Flutterby™! From 2023-02-01 to 2023-02-28

I see people are talking about power connectors for graphics cards, and I've gotta say that this is our opportunity to standardize on J1772 plugs for more than just EVs.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

Interesting: Corsi- Rosenthal box style air filters not only help reduce aerosol disease transmission, they also reduce concentrations of PFAS and phthalates.

Environmental Science & Technology: Does Using Corsi–Rosenthal Boxes to Mitigate COVID-19 Transmission Also Reduce Indoor Air Concentrations of PFAS and Phthalates?

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c05169

And I'm trying to find the original cite, but this Toot is claiming some pretty amazing results for smaller particles using MERV13 filters vs HEPA filters because it's easier to get volume through the large surface area of the Corsi-Rosenthal boxes.

I made a couple of plydwood filter carriers for some stand-alone fans because of fire season a few years ago, and they've served us fairly well, but I'm thinking about that larger surface area thing should we need 'em again.

[ related topics: Current Events Pyrotechnics ]

A good collection of resources: The Problem With Police Reform Is That Police Already Know It's Bad To Beat People To Death.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Archaeologists Discover 1.2 Million-Year-Old 'Workshop' in Mind-Blowing Find

The discovery pushes the timeline of obsidian tool use back by an astonishing 500,000 years, and reveals that the hominins who lived in this part of Ethiopia, known as Melka Kunture, must have been considerably skilled crafters in order to work with this capricious material.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01970-1

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

RT Dropped Mike @rebrafsim@universeodon.com

teacher: what does “agnostic” mean?

me: I don’t know

teacher: correct! how about “ambivalent”?

me: *shrug*

teacher: yes! how about “nihilistic”?

me: what difference does any of this make?

teacher: amazing

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Got gigabit bandwidth at home, and 200mbit and limited storage on my colo server, and was thinking about experimenting with PeerTube to get away from YouTube dependence, but I think doing it easily is gonna mean switching my own CMS to NGINX.

Which I should probably do, because it's getting increasingly untenable to stay on the HTTP server with the frankly pretty offensive name.

[ related topics: Content Management broadband Political Correctness ]

How to implement Q&A against your documentation with GPT3, embeddings and Datasette

Calculating embeddings with gtr-t5-large in Python

I've long wanted to run some kind of large language model on my own computer. Now that I have a M2 MacBook Pro I'm even more keen to find interesting ways to keep all of those CPU cores busy.

Running the Sentence Transformers gtr-t5-large model.

Via.

[ related topics: Monty Python Sports Python ]

So it was some time back in February of 1998 that I made the first entry on this here blog. The exact details are lost to history because I was using a tool I called Newwwsboy, that took email with Markdown (though I don't know if we even called it that yet, we sure didn't call these things "blogs" yet) and stuffed it into HTML, and didn't maintain timestamps.

It's interesting to me to wander back through the archives. I, of course, was a very different person back then, but so was the world. I noted new Susie Bright columns in Salon, Pat Califia, Lisa Palac, and Carol Queen writing in various forums. Need To Know was the latest in tech news. The much lamented Mouth Organ was publishing.

The number of people who are now dead-named in the archives would have been surprising to me then. It's kinda surprising to me now. I'm not sure if I should go back and edit history, leave it as is, or just hide the archives (I see that I've whined about the values of archives before, back in 2012, when I rel="nofollow"ed a bunch of old links and made commenting a little harder).

A number of people just dead. Some I'd met in person, they'd been in California for a conference or whatever, some I only ever corresponded with, or admired from afar.

I started writing stuff here for two reasons: First, I had a long history of writing long emails, and wanted a place to save the better ones (whence the email interface to the initial engine), second, I saw what Dave Winer was doing with Scripting News, and wanted to build the "check it daily" site that I wanted to see on the web.

I don't know that second bit ever happened, largely because, well, it was me writing it, and I think that what I wanted to see on the web, that optimism about a new media space and new culture and building a fresh world from the wreckage of the Reagan era has largely dried up and gone away.

I have made some really cool connections and friends over the years. I'm sorry I don't keep in touch with y'all who are still here better.

I miss the newness of the web, that this was a platform we were all exploring, when the parameters, both social and technical, weren't so defined. During the Bush II Iraq invasion, TC abused some of the public Referer(sic) tracking I had in place to game a Flutterby to the second Google search result for "French military victories", resulting in me implementing some code to hide various entries from Google, because dayumn there's some stupid people out there. Of course that was back when most of the web traffic was human. These days I go look at the logs and it's obscure search engine after other thing I've never heard of spidering the shit out of the database. The humans are few and far between.

