Flutterby™! From 2024-01-01 to 2024-01-31

Theory: making art that stretches humanity, rather than reinforcing the existing culture, by reusing the symbols that are deeply embedded in that culture, is not likely to be made easier if repurposing old versions of icons is suddenly legal.

In fact it feels likely that mostly this will serve to re-entrench the mores and valued of the entrenched forces.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Robotics Sociology Law Art & Culture California Culture Embedded Devices ]

Happy New Year! As we go into 2024, remember that the purpose of a system is what it does, and that we won't solve systemic failures by punishing individuals. And that, in the US, the underlying reason for policy is usually racism.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Race ]

Future door frames (the frames need to match the trim, which sounds like a euphemism).

[ related topics: Photography ]

Costco's CEO just shared a surprising response to a warehouse unionizing

The memo on Reddit, text excerpted:

To: All U.S. employees

From: Craig Jelinek and Ron Vachris

Some of you may have heard recently about union activity at Costco's warehouse in Norfolk, Virginia. Last week, in a close vote, Costco employees in Norfolk voted in favor of representation by the Teamsters union.

To be honest, we're disappointed by the result in Norfolk. We're not disappointed in our employees; we're disappointed in ourselves as managers and leaders. The fact that a majority of Norfolk employees felt that they wanted or needed a union constitutes a failure on our part.

At Costco, we take great pride in our relationships with each other. We're not anti-union, but our core value of "taking care of our employees" has never been the result of any union. It's been part of Costco's Mission Statement and the foundation of our Employee Agreement from the very beginnings of Costco's business.

Please know that we're as committed as ever to our employees. If you ever have any doubt or question about this commitment, please talk with your manager or any member of Costco's leadership team. Our culture of trust, respect and reliance upon each other is what makes Costco such a great company.

As always, thank you for all you do for Costco and for each other.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology Work, productivity and environment California Culture ]

masto.sh is a tool to download all of your mastodon posts so that you can query them via DuckDB.

DuckDB is a tool for using SQL for Online analytical processing (OLAP) queries, long-running, where the data sets are likely to have large bulk updates.

To efficiently support this workload, it is critical to reduce the amount of CPU cycles that are expended per individual value. The state of the art in data management to achieve this are either vectorized or just-in-time query execution engines. DuckDB contains a columnar-vectorized query execution engine, where queries are still interpreted, but a large batch of values (a “vector”) are processed in one operation. This greatly reduces overhead present in traditional systems such as PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite which process each row sequentially. Vectorized query execution leads to far better performance in OLAP queries.

Via

[ related topics: Open Source Theater & Plays Graphics Art & Culture Mathematics Sports Machinery Databases ]

Grex

Generate a matching regular expression from the test cases you provide

RT Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein@neuromatch.social

The funny thing about LLMs is they’re not good for knowledge work because they sometimes make up stuff that doesn’t exist and they’re not good for creative work because they sometimes make up stuff that does exist.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

RT Børge A. Roum @forteller@tutoteket.no

Oh my! I've found my new favorite website of all time: https://cyclingfallacies.com/

A list of all kinds of uninformed reasons people give for not making it safer and easier to bike, with rebuttals. This is exactly the kind of thing the internet is useful for!

It's available in many languages, and you can help translate it. The content is CC licensed. It's great!

Thanks to the fantastic podcast Bike Talk for letting me know about it!

[ related topics: Invention and Design Net Culture Bicycling ]

Intriguing: Maestro is a Unix-like kernel and operating system written from scratch in Rust

Maestro is a monolithic kernel, supporting only the x86 (in 32 bits) architecture for now.

At the time of writing, 135 out of 437 Linux system calls (roughly 31%) are more or less implemented. The project has 48 800 lines of code across 615 files (all repositories combined, counted using the cloc command).

https://github.com/llenotre/maestro

[ related topics: Free Software Weblogs Open Source Writing Architecture ]

We've probably already seen the news that Donald Trump's "fixer"/lawyer Michael Cohen used fake cases created by Google Bard AI in bid to end his probation (#GiftArticle), but the filing notes:

Specifically, the citations and descriptions came from Google Bard. As a non- lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not. Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online. I did not know that Google Bard could generate non-existent cases, nor did I have access to Westlaw or other standard resources for confirming the details of cases. Instead, I trusted Mr. Schwartz and his team to vet my suggested additions before incorporating them.

I think there are a couple of interesting things here: That we as a society are needing to go back to a world of specialized search with vetted information (Westlaw), and the open web is now polluted to the point where even if we find a link, we don't know if it was LLM generated, or what the provenance is. This is just part of an SEO driven trend, but it's definitely moreso.

That the legal profession is probably going to become more valuable, because putting a reputation behind a claim means more.

And that little disclaimer that "Bard may display inaccurate info, including about people, so double-check its responses." is not enough.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Current Events Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

These fuckers need some serious Streisand effect: Cyclist threatened with legal action for posting video of close pass by driver in company-branded van

But, rather than an apology and "some form of disciplinary action against their driver", the road.cc reader instead received a lengthy email from a company director claiming that "unauthorised use" of their 'CORNICES CENTRE®' trademark was "confusing our customers, negatively impacting our brand reputation, and potentially harming our sales and the exclusivity of our trademark", something the company wanted addressed with prompt removal of its name from the "video content and descriptions".

