What's interesting is that I've seen a noticeable uptick in ordinary cars being camouflaged, in quasi-legal ways. Dark tinted windows all over, plenty of license-plate cloaking techniques, and a new one which is probably specifically anti-AI/anti-Flock: people are cloaking or concealing their hood ornaments: that is, the unique logo of the maker of their vehicle. An idle pastime of mine has always been car ID, so it's interesting to be a little more challenged when I see a hood ornament that's encased in a tinted shield, and I still need to correctly guess the make/model of the vehicle.

Gemini tells me it's 100% legal everywhere in the USA, to swap, modify, or conceal vehicle branding on privately-owned vehicles.

This is paired with a rather alarming but "more harmless than it appears" fad where people modify their "exhaust tune" to sound like backfire/gunshots. And they drive past all night long. I hear them everywhere. I had an LLM chat about it, and it's really something people deliberately do. I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.