I was hoping this'd be some sort of grand epiphany, but right now I'm just gonna post it so it doesn't get lost in the morass of browser tabs. Who knows, since I've got all of Feburary, maybe I'll come up with something intelligent to say...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Games Sexual Culture Content Management Weblogs Dave Winer Invention and Design Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Sociology Writing Current Events Journalism and Media California Culture Machinery Community Conferences Databases Archival Woodworking hubris ]

Wish I could find the original so I could give credit, but I'm really liking the notion of flipping the script, rather than referring to "climate activists" or "social justice advocates" as somehow the non-normative, start referring to "destruction advocates" and "slavery advocates" and "injustice advocates" to refer to those who are fighting to maintain the status quo.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Global Warming ]

I used to scoff at UL and CE certification, but learning about cut-rate EV chargers, and some of the disasters sold as wireless device chargers, is reminding me that those are, alas minimums.

And I wonder about Amazon's brand now that we have no particular assurance that anything we buy from that web site is gonna be better than random cheap shit off AliExpress...

[ related topics: Books Wireless Education ]

AP reports on tapes of the the Wisconsin Trump campaign staff 2 days after the election. After acknowledging the loss:

“Here’s the drill: Comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We’ll do whatever they need (inaudible) help with. Just be on standby in case there’s any stunts we need to pull,” Iverson said.

Via The Status Kuo: Lordy, There Are Yet More Tapes

[ related topics: Politics Law Pyrotechnics ]

The Google Podcast player is... not growing on me. AntennaPod doesn't play nice with Android Auto. Anybody got recs for a podcast player that does work with Android Auto and doesn't suck?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Okay, hive mind: since we went to Google phones we're mostly gappy, but the clutter of Google Photos suuuuucks. And I damned sure don't want to be auto uploading everything. What's your favorite "images on this device" photo gallery app for Android?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Now I have to finish spackling and paint that ceiling.

Brass, maple, mahogany, fan vent louver in place.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Model Building ]

Okay Google Maps, maybe that's a little too much information about me...

Home

13 min 5.6 mi .

Rex Ace Hardware

11 min 4.8 mi

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

Last night we started watching The 1619 Project on Hulu, and the third episode is really good, but is worth it just for the segment of Nile Rodgers describing the origin of "Freak Out"...

Went down to the Inkwells by Lagunitas to see if we could find any spawning salmon. Didn't see any, but did see these ducks. Didn't get any pictures of them diving, but it was cool to see them swimming under water. Wonder what they were catching down there.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

And it was nice to walk around by flowing water.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Over on Mastodon there's been a little discussion about "Endless Nothing", a ChatGPT generated and ... I dunno, something rendered ... continuous Twitch stream that's meant to parody Seinfeld. Complete with inane and random laugh track.

Endless Seinfeld episode grinds to a halt after AI comic violates Twitch guidelines

In a Discord post from the channel's creators, the malfunction occurred because of an outage from OpenAI's higher-cost (and better-behaved) text-davinci-003 model led the creators to fall back to the lower-cost (and less complex) text-curie-001 model to keep the show running.

"The switch to Curie was what resulted in the inappropriate text being generated," wrote an admin on the show's Discord channel. "We leverage OpenAI’s content moderation tools, which have worked thus far for the Davinci model, but were not successful with Curie. We’ve been able to identify the root cause of our issue with the Davinci model and will not be using Curie as a fallback in the future."

The "...none of what was said reflects the devs' (or anyone else on the staff team's) opinions." is gonna reflect the basic problem with Machine Learning generated content.

Which is a good place to hang Dan McQuillan: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it.

[ related topics: Sports Community Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Senior officials ordered destruction of Vallejo police shooting evidence

In January 2021, officials for the city of Vallejo intentionally — and with approval from a senior attorney for the city — destroyed key evidence in multiple police killings and one non-fatal shooting, documents obtained in a public records lawsuit filed by Open Vallejo show. The city destroyed the records although many were set to be disclosed under California transparency laws — a potential crime, according to a motion filed by this newsroom last month.

[ related topics: Law Law Enforcement California Culture Government ]

Stored away for the next time someone asks "but what about Hunter Biden?" Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post: Laptop email suggests Hunter Biden read newspapers, not classified documents

[ related topics: Politics ]

Walked some stuff I gave away on the local Buy Nothing group up to a house in West Ridge and found this along the path by the creek..

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Real Estate ]

We've moved on from dalmatians.

(Talked with the guy, he's installing the flues and hoods at the remodel of the restaurant formerly known as McGuire's.)

[ related topics: Photography Food ]

New Zealand authorities have intercepted 3.2 tonnes of cocaine that was found floating adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

In a joint media conference today, the authorities said the drugs have a street value of "half a billion dollars".

GDP of New Zealand is about $250B, in case you were wondering...

[ related topics: Drugs Health Invention and Design Law Journalism and Media California Culture Boats Conferences Economics ]

Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the State of the Union address

And then Biden did something astonishing. He tricked the Republicans into a public declaration of support for protecting Social Security and Medicare. He noted that a number of Republicans have called for cutting, or even getting rid of, Social Security and Medicare. This is simply a fact—it is in Senator Rick Scott’s (R-FL) pre-election plan; the Republican Study Committee’s budget; statements by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Ron Johnson (R-WI); and so on—but Republicans booed Biden and called him a liar for suggesting they would make those cuts, and they did so in public.

