Flutterby™!

Back in the... must have been the late '70s, maybe very early '80s, GE in Pittsfield MA had a huge open house. My Dad worked there, and it was a time we could go see where he worked. The guys in the high voltage lab associated with power transformer were doing all of the big arcs, and over in the naval defense department they had a little robot that was wandering around and interacting with people. And was obviously remote controlled by someone off-screen.

That has stuck with me in the current craze of demonstrating robots as "AI"...

Tesla's Beer-Serving Optimus Robot Was Controlled By A Human The Whole Time.

As a former Ocoee guide, a former Outdoor Adventures Rafting guide, even, NBC reporting on the whitewater guides helping with rescues and clean-ups in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton gives me all of the warm fuzzies.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/r...rews-hurricane-helene-rcna174716

I try to avoid Amazon, but ended up signing up for a free Prime trial to watch a movie last night, and... I could either, on Tuesday, drive 25 miles to hope that Electronics Plus in San Rafael has what I want in stock, or have 20 of them delivered for ten bucks tomorrow.

And given the number of things delivered in my neighborhood, I'm sure that that's dramatically fewer vehicle miles traveled.

1 bug, $50,000+ in bounties, how Zendesk intentionally left a backdoor in hundreds of Fortune 500 companies

hi, i'm daniel. i'm a 15-year-old with some programming experience and i do a little bug hunting in my free time. here's the insane story of how I found a single bug that affected over half of all Fortune 500 companies:

The fun bit is how Zendesk blew him off with the initial reports...

RT Josh Jersild @JoshJers@peoplemaking.games

One thing that I was trying to describe to the 15-year-old is that, when I was in college, google worked *so well* to find basically exactly what you were searching for that there was a site called "Let Me Google That For You" where you could snarkily send someone their question back and they'd see it animate the process of typing their question into google, then get the search results and bam, there's the answer to their question

I would *never* consider doing that now because almost never is the first hit the actual thing you want (and, honestly, it's getting rarer that it's top 10)

Shades of the old Elf Sternberg "Balkanize Usenet" proposal: The Oliphant: Islands

Islands are opt-in federated networks consisting of a chain of allowlist or “limited federation” servers linked together. Everyone in the network federates with each other, and as such the entire network is more resilient and able to handle moderation challenges simply impossible in the wider fediverse.

Although I think Tara is doing an amazing job at moderating the Mastodon instance I use.

Running Clang in the browser using WebAssembly

Discover how to compile C programs directly from JavaScript or any browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), and explore the powerful capabilities of the Wasmer JS SDK

Ugh. Two things that didn't survive the server upgrade that I have to figure out. One appears to be database triggers of some sort, because I don't think my edits, or comments, are triggering a front page rebuild.

The other is in PNG file handling somewhere.

Apple Machine Learning Research: GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer.

Via Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

Here in one paper is the probable reason why Apple abruptly pulled out of OpenAI's current funding round a week ago, after previously being expected to buy at least a billion bucks of equity.

(AI is peripheral to Apple's business model and not tarnishing their brand in the long term is more important than jumping on a passing fad.)
https://appdot.net/@jgordon/113294630427550275

Marcus on AI: LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem

Interesting to see what triggers Google Gemini and what doesn't. Matching the pronoun to the plural/singular gives the (in)appropriate search results, but "how do french women hold their liquor" gives this botsplaining...

When someone realizes that maybe the candidate whose sign they put up isn't all that...

What does it mean when your vacant downtown restaurant space is being used to advertise a catering event in the not really a town next town over?

I was recently involved in a discussion, stemming from my whine about Ubuntu renaming libgeographic-dev to libgeographiclib-dev, about the value of code, about building assets, and about operations vs capital improvement.

We in software kind of casually say that every line of code is a liability. And it's true. We say that the value of software is in how little it costs to change it, and this is a little less true, because a working system has value, and, yes, changing it costs and agility has value, but...

I'm not sure what my thesis is, but when we build external dependencies, we're making it so that we must, randomly, spend on changing our software, on updating, and the constant churn means that we don't have value for craft.

