Flutterby™! From 2024-02-01 to 2024-02-29

The thing I like about C? Code written back in the '80s compiles just fine. Perl? Same damned thing.

Python? Yeah, they've got tools to manage all of the issues.

C++? Sorry, namespace semantics changed subtly, and will subtly change back, because fuck you, that's why. And deities forbid you should try to find cross-platform ways to use Boost. Just code to POSIX and do your own smart pointer types from the ground up.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Monty Python Python hubris ]

Those of you familiar with toxoplasmosis and T. gondii in humans already know the answer to this headline: Something Strange Happens to Wolves Infected by Infamous Mind-Altering Parasite

Infected wolves were also way more likely to become pack leaders. T. gondii may increase testosterone levels, which could in turn lead to heightened aggression and dominance, which are traits that would help a wolf assert itself as a pack leader.

In humans it's also linked to schizophrenia, which kinda meshes with that whole "pack leader" thing: Toxoplasmosis and behavioural changes doi: 10.1016/j.jfo.2020.01.001.

Via

Always a good reminder: RT djb@cr.yp.to Daniel J. Bernstein @djb@cr.yp.to

Columbia Accident Investigation Board, final report, 2003, volume 1 (https://history2.nasa.gov/columbia/reports/CAIBreportv1.pdf), page 191: "The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Struggling with this a lot: RT pollyjay @axoplasm@pdx.social

@enobacon @crowdotblack “my own decisions don’t seem to matter much anymore” p accurately describes the scale of 21st c problems

I mean yeah I can walk away from Omelas but that kid is still locked in the cellar

PsyPost: Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success

“Heterosexual men who play extreme metal guitar do not seem to be doing it to attract women, as has been suspected about musicians of other genres,” DeLecce told PsyPost. “Instead, it seems they are trying to impress and/or intimidate other heterosexual men with their skills.”

[ related topics: Music ]

Facebook ad for some Chinese EV manufacturer suggesting that they're building "aviation-grade service and design".

Which, I suppose, means that it's super freakin' expensive, the door plugs will blow out on it, and if your mechanic leaves a bolt off, hundreds of people will die...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Cool Science Aviation Graphic Design Fabrication ]

Gotta say, all of my friends on this exclusive group of new experts picked by LinkedIn to give out knowledge to their LLM training efforts are feeling pretty darned smug about how well we've demonstrated or skills to our peers...

In other news, are neurotypicals really this gullible?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Machinery Trains ]

Okay, JavaScripties: Imagine you had like a combo box, where you're filtering the contents of a <div> with a text box. And you wanted to make that contents clickable, and make the <div> go away when the text box loses focus.

I currently have a half-second timeout on destroying the <div> from the blur event. Anything less and I don't get the click.

(WKWebView, if it matters)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld: Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole

Ben Werdmuller: Stripping the web of its humanity

I tried Arc Search, the new mobile app from the Browser Company. Its central insight is that almost every mobile browsing session starts with a web search; rather than giving you the usual list of results, it prioritizes building a web page for you that contains all the information you asked for.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design ]

bioRxiv: Syntactic Sugars: Crafting a Regular Expression Framework for Glycan Structures Alexander R Bennett, Daniel Bojar

doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.01.578383

Via

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson ]

If you publish an RSS feed, *please* put it in a "link" element with type "application/rss+xml". Don't just link to it somewhere in the body of your text in an "a href=...", it's really hard to suss out that automatically.

If we're, say, building browser features where we offer "tell me when this page updates" to users... For instance.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management ]

We're using APIs rather than screen scraping because APIs *should* be more stable, but holy crap the number of API revs that require keeping up with bullshit makes screen scraping seem like maybe not a bad idea...

"Oooh, a syntax highlighter for code on my web page, that sounds cool!"

Instructions: "just npm install ..."

Fuck me, no. Tell me how the damned thing works.

Today's XKCD points out that "we figured out the greenhouse effect closer to the start of the Industrial Revolution than today".

