Flutterby™!

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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...

Cat throwing pottery (Mastodon video)

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.

Via and Via.

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)

Yep. It's a scam. FTC staff report analyzes 70 MLM income disclosure statements

Via ResearchBuzz

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!

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?

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.

University of Virginia suspends tours that had come under fire for mentioning Thomas Jefferson's ties to slavery

The Jefferson Council alumni group had opposed University Guide Service volunteers for mentioning that the school's founder was a slaveowner.

Bypassing airport security via SQL injection

The TSA press office said in a statement that this vulnerability could not be used to access a KCM checkpoint because the TSA initiates a vetting process before issuing a KCM barcode to a new member. However, a KCM barcode is not required to use KCM checkpoints, as the TSO can enter an airline employee ID manually. After we informed the TSA of this, they deleted the section of their website that mentions manually entering an employee ID, and did not respond to our correction. We have confirmed that the interface used by TSOs still allows manual input of employee IDs.

In twenty freakin' twenty four. Sigh.

As my personal philosophies evolved to see some of the harms in the "if you believe it strongly enough you can manifest it" in the Richard Bach/James Redfield/etc "New Age" thinking, I confess that I never expected to see those magical thinking attitudes surface so strongly in Republican opinions about transportation policy.

This is cool. The secret inside One Million Checkboxes — Teens wrote me a secret. I found them.

There was this web site with a whole bunch of collaborative checkboxes floating around not too long ago. Obviously people are gonna hack on it. This talks both a little bit about design, and about some kids hacking on it.

"This is Texas! White people do guacamole crimes every day!" -- from the podcast "Today's Lucky Winner".

Somebody in Novato must have put an air quality sensor right beside the local barbecue joint's chimney or something. This is a level of pretty I can get behind.

(I was checking Watch Duty for updates on the Two Fire, you do have them on your small butt impactful recurring donations, right?)

A number of people have asked me about my reactions to the Harris housing plan, such as has been published, and I just wrote this for a private forum:

Working off of https://mailchi.mp/press.kamal...ower-costs-for-american-families : Last night, at the Petaluma Urban Chat board meeting, the Realtor had the same reaction to the $25k down payment support for first-time homebuyers that I did: That just raised the cost for starter homes by $25k. And, it's hard to be against "Stop Wall Street Investors from Buying Up and Marking Up Homes in Bulk", but I'm not sure that a fund buying 100 homes in a struggling development is all that different from 20 individuals following the Rich Dad playbook with 5 homes each. People like to piss and moan about institutional investors, but as long as constrained supply makes housing a super profitable investment, it hardly matters if it's single homeowners or institutional investors.

Though the bit about breaking the strangle-hold of monopolistic rent pricing is good.

I know a couple of people who make their living as affordable housing developers, and anything that simplifies the funding path for them is good (I mean, it reduces the demand for their services, but...), and I hope that the bullet points under the "Calling for New Construction..." is focused on multi-family. Which is tough to do as a small developer, but if the rules really do get simplified then maybe we can get to building single-digit-n-plexes by neighborhood developers.

I kinda doubt that there's room for Federal policy to override some of the worst of the local land-use regulations, because that stuff really needs more regional solutions. I'm all for the ways that the California State Legislature is overriding local control on some of the worst Prop 13 driven single-family zoning, but at the Federal level it'd be really hard to build policy that'd do the right overriding both here and in Ohio.

All of the good solutions are gonna deflate the housing market in some way, so are gonna be politically unpopular. So... it's something. I'd like to find the document that goes into more specifics, but I probably don't have the background to read the text of "Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act" and the "Stop Predatory Investing Act" to actually understand them.

And... one of the challenges with policy in campaigning is that the more specific the proposal, the easier it is to pick it apart, so getting too specific means that the press is gonna shower you in negative bullshit. Which we're seeing here, even with the generalities. Which makes me wanna be a cheerleader, even though I think a bunch of the more popular proposals here are going to be counter-productive.

Cybertruck parked by Wickerhsham Park with a SoilDAO vinyl wrap, and I am unsurprised at the overlap with crypto scammery.

(Wait, "crypto scammery" is redundant. Sorry.)

Holy crap! I haven't vetted this beyond Matt, though I trust him, but Steve Silberman @stevesilberman@newsie.social , the author of Neurotribes. Dead Head extraoirdinaire, and generally awesome human being, as died.

Damn. I will miss him.

https://xoxo.zone/@mathowie/113046412549920878

There's a strong contingent in Petaluma arguing against those awful out of town developers destroying the character of downtown. While blighted lots near downtown sit locked up by local families that have owned them for generations.

Anyway, this woman's rant seems completely apropos.

https://social.linux.pizza/@Bearfaced/112970664904813908

Maybe lots of ewaste and lithium batteries in everything isn't such a good idea after all? WSOC TV 9 Charlotte: Children’s book sparks fire inside Burke County minivan, investigators say, with some interesting conflicting reporting:

“The world itself is moving to lithium batteries, which propose some of these troubles to the fire service,” Chief Craig said. “I don’t know if there is — other than trying to keep them cool — that there is any precautions.”

vs the statement from Cottage Door Press:

“Our electronic children’s books, which have sold millions of units without incident, use alkaline batteries, not lithium-ion batteries. We are relieved that no one was injured and are working closely with local officials and experts to determine the cause of this incident.”

