Wednesday April 2nd, 2025
Alan Kay on machines understanding language: "What I want in a computing system I can work with, is something that is much more trustworthy and understandable than most humans and societal systems. I certainly don’t want to work with something that is extremely dangerously *below* expectations and wishes even for humans."
https://www.quora.com/Now-that...ine-interface/answer/Alan-Kay-11
Tuesday April 1st, 2025
The camo doesn't hide that the Cybertruck is parked on the sidewalk.
Court in Japan orders the dissolution of the Unification Church. The man accused of killing former prime minister Shinzo Abe said he did so because the church was responsible for his family's financial troubles. Apparently the court agreed:
Lawyers representing those seeking damages from the church welcomed the court decision as a major first step toward redress.
“We must pursue our effort to achieve redress and to prevent future problems,” head lawyer Susumu Murakoshi told reporters, demanding the church accept the dissolution order and offer an apology and compensation to all victims.
Can you imagine if we did this for, say, churches that institutionally protected child molesters?
<ahref="https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-banks-predict-catastrophic-warming-with-profit-potential/">Big banks predict catastrophic warming, with profit potential
“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”
Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming
"The world is not on track to limit temperature rise below 2°C — and limiting warming [to] 1.5°C is almost certainly unachievable," the Institute of International Finance wrote in bolded text, citing analyses from the energy research firm the Rhodium Group and the Climate Action Tracker, an environmental collaborative.
"Financial institutions need to recalibrate targets to reflect that 1.5°C are no longer suitable as strategic goals," the briefing said. "Reputational concerns may arise in the absence of an aligned view amongst stakeholders on how such processes should be handled, and what criteria may need to be applied."
Via.
Neurotypicals will literally write 4 pages of instruction to an LLM, revise, pretend to understand the output, and run the untested code on production data, rather than write 4 lines of unambiguous Perl...
Been thinking a lot about those posts that show up in our feeds about various activists executed by Nazis: the Scholl siblings, etc...
Anyway, prosecutor Pam Bondi is seeking the death penalty against Luigi Mangione. https://apnews.com/article/uni...29dba97034d4fa81822f481d08cf2842
Monday March 31st, 2025
Well, the Trump administration is certainly bringing nations together... China, Japan, South Korea will jointly respond to US tariffs, Chinese state media says
More in the "understanding the workplace integration of AI means reacting to it as an adversary rather than a collaborator" (or, collaborator, but with whom?): News Guard's Reality Check: A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda
NewsGuard’s findings confirm a February 2025 report by the U.S. nonprofit the American Sunlight Project (ASP), which warned that the Pravda network was likely designed to manipulate AI models rather than to generate human traffic. The nonprofit termed the tactic for affecting the large-language models as “LLM [large-language model] grooming.”
Anybody have a favorite review or critical reading of the Hallmark show "The Way Home"? Charlene and I got sucked into it to discuss with friends, and some of the themes about not letting the past and nostalgia rule one's life (even as the characters do) seems un-Hallmark...
The expression "land ho" implies the existence of an "air ho" and a "sea ho".
Sunday March 30th, 2025
So, yeah, I guess I should make some badge boxes for a square dance raffle or something...
Had another stack of that square dance inlay taped up, so rather than do the smart thing and make thinner veneers, I decided to cut them out, glue them up, and resaw by hand ...
Petition to mercilessly thrash anyone who insists on relative times ("1 year ago") rather than dates on comment posts and the like. I wanna know exactly which episode you're reacting to when you talk about the events in the latest show...
Thread on the various tools at RSSGizmos. A number of cool things to work into your RSS workflow.
https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@researchbuzz/114252071365517876
Wonderful visit to https://sonomabg.org/ this morning. We'll have to become regulars to see how it evolves through the seasons, as things bloom and blossom. Just enough sense of gardening to make it feel like a loved space, without being fussy.
Saturday March 29th, 2025
Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
One thing I’m noticing - lately, the consultancy businesses are realising generative AI isn’t generating nearly as much business value as they suggested.. so they’re starting to move on to fear about quantum computing again.
Friday March 28th, 2025
Infostealer campaign compromises 10 npm packages, targets devs.
Ten npm packages were suddenly updated with malicious code yesterday to steal environment variables and other sensitive data from developers' systems.
...
All these packages, except for country-currency-map, are still available on npm, with their latest versions designated above, so downloading them will infect your projects with info-stealer malware.
So you can't just npm upda... wait a minute...
Andrew Plotkin @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place
@cstross That also means back-pressure on the tech industry, where "new phenomena" are people inventing things rather than observational science.
It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine.
It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is.
Worth reading through, and especially as the author notes the asymmetry of information, that Flock, and thence police departments, have a stronger historical record of your travels than you do. Making me think (and re-think) some of those old "quantified self" thoughts again.
You knew that color printers could be tracked by their dot pattern. DEDA — tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit apparently attempts to give you the tools to obfuscate the tracking.