Meanwhile, the IPCC estimates from 1990 for "no action" closely match the current situation.

On the one hand it's like "Russian oligarchs getting rich off pump&dump schemes bad", on the other hand, fuck investors who buy into Trump scams...

#GiftArticle Washington Post: The wild probe into investors of DWAC, Trump Media’s proposed merger ally

https://wapo.st/3SKVcju

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Personal Lubricant ]

I was never a Quora fan, it always seemed like gamified mansplaining, but it's interesting to see this article about how "AI"/LLM generated content destroyed it right along side posts talking about using ChatGPT to rough out software.

Especially since I've been pondering a lot what code idiom and process smells one can use to suss out a healthy software ecosystem.

https://slate.com/technology/2...ra-what-happened-ai-decline.html

[ related topics: Health Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

Wandering in Samuel P Taylor State Park, Bunch of these beauties around.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Love the twist in this redwood

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Picture for that twist in the redwood...

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

So, in electricity, the positive pole is the one that lacks electrons. The negative pole has an excess of them.

So I'm thinking now about positive thinking. Is that lacking people?

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

Washington Post: Paris banned e-scooters. Now it is taking on SUVs.

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

A few years ago, Charlene and I were sitting on opposite sides of the couch with our laptops, working on a presentation on CO2/PMT that she was doing for the UU church. We had a Google sheet up, and were passing links back and forth via email, and...

A few days later, I saw https://MeshOS.com. Big shared zoomy canvas, drop your web pages and PDFs on it, draw arrows & notes. I joined.

I have struggles with dev direction, but we need to pick up some users. If this sounds cool, let's chat?

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Woodworking Global Warming ]

John Scott-Railton ☕ @jsrailton@mastodon.social gives an example of a bot network on Twitter missing an image on a post, but still giving all of the responses to what would have been there in an attempt to try to build legitimacy and algorithm cred.

[ related topics: broadband ]

RT josh@phocks.eu.org josh :bocchi_arch: @josh@phocks.eu.org

a CEO can never be held accountable therefore a CEO must never make a management decision

RT William Lindsey :toad: @wdlindsy@toad.social

Horrifying: as Robert McKie reports, faked scientific research papers are becoming more and more common in academic journals, such that last year, journals had to retract more than 10,000 of them, a record number.

The problem began especially in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion are required to have published scientific papers.

#science #medicine #research

/1

https://www.theguardian.com/sc...arch-credibility-to-crisis-point

Well, I'm gonna blow through my #GiftArticle links quickly: Washington Post: Want Safer Streets? Paint Them

https://wapo.st/4brpxek

I'll get into conversations with folks digging through our free library out front, and occasionally get recommendations for books people have dropped off there, and... I just can't get into so much mainstream fiction: like yeah, these people are trapped in meaningless lives looking for fulfillment from communities that don't care for them, while fucking up their relationships with repressed (vanilla) urges they dared not speak.

How bout some new models?

[ related topics: Language Books Invention and Design Community ]

Looking for plumbing information regarding a few specific fixtures. Google is totally overrun with LLM generated spew.

Where we used to have message forums with real people, we now have linkbait with worthless "AI" generated generic text.

[ related topics: Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Ugh. That thing where you think a Mac is a Linux box, and you type something, and it isn't, and then you spend mumbledy time mucking about with Homebrew to try to make it useful, and it probably would be faster to copy everything over to a real computer, do the processing, and copy it back.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Macintosh ]

`brew install imagemagick`

And several minutes later I see "Pouring poppler..." and... Look, I know ImageMagick has a lot of dependencies because modern image file formats are shit, but holy crap. All I wanted to do was "for a in *.jpg; do convert -geometry 50% $a.jpg `basename $a jpg`_small.jpg; done"

RT lolgop @lolgop@journa.host

Someone of global stature needs to stand up and say that House Republicans under direction from Trump are trying to hand Ukraine to Putin who will help Trump get a 2nd term so Trump can break NATO.

