People who can roll your Rs: Do you do so with the tongue on the bottom of your mouth, as in touching your teeth and static? I discovered something relative to my voice teacher, when we were trying to do the warble thing to keep my throat loose, and I apparently do that in a *completely* different place in my mouth than most people do, and my tongue feels like it's static.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

My recent work with LLMs has this resonating: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: what it might be like to converse with your dead grandmother

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Comics ]

Earth: An Oscillator and Frequency Standard

Earth is a vintage, quality constructed, high-Q oscillator, composed of SiO₂ Al Fe Ti, spherical, although not perfectly shaped (flat by about 1/298), and off-axis (about 23 °). During the 40 year test period, the average frequency of the oscillator was about a few parts in 10⁸th below the nameplate value.

There appears to be no fine or coarse frequency adjustment on earth. In cases like this one must either use an external frequency synthesizer, or phase microstepper, to correct for the frequency error. Or one can post-process the data and apply corrections in software. The lack of electronic frequency adjustment prevents it from being used in a GPSDO.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Art & Culture ]

United Nations: Amazon, DoorDash, Walmart, trapping workers in poverty: UN rights expert

As outlined in a recent report to the UN on the rise of the “working poor”, being in a non-standard employment contract is a major cause of in-work poverty.

The Special Rapporteur also pointed to a United States Government report naming all three as among the top employers of Government medical and food assistance recipients.

“Jobs are supposed to provide a pathway out of poverty, yet in all three companies the business model seems to be to shift operating costs onto the public by relying on government benefits to supplement miserably low wages,” he said.

[ related topics: Books Food moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties ]

I have mostly been "yeah, sure, gas stoves are bad, but my grandmother had one, and I'm 55 years old and still kicking, I'll wait to replace it..."

Just got an always on air quality monitor. After the third alert I'm starting to think about what it would take.

Mentioned by name in reference to an art project by a city engineer in a PBAC meeting.

I feel a sense of accomplishment.

https://www.flutterby.net/Image:2022-03-28PedestrianAxe.jpg

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Happy 35th Birthday to the Morris Internet Worm: spaf: Reflecting on the Internet Worm at 35

[ related topics: Weblogs virus Net Culture ]

What I'm seeing in Firefox when trying to view Musicnotes.com, and the sorts of gobbledygook I'm seeing when I view various PDFs, for discussion elsewhere.

[ related topics: Photography Community ]

RT Stephanie King @stephstephking@mstdn.social

BECAUSE WE PAID ATTENTION TO SARAH CONNOR IN T2, YOU ABSOLUTE KNOBS

BBC: Why are fewer women using AI than men?

RT Simon Willison @simon@simonwillison.net

New LLM paper highlighting quite how weird and ridiculous these things are https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

Adding "it's important to my career" can produce better results, across every model they tested!

RT zellyn @zellyn@hachyderm.io

@simon I suspect that it's because these things are trained on the internet, which is 90% bad takes on things! Any kind of signifier that the answer is likely to be "expert" or "well considered" is thus likely to bias towards better answers.

I would expect: "I found this answer on a forum where only licensed medical doctors can post:" to have a positive effect.

And possibly, "Please don't reply unless you have personal experience with this problem: I've had enough answers that were guesses!"

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Monty Python Net Culture Community Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Unsurprising: Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty on all seven counts. 4 hours of deliberation for a 5 week trial...

I have probably whined about this before, but of all of the annoyances I have with Apple's UI decisions, the fact that iMovie and Logic Pro use different accelerator keys for "split track at current selection point" ranks pretty high.

[ related topics: Apple Computer User Interface ]

Because I'm becoming even more aware of hidden external costs of things: Pocket link to a Rolling Stone article: America’s Radioactive Secret

Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America.

[ related topics: Television Community ]

With various data brokers looking like they're gonna be contracting with cloud camera providers to do data mining, and all sorts of other "you're the product" issues with any cloud connected services, this is interesting:

Matic is a $1,795 robot vacuum for people concerned about privacy

Matic Robots product page

[ related topics: Photography Privacy Robotics ]

Was about to make a "they're good dogs, Brent" joke, but realized that the reference may be outdated to the kids these days...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dogs ]

Finally took pictures of new socks, the cute unicorns from Foot Clothes. Particularly on brand because part of today's activities involve being gnomes riding unicorns.

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Clothing Bicycling ]

Charlene just suggested that MacOS was annoying enough that she should switch from her MacBook Air back to her clunky decade-old Linux laptop. I think we can de-annoy it, but good job Apple on talking basic concepts and fucking them up so badly with constant attempts to coerce people into subscription bullshit and taking control of document management.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Open Source Heinlein Macintosh ]

Got this air quality monitor off of Ali Express, which is teaching me things about our indoor air quality that I don't want to know, but also requires an app to configure, and that app isn't seeing the device, and ugh I wish I could double all of the alarms levels on this thing.

The most unrealistic thing about Gilda Radner's Emily Litella character is that when confronted about completely misunderstanding the situation she said "never mind" rather than doubling down.

So based on the discussion about advertising and the current crop of "smart TVs", the thing that's gonna keep the movie theater business alive is that ads built into TV firmware are gonna fuck up the home viewing experience so badly that people will go out to watch their streaming content.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Theater & Plays Consumerism and advertising Television Community ]

I'm still not sure what the parade was, but the float theme was gnomes, and we joined as part of the Unicorn Blessing Brigade.

