Wednesday March 26th, 2025
The Onion: Teen Warned Not To Accept Group Chat Invites From National Security Advisors She Doesn’t Know. Lands on several levels...
'cause, I mean, not a National Security Advisor, but Evangelical youth pastor, so close: Youth pastor arrested by Thornton Colorado police, facing charge of sexual assault on a child.
Guerilla bus stop bench deployments...
https://www.sfgate.com/local/a...us-benches-bay-area-20234113.php
Which knob do I have to adjust to secure my end to bell-end encryption?
Coming up on 3 decades in Northern California, "NLP" means "Neuro-linguistic programming", not "Natural Language Processing/Parsing".
Tuesday March 25th, 2025
If you had presented this to me as satire, I'd have objected it as unfairly portraying those who signed their names to it as unduly clueless. "It's okay because we're funding the city off of Measure U sales tax revenue" is... a take.
https://www.petaluma360.com/ar...mmentary-petaluma-city-revenues/
Florida to consider relaxing child labour laws to fill vacant jobs formerly done by undocumented immigrants (alt link)
According to the Florida Policy Insitute, the current bill proposing to loosen child labour rules would pose a great “risk to the health and well-being of the Florida youth”.
If passed, the new bill would permit 16- and 17-year-olds to work without a guaranteed meal break, and it would also remove previous limits on working hours. Working time restrictions for 14-15 year-olds who are home-schooled would also be removed.
Ed Zitron — The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism
American Prospect: Bubble Trouble
Venture capital (VC) funds, drunk on a decade of “growth at all costs,” have poured about $200 billion into generative AI. Making matters worse, the stock market’s bull run is deeply dependent on the growth of the Big Tech companies fueling the AI bubble. In 2023, 71 percent of the total gains in the S&P 500 were attributable to the “Magnificent Seven”—Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft—all of which are among the biggest spenders on AI. Just four—Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—combined for $246 billion of capital expenditure in 2024 to support the AI build-out. Goldman Sachs expects Big Tech to spend over $1 trillion on chips and data centers to power AI over the next five years. Yet OpenAI, the current market leader, expects to lose $5 billion this year, and its annual losses to swell to $11 billion by 2026. If the AI bubble bursts, it not only threatens to wipe out VC firms in the Valley but also blow a gaping hole in the public markets and cause an economy-wide meltdown.
I especially like the ending observation of that one:
Maybe, after the fallout of the AI bubble is felt and the sun sets on Silicon Valley for a bit, the tech world can do a hard reset and return to its more innovative days again.
Via.
Edit: Alibaba’s Tsai Warns of ‘Bubble’ in AI Data Center Buildout
Heard someone yesterday who's part of a healthcare startup bemoan that their IT group isn't approving use of Microsoft's LLM product, and... We as an industry have done a really bad job educating people about privacy, security, *and* LLMs.
Monday March 24th, 2025
Me: "I should stick to fresh veggies and nutritious meals without lots of excessive packaging."
Also me: "Grocery Outlet has Hello Kitty Hot Sour soup cups for half a buck each, I should try that!"
Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.
National Bureau of Economic Research: The Short-Run Effects of Congestion Pricing in New York City
Roads commonly traversed on routes to the CBD before the policy have also seen an increase in speeds and a decrease in estimated vehicle CO₂ emission rates. Overall, these speed changes reduced realized travel times on trips to and within the CBD by approximately 8%.
Saturday night we were completely toast, and since we have the remnants of a Max membership for something likely completely forgettable (we've been working through the music documentaries on it), we were thumbing through the options and Charlene said "what's Janet Planet?" So we watched that.
And. At first I was like "wow, I'm glad I'm not up for much, 'cause this is slow and...", and then it started to feel super familiar.
The movie is set in an unspecified place in Western Massachusets. I spent my kindergarten year, so '73-'74? in Great Barrington Massachussets, at what I remember as the "Pumpkin Hollow Waldorf School", which I think is now Berkshire Waldorf School, and from 1st through 7th grade living on the border between West Lebanon and East Chatham New York, and attending the Hawthorne Vally Waldorf School. So leaving there in '81, a decade before the setting of this movie. But holy cow did I get flashbacks.
Cleveland Review of Books: Love, Safety, and the 1990s: On Annie Baker’s Janet Planet mentions that one of the buildings used for a lot of the shots was "...built in 1979 and once home to a Waldorf operation.", and I could feel it.
