u/fakejakebrowne

Gotta own where I messed up after going down a real rabbit hole. Original comment here.

What's accurate: Flock was voted down. Then the mayor tried to slide it past the 500k council review threshold by agreeing to a contract with Flock for $498,500. The auditor said, in so many words, gtfo.

What happened next: a rush to replace Flock led to a contract with Axon. You might know them as the supplier of ~1700 body cams to DPD. Because of said rush, the Denver Surveillance Task Force didn't have time to actually come up with much on it. If they had more time, they might have found Fusus.

A quick timeline:

• 2015: Denver buys ~$6,000,000 in body cams and cloud storage (and pays for the extended warranty, c'mon, we all know that's a scam) and other gear from a company called Taser International.
• 2017: Taser International becomes Axon.
• 2020: $16,000,000 more to Axon for tasers and data storage. It also includes 670 licenses for Axon Respond, which turns body cams into live feeds, at no charge.
• 2023: Denver started a contract with a new company called Fusus to support 1200 concurrent AI video streams for $216,000 a year.
• 2024: Fusus was acquired by Axon.
• 2025: $27,000,000 more to Axon for body cams and upgrading old tasers.
• 2025: Denver's checkbook starts showing $216,000 payments to Axon. Identical to the Fusus subscription. Same amount, same expense code.
• 2026: Axon replaces Flock for $150,000.

So, the company that sells us the body cams and license plate readers also owns the company that sold us the AI surveillance technology. We do have strict guidelines on how that data is shared and Axon is not allowed to train its models on Denver video without authorization.

I haven't found a restriction about the city using Axon's AI technology when looking at video of us. DPD has already acknowledged that its Fusus system has an AI image-recognition layer capable of searching video footage.

The big thing we don't know is the extent to which FususOne, a system that "combines private and public video streams into a single feed", is currently being used. Which Denver camera feeds can currently be searched or analyzed using AI? Does analysis occur continuously or only when an officer initiates a search? What features have DPD actually activated?

TL:DR; Flock might be gone, but the city just contracted for another piece of surveillance tech from the same company that already supplies its body cams and owns its AI video platform. Instead of diversifying surveillance vendors, Denver is putting more of that infrastructure under Axon.

This all started back in November when I saw a homie had posted the same busted pack to social:

https://preview.redd.it/7aix0vak4h5h1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=163f71d8b2d1f06fce05a0139dfadceea81dc6b4

The odds of us having the same first 8 cards seemed suspiciously low. I also had zero time to look into this since holiday season is insanely busy at work, plus 17Lands had said early on they probably weren't releasing public data for Powered Cube since it was a short event. For me, I was fine moving on knowing that there was a 99.9% chance packs were seeded.

Come January, guess who's bored as hell? This guy. So one day I notice that 17Lands had released the public draft data for PC because a guy I used to edit a podcast for posted some cool data about the Power 11 (P9 + Sol Ring and Mana Crypt were not allowed in the same pack). Well, let's throw that in the wood chipper and see what comes out.

Took about an hour and I found the pack that Ryan and I had drafted:

https://preview.redd.it/lvkrewhm4h5h1.png?width=889&format=png&auto=webp&s=873d2f07ea4e8e7ba9b49d6df2a027db5ded5d8b

The big issue with this dataset was that P1P1 wasn't being captured by 17Lands at the time, so it was hard to get the full picture. The only thing I could pull was P2P1 and P3P1 and query if two or more people had seen identical cards. Just ran it again and we see that happens 19,407 times in the 48,152 drafts we can look at.

https://preview.redd.it/hndy4jtn4h5h1.png?width=3652&format=png&auto=webp&s=d34bfc718c93d825b1f3df3b1f4569f522cdeeff

The number of actual packs that could be generated in a 540 card cube might as well be infinite, so having ~24.5% repeat rate in a sample size of 96,304 shows that there's something obviously afoot.

My original hypothesis was that if they're clustering the P11, there are overall buckets of card strength that determine a Powered Cube pack composition. Sadly, the end of spring is also a busy time at work, so that's all I can give you for now.

When I saw u/sc2gg's post, I went, "Yeah, of course." and then kept scrolling but it turned into kind of a thing, so I figured I'd post what I found again. The deal is that, yes, if you happen to watch one of the hundred or so publicly available drafts on video you can find your entire draft a smol percentage of the time. If you had a nickel for every time this happened, you'd have one nickel a fraction of a percentage of a time. Which is actually a lot.

More on why I think this isn't a massive problem:

First, the 17Lands data set comes out pretty late in the format, if it all. They've only released it once and that was from November.

Second, the card pool rotates so that old data isn't relevant unless we can show they simply swap cards 1:1 with the replacement. Entirely possible! But I give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Third, you need to actually have the tools to build the massive, queryable database and 99% of Arena users just won't. 99% is probably low.

If this was on MODO and people in the MOCS could look up their Vintage Cube packs during a draft for a few thousand dollars? Big issue. But this isn't a comp format (I know, it's ranked, but it's not Arena Direct: Powered Cube ^(yet)) so the advantage for knowing a few of your packs remains small.

I'm the first person to overreact in situations like this, so please don't mistake my cautious optimism about this as anything but that. This is a small problem, not a MASSIVE one. It also probably makes your experience better.

Not having to generate a ton of random packs each draft PROBABLY helps Arena's physical performance. It also ensures that we get somewhat better packs instead of the rare 15 red card pack. I don't know. Not a software developer, haven't drafted Oops, All Red Cards. But that's where we are.

TL;DR: Packs have been seeded for a while, it's probably not anything people can use to gain a massive advantage outside of the rare time you're watching a draft and are also in that same seat in a draft.