[ related topics: Photography Boats ]

And then this dude said "need a picture of you on my couch", and didn't capture thee glorious NASA-ness of his fluffy cloud couch.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

*All* songs are make-out songs if you're horny enough. #NoContextForYou

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Dear Forbes: publish your "30 doing 30" list already, you cowards.

RT @allrite@allrite.at

The word "excellent" is derived from the Christian practice of giving up the use of Microsoft Excel for 40 days to commemorate Christ's sacrifice.

It is a period of great productivity.

The date of lent is calculated by using an obscure Excel macro on a field that didn't originally have anything to do with dates, but Excel converted it to one anyway.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment ]

I'm not sure if an LLM is writing AWS documentation, but I'm pretty sure that output is not coming from a human who has tried to actually use these services.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing ]

Oh no! Killara, the Stephens 34' 1929 wooden boat, is partially submerged (looking at the picture, might be resting on the bottom). Sympathies to Greg Sabourin and family, hope they refloat and refurbish!

https://local.nixle.com/alert/10409203/?sub_id=0

[ related topics: Sociology Boats Machinery ]

Augh. iMovie is making me want to perform random acts of violence. You'd think there'd be a way to put a simple title card, mixed case, up so that the text is visible at the beginning of the movie. But all of the title cards want to either fly shit in, or won't let me used mixed case, or...

This is fucking bonkers. Anyway, creating my title cards elsewhere, merging them in, this sucks.

[ related topics: Movies Law ]

Whoah: DAK and the golden age of gadget catalogs. If you remember the phrase My name is Drew, and I've probably got the neatest job in the world., printed in dot matrix as part of the customized customer field of the catalog, this will take you right back to a golden age of copywriting, Drew Alan Kaplan, and how that leads back to a seminar leader named Joseph Sugarman, and the two decades from 1972 and magnetic tape products to the bankruptcy in 1992....

A friend of mine once remarked that the DAK catalogs, in some way, reminded them of TikTok videos, where people talk at length about products they love and why they love them. It’s just not written down and mailed to your house.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Real Estate ]

Huh. I wonder what large chip manufacturer with a strong lobbying capacity might be trying to keep Americans from working with RISC-V products?

Bunnie's Blog: Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment ]

Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT event visitors blame lighting at ApeFest for ‘severe eye burn’ caused by unprotected exposure to ultraviolet rays. Apparently someone used UV-C lights for a party atmosphere.

Funranium Labs: Ultraviolet Rant

Having now had a chance to take a look at the likely culprit, assuming a repetition of the previous incident, all I can say is You Completely Irresponsible Fucks. I am having flashbacks to yelling at Naomi Wu for irresponsible deployment of germicidal UV designs in 2020.

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

I'm still trying to find an application for LLMs, but... I wonder if there's some way to use what we've learned from parsing and semantics in building these chatbots to re-vitalize the Interactive Fiction scene?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

From 3 years ago, but worth noting: Zelda recipe appears in serious novel by serious author after rushed Google search

If you were writing a book and needed to find out how red clothes dye is traditionally made, you’d probably start with a simple Google search. At least, that’s what John Boyne, the author behind The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas says he “must have” done when it emerged that several fantasy ingredients from The Legend of Zelda have appeared in his most recent book, A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom.

The problem, as journalist Dana Schwartz notes, is that rather than listing a real-world recipe, the current top search result for “ingredients red dye clothes” links to a guide from Polygon on how to dye clothes in the video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s not an uncommon mistake for Google’s algorithms to make, but in this case the mistake seems to have made its way all the way into a published book by a respected author.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Erotic Games moron Writing Law Journalism and Media Douglas Adams Clothing Video ]

RT VessOnSecurity @bontchev@infosec.exchange

@unlofl @molly0xfff

The 3 authentication factors:

- Something you forgot.

- Something you left in the taxi.

- Something that can be chopped off.

Peter Hartlaub and Joe Garofoli in the SF Chronicle: How to write your own San Francisco ‘doom loop’ story: An essential guide for visiting APEC writers

[ related topics: Bay Area Writing California Culture Douglas Adams ]

Stoners Are More Empathetic, New Research Finds

Researchers at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México compared the brain activity of regular weed smokers with the rest of us, and found that their anterior cingulate (the region linked to empathy) was particularly active. In effect, this made the stoners more capable of sensing others’ feelings, and better able to feel someone else’s emotional state within their own body.

MedicalXpress: Does cannabis use affect empathy?

Empathy-related differences in the anterior cingulate functional connectivity of regular cannabis users when compared to controls<?a>

https://doi.org/10.1002/jnr.25252

[ related topics: Drugs Invention and Design Current Events ]

arXiv: Computer Science > Computers and Society: Frugal Computing — On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing Wim Vanderbauwhede

The current emissions from computing are almost 4% of the world total. This is already more than emissions from the airline industry and are projected to rise steeply over the next two decades. By 2040 emissions from computing alone will account for more than half of the emissions budget to keep global warming below 1.5∘C. Consequently, this growth in computing emissions is unsustainable. The emissions from production of computing devices exceed the emissions from operating them, so even if devices are more energy efficient producing more of them will make the emissions problem worse. Therefore we must extend the useful life of our computing devices. As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal computing: achieving our aims with less energy and material.

This does speak to how we weirdly price energy... and where we're using that energy. The paper itself notes that:

The report about the cost of planned obsolescence by the European Environmental Bureau [8] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global WarmingPotential (i.e. the amount of CO2-equivalent emissions caused). For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years to limit their Global Warming Potential. Currently, for laptops it is about 5 years and for mobile phones 3 years.