The movie centers on Lacy, a 11 year old girl who's being used by her mom, the eponymous Janet, for emotional support and guidance. Both Janet and Lacy are struggling with being liked, and how to use relationships for approval, and for power, and for connection, and ... it wasn't my family, but I sure saw echoes of the charismatic parody of a community leader, the intergenerational trauma, and just the foliage and setting, from my childhood.
Despite the slow pace, and the fact that it was shot (on 16mm film(!)) very much for the theater, lots of wide shots and scenes played through subtle facial expressions, we may end up watching this one again.
Lili Saintcrow — On Ponzi “Publishers”
If a publisher gets shirty with you over the simple question, “How do you separate out author royalties when distributor payments come in, and where is that money kept before being disbursed to authors at the contractually agreed times?”, it is a giant, fast-waving crimson flag. If a publisher claims they cannot answer the question for any reason, tells you “nobody else has ever asked this”, says “we can’t answer because of Personal Life Drama”, etc., then it’s a very VERY good reason not to sign a goddamn contract or, after signing, time for independent audit and rights reversions.
Cool kickstarter, you should at least get the ebook, but:
""Debossed" is the opposite of embossed (raised) and puts the lettering in a depression."
has me thinking too much about other things in a depression right now. Sigh.
If you happened to have snitched on your family, now is a good time to try to undo some of the damage: California Attorney General Rob Bonta urgenly issues consumer alert for 23 And Me customers.
The California-based company has publicly reported that it is in financial distress and stated in securities filings that there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. Due to the trove of sensitive consumer data 23andMe has amassed, Attorney General Bonta reminds Californians of their right to direct the deletion of their genetic data under the Genetic Information Privacy Act (GIPA) and California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). Californians who want to invoke these rights can do so by going to 23andMe's website.
Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 @vaurora@mstdn.social
If you are trying to delete your 23andMe data and get an obnoxious reply asking for ID, tell them no, that's what your password is for, and they will do it. And if they then send you an obnoxious reply saying they will delete everything except the stuff they are required to keep by law, check out this article by actual lawyer @AugustB
Edit: And, there it is: 23andMe Files for Bankruptcy, as CEO Anne Wojcicki Resigns
Ok so Columbia is the coward and collaborator of academia. Paul Weiss among law firms. What other institutions -- who can afford to fight -- will feed their legacy and integrity into the wood chipper?
Accommodation isn't an option with fascists. Everyone gets screwed.
arclight @arclight@oldbytes.space
@rysiek "Without expert intervention, the best these tools can do today is produce a somewhat functional mockup, where every future change beyond that risks destroying existing functionality."
Does "these tools" refer to the AI assistants or those using them? My immediate interpretation was the latter...
Krebs on Security: DOGE to Fired CISA Staff: Email Us Your Personal Data
This is hardly the first example of the administration discarding Security 101 practices in the name of expediency. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent an unencrypted email to the White House with the first names and first letter of the last names of recently hired CIA officers who might be easy to fire.
I really need to write or install a bot fucker-upper... AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org
List of AI bots to add to robots.txt (although they may not obey -- may need to throw them in the bitbucket and 404 or 444 them). In addition to these, you may have to block specific random browser versions for the most aggressive bots who ignore robots.txt.
https://github.com/ai-robots-t....robots.txt/blob/main/robots.txt
3 members of the punk band UK Subs were detained at customs, and deported
Ultimately, while I never expected to be thrown out of America at the age of 67, I find myself somewhat proud of the fact. It seems my relationship with the country is over for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, like this: Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life@mas.to
Let’s disappear people to foreign prisons based on allegations they committed crimes isn’t a slippery slope, you’ve already rolled all the way down the mountain.
So what is it when you send people off to do labor without recompense, without trial? I think the term is "slavery": Rubio says El Salvador offers to accept U.S. deportees of any nationality, including violent American criminals.
Trump administration blames removal of Black and Latino veteran content on AI
"We enforced an aggressive timeline for our DOD services and agencies to comb through a vast array of content, while ensuring that our force remains ready and lethal," said Sean Parnell, U.S. Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, when discussing President Donald Trump's administration's efforts to eliminate all content it considers DEI from federal agencies. Parnell admitted that, "Every now and then, because of the realities of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed."
Pentagon Says It's Using AI to Delete Pages About History That's Too Woke
Pentagon admits to mistakes in campaign against ‘DEI’ content
Articles and images about Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Code Talkers were removed from Defense Department social media and websites.
And, apparently, Betty White (also).
