Thursday September 12th, 2024
When Marjorie Taylor freakin' Greene calls out the racism...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/12...reene-laura-loomer-rhetoric-maga
I think I have discovered both a band name and a logo...
Sierra Clubs: Getting off gas, block by block.
Gas utilities’ monopoly franchises generally require that they keep delivering their fossil fuel as long as customers keep paying. That means a single gas user can sink a project, and, so far, one or more usually do. In 2021, for example, a farmer reported a leaky gas pipe south of Sacramento to PG&E. According to the utility, electrification could have saved ratepayers “millions on repairs.” Instead, the project died when the lone customer served by the 3.5-mile pipe insisted on keeping gas service.
Aiden Clark’s dad begs Springfield, politicians: Stop using son to hate Haitians
“I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” Clark told the city hall forum. “The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem that our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate.”
Stanford Report: Methane emissions are rising faster than ever
The trend “cannot continue if we are to maintain a habitable climate,” the researchers write in a Sept. 10 perspective article in Environmental Research Letters published alongside data in Earth System Science Data. Both papers are the work of the Global Carbon Project, an initiative chaired by Stanford University scientist Rob Jackson that tracks greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought. Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1°C warming reduces world GDP by 12%. Global temperature correlates strongly with extreme climatic events unlike country-level temperature used in previous work, explaining our larger estimate. We use this evidence to estimate damage functions in a neoclassical growth model. Business-as-usual warming implies a 29% present welfare loss and a Social Cost of Carbon of $1,065 per ton. These impacts suggest that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.
8,887 grams of CO2 emitted per gallon of gasoline, 112.5 gallons of gas emits a metric ton, which suggests gas taxes should go up by at least $9.46/gallon.
Drawing on data pertaining to eviction rates, criminal incidents, housing code violations, and landlord behavior in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this study documents how extractive rental management strategies, such as weak tenant screening, frequent eviction filings, and property disinvestment, concentrate crime at particular properties. In turn, high rates of crime in a neighborhood incentivize these extractive landlord strategies. By showing how landlords’ economic strategies are central to urban crime geographies, this study contributes to our understanding of third-party policing by revealing the limits of market-based solutions to place management dilemmas.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12332
Our results indicated that the tax delinquency of company-owned properties (e.g., rental homes, apartments) was the only variable in our model (R2 = 0.62) that was associated with violence in all but four Richmond neighborhoods. We replicated this analysis using violence data from a later point in time which yielded largely identical results. These findings indicate that external sources of neighborhood instability may be more important to predicting violence than internal sources.
I confess that I did not expect the first powered exoskeleton that I was aware of hitting the market to be marketed for wallpapering and drywall sanding. But it makes perfect sense, don't need a lot of support in those applications, but hands over the head all day is tough.
https://www.festoolusa.com/pro...77340---exo-18-hpc-4,0-i-plus-us
Well, I suppose that the good news is Apple's lack of clipping means I can draw into the region of the superview even though it's outside my own subclass's bounds.
Yay for being able to fix selection drawing in these table view rows, I guess...
I haven't been doing a lot of non-work coding of late, but as every widget set on the planet strives to both implement all of HTML+CSS+JavaScript internally, and be embeddable in that environment, and bloat out to require a modern machine to run passably (yeah, I'm looking at you, Qt, though not the only one), I keep my eyes open for lighter-weight widget systems.
Dear ImGui is a bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++. It outputs optimized vertex buffers that you can render anytime in your 3D-pipeline-enabled application. It is fast, portable, renderer agnostic, and self-contained (no external dependencies).
egui (pronounced "e-gooey") is a simple, fast, and highly portable immediate mode GUI library for Rust. egui runs on the web, natively, and in your favorite game engine..
Wednesday September 11th, 2024
Concrete clickbait: next time you share a spomenik photo, think about what it means
Alongside this, many contemporary artists have made work on these monuments that is considerably more thoughtful. Pupovac points to David Maljkovic’s work in sculpture and film, such as Scenes from a New Heritage, which “asks the question of what is left of the monuments when all of the necessary tools for understanding have been stripped away; and one of the answers is the position that Kempenaers takes — the awe”.
