Tuesday March 19th, 2024
How far has the net fallen? I'm trying to find an old comic, it was about mixing Christianity, and the punchline was on the order of "There's no wrong way to eat a Jesus™". It was of the era of Bob the Angry Flower, but I'm pretty sure was another comic.
Google, Bing, Stract and Marginalia are being of no help here.
Monday March 18th, 2024
I'm a huge fan of moderating how casually people brandish deadly weapons (like cars) in our community, but every time I read stats from the local police on a checkpoint like "1368 Vehicles through the checkpoint", with 3 arrests for impaired driving and 13 citations for driving without a license, I read it as "Ihre papiere, bitte"...
From this experience it would seem that students can work well in a clean room with about seven parts ber 10,000 of carbon dioxide; much more than this causes dullness, and anything over thirteen parts causes in most cases an almost impassable barrier to the full ackquisition of knowledge.
Anyway, enjoy that interior conference room...
Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update. I mean, Sonoma has been a shitshow generally, but it's good to know that Java's mission of being the platform which will semi-randomly segfault on all of the platforms is still being actively pursued, despite the Oracle acquisition.
Absolutely loving @jwgoerlich@infosec.exchange's reposting of the foreword to "Learning Perl". https://jwgoerlich.com/we-were-wizards-learning-perl/
I've been reading through the learning Rust book (again), and thinking about how we used to aspire to expressiveness in computer languages, and now...
It feels like the sense of possibility needs to come back to computing. LLMs and GANs make it feel like the most we're aspiring to is bloviating and bad drawing. I want my future back!
Sunday March 17th, 2024
Wondering what the aircraft loss rate was back when Boeing was "an engineering company" vs now. Not to dismiss the current shenanigans, and I know that we've learned a lot about engineering and air travel in the intervening decades, but I think there may be some "good old days" stuff going on....
Saturday March 16th, 2024
Ya know, I try, I really do, to use Firefox. Despite bullshit like Pocket, and partnering with extortionists for "reputation management" protectionism, but holy shit they make it hard.
This morning it's all the security failures because Firefox can't get its fucking clock right, and won't let me easily override the SSL failures because the idea that someone's gonna MiTM SmugMug pictures is soooo scary.
I love how staff and consultants put subtext into contextual documents.. "The downtown was a mix of commercial and residential uses during the late-nineteenth century, as lack of easy transportation led people to live near their place of business or job."
This Berkeley Shattuck Avenue Commercial Corridor Historic Context and Survey is a thing of beauty.
https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/pages...ttuck%20context%2005-28-2015.pdf
Ugh. Several days recently of trying to figure out why Apple is sometimes not sending -mouseMoved: events to my views (and then suddenly starting to send them again), and what combination of gesture recognizers is causing drags within a scroll view that happen to put another scroll view under the cursor to sometimes stop the original drag.
I long for the days when we had a freakin' memory map for what showed up on screen and dealt with all of this ourselves.
Friday March 15th, 2024
For whatever reason, the Blink EV charging network has been emailing blow-by-blow status updates through some recent network travails, and just emailed "Blink charging network fully operational".
And I completely read that in a menacing Darth Vader voice: ""Now, witness the power of this fully operational charging network."
Associations between 11 parental discipline behaviours and child outcomes across 60 countries
Conclusions: Psychological and physical aggression were disadvantageous for children's socioemotional development across countries. Only verbal reasoning was associated with positive child socioemotional development. No form of psychological aggression or physical aggression benefited child socioemotional development in any country. Greater emphasis should be dedicated to reducing parental use of psychological and physical aggression across cultural contexts.
doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-058439.
Research Brief: Is Your Child Misbehaving? Try Reasoning With Them
These results are consistent with a recent study of U.S. families that found that young children who receive harsh physical discipline, such as spanking, are more likely to exhibit aggressive, impulsive, or antisocial behaviors. Researchers following American mothers and their children from birth to age 9 found that children who were spanked had higher levels of these “externalizing behavior problems” at later ages—with the effects more consistent and longer lasting among families facing economic hardship.
Rewatching bits of the September 18, 2023 City Council meeting, with the hearing on Oyster Cove, to try to figure out how the project went from being so awesome to being so "meh".
Thursday March 14th, 2024
Car and Driver: First IIHS Semi-Autonomous Testing Fails Nearly Every Automaker
Of the 14 systems the Insurance Instiute for Highway Safety tested, none earn the top Good overall rating, only one is rated Acceptable, two are graded as Marginal, and 11 are given the lowest rating of Poor.
The "Acceptable" one is Lexus's system. GM & Nissan (with the NaviLink option) get "Marginal".
Wednesday March 13th, 2024
RT Missing The Point @MissingThePt@mastodon.social
If you are patient enough, you can build your very own Boeing airplane out of parts that fall from the sky.