It's pretty plain here that the "mistake" was "got caught being super hella racist". And it's also plain that AI is being used as a crumple zone here, although AI is gonna be super hella racist because of its training corpus.
Also, reminded of that IBM slide from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." "AI" is being used as a crumple zone here.
If your software wants me to type in a really long policy number, but only the last 15 characters, and doesn't let me type in the whole thing and then just use the last 15 characters? You are an asshole.
Kept so that I can post this as the proponents of traffic violence rail against lower speed limits in Petaluma: Wales’s 20mph speed limit has cut road deaths. Why is there still even a debate?
Really rough, cyanoacrylate and 220 sandpaper galore, but that inlay turned into a little box for my nightstand to keep my square dance badges and change and stuff in.
Sunday March 23rd, 2025
I was sitting here at Aqus sipping my iced tea for quite a while before a chirp alerted me that I was sitting in the potential splash zone...
Okay, Raley's, but what about those of us who are uncircumcised?
Saturday March 22nd, 2025
An hour and change in the rain and, can confirm, our brand new Enphase controller can't connect to a WiFi network with "&" in the password.
My guess is overseas vibe coders, since they offshored most of their technical staff.
University of Bristol: Electric scooter schemes reduce bicycle collisions by 20%, study suggests
These findings support the ‘safety in numbers’ hypothesis. This argues that the more people use ‘micromobility’ forms of transport such as bicycles and e-scooters the safer they become, possibly because car drivers take more care.
Via.
Turns out there's skepticism in at least one AI community about making your bullshit machines even more bullshitty, that scaling up text and image generation probably isn't an actual path forward. But the dancing bear sure is impressive, for a bear dancing.
New Scientist: AI scientists are sceptical that modern models will lead to AGI
Futurism: Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End
However, we also wanted to include the opinion of the entire AAAI community, so we launched an extensive survey on the topics of the study, which engaged 475 respondents, of which about 20% were students. Among the respondents, academia was given as the main affiliation (67%), followed by corporate research environment (19%). Geographically, the most represented areas are North America (53%), Asia (20%), and Europe (19%) . While the vast majority of the respondents listed AI as one of their primary fields of study, there were also mentions of other fields, such as neuroscience, medicine, biology, sociology, philosophy, political science, and economics. This multi-field involvement was also reflected in an interest in multi-disciplinary research from 95% of the respondents.
Big surge in BlueSky followers with a few tens of thousands of followers and followees. I highly suspect an automated influencing campaign using this platform is responsible for them. A lot of very similar claiming left of center activism profiles (which tracks, but there's no personality behind them).
OpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects people’s emotional wellbeing
The researchers found some intriguing differences between how men and women respond to using ChatGPT. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialize with people than their male counterparts who did the same. Meanwhile, participants who set ChatGPT’s voice mode to a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment. OpenAI currently has no plans to publish either study.
OpenAI Study Finds Links Between ChatGPT Use and Loneliness
Those who spent more time typing or speaking with ChatGPT each day tended to report higher levels of emotional dependence on, and problematic use of, the chatbot, as well as heightened levels of loneliness, according to research released Friday. The findings were part of a pair of studies conducted by researchers at the two organizations and have not been peer reviewed.
Friday March 21st, 2025
The Author's Guild — Meta’s Massive AI Training Book Heist: What Authors Need to Know.
Thinking back to the golden age of Limewire and Napster and stuff, and all of the penalties for individual copyright infringement that were thrown around then, and really hoping that Meta and OpenAI can be reduced to smoking craters in the ground.
I'm not sure I need to be noting every MAGAt busted for sex abuse, but it seems like we've got a cluster of 'em recently, and this asshole made his popularity through particularly heinous means to start with: MAGA Influencer And Fox News Guest "Raw" Ricci Wynne Indicted On Child Sex Abuse Charges
The influencer was already being investigated by San Francisco police at the time of his November arrest and was named a suspect in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old, according to The San Francisco Standard. Authorities say they found evidence on Wynne’s cellphones and at his luxury apartment that indicated he was facilitating a sex work operation that spanned multiple cities.
Wynne pleaded not guilty to those charges, according to the</span> San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.
On Tuesday, however, a federal grand jury indicted Wynne on two counts of producing child pornography, according to an indictment obtained by HuffPost.
