Friday June 9th, 2023
Ooooh, I think I know what's going on with those Academia.edu claims of mentions. Probably people citing IATS stuff.
I thought all of that had been buried deep...
At one point, Lorenzo began collaborating with exotic researchers — who nobody knew about — on topics that have nothing to do with meat. Four months ago, he published a study on the hospital management of monkeypox, alongside Iraqi, Indian and Pakistani co-authors. And a year ago, he and some researchers from India and Saudi Arabia published an article on the treatment of gum disease with bee venom. In a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS, Lorenzo admits that he doesn’t know any of these co-authors in person, nor is he an expert on any of these issues.
Fuuu. I don't know how many times I've gone to the Apple "forget my phone number" thing, and yet here are messages showing up in MacOS Messages rather than as SMS on my phone. It's been a long time since I went Android.
iPhone. Not even once, unless you want to commit to it for life.
Thursday June 8th, 2023
Whoah! What happens when you can't guarantee that your boot is coming from completely clean media: Barracuda Networks Email Security Gateway Appliance Vulnerability:
ACTION NOTICE: Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level. If you have not replaced your appliance after receiving notice in your UI, contact support now [elided]
Barracuda’s remediation recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG.
I mean, we know that when you can field upgrade the BIOS you can get devices into this kind of a state, but that's a very strong argument for the BIOS to be little more than a boot sector loader. Instead we seem to be going to more and more BIOS capabilities...
Pat Robertson has died. Far too old for justice. I know, a lot of people are already dancing on his grave, my footsteps are redundant, but it feels inappropriate to let the death of this hateful awful person go uncelebrated.
Good fucking riddance.
Great. So we've been waiting on the battery for our 2022 Bolt EUV. Called the dealer, Victory Chevrolet in Petaluma, asked "what's up?", they said "you just need another software upgrade". Plugged the VIN into experience.gm.com, it says we need a battery replacement.
This is kinda when I wish I was back on Twitter so I could publicly slag everyone for not having their data integration shit together, because now I need to spend more time on the fucking phone.
Wednesday June 7th, 2023
Happy Clean Air Day in Canada, to those who celebrate.
"Clean Air Day is June 7, 2023. This is a day to recognize how important good air quality is to our health, our environment, and the economy."
https://www.canada.ca/en/envir...ironment-week/clean-air-day.html
Has anybody got experience with the Academia.edu claim of mentions in papers? I recognize the author of one of the papers they've emailed me to claim I'm mentioned in, but not $150 worth, especially![[Wiki]](/adbanners/lookingglass.png){kind=small}
given that it's unlikely that most of the mentions are actually of me.
Perry Bacon Jr. writing opinion in the Washington Post: CNN’s Chris Licht showed the problem with anti-woke centrism (Gift link, no subscription needed)
OH: "Under the new arrangement, the PGA will manage holes 1-8 and 12-18, while the Saudis will continue to be responsible for 9-11."
Just catching up and clearing a backlog, at this point the "lawyer tries to argue a case using ChatGPT" thing is pretty old, but Simon Willison has a pretty good rundown of the situation:
The judge, clearly unimpressed, issues another Order to Show Cause, this time threatening sanctions against Mr. LoDuca, Steven Schwartz and the law firm of Levidow, Levidow & Oberman. The in-person hearing is set for June 8th.
New Republic: Reality Winner's story was never about a leak, a review of the HBO movie Reality, and a bit of a look at what she was trying to accomplish, and may or may not have.
Thinking about how Jira provides a draggable interface in the exact place where I want a text-selection interface, and how I absolutely never want to use their draggable functionality for what it does.
I guess the breakdown on people seeing the value in LLMs as "AI" is how much they think the language *is* the domain.
Amusing how the further up one gets on either the economic hierarchy or the academic hierarchy, the more one thinks that language is sufficient representation of the model, and the further down, the more the tools come into play.
Yes, this is talking about how people perceive the value of "AI".