Via MeFi, where the comments delve into some of the complexities of framing the narrative around large public art works, and the legacy of Tito in Yugoslavia, and...
Anyway, next time you see one of those surrealist big sculptures, this may help contextualize it.
A+ to the headline writer: Rolling Stone: Elon Musk Threatens Taylor Swift After Harris Endorsement: ‘I Will Give You a Child’
Really, that tweet (no link, because ugh) was so fucking creepy.
he calls her a marxist but she's not the one getting publicly owned
I don't guess that last night's debate actually changed anyone's mind, though the reports of voter registration following Taylor Swift's endorsement of the Harris/Walz ticket might have, but among the word salad there was concern expressed that immigrants in Springfield Ohio were eating pussy. Or something.
Anyway...
Electrek: It turns out cyclists actually should roll through stop signs. Here’s why.
Alvin explained, “The main takeaway from the study is that a rolling stop law allowed people biking to do an action they preferred in treating a stop sign as a yield. And once drivers were educated, intersection interactions between people biking and driving were no more dangerous than before introducing the law.”
The quote says "the study", the article actually links to several studies, though the articles that the link farms are ripping off, like Velo: Of Course a Rolling ‘Idaho Stop’ Is Safer for Cyclists. Here’s Why. and Oregon Public Broadcasting: Allowing rolling stops on bicycles doesn't cause risky road behavior, study finds are referencing Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies Volume 166, September 2024, 104754: Safety relevant driver and bicyclist behaviors resulting from bicycling rolling stops observed in a networked driving and bicycling simulator.
Delaware Yield Crash Data shows a -23% change in bicycle/automobile collisions in the 30 months before and after implementing the rules.
The Idaho Stop Law and the Severity of Bicycle Crashes: A Comparative Study Brandon Whyte, Masters Project 2013 (PDF) didn't find a difference in the number of collisions, but did find a "...significant difference in crash severity".
NHTSA Bicyclist Yield As Stop Fact Sheet (PDF)
I'm trying to find the Tampa Bay study mentioned in the original article, but that led to League of American Bicyclists: Laws To Promote Biking & Walking which mentions a study out of that region that addressed racial disparities in enforcement. Go figure.
Note that the key here seems to be in educating the causes of cyclist injury: Automobile drivers and law enforcment.
Well. Touting an endorsement from Viktor Orbán sure is a take. I'm not sure that debate changed any minds.
Though it did reinforce to me that we need better education, and an emphasis on learning about systemic complexity so that we don't fall for facile claims of easy solutions, and for the destruction of reality in favor of assertions.
Thinking about how "is because" is code signaling.
Tuesday September 10th, 2024
As I won't shut up about, Charlene and I obviously had a good time at Sactown Stomp this last weekend. Re-energized us on much of what we love about square dancing and the square dance community. Some good conversations there, and the drive home involved discussion about what we could do short of trying to start a club again to help bring more of the energy we love to our participation in square dancing. Which made us ask what makes the square dance fly-in format so much more sense of community than the club event, and I think we settled on a few things:
- The longer time period (all day, or more) means we end up sitting out and chatting more.
- Bonus if there's a little bit of space for socialization. In this case there was the Friday night party, and, though we bailed on the announced place and went elsewhere, the "whole bunch of us are going to this place for dinner" vibe.
- Multiple rooms means there's a bit of option. Even for programs we don't dance, it's sometimes fun to sit and watch.
- The sense of destination means that rather than driving 2+ hours each way for half that in dancing, we're willing to extend things out a little bit more and explore a bit. But I think part of this is that the context needs to allow for socializing; it's not like we go down to Palo Alto early for an ECR dance, even though I'm sure there's stuff there we haven't seen or done that might be open on a Saturday evening.
So we're trying to think about what this means. Would it draw anyone, for instance, to rent a hall for the day before an evening dance and inviting some callers you may not have experienced before to play? Are two rooms important for that?
Is there a way to get the sense of "sitting down with friends for dinner" without completely overwhelming a single kitchen by bringing 3 squares of people into a restaurant at one time? Does catering work? (This is where a few hundred people and a walkable region around a hotel works.)