Why should I bother to build it beautifully if it's gonna get torn down in 6 months? Why should I build it for a decade, or a month, if I'm going to have to gut it and rebuild it in two weeks?

As someone drawn to the startup world, I have struggled with this often, on the other hand the code running this website has legacy that runs back two and a half decades, and a good portion of it has been running largely unchanged for two.

And it pisses me off when an apt upgrade, even across releases, breaks shit.

Which is why I recommend today's rant: Get me out of data hell:

Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.

Tesla’s surprise announcements: Robovan and Optimus

Reminder that back in 2021 the humanoid robot was just someone in a robot suit, the ones yesterday were remote controlled by people, and in 2019 Musk said “Next year for sure we will have over a million robotaxis on the road.”.

Art Nouveau mock-ups aside (and, let's face it, it'd be kickass to see the whole carbeurated hot rod culture replaced with electric vehicles with wicked cool body sculpture and paint jobs), the whole thing is summed up nicely in Pivot to AI: Elon’s double nothingburger: robotaxis any year now, bro. And robots, bro. Trust us, bro.

RT Sohan Murthy @sohan@freeradical.zone

A friend of mine suggested that we stop using the sparkle ✨ emoji as the symbol for AI and replace it with a magic eight ball 🎱 as it more realistically conveys how the technology works. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. 😂

Juice Rescue ⚡🔌🚗 — A collective effort to save and maintain Juicebox EV Chargers

Enel X Way USA is shutting down their support of Juicebox chargers, this is an attempt to keep those devices running.

Zoom is floundering. Just sent me an email saying "Upgrade to Zoom Workplace Pro and get 1 year of Perplexity Pro free", and... is that like a threat?

I've used Perplexity, and... no, just no.

Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.

Via Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io, who talks about this in the context of finding therapists who are culturally attuned.

Reporting Non-Consensual Intimate Media: An Audit Study of Deepfakes

Abstract: Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) inflicts significant harm. Currently, victim-survivors can use two mechanisms to report NCIM—as a non-consensual nudity violation or as copyright in- fringement. We conducted an audit study of takedown speed of NCIM reported to X (formerly Twitter) of both mechanisms. We uploaded 50 AI-generated nude images and reported half under X’s “non-consensual nudity” reporting mechanism and half under its “copyright infringement” mechanism. The copyright condition resulted in successful image removal within 25 hours for all images (100% removal rate), while non-consensual nudity reports resulted in no image removal for over three weeks (0% removal rate). We stress the need for targeted legislation to regulate NCIM removal online. We also discuss ethical considerations for auditing NCIM on social platforms.

If I wanted a USB camera with a narrower field of view and longer focus distance for Zooming our KBYG talks, anyone got a suggestion? This garage sale Logitech would be fine if it focused at 20' or so, but it's set up.for a person at a desk.

Seeing if I have fixed the upload: Google Labs once again adding AI value, this time telling me about the difference between sauces and dressings...

Seeing if I

Also: fuck Boost. I should have just written this code to raw POSIX calls to begin with; changing signatures mean I'm converting last_write_time(f) to just using stat(f.c_str(),&...).

It's times like every time I upgrade and C++ breaks that makes me think I should just port all this shit back to C. Or Perl. Some environment that doesn't think dicking around with my legacy code for its own sake is good.

It really shouldn't be this much of a PITA to keep stable systems running.

Today in "is that *really* necessary?", Ubuntu upgrade renamed libgeographic-dev to libgeographiclib-dev.

And of course it doesn't want to link.

Fuck it. Statically compile everything. Don't actually upgrade anything until you need to. Also, I'm assuming that I'll never find the gtest repo again, because that seems to be giving all sorts of warnings now.

Google Labs once again adding AI value, this time telling me about the difference between sauces and dressings...

Just riffing on that MTG quote about "controlling the weather". Yes, we have the technology, it's written in your local zoning code.

RT Sbectol :twt: @Sbectol@toot.wales

Wait. So this Nobel prize was won by a guy for a seminal paper first authored.. by his wife.

Who wasn’t even mentioned in the citation by the Nobel committee.