This makes me wonder about compute capacity, Jevon's paradox issues, and even at 72%, efficiency gains seem to make those 25 years calculations ... something.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Aviation Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Archival Model Building Global Warming ]

Court rules automakers can record and intercept owner text messages

A federal judge on Tuesday refused to bring back a class action lawsuit alleging four auto manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record and intercept customers’ private text messages and mobile phone call logs.

As cars hoover up more and more driver data, is it time to regulate the industry?

[ related topics: Privacy Law Journalism and Media Government ]

It's only gonna get worse with LLMs: Nature: How big is science’s fake-paper problem?

An unpublished analysis suggests that there are hundreds of thousands of bogus ‘paper-mill’ articles lurking in the literature.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Woodworking ]

Facebook suddenly started offering me ads for scammy looking "gut health" and similar supplements, and I was confused about where it got the idea that I might be remotely interested, until I realized that I'd clicked on a Pocket article about changing your mindset from the Firefox start page, which probably triggered a pseudo-science bit somewhere...

[ related topics: Health ]

David Zipper in Slate: There’s a Big Problem With Your Car’s Tires — Regulators—and a reluctant industry—are finally starting to deal with it.

References the recent The EPA's response to Earth Justice's Petition ID No. 001845: Toxic Substances Control Act Section 21 Petition Regarding N-(1,3- Dimethylbutyl)-N’-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine (CASRN 793-24-8, aka 6PPD) in Tires

The 2021 Pew Trusts study about 3/4 of ocean microplastics coming from tires.

The U of W study on 6PPD and Coho salmon, press release.

And more

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Automobiles Gambling ]

RT zerofox@plush.city MattyZero 𓃥

OH: A coworker just shared a term she uses to describe meetings that go astray when certain coworkers bloviate. “Non-consensual TED talk.”

The Long-Term Mortality Effects Associated with Exposure to Particles and NOx in the Malmö Diet and Cancer Cohort

In this cohort study, with roughly 30,000 participants from the general population and almost 25 years of follow-up, clear associations were observed between natural-cause mortality and long-term exposure to modeled concentrations of NOx at the residential addresses. The robust hazard ratios for NOx indicate that traffic-related air pollution had a significant association with mortality in the MDC cohort. However, it is uncertain to what extent NOx exposure in itself is the main driver of these clear and robust hazard ratios, or if it is instead an indicator of combustion-related air pollutants including ultrafine particles and their toxic components, or road traffic noise. ...

https://doi.org/10.3390/toxics11110913

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The Fediverse is scoffing at the launch video for this new wearable: Humane officially launches the AI Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable

We just watched the video, and there's some cool interaction modes (using a projector to put the display on your hand is kinda interesting), but in response to a query, the device proposes watching the April 8, 2024 eclipse from Australia(!) and suggests that there's 15g of protein in a small handful of almonds (.2 to .3g/almond, so maybe it was approximating per cup, and not by the volume in the presenter's hands?).

The real-time translation thing is interesting, but I've been using Google Translate to try to keep up with some of what's going on in Israel right now, and... machine translation does not carry a lot of nuance.

So, interesting concept, skeptical about using LLMs for the back-end.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Food Space & Astronomy Astronomy Artificial Intelligence Video Java ]

RT allrite @allrite@allrite.at

The word "excellent" is derived from the Christian practice of giving up the use of Microsoft Excel for 40 days to commemorate Christ's sacrifice.

It is a period of great productivity.

The date of lent is calculated by using an obscure Excel macro on a field that didn't originally have anything to do with dates, but Excel converted it to one anyway.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment ]

RT Itamar Turner-Trauring @itamarst@hachyderm.io

The fundamental flaw with pitching CoPilot as a massive productivity boost is that its goal is to make it faster and easier to generate code.

As a programmer, you don't want to generate code. You want to solve problems; the less code involved the better. I don't want tools that will generate repetitive code, I want less repetition.

https://github.blog/2022-09-07...oper-productivity-and-happiness/ shows the problem. "Less mental effort on repetitive tasks", sure, but you should be trying to prevent the repetition, not do more of it.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Television ]

Not sure whether this is cause for optimism or not, but Nextdoor is laying off 25% of its staff. The article suggests that they'e going for break-even circa 2025, but if we could pressure them out of business that would be a fantastic positive for the health of our communities, and the mental well-being of those coerced into moderation service in the hopes of protecting said communities. https://wapo.st/49z7OAH #GiftArticle

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Community ]

Someone on Facebook just asked "how does ditching pur parking minimums help us.meet our climate goals?" and I think I'm being trolled, but years of Facebook.have made me not so sure about that.

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

Thinking about that "Humane AI" demo, and how gratitous and unnecessary the features where really bogus answers happened are. Like, this product could be really cool without those aspects, why did you overreach?

And how did you let the video get out without catching that stuff?