Seeming to enjoy himself, Biden jumped on their assertion, forcing them to agree that there would be no cuts to Social Security or Medicare. It was budget negotiation in real time, and it left Biden holding all the cards.

In her rebuttal, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.", and boy ain't that the truth.

Games Hub: Hogwarts Legacy does not deserve to be reviewed on its own merits

Whether or not we want to admit it, it is impossible to talk positively about Hogwarts Legacy without harming a community of human beings.

Hogwarts Legacy Purchase Simulator

[ related topics: Games Current Events Community ]

Saving this Doug Robertson answer to Quora "Why do people get angry when I try to share the word of God with them? I only do it because I care about them deeply and don’t want them to end up in hell. I feel like some people avoid me because of this. Is there any way to get through to them? because it nicely sums up all of the purposes of encouraging proselytizing. And since permission is granted in the comments, I'm gonna copy the answer into the comments here, for safekeeping.

In other news, have I told you how awesome square dancing is lately?

[ related topics: Religion ]

In honor of today's Twitter events, may I present an updated Schadenfreudometer?

[ related topics: Photography ]

It's a shame Apple deprecated Carbon before having a real widget set, and it'll be so nice some day when Cocoa is finally something other than a steaming pile of bugs.

(Currently trying to get tabbed windows to display a title that has any resemblance at all to the NSWindowController that is attempting to set the title on the window.title, the window.tab.title, and anything else that looks promising.)

[ related topics: Apple Computer Microsoft ]

Vestas claims major breakthough in wind turbine blade recycling

In a landmark discovery that Vestas hopes will change this, the company has developed a new chemical process that is capable of breaking down epoxy resin into virgin-grade materials.

The new method does not require a change in the design or composition of blade materials, meaning that the recycling method can be applied to turbine blades in use or those that have been dumped into landfill.

Vestas unveils circularity solution to end landfill for turbine blades.

“Until now, the wind industry has believed that turbine blade material calls for a new approach to design and manufacture to be either recyclable, or beyond this, circular, at end of life. Going forward, we can now view old epoxy-based blades as a source of raw material. Once this new technology is implemented at scale, legacy blade material currently sitting in landfill, as well as blade material in active windfarms, can be disassembled, and re-used. This signals a new era for the wind industry, and accelerates our journey towards achieving circularity,” says Lisa Ekstrand, Vice President and Head of Sustainability at Vestas.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media Graphic Design ]

It's a shame the Pixel 7 design team didn't have any left-handers on it...

(Trying to delete a voicemail, every time I moved my thumb over the delete icon the screen went blank because it thought I was holding it up to my ear or something... Finally managed it with my right hand.)

[ related topics: Graphics Graphic Design ]

Turkey earthquake: Why did so many buildings collapse?

In Turkey, however, the government has provided periodic "construction amnesties" - effectively legal exemptions for the payment of a fee, for structures built without the required safety certificates. These have been passed since the 1960s (with the latest in 2018).

Critics have long warned that such amnesties risk catastrophe in the event of a major earthquake.

Up to 75,000 buildings across the affected earthquake zone in southern Turkey have been given construction amnesties, according to Pelin Pınar Giritlioğlu, Istanbul head of the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects' Chamber of City Planners.

Just a few days before the latest disaster, Turkish media reported that a new draft law is awaiting parliamentary approval which would grant a further amnesty for recent construction work.</blockquyote>

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food moron Law Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Earthquake Machinery Fabrication Birds Architecture Model Building ]

Good evening, Petaluma.

[ related topics: Photography ]

This cat knows that we are planning on trimming his nails, and as much as he gets them stick on things when they're long, is not looking to cooperate.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Local inequities in the relative production of and exposure to vehicular air pollution in Los Angeles

Vehicular air pollution has created an ongoing air quality and public health crisis. Despite growing knowledge of racial injustice in exposure levels, less is known about the relationship between the production of and exposure to such pollution. This study assesses pollution burden by testing whether local populations’ vehicular air pollution exposure is proportional to how much they drive. Through a Los Angeles, California, case study we examine how this relates to race, ethnicity and socio-economic status – and how these relationships vary across the region. We find that, all else equal, tracts whose residents drive less are exposed to more air pollution, as are tracts with a less-White population. Commuters from majority-White tracts disproportionately drive through non-White tracts, compared to the inverse. Decades of racially-motivated freeway infrastructure planning and residential segregation shape today’s disparities in who produces vehicular air pollution and who is exposed to it, but opportunities exist for urban planning and transport policy to mitigate this injustice.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221145403

Free open-access preprint of the paper

Via.