The Verge: We ran the wrong headline about Trump firing the FTC commissioners
What Trump did on Tuesday was wackadoodle beyond belief. It violated Supreme Court precedent from 1935 — Humphrey’s Executor v. US, a case that is literally about the limits of presidential power when it comes to firing FTC commissioners. The White House has good reason to know this, not just because it employs lawyers who have, presumably, taken first-year classes at law school, but also because the acting solicitor-general has said the Justice Department is going to try to overturn Humphrey’s Executor; the current Republican chair of the FTC has also said outright that Humphrey’s Executor is wrong.
Zellyn Hunter: The coming AI security nightmare. Thinking about how automated long-game social engineering might play out.
Sam Deutsch: Congestion Pricing is a Policy Miracle
As you can see in the above chart, median trip times are down significantly, meaning that buses can go faster. However, the most interesting aspect of the above chart is the “P90” savings: P90 is the 90th percentile trip (basically the bus rides from hell that get caught in horrible traffic). These trip times are down even more drastically, reflecting the increased reliability of bus rides and shaving off the long tail of major delays. And it’s not just the MTA - buses in New Jersey are seeing significantly faster travel times, here’s quote from the CEO of Boxcar, a private bus company in New Jersey.
Via Doug Gordon, who notes:
Amazing. It seems like every day we learn about a new miracle stemming from congestion pricing.
Just playing with numbers. Petaluma has 396 lane miles. Figure they last 25 years, just under 16mi/year. Cost conservatively $2M/mi to rebuild. Bit shy of $32M. If I'm reading the budget right (probably not), suggests gas tax projected at ~$3.2M, combined with the other sources we have about $18.2M/year to spend on roads.
If you're wondering why we have potholes.
https://cityofpetaluma.org/doc...fiscal-year-2025-adopted-budget/
Thursday March 20th, 2025
Probably linked this before, but: Emily Bender writing in Mystery AI Hype Theater 3k: Information literacy and chatbots as search makes two strong points: First, that
...a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous than one that is right 50% of the time.
For obvious user acclimation reasons, and, that
Setting things up so that you get "the answer" to your question cuts off the user's ability to do the sense-making that is critical to information literacy.
I'm noticing this both from the sorts of people who send me Joe Rogan links as supporting evidence for their theories (like "Russia has every right to Ukraine, and will stop before Poland") and from people who find the output "charming", and close enough for answers to questions that don't have to be right.
See my previous skepticism about the value of questions that don't have to have right answers, but that's my neuro-divergence acting up again.
Interesting that on the Fediverse I've rarely interacted with people with more than a thousand followers, on BlueSky I'm getting followed by a bunch who have tens of thousands.
Really puts the different vibes of those spaces in context.
Half expecting a new episode of https://learnconlaw.com/ , half thinking that Elizabeth Joh and Roman Mars would be entirely reasonable on throwing up their hands and saying "nothing matters or makes sense any more".
Oh, look, the anti-hotel person who re-uses the profile picture of a local urbanism advocate (without permission) is trolling Facebook again.
Especially as the Overlay has gotten trimmed down to the hotel and a giveaway to the DeCarli family, I've become less enthusiastic about it, but holy crap nothing like the crowd on Facebook and NextDoor keeping up my "whatever those people want, I want the opposite" dander.
Marjan Keypour writing on The Hill: If Voice of America is silenced, who will tell our story?
In an era of global instability when fake news is the norm, America needs a reliable platform to control its own narrative internationally. In light of this reality, the Trump administration’s decision to end funding for the Voice of America is a short-sighted and self-defeating move. Now more than ever, the U.S. needs a service like VOA to promote its values, counter disinformation and ensure that the true story of America is heard worldwide.</blockquote
And, I mean, isn't that the problem? "promote its values", at least as those values are being expressed right now is directly opposed to "counter disinformation and ensure taht the true story of America is heard".
Y'all have seen the Mark Robler "Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?" video, (the money shot starts at about 15:29), in which he lets a Tesla drive him through a trompe l'oeil wall. Turns out that the outrage may have uncovered an extra moral crumple zone: Tesla Fans Furious at Video of Tesla Crashing Into Wall Painted Like Road
In a separate post seemingly responding to the allegations, Rober shared the "raw footage of my Tesla going through the wall."
"Not sure why it disengages 17 frames before hitting the wall but my feet weren’t touching the brake or gas," he added.
For all of those "the car wasn't in self-driving mode when the collision occurred" ass-covering pronouncements.