Erm.

My wife is Not Amused.

RT Annalee @Annalee@wandering.shop

@Sbectol the part where her name is ROSALIND is one of those things where if you put it in a novel the editor would suggest it was too on the nose

RT Tilde Lowengrimm @tilde@infosec.town

It's so weird talking to lawyers about important court cases right now. In the past, you'd ask about a case and they'd be like "Aah yes, the doctrine of Bibbity Bobbitus first promulgated under the Smithers court in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram which pertained to the rights of ranchers to interfere in the curtilage of unincorporated Res Materia…" and then make the Charlie Brown teacher noise for twenty minutes. But now you just ask something innocent like how many crimes the former president did and they say things like "Law is just an exercise of raw political power through another form; hundreds of years of precedent, gone in an instant; there is no justice in the world, or meaning in life…" and then make an inhuman keening wail which awakens all the dogs for miles around as the they sob into their hands. It's just different now, you know?

In 2024, hearing "backslash" in spoken URLs in podcast ads. We're doomed.

Frogger: Walkable City (in-browser game)

Via.

I recently saw a rant about this in which one of the examples was that BSD still uses ifconfig, and I get it. With the bloat of glibc, I have occasionally wondered how much of a desktop machine one could build with Busybox (session clean-up bugs in wget notwithstanding).

And, of course, as I use the Mac as my daily driver, holy shit I want something that just works well and continues to do so.

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Stability? Predictability? Reliability? Where's the fun in that?

Modern computing is just trying to keep up with all of the places where people have changed things for bullshit reasons, and fixing the resulting broken processes, until you die.

"This America does not respond kindly to our sort of person." Noxeema Jackson (played by Wesley Snipes), in "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar"

I have often decried the impact of Nextdoor on our community, but I have to admit: without the bigots showing their whole asses there I never would have made the connection between certain factions around downtown development patterns and the anti "drag queen story hour" hate. Daaang.

YCombinator funded techbros search and replace open source of other YCombinator funded techbros, drop license, call it a startup.

Pivot to AI: Ex-coiner Y Combinator startup bro: ‘dawg i chatgpt’d the license, can’t be bothered with legal’.

Dear XCode: I'm not even mad that somehow you let a ^S file into my source code.

It's that you didn't freakin' show me that it was there somehow...

Well, I suppose if I'm gonna discover that my backups went kablooie, having to install Postgres 12 to dump the old database and then restore to 16 isn't the worst thing that could have happened to me.

So I haven't broken my 26 year blogging streak, I guess, and I've got some new backups, and should probably make sure these backups get on an S3 store somewhere or something.

Digital spelunking: Did I get my blog back? Maybe? Looking positive?

I am prepared to forgive Apple for a number of things, but a case insensitive file system is not one of them.

The greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported from the United States Robert W. Howarth

Overall, the greenhouse gas footprint for LNG as a fuel source is 33% greater than that for coal when analyzed using GWP (160 g CO2-equivalent/MJ vs. 120 g CO2-equivalent/MJ). Even considered on the time frame of 100 years after emission (GWP100), which severely understates the climatic damage of methane, the LNG footprint equals or exceeds that of coal.

https://doi.org/10.1002/ese3.1934

Shit. More to read: Bloomberg CityLab Housing: How Americans Voted Their Way Into a Housing Crisis

A new book from Jerusalem Demsas explores how local elections, community meetings and other democratic structures brought on a national shortage of affordable homes.

Streetsblog Opinion: We Need More Consequences for Reckless Driving. But That Doesn’t Mean More Punishment

"Punishment" and "consequences" aren't synonyms — and when we confuse the two, we lose lives on our roads.

Anybody else interested in aviation safety mix up AITA and IATA?

After the warm day, sitting outside in the cool of the evening, and smelling smoke, and not seeing anything on Watch Duty, and I'm concerned.

Anyone I know use Jupyter or similar notebooks extensively? Care to share what environment you run them in, how you manage the resources they access, how you avoid leaving VMs running up bills remotely, whether you leave tabs to them open, etc?