Won't shame Republicans. But needs to be at least clear that this is happening.

[ related topics: Politics Real Estate ]

The Conversation: The problem with reinforced concrete

Early 20th-century engineers thought reinforced concrete structures would last a very long time – perhaps 1,000 years. In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less. Building codes and policies generally require buildings to survive for several decades, but deterioration can begin in as little as 10 years.

[ related topics: Architecture ]

RT thedansimonson@lingo.lol 𒁕𒀭@thedansimonson@lingo.lol

Learn to use a profiler, you parasitic muppet

“Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy, Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source”

https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough

RT 𒁕𒀭 @thedansimonson@lingo.lol

Like, fuck, we just got more energy out of a fusion reaction than we put into it. We don’t know how to collect that energy. It took them like 70 years to get to that point. You’re not getting another energy source.

Altman is not making a statement of ambition or a roadmap. It’s an admission that he’s hopelessly bottlenecked and will be stalling very soon.

Futurism: Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy, Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source — "There's no way to get there without a breakthrough."

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," Altman told audiences, as quoted by Reuters. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion," adding that we need better ways to store energy from solar power.

[ related topics: Quotes Current Events Artificial Intelligence Photovoltaics ]

RT Steven Bodzin bike & subscribe @stevenbodzin@thepit.social

I see people criticizing fake images and saying that you can tell they are fake because the skin looks like plastic. Buddy, you need to come visit your local Sephora outlet.

#ai

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Bloomberg CityLab: Inside California’s Coming Fight Over Vehicle Speed Limiters

On Jan. 24, California State Senator Scott Wiener introduced a bill outlining a different approach. If California Senate Bill 961 passes, the state would be the first in the US to require technology known as Intelligent Speed Assist, which uses GPS location data to adjust a vehicle’s top speed to reflect a roadway’s posted speed limit. Wiener’s bill mandates that speed limiters be installed on all new cars sold statewide by 2027, with the devices set to 10 miles per hour above the speed limit. (Drivers would be able to temporarily override the system, and emergency vehicles would be exempt.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Invention and Design Current Events California Culture Maps and Mapping ]

Yeah, I'll burn a #GiftArticle for WaPo dunking on Nextdoor: https://wapo.st/3ukb2Zg

"“Nextdoor taught me that my neighbors are bad people,” said one former subscriber online. “I really would have preferred not to know that.” It’s not entirely the fault of the people who run Nextdoor. They’ve got all kinds of reminders to be kind, to not be racist, to not overreact. But its very existence fosters exactly that. It’s like owning a roadside bar and telling people not to drink and drive."

How to create a secure random password with JavaScript. Probably stuff you know, about modulo bias and using decent sources of randomness and so forth (although at least one of my little one-off (non-JS) scripts that manages one of my personal sites has random number collisions far more often than I think it should for reasons I've never bothered to fix because it's just an annoyance, but...), but it's in one place.

[ related topics: Weblogs Archival ]

404 Media: A ‘$3,500 Chastity Belt’: Early Apple Vision Pro Adopters Alarmed to Learn VR Porn Doesn't Work

I'm sorry, citizen, are you not content with the family friendly content that Apple has carefully curated for you?

[ related topics: Apple Computer Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

Because I know I'm gonna have to do this for at least one Windows user I help out (unless he switches to Mac first), Dr Ro Smith @Rhube@wandering.shop has instructions on disabling Copilot for Windows, taken from this Microsofto support question on removing it.

In a command prompt, paste:

reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot /v TurnOffWindowsCopilot /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

and then restart.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Macintosh Community ]

RT brettshavers @brettshavers@infosec.exchange

I just peer-reviewed a forensic analysis in a case.

The suspect mailed a package with a hidden Apple AirTag in it to a victim's old home address.

The package was forwarded to her new (and formerly safe) address....

Might be good to warn DV victims of unexpected mail.