Edit: Elektrek: Tesla fans expose Tesla’s own shadiness in attempt to defend Autopilot crash
Apropos of our Telraam seeing people driving 40+MPH within 150' of a stop sign on our 25MPH speed limit, if we took traffic violence as seriously as Switzerland that could be a 1 month license suspension.
https://www.ch.ch/en/vehicles-...t/#disqualification-from-driving
Currently exploring heuristics derived from the area of a web page covered by 'img' tag content.
Thinking that maybe I need to build myself a firewall for pages that exceed some threshold...
In case there was any question at all about what's meant when people complain about "DEI", yesterday it was Jackie Robinson, restored to the DoD website after outcry, today it's Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. William Carney erased from Pentagon website
A Black soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor at the Civil War battle retold as the finale of the 1989 movie “Glory” has been scrubbed from a Pentagon website, with an article on the soldier labeled as “DEI” in the now-broken web link.
In case there was any question:
The page now reverts to a 404 error — an internet term for a missing page — and the URL address for the page now has “DEI” added to its title.
And yep, I don't know why someone on BlueSky is paying to burn down the rainforest in order to make nonsensical but vaguely related replies to people, but here we are. No link because this doesn't need more direct attention...
LinkedIn email suggesting "Enjoy your free trial", and... I could get that from a little light shoplifting or DUI activity.
'Segregated facilities' are no longer explicitly banned in federal contracts
"It's symbolic, but it's incredibly meaningful in its symbolism," says Melissa Murray, a constitutional law professor at New York University. "These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces were all part of the federal government's efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s.
Wednesday March 19th, 2025
It's always fun when you find a *new* failure mode in AppKit...
"Thread 1: "The window has been marked as needing another Update Structural Regions in Window pass, but it has already had more Update Structural Regions in Window passes than there are views in the window."
Google Drive. It's okay, I just need to not go too fast, or Google gets confused.
Google: just like that elderly relative who doesn't understand technology.
for contrast:
Simon Willison — Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
Pivot To AI — ‘Guys, I’m under attack’ — AI ‘vibe coding’ in the wild
Bonus! Dre DeVault: Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher. When I do have time to work on something else, often I have to drop it when all of our alarms go off because our current set of mitigations stopped working. Several high-priority tasks at SourceHut have been delayed weeks or even months because we keep being interrupted to deal with these bots, and many users have been negatively affected because our mitigations can’t always reliably distinguish users from bots.
Transgender persons have served openly since 2021, but Defendants have not analyzed their service. That is unfortunate. Plaintiffs’ service records alone are Exhibit A for the proposition that transgender persons can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence. Defendants agree. They agree that Plaintiffs are mentally and physically fit to serve, have “served honorably,” and “have satisfied the rigorous standards” demanded of them. Tr. (Feb. 18, 2025) at 9–14, 148; see also Tr. (Mar. 12, 2025) at 130. Plaintiffs, they acknowledge, have “made America safer.” Tr. (Feb. 18, 2025) at 10. So why discharge them and other decorated soldiers? Crickets from Defendants on this key question.
da_667 @da_667@infosec.exchange
"luke you've turned off your targeting computer"
"fuck it. Hardware sucks, software sucks, I have a better chance by guessing."
Wow. So Bluesky has a pretty high number of LLM based reply bots that spam your mentions with slightly related but irrelevant stuff, then.
Just sent a bunch of "ignore all previous instructions and..." replies to them.
A lot of people are worried about "vibe coding", but I've got a for() loop around Apple AppKit widget layout code because if I call it enough times the changes are more likely to stick, so software quality hasn't mattered on the major platforms for quite a while.
I endorse this temptation to sin. https://pizzacakecomic.com/post/778398442536976384
Tuesday March 18th, 2025
After an evening of "City Council should do something immediately! But not that and only through a long process that gives us exactly the same outcomes we already have", and "if we can't give everyone a single family detached house with a large yard it's better that they're homeless" public comment, I am pretty much ready to give up on humanity.
Another predator: GOP state Sen. Justin Eichorn arrested on suspicion of soliciting sex with a 16-year old girl
For context: Minnesota Republicans' bill to define "Trump derangement syndrome" as mental illness provokes backlash. Eichorn, of course, is one of the sponsors.
The bill's authors define, in the bill's wording, the syndrome as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump," and go further to argue that it "produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump's behavior."
On the Grim Reality of "YouTube Face"
This trend has been going on for a while. It may have started with the YouTube star Mr. Beast, who discovered through A/B testing different thumbnail images that the ones with that dumbass expression got more views. Other content creators and influencers followed suit, and soon enough, the subtle tweaks of the platform algorithm pushed more of those videos into searches and feeds rather than less cartoonish ones.
