Flutterby™!

Today pissed off that I'm spending yet more time trying to make a solar company (High Definition Solar) fix their install to conform to the plans we agreed to, and that I'm gonna have to spend time on the phone with our health insurance (Anthem) to get them to acknowledge a fuckup on their part.

Jason Bergman: Talking Oglaf with Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne: ‘We’d stay up all night drawing stuff to make each other laugh’

The unbearable heartbreak of a typo in the name of a git branch, making it difficult to type until it gets merged back in.

Holland-Cycling.com stops in 2026

Search engines like Google that once led users to the information on our website, which we presented and updated with so much care and effort, have now become 'answer engines'. This has huge consequences for us, as many potential visitors get an answer to their question before even reaching our site. But what answers are they getting? What useful information are they missing out on by not reaching our website and having a look around?

Occasionally I wonder "am I autistic, or are my social challenges just trauma response?"

Then I see the ways in which people are fawning over "AI"/LLMs, and the ways in which these things interact with me, and... yeah, I definitely do not process this stuff the way normies do.

New rule. If you don't let an mtr through to tell me more about the host that's probing my server for /admin paths, I'm gonna assume your entire network is hostile. Talkin' to you, ae1011-0.icr01.tyo31.ntwk.msn.net

The material is about 3/8" think branches nailed to a skeleton of some sort. Wonder what the finish and expected life span of the sculptures out in the elements like this is.

Over at the Sonoma Community Center to see the elephant sculptures, made from lantana camara, an invasive plant that completes with the resources that supports elephants in India.

not sure whether brazen, or hungry, but out in the daytime in our neighborhood...

We have a friend, a piano player and decent vocalist, who's taken to inviting a number of people over on the first Friday of the month to "bring their [creative] gifts".

Last night was a wonderful gathering of song and verse, and I'm inspired and humbled and it was awesome.

If you haven't already abandoned Firefox, Firefox Forcing LLM Features has some notes on configuration, including ways to replicate these things across machines.

Via lobste.rs.

Jury acquits D.C. 'sandwich guy' charged with chucking a sandwich at a federal agent

Sean Dunn faced a single misdemeanor after federal grand jurors refused to indict him on the felony charge sought by prosecutors.

Via @GottaLaff @gottalaff.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy Who noted...

Just desserts!

and

2/ I think we all knew this one was in the bag.

3/ The DOJ lawyer should be sacked.

4/ Sandwich Guy's lawyer ate DOJ for lunch.

5/ ... because DOJ just couldn't cut the mustard.

Okay, I'm done.

6/... because my jokes are getting stale.

Mozilla's SUMO Japanese translation community ends their support over botched machine translation:

They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.

Via nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social, in the replies David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange has some notes on how, yes, this is the result of a bug, but...

That bit bothers me the least. Lots of systems have bugs. The issue here for me is that they have a load of experts who understand the problem, and someone who does not understand the problem has mandated a tool that does not solve the problem and entirely disregarded the value of the experts.

Machine-assisted translation tooling primarily focuses on building, maintaining, and using a term dictionary: a set of prior translations that ensure that you consistently translate terms of art in the same way. If you don't do this, you get something that is technically a valid translation, but which is completely useless because the same term is translated in different ways throughout the document (based on surrounding context and translator preferences) and so it's impossible for a reader to tell that they're the same term.

It sounds like the Japanese translators have put a lot of effort into solving this problem. LLM-based translation is infamous for not doing this. It will translate terms based on how, across the training corpus, that term was translated when adjacent to other words. This is completely fine for short, low-stakes translation. If I want to translate a menu while travelling, for example, an LLM will typically give a good output (maybe don't trust it if you have serious allergies, but for the rest of us it's fine). But for something where you want to communicate technical content (in any domain), they're (at best) a good first approximation. And translators have repeatedly reported that cleaning up LLM translations is more work than doing the translation well in the first place.

Also Via.

You know what I love about modern software? Slack is adding "AI" features and can't get my unread workspaces or messages right.

New features trump core annoyances.

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’

I am actually surprised that the number is that low. I assume that any ads on Facebook are scams. I wonder if they've A/B tested out exactly what proportion of scammy ads they can get before users stop engaging and advertisers stop buying ads?

Via and Via.

Charlene is now reading Carter Lavin's If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy and is all fired up about advocacy and messaging. I was super impressed with Zohran Mamdani's videos and campaighn generally, and ran across Corey Atad in Defector: Selling Zohran, and thought it was worth sending along to her and saving here.

Kay Leadfoot @ FuelArc News‬ ‪@kayleadfoot.bsky.social‬

I had the regrettable realization...