The video, with explanatory text.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Movies Law Current Events Copyright/Trademark Video ]

23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached

The data breach started with hackers accessing only around 14,000 user accounts. The hackers broke into this first set of victims by brute-forcing accounts with passwords that were known to be associated with the targeted customers, a technique known as credential stuffing.

From these 14,000 initial victims, however, the hackers were able to then access the personal data of the other 6.9 million million victims because they had opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature. This optional feature allows customers to automatically share some of their data with people who are considered their relatives on the platform.

I mean, my first reaction was to quote Otter from Animal House: "Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You fucked up... you trusted us! Hey, make the best of it! Maybe we can help."

But really, this is more about the whole trust model from engaging in the activity in the first place.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Grrr. Dear PG&E, nobody wants to break into our house and hack our computer passwords in order to pay our energy bills. You can let a web page stay logged in for a little while longer than that.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Hahahahahaha! Crypto hedge fund CEO may not exist; probe finds no record of identity

For years, rumors spread on social media that Steven Reece Lewis, the chief executive officer of a now-shuttered cryptocurrency hedge fund called HyperVerse, was a "fake person" who "doesn't exist." After its investigation, The Guardian has confirmed that no organization cited on his resume "can find any record of him."

That picture, tho... has anyone counted his fingers, to see if he's AI generated?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Journalism and Media Beer Cryptography Artificial Intelligence Personal Lubricant ]

Microsoft’s new AI key is first big change to keyboards in decades.

Ya know, I'm still getting used to four buttons to the left of the space bar, I was quite happy with two... three... and would be even happier if those damned things stayed mapped in a way that I felt comfortable adopting them for Emacs modifiers, as it is I'm using escape because the Meta key mapping kept moving around.

But... Microsoft thinks we need a dedicated button for make shit up Copilot? Without a "compose" key?

I hate computers.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Invention and Design moron Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence Maps and Mapping ]

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, Dan Boneh

We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant. Furthermore, we find that participants who trusted the AI less and engaged more with the language and format of their prompts (e.g. re-phrasing, adjusting temperature) provided code with fewer security vulnerabilities. Finally, in order to better inform the design of future AI-based Code assistants, we provide an in-depth analysis of participants' language and interaction behavior, as well as release our user interface as an instrument to conduct similar studies in the future.

Cite as: arXiv:2211.03622 [cs.CR] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.03622

[ related topics: User Interface Software Engineering Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

I'm sure that much of it is the build of having listened through, and bought into the premise and the characters, but day 11 of The Amelia Project's 12 Days of Christmas has me laughing out loud in all of the good ways.

https://ameliapodcast.com/

You may remember from back in April 2021, Mortality outcomes with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in COVID-19 from an international collaborative meta-analysis of randomized trials. Looking at that data, we get to Deaths induced by compassionate use of hydroxychloroquine during the first COVID-19 wave: an estimate:

During the first wave of COVID-19, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was used off-label despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits. Since then, a meta-analysis of randomised trials showed that HCQ use was associated with an 11% increase in the mortality rate. We aimed to estimate the number of HCQ-related deaths worldwide.

The answer is probably about 17k excess deaths due to use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

Politico: Hydroxychloroquine could have caused 17,000 deaths during COVID, study finds

Former US President Donald Trump said: ‘What do you have to lose? Take it.’

The Hill: Nearly 17,000 people may have died from hydroxychloroquine: study

Via, and here, among other places.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Fuck. I don't need another book to read right now, but: Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System by Wes Marshall | An Island Press book

Via.

[ related topics: Books ]

Yes: Cold-blooded software.

A cold-blooded project is like the baby painted turtle. You can freeze it for a year and then pick it back up right where you left off.

A cold-blooded project uses boring technology. The build and test scripts don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear entirely. It uses vendored dependencies.

Of the programming languages I use, Perl seems to be the best at this. C is okay. C++ less so (wait, that library interface changed again?). JavaScript and Python seem to be awful.

[ related topics: Language Books Weblogs Perl Open Source Software Engineering Monty Python Python hubris ]

Some were meant for C — The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language

For true “systems” programming (as I will define), C’s benefits are of another kind. Again, performance is not the issue; I will argue that communication is what defines system-building, and that C’s design, particularly its use of memory and explicit representations, embodies a “first-class” approach to communication which is lacking in existing “safe” languages

Via

[ related topics: Bay Area Software Engineering Theater & Plays Graphic Design ]

Okay, a little weird that it's gendered, but: Women and nonbinary skiers to zip naked down Colorado mountain at ‘liberating’ festival: ‘full-frontal freedom’

[ related topics: Privacy Nudity Current Events Civil Liberties Shoes Government ]

The link is to a Buzzfeed article about therapists talking about things their clients tell them that the clients think are weird but the therapists have heard many times before, but...

The Metafilter thread is about the practicalities, and more worth a read.

The I in LLM stands for intelligence

Right now, users seem keen at using the current set of LLMs, throwing some curl code at them and then passing on the output as a security vulnerability report. What makes it a little harder to detect is of course that users copy and paste and include their own language as well. The entire thing is not exactly what the AI said, but the report is nonetheless crap.

