Flutterby™! From 2023-10-01 to 2023-10-31

RT Mike Godwin (he/him) @sfmnemonic

Drawing Bayesian inferences after extensive sampling, I've determined that it's 99-percent certain that anyone who uses "woke" as pejorative will turn out to be a fuckhead. Please don't blame me for pointing this out--it's just science.

Via

`git stash poop`

Baltimore Archdiocese files for bankruptcy before law on abuse lawsuits takes effect

The step will allow the oldest diocese in the United States "to equitably compensate victim-survivors of child sexual abuse" while the local Catholic church continues its mission and ministries, Archbishop William E. Lori said in a statement posted on the archdiocese website.

Or "if we paid out to survivors of our abuse, we couldn't continue the institutions which enabled and covered up that abuse".

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Signs from the slow streets sign making party

[ related topics: Photography ]

More signs (or a different view)

[ related topics: Photography ]

And even more.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Blue Zones Project Petaluma Launches to Transform Community’s Well-Being, and the ways in which the activities of the company behind the Blue Zones lifestyle brand intersect some of my own concerns and advocacy related activities are something I'm concerned about.

This weekend Charlene and I watched two of the episodes on Netflix, and came away feeling like we'd just watched something that'd make the producers of "Ancient Aliens" blush. I similarly thumbed through the book, and.... yeah.

So, anyway, as a "it's probably not rice (or yams) and beans" chaser, I offer: People in Hong Kong Have the Longest Life Expectancy in the World: Some Possible Explanations, and leads the world in meat consumption.

[ related topics: Books Movies Current Events Community Douglas Adams Hong Kong ]

Some day, Google will make the quick results headlines relevant to the context of both the question and the answer.

Today is not that day. Though, I admit, I did click to open this one because I was kinda surprised at the implication of "When did Andy Grammer come out?"

(For those unable to read the image, it's an excerpt of the Wikipedia page about the album of the same name.)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Over on the Fediverse, I made reference to an old C compiler that reported success with "none of the errors were found".

I'm sure I wasn't making this up, but I went searching for it, and... damned if I can find it, on any search engine. Unquoted, it's finding all sorts of StackOverflow entries. Quoted it's finding one completely unrelated thing.

But it's kinda like this part of programming history only exists any more in the heads of us olds.

Completely unrelated: How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.

Addendum: RT ResearchBuzz @researchbuzz

Y'all remember me mentioning a couple of weeks ago that I had backed out participating in an interview because the publication asked me to soften my comments about Google?

Just thinking about that now for no particular reason...

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Software Engineering Machinery ]

RT Janel Comeau @VeryBadLlama@mas.to

scrapping the term '15 minute cities' and exclusively referring to them as 'cities where you can just walk to the post office and then pick up your prescription and maybe stop and get a little treat on your way home" because some of you caught brain worms on Facebook

The fact that I'm getting all sorts of JavaScript and Windows bullshit when I'm searching for details of NSDraggingInfo shows that matrices of semantic meaning are not one-size fits all.

In other news, if anyone can help me figure out what the offset is from the mouse cursor to the displayed drag image, in MacOS, in a `-draggingUpdated:` method, I will be forever grateful.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft Current Events Television Macintosh ]

Slow streets signs are up.

[ related topics: Photography ]

More slow streets signs

[ related topics: Photography ]

Some I can't read

[ related topics: Photography ]

Some are more obviously kid painted than others.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Careful, please

[ related topics: Photography ]

Another I can't read

[ related topics: Photography ]

Ready set slow

[ related topics: Photography ]

Burmashave!

[ related topics: Photography ]

For Fox sake

[ related topics: Photography ]

Slow is beautiful

Chicken crossing

[ related topics: Photography Food Birds ]

Sloth still up from the fall

[ related topics: Photography ]

Kitty!

[ related topics: Photography ]

Breathe

[ related topics: Photography ]

Donuts are to eat, not for the street

[ related topics: Photography Food ]

Slow your roll

[ related topics: Photography ]

Go slow, or we'll put the potholes back

[ related topics: Photography ]

Kitties are a common theme

[ related topics: Photography ]

20 is plenty

[ related topics: Photography ]

Dynamic loading and glibc were mistakes... Qualys Security Advisory — Looney Tunables: Local Privilege Escalation in the glibc's ld.so (CVE-2023-4911)

The hidden costs of using an electric bike

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Reading through the City of Petaluma's Blueprint for Carbon Neutrality, and if one thing will get me to reduce my dairy consumption, it's the focus on locally produced food. Because holy crap even the froufrou organic dairy industry's impacts on the local ecology and requests for exemptions from water quality rules...

https://www.planpetaluma.org/blueprint-for-carbon-neutrality

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food ]

North Bay Bohemian: Water Board pursues record-setting $8.6 million fine against BoDean quarry

This is notable to me because... there's a lot of pressure against a Dutra asphalt plant here in Petaluma. Dutra has a long history of lying about stuff, so it's not like I'm for the asphalt plant, but a lot of the arguments against seem kinda trumped up. Especially given that it's on the other side of the 101 freeway from Petaluma, so noise and emissions from it are overshadowed.

I looked at where else there are asphalt plants in my area, and the BoDean plant is in the middle of a residential area. I pointed this out to one of the opponents of the Dutra plant, and they mentioned that it's moving in the next 5 years. To a spot upwind of a trailer park.

Soooo as long as there's still a demand for asphalt, this feels kinda NIMBY. I'm not hearing a solution to that from the anti-Dutra crowd; they don't seem to be hollering about the 101 and 37 widenings, or for more density.

