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Holy shit. Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died

Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and one of the first whistleblowers to allege Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 MAX, died Tuesday morning after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection.

Known as Josh, Dean lived in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit is based. He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.

So the legit uses for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at this point have been pretty much reduced to malware and helping North Korea and Russia evade sanctions.

I've been thinking about LLMs in the context of cryptocurrencies, how much of the early hype was in glossing over the core flaws which make both technologies unsuitable for purpose.

And realized, with the rise of automated spam from LLMs, that the end uses of both technologies are the same. The parallels run deeper than I thought.

Tire toxicity faces fresh scrutiny after salmon die-offs

California has begun taking steps to regulate the chemical, last year classifying tires containing it as a "priority product," which requires manufacturers to search for and test substitutes.

"6PPD plays a crucial role in the safety of tires on California's roads and, currently, there are no widely available safer alternatives," said Karl Palmer, a deputy director at the state's Department of Toxic Substances Control.

It's not in the current development path, but some features prototyped for work use a prefix notation math system, and that's bugged me, and wrote a little framework that let me use Objective-C to specify a parser in Backus–Naur form, and because that created an in-memory tree and had some good intermediate information that I could use for command completion.

I've done stuff with the peg/leg recursive descent parser generators in C, and realized that I want the ability to introspect the parse tree better, for things like command completion and better error messages.

I've been both thinking that this is a tool I'd like to have generally for implementing configuration and scripting kinds of things, and that this might be my opportunity to learn a new language. I've been thinking that I should learn Rust, although as I dig through a lot of it it (and Go) feel pretty prescriptive, on the other hand I've also looked at some of the side effects that sneak into Perl and Python and realize that whipupitude is not always great for long term maintenance of the code.

Anyway, I started thinking about what it might look like in C++, and that reminded me of how much the language informs my design thinking, even as I think that many of those ideas are portable across languages. Which got me back towards Rust, although...

LogLog Games: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years is a fascinating look at how Rust's proscription about memory management can make it difficult to build. Especially as we start to think about "data oriented design" as a response to Object-Oriented design, maybe that isn't a great idea.

On the other side, The Brain Dump — One year of C is some musings about C99 (vs C89) and thinking about design and memory in C vs C++, and it's making me think that maybe I even need to go back to my preprocessor abusing ways and implement this thing in C.

Whoah, Nixle alert from the Petaluma PD says AT&T customers in the area don't have 911. It as only 2 weeks ago that they fixed it, and a week before that it was out before, and... does AT&T know how to run phone networks?

Today in Mac app development woes: is it Sonoma 14.4.1 vs 14.3.1, WkWebView based on Safari 17.4.1 vs 17.3.1, or my own incompetence with CSS?

Listening to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, episode 26: "Ain't That A Shame", he hit the Pat Boone version and... I had a moment of very uncomfortable self awareness about the progress of my vocal lessons. Hopefully I have left that era of the development of my voice behind.

I'm gonna go with: the purpose of a University is to indoctrinate, free thinkers are outside agitators. Academia is based on abuse, let us not defend that.

"When students begin to defy established authority it often appears to besieged administrators that “someone must be behind this,” the implication being that young people are incapable of thinking or acting on their own." — Howard Zinn, 1971

https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/outside-agitators/

JFC: Stunning accusations of sex abuse in Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans seminary pool; secret signals from one church abuser to others

“Additionally, it was reported that in some instances, ‘gifts’ were given to abuse victims by the accused [molesters] with instructions to pass on or give the gift to certain priests at the next school or church,” the warrant contended. “It was said that the ‘gift’ was a form of signaling to another priest that the person was a target for sexual abuse.

I have been kind of taking casually that the Petaluma St Vincent de Paul high school was "reorganizing", presumably to shield assets from paying out to victims of Santa Rosa diocese abuse, but I think the horrors are becoming less removed.

Via ResearchBuzz

RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

@anthrocypher I've got this in an upcoming publication:

"Every line of code written today represents a testing, complexity, maintenance and refactoring burden your team will bear tomorrow, and the reality is that none of our customers want code. Our customers want _utility and functionality;_ code is a liability we accept so we can deliver that functionality. GenAI or not, nobody wants or needs an arbitrary quantity of code for its own sake."

Firstyear's blog-a-log — Passkeys: A Shattered Dream

I mashed the wrong buttons somehow and Android Auto pulled up the Google Virtual Assistant while I was driving.

So I said "oK Google, fuck off", and for a lecture about language.

Which was a good reminder about how advertising parasites leech off our social norms and sense of guilt, and how the norms that guide us when we're interacting with people should not apply when we interact with those who's abuse or good nature.

My Zoom renewal is coming up again, and I'm looking at the features list and thinking "wait, could I get this ala carte without all of the bullshit? I don't need "Mail & Calendar", I can't figure out what "Notes" are, and I can definitely do without the "AI Companion".

It's easy for hosting the sorts of events we host, but I am definitely looking for other options.

priscilla @ghoulnoise: DO NOT BUY HISENSE TV'S LOL (Or at least keep them offline).

In which a person's Windows computer is gradually failing, first it started with MIDI device capabilities degrading, then Task Manager stopped working reliably, then video capture, and remote desktop, and then System Settings disappeared, and...

Then they discovered that the Hisense TV on their network was generating a random ID for UPNP discovery every few minutes, and Windows was adding it to their device list, and:

I followed the instructions. I deleted keys generated by our TV for 5 straight minutes. 5 Minutes of like 200BPM clicking. I restarted. Everything worked again. I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I'd solved a murder. The main suspect was the PC but the culprit was the TV in the other room.