[ related topics: Health Theater & Plays Law Work, productivity and environment California Culture Race Economics ]

With the decline of Google search results, there's more reason for alternative search engines. To go along with Marginalia, Wiby.me is another search engine focused on the simpler more personal web.

And Internet Archive Scholar is focused on scholarly publications.

[ related topics: Net Culture Machinery ]

The Commonwealth Fund: U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes.

As the toot from which I got this observes:

- Lowest life expectancy at birth

- Highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions

- Highest maternal and infant mortality

- Highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions

[ related topics: Health ]

RT sara@hachyderm.io Sara Safavi @sara@hachyderm.io

accidentally wrote "saad" instead of "saas" in a text to my partner; they immediately coined "Software as a Disappointment"

and honestly, where is the lie

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Graham Sutherland goes deep on a Stack Exchange question about driving high current loads with MOSFETs and PWM

John Roberts’ wife’s client list raises concern about “conflicts of interest and influence peddling"

The complaint, which was first obtained by The New York Times, accuses the chief justice of failing to acknowledge the full extent of his wife's work in his ethical disclosures. 

Jane Roberts, who quit her job as a law partner when her husband was confirmed as chief justice in 2005, made millions of dollars in commissions helping recruit for firms – some of which had business before the Supreme Court, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.

Supreme Court justices used personal emails for work and ‘burn bags’ were left open in hallways, sources say

The problem with the justices’ use of emails persisted in part because some justices were slow to adopt to the technology and some court employees were nervous about confronting them to urge them to take precautions, one person said. Such behavior meant that justices weren’t setting an example to take security seriously.

[ related topics: Politics Ethics Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Heinlein New York Marriage ]

Streetpass.social, a browser plug-in (Chrome & Firefox, Safari coming soon) to look for rel="me" links in web pages you browse and give you a suggested Mastodon follow list.

Disparities in Activity and Traffic Fatalities by Race/Ethnicity

Exposure to traffic fatality differs by race/ethnicity group and by mode, indicating that adjustment for differential exposure is needed when estimating disparities. The authors find that fatality rates per 100 million miles traveled are systematically higher for Black and Hispanic Americans for all modes and notably higher for vulnerable modes (e.g., Black Americans died at more than 4 times the rate for White Americans while cycling, 33.71 [95% CI: 21.84, 73.83] compared with 7.53 [95% CI: 6.64, 8.69], and more than 2 times the rate while walking, 40.92 [95% CI: 36.58, 46.44] compared with 18.77 [95% CI: 17.30, 20.51]).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2022.03.012

[ related topics: Sports Pedal Power Race Bicycling Gambling ]

Violet Blue now reports that her memoir of being homeless and punk in San Francisco, A Fish Has No Word For Water, is available from your local bookstore.

Which means you no longer have any excuse. Buy this book. Seriously. It's amazing. You need to read it.

https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/109843223133506831

[ related topics: Books Bay Area California Culture ]

RT I would prefer not to @lolennui@mstdn.social

every day there’s a new social app called like blabbr that wants your passport when you sign up and then you find out it’s a scam run by a fortnite streamer and something called the kissinger institute for peace

[ related topics: Invention and Design moron Dictators ]

Well poop. I installed KDE Neon because people said it worked out of the box for the Surface Pro 3, and it's great, except that I can't instantiate a QAudioDecoder or other Qt multimedia object without a segfault, and can't figure out what package is missing.

Also, it likes snaps, so... maybe I try yet another distro. Sigh.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Well, I thought I wasn't making progress on my keyboarding, but Charlene just asked me to help her puzzle out a piece of choral music in F minor (4 flats) and I think we might have actually done it.

[ related topics: Music ]

Like the quirky lines of this little runabout docked in the turning basin today.

[ related topics: Photography ]

sudo does not work even more emphatically if you type it in all caps.

Seems like this should be rectified.

(Except on the Mac, because Mac don't care about your silly upper lower case conventions.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

Dear dd: WTF is the point of "status=progress" if you're gonna let the kernel cache all 4GB and take another half an hour to finish writing to this USB stick.

"grep Dirty /proc/meminfo" is telling me just how not finished you are...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing ]

Listening to Kirk Hamilton's "Strong Songs" episode on Prince's "Kiss" the way I should listen to it, with a keyboard in front of me so I can play along to figure out the chords. https://strongsongspodcast.com/

In the intro to the recast, he talks about the difference between practice and playing, and I realized that a lot of my musical "practice" has just been playing, and I should be more systematic about it.

[ related topics: Star Trek Pop Culture ]

Dropped in at Marco Cochrane's studio for the R-evolution going away party. First time wandering through his studio. Really like the fierceness of this leaping woman

[ related topics: Photography ]

More from Marco Cochrane's studio

[ related topics: Photography ]

Saw this egret hunting down by the F St bridge

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Cool to just casually run into our State Representative (Damon Connolly) at our favorite watering hole (Aqus Cafe).