Which brings me back to: great on environmental protections. Great on stricter environmental standards. Apply those suckers across the board.

[ related topics: California Culture Gardening ]

Let the Right Hon In @danhon@dan.mastohon.com

why not simply send the people in midwestern diners to coastal cities for three months and see what happens and how they react rather than constantly flying coastal journalists to diners

[ related topics: Aviation Journalism and Media ]

RT doctor mommy kip van den bos @tobi@goblin.technology

I'm pretty sure wild horses could actually drag me away, without even breaking a sweat; have you seen how muscular those big bastards are? :blob_sweating_:

[ related topics: Health ]

So dieselpunk is writing about 80-100 years ago, we're due for some atompunk...

And what's post-cyber? We're clearly in the dystopia that cyberpunk predicted, so looking forward....

[ related topics: Writing ]

LinkedIn email subject says "Enjoy your free trial". Do I get a free booking and free arraignment beforehand?

Walkable neighborhoods associated with lower risk of some cancers, study finds

The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on Wednesday, found that women who lived in more walkable neighborhoods – measured by population density and access to key destinations – were up to 26% less likely to develop obesity-related cancers.

[ related topics: Health ]

Target says it's closing 9 stores due to theft. The crime data tells a different story.

Popular Information analyzed publicly available crime data for the stores Target is closing in New York and San Francisco. This data reveals that stores that are being closed have lower levels of theft than nearby stores that have remained open. An analysis of the stores Target is shuttering in the Seattle area follows a similar pattern. This data suggests that factors other than crime are driving Target's decisions.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area California Culture New York Seattle ]

Amsterdam preparing to lower speed limit to 30 kilometers per hour (18 mph)

RT floppyplopper@todon.nl Angela Glansbury 🚽 @floppyplopper@todon.nl

metric is still imperial

just a different empire

So there's a lot of missing data in trying to understand the actual impacts of Tesla's "autopilot" on automobile collisions. It seems like a lot of the analyses are finding that right now it's less safe than a human driver (2019: +59%, 2023: +11%).

This is an interesting deconstruction of a crash, that's got me thinking a lot more about the notion of "moral crumple zones", especially when a technology is marketed as "autopilot" and, despite having good map data, allows drivers to set parameters outside of legal limits. Washington Post: The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash

Gift article link.

[ related topics: Ethics Bay Area Law Automobiles Maps and Mapping Archival ]

RT acdha@code4lib.social Chris Adams @acdha@code4lib.social

This does make me wonder how much climate impact Electron (React, etc.) have. I bet it’s a bigger number than the AI usage we’ve been hearing about, but probably still measured in hundredths of a percent of, say, fast food burger consumption:

Microsoft: Announcing general availability of the new Microsoft Teams app for Windows and Mac

[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft Invention and Design Food moron Macintosh Artificial Intelligence Global Warming ]

Dan North: McKinsey Developer Productivity Review

McKinsey recently published an article claiming they can measure developer productivity. This has provoked something of a backlash from some prominent software people, but I have not seen anyone engage with the content of the article itself, so I thought this would be useful.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

A Few Tips on Seeking a Lawyer, Psychiatrist or Therapist. Also some good questions to ask yourself to clarify situations.

[ related topics: Law ]

Ugh. Those recent XCode 15 breaking changes make "git bisect" hard to use. Fucking Apple, man...

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

And now is the time on Sprocke... MacOS development... when we try to figure out WTF Sonoma is breaking view hierarchy shit.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

This observation on what it means to be human, and how the future of distinguishing human from "AI" will likely be measured by the ability to transgress, has been making the rounds recently: @sadclowncentral on Tumblr:

for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the “question only a human can answer” which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

And I think it's worth adding @mhoye@mastodon.social's observation that:

I wish I could convey to you the psychological swoop of remembering that there is a whole section of the first Terminator movie where Kyle Reese is teaching Sarah Connor how to make pipe bombs and how differently that will land once you've read this.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Movies Nature and environment Space & Astronomy Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

Whoah. When you think you're immune to online fraud, check this out: The Great Zelle Pool Scam — All I wanted was a status symbol. What I got was a $31,000 lesson in the downside of payment apps.

And do not trust email.

Via

[ related topics: moron ]

Psychedelics improve mental health, cognition in special ops veterans

“What sets this group apart from some other veterans and civilians is that often, they are exposed to repeated traumatic events as a routine part of their jobs. This build-up of exposure to these difficulties seems to produce a cluster of challenges that include traumatic brain injury, which we know in and of itself predisposes people to mental health problems,” said lead author Alan Davis, associate professor and director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) in Ohio State’s College of Social Work. 

“So the fact that we saw that there were improvements in cognitive functioning linked to brain injury were probably the most striking results, because that’s something we didn’t predict and it’s very new and novel in terms of how psychedelics might help in so many different domains.” 

Open-label study of consecutive ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT assisted-therapy for trauma-exposed male Special Operations Forces Veterans: prospective data from a clinical program in Mexico

https://doi.org/10.1080/00952990.2023.2220874

[ related topics: Health Current Events ]

That's one way to fund automobile infrastructure: Cost of car ownership soars in Singapore

The cost of a certificate to own a large family car in Singapore has jumped to a fresh record high of S$146,002 ($106,619; £87,684).

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events Monty Python Automobiles ]

Wow. All the changed MacOS Sonoma stuff. I'm not gonna say it's broken, because I suspect some of these things are the edges of defined behavior, but I'm doing a lot of debugging weird shit today.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

Bleeping Computer: Hundreds of malicious Python packages found stealing sensitive data

Checkmarx reports that the malware used in this campaign goes a step further from typical info-stealing operations, engaging in app data manipulation to perform a more decisive blow.