The Caribbean boat strikes are our "dropping dissidents out of helicopters into the Atlantic" moment.

The regime has tipped into extrajudicial killings against perceived opponents.

Only, instead of Pinochet's cloak of secrecy, we live-tweet videos of it.

"This neural network could have been a matrix computed with principal component analysis" is the new "this meeting could have been an email".

Norman Rockwell family slams DHS over art use on social media

“Protect our American way of life,” one DHS post on Facebook from August said, with an image of Rockwell’s 1971 painting “Salute the Flag.” Another post included an image of Rockwell’s work along with a quote from former President Coolidge: “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.”

USA Today Opinion: We're Norman Rockwell's family. Trump's DHS has shamefully misused his work.

“I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in an interview in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”

Via.

Charlene read Truly by Lionel Richie, and said it was good, so I'm reading it, and quite enjoying it. From that, we got to talking about We Are The World, which led to last night watching The Greatest Night In Pop (official trailer), and...

I know I have been dismissive about Michael Jackson before, and I think my understanding of why people do what they do (and the pressures of performance and being a public figure) has evolved quite a bit, but I think it's been with the development of my own voice that I've started to really listen to vocal performers, and holy shit that cat could sing.

As could everyone else in that performance, each in their own distinct (and, with their voices arranged to showcase those distinctions) way.

I may have to watch the thing again just to catch those places where people were singing in isolation, and take careful notes about some of the things they were doing with pronunciation and emphasis, and...

Anyway, really enjoyed the documentary. Probably helps if you've seen Quincy, and some of the framing from reading Truly is also useful.

The headline is... overblown: Kim Kardashian Blames ChatGPT for Failing Law Exams

Taylor jokingly asked whether she was cheating and Kardashian clarified that it was just to study for her tests, but it often gave the wrong answer. “They’re always wrong,” Kardashian said, stone-faced. “It has made me fail tests all the time. And then I’ll get mad and I’ll like yell at it and be like, ‘You made me fail, why did you do this?'”

Not sure whether this is pro or con on using LLMs to study.

Via Tara Calishain.

I'm an "AI" detractor, but I would like every developer of a package management environment to use an LLM coding tool to install and configure a package, to demonstrate just how bizarre and how much lore goes in to using these damned things.

Jef Poskanzer @jef@mastodon.social

Gun Town

There's a town near you where most of the residents spend much of their days running around with guns. The guns are real. They are loaded with real bullets. Their fingers are on the triggers. But they don't pull the triggers, they just yell "BANG, BANG, BANG!"

Except occasionally something happens. Maybe they hit a bump. Or they are distracted by their cell phone. Or they had a little too much to drink before going out for a gun run. Or they see a non-gun person and want to teach them a lesson.

The gun goes off.

The gun people nod sadly to each other. "Such a tragic accident," they say. The police arrive, interview people, and make a report: "Accident." The dead are not interviewed. Then everyone runs off yelling "BANG, BANG, BANG!"

Of course we don't live in Gun Town. That place is obviously absurd and could never exist in real life.

We live in nice safe Car Town.

Re age verification laws: Angela Glansbury 🚽 @floppyplopper@todon.nl

comparing the complexity of applying for a british wanking license and a swedish passport and deciding to become a swedish citizen

Thomas 🔭🕹️ @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

If we’d speak more ill of the dead, maybe it would remind the living not to be assholes.

My own preferences tend towards modern pop, but my voice teacher tends towards 60s and 70s, which means that along with square dance music, I get to do deep dives into a lot of problematic music.

Anyway, Jefferson Starship's Jane is both musically very challenging, and an awful view of matrimony.

Seems worth noting that a man who worked tirelessly to fulfill the goals of the 9/11 hijackers, and was responsible for countless deaths, died today. Dick Cheney, dead at 84.

My neighborhood is awash in feijoa/pineapple guava (not actually a guava). Everyone's trying to figure out what to do with them.

I just had one that was smooth and sweet (rather than sour and slightly bitter), and now I'm trying to figure out what we're doing wrong with the rest of them...

Playing with hank drums again, and couldn't find my old hacksaw blade handle for lengthening tuning slots, so made another one..

For reasons, I went searching for US railway worker deaths in the late 1800s. It used to be that if someone wrote up a web page on a topic like this, it was an indication that they'd done some digging, and I felt comfortable passing along the page as a reference.

AI has ruined everything.

Tonight's enchiladas started with making tortillas. I may have issues.

That boards are choosing CEOs who can't understand why prayer and fasting didn't save their sinking company, and same former Intel CEO then getting investment money to build AI to hasten the Second Coming, says pretty much everything about modern tech culture... https://futurism.com/artificia...gence/former-ceo-intel-ai-christ