I'm so out of touch, I heard the Eagles were in today's game and I don't even know if Don Henley plays offense or defense.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

RT null @nova@starflower.space

u have to be very quiet when hacking so the coputer doesn't hear you. thats why its called ssh

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Courtesy of ResearchBuzz comes this horrifying news of the coming apocalypse: Mattel Announces Barney Franchise Relaunch

The global reintroduction of the famed Barney brand will include TV, film, toys, music, apparel, and more

[ related topics: Music Technology and Culture Current Events Television ]

A school took his family name off a building. He’s demanding $3.6 billion.

Smith, a Richmond lawyer who graduated from the university’s law school, is the great-great grandson of T.C. Williams, one of the school’s early and prominent benefactors. Until last year, the official name of the university’s law school was the T.C. Williams School of Law.

But that ended in September when the university’s board voted unanimously to change the name to the University of Richmond School of Law following the adoption of a policy that prohibits the university from naming any building, program, professorship or entity “for a person who directly engaged in the trafficking and/or enslavement of others or openly advocated for the enslavement of people.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Software Engineering Sociology Law Education ]

Hey, anyone know what that helicopter circling slowly over Petaluma, moving north to south, mid-day today was? Perhaps centered down Lakeville? Didn't recognize it as law enforcement, forgot my glasses so couldn't see if there was a news logo on it, but didn't look familiar.

Perhaps a small camera pod on front?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Current Events Law Enforcement Aviation - Helicopters ]

Village Network of Petaluma just sent me an email titled "Fall Prevention Workshop", and I'd just finished reading an article about El Niño predictions and thought "holy shit, climate change is gonna take care of that for us anyway".

Then I recontextualized to hazards of aging.

Then I recontextualized to prospects of aging in the face of climate change.

Now I'm depressed.

[ related topics: broadband Global Warming ]

Since we're all dunking on Bing tonight, I think it's interesting how many different answers it's giving...

[ related topics: Photography ]

"🎶 If I had a dust pan, yi bi dibbi dibbi dibbi dibbi dibbi dibbi dooo... 🎶"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Hope for the future: ‘I’ll call an Uber or 911’: Why Gen Z doesn’t want to drive Zoomers are shunning cars and driver’s licenses. Will it last?

[ related topics: Archival Global Warming ]

A Sidewinder missile costs $210k-400k. An F22 costs $85K/hr to operate.

The 1200 g weather balloon from High Altitude Science costs $129 and "Although it is more expensive than the Chinese and Indian weather balloons, its quality is far superior."

Just please remember that helium is not a renewable resource, hydrogen is a more responsible gas to use.

https://www.highaltitudescienc...oducts/near-space-balloon-1200-g

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

The US Airforce may have shot down an Amateur Radio Pico Balloon over Canada

There is speculation that at least one of the objects shot down over Canada, Yukon by a US Air Force jet may have been amateur radio pico balloon K9YO-15 which was launched from Illinois on October 10 2022. It was on it's seventh circumnavigation of the globe after being aloft for 123 days.

The launch blog post indicates that the K9YO-15 balloon was flying a silver mylar 32" sphere SAG balloon which appears to be this one from balloons.online. Unlike latex or rubber weather balloons which inflate and stretch as they rise into lower atmospheric pressures, these mylar balloons can't stretch, so their fully inflated ground size will be the same as their size at high altitudes, meaning the pico balloon won't get much bigger than 32". The payload was a GPS module, Arduino, SI5351 used as a WSPR and APRS transmitter and a solar panel, all together weighing 16.4 grams. A pentagon memo notes that the object shot down over Canada was a "small metallic balloon with a tethered payload" which fits the description of the pico balloon exactly.

Via https://defcon.social/@jianmin/109874482424345251

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Aviation Space & Astronomy Maps and Mapping Photovoltaics ]

RT Roxi Horror 💀🌸 @roxiqt@mastodon.social

That feeling when he says you look angelic but you don’t know if he means you look really pretty or if you have an abnormally high number of eyeballs.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

How you know fundraising events aren't super well targeted: "Two prestigious awards will be presented..." one to "San Francisco Mayor London Breed"

<delete>

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

RT Red Herring Bear @liam@ioc.exchange

Oh, you think British spelling looks strange? That sounds like a “u” problem.

[ related topics: Business New Economy ]

The one thing that's become clear from the New York Times taking reprehensible positions on things like trans rights is that based on those editorial decisions and biases we can say that them publishing The 1619 Project probably means it's actually minimizing the treatment of Black Americans, and the truth is far worse.

(To be clear, mad props to Nikole Hannah-Jones and her collaborators)

[ related topics: Invention and Design Civil Liberties New York ]

RT Laura Howes @L_howes@mastodon.social

Here's a first... I just got an email because ChatGPT suggested an article I wrote to somebody. Could I send them a copy? Except, I never wrote the article, it doesn't exist. PLEASE realize right now that this tool isn't pulling out cool references for you. It's making plausible titles and matching them to authors names.