Via ResearchBuzz

[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

Using C11 generics to implement C++-like function overloading in C, including variable number of arguments (via the preprocessor)

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Mathematics ]

Yeah, just tried it, it works: https://nerdculture.de/@booksthatgoboom/111710838850653630

Googling for "how much spin is necessary for an earth like gravity", Google asks "Did you mean: how much spinach is necessary for an earth like gravity?"

[ related topics: Photography ]

I am very concerned about police brutality. I am not a fan of car alarms. But it turns out that when some asshole in a motor vehicle accelerates loudly enough up my street to set off car alarms, my ethical structure becomes amazingly flexible.

[ related topics: Ethics Law Enforcement Automobiles ]

'm seeing a lot of discussion about the semantics of "AI", vs other sorts of intelligence or ways to describe machine emulation of human behavior, and I think it's a good reminder that language, and meaning, is participatory.

And it's up to all of us to understand "Artificial Intelligence" in the same sense that we'd use "artificial sweetener" or "artificial flavoring". As a sad simulacrum of the real thing, that's likely hazardous to our health.

[ related topics: Health Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Good read on how the angry mob is trying to enforce gender roles and dress with violence: Family-friendly drag queen faces hate and threats in hostile Florida

#GiftArticle

[ related topics: Sociology ]

Trying to help an elderly friend debug a printer cartridge issue without me having to drive 22 miles each way to go and help him, and... I suspect that he thought he was buying genuine toner, and got some under-sized cheap knockoff that may not even be appropriate to his printer. By accident.

Amazon has a lot to answer for. I hope their willingness to extract every bit of value that their brand once has causes their demise.

[ related topics: Books ]

Thinking about helping my elderly friend out with his printer issues, and other situations in my life where the critical skill is just being able to actually read the error messages and the fine print, and thinking about how much of the difficulty introduced into these processes needs to be treated as actively malicious.

Still need to build the door, and I will build several doors when that happens, but at least the trim around the bathroom door is done.

And the number of clamps and just shop space is the limiting factor as I reprocess reclaimed wood into door trim and door frames for the other portals in the house.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Real Estate Woodworking ]

Shit, if swearing really is becoming more acceptable, what the fuck are we going to do for impact?

https://www.theguardian.com/me...ptable-linguistics-experts-claim

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media ]

Works fine on Chrome and Firefox. Looks like a Safari bug.

Sigh. #FML

RT aparrish@friend.camp allison @aparrish@friend.camp

out: google it if you want to learn more

in: google it if you want a heavily monetized sequence of tokens in an order deemed to be statistically similar to information on the topic

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bioinformatics ]

As I was copy-and-pasting to re-toot a Mastodon post on to my blog, I had a huge moment of... I appreciate that there are a few folks I interact with on Flutterby. I do occasionally use it as long-term memory, although with the decay of the web I'm not sure how much value that has any more.

I've got a few bugs in my CMS that I've been threatening to fix for years, but maybe the social web's time is over and it's time to just do something else with the domain names.

[ related topics: Content Management Weblogs ]

Don't believe anything you read on Twitter: SEC says it did not yet approve Bitcoin ETF, X account was compromised

Listening to the WGBH podcast on The Big Dig, into episode 2, and a "duh" moment: Yes, it is likely that the reputation of Boston drivers for aggressive behavior is driven by the environment in which they were driving.

https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig

[ related topics: Nature and environment Pop Culture ]

Big Ed Magusson writing on the Girl on the Net blog: It’s not sex addiction, it’s my libido

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Writing ]

I realize that (European) music theory is an expression of white supremacy, and as such abitrary redefinition is part of the point, but how did we get to "a Fifth" being equal to 3/2?

[ related topics: Music Race ]

Explain Extended: Happy New Year: GPT in 500 lines of SQL

[ related topics: Invention and Design Databases ]

RT the good post queen @triz@octodon.social

call me a boeing 737 max 9 plug door with the way im getting sucked off mid flight

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Totally cool short little video of a crow figuring out how to retrieve a piece of food from a transparent tube using a stick. Corvids are awesome.

[ related topics: Food Video ]

So Hunter Biden has agreed to testify publicly, but has been ignoring a Congressional subpoena to testify privately. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) agrees to sign on to a contempt vote if others who've ignored Congressional subpoenas are included.

Specifically, Scott Perry, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs, and Kevin McCarthy.

Yay for nailing those hypocrite slimeballs to the wall.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT Andrew Plotkin @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place

If Joseph Campbell had played videogames, the Journey would have been

- Call to tutorial

- Refusal of the default video settings

- Climb things

- Ordeal of the boss

- Wake up in the sewers

- Gain double jump

- Climb things again

- Kill something three times

- Credits

- Scrimp for achievements

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Video ]

Today I learned about "ketohol"/(R)-(−)-1,3-Butanediol alcohol alternative drinks, and...

I don't have any evidence, and haven't pursued it very far, but man every acetate tocopherol vape juice hair on my body is tingling.

Paint rainbows all over your grain silos...

[ related topics: Photography ]

So how can we leverage this mistrust of Boeing into a massive drawdown of aviation. Like: we know that our addiction to travel is having huge climate impacts, but we keep flying. Can we make flying scary enough that we can have a future, instead?