No answers, just brainstorming. Thinking about venues (a walkable downtown would be cool for so many reasons, so could ya, like, rent Out West Garage for a weekend?). Thinking about ways to piggyback on existing events. Thinking about the SCVSDA Jubilee and other similar events...
Monday September 9th, 2024
US seeks new pedestrian safety rules aimed at increasingly massive SUVs and pickup trucks
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Monday that for the first time it’s proposing a new rule setting testing and performance requirements to minimize the risk of pedestrian head injuries.
It's vehicles less than 10k lbs, so actually does get some of the Section 179 $25k tax deduction class monsters.
And in case you missed it, The Economist on how Americans' love affair with big cars is killing us (archive.ph version).
Today I learned that DTMF encoded messages encrypted and decrypted with PowerBASIC code helped take down South Africa's apartheid system.
Mike Spooner @shelldozer@oldbytes.space
An old witty paraphrasing of Arthur C Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" when applied to the maxim "never attribute to malice that which can be explained as incompetence":
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
Friday we went up to Sacramento, plugged the car into an L2 charger in a garage in old town Sacramento, wandered through the heat towards downtown, eventually found Capital Books, came back via a snack at Salud restaurant on Cesar Chavez plaza, to discover that the L2 charger was running about 3kW. Sigh. Anyway, fun party that evening, danced 'til I couldn't see straight at Sactown Stomp, hosted by Capital City Squares. First time seeing so many of those folks since COVID started, some bumps 'cause this was an attempt to reboot Stumptown Stomp in a new venue (that wasn't as walkable as Guerneville, both from geography and heat) and carpet in one of the dance venues.
Sunday we went up to Grass Valley on Sunday, saw those kids, but/and... trying to keep to L2 charging, in the afternoon we parked the car up at the campus, hung out at the koi pond, and walked down to Briarpatch Co-op to refill water and use the bathroom and stuff. So we bought a container of gelato and sat in the AC and I noticed that there, in the community ownership locally grown whatever and so forth (with, let's be fair, prices to match)... that it was a Unilever brand.
Baldur Bjarnason: The LLM honeymoon phase is about to end
The usefulness of LLMs was always overblown, but unless the AI vendors discover a new kind of maths to fix the problem, they’re about to have an AltaVista moment.
GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation. Or: yep, LLMs are being used to generate exactly the sort of propaganda masquerading as research that you expected.
RT Matteo Collina @mcollina@fosstodon.org
Finally it happened to me as well: developers complaining that the behavior of my OSS libraries does not match what ChatGPT explains to them. 🤦♂️
In the replies, shrimp eating mammal 🦐 @walruslifestyle@octodon.social observes
this is a power game, and openai has the upper hand. if it's not already true, one day there will be "open source developers" who argue that they should modify their project to do what chatgpt says they should do. it'll help adoption, they'll say, it'll help accessibility, they'll say. user first, they'll say.
Which also means that it's going to be interesting to get adoption on new approaches to problem, because the frameworks by which people "understand" concepts will be limited by LLM behavior (this is especially already a problem that we see with people who use LLMs to "summarize" documents, because the LLM most certainly is not doing that).
Governor Newsom seeks to harness the power of GenAI to address homelessness, other challenges. Given that Newsom has gone full on "let's inflict more trauma to people experiencing trauma response", this bodes ill. (Via)
Others tested this new model — but Shumer’s claims didn’t check out. Reflection 70B had similar benchmark scores to Facebook’s LLaMA 3 70B — and lower than LLaMA 3.1, which Shumer had said it was based on. Reddit r/LocalLLaMA concurred — Reflection 70B was just LLaMA 3 with some extra tuning. [Twitter, archive; Reddit; VentureBeat]
Further testing suggested that Reflection 70B was, in fact, a front-end to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet using LLaMA 3 weights. HyperWrite filtered the string “Claude” in an attempt to hide this. [Twitter, archive; Twitter, archive; Reddit]
Another mural
Another shot of that mural
Loving this mural
Without parking and cars, nobody will come here...
Sunday September 8th, 2024
Something's fishy here...