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Move fast and break people: Reuters: At SpaceX, worker injuries soar in Elon Musk’s rush to Mars

The 2022 injury rate at the company’s manufacturing-and-launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, was 4.8 injuries or illnesses per 100 workers – six times higher than the space-industry average of 0.8. Its rocket-testing facility in McGregor, Texas, where LeBlanc died, had a rate of 2.7, more than three times the average. The rate at its Hawthorne, California, manufacturing facility was more than double the average at 1.8 injuries per 100 workers. The company’s facility in Redmond, Washington, had a rate of 0.8, the same as the industry average.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy California Culture Seattle ]

RT Burrowing Skylar 🦉🏳️‍⚧️ @stellarskylark@solarpunk.moe

this meeting could have been a message taped to a brick

Cannabis users appear to be relying less on conventional sleep aids

“In general, the use of cannabis for sleep-related issues was perceived as more advantageous than over the counter medications or prescription sleep aids,” Cuttler said. “Unlike long-acting sedatives and alcohol, cannabis was not associated with a ‘hangover’ effect, although individuals reported some lingering effects such as sleepiness and changes in mood.”

Exploration of Medicine: A large-scale survey of cannabis use for sleep: preferred products and perceived effects in comparison to over-the-counter and prescription sleep aids

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Oh that looks like a fascinating MacOS Sonoma bug: A small scroll view change ends up in some eternal scroll loop. The call stack says i†'s some timer deep in their code.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

Watching the Petaluma Planning Commission meeting on the overlay zone. Kinda impressed by how quickly public comment has gone to the "low income housing will bring those people" space. And Callum Weeks just got a recurring donation to Generation Housing from us.

One takeaway from the public comments: I can now believe that Petaluma has a drug problem, because dayumn.

[ related topics: Health Space & Astronomy Real Estate ]

8 years ago, I had a run-in with Gamergate. I still wonder about how that all worked out, and second guess my reactions.

KQED: David DePape, on Witness Stand, Details ‘Grand Plan’ to Violently Interrogate Nancy Pelosi

DePape said he had been looking up video game tips on YouTube when he first encountered information about “gamergate,” a nearly decade-old social media harassment campaign led by misogynistic male gamers who targeted and threatened violence against women in the video game industry. He then began intensely researching their many spurious claims about feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, which led him to discover additional targets, DePape said.

Ars Technica: At trial, accused Pelosi attacker says Gamergate led him to far-right conspiracies.

As I see people sucked deep into the various hate machines, I'm still struggling with how best to deal with people who are in it.

[ related topics: Games Current Events Journalism and Media Video Archival ]

[Ransomware cartel] AlphV files an SEC complaint against MeridianLink for not disclosing a breach to the SEC

The attack was last Tuesday, November 7. According to AlphV, they did not encrypt any files, but did exfiltrate files. MeridianLink was aware of it the day it happened. According to AlphV, no security upgrades were made following the discovery, but “once we added them to the blog, they have patched the way used to get in,” DataBreaches was told.

[ related topics: Weblogs Cryptography ]

Just putting some stuff from the zoning overlay documents for which the EKN Appelation Petaluma hotel was the catalyst, from page 26 of "Attachment E" . Note the Phoenix at 75', listen to Tom Gaffney's comments last night in that context. https://storage.googleapis.com...-Downtown-06-07-2023-reduced.pdf

[ related topics: Photography Travel ]

Just putting some stuff from the zoning overlay documents for which the EKN Appelation Petaluma hotel was the catalyst, page 12 of Appendix A of the project plan set https://storage.googleapis.com...Appendix-A.-Project-Plan-Set.pdf

[ related topics: Photography Travel ]

Does anyone have an opinion about the current race for a Sonoma County judge position? I've got someone I respect asking for an endorsement of a candidate, and aside from the usual "wait, you think *my* opinion would be taken positively in the wider community?" incredulity, I don't know that I'm tuned into the broader issues.

Aside from being *extremely* skeptical of anything our Sheriff's department says.

[ related topics: Law Community ]

Okay, I can deal with leaf blowers, and loud trucks, and barking dogs, but when I sit down to record and it's the neighbor's wind chimes...

Aaargh. Might have to go into the office, not that it's necessarily any better there. Maybe the workshop?

[ related topics: Machinery Dogs ]

RT Mike, First of His Name @mike@chinwag.org

Putting software in containers is cruel and unnatural.

Programs should be allowed to roam and graze freely on computer systems. Forcibly isolating and constraining them will lead only undue suffering.

Use of technologies such as Docker in systems administration must be ended immediately, there is no ethical justification for inflicting trauma like this in an enlightened society.

In this "free range software manifesto" I will -

[ related topics: Ethics Software Engineering ]

Northwest Treaty Tribes: Nisqually Tribe’s system shows promise in fighting threat to salmon, helping to remove tire dust, and the associated 6PPD, from stream water:

The tribe teamed up with Long Live the Kings, Herrera Environmental Consultants and Cedar Grove, among others, to place a newly developed biofiltration unit at Ohop Creek. The creek is a tributary to the Nisqually River and home to a large salmon habitat recovery project. It’s also near Highway 7, a busy road that sees vehicles deposit 12 pounds of tire dust on its surface every year—tire dust that rainstorms can wash into nearby habitat.

Developed by Cedar Grove, the biofiltration device applies the concepts of in-ground biofiltration to a mobile unit. Filtering stormwater through two layers—compost and a layer that removes phosphorus—the unit captured stormwater from three storms last year, with its results at leaching out harmful chemicals from that stormwater closely studied.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Theater & Plays Sociology Television ]

NTSB Calls for Technology to Reduce Speeding in All New Cars. I wrote on Metafilter:

I think that, whatever the privacy issues, we're headed towards a future where we have time and location based mileage taxes, and it makes perfect sense to integrate that with speed limit enforcement, but...