[ related topics: Cool Science Aviation Global Warming ]

The thing about listening to "The Big Dig" podcast from WGBH is that, sure, we can look back on that project and say it was a boondoggle and disaster of epic proportions, but at the time people were saying the same thing.

Anyway, thinking a lot about the 101 widening (for the same price we could have gotten electrified SMART with 15 minute headways) and the upcoming highway 37 project (where, you know, we could also tear it out and just make Marin County, and, let's be fair, Petaluma, allow developers to build some workforce housing.

Meanwhile, as a bunch of people have pointed out, 2023 was the warmest year of your life and likely the coolest year of the rest of your life. And the IPCC 1990 predictions for "no action" are pretty much exactly on track.

Anyway, I'm in Episode 4, and it's a good listen.

https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig

[ related topics: tolkien Bay Area Pop Culture Real Estate ]

Holy crap. I've just rediscovered https://lycos.com/, and it looks like it's actually giving me some pretty good search results?

My brain just broke.

My own testing hasn't turned up an extant page yet, but there sure are a whole lot of references in Google's cache: Lazy use of AI leads to Amazon products called “I cannot fulfill that request”

[ related topics: Books Artificial Intelligence ]

Thinking this morning about how pseudo-technical language that is similar to, but oddly distinct from, scholarship in a particular subject, creates search engine topic subdivisions in which we have prejudices and conspiracies reinforced when we start to use that language...

[ related topics: Machinery ]

"Theory is the scat of music, what it leaves behind." -- W. A. Matthieu in "Harmonic Experience", p.5

[ related topics: Music ]

Somewhere recently I could swear I saw something about a Nature article examining language use and misinformation, and how various groups use jargon which isolated search results from mainstream thought, and now I can't find it. Ringing bells for anyone?

[ related topics: Nature and environment Woodworking ]

Bike parking at the Safe Streets Petaluma meeting, on the new city racks

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Bay Area Bicycling ]

Nature: How online misinformation exploits ‘information voids’ — and what to do about it, an article based on Nature: Online searches to evaluate misinformation can increase its perceived veracity Kevin Aslett, Zeve Sanderson, William Godel, Nathaniel Persily, Jonathan Nagler & Joshua A. Tucker

To shed light on this relationship, we combine survey data with digital trace data collected using a custom browser extension. We find that the search effect is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information. Our results indicate that those who search online to evaluate misinformation risk falling into data voids, or informational spaces in which there is corroborating evidence from low-quality sources. We also find consistent evidence that searching online to evaluate news increases belief in true news from low-quality sources, but inconsistent evidence that it increases belief in true news from mainstream sources. Our findings highlight the need for media literacy programmes to ground their recommendations in empirically tested strategies and for search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified here.

An example: If you hear about Bob Lazar, the UFO hoaxer, and search for "Zeta Reticuli" (the binary star system) and "Moscovium" (the element with atomic number 115), you'll get almost exclusively content backing up his story. And it's now old, but for a while if you used the phrase "sound science" in your searches, it would be biased towards deliberate petroleum producer content.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Nature and environment Space & Astronomy Current Events Journalism and Media Conspiracy Philosophy Aviation - Helicopters ]

"No, TypeScript is awesome, and you handle the code obfuscation with source maps" he said, and, okay, I can see the line number I'm on in the debugger, but Safari can't see the original variable names, so in fact the minimized code would be way more useful here anyway...

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Also, did Apple take whoever was responsible for the 2017-2019 MacBook Pros and put them in charge of XCode? Every release seems to get crappier.

I no longer have any mental model for what the assistant editor is supposed to think of as a "Counterpart".

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Case in point: Notice that the file is MeshCommand.m, right below that is a highlighted "h MeshCommand", like: what's that telling me. And over in Counterparts is something completely unrelated, and no matter how many times I close and reopen this accessory editor it keeps the same stale counterparts.

I guess a new tab fixes that? For a bit?

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Law ]

Wait, this cannabis dispensary's affiliate marketing program is "Refer a Friend" and not "Reefer a Friend"?

Is anyone even trying any more? Honestly...

[ related topics: Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Is anyone else reading this Elon Musk trying to extort the Tesla board for more shares thing as he just discovered that Tesla's "AI" efforts have a major fatal flaw, and it's about to come out,and he wants something to blame the resulting explosion on?

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

What on earth is the value of cold-calling and asking if I'm interested in selling our house? Like are there really people who say "oh, yeah, I hadn't considered moving, but it turns out, random phone caller, yeah, I *am* interested in a major life upheaval!" Or do people move often enough that someone may actually get ahead of other brokers by doing this?

Or maybe there are enough people struggling that offering an out so the homeowner can move elsewhere and start a new life pays off?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Real Estate ]

Lend Me Your Ear: Passive Remote Physical Side Channels on PCs, Daniel Genkin, Noam Nissan, Roei Schuster, Eran Tromer.

We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side- channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign chan- nels such as audio recordings and common Voice-over-IP applications, even after lossy compression.