Discussion about square dance calling this weekend made me think about the heyday of it, and how, yeah, it just takes a couple of hundred people per week at twenty bucks a pop to make calling as a business viable. Which is an order of magnitude and 2-2.5x more than now, but shows how it was feasible back in the day... And not like selling out stadium shows.
Saturday September 7th, 2024
Dang it. We're Here isn't getting renewed. This household would probably drop a few hundred into a Kickstarter for another season...
https://variety.com/2024/tv/co...led-hbo-drag-reality-1236133021/
Friday September 6th, 2024
I mean, it's free (on top of the cost for the parking garage, Old Town Sacramento), but that is the most anemic "Level 2" charger that I think I've encountered.
"All the credibility of a right-wing influencer claiming that they were unaware of being a Kremlin psy-op..."
Short thread about Microsoft CoPilot's inability to summarize:
What I do fear is that for those that do heavily invest, they’ll be required by the likes of Microsoft to begin to speak in ways that Copilot can parse and ‘understand’. Which in larger organisations will shape the way that they communicate with others, and it’ll spread. In the same way that American corporate speak, or Agile terminology has infected the rest of the world.
The thing that most blows my mind about this whole LLMania is that we have mechanisms for accurately describing processes to computers already...
Somewhat amused that Petaluma's "we don't want to end up like Healdsburg" contingent is now going on Nextdoor with the "vote for my candidate so we can end up like Healdsburg" take.
Thursday September 5th, 2024
Shout out to the F150 driver who chirped tires to pull through the intersection behind me once I'd walked past the centerline.
In a fair and just society that'd be brandishing a deadly weapon.
Feedback sent to the city on the D St restriping:
I am *loving* the new design. When I'm walking to and from work, it's way more comfortable to cross D Street. When I'm biking, D Street is now an option.
The only two suggestions I'd make are:
- maybe, in the places where the parking coexists with the bike lane, to put the parking outside of the bike lane. This will both better protect the bike lane, and make the weird jogs a little less intrusive when riding it.
- from the dynamic speed sign, it's clear that the current traffic calming measures don't go nearly far enough in restricting automobile speeds southbound. Maybe when the permanent changes go in there can be some concrete and other additions rather than just paint to help bring drivers under control.
The news that an OAR guide recently became legend by (presumably accidentally) taking a boat full of customers over the dam has made me nostalgic for the days of being a whitewater guide. Ocoee!!! - by Microdahts (YouTube video) with lots of carnage video from 2012 helps on the nostalgia.
If you've noticed an uptick in franticness about "deep state" from your Russian apologist acquaintances....
US Department of Justice: Two RT Employees Indicted for Covertly Funding and Directing U.S. Company that Published Thousands of Videos in Furtherance of Russian Interests. In addition to being involved in the editorial direction,
Between in or about October 2023 and in or about August 2024, RT sent wire transfers to U.S. Company-1 totaling approximately $9.7 million, which represented nearly 90% of U.S. Company-1’s bank deposits from all sources combined.
Though the US DOJ didn't name the company in question, it's widely reported to be Tenet Media (Wired, Mother Jones).
Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social points out an Elon Musk trait.
US DOJ: Justice Department Disrupts Covert Russian Government-Sponsored Foreign Malign Influence Operation Targeting Audiences in the United States and Elsewhere. From the affidavit.
The cybersquatted domains used by Doppelganger generally are not indexed by search engines. A visit to the standalone domain, such as www.washingtonpost[.]pm, reveals a blank page or an error page. Rather, as its primary method of distribution, Doppelganger created fraudulent social media personas impersonating U.S. citizens to post article-specific extended hyperlinks to the cybersquatted domains on those social media platforms.
The actual domain names start on p70 of the affidavit...
Not news: AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds
Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.
Nature: AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level.
Via Kent Brewster, who observes that this has implications about the use of "AI" to automatically write police reports from body cam footage, and via allison @aparrish@friend.com whose thread expresses some good anger.
ChatGPT is truly awful at diagnosing medical conditions. PLOS ONE: Evaluation of ChatGPT as a diagnostic tool for medical learners and clinicians
While our results indicate that ChatGPT consistently delivers the same information to different users, demonstrating substantial inter-rater reliability, it also reveals the tool’s shortcomings in providing factually correct medical information, as evident by its low diagnostic accuracy.