We've been trying to do traffic calming efforts in our neighborhood, and our town's public works department is trying to get out in front of this as well. I've been aware of the fact that "furniture" (sign and light posts, etc) in the "recovery zone" (shoulders and sidewalks) are breakaway, designed to not injure motorists should they swerve into them.

We were recently measuring the geometry of a new roundabout in an other neighborhood to see if it could be applied to our neighborhood, and among the neighbors who stopped to chat and sing the praises was a guy who said "yeah, I got this car cheap because some teenager drove over the roundabout and ripped the oil pan out".

And I am now 1000% behind automated speed enforcement through passive infrastructure. Let's build shit to *seriously* fuck up a car when drivers deviate.

Let's put up bollards to narrow lanes.

The design goal should be that when drivers exhibit unsafe traffic behavior, their cars are destroyed.

So, yes, move forward NTSB, but also work with your local traffic engineers. There's a lot that can be done at the local level in concrete and asphalt as roads are maintained.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Privacy Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Automobiles Graphic Design Government ]

So Simon Tatham @simontatham@hachyderm.io asked

In #emacs, what's the easiest way to type (say) a hundred 0s?

For a non-digit printing char, ESC 100 x is easy. But for a digit, you need to indicate what's the count and what's the literal.

Perhaps C-q, "insert this literally even if you otherwise wouldn't"? For digits 8 or 9, that works, e.g. ESC 100 C-q 9.

But C-q special-cases octal digits! So the best I've found is to enter the octal code for the digit you want: ESC 100 C-q 060 RET. Yuck. Is there an easier way I've missed?

It's Emacs, there are a number of answers. C-u 100 C-u 0 works, the second C-u works as a delimiter. A smartass suggested C-x C-c vi RET 100 i 0 ESC, and, a couple of people suggested using C-x z, broken down by Choan Gálvez 🐐 @choanmusic@mstdn.social as

0                                                  ;; self-insert-command
M-9						   ;; digit-argument
M-9						   ;; digit-argument
C-x z						   ;; repeat

And of course there's "record a 0 macro", and other such things. But what I found interesting is that as I tried to think through a couple of strategies for this, I didn't have a direct mechanism. I had to wiggle through my fingers to remember how to do this stuff.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT qdot @qdot@buttplug.engineer

the openai news isn't funny

boards of directors only do this when they're very stressed or anxious

RT Anil Dash @anildash@me.dm

How is the OpenAI board gonna fire Sam Altman just because he gave answers that sounded plausible but weren't actually accurate?

Anyway: OpenAI Board Fires Sam Altman For Reasons Unclear

"Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," the post states.

"The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

Very interestingly, CTO Mira Murati will take over as interim CTO.

[ related topics: Current Events Pyrotechnics ]

Josh Simmons recently took a CO2 monitor to a city meeting, and got measurements over 1,700 PPM. He observed:

Reflecting on how poorly a recent city meeting went, how CO2 impacts cognitive function, and how poorly ventilated the city chambers are...

I have to wonder to what degree we make self-governance harder than it needs to be 🤔

Connecting this also to studies about how attitudes change when people are hungry, and how, for instance, it impacts parole board decisions.

Maybe, just maybe, if one is holding an important meeting, great care should be taken with the conditions one can control or influence.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Mathematics Global Warming ]

Okay, I hear what you're saying when you tell me that Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is not a Christmas song, but maybe you're just celebrating wrong?

#SheTiedYouToAKitchenChair #SheBrokeYourThroneAndSheCutYourHair

A friend of mine has been bragging about sarcastic responses on Quora. For a while, I was giving him side-eye about polluting the infosphere, but then I realized that he's building training material for LLMs. The future is deliberately wrong sarcasm.

Collaborative terminal sessions on a large zoomable shared canvas: sshx — A secure web-based, collaborative terminal

sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone by link, on a multiplayer infinite canvas.

It has real-time collaboration, with remote cursors and chat. It's also fast and end-to-end encrypted, with a lightweight server written in Rust.

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

RT Toastie @Toastie@journa.host

EVERYONE: We gotta save salmon

US ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: Ok we'll build a giant fish vacuum

TRIBES: Why not just open up the dams

ARMY CORPS: We have to save the power companies!

POWER COMPANIES: No, you really don't

ARMY CORPS: FISH VACUUM

CONGRESS: Maybe u should look into shutting down the dams

ARMY CORPS: Our FISH VACUUM only costs $1.9 BILLION AND DOESN'T WORK LET'S GOOOOO

TRIBES: “Killing salmon to lose money deserves a deeper analysis.” (actual quote)

ProPublica: This Billion-Dollar Plan to Save Salmon Depends on a Giant Fish Vacuum

[ related topics: Politics Work, productivity and environment Currency ]

Smart Cities Dive: Plans to get an entire block off the natural gas system take shape in one California city

Albany, California, wants to lay the groundwork for widescale adoption of this emerging building decarbonization approach.

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture ]

Oh, hey, maybe there is something to this trans panic thing after all. Male pastor Phillip Fisher Jr. is presenting as a "mom for liberty"... The ‘faith-based’ leader for Philly’s Moms for Liberty chapter is a registered sex offender

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Douglas Adams ]

The Bolt is into the shop this morning for the battery replacement, but a trip to Fresno this last weekend by way of Sunnyvale really amplified the crappiness of the software stack between GM, Android, Google, ChargePoint, and EVGo (which I guess is a ChargePoint company now).

From frustrations with apps under Android Auto to fast chargers that wouldn't communicate with the car, we're just... not there yet.