Malware package list at https://gist.github.com/master...65b55a117fe2ea33735f05024abc92c2

Via Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Monty Python Python ]

This toot reminding us that Unicode is now older than ASCII was when Unicode is introduced tells us that every time we see ISO 8859 misinterpretations, we're seeing the equivalent of getting EBCDIC in your ASCII...

https://everything.happens.horse/@vruba/111189888669593645

I'm being prayed upon

[ related topics: Photography ]

Yale Climate Connections: American society wasn’t always so car-centric. Our future doesn’t have to be, either.

Draws on Motornomativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard (PrePrint), DOI

[ related topics: Health Automobiles Global Warming ]

Hanan Cohen — The Lighthouse for the awareness of Gaza – October 2023

Vasectomies up in Oregon since Roe vs. Wade overturned

Listening to Switched On Pop #322, and thinking about the Crunk genre as a called dance. And wondering when we're gonna get some of these calls in Square Dancing. Thinking I'm gonna have to add "just stop" and "wiggle with it" to my call repertoire.

[ related topics: Pop Culture ]

Yet another report on remote work and greenhouse gas emissions, or, as T Chu 朱 @chu@climatejustice.social observed:

Exactly why billionaires hate remote work. Here's another way to spin the headline:

"Remote work to reduce fossil fuel revenue by more than half"

Returning to the office is ‘wildly more expensive’ today than in 2019—here’s how much people are spending

Full-time office workers are spending roughly $1,020 every month to report to the workplace, while hybrid workers spend an average of $408 per month on attendance.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Unsurprising: Tim Ballard, of ‘Sound of Freedom’ fame, accused of sexual misconduct (Gift article):

The lawsuit claims Ballard would ask each woman: “Is there anything you wouldn’t do to save a child?”

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Civil Liberties Government ]

Bellingcat: Hamas Attacks, Israel Bombs Gaza and Misinformation Surges Online:

Some of the examples above received thousands of views and continue to circulate online. Several of them have been shared by the accounts of NGOs and news organisations on social media, as well as by prominent individuals with verified accounts on the same platforms.

Importantly, these cases did not require sophisticated image manipulation techniques to convince users that the imagery was credible enough to be amplified. They were simply miscontextualised and misrepresented, knowingly or unknowingly, by those who initially posted them.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Bradley M. Kuhn: Eben Moglen & SFLC — abusive employer & LGBTQIA+ unfriendly

Joint Statement by Free Software Foundation Europe and Software Freedom Conservancy Regarding Eben Moglen and Software Freedom Law Center

Today, we share -with the community at large- our policy to not work with Moglen or SFLC. We have chosen to speak publicly on this matter because we feel we have an obligation to warn volunteers and activists in software freedom that this pattern of reported behavior exists. Of course, everyone should read the publicly available source materials and make their own decisions regarding these matters. While we loathe to publicly speak of these unfortunate events, the decades of ongoing reports of abusive behavior & and the risk that behavior creates for unknowing members of the Free Software community ultimately requires that we no longer remain quiet on this issue.

[ related topics: Free Software Privacy Weblogs Software Engineering Current Events Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties Community Government ]

Whoah: The little-told story about the BART seat-slashing gang that was part of an upholstery racket. The company that had the BART seat re-upholstering contract was paying people to slash seats, with particular slash patterns so that they'd know who to pay...

Via

[ related topics: Trains Public Transportation ]

Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications: Evaluation of science advice during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden

During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway. ... We recommend Sweden begins a self-critical process about its political culture and the lack of accountability of decision-makers to avoid future failures, as occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Via

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron Sociology California Culture ]

Times of Israel OpEd: For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces

The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from

RT Missing The Point @MissingThePt@mastodon.social

Now that I’ve finally located Israel on a world map I’m ready to provide some insightful commentary on the current conflict.

1/567

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

We had a fantastic Know Before You Grow tonight, both because the hybrid in-person/Zoom format at the LivXplore real estate offices worked really nicely (Thank you Sean and Isaiah!), and because Dan Zack did a fantastic presentation and discussion following up on The Fresno Miracle short film that we saw at the recent film festival. I'm gonna have to listen to this one again.

https://youtu.be/ECBO67Ak4Hw

[ related topics: California Culture Community Real Estate Woodworking ]

If you're in the US and follow ANSI, happy World Standards Day!

https://www.ansi.org/events/standards-events/world-standards-day

If you're elsewhere and subscribe to the doctrines of the ITU, ISO, or IEC, you'll have to wait until Saturday to celebrate.

https://www.worldstandardsday.org/home.html

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Wow, software is hard: MacOS Ventura changed media autoplay behavior in WkWebViews. And holy shit is that annoying.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Journalism and Media Macintosh ]

Thinking about how we deal with that a 11 year old clothes washer with a bad control board needs to be entirely replaced. The mechanism is likely intact. Even when abandoned by the manufacturer it's just a few relays, or maybe a motor controller.

Can we legislate composability and repairability?

https://dementedandsadbut.social/@genehack/111219003122029299

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Law Clothing ]

Coin flips don’t appear to have 50/50 odds after all

Conventional wisdom about coin flips may have been turned on its head. A global team of researchers investigating the statistical and physical nuances of coin tosses worldwide concluded (via Phys.org) that a coin is 50.8% likely to land on the same side it started on, altering one of society’s most traditional assumptions about random decision-making that dates back at least to the Roman Empire.