I think maybe we've found a tell for LLM use? Surfaces and Interfaces — Volume 46, March 2024, 104081: The three-dimensional porous mesh structure of Cu-based metal-organic-framework - aramid cellulose separator enhances the electrochemical performance of lithium metal anode batteries
Introduction
Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2].
Via @hugo@assemblag.es who notes "boy oh boy. there goes peer review."
Hey, I remember those! RT Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@octodon.social
In the old days, they used to have little vending machines at the airport where you could buy a life insurance policy. Maybe Boeing’s just trying to bring them back
Insurance News: A look back: Whatever happened to airport insurance vending machines?
Ugh. And I can't seem to get any Android SFTP transfer apps to find my voice recorder files. Fucking walled gardens trying to get me into their damned cloud services that I can't script with anything.
Got someone looking for more info about Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster Pennsylvania, as a potential attendee. If anyone in my circles is willing to chat, they'd appreciate it!
Fuuu! When did Apple break USB file transfer from Android devices? I can't get my phone to go into "Connected device" any more.
Fucking Apple.
Y'all have read about this New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick complaining about the conditions in headquarters, and that rats are eating evidence?
"Golly, I don't know where that cannabis went, the rats must have eaten it" is about the most bullshit line a cop can deliver.
Tuesday March 12th, 2024
Once the internet became completely pervasive within society, low-information religious fundamentalists finally became aware that their side had totally and completely lost all scientific and historical arguments. This has been extremely traumatizing psychologically because all of the authorities they have been conditioned to believe (pastors, the Bible, political leaders) proclaimed themselves to be infallible. Instead, they were completely defenseless against anthropologists, biologists, and historians.
But rather than admit they were wrong and adapt to modernity, religious fundamentalists have decided to attack it and to force the majority who disbelieve their ideas to genuflect before them. Having failed to convince people of their beliefs, they have decided to mandate them. In so doing, they are embracing their core epistemology, that knowledge comes from authority rather than from the scientific method. ...
A reminder to myself that I should probably put `rm -fr /Users/*/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/*` in my XCode startup script. I bet a lot of funky behavior will be reduced.
Monday March 11th, 2024
RT gsuberland@chaos.social Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social
lewd
OH: "porn should not have a plot. I don't wanna be trying to figure out who the Lisan al-Gaib is mid-wank"
Friend asked Bard for a "picture of an Amazon woman". After all of the caveats about no historical evidence and whatnot, it gave him a picture of a woman modeling Amazon(dot)com branded products.
Thomas 🔭✨ @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
Remember 10 years ago when the tech industry promised we’ll “3D print everything from food to houses”?
Now think about the promises about AI.
Also, if I'm ever trying to set up an event for you and your rider is detailed enough to say anything about brown M&Ms or favorite brand of bottled water, I will be freakin' overjoyed. "Yeah, we're gonna bring a computer" is okay, until I have to verify projector compatibility, and wrangle everyone's slide formats....
I mean, sure, people are complaining about the lack of turn signal stalk on the newer Tesla Model 3s, but how many Tesla drivers are using turn signals anyway?
We should probably just remove the capability altogether, they're only using it for misinformation...
"So why don't we..."
We have no experience with crowd management. We don't have the spare people to make sure that the social predictions you're trying to make work correctly with people in line.
I am tasked with making the AV work correctly for this event, which has become "interface with the venue operator", so I already have no control.
Trying to get me to make you a plan for crowd behavior is outside of my area of expertise, and a distracting from tasks I'm already wigged out about.
Krebs on Security: Incognito Darknet Market Mass-Extorts Buyers, Sellers
Borrowing from the playbook of ransomware purveyors, the darknet narcotics bazaar Incognito Market has begun extorting all of its vendors and buyers, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000. The bold mass extortion attempt comes just days after Incognito Market administrators reportedly pulled an “exit scam” that left users unable to withdraw millions of dollars worth of funds from the platform.
So it turns out that maybe recording all of your illegal transactions on an immutable public ledger might be problematic after all? And that the limitation of 7 global transactions per second means that you have to use a shadow banking system, and that has additional problems? Who'd have thought.
Woke up this morning to a message from yet another friend who was hit by a distracted driver while walking. Meanwhile, spent a good bit of the weekend talking to neighbors about street safety, and while people are sympathetic to the dangers, I'm pretty sure that if you asked most people to choose between an on-street parking spot in front of their house and the life of a child, they'd express sympathies for the parents' loss.
Billy Cobb: 2005 (1985 Parody)
Apparently if 1985 by Bowling For Soup were released today, it would be about 2005. Anyways, here's what that would probably sound like.
Sunday March 10th, 2024
I have been having a lot of realizations about being overcommitted, about all of the implicit volunteering because my technical skills mean I'm seen as a leader in a community which means that people come to me for advice with social problems, about how people who represent themselves as project managers are often good at face, but not much at management, and I'm picking up pieces in the background.
I have a lot of "no"s queued up, but first I have to get through all these implicit "yes"s.