Also interesting is the way that news propagates, WSB TV 2 Atlanta: Child’s book starts fire in mom’s minivan basically looks like a rewrite of the WSOC story. Which, yeah, news orgs do their "reporting" by rewriting other news orgs work all of the time, but/and there's gotta be a better way.

Okay, loving this: BBC: Why badminton has become code for teen sex in Hong Kong.

In teaching materials it released last week, a <!-- -->module titled adolescents and intimate relationships for Secondary Year 3, suggested that teenagers who wanted to have sex with each other could "go out to play badminton together" instead.

Via Angela Glansbury 🚽 @floppyplopper@todon.nl who noted:

parents, are your children talking about BADMINTON?!? 🙀

FWB: friends with badminton
LGBT: Lets go, badminton time
FFS: friendly fun shuttlecocks
LOL: lots of lobs
BDSM: badminton day shuttlecock maniacs

Last time we were down at Raphio Chocolate, they had samples of the juice squeezed from the chocolate fruit pulp. It was kinda... non remarkable. BBC: Have Swiss scientists made a chocolate breakthrough? is about condensing that juice, and using it in conjunction with the ground husk.

Sainsbury Wing contractors find 1990 letter from donor anticipating their demolition of false columns

IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS NOTE YOU MUST BE ENGAGED IN DEMOLISHING ONE OF THE FALSE COLUMNS THAT HAVE BEEN PLACED IN THE FOYER OF THE SAINSBURY WING OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY. I BELIEVE THAT THE FALSE COLUMNS ARE A MISTAKE OF THE ARCHITECT AND THAT WE WOULD LIVE TO REGRET OUR ACCEPTING THIS DETAIL OF HIS DESIGN.

LET IT BE KNOWN THAT ONE OF THE DONORS OF THIS BUILDING IS ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTED THAT YOUR GENERATION HAS DECIDED TO DISPENSE WITH THE UNNECESSARY COLUMNS.

Via Simon Willison

Asking for a Sex Book Will Not Get You Out of Reading

J.F.C.

https://a2mi.social/@dave0/113031300914816116

https://mas.to/@pjie2/113030674867405430

Automated bullshit generation comes to policing: AP: Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court?

“It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate. It flowed better,” Gilbert said. It even documented a fact he didn’t remember hearing — another officer’s mention of the color of the car the suspects ran from.

It'll be interesting to see if there's any more attention paid to the correctness of these. It's not like police officers ever get prosecuted for perjury, but will GPT?

When Pirate Bay does it, everyone is up in arms, but when Facebook shows me all of these pirated webcomics with the credits clipped off from scammy link farms with "source unknown" (when the source is immediately obvious to anyone who reads web comics or spends 30 seconds with Google) they're "generating engagement".

Homogenization Effects of Large Language Models on Human Creative Ideation

<blockqutoe>Coupled with evidence that ChatGPT users exhibit greater fluency, flexibility, and elaboration than users of an alternative CST, these results suggest that current general-purpose instruction- tuned LLMs (such as ChatGPT) are capable of functioning as useful CSTs by enabling the rapid enumeration of relatively obvious possibilities that users might otherwise fail, or take longer, to consider. However, these systems are not currently well-suited to helping users develop truly original ideas.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3635636.3656204

Via Mark Gritter, who links to some additional resources used in the paper.

Copying here so that I can link people to it. Written to The Petaluma Argus-Courier, published on August 9. I think I missed something in editing, because the point of the police parking the dynamic speed trailer under the 15MPH yellow sign is that it has a big "30MPH" white speed limit sign on it. So... uh... Anyway, the scuttlebutt is that we may get stop signs!!! Yay!

EDITOR: The short stretch of Mountain View Avenue between Olive Street and Fairview Terrace has seen three automobile collisions in the past five weeks. Pedestrians and bicyclists cross this racetrack with trepidation, and a local power wheelchair user reports having been hit by drivers several times.

Residents of Mountain View Avenue have talked about trying to get traffic calming and safety improvements for literally decades. I've only lived here for 16 years, but in that time the speed limit along the straightaway was raised from 25 mph to 30 mph so that it could be enforced.

The enforcement we've seen involves parking an electronic speed sign underneath the 15 mph recommended speed sign for the curve. Meanwhile, the safety improvements of paint and reflectors installed in 2022 have already worn off, and guerilla safety enhancement efforts are removed within a few business hours. Resident-installed speed monitors record speeds of over 40 mph within 150 feet of stop signs.

I would be irate at the inaction of city processes, but as I look around I realize that there are many roads and intersections in Petaluma that are much higher priority to fix than our neighborhood. If we truly care about climate, and about the livability of the city, we need to prioritize rebuilding our infrastructure in ways that makes it accessible to all users, not just automobile drivers speeding recklessly through our neighborhoods.

Door by slow door, the reclaimed white oak is replacing the painted trim. Not gonna contemplate the doors right now...