Which leads to extracting keys from libgcrypt's ECSDA implementation, and detecting camping snipers in Counter-Strike:

These players joined one of CS’s standard gaming arenas named cs-assault which features a truck with a cargo container. Our attacker is inside the cargo container, and the camper could be lurking on either side of the truck. In this classic scenario, the attacker would normally not know which side of the track to face when emerging from the container; if they guess wrong, they will be an easy target as the camper is ready to shoot them right after their next step. To discover the camper’s location, our attacker repeatedly moves to the right and to the left, and detects which of the movement causes a change in the VoIP audio sent by the camper, which indi- cates entering into their frustum.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Games Automobiles Machinery Education ]

In December I told them "no, I don't want to be a club caller", now I'm calling 3 square dances for them in February, and showing up for a 4th...

Boundary issues...

In Northern California, Asian residents say they are being targeted by traffic stops — The Siskiyou County sheriff’s department has been accused of racial profiling in the past.

[ related topics: History California Culture ]

Just saving this for the next time that someone objects to a development because of lack of places to put trash cans...

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT Zhuowei Zhang @zhuowei@notnow.dev

The only non-programmer to buy the Apple Vision Pro yanks it off their head in horror when they see the top apps are all about thigh-high socks and ThinkPads

[ related topics: Apple Computer Software Engineering Clothing ]

A Comparison of Psychological and Work Outcomes in Open-Plan and Cellular Office Designs: A Systematic Review Olivia James, Paul Delfabbro, and Daniel L. King

Consistent with previous reviews, open-plan workplace designs were found to be negatively associated with health, satisfaction, and productivity. Significantly, very few positive effects were found throughout the entire review, with not a single study measuring productivity finding a positive effect. Furthermore, the empirical evidence does not support the anecdotal claims of increased collaboration and communication between open-plan office workers. ... While open-plan workplace designs may offer many financial benefits for management, these appear to be offset by the intangible costs associated with the negative effects on workers’ health, satisfaction, and productivity.

https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020988869

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Work, productivity and environment ]

RT bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺 @bert_hubert@fosstodon.org

And another unfortunate security thing I learned today is that .svg files can contain JavaScript, and that your browser will happily execute that if someone directly views your image (so not through ). This has consequences for anyone hosting user supplied images. Thank you Wander Nauta for pointing this out. The painful story is here: https://github.com/berthubert/trifecta/issues/38

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

If you are tempted by online advertisements for heated gloves, DO NOT do any business with the scam artists known as "Vernier Shop", "Vernier Research", or probably a whole bunch of other domain names.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Art & Culture ]

Just thinking about how the health of the stock market is a measure of how much the productivity of labor is allocated to capital...

[ related topics: Health Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Running around the house with a Kill-a-Watt, measuring the idle power consumption of all of the things. Some surprises, both in how much some idle wall warts draw, and how modern USB chargers are essentially leakless

And our various camera draw less than I thought. And the clock in our stove is pretty power hungry.

[ related topics: Photography Sports Real Estate ]

So I think, pre-solar, we pay roughly $8.26/kW/day across our various tiers. I have accounted for roughly 100-130 watts of our house's idle load of about 230 watts. Our answering machine, main router, ONT, hub, and UPS for data consume about 30 watts, so $90/year, the house server is pulling 30-40, that might be worth finding something lower power consumption for.

Now to track down those extra hundred watts... Fridge? HVAC? Idle car charger?

[ related topics: Automobiles Real Estate Woodworking Photovoltaics Energy Monitoring ]

Firefox is my primary browser. I live with the weird-ass shit it does on mobile (dude, where's my address bar?), I endure all of the crap, and even nod in agreement when Mozilla complains that Safari and Chrome are competing unfairly.

But holy fuck, the fact that I cannot trust it to give me an unaltered version of a PDF from my insurance company is un*fucking*forgiveable.

I don't care that it can't render and print PDFs reliably. That's fine. Just download the fucking thing as is.

JFC.

[ related topics: Open Source Theater & Plays Graphics ]

Just kinda RTing this warning that answering questions on LinkedIn is giving your labor to AI training, on the other hand I know a guy who's kind of an obnoxious bigot who seems to spend a lot of time shitposting on Quora, and I haven't said anything, because fuck Quora.

So maybe if you wanna shitpost on LinkedIn and poison their data set, maybe more power to ya?

https://mastodon.social/@wirepair/111797395838999984

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

There's a Shamrock (Materials) at the end of the rainbow.

[ related topics: Photography ]

In "really? I'd never have suspected that a DA's office might make up bullshit for propaganda purposes." news: Northern California Public Media: Sonoma County DA's fentanyl ad features fake storyline

Via SFGate: Bay Area DA admits 6-year-old's playground fentanyl overdose never happened

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media California Culture ]

So, uh, who do I have to kill to cancel iCloud billing. The Apple instructions do not, apparently, work, as we keep getting $.99/month on our credit card...

Beginning to think cancelling recurring charges with Apple works about as well as trying to tell them you no longer have an iPhone and don't want to participate in the iMessage ecosystem any longer.

Sigh.

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

Account update email offered the option to "Chat with a live person"... the fact that they have to specify "live" explains so much about customer support from other vendors.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

Holy shit: this comment about Boeing and Spirit's processes on the 737.

Via.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

It's spelled "AI", but it's pronounced like the Wilhelm Scream.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

Not pleased with our console on the work project, so I spent some time hacking on a language parser framework that lets me quickly respecify and reconfigure the grammar, and inspect the state at parse failure so I can do completion and whatnot, and...