This is confirmation of earlier (2007) work by Persi Diaconis that suggested about 51%....

[ related topics: History Current Events Work, productivity and environment Currency Real Estate ]

Seems like Mac's support of third party devices has gotten worse since Sonoma. I know better than to try an off-brand Bluetooth mouse, but I haven't had this much of an issue with non-Apple keyboards since the days of /etc/termcap by hand.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Wireless Macintosh ]

Motherf%^&*(). Did Numbers just lose my spreadsheet? After a reboot I have an appropriately named file here, but it appears to be just the blank template...

Damn it, knew I should have just started with LibreOffice.

Alvin Finkle in The Tyee: Canada Let in Thousands of Former Nazis: Files I’ve Seen Tell Why

Canada’s Immigration Department after the war determinedly and successfully prevented communists and other leftists from immigrating to Canada or even visiting the country. It also determinedly and successfully prevented non-whites from becoming immigrants to Canada between 1946 and 1962. For several years after the end of the war they also successfully prevented Jews, desperate to leave deportation camps in Europe and settle in permanent homes, from coming to Canada.

So why were they so lax in terms of people who had clear connections with the Nazi regime, particularly with those whose claims that they were forced to serve the Nazi cause were transparently false?

[ related topics: Religion History ]

Setting up our new Telraam traffic monitor device, and boy those wacky Europeans, defaulting to 1.5m sidewalks, 4m wide roadways, and 20kph speed limits...

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

If the first solar entrepreneur hadn’t been kidnapped, would fossil fuels have dominated the 20th century the way they did?

[George] Cove’s company, Sun Electric Generator Corporation, based in New York, was capitalised at US$5 million (around US$160 million in today’s money). By 1909, the idea had gained widespread media attention. Modern Electric magazine highlighted how “given two days’ sun… [the device] will store sufficient electrical energy to light an ordinary house for a week”.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Journalism and Media Currency New York Economics Real Estate Java Photovoltaics ]

Ah, the "screen capture and print the resulting raster image" stage of trying to get PDF printing working.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Graphics ]

As I play "is that auto-carrot, or is that person using words with similar spellings that have completely dissimilar meanings to me?", I'm wondering if this notion of assuming that someone's saying a particular thing because it's probably auto-corrupt is going to extend into more complex structures as LLMs take over writing tasks.

Like we'll just end up projecting meanings on to things because they don't make any sense in our own language framework, but the writer must have meant...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing ]

Post on the "The nation-stateification of the fediverse" has me remembering the (now lost) manifesto from Elf Sternberg to "Balkan use Usenet", and thinking about the role of social solutions, including exclusionary grpups, vs technical ones.

https://octodon.social/@cwebber/111233857853330378

[ related topics: tolkien Net Culture ]

Yeah, just another waste of bits on a pixelated crescent, but there was a break in the clouds so I grabbed my cell phone and a cheap solar filter.

[ related topics: Wireless Photography Photovoltaics ]

Busy day, which included a funeral, Petaluma Pride, and square dancing to Mike Seastrom (and fumbling through rounds with Erin Byars). Mad props to the Pride safety team, it was humbling watching you work, and the organizers and faces, y'all were amazing, and yow, nothing like dancing to a caller with 60 years of experience to show me how much I have to learn.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

A bit of mahogany drawer faces and a shelf, with ColorTone grain filler, sanded to 400, now building up layers fast with Watco wipe on, I'll do a few of those, then finish with the Minwax wipe on.

Which I'm posting just to show that I finally got some shop time. Holy crap it's been a while, and there was so much more I was going to do today.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Nothing like trying to use Google Translate to help understand what's going on in the Israel-Hamas conflict to see the limits of machine translation...

Dear (MacOS) Ventura: Why am I having to find the intersection of the view bounds and the dirty rect *myself* in `-drawRect:`?

And I think clipping used to be a thing, what's up with that?

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

RT Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Disappointed to realize that "Get started with machine learning fast" was NOT meant to be a machine learning cleanse.

[ related topics: Education ]

It is pretty amazing how long Firefox has let feature parity with PDF viewing in other browsers slide.

Outside: Should I Stop Flying? It’s a Difficult Decision to Make.

This shutdown, as well as my own reluctance, made me even more curious. What did we really think we were losing? On a subconscious level, do those of us who fly believe we have the right to pollute more than others, simply by virtue of being accustomed to it? And able to afford it?

I've been pondering this a lot. The timeout from COVID has me thinking about the overall costs of, say, visiting family. Or the annual trek to the IAGSDC convention.

And in a world where so much of our activities is subsidized by external costs, and where my own individual choices just have the effect of reducing the demand, and therefore the costs, of other people doing it, which probably won't change things much, how do I prioritize?

Definitely don't have a good answer....

[ related topics: Aviation Sociology Writing ]

First data from the Telraam traffic counter is in. To put that 43+ MPH speed in context, the device is maybe 150' from the stop sign.

That 85% of the traffic is at the speed limit that close to the intersection is pretty telling, and we really need some counting up the street...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Huh. Probable Facebook scammer friend request using a picture of Michael Hayden for their profile. That's a very interesting target demographic.

[ related topics: Marketing ]

This is a thing of so much beauty: I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again

With God as my witness, the next son of a bitch to mention Agile is going to get hurled into the ground so hard that I'm going to publish a seismology paper in Nature with the data.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Weblogs Nature and environment ]

Listening to Switched On Pop talking about Metro Boomin, and how his mom used to drive him to recording sessions, and wondering what it would be like to have a professional career defined by a name chosen as a young teen.