Program state is state the user's mental model has to track. Expanding program state to try to guess the user's wants invariably just increases to user cognitive load and makes the software annoying.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Weighing in on the current state of the New York Times: The Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food Journalism and Media New York ]

Extraordinarily Confused Congressional Rep. [Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL)] Thinks Social Media Companies Are Secretly Communicating With Gov’t Censors… Via Jira

Oh, honey, nobody manages to communicate anything with Jira, let alone the "Deep State".

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

"In an article published in the journal Leonardo, the researchers draw upon a fresh look at one of da Vinci's notebooks to show that the famed polymath had devised experiments to demonstrate that gravity is a form of acceleration—and that he further modeled the gravitational constant to around 97 percent accuracy."

A century before Galileo.

Via Kottke

[ related topics: Current Events ]

It's easy to dunk on Jira, but... fucking "smart" quotes, in a tool for programmers?

[ related topics: Quotes ]

This may be the goofiest ass face this cat has ever made at me.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Though this look of surprise one the cat seems worthy of an upload

[ related topics: Photography ]

And this one looks like the cat has had just about enough of the stick a phone in his face while he's begging for treats on the bridge thing

[ related topics: Photography ]

My "you're being followed by an Air Tag / Tile" tracker has alerted twice recently, and, having found no trackers on any of my stuff, I think that somebody who I walk by on Mountain View Ave also spends time at Work Petaluma, and the same tag showing up in those two places set off the warning...

Now to figure out who's it is and how to use this leaked information...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Every day I interact with a computing device, and have a "wow, that is certainly a user interface decision" experience.

[ related topics: User Interface ]

Sparalloid added to the Pindo wine, first batch of persimmon and Pindo racked from the primary into carboys, billing sugars for the second batch of persimmon and Pindo now...

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

My neighbor Mark gave me this garish Disney Kids guitar for parts, Scott have me a cigar box, I milled the purple stars off the headstock, dropped some inlay on it, reused the neck, and turned the whole thing into a 6 string CBG...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Photography ]

A closeup of the headstock inlay.

[ related topics: Photography ]

We generally subscribe to a streaming service for a specific thing. Right now it's Hulu for The 1619 Project. But while we have the subscription, sometimes we'll want a comedy or something, so I'll Google to see what's on that service.

Right now I kinda get the feeling that the first few pages of "best [genre] on Hulu" results are Large Language Model auto-generated.

RT born miserable @bornmiserable@mastodon.world

[hospital]

SURGEON: [lowers mask] I'm sorry, we were unable to separate the art from the artist

ME: is he

S: yes, he's still an asshole

[ related topics: Health Art & Culture ]

CrimethInc. — Escaping Washington for Freedom — Let’s not Celebrate George Washington, but the Slaves Who Escaped Him

[ related topics: Privacy Civil Liberties Government ]

McSweeney's taking on the New York Times: In Order To Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We Are Hiring More Dipshits

Why do we hire dipshits? It’s simple. After the 2016 election, we got yelled at a lot by right-wingers. How could you report such negative stories about Trump by printing the words he says? Why don’t 100% of your stories talk about Hillary Clinton’s emails, rather than just the ones on the front page? They had a point. So, despite the fact that throughout the last year the right has decided they hate everything from Keurig to the NFL, we have decided to do the journalistically correct thing and capitulate entirely.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Sports New York ]

The Onion: Evangelical Leaders Announce J.K. Rowling Finally Bigoted Enough That It’s Okay For Kids To Read About Witchcraft

[ related topics: Children and growing up Food ]

Just putting it out there: If my heirs think they can profit by editing any works I leave behind to be less racist, more power to them.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Pondering a Rolling Stones cover band called No Moss.

The lead singer will look like Roberto Duran.

Currently trying to migrate a bunch of code from Google Cloud Functions v1 to v2, and... I'm not sure that the documentation for this wasn't written by ChatGTP or similar.

Like: I have a really simple task in front of me. Everyone who deployed code for v1 has the exact same task to do.

Every single f***ing page is prose describing why I should do this task, not what I actually need to do.

Unsurprising: A Christian Ministry Promised An Obamacare Alternative. The FBI Says Its Leaders Pocketed $4 Million And Left Members With Thousands In Unpaid Medical Bills

[ related topics: Religion Law Enforcement ]

ObJurassicParkYourScientists: Doom on a LEGO© brick (YouTube video), using a Raspberry Pi RP2040 and a nifty sub-refresh on the monochrome display to approximate grey scale.

Via

[ related topics: Movies Lego Mindstorms Video ]

Signs I'm getting old: I'm sitting here in front of the heater rather than going down to hike on the snow that's undoubtedly on Mount Tamalpais. Or, heck, even Burdell.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Really feeling the failure of large language models this morning. Searching for information on how NSGestureRecognizer data propagates, getting just UIGestureRecognizer results, through the NSView hierarchy, where I'm getting data on subviews in every other single widget set, but not AppKit.

