with optimistic updates out of the box.
Both Convex and Instant support files out of the box. But with Instant you can write CASCADE delete rules, and you also get other services, like presence and streams.
Congratulations on your launch! 4 years of work is certainly remarkable perseverance.
The sync engine feature looks very interesting to me. There have been quite a few products available on the market today, but none has achieved a dominant share yet. So if this is your main strength, I'd like to see more demos built local first.
Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece.
> Is React the only first class citizen in this stack?
Each system gets the same functionality. We centralize the critical logic for the client SDK in "@instantdb/core". React, Svelte, Tanstack, React Native et al are wrappers around that core library.
The one place where it's lacking a bit is the docs. We have specific docs for each library, but a lot of other examples assume React.
We are improving this as we speak. For now, the assumption on React is quite light in the docs, so it's relatively straightforward to figure out what needs to happen for the library of your choice.
Any thoughts on a potential Tanstack DB integration?
I love tanstack's rich front end. Ya'll have quite an amazing system, and I'm wondering if there's any thoughts on how perhaps your pretty substantial front end side might be adapted to tanstack DB. https://github.com/TanStack/db/tree/main/packages
1. Unlimited projects: when you spin up traditional backends, you usually use VMs. It's expensive to start many of them. With Instant, you create unlimited projects
2. User experience: traditional CRUD apps work, but they don't feel delightful. I you want to support features like multiplayer, offline mode, or optimistic updates, you'll have to write a lot more custom infra. Instant gives you these out of the box, and the agents find it easier to write than CRUD code
3. Richer features: sometimes you'll want to add more than just a backend. For example, maybe you want to store files, or share cursors, or stream tokens across machines. These often need more bespoke systems (S3, Redis, etc). Instant already comes with these out of the box, and the agents know how to use them.
There are a few demo sections in the post that show this off. For example, you can click button and you'll get a backend, without needing to sign up. And in about 25 lines of code, you'll make a real-time todo app.
How does it compare to photon networking? I've been using photon and webrtc mostly. I haven't had any issues, but I'm always interested in finding better solutions!
Photon looks interesting! I am not too familiar with it, but from what I understand Photon and WebRTC are for communicating messages between clients. Those messages can be very fast, because they aren't blocked by writes to disk. Instant has two similar services, Presence & Streams. The primary sync engine is more for storing relational data.
I'll step in and add a voice. Ultimately, Flock is solving a real problem with crime. This is why police departments when them.
Stopping Flock doesn't address the need that got police departments to use them. If you want to "stop flock", you need to address that need better.
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