@SwiftOnSecurity Just

Pernicious that this is a route that wouldn't show up with AirTracker or similar...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Invention and Design Bay Area Law Video ]

Fediverse thread by Shannon Skinner (she/her) @shansterable@c.im about left-handedness in design

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

RT Dan Morris @coldfish@sfba.social

@scott This is no "trend". Chesa Boudin was elected in Jan of 2020 and (according to my one remaining sfpd friend) the work stoppage started when he announced he would prosecute that cop who shot the guy through the window while he was running away - on his 3rd day on the job.

So, they basically got together with a bunch of people and started a recall campaign, and stopped arresting shoplifters. Then, when Jenkins was "elected" she promised there was no quid-pro-quo, and then the cops suddenly tripled shoplifting arrests and then she let the arrested cop go, saying the arresting officer didn't mean it - and he later sued her for defamation (because he never said that) and got a private settlement, because the suit vanished.

Honestly, I never thought this city was corrupt (at least not too much) until I watched that all go down.

Even if you HATE and DESPISE that Chesa guy, when cops don't arrest people intentionally, in order to get rid of an elected official, to free their buddy, that's really bad.

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

I sure would feel better about development methodologies and practices if those selling tools to implement said processes seemed to have their shit together.

(This is a post about Jira.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Also, I wish there were a way to vet RapidAPI providers. It's like an aggregator and proxy of some sort, I guess, but while there are a gazillion people reselling the same underlying API access for slightly cheaper, which is great, aggregating this stuff is a service worth paying for, there's no way to guess at who might be the most long-lived provider so we don't have to do this search again in a few months.

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Edit: I'm seeing more and more comments throwing doubt on this story, eg this toot

Edit 2: 404 Media: The Viral Smart Toothbrush Botnet Story Is Not Real

Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks — botnet causes millions of euros in damages

According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets. The source report says this sizable army of connected dental cleansing tools was used in a DDoS attack on a Swiss company’s website. The firm’s site collapsed under the strain of the attack, reportedly resulting in the loss of millions of Euros of business.

[ related topics: Current Events Skating Birds ]

Liebreich: The Unbearable Lightness of Hydrogen. Good reiteration of something you already know: the "hydrogen economy" is greenwashing bullshit from the existing natural gas and petroleum producers, and makes zero sense, because of physics.

[ related topics: Weblogs Economics ]

More external costs of the trend towards extreme vehicles: Slate: A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us.

If roads need to be updated to accommodate absurdly large cars, taxpayers will foot the bill.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Automobiles ]

Okay, so Snopes (and several other probably mainstream media sites) says that ExperianIDWorks(dot)com is legitimate, but holy shit this whole data breach notification thing feels like an elaborate phishing scheme.

And, fuuu, I know that there's a huge incentive for the breached companies to not have you sign up, and the whole Experian thing feels super scammy, but... this feels all out of control.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...ax-data-breach-settlement-email/

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Tomorrow night we're going down to Marin for a song circle with Marv Zauderer. Thursday I'm driving... I'm allowing 2 hours there, probably an hour and a half back... so 3 to 4 hours ... to call in the East Bay. And I've turned down quite a few East Bay calling gigs recently. And I'm thinking about square dance calling vs song circles, and what I'm putting my energy into, and how square dancing *needs* more callers here willing to subsidize the hobby ('cause calling is not a cheap hobby), let alone in the East Bay, and what we put our energies into.

One of the nearer clubs getting my services of late made some huge shifts in their calling because they wanted to feel like the caller was more a part of their social circles. And as I compare square dancing to song circles, I see just how much the idea of the caller as separate is baked into the activity, and how the song circle community can have nurturing additional leaders integrated into the activity.

One of Charlene's complaints with me calling is that we don't get a chance to dance together as much as she'd like. I don't know how to change, to reimagine, square dancing as an activity to be less hierarchical, to be more nurturing of new callers, to have a better mix of dancing and calling.