Last night: Nvidia-backed CoreWeave downsizes US IPO
This morning: CoreWeave Stock Opens at $39 After Disappointing IPO.
CoreWeave, a rapidly growing AI cloud company, priced its initial public offering at $40 a share on Thursday night, well below an expected range of $47 to $55.
Peter @peter@thepit.social observes:
AI is such an exciting technology that the first big IPO for the sector is a bust. like, if you spun off Google and Microsoft's AI businesses, they would immediately be stripped for parts and shut down because generative AI is not a profitable business.
A DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding a reporter to a group email
The DHS employee told colleagues she accidentally added a reporter from a conservative Washington-based print publication to an email that included information about upcoming ICE operations in the Denver area.
Via.
'Lone offenders' carrying out Tesla attacks, catching them 'difficult,' FBI, DHS say
Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social observed that
it's a little like when DHS tried to find the leader of Portland Antifa and concluded everyone actually spent most of their time calling each other out on Twitter
I keep thinking that in 80 years we'll be posting pictures and short bios in the way that we celebrate people like the Scholl siblings or Christoph Probst now.
How is Meta Getting Its Hands on Advance Digital Galleys to Train Its AI? doesn't really have any answers, but is asking some of the right questions:
The last time I used a torrenting site was in the days of searching for files on Napster in the very early aughts. I remember how thrilling it was to find music, but then how terrifying it quickly became when individual users started to be sued by record labels for torrenting the latest 98 Degrees album or whatever. Ultimately Napster was shut down, but as Liz Pelly notes in her new book Mood Machine, the anti-pirating frenzy within the music industry paved the way for predatory streaming sites like Spotify to emerge by creating alternatives to piracy. The streaming sites have managed to devalue music and the artists who make it, all while enriching large corporations and making discovery more difficult for individual users. Don’t let this happen again.
Today in "who saw that coming?": AI models miss disease in Black and female patients
Compared with the patients’ doctors, the AI model more often failed to detect the presence of disease in Black patients or women, as well in those 40 years or younger. When the researchers looked at race and sex combined, Black women fell to the bottom, with the AI not detecting disease in half of them for conditions such as cardiomegaly, or enlargement of the heart. These disparities persisted when the team tested CheXzero using four other public data sets of chest x-rays from other regions, including Spain and Vietnam.
Jess Huang: How a well-intended California domestic violence law results in victims being arrested
Under the California Penal Code, officers must make an arrest in domestic violence cases when they determine probable cause. Enacted in 1986, this specific provision was meant to protect victims.
The problem? The law assumes officers are trained to identify the dominant aggressor, but research shows that training gaps and the code’s mandatory arrest provision often pressures them into rushed, surface-level decisions. Experts say this creates too much room for error.
Thursday March 27th, 2025
The vast majority of new follows on BlueSky have huge "how do you do, fellow Democrat" vibes.
Hayao Miyazaki, 2016, on being shown some "AI" image generation demos translation transcription further transcribed by me:
Every morning ... not recent days, but I see my friend who has a disability.
It's so hard for him just to do a high five, his arm with stiff muscle reaching out to my hand.
Now, thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting.
Whoever creates this stuff has no idea of what pain is whatsoever.
I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.
I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.
After one of the presenters says "We want to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.", Miyazaki replies:
I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.
Anyway, just a cultural touchpoint to contemplate as using OpenAI's new image generator to create images of one's-self in the style of Studio Ghibli is being used by Sam Altman to distract us from OpenAI's money problems.
Radical thought: Price the service to pay for the CPU usage? ChatGPT’s viral image-generation AI is ‘melting’ OpenAI’s GPUs
Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ @xgranade@wandering.shop
@noracodes Everyone loves talking about computers like they're magic, but no one wants to do the hard work of maintaining an arcane order dedicated to the esoteric arts through centuries of the ever-shifting concerns of mere mortals.
I think it's becoming more and more clear that the "AI job skills" for the future will not be focused on using AI as an assistant, but in understanding and mitigating the impacts of AI as an adversary.
Frank McKenna on Forbes: 5 AI Scams Set To Surge In 2025: What You Need To Know
According to Deloitte Center for Financial Services, generative AI will enable $40 billion in losses by 2027 up from $12.3 billion in 2023. That’s a 32% compound annual growth rate.
Going beyond Business Email Compromise attacks, obviously romance and pig butchering scams are becoming more and more automated, and the deepfake scams are gonna get deeper.
On the one hand, maybe we shouldn't be judged by what we did in High School, on the other hand...
Reuters: Exclusive: DOGE staffer 'Big Balls' provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show
Even if the connection between Coristine and EGodly were fleeting, Nitin Natarajan, who served as the deputy director of CISA under former President Joe Biden, told Reuters it was worrying that someone who provided services to EGodly only two years ago was part of a group that has gained wide access to government networks.
"This stuff was not in the distant past," he said. "The recency of the activity and the types of groups he was associated would definitely be concerning."
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.