It's no wonder that Tesla is owning this market, despite lower charger densities.

[ related topics: Software Engineering California Culture Travel Automobiles Fabrication Economics ]

On Friday, the dealer called and told us our Bolt's replacement battery wasb finally in. This weekend's trip, the car was giving us some unexpected range and charging issues, so I was super happy to drop the car off at the dealer this morning.

Just got the "holy shit your car is about to explode get it serviced now" message from GM, presumably based on car telemetry.

[ related topics: Photography Heinlein Travel Automobiles Fabrication ]

Realized this morning, as I was trying to check some stuff brought up in office conversation, that the current "AI"/LLM destruction of the infosphere is really raising the value of good sources.

We're gonna have to figure out how to vet and elevate those sources, and this is probably going to make good information more expensive; we'll need to subscribe or pay per lookup, but the wide variety of answers, some of them clearly LLM spew, is laying this bare.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

RT Arri Blais :verified_trans: @arri@hachyderm.io

May be an unpopular take, but I think the main risk of ML is not that it's good at what it does.

It's actually very bad, worse than humans by far at what it does. But because people collectively believe it is good at stuff, people are focusing so much on "the singularity" or "it replacing [x job]" the real risk continues unhindered.

This is a good example of the true goal of ML: introduce bias and inefficiency in areas where inefficiency is desirable to capitalism.

UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges — For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug.

[ related topics: Health Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

I don't remember why or if I ever downloaded the Shop.app thing, I could imagine that I did in order to track some weird-ass order, but a subject line of "Cha-ching! $0.26 Shop Cash to Spend" makes me think that maybe I exist in a different economy...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Economics ]

I am still finding that Grumpy Player is a reasonable home music system, but the Amazon Fire tablet I've been running it on has, despite all of the notifications being turned off and notification sound turned down, a tendency to play an ascending arpeggio at inopportune times.

I have not found the source for this.

Suggestions for a cheap small touch-screen web device that'd work as an audio player?

[ related topics: Books Music Work, productivity and environment Sports Pyrotechnics ]

Well, I scoffed at the Shop.app low rent thing, but Amazon just emailed me to warn me that I have $.33 expiring...

I remember back in the '90s, someone warning us that we needed to find a way to make sending email more expensive because otherwise we'd be buried in bullshit, and...

Yeah.

[ related topics: Books Photography Gambling ]

I mean, sure, it's funny and all to rag on the Linux audio stack, but have you used MacOS?

[ related topics: Free Software Music Open Source Macintosh ]

Nature: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported by real original data, and it is also opposite or in the other direction compared to the evidence that are available,” says study co-author Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy.

The ability of AI to fabricate convincing data adds to concern among researchers and journal editors about research integrity. “It was one thing that generative AI could be used to generate texts that would not be detectable using plagiarism software, but the capacity to create fake but realistic data sets is a next level of worry,” says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and independent research-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. “It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments.”

JAMA Opthalmology — Research Letter — November 9, 2023 — Large Language Model Advanced Data Analysis Abuse to Create a Fake Data Set in Medical Research.

doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2023.5162

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment Bay Area Software Engineering California Culture Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Atlas Shrugged: The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now. — As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags.

The precise effect of all this on the brain drain is hard to tease out from migration statistics because the Dobbs decision is still fairly new, and because red states were bleeding college graduates even before the culture war heated up. The only red state that brings in more college graduates than it sends elsewhere is Texas. But the evidence is everywhere that hard-right social policies in red states are making this dynamic worse.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Objectivism Invention and Design History Sociology Work, productivity and environment Mathematics California Culture Education ]

I'm so old I remember when this was the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

Rishi Sunak trying to use a hammer is both the funniest and most awful thing you’ll watch this week

RT tiddy roosevelt @babe@glitterkitten.co.uk

This man is the leader of one of the (arguably formerly) most powerful countries in the world.

I am someone who sells boob photos online.

Apparently only one of us knows how to use a hammer.

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work

For example, one pitch in particular was for a product which promised to remove the need for me to write SQL in exchange for being able to set up all my dependencies from a drag-and-drop editor, with the sales pitch consisting of "You can get rid of thousands of lines of all that SQL you hate!" - no I can't, fucko, because your application is still connecting to Postgres so it's just writing the SQL for me with another layer of licensed abstraction on top of it. Why would I pay to have more abstractions designed for you to sell software to multiple clients, you blue-suited dementor? Eight times out of ten, I want to pay you to remove them from my codebase.

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Open Source Software Engineering Writing Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

Because you need a little more "AI is bullshit" in your morning, a long thread from Emily M. Bender saying her usual things, but in the context of current LLM company news:

With the OpenAI clownshow, there's been renewed media attention on the xrisk/"AI safety"/doomer nonsense. Personally, I've had a fresh wave of reporters asking me naive questions (as well as some contacts from old hands who are on top of how to handle ultra-rich man-children with god complexes). 🧵1/

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Current Events Journalism and Media Community Artificial Intelligence ]

TechDirt: Congrats To Elon Musk: I Didn’t Think You Had It In You To File A Lawsuit This Stupid. But, You Crazy Bastard, You Did It!