It really means an extreme re-work of the activity.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Work, productivity and environment California Culture Community ]

Something to ponder, as I put energy into building institutions and social structures: A Working Library: A Unified Theory of Fucks.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft. You will realize the loss of something you did not know you ever had. But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back. Maybe not every one of them; maybe not every time. Some people’s bags have been empty for a long while, and they may feel the need to ration whatever they have; some people have been taught that to give a fuck is to lose something, not realizing that to withhold is what it means to lose. But I believe—I know from having given and received, from having lost and been renewed—that enough of them will come back that you can keep on giving, for a while at least, for as long as any of us has time to give.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Writing Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

U.S. Department of the Treasury, IRS Release New Analysis Showing the High Return on Investment from Inflation Reduction Act Resources

Today the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released a new analysis showing the high return on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) investment in rebuilding and modernizing the IRS. Taking a more comprehensive approach to evaluating the transformational initiatives enabled by the IRA, the IRS estimates in a new paper “Return on Investment: Re-Examining Revenue Estimates for IRS Funding” that the IRA as enacted would increase revenue by as much as $561 billion over 2024-2034, substantially more than earlier estimates. If IRA funding is renewed when it runs out, as the Administration has proposed, estimated revenues would be as much as $851 billion.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Invention and Design Current Events Economics ]

So, I know I need to re-record this with a more excited VO, and there are various places to tweak the messaging and the graphics, but... we're at the point where we have to start having conversations about the work project with folks, and this is a minute-ten conversation starter.

https://us-west-1-meshos-video...aws.com/videos/WelcomeToMesh.mp4

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Graphics ]

Happy V.D.: New Study Might Surprise Locals

According to Innerbody Research, which just published the results of its 7th annual study ranking the Top 100 U.S. cities with the highest STD rates based on the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) most recent STD data (collected and analyzed over the past two years), cases in local counties are on the rise.

[ related topics: Invention and Design History Mathematics ]

RT program jiggler @pho4cexa@tiny.tilde.website

unit tests? actually, we subscribe to a more modern systems-thinking philosophy: "the specification of a system was what it does"

you see, there is no point in claiming that the stakeholders specified that a system should do what the system constantly fails to do

[ related topics: Software Engineering Philosophy ]

Does anyone listen to terrestrial radio any more? Thieves somehow steal 200-foot WJLX radio tower.

RT Wilhelm Fitzpatrick @rafial@hackers.town

It was called hyper_text_, a massively interwoven corpus of information.

We have replaced that vision with siloed collections of screenshots.

[ related topics: Archival ]

Fun night filling in for Gary Kendall at the Clutch Busters over in Concord last night, two or three squares (red light/green light) but as I got back home I realized... Conservatively, I loaded the car at, say, quarter after five yesterday, and left at 5:30, because Google gave a wide variety of arrival times. Got home at quarter to 11. Called from 7:30 to 9:30, but five and a half hours out of the house, ignoring any coordination and prep time and whatnot. 60 miles each way, so using IRS numbers, about $80 in mileage. Paid $120, so that leaves $40 to distribute between music licensing, music, gear depreciation, voice lessons, and... me. So including drive time, seven and a quarter an hour, before all of those other costs...

While I was driving, Eric Henerlau called, and we talked about how we need more callers in our area or this activity is going to drop below the critical mass threshold for lack of callers before it drops for lack of dancers.

Last Friday, Charlene and I wandered down to Aqus and there was a band playing there. Good musicians, good harmonies, but it was hard to hear the band over the conversation. We left after a little bit, walked to get groceries, and talked about why, and she pointed out that the band was having fun with each other, rather than having fun connecting with the audience.

As a caller, the only thing I've got is connecting with the floor, and that's a very hierarchical relationship. I realize that this is part of why Charlene and I find caller workshops so much fun even though the calling is often rudimentary and uneven; we're hanging out, and dancing, with other people who are experiencing the form in the same way that we do.