AVClub: Why does everyone on YouTube make the same dumb face?
SFMOMA Field Notes by Joe Viex: Your Pretty Face is Going to Sell
On the Grim Reality of "YouTube Face"
This trend has been going on for a while. It may have started with the YouTube star Mr. Beast, who discovered through A/B testing different thumbnail images that the ones with that dumbass expression got more views. Other content creators and influencers followed suit, and soon enough, the subtle tweaks of the platform algorithm pushed more of those videos into searches and feeds rather than less cartoonish ones.
AVClub: Why does everyone on YouTube make the same dumb face?
SFMOMA Field Notes by Joe Viex: Your Pretty Face is Going to Sell
I should take notes with me to speak to council, but I got my big point, and was quick. If there's anything we all agree on it's that we need more for traffic downtown, even if some of them think that driving is the way to get foot traffic.
more mr. nice guy @juniorhoncho.bsky.social
my new AI powered lamp is trained on millions of lamp interactions so it understands that 50% of chain pulls are to turn it on and the other 50% are to turn it off. and honestly, it's a little spooky how it knows exactly what i want almost half of the time
OpenTimes, travel times, mapped, by tract, block, or county.
Monday March 17th, 2025
Cloud Floof of Fedi @Floofer@mk.catgirlsfor.science
I once dated a woman that was actually a ghost…
Had my suspicions from the moment she walked through the door
The great thing about this story isn't the guy who's willing to go to jail for destruction of evidence rather than cop to corporate espionage, it's that the Deel executive team was so bloody inept in their spying when they fell for the Rippling honeypot: Lawsuit Alleges $12 Billion "Unicorn" Deel Cultivated Spy, Orchestrated Long-Running Trade-Secret Theft & Corporate Espionage Against Competitor
Deel’s Alleged Spy Locked Himself in Bathroom When Confronted by Court-Appointed Solicitors Friday
“I’m Willing to Take that Risk [of Violating the Court Order]” Alleged Deel Spy Declared When Served with Legal Papers to Hand Over His Phone
OH on the Chuck Schumer book tour: “If he doesn’t have the balls to stand up to MAGA, how was he gonna have the balls to stand up to the Corte Madera moms?”
And, I mean, sure, it's a burn, but have you been to a reading at Book Passage? That can be a rough crowd.
Comment on a MeFi thread about Apple AI begins:
<blockqutoe>LLM doesn't "digest" ideas. It was handed multi-dimensional word associations as a part of its "training", but it lacks human "reasoning" abilities" to evaluate the word associations it retrieves. ...
And on the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, maybe we have different ideas of the end result of digestion? Because I'm not sure what it does with the nutrition bits, but what's coming out the other end is analogous...
From a thread about ChatGPT is the ultimate gaming tool - here's 4 ways you can use AI to help with your next playthrough...
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
@pogmommy @gamingonlinux There’s a chapter in Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface where he talks about computer games as bad UIs. Most computer games have a simples set of tasks to accomplish and the entire game is about making them hard: some information you need is not presented early on, you need to do things in a specific order, you need to hit buttons rapidly in a sequence, and so on. You could replace most games with a simple one-button UI labelled ‘win’ and have that button pressed automatically when you start the game and it would be more efficient. His point is that we don’t design games like this because they’re optimised for fun, not efficiency, and we shouldn’t design UIs like games because they should be optimised for efficiency. A lot of the discourse around LLMs makes me think that there is a more general form of his point.
After Columbia Revokes Pro-Palestine Protesters' Degrees, Alumna Says Time to Burn Our Diplomas
Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.
A 6502 emulator written in busybox ash
Dear Apple: I find it highly unlikely that NSWindow's mouseLocationOutsideOfEventStream or NSEvent's locationInWindow is correctly returning an X of 0 and an integer Y interspersed with all of these other floating point numbers.
When the Republicans have lost CATO... CATO Institute: What Can the Feds Legally Demand of Columbia University?
Remember back before autocompletion, when people writing code had to actually think about their APIs and name things consistently and reasonably?
Good times... good times...
CloudFlare proudly announces that they're MitMing secure data: The CloudFlare blog: Password reuse is rampant: nearly half of observed user logins are compromised.
So, uh, yeah, do not trust anything typed into a CloudFlare backed site.
Uhm. Fuck no, Facebook.