Language stuff is fun. May have to implement these ideas in something other than Objective-C for wider distribution. Gonna have to move at least some of it over to JavaScript for UI reasons...

[ related topics: User Interface Work, productivity and environment ]

Good reminder that we watched the movie we were gonna watch and it's time to cancel the Netflix plan before it auto-renews.

Netflix is going to take away its cheapest ad-free plan

https://www.theverge.com/2024/...ubscription-ads-earnings-q4-2023

[ related topics: Movies ]

Video shows massive waves crashing Army base in Marshall Islands, causing extensive damage

Direct Twitter link.

[ related topics: Current Events Television Video ]

Seeing a lot of celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Mac, but to my mind the Mac was the beginning of the end of personal computing. It turned the computer into an appliance rather than a platform for exploration. A toaster rather than a drill press. At the time it was a tool for creative expression, but the evolution of Apple as a company has definitely been towards tools for consumption.

Bring back source code for BIOSes and schematics and hackability and general purpose I/O.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Open Source Macintosh ]

In a new announcement, Ring to now require warrants to share your video with law enforcement

This week, we are also sunsetting the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool. Public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events. They will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app.

Ring ends feature that let police ask users for videos via Neighbors app.

Bloomberg (registration required): Amazon's Ring to stop letting police request video from users

AP: Ring will no longer allow police to request doorbell camera footage from users

EFF: Victory! Ring Announces It Will No Longer Facilitate Police Requests for Footage from Users

Via /..

[ related topics: Books Privacy Weblogs tolkien Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement Pyrotechnics Community Video ]

JFC. WTF is this clownshow? I'm trying to cancel iCloud Drive. The instructions don't work. I follow the instructions to the System Settings for iCloud+, click "Change Plan", the button blinks, and nothing happens.

But the best part is: ya try to go give feedback on these chucklefucks' "how to cancel iCloud" page (like you should fucking need instructions!), and the "How can we make this article more helpful?" text box is read only.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Cracked: Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out. It's easy to just point to his comments on no longer being a Libertarian, but there's lots of good stuff in here. I was gonna do a pull quote about QAnon and MAGA stuff, and then I was gonna do a pull quote about what "Jewish" means in the context of the current razing of Palestine, and then about race privilege, and the Three Stoges and meaning of comedy and... yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in here.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Libertarian ]

Kyle Orland in Ars Technica: Did an AI write that hour-long “George Carlin” special? I’m not convinced.

"Everyone is ready to believe that AI can do things, even if it can't."

Interesting exploration into why we seek out the kayfabe in our entertainment, and how believing in the "magic" of LLMs scratches that itch.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

I've been wondering when Tesla shares were going to start to collapse, and if this spreads a bit it's gonna be very interesting for the Bay Area, as so many startups are propped up by people who made money in TSLA and are hodling...

WaPo on how the recent earnings call was a disaster. But the cheap car will be out in 2026. I guess they've given up on promising actual Full Self Driving.

#GiftArticle https://wapo.st/4b6UtAp

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture Automobiles Currency ]

The importance of user testing. An elderly friend just got rid of the Brother laser he'd been using because his attempts to buy toner kept ending in failure. So he bought a (shudder) HP inkjet, with the promise of automatically mailed refills.

He just ran out of ink. I'm trying to walk him through "yeah, whatever" on the privacy policy on the iPhone app. Which I fucking set up for him and clicked through once.

He can't figure how to get past the legalese, and may drop the subscription.

[ related topics: Privacy History iPhone ]

Wreckage Systems 65daysofstatic/65 Labs on Patreon: JANUARY DOOM

Here is a major issue we are currently tussling with. Since we started work on Wreckage Systems, the notions of generative/procedural art and, in particular, 'A.I.' have become increasingly loaded terms. As we hopefully made clear in various posts over the last few years (this one comes to mind), we are deeply, deeply sceptical about A.I. and all the algorithmic and technological answers being carelessly thrown at what are actually political and structural problems in the name of progress/infinite growth/capitalism-is-fine-actually-and-will-save-us-from-climate-change-honest. 65LABS has picked a side, and it is Team Luddite. Against us, these tech bros are not only destroying the internet, not only devaluing art, not only making the already-precarious lives for creative workers even more precarious, not only failing to understand that the meaning and magic of art is not contained in its particular combination of pixels or samples but rather created in the ripples of social relations that any piece of art makes as it pushes its way into the world, not only are they failing to understand that making art is, at best, to clumsily capture a snapshot of something larger, a fragile, flawed, always-incomplete communication of intent from one/some humans to others, NOT ONLY ALL THAT, but also (and yes, admittedly more trivially), they have tarnished this curious little space of computer-based art that uses generative tools to make itself. Because they do not use these tools in the name of exploring liquid, impermanent art that flutters around a recognisable core but never achieves a single, fixed state. They are employing them solely to be able to dig faster to the bottom of lowest common denominator Generic Internet Content.

Via

[ related topics: Politics moron Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Heinlein Net Culture Clowns Global Warming ]

RT Gerry McGovern @gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green

Road traffic collisions fell in Edinburgh by 30% in the 36 months after the 20mph policy’s introduction https://www.thenational.scot/n...and-say-speed-limit-campaigners/

Pickup trucks are 108% more likely to kill pedestrians https://towardsdatascience.com...-are-killing-people-de6ce08bac3d

At intersections, SUVs are more likely than cars to be involved in accidents https://www.iihs.org/topics/bibliography/ref/2249

Being hit by a 1,000-pound heavier vehicle results in a 47% increase in probability of being killed. Fatality risk is even higher if it's an SUV. https://www.nber.org/digest/no...weight-and-automotive-fatalities

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Current Events Machinery ]

RT Alex C @neuralex@neurodifferent.me

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was people asking me for tech support help and me having to slowly, patiently explain to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

[ related topics: Nostalgia Interactive Drama User Interface Boats ]

Once again we see that the world is not worthy of Chuck Tingle: Tingle writes on Facebook about the current Hugos controversy:

finally had time to get informed about xiran jay zhao, rebecca f kuang and neil gaiman being removed from hugo ballot without explanation and hugos claiming they were 'disqualified' but not being able to say why. there is something about this that i think only i can say so here goes:

i philosophically believe my story SPACE RAPTOR BUTT INVASION deserved its nomination because of my views on art, but i also know my views are rare and extreme. my circumstances were very unique and strange, so consider this: EVEN SPACE RAPTOR BUTT INVASION WAS NOT DISQUALIFIED

look up the circumstances of my nomination if you are unfamiliar. apparently that was NOT enough for a disqualification but some mysterious thing about the work of xiran jay zhao, rebecca f kuang and neil gaiman is?

again i am not saying i should have been disqualified and i could write a dang 50 page thesis on art theory and why i believe in my nomination, but compared against the current situation it says a LOT. i am very disturbed and saddened by the treatment of these authors.

The Bookseller: Controversy over 'inexplicable' exclusion of R F Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao from Hugo Awards 2023

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Current Events Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Neil Gaiman ]

Facebook ad which says "my wife's boyfriend got me this ice bath". Not sure what's going on here, but if there's an ad target tranche that assumes poly relationships are mainstream enough to target, and I'm in it, why are they missing the mark generally?

Or is this just LLM generated spew?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Marriage ]

Aha moment of the morning: markets need enforcement. The term "free market" is a diversion.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Even though my wife knows my phone unlock code, connected devices and household services companies need to stop treating identity like everyone in a household shares a Facebook account...

In other news, our refrigerator is now hooked up to an OhmConnect switch.

[ related topics: Current Events Marriage ]

Kathleen Moriarty at RIPE Labs: The LLM Misinformation Problem I Was Not Expecting. In which a teacher of Masters level work at Georgetown University finds her students citing publications they found on the Internet which were generated with LLMs, resulting in much bogosity in their work.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Education ]

Zodiac wants huge amounts (like $1500) for a replacement remote. Turns out we can do almost all of what we want to do with the swim spa with a $40 mechanical timer and a couple of $15 pneumatic switches, except... Anyone have suggestions for a way to make sure the pump always runs for 5 minutes after the heater shuts off?

The "Corn is a Platform" exchange has me thinking about how on the one hand agriculture in the US is about paying subsidies to huge landowners who have created a mythical paragon of farming as a social good on one hand, and Joel Salatin's self-entitlement and casual acquaintance with facts on the other, and... it all makes me never want to eat anything ever again...

https://forum.openglobalmind.com/t/corn-is-a-platform/575.html

[ related topics: Food Community ]

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox. On Apple VisionPro fucking up everything we once knew about user interfaces.

It was bad enough when they took scroll bars.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs ]

We're trying to squeeze every last watt out of our power consumption, and the workshop is brightly lit. Which means that if I'm in and out on yard projects, it actually sucks down considerable power.

Anyone got suggestions on occupancy sensors? I see that one can pay as little or as much as one would like for them...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

My shocked face: Visual Studio Magazine: New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure on Code Quality'

The "Coding on Copilot" whitepaper from GitClear sought to investigate the quality and maintainability of AI-assisted code compared to what would have been written by a human. In other words: "Is it more similar to the careful, refined contributions of a Senior Developer, or more akin to the disjointed work of a short-term contractor?"

Spoiler: Disjointed junior programmer, with lots of re-implementation rather than re-use, and lots of fairly quick churn.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Television Artificial Intelligence ]

Finding the air cannon.

tldr; An agricultural air cannon began firing every two minutes all night long disrupting the sleep of many in my community. I used Google Maps, three listening posts, and a programmed simulation to pinpoint the field hosting the air cannon. The county tax assessor office identified the land owner. I had a phone conversation with the farm manager. That conversation was coincident with the cessation of the nighttime air cannon. I can sleep again.

Using cell phones for timing.

Via

[ related topics: Politics Community Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

RT Brooke Vibber :blobcatcoffee: @brooke@bikeshed.vibber.net

apple vision pro has downward-facing cameras to watch your hand motions in your lap

just sayin'

[ related topics: Apple Computer Photography Movies ]

RT Davey :sugar_approved: @sugar@goblin.camp

the opposite of cruising for a bruising is scampering for a pampering

More knowledge that I don't have the tuits in my life to pursue, but might at some point: RT Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social

if you're interested in practical EMI/SI/PI stuff in PCB design, these are the resources that I would recommend checking out:

- Rick Hartley's talk "The Extreme Importance of PC Board Stackup" (which was mind blowing and made me change how I think about electricity entirely)

- Phil's Lab's series on PCB design for EMI and SI

- Robert Feranec's entire YouTube channel, especially his interviews with Eric Bogatin

none of this is a black art and you CAN learn it, even with a hobbyist background!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Cool Science Art & Culture Graphic Design ]

The "entirely free" bit is kinda ancillary, this may be useful at some point (though I am quite happy tossing a few bucks via Patreon to Tara for my Mastodon presence): Running a Mastodon instance entirely free forever

[ related topics: Sports ]

Learning that "What3Words" took "What Free Words" on the basis that it sounded similar, now I want to buy "WhatTweeWords" and dedicate it to creating a proprietary identification system for things that are affectedly quaint and sentimental.

"Grandma's knickknack shelf"...

[ related topics: Education ]

Oooh, the third in Cooper Beckett's "Osgood" series is coming out end of February!

https://spectralinspector.com/

Storing this off 'cause I wanna explore some of these pictures later: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: Webb Depicts Staggering Structure in 19 Nearby Spiral Galaxies

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Astronomy Current Events ]

Yeah, if you've been around for any amount of time you already knew this: The Conversation: Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names

The article references a number of papers, and describes how they mined comments from Huffington Post's transitions from free-for-all to stable names to Facebook commenting. With predictable results.

Deliberation and Identity Rules: The Effect of Anonymity, Pseudonyms and Real-Name Requirements on the Cognitive Complexity of Online News Comments

https://doi.org/10.1177/003232171989138

Anonymity and Online Commenting: The Broken Windows Effect and the End of Drive-by Commenting

https://doi.org/10.1145/2786451.2786459

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft Nature and environment Current Events Model Building ]

Don Norman in Fast Company: I wrote the book on user friendly design, what I see today horrifies me.

[ related topics: Humor Books User Interface Graphic Design ]

Thinking about how the local loud complainers are just fine with tying up a prime piece of public land that restricts most uses of it to subsidize various underperforming businesses, but propose building housing on a part of it to Fund turning the rest of into publicly usable space, and people lose their fucking minds.

It's almost like the real problem is letting the poors live here or something...

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Real Estate ]

I too am on ancient seedy cracker, there, snack box. I feel ya.

(Pic: line on a box of buckwheat crackers that reads "I'm an ancient seed")

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

I linked to this back in 2017, but it's making the rounds again, and it's worth a re-read, especially since I've been thinking a lot about the value of history, and how much we re-tell stories in the context of our current culture. Often telling that as what we'd like it to have been, rather than how it was.

Strange Horizons: Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift, by Erin Horáková. On how the popular image of Kirk as womanizer interacts with the canon.

[ related topics: Star Trek Sociology California Culture Archival ]

Got a couple of gift articles left for the month, and this one seems important: Washington Post: Jackie Robinson statue found burned, dismantled in Wichita trash can

#GiftArticle https://wapo.st/3UlkS7x

Another #GiftArticle: Washington Post: The NFL ruins its players, and then looks the other way

https://wapo.st/3SEDwpK

I don't wanna get all up in the Taylor Swift thing, she's gonna date who she's gonna date, but I do worry about the normalization of gladiator sports among a generation of Swifties. We should be eliminating chronic traumatic encephalopathy as a spectator sport.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sports ]

Another Washington Post #GiftArticle, this one on the human cost of the NFL weaseling out of paying under the terms of the CTE settlement.

https://wapo.st/3SBxLcq

[ related topics: Sports ]

RT John Cutting @jcutting@vivaldi.net

A passenger airline client is developing the complicated scheduling tools to ensure that pregnant employees can minimize working in states with actively dangerous restrictions on reproductive healthcare. Pilots also need to rethink where to divert if a passenger has a prenatal medical emergency.

The nearest airports are not necessarily places where care can be provided. This is a major safety, moral, and reputational risk, and it's damned shameful that we have medical "dead zones" in America

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Aviation Work, productivity and environment ]

Still stuck on the fact that my (gas) stove draws 5 or 6 watts at idle, and the completely crappy UX of my dishwasher, and thinking about the incentives that mean that modern keyboards have >80k transistors, vs <5k in a 6502.

Anyway, I used a sqrt and a divide inside a loop yesterday, and thought about it.

[ related topics: Law ]

An Ask MeFi question about terminology for preserving food led me to search for "putting food by", and... uh... I knew Twitter had gone to shit, but Google is amplifying this weirdly...

Screenshot is of featured Tweets including someone calling Bill Gates a "Eugenicist and Evil Vaccine Pusher", same poster with video about Cruz's child porn assertions on FB and IG, and the House Energy & Commerce Committee on household finances.

[ related topics: Humor Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Food moron Video Real Estate ]

RT Comrade Kip Van Den Bos, noted homosexual @tobi@goblin.technology</a.

Mastodon dot com posters talk a lot about "committing to the bit", which I can only assume is some kind of pony play reference

RT Hapbt @Hapbt@mastodon.social

@babe if you don't hate all operating systems the same amount for different reasons you're probably lying to yourself about one of them

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]