RT BeeCycling @beecycling@romancelandia.club

Do not seize the day. This will startle the day and may cause it to become aggressive and give you a nasty bite.

Instead approach the day calmly without making eye contact, pet it gently, and slowly enfold it in a careful embrace

If the day shows any signs of resistance to being engaged with, it is likely to turn on you. Back off and return to bed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Television Furniture ]

"In the Facebook justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the trolls, who report my memes, and the reviewers, who deny my appeals. These are their stories."

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

As long as we under-price energy externalities, we're gonna have this problem: MIT study finds huge carbon cost to self-driving cars

The widespread adoption of self-driving cars will create a major bump in carbon emissions without changes to their design, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found.<span id="more-1886632"></span>

The study found that with a mass global takeup of autonomous vehicles, the powerful onboard computers needed to run them could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centres in operation today.

Via

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

Open Cage Data — Don't believe ChatGPT - we do NOT offer a "phone lookup" service.

The speculation is that ChatGPT is picking up on bullshit YouTube linkbait tutorials, so this was apparently a problem before the large language models started amplifying it, but it's only gonna get worse.

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Let Me Just Interrupt You": Estimating Gender Effects in Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Abstract Oral argument is the most public and visible part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision-making process. Yet, what if some advocates are treated differently when they argue their case before the Court, solely because of aspects of their identity unrelated to the case? In this work, we use a causal inference framework to quantify the effect of an advocate’s gender on interruptions of advocates. Leveraging nearly four decades of U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcript data, we identify a clear and consistent gender effect, with female advocates interrupted more frequently than male advocates. We demonstrate that, for most justices, the gender effect dwarfs other influences on justice interruption behavior including ideological alignment between justices and advocates. Through a series of corroborative analyses, we further demonstrate the consistency and strength of the gendered interruption behavior of the justices.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement ]

Ways in which Stardew Valley is realistic: You cannot get people to change; rampaging with weapons through apparently sophisticated societies, pillaging their technologies, is a way to wealth; and if you give me the keys to houses I will enter in the middle of the night and try to give people gifts, in bed, while they're sleeping.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Guns Real Estate Furniture ]

I've probably already said this, but now that I'm reading everything with a "did a Large Language Model write this?" sense of discernment, it's really bringing into focus how low a bar "human intelligence" is.

There's a lot of really dumb shit out there in the world, presumably written by humans, and somehow we ascribe a basic level of consciousness to people based on this output that probably isn't warranted.

[ related topics: Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Snow on the hills over Petaluma

[ related topics: Photography ]

Look around; happiness is trying to catch you.

Run.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Driving to my voice lesson, no real good place to stop and get a picture of the snow covered mountains to the north, maybe Mount St Helena? But it's amazing to have the snow part all day, and to have it this widespread.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Can we at least start to acknowledge that requiring in person doctor's visits for prescriptions is a way of further privileging medication by class, and is likely to make the risk of bad pharmaceutical supply chains worse, not bettet.

[ related topics: Health ]

Stop

[ related topics: Photography ]

Called my first Saturday square dance tonight, a "newer dancer" event for the Martinez Swingers. It was a lot, felt like 8 or 9 squares. I am wiped.

Edit: Notes I just put on Facebook:

Back in, I think, 2019, the Martinez Swingers asked me to call a square dance for them in February of 2021. That got postponed to 2023. I called it last night. First real calling in 3 years, definitely the first calling to more than one square in my back yard. Thank you *so much* for the friendly faces who turned out to support me! I'm still buzzing on the emotional rollercoaster of performance.

It was kinda a tough situation: It was advertised as a "Newer Dancer" dance, and the final flyer suggested there'd be some newer dancer, SSD, and a few full Plus star tips.

The Swingers didn't have a class going. It was suggested that a few of the dancers who are 2 or so classes from completing SSD from Circle n' Squares in Santa Rosa would be there, so I prepped some material that might work from them.

I know when I was handed my check for the evening I was told how many people were there, which I promptly forgot, but it was enough that I never had the moment to actually count the squares. I know there were generally 3 in the front, and sometimes it felt like it was 3 deep, but it was probably actually 2 and a half or so. It was few enough people that they paid the mandated minimum, on the other hand it was quite a few more than many larger name callers have drawn locally.

It turns out we had a floor full of people who danced solid Plus or Advanced, with about one square full of kids (I think they were teens, I'm of the age where anyone under 40 is a kid) who were doing the refresher thing. So I probably didn't give the majority of the floor the challenge they were hoping for.

My voice felt fairly good. The fact that I hadn't worked with my music in 3 years didn't. My nice laptop died at the beginning of Covid and I've never bothered to replace it, so I was using a laptop that's likely over a decade old, and it felt kinda laggy when I was filtering music. Gotta resolve that before I call next time.