Like, the alias I used on BBSes in the '80s? Maybe...

[ related topics: Pop Culture ]

Neat: UM-Led Project Creates Mapping Tool Using Satellites, 1950s Photo Archive

When the Cold War grew chillier around 1950, the U.S. military worried about a communist land invasion of the United States. So pilots were employed – many of them veterans of World War II – to photograph the entire country using aircraft.

The tool is Landscape Explorer. The images aren't really high enough resolution to show a whole lot of my neighborhood's evolution, but it's still hella cool.

Via Research Buzz.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation History Current Events Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Metals from spacecraft reentry in stratospheric aerosol particles

...Here, we show that metals that vaporized during spacecraft reentries can be clearly measured in stratospheric sulfuric acid particles. Over 20 elements from reentry were detected and were present in ratios consistent with alloys used in spacecraft. The mass of lithium, aluminum, copper, and lead from the reentry of spacecraft was found to exceed the cosmic dust influx of those metals. About 10% of stratospheric sulfuric acid particles larger than 120 nm in diameter contain aluminum and other elements from spacecraft reentry. Planned increases in the number of low earth orbit satellites within the next few decades could cause up to half of stratospheric sulfuric acid particles to contain metals from reentry. The influence of this level of metallic content on the properties of stratospheric aerosol is unknown.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2313374120

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Sigh. We made the mistake of opening the sunroof on the Bolt. Now the car's in the shop overnight, 'cause they couldn't figure it out today.

Also, apparently they're gonna give us new software that will monitor the battery for 6k miles or so, and then tell us if we actually need a new battery. At our current rate of driving that's gonna be well into next year.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Software Engineering Automobiles Fabrication ]

I order books from Copperfield's because I have this feeling that bookstores are holy places that should be supported. But, especially since Ray has left, my chances of finding a book there seem pretty low.

This weekend at Petaluma Pride, Word Horde Emporium of the Weird and Fantastic had a booth, and I bought a book, and this looks like the sort of place with curation that matters.

https://www.weirdandfantastic.com/

[ related topics: Books ]

Bloomberg, October 17, 2022: Forecast for US Recession Within Year Hits 100% in Blow to Biden [emphasis mine]

• Bloomberg Economics sees near certainty downturn will start
• Tightening conditions, inflation, hawkish Fed weigh on outlook

Via.

[ related topics: Microsoft Current Events Economics ]

I've long been of the "own your own data" mindset, as is obvious from this blog that's been going for two and a half decades, and I've long thought that a distributed P2P sort of system that didn't depend on the DNS system for identity, and didn't require explicit hosting, would be a good thing. Decades of link rot have me thinking about archives, the centralization of social media has me thinking about how much of my conversations are guided in directions that "drive engagement" and sell to advertisers.

The growing Fediverse and Mastodon phenomenon are re-surfacing a lot of the issues involved with distributed social media, and the cryptocurrency fad displayed a lot of the problems P2P stuff, but security and safety are filtering higher to the list.

Krebs on Security: The Fake Browser Update Scam Gets a Makeover, on how blockchains are being used to host malware:

“These contracts offer innovative ways to build applications and processes,” Tal wrote along with his Guardio colleague Oleg Zaytsev. “Due to the publicly accessible and unchangeable nature of the blockchain, code can be hosted ‘on-chain’ without the ability for a takedown.”

Beginning to think the Internet was a mistake.

[ related topics: Weblogs Nature and environment moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Net Culture Archival ]

The phone alert said 5.7 over somewhere between Vacaville and Stockton, so we all dutifully hustled outside, made small talk for a bit, then got bored and came back into the office.

USGS says 4.1, which... I dunno, I'm pretty jaded, but I don't think that'd wake me out of bed any more.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/ea...s/eventpage/nc73948665/executive

[ related topics: Earthquake Furniture ]

RT SnoopJ@hachyderm.io SpookJ 👻 @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io

uspol, snarky, sexual abuse

Friend of mine points out that if elected, Jordan would also become the second Speaker who is both a former wrestling coach and party to sexual abuse

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Sigh. We went with an API because screen scraping was too fragile. Now I'm chasing down a replacement for the API because it went away.

Getting data from the web is broken.

Fucking Apple. Videos are not documentation. Grrr.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Hey, there's another use for cryptocurrency: United States Attorneys Office Northern District of Georgia: Doctor pleads guilty in dark web murder-for-hire plot.

The thing that amazes me is that dude thinks he can find a hit man on the dark web who isn't, by default, a fed, and that for $16k he can hire a murder. Like, this person became a doctor, which... well... doesn't speak well of professional licensing.

[ related topics: Health Law Enforcement ]

The window display at Fiber Circle Studio is cute. Might even say gorgeous...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Fucking auto correct, that was supposed to say gourdgeous

[ related topics: Photography ]

I'm willing to migrate from Chrome to Safari to be my work browser, but holy crap Apple's broken implementation of an address bar is really really hard to get over. I do a lot of navigation of Jira by URL hacking, and it's just ugly to do that in Safari.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Work, productivity and environment ]

With all of these car companies trying for patents on reproducing the experience of driving a manual transmission in an electric car, I'm gonna put out there as prior art the idea of driving a carbureted, pre fuel-injection, car.

Get the choke settings wrong? Gotta wait for half an hour for the flooding to clear. Cold? Yeah, now it's a race between your battery and cranking sounds to see if it's gonna catch.