Latest follower in the Fediverse. "AI" is just gonna drown us in bullshit.
This webinar could have been a one page email.
RT mwl@io.mwl.io Michael Lucas
Me: I won't discuss business in a room with an Alexa, because Amazon is my business competitor and they eavesdrop.
Various other folks: :flan_eyeroll:
Today: Amazon to pay fine for eavesdropping. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/01...126/amazon-alexa-ring-settlement
Good read on a life lived with purpose: Politico — Daniel Ellsberg Is Dying. And He Has Some Final Things to Say.
Graydon Hoare: The Rust I Wanted Had No Future
In a recent podcast about Rust leadership, the BDFL question came up again and Jeremy Soller said (in the understatement of the century) that "I believe Graydon would have said no to some things we all like now". And this echoes a different conversation on reddit where I was reminded that I meant to write down at some point how "I would have done it all differently" (and that this would probably have been extremely unsatisfying to everyone involved, and it never would have gone anywhere).
Tuesday June 6th, 2023
The bad thing about modern LED lighting and all of the computing being on batteries and switching power supplies is that I can tell the electricity is fucked up because the UPS is making weird humming noises and the car charger and car just declared power faults, but I don't have that "wait, the lights just got dimmer weirdly" feedback of incandescent bulbs and brownouts.
Wondered why it seemed like my webcam's FOV was changing, then looked back and realized that a side of my backdrop had fallen down.
Okay, gonna put the current chat GPT saga in the comments to this thread.
At this point I don't know what to believe any more, but the first use of the term “conspiracy theory” is much earlier — and more interesting — than historians have thought explains why I couldn't find the term in the NYT letter that the AP linked to, it's in a letter responding to that letter.
This post brought to you by me subsequently going far too deep in trying to chase LLM generated bullshit.
Wow, so a friend asked ChatGPT how the phrase "conspiracy theory" was developed, and it gave a very 4chan/Q-adjacent response. I found the AP article that referenced the NYT 1863 reference, but on digging deeper, it was clear that their author hadn't read the source the linked to either.
So I found that source (a response to the letter that the AP lazily linked to), but then asked Bard for the origins of the term.
Holy shit, we're doomed. Expensive generators of obfuscated bullshit.
Monday June 5th, 2023
It's good that they've started naming Apple releases after regions known for recreational drugs. Once they work through wine, presumably they'll either go in the Humboldt/Mendocino or Kern/Lake County direction, and then we'll have a better sense of the vibe.
Thinking about Feynman's anecdotes about education in Brazil, my own experiences with education in the US, and Emily Benders "Thai library" critique of large language models. Most humans don't have the advantage we'd like to pretend.
Just when I thought the writers of this face couldn't get any lazier, here comes Mr Bean shilling "hydrogen" (natural gas) and spreading battery fud in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/co...ar-ev-environment-rowan-atkinson
Sunday June 4th, 2023
Twitter is definitely going great. Pages of scammer follows with a request to turn on notifications...
Down at St Vincent's to see owls. The no trespassing signs have gotten way more aggressive since the last time we were here, so we're at the fence. No periods yet, Merlin says hooded oriole, spotted towhee, and now that the sun has gone down the peafowl at Silvera ranch are noisy.
I have a request: Show me your favorite little free library type structures. I've seen the Adult Bookstore one, which is awesome, but I think not quite the vibe of our house. There are a bunch of examples of off-square kid-themed libraries, but we don't pass on a ton of kids books. Thinking like Japanese temple architecture, maybe, I like whimsy, but... not kid-themed in this case. I'm trying to figure out how to do like a Bombay chest side without spending a gazillion dollars on lumber (gluing up 3/4" ipe chunks, which I have, into a curve sounds like a huge challenge). Just: inspiration on something for the front walk!