Also gotta make sure the hearing impaired transmitter is actually working. Sorry to those folks.

Anyway, got there at 6:30, setup went fairly easy so I was out on the floor talking to people, trying to get a feel for what I could and couldn't call. First tip started at 7:32, by 10:56 I was *completely* toast. Turns out that three and a half hours of peopling is *hard*.

Completely different experience from calling to a few club squares.

Was great to get back behind the mic again, but dang that's hard work.

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture ]

Wish NameCheap would distinguish between the "your domain's gonna/did renew" level of "Important Auto-Renewal Information" and the "OMG, your payment failed" level.

I don't actually care about the former.

Reading this evening included bits of Knuth's "Literate Programming", and Johnson's " Everything Bad Is Good For You". Both feel very dated, and I can't help but wonder if much of the appeal of social media, the reason we turn back to our phones multiple times an hour, is how quickly this social sphere is evolving in form.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Software Engineering Journalism and Media ]

I've been kinda like "yeah, yeah, American Graffiti was filmed in Petaluma", but after doing a lot of looking at the history of local buildings, the iconic shot down the Boulevard (as headlines this article) just totally leaps out at me. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11...-cruising-with-american-graffiti

[ related topics: Architecture ]

RT Rich Felker @dalias@hachyderm.io

@stereo @futurebird They could easily just exclude all the content farm drivel from indexing. They don't and that's a very intentional choice. According to Googlers, it's because their lawyers VIEW THAT DRIVEL AS COMPETITION IN THE SAME LINE OF BUSINESS and freak out about antitrust.

RT Rich Felker @dalias@hachyderm.io

@stereo @futurebird Repeating this for folks in the back:

Google's own lawyers believe their line of business is machine assisted/generated content farm drivel.

The more I'm thinking about search, the more I'm wanting something that runs on my own server, indexes domains that I give it or a couple of leaps from some OPML files, maybe with some rules about how deep to go from domains with ads on them.

It's a little more than a weekend's worth of work, especially since it needs to have some capability for plurals and other basic word forms, but I have a home machine with 32G of RAM and a few TB of storage hanging off of it mostly just managing backups.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Help, I'm stuck in a stack trace of `WTF::ParkingLot::`s and `_os_unfair_lock_lock_slow()`s.

(If you know, you know.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I haven't mucked around with rendering in quite a while, but I thought this list was a good read if only as examples to help take other problems in programming and reduce them to what actually matters: How to render it. Ten ideas to solve Computer Graphics problems.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Graphics ]

Aha! Turned off Android messages SmartReply because the risk of inadvertantly responding with inappropriate shit was way higher than the marginal value of maybe lucking into a useful response.

Erythritol zero-calorie sweetener linked to much higher risk of heart attack and stroke

“The degree of risk was not modest,” said lead study author Dr. Stanley Hazen, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.

People with existing risk factors for heart disease, such as diabetes, were twice as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke if they had the highest levels of erythritol in their blood, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Nature and environment ]

"Dan, you have earned a reward! Get your three-month Google One Premium trial now!"

Second prize is *six* months of Google One Premium!

Headline: People who think they're attractive are less likely to wear masks, a study shows

Paper: Post COVID-19, still wear a face mask? Self-perceived facial attractiveness reduces mask-wearing intention

Self-perceived attractiveness was negatively correlated with mask attractiveness belief (r = −0.26, p < 0.001) and mask-wearing intention (r = −0.17, p = 0.009), both of which were positively correlated with each other (r = 0.49, p < 0.001)

But if you go click on the "supplemental data" link:

Third, on the other hand, ethnicity showed inconsistent patterns. Ethnicity was not significantly associated with self- perceived attractiveness in Study 1 (r = .07, p = .26) and Study 2 (r = .09, p = .08), while they were significantly correlated in Study 3 (r = .10, p = .046), indicating that the scores of self-perceived attractiveness were higher among ethnic minorities than among Whites. Regarding mask attractiveness belief, ethnicity showed non-significant correlations (Study 1: r = .07, p = .26; Study 2: r = -.01, p = .82; Study 3: r = .07, p = .16). Finally, ethnicity was associated with mask-wearing intention in Study 1 (r = .16, p = .01) and Study 2 (r = .13, p = .02), such that ethnic minorities tended to have a stronger mask-wearing intention than Whites.

So, yeah, white people who think they're more attractive are less likely to wear masks.

Via an exchange between mekka okereke and Lucas Gonze.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Star Wars Sociology Television Race ]

An Overlooked Detail in the Scott Adams and Dilbert Story. I mean, not really "overlooked", anyone who's been paying attention knows that the phrase "it's OK to be white" made its way into the popular culture from racist propaganda, but this lays out the path and methods of the trolls.

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture Race ]