So… within the span of about 2 to 3 pages we are told that Elon Musk and exTwitter are passionate supporters of free speech that allow “all viewpoints” to be shared and that Musk is filing this lawsuit to force Media Matters to take down speech that he admits is absolutely true, but where he doesn’t like how they portrayed things.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Gambling hubris ]

I worry about LLMs corrupting the infosphere, but, let's face it, when we have Iowa school officials quoting Heinrich Himmler and then walking it back by claiming ignorance, I think the Establishment is doing pretty well at this already.

https://www.businessinsider.co...use-nazi-sloganquote-day-2023-11

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

More on the "Red State" brain drain: Why Bumble Is Joining a Lawsuit That Challenges Texas Abortion Laws

At Bumble, the women-centered dating app that calls Austin home, executives say that about one third of their 150 Texas employees have left the state entirely, opting for remote work. Though the woman-led company went public during the pandemic and company executives remain eager to continue growing, plans to invest heavily in the company’s Austin hub and attract employees here are on hold. The reason: It’s not just hard to keep talented employees in Austin in a post-Roe world, where doctors might not perform even medically necessary abortions for fear of reprisal, it’s also hard to attract them to Texas in the first place. Company executives say that policies promoted by politicians under the guise of being “pro-family” are making it harder for families to form.

[ related topics: Politics Games Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events Work, productivity and environment Government ]

RT cstross Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

Not only was it not a terrorist attack, the model of Bentley that ran into a barrier and exploded at the Rainbow Bridge crossing, killing the occupants, was subject to a recall in 2021 due to a "stuck accelerator" problem. Source: https://www.drive.com.au/news/...tal-gt-and-flying-spur-recalled/

Incoming negligence lawsuit (against Bentley) ahoy ...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/...nt-erroneous-reporting-1.7036978

Addendum: Right-wing U.S. media covered fiction as fact: A non-existent terrorist attack from Canada at Rainbow Bridge

[ related topics: Aviation Current Events ]

RT extreme organic gay @dysfun@treehouse.systems

so far i have achieved enlightenment.

but nothing practical.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Man's enthusiastic participation in horrific system catches up with him: Ex-officer Derek Chauvin, convicted in George Floyd’s killing, was stabbed in prison, AP source says

We are trying to extricate Charlene's MacBook Air from the clutches of iCloud, and I cannot believe that anyone accidentally made software this bad. This has to be all dark patterns, meant to ensnare users.

Charlene's deep sigh and "I just want a normal computer" sums it up.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Vox: The sexual abuse scandal rocking the Southern Baptist Convention, explained:

Complementarianism’s centrality within the SBC led to a heavily patriarchal institution, which Stone said created an environment in which sexual abuse could happen and be covered up as extensively as the Guidepost report said it was. And as such, she said, simple systemic fixes ultimately won’t be enough to reform the SBC. Instead, theological changes will have to be made, and they will be ones the SBC won’t want to make.

Huh. Turns out that maybe a religious community founded because of support of the institution of slavery might have deeply entrenched power dynamics which lead to abuse. Go figure.

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Nature and environment History Sociology California Culture Community ]

This is fantastic: Dan Luu: Why Benchmark? looks at products in and out of the tech industry, though there's the usual snickering at "web scale" databases:

Vehicle headlights: Jennifer Stockburger has noted that, when Consumer Reports started testing headlights, engineers at auto manufacturers thanked CR for giving them the ammunition they needed to force their employers to let them to engineer better headlights; previously, they would often lose the argument to designers who wanted nicer looking but less effective headlights since making cars safer by desiging better headlights is a hard sell because there's no business case, but making cars score higher on Consumer Reports reviews is an easy sell because that impacts sales numbers

[ related topics: Law Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

Wondering if there's an "advanced iMovie" resource somewhere. I want like an "attach audio" notion, a way to re-tie the audio to a particular spot in a video clip. I'm trying to patch in some room tone and re-takes, and keep sliding the audio all over relative to the video.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Video ]

RT Catbus @ancient_catbus@jorts.horse

entertainment conglomerates: we are increasing our subscription fees and polluting our content with advertising

me: huh interesting...hey, did you know 14tb external hard drives have dropped below $200?

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

We've been trying to disentangle Charlene's computer from "the cloud", think we're there, but today's holy shit: Google Drive users angry over losing months of stored data.

Google Drive help forum thread on the issue

[ related topics: Current Events Community ]

Well as a Petaluma resident who often hears about the dust-ups around Clover (and who adores Clover's punny groan inducing advertising), this is a fascinating observation: RT Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

Almost all SE Asian immigrants I know in California are deeply lactose intolerant only to the horrible Clover milk they use in cafes and restaurants here. Strauss, Alexandre etc are fine.

Reminded of this as I see the Indonesian cafe I like (Kopiku) say they serve lactose-free milk. I’d prefer Strauss, but that’s better than Clover. I don’t understand the science (some people think it has to do with A1/A2 proteins but the science is unclear). European, Aussie, Japanese milk is fine.

[ related topics: Food Consumerism and advertising California Culture ]

Scott Jenson writing about the difficulties of building text editing systems on mobile devices

[ related topics: Writing ]

Fediverse thread about digital picture frames, saved off in case I get motivated.

[ related topics: Law ]

World Health Network: WHN Science Communications — COVID-19 and Immune Dysregulation, a Summary and Resource

COVID-19 infection has several very concerning effects on the immune system that might easily lead to advantages for other pathogens as well as worse outcomes in COVID-19 reinfections. This immune dysfunction or aging is at least one of the most likely scenarios explaining the recent surges in diseases like RSV, influenza, Strep A, and other infections. By contrast, immunity debt is not considered a viable explanation as the surges of these diseases continue in countries that had surges last season and immunity wanes for many of these diseases. Another serious concern at this point is that repeated infections by COVID-19 might lead to depletion or exhaustion of cytotoxic CD8+ T cells which could have downstream effects on other diseases like cancers, as these T cells are instrumental in limiting tumor proliferation and have been shown to differentiate to become dysfunctional.