Saturday June 3rd, 2023
Thinking that "Odourless White Spirit" has something to do with appropriation of indigenous spiritual practices
The more I read of Colburn and Aldern's "Homelessness is a Housing Problem", the more I wonder how California is gonna dig itself out of decades of Prop 13 and single family zoning driving out the construction labor force that could build us out of this housing shortage.
It's gonna take massive government intervention to undo bad policy.
Friday June 2nd, 2023
Meetup just offered me a "New group suggestion: Female Millennial Friendships", and given that I'm pretty sure they know all about my demographic memberships, this feels a lot like an email advertising hot MILFs in my area.
Anyway, yes, friendships with Millenials are great, this suggestion not so much.
DNS is a crap mechanism for identity, #... well... at this point why bother numbering any more?
798,000 Md. license plates promote Philippines gambling site in URL mishap
About 15% of registered vehicles in Maryland have the plates, meant to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812
The redirecting domain is starspangled200(dot)org
Reddit: Maryland 'War of 1812' license plates: advertisements for online gambling.
Working on that English Muffin texture, but works for a breakfast sandwich...
I was mad to not have been exposed to the idea that I too, can some day be a dancing Chinese auntie in my 60s, prancing about on stage singing Teresa Teng songs at a karaoke in Oakland. I was mad that I never got to see people like M and her partner, an older interracial East- and South Asian couple, like Sabrena and I: with their children babbling about in several languages, the way it might look for us if we decided to have children some day.
Well, I have come full circle. Now I'm building RSS systems at work. 20 years ago I was pushing NNTP for blogging. https://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/6704.html
Which I went looking for because of https://www.complete.org/usenet-over-nncp/ , NNCP is an Onion encrypted Darknet copying thing. Almost enough to make me want to spin up INN again.
Unfollowed a few people on the Fediverse because it was plain that they were seeking being the center of parasocial relationships, and seeing another post about a friend giving up on trying to bust "Yahoo Boys" because the scammed are actively seeking parasocial relationship.
As I dance on the edge of being "known" in some circles, I'm thinking about how difficult it is to avoid that, but how much I'd rather make genuine social connections.
Charlene wanted some color on the living room ceiling, perhaps to go along with the Milky Way print, so I got some cellophane and played with the light. The good news is that, because these are adhered with baby shampoo, when we remove it everything will be cleaner...
I'm sympathetic to all of the complaints about anthropomorphizing technology in the context of "AI" and large language models.
I mean, I'm still convinced that anthropomorphizing humans was a mistake.
(with apologies to BF Skinner, whom I don't actually agree with)
Thursday June 1st, 2023
In honor of Pride month, was tempted to post an "If your parents aren't accepting of your identity, I'm your Daddy now" meme, but somehow it feels like slightly the wrong message.
I think that NextDoor post about road rage was from someone who honestly thinks that speed limits are minimums.
May 31st is National Dam Safety Day. Take a moment to look upstream from your home at our crumbling infrastructure and sob.
But, yeah, California doesn't have a water problem, it's got a water storage problem. Double sob.
https://www.fema.gov/emergency...agers/risk-management/dam-safety
Wednesday May 31st, 2023
The interesting thing is that, yes, Google's summary card disagreed with Bard, but that within the front page of Google results various sites also had a wide span of values for the population of the Dominican Republic. Wikipedia claiming 10,694,700, World Population Review suggesting 11,323,179. But it's a good reminder to not use LLMs for anything where sorting or precision or accuracy matter.
Here's the Bard table that's not sorted correctly and presenting questionable numbers.
Office discussion led to asking Bard for a table of the population of Caribbean nations, sorted. It not only sorted them wrong, it gave numbers that disagree with Google.
I didn't dig deeper than the Google above-the-results card on those numbers (which are often hilariously wrong on their own), but it's a good reminder to not trust the outputs from such things.
Especially don't bring them to conversations with me about policy, because I will check if it matters...
Dear Enphase: I am skeptical that from midnight to 6AM my system was continuously generating 124 Wh/hr.