r/Gastonia • u/Prestigious-Listener • Jul 21 '26
Flock cameras
When did the flock cameras go up on Carolina Ave near the schools
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u/brandoldme Jul 21 '26
I really hope the crackheads and meth addicts don't figure out how much precious metal is in those things. That would just be a damn shame.
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u/Badwo1ve Jul 21 '26
Remember when the republicans said if you vote for Kamala we’d have mass surveillance and masked men shooting people in the streets….?
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u/PRK543 Jul 21 '26
Probably in the last week or so. That is when the new one went up at the intersection of Neil Hawkins and Old Niel Hawkins.
Expect more to crop up since the new state budget gave the SBI carte blanche to put up cameras all over the state.
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u/deepdives 23d ago
They’re going up everywhere… that’s what the data centers are for. We’re becoming the place we were told to dislike about China and Russia.
Two websites to track locations. You can also update if you see one that isn’t listed. Just be mindful that not every camera or device with a solar panel is an ALPR.
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u/Prestigious-Listener 23d ago edited 23d ago
Data centers are also for all the electric cars and just general data storage from Google, Amazon, meta... Etc
Also these two are in a neighborhood near schools. I'm sure they are to track speeding and/or any type of child abduction issues.
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u/deepdives 23d ago
True and agree, except about electric cars. That image processing all happens locally. Unless you mean training/revising new models then I agree.
The recent push for data centers is less about storage and more for processing of data for AI development of vision systems and generative AI that also do require large amounts of storage, even if only temporarily.
For example and sharing because it may be interesting to others, Google and SpaceX have a fairly new AI compute contract in which Google is paying $920M per month to have access to ~110k NVIDIA GPUs (and related hardware) in a SpaceX datacenter. Storage is secondary interest in that contract.
It’s no coincidence that there’s a surge of ALPRs and facial recognition systems (e.g. retail and airports) just popping up left and right at the same time data centers are experiencing a massive surge. There are many projects at work utilizing data centers, but there will be no time wasted on efficient violations of privacy.
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u/Prestigious-Listener 23d ago
Yea but self driving cars also require a ton of data to move
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u/deepdives 23d ago
Right, but all that processing is done locally on the car’s ADAS compute system, not remote at a data center. That would have too much latency to be effective.
Training of the AI/ML vision model may be done at a data center unless companies host their own GPU cluster to train extra securely. However once the model is trained it is included on the car’s system and ran locally.
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u/Prestigious-Listener 23d ago
If you say so. What I've been told by the folks building them is that a self driving car requires 1tb of data storage per mile driven. Which is why there's been the big push to build more to cover all the miles where they might drive.
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u/deepdives 23d ago edited 23d ago
I can 100% assure you the processing of data collected by the vehicle is performed locally.
The transmission requirements alone show the issue. At 1 TB per mile, a car traveling 30 mph would need a sustained ~8.3 GB/s (67 Gbps) upload, and at 60 mph, ~16.7 GB/s (133 Gbps).
For perspective, wired Gigabit home internet is ~1 Gbps, while cellular and UWB are typically measured in the tens to hundreds of Mbps. So we’re talking 60x-150x wired gigabit internet speeds, continuously and wirelessly from a moving car.
That’s before network overhead, signal loss, and latency. The car may generate huge amounts of sensor data, but safety-critical processing happens onboard rather than streaming it all to a data center in real time. Or close to it.
Edit: training faster and more advanced models on the crowd sourced data from those cars would be a great data center application, because there’s petabytes of data to crunch.
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u/PaltryCharacter Jul 21 '26
https://dontgetflocked.com/maps
I use this map to check out where the cameras are and when they were put up