[ related topics: Health broadband ]

Politico: What London's mayor learned when he took on cars — Sadiq Khan is facing protest, death threats for the expansion of his city’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ).

[ related topics: Civil Liberties Global Warming ]

RT Nick Wright @nickthewright@mastodon.art

1993: I use BBSes for online interaction. Each BBS is run by some random person. They connect to a federated worldwide network. I keep my notes in .TXT files.

2008-2022: I use social networks like Facebook and Twitter for online interaction. They're huge and popular. I use Evernote for my notes, which is full of features.

2023: I use Mastodon for online interaction. Each instance is run by some random person. They connect to a federated worldwide network. I keep my notes in .TXT files.

[ related topics: broadband Art & Culture ]

"NSInternalInconsistencyException - NSWindow: -_newFirstResponderAfterResigining is not a valid message outside of a responder's implementation of -resignFirstResponder."

"Resigining" sure is a spelling.

RT arborelia @arborelia@computerfairi.es

sexual implications. the one good tweet from my old private twitter

[this actually happened to me, in 2019]

Cute girl: So. Before we proceed. How do you feel about Marx?

Me (nervous): Umm look I guess I'm a socialist but I don't really know enough about the political theory behind it

Her: ...

Me: I'm sorry

Her: ...

Her: Marks. Can I leave marks on your skin

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture moron ]

I've been thinking a lot recently about "what even is sex, anyway?", which has me wondering: who's the current analogue of Susie Bright or Carol Queen, pondering those questions in the context of the pandemic and MeToo and trans rights and all of the other things we've gotten cultural awareness of in the last quarter century?

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Civil Liberties Currency ]

And that last query about modern authors pondering the philosophy of sex reminded me to re-recommend Hot Blooded: a sexual resurrection by Karin Grace Wares. Part of what got me pondering more about the human connection, power exchange, attraction and whatnot that we tie up in the simplification off "sex".

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Philosophy ]

404 Media: Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data

“We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT,” the researchers, from Google DeepMind, the University of Washington, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California Berkeley, and ETH Zurich, wrote in a paper published in the open access prejournal arXiv Tuesday.

Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT

Via @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io

[ related topics: Bay Area Journalism and Media California Culture Education ]

Fatherly: Police and Violence at Home: What The Numbers Say

Though data on police domestic violence is not only notoriously difficult to gather but also skewed by a culture of silence and intimidation, it suggests that police officers in the United States perpetrate acts of domestic violence at roughly 15 times the rate of the general population. Because officers tend to protect their own, domestic victims of violent cops often don’t know where to go. ...

[ related topics: Sociology Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Fediverse thread from @irenes@mastodon.social about confusing CHatGPT with trolley problems with their precepts reversed

Was reading through the Discord API docs for a work application, switched away, switched back to a tab with https://foaas.dev/ in it, and was momentarily confused.

But, ya know, considering integration now.

FOAAS — Fuck Off As A Service

FOAAS (Fuck Off As A Service) provides a modern, RESTful, scalable solution to the common problem of telling people to fuck off.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Wow. So I saw https://queer.party/@wolfie/111490252544220743 and thought "wonder if an LLM can help me find the name of a snake that rhymes with sombrero".

So I asked Bard, it gave me a list of snake names, but when I put each of those names plus "snake" into Google, not a one of them gave me results that made me think that a snake of that name actually exists.

ChatGPT said that none exist that are "recognized in formal taxonomy."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Woodworking ]

Ouch. Modular home building startup Veev goes kablooie.

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/ar...up-hayward-bankrupt-18519602.php

Today I learned about OnX Hunt, which urbanists are are using as a quick "who owns that vacant lot?" resource when having discussions about urban blight.

Nothing But Good Should Be Said of the Dead — Henry Kissinger is Dead. Good.

https://wapo.st/3QTI9Ks #GiftArticle

Later addition:

RT Paul Guinnessy @Guinnessy@mastodon.world

Henry Kissinger, who famously sabotaged the 1967 Vietnam peace talks in order to become Nixon’s national security advisor, has died. It’s rare when you can pinpoint a number of deaths to a political appointee but the 1975 peace deal was exactly the same as the 67 guidelines, and more than a million people died because of his decision, including 60% of all US casualties.

Yes, Kissinger was a monster — but only one of a succession of them

[ related topics: Dictators ]

Heartwarming: Players Camp Outside Spawn to Keep Henry Kissinger From Coming Back

[ related topics: Games Video Dictators ]

In our various Know Before You Grow Petaluma forums, we often get the "what about modular construction?" question. With construction costs running over $450/sq.ft., often way over, ways to reduce construction costs is a topic of much discussion, even if it just means that some of the construction labor that would normally be commuting in from the Central Valley (because we've priced that sector out of our communities) could do some of their work further from home.

Many of us who've looked at this sigh and point out that modular construction has been the technology of the future for at least half a century. At any rate, Veev, yet another modular builder, has tossed in the towel.

Once a Bay Area 'unicorn,' well-funded company to fold with few houses built — Veev raised $400 million last year, and now it's closing with few homes built

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment California Culture Sports Machinery Community Fabrication Real Estate Model Building ]