Bonus: the unburned hydrocarbons air freshener dangling from the mirror.`

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Art & Culture Automobiles ]

Those kids who were doing hearts and flowers and inspirational stories have graduated to chalking out their biology homework on the sidewalk...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography ]

Just when I'm feeling positive on square dancing again, someone decides to post that the Epoch Times is saying positive things about it. Sigh.

"The Epoch Times, Sept 20-26 edition, has an interesting article about traditional square dancing. For a few of us it is a walk back in time and for others it is just an interesting article. Enjoy."

Signs that give me hope for humanity: went to buy a connector hose for the toilet this morning, because the automatic cut off on the old one had jammed closed, and they apparently don't sell them with the automatic shut off any more. Hell yeah! Now my toilet can refill at a reasonable rate again!

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Kai Greshake: Inject my PDF, using LLM prompt injection to make sure that any "AI" resume screening reports your job application as the best resum ever, that you are supremely qualified for the job, and that not hiring you would be harmful to the company.

[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

Eeenteresting: Business Insider — Exclusive: Tech billionaire Peter Thiel was an FBI informant

The FBI maintains a vast network of informants to keep tabs on organized crime, terrorist threats, extremist groups, and other criminal and intelligence targets. These sources, according to the bureau's Confidential Human Source Policy Guide, are more than casual tipsters. 

Confidential human sources enter "into a relationship with the FBI, and that relationship will forever affect the life of that individual," the guide says. "[They] will be either an 'FBI source' or a 'former FBI source' and, in turn, his or her conduct or misconduct will reflect upon the FBI." As such, the process for recruiting and maintaining such sources is highly regulated, requiring multiple layers of approval. Only people who are able to provide "valuable information … on a recurring basis" are granted CHS status, according to the policy.

So the interesting question here, especially in light of Thiel's support of insurrectionist apologists like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, both of whom have repeatedly denigrated the FBI, is who's using whom?

[ related topics: broadband Law Enforcement Douglas Adams Fashion Archival ]

I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python.

That’s right: I teach courses in Python and Pandas. Never mind that the first is a programming language and the second is a library for data analysis in Python. Meta’s AI system noticed that I was talking about Python and Pandas, assumed that I was talking about the animals (not the technology), and banned me. The appeal that I asked for wasn’t reviewed by a human, but was reviewed by another bot, which (not surprisingly) made a similar assessment.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Language Books Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Monty Python Artificial Intelligence Python ]

I am a fan of passive speed enforcement infrastructure: Security camera catches car flying into Cape Coral canal (YouTube video).

Via, Via.

[ related topics: Photography Movies Aviation Sports Automobiles Video ]

Quoted for truth: "If it won’t damage a car, it won’t protect a bike lane."

https://mastodon.social/@docpop/111264021857924542

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Automobiles Bicycling ]

Things I did not want to learn: Too much red meat is linked to a 50% increase in Type 2 diabetes risk

Researchers tracked the eating habits of more than 200,000 people enrolled in long-term health studies for up to 36 years and found that those who regularly consumed a lot of red meat — more than a serving per day — had a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

"When we looked at the women and men who consumed the most red meat compared to the least, we found about a 50% increase in risk," says study author Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The results were published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Current Events Dogs Food - Bacon ]

Axios: America's highest gun death rates are in the South is a riff on Center for American Progress Action Fund: Cities in Blue States Experiencing Larger Declines in Gun Violence in 2023

Texas Observer: Study: More Infants Die in States that Restrict Abortion draws from American Journal of Preventive Medicine: Research Article: Abortion Restrictiveness and Infant Mortality: An Ecologic Study, 2014-2018.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Guns ]

Jeff Poskanzer: Golden Gate Sunsets — An ACME GeoRSS Map. For helping to figure out where you need to be to take a picture of the sunset on the Golden Gate Bridge at any particular time of year.

[ related topics: Bay Area Maps and Mapping ]

Today in better late than never: Lead pollution from small planes threatens human health, EPA finds:

The move puts the Biden administration in the middle of a brewing fight over how long airports – particularly smaller ones – can continue selling leaded gasoline, despite the health hazards from this powerful neurotoxin. More than 170,000 smaller planes, known as piston-engine aircraft, still use leaded gasoline, according to the EPA, and there is an ongoing dispute about how quickly this form of fuel can be phased out at thousands of airports nationwide.

[ related topics: Health Aviation Machinery ]

Nature: ChatGPT use shows that the grant-application system is broken

The fact that artificial intelligence can do much of the work makes a mockery of the process. It’s time to make it easier for scientists to ask for research funding.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Television Artificial Intelligence ]

Gathering for the Unicorn Blessing Brigade

[ related topics: Photography ]

"I hope this presentation reinforces prejudices" is the meaning of comment I expect to get on Facebook event postings, but it sure does make me think "buddy, the plan you are so proud of has been fucking up this town for two decades, and I was willing to give you the benefit, but you just burned that."

I mean, Midnight Burger is a slow burn so the latest episode probably isn't as hilarious stand-alone, but I had the headphones on because of office noise, and probably still giggled out loud.

I've been thinking a lot about infrastructure for passive traffic enforcement via vehicle damage. Like if you drive through the middle of a roundabout and it tears out your oil pan, well, we don't want to have to go around fixing cars, but unsafe behavior should have consequences. Traffic engineering "recovery zones" are part of the problem.