But, to be fair, that Windows was brought to a screeching halt by this is *also* a serious issue.

sarina-anadyomene

Cocaine was a stimulant used by a priestly caste of the middle period United States called businessmen in order to commune with The Market. [1]

Saturday, Charlene and I were wiped from the Apple Blossom Parade and the activities of the afternoon, and in the evening ended up vegging out in front of "Watch Call Me Country: Beyonc&#eacute; & Nashville's Renaissance", which wasn't long, and MAX recommended the series "We're Here" afterwards, and...

Drag, queer acceptance, and a focus on supporting all of the participants? Yeah, we've watched 3 episodes so far, and will probably let our MAX subscription renew for another month because of it.

UX Collective: How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? — A digital endorsement process gone wrong

I'm so old, I actually remember when we talked about things like user experience...

I mean, from a perspective other than "how can we A/B test to extract the most value from users?"

Bunch of scraps I needed to get out of the way, and wanted to fine tune some methods of work for various cuts, so I'm making 4 music stands. And learning things about geometry and what's practical as my design evolves.

Itis really quite the thing to see all of the shock and dismay over the Supreme Court when Big Tony Scalia explicitly fucking told us what was up. Great to be outraged, but if you're only noticing now, it's worth doing some introspection.

And find better pundits.

”The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter." Wait, I thought London Breed was trying to do this already.

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco

This Metafilter comment on the decline of Google is such a wonderful summary of how, once Google has always been somewhere on the spectrum between cooperative player in an ecosystem and extractive, and how the extractive nature has become overwhelming:

My phrasing of this point differs, but not in disagreement or criticism, just as another way to view it through the lens of wnissen's really excellent phrasing above:

"The original intent of Backrub was to profit off of the work of Internet curators without paying them for their time creating high-quality sites."

Which is the essence of the modern AI content theft problem as well, only starting twenty-five years ago. Once Google's full-text search devalued the effort of curators, most of the unpaid ones stopped doing it at all. Later on, the paid ones got replaced by algorithms. Which means that today, Google Search no longer has the data necessary to function as designed.

Software development is just an unending series of discussions in which you attempt to get people to describe what they're seeing or what they want more precisely, continually iterating on what "that", "it", "home", "away", and similar terms mean....

...and then you die.

As campus administrators across the country are solidly positioning themselves on the wrong side of history, I'm reminded of my Dad, who had a stint in the army that he actually really enjoyed (he was in Germany along the Iron Curtain and didn't re-up because Vietnam was finally catching up with him), observing that when his peers were protesting, he was enlisting, and that he should have been protesting.

Seriously, if anyone has recommendations for USB-C power cables that last any amount of time, please mention them. I'm, down to one 3' long one that I bought because it was $20 vs the $15 for the other ones, the original Apple one died, the magsafe connector on this M2 MBP seems to have died, and I'm sick of shoveling money down the USB-C hole.

Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search. TLDR: They took the ex-McKinsey guy who ran Yahoo! search into the ground and let him degrade search so that people would spend more time looking at ads.

Hacker News thread, linked to because it's rare to see that many comments about a Google personality, with nobody stepping up to defend him.

MeFi thread

Oh that's A powerful observation: "It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia

Email from Chevrolet informs me that "Dan, there’s a world of tech in Blazer EV", and... no, I work with this stuff, let's limit that tech as much as possible...

For all of the horrible things McKinsey has done to the US, this feels an awful lot like taking down Al Capone via tax fraud, but I'll take it: McKinsey Faces US Criminal Probe Over Opioids Work, Sources Say

Not sure if "8 Cheese Pizza" means like 7 bladed razor, or "we had leftovers and a grater" or ... But that many seems excessive for a blend.

Charles Buhler's "reactionless drive" is making the rounds again, just as the reviews of all of these half-baked cell phones that talk to "AI assistants" are starting to come out. This morning it's The Verge talking about the Rabbit R1, in the wake of all of the hullabaloo over Marques Brownlee's review of the Humane AI pin titled "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now" (YouTube).

And I'm reminded of that thing where it's useful to look at "what's the enabling technology here?". If Buhler's right, space travel is the absolutely least interesting thing about what he's pushing. If a company has developed interesting "AI assistant" technology, carrying around another device is the least interesting part of that.

A few years ago I was thinking "well, I could learn to play another instrument, or I could use my voice to generate MIDI", so I went looking for those technologies, and holy shit the number of people who were selling plugins that promised to do that, but bundling it with a cheap USB mic, were legion (especially once I triggered the Facebook ad demons). And, of course, none of them found any third party who'd credibly say "yeah, this works".

Anyway, wish more "AI" reviewers would do head-to-heads against the current state of Siri or Alexa.

An Ask MeFi question for "Fluffer pro tips" did *not* go in the direction I was expecting...

It's been a while since I've been cycle counting, but this is interesting: The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword

In case you skimmed to the end, here's the summary:

• Benefit seems to be available for GCC.
• Doesn't affect Apple's chips much at all.
• Do not use final with Clang, and maybe MSVC as well.

At the very least, it's another one of those things to hide behind the preprocessor so you've got options.

Study: Alphabetical order of surnames may affect grading

An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students’ submissions in Canvas — the most widely used online learning management system — which is based on alphabetical rank of their surnames.

30 Million Canvas Grading Records Reveal Widespread Sequential Bias and System-Induced Surname Initial Disparity