No good answers (except that we're definitely gonna work to support our friend who's trying to get a regular song circle going in Petaluma, 'cause that's something we can do together that's a less uneven way to build community), but further little dots in trying to figure out how we might find something that looks enough like square dancing that we get similar things out of it, but one that doesn't require so much effort on the part of just a very few to sustain.

[ related topics: Politics Music Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Automobiles Community Currency Real Estate ]

RT Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social

this toothbrush DDoS thing shows just how easy it is to get a dozen well-regarded news outlets to post a completely false story, as long as it sounds vaguely plausible and compelling. you only have to convince one reporter to write something and the rest will rush to write a story based on the content of the first article.

And, yes, I fell for it (for a short time), because the idea of someone having the 8MB or so to run Java on a toothbrush rather than engaging in software development seemed totally plausible.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events Television Archival ]

RT Zach Weinersmith @ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social

The Venn Diagram on this one may not be terribly encouraging, but *I* am giggling

[Image which reads: "Man yells out window:

Man: FREE SEX WITH AN ECONOMICS PROFESSOR! ABSOLUTELY FREE SEX WITH AN ECONOMICS PROFESSOR!



Caption:

Professor Rosen creatively demonstrates that the demand curve does not go to infinity at zero."]

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Economics ]

When did computers stop being so cool?

When did computers stop being so cool? (Damnit, with image.)

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT liffy 💜 @lifning@snoot.tube

is there slang for when companies try to cut costs by replacing real artists with plagiarism-laundering machines

if not, i propose: "six-finger discount"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Art & Culture ]

RT tante @tante@tldr.nettime.org

As someone in software for a while that has been the most surprising thing that Open Source did: It massively increased complexity even for small projects because "that's how Google/Amazon/etc do it".

Yes Amazon does Microservice architectures. They also have a few people for every service that knows the ins and outs. You have a team of 5 that now not only has to understand the problem but juggle dependency chains from here around the moon and back so your React App that should have been plain HTML doesn't fail while showing a basically static page.

You won't grow to Google/Amazon scale. It's fine. Just build a simple solution you can maintain.

Working on React/K8s or whatever is mostly you training yourself on your own dime and time to be a potential hire for some Big tech company that will fire you to juice the numbers at he end of the next quarter.

[ related topics: Free Software Books Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Pyrotechnics Currency ]

Gonna go out on a limb here and say that if it's gonna need $7T, then general AI isn't "right around the corner".

And, incrementally, we could get the energy part of this licked before we bothered to pursue spicy autocomplete, and solving that problem that's necessary for "AI" would be great whether or not AGI can succeed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Tempted to smoke a Super Bowl in honor of the day, but my voice can't really handle that, and edibles seem kinda out of the spirit of things. Plus I have projects to work on this afternoon.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Sports ]

Since I've done some timezone stuff, all this, and more: Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Watched Bathtubs Over Broadway last night, and quite enjoyed it, but/and it also gave me more to think about in terms of the "what history is worth saving?" and "what does history mean to us as a culture vs individually?"

But it was fun to see a niche of Americana that isn't widely exposed.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Sociology California Culture ]

I regret that I never got to know Robert, but Sharon's a friend, and writes about her husband's (terminal) dementia, and.... A funny from dementia's front lines

[ related topics: Marriage ]

Well, might be time to wire all of those security cameras: Edina Minnesota police warn that burglars are using WiFi jammers. Given the way that my Chevy Bolt drops Android Auto sometimes, I bet these things are pretty widely deployed.

https://www.kare11.com/article...08f6-8e13-4577-8a88-628d757207a2

Via https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/111919925948858094

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Law Enforcement Fabrication ]

Deciphering Glyph: Let Me Tell You A Secret

In which I provide you with hundreds of dollars worth of software consulting, for free, in a single blog post.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering ]

There are a number of different takes on this: San Francisco crowd attacks Waymo driverless car. Apparently the vehicle tried to drive through the middle of a Chinese New Year celebration in Chinatown.