(Via)
Ouch. Pulling no punches. McSweeney's: Your Favorite Regional Theater’s (Honest) Season Announcement! by Jenny Stafford
Join Prospero and Caliban as they… okay, look, we know you don’t want to see this, and we don’t want to do it. But it’s public domain so we don’t have to pay any playwrights, and our unpaid intern, Micah, can basically sell this out to school groups, who also don’t want to see it. With any luck, some of you will come, too, because we all know we should like Shakespeare, right? Come feel smart for an evening!
Wednesday September 4th, 2024
This is such a good read: Ian Cooper: Is AI a Silver Bullet?
Like previous attempts to find a silver bullet such as 4GLs, it does not seem likely that LLMs as a software authoring tool will be succeed. In particular, like 4GLs they suffer from the problem that because software spends most of its life in maintenance, the cost of change makes most improvements to the cost to author irrelevant; in fact, some rapid authoring techniques make maintenance harder and increase the lifetime cost of software.
And, yeah, it's nominally about LLMs and AI for code generation, but really it's about complexity management. As I try to debug Mithril TypeScript today, with the wacky stuff that Safari does to code maps (and, yay, TypeScript's error messages), and think about some of the performance issues that we're seeing because we're blindly accepting Google's Firebase client libraries without really understanding what that abstraction layer imposes on us, I've been thinking a lot about the abstraction layers that have had lasting value.
SQL. OpenGL. I think there's some reasonable value in the scene graph of your choice, but... I'm not sure that we've seen a good replacement for CGI for web serving yet, it sure seems like the ability for PHP and Perl scripts to cohabit on a server has been lost with the "fuck it, let's put everything in its own virtual space" direction that everybody's gone (with all of the wasted RAM and CPU cycles of all of those services waiting around for a few hits a minute).
And we really don't have a better mechanism for keeping artifacts around than the shell, despite 4+ decades of attempting GUIs. Hopefully work project will get there, but...
Doing a lot of pondering about how the value of software is in the cost to change it, and how the layers of abstraction we're adding mostly improve tone to market, but leave us with debugging and performance nightmares.
(Why yes, I have been doing TypeScript and Mithril code this morning.)
What (else) could possibly go wrong? Former Mt. Gox CEO’s new crypto exchange set to launch this month with 'transparency' focus.
In a bid to outpace existing trading giants in the crypto exchange market, the former Mt. Gox CEO told The Block that EllipX will use user-friendliness as its weapon, mainly with the EllipX Wallet that was introduced last month. Equipped with multi-party computation technology, the EllipX wallet is said to be easier to use, with no need to write down phrases on a piece of paper, according to Karpeles.
Ooh, all my griftcoins in a single vulnerability? Sounds... transparent.
YubiKeys are vulnerable to cloning attacks thanks to newly discovered side channel if you have physical access to the device and the PIN.
So you probably shouldn't sweat it.
RT Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social
Ok, here's the deal on the "YubiKey cloning attack" stuff:
:eyes_opposite: Yes, a way to recover private keys from #YubiKey 5 has been found by researchers.
But the attack *requires*:
👉 *physically opening the YubiKey enclosure*
👉 physical access to the YubiKey *while it is authenticating*
👉 non-trivial electronics lab equipment
I cannot stress this enough:
✨ In basically every possible scenario you are safer using a YubiKey or a similar device, than not using one. ✨ #InfoSec #YubiKey5
You know what I really love most about computing? That rather than building simpler and more elegant programming languages and interfaces, we're building Byzantine tools to automate the process of building inelegant code that requires fragile runtimes.
This message brought to you by Perl one liners to figure things out while using VSCode to write TypeScript.
Also, autocorrect said "BSCode", and... Uh... Maybe AI is closer than I think?
Sunday September 1st, 2024
Back from the Sunnyvale Caller's Workshop. I forget how fun it is to hang out with new caller energy, and wish we had a group of square dance callers up here in the North Bay who'd wanna get together and pass a mic around and dance for and mess with each other.