So I have to admit I'm intrigued by exploring this idea. RT😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Why are we trying to make autonomous cars when we could be making autonomous streets with much simpler logic? Car = speeding => bollard = up. No license plate => please wait here and an attendant will be with you shortly. It's like 1st graders could write this code, come on. #BanCars

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

First get self-enforcing streets figured out, then maybe robot taxis can be safe to test.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Robotics Bay Area Automobiles ]

Anyone out there have a suggestion for a basic amplifier, can be mono, preferably with two inputs. 150-250 watt range?

I'm looking for a better alternative to a Hilton MA-150 or MA-220. I currently have the 240 watt version of the Monoprice Commercial amp, and it's got some weird ducking issues, that I think may be related to the "microphone priority" (even when I'm not using that). I want something I can feed a mixer and a computer into and trust.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=14886

Well poop. I was doing such a good job of working down my lumber stash, and then I got a ton of reclaimed white oak that's gonna become door trim and frames, and now I'm trying to work around the parts that are for finishing up the kitchen...

[ related topics: Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Race Woodworking ]

Red chair, surrounded by pictures of pets and kids on the chair. I St & Grant Ave.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Furniture ]

6 deer, in daylight, in a fairly dense neighborhood...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Occasionally someone will float the idea of me doing a presentation on the externalities of automobiles for a KBYG forum, so I've been casually putting together slides.

Things I'm learning: Holy crap, the way transportation departments have been deliberately under-estimating the external costs. The range, and deliberate downplaying, in estimates of social costs of CO2.

It's like there's a concerted campaign to obfuscate this stuff or something...

[ related topics: Automobiles Boats Community Education Global Warming ]

Mac really has jumped the usability shark and gone completely into the "extort subscription out of users" mode. Charlene is describing some of her frustrations this morning, and... she's ready to go back to Linux.

I'm sure missing Linux.

I don't want to buy new laptops for all of the direct cost and ewaste and consumerism reasons, but as much as we bought these machines so we can run my work product on them, Mac is just too non-deterministic about UI features for everyday use.

[ related topics: Free Software User Interface Open Source Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

I thought all of those people who stood up immediately when the airplane arrived at the gate and waited as far at the front of the plane as they could were being impatient. Turns out they're trying to protect the aircraft... Wild images show JetBlue plane tipping backward at JFK Airport gate after ‘shift in weight and balance ‘

[ related topics: Aviation Woodworking ]

HTML 2 was a mistake. All subsequent HTML-adjacent technologies likewise.

My looking at automobile externalities, and how official numbers on external costs have long failed to acknowledge reality has me thinking about how the developer we all kinda scoffed at was still proposing building for what the State of California suggests is the 0.5% (yes, 1 in 200) worst-case projections for 2100 year sea level rise, while Petaluma is 1% numbers.

Anyway, have a Nature paper about West Antarctic ice shelf melting.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01818-x

[ related topics: Nature and environment Law California Culture Automobiles ]

Interested in folks with experiences in setting up and running a 501(c)(3) in California. Got a fiscal sponsor who takes almost nothing, but is slow to respond. Have another potential one that would take 10%, but does this in a way that scales. We don't want to grow huge, but may try to get enough funding to pay for some admin hours, not just pass through hall rentals and occasional dinners for our speakers...

[ related topics: California Culture Sports ]

Okay, Imma need you to not put your in-line email responses, to red text, in yellow on a white background.

HTML email was a mistake.

[ related topics: Race ]

Whoah: California suspends GM Cruise’s autonomous driverless vehicle permits.

"The agency also determined that the company “misrepresented” information related to safety of the autonomous technology."

Use with a safety driver, and presumably their ACC technology using a customer as a moral crumple zone, is still allowed.

#GiftArticle #GiftLink https://wapo.st/3Sgf5PJ

[ related topics: Ethics California Culture ]

Hmmm... Seeing Californians buying investment single-family residential properties in the Midwest, and wondering what this is doing to the demand curve, and if individual investors, on top of institutional ones, is going to create even more of a housing bubble.

And is this smart, or just that the bubble has now spread to less sophisticated investors.

Not just YIMBY, but also YITheirBY...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology Economics Real Estate ]

Product development is like writing science fiction. It's easy to get everyone to buy into the high concept, but as you flesh out your world, at some point you get enough detail that people start to take a long hard look at the economics and physics of your universe building.

With fiction, you can handwave this step away by asserting early and not inserting detail that's extraneous to the story.

Product development leaves no such luxury.

[ related topics: Writing Economics ]

Terence Eden's blog: EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR. Bank customer complained that their name wasn't being spelled with the appropriate diacritical/accent marks. GDPR says that "The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her."

Bank says "we can't, because EBCDIC technology stack". The Court of Appeal of Brussels says "tough".

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Minnesota Reformer: Minneapolis small business owners say they’re pressured to hire off-duty MPD cops for security

Jackson Mississippi: A mother reported her son missing in March. Police kept the truth from her for months.

It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Automobiles ]

A small warning about UDP based protocols. Anything that sends more data than it receives, and doesn't validate who it's sending to, can be used for amplification attacks...

KBYG this evening is Allison Quinlan talking about traditional architecture for small spaces. She had some slides with amazing density numbers, and that led to a recommendation of the book Visualizing Density.

https://www.lincolninst.edu/pu...ations/books/visualizing-density

[ related topics: Books Architecture ]

Also recommended by Allison Quinlan at tonight's KBYG session is James Urban on the topic of street trees.

And, yeah, this is another fantastic session. We get some damned good presenters for these events.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Just so that I have it in one place for easy copy-pasting:

The original The Fresno Miracle film (https://vimeo.com/371261518)

The follow-up KBYG forum with Dan Zack that applies this to Petaluma.

[ related topics: California Culture Community ]

Not all hero... wait, I don't know what he wears. Websites stole and monetized a free browser game, so the designer replaced it with Goatse

As reported by 404, Simmons found out Sqword was being monetized by sites that were simply embedding it with iFrame, and decided to do something about it. "The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page", he wrote. "I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Graphics Net Culture Birds ]

So is everyone's Nextdoor feed basically metaphorically flat earthers whining that they're not feeling welcome at the rocket design meetings, or is that just my community?

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Graphic Design Community ]

Decided to see if Bard was useful for today's Rootl. It... was not. But it's okay that it was trying to tell me that "infusion" was 7 letters, GPT4 was trying to tell me that "oblate" was, too.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Arch :arch: @arch@floofy.tech

IT'S NOT SINGLE SIGN ON IF I HAVE TO SIGN ON MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY

:(

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT Bethany Black @BethanyBlack@mastodon.social

On the one hand as an autistic person people tend to infantalise you, but on the other I was very brave at the dentist the other day and my wife said I could have any LEGO set or video game up to £30, so it’s not clear cut

[ related topics: Games Lego Mindstorms Video Marriage hubris ]

RT Nick @Ptfeperson@kinkyelephant.com

@Daojoan I propose the successor to TL:DR is V:CR. Video: Couldn't Read.

Poor eyesight? Screw you, hope the visuals are unnecessary.

Poor hearing? Screw you, AI generated bad transcript if you're lucky.

Poor ability to focus? (hi!) Screw you, you're doing this at the speed they talk.

Want to use the material? Screw you, can't copy and paste from video.

There might be workarounds, but they're utterly useless when almost nobody uses them on their videos.

Rant over. Sorry.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Tall Toad music store did not have a pitch pipe (maybe that explains some things about the local music scene...). So I thought "okay, maybe I just run a pitch pipe app on my phone".

Android App Store is just... like, this is a simple thing, I wanna pay a few bucks, get something that will work reliably (ie: not have to have a network connection, probably not have ads).

But everything is free with undefined in-app purchases, which is like "shit, for that I'll write my own web page". Sigh.

[ related topics: Music broadband Work, productivity and environment ]

Nothing like trying to build a simple interactive box in a .xib on XCode to make you think "wow, I miss the expressiveness and simplicity of CSS".

In honor of the trend of bootstrap and other CSS frameworks going to CSS names that describe what the class does rather than what the semantic meaning of the block of text is: marmelab/universal.css - The only CSS you will ever need.

Is this a joke?

Of course it's a joke. Use semantic CSS class names.

Stop giving fucks. Self care means keeping enough fucks for you to function, and you need a healthy reserve.

Fucks are not to be given lightly.

[ related topics: Health Mathematics ]

I've always found babies terrifying, but this Halloween display is gonna give me nightmares.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Slow down, people, pets, and skeletons live here.

[ related topics: Photography Theater & Plays ]

Texas pediatrician, 52, is stabbed to death by knifeman, 24, who 'came out of nowhere' while she was sitting at a picnic table outside her apartment and 'checked her pulse' before fleeing.

Witness said 17 residents came out with guns after hearing the doctor scream

Apparently none of them were good guys.

[ related topics: Health Current Events Guns Real Estate Furniture ]

I'm spending some time trying to figure out how to effectively talk to GPT (and if it's possible).

Having spent entirely too long exploring what Eliza and the "Animals" approach to expert systems could do back in the days of BASIC, I'm increasingly perplexed over the enthusiasm for this latest generation.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

My office-mates are so supportive. When it hits 5PM on voice lesson days they ask "isn't it time for you to go yell at that lady?"

On Friday, I mentioned that I was off to a gig, my boss asked what, I said "square dance calling" and my coworker helpfully inserted "He's off to yell at old people."

I mean... not wrong...

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

RT violet @object_user_displayName@mastodon.social

it's called a nuclear family because we need to enter global non-proliferation

it's called a nuclear family because it has a short half-life and the second something goes wrong it completely explodes

[ related topics: Sociology ]

I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars

While my managers are very happy, they quietly suggest it may be unwise to roll out the changes to all the computers (I only did a few to be safe) because it would oversaturate the department to hear about us all day. And invite unwelcome questions. The subtext is that if we do this all slowly enough, it might seem like it took a lot of effort instead of just clicking buttons that I said had to be clicked almost a year ago.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Bay Area ]

Okay, everyone's been raving about the Nile Rodgers & CHIC Tiny Desk Concert, but dayumn their version of Get Lucky slaps</e>!

[ related topics: Movies ]

Jalopnik: Study Finds Cyclists Are Better People Than Drivers

That said, the study didn’t attempt to determine whether people more oriented toward the common good are simply more likely to ride bikes, or whether riding bikes actually increases people’s interest in the common good. It would be incredibly hard to do in most of the U.S., but we’d love to see a follow-up study that measures whether or not cycling at least a few times a week changes people’s interest in the four criteria used here.

Streetsblog: Academics Conclude What We Already Know: Cyclists Are More Neighborly than Drivers

Orientation towards the common good in cities: The role of individual urban mobility behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102125

[ related topics: Sports Pedal Power Bicycling Model Building ]

Hey, can anyone else running Firefox check MusicNotes.com and see if their sheet music looks all zalgo to you? I recently had a "PDFs don't render right in Firefox" closed as a cannot duplicate, but I've got two Macs here on which PDF rendering in Firefox is regularlly b0rk3d.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Graphics Sports ]