I like this one: RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

@AndyGER @mastodonmigration Reading between the lines: an EMPTY car tried barging its way through a Chinese New Year CROWD in Chinatown. Totally unsurprised they got angry!

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events California Culture Automobiles ]

The thing I love about this collection of bizarre pictures about misrepresentations in stock photography of tech issues is that it makes clear that GAN generated images are not the beginning of WTF? in corporate communications.

https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/111926472890545992

[ related topics: Photography Economics ]

RT Patrick Breyer @echo_pbreyer@digitalcourage.social

🇬🇧European Court of Human Rights today bans general weakening of secure end-to-end encryption #E2EE because it keeps us all safe. https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/?i=001-230854 (par. 76 pp.)

This makes the client-side scanning on all smartphones contained in the EU Commission's #ChatControl 2.0 proposal clearly illegal.

EU governments must now finally remove the destruction of secure encryption from the #Chatcontrol 2.0 plans - as well as the blanket surveillance of non-suspects! We #Pirates will continue to fight for this.

[ related topics: Bay Area Civil Liberties Cryptography ]

Taking a break from the SPAR of the Oyster Cove project to do some shopping, and trying to figure out why this iteration feels so much less exciting. I think the restructuring around exterior balconies and complete ceding of the inner area to automobiles is a large part of it. It now feels like an outward facing condo project rather than pedestrian-oriented community.

[ related topics: Automobiles Community Real Estate ]

Mozilla downsizing, refocusing on AI. What stands out to me is that they're scaling down these various fads in order to pursue another fad.

Rather than maybe fixing PDF handling, all the mobile glitches, packages for Amazon Fire, making it so I don't have to switch to something else for buying music (square dance and sheet), using my insurance and financial serviCes sites, etc...

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02...on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/

[ related topics: Books Music Open Source Pyrotechnics Artificial Intelligence ]

The Facebook algorithm. Offering up stale news amidst pages and pages of outrage bait.

Image shows an event announcement for "tonight", 4 days old.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Television ]

Holy crap... U.S. Internet Leaked Years of Internal, Customer Emails

The Minnesota-based Internet provider U.S. Internet Corp. has a business unit called Securence, which specializes in providing filtered, secure email services to businesses, educational institutions and government agencies worldwide. But until it was notified last week, U.S. Internet was publishing more than a decade’s worth of its internal email — and that of thousands of Securence clients — in plain text out on the Internet and just a click away for anyone with a Web browser.

The money quote...

“The feedback from my team was a issue with the Ansible playbook that controls the Nginx configuration for our IMAP servers,” Carter said...

As Brian Krebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange observed:

Also, I'm still struggling to understand why they put Nginx in front of their IMAP servers. That's just one example of their reply that made no sense.

All I had to read was "Ansible"...

[ related topics: moron Net Culture Currency Douglas Adams ]

Why are kids doing the ‘Brexit tackle’? They’re having fun at adults’ expense – and mocking our toxic politics — Lola Okolosie

So where did the “Brexit tackle” come from? The phrase “Brexit means Brexit” became a joke right from its inception because it was so obviously meaningless – as even a Tory minister admitted at the time. In the face of great complexity, we were given what Fintan O’Toole called “ludicrous tautology”. That young people now repeat the political slogan during aggressive play should tell us that the phrase has become symbolic of a kind of empty-headed belligerence. If we keep in mind that the tackler is willing to hurt themselves – either by getting sent off the pitch or injuring themselves physically – then it can also be read as a pugnacious attempt to make things worse for yourself, just to make a point.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics moron Current Events Sports ]

Ugh. Sonoma 14.3 with a scaled view that's drawing a solid color has some weird-ass artifacts that indicate that they're not handling the seams between draw regions very well.

This is impacting my screen share video production. It's also a new bug.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Video ]

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion

When the Hugo Award voting and nomination statistics were released, no detailed explanation was given for why multiple authors and works were deemed “not eligible” even though they had enough nominations to make the award’s final ballot. The only official explanation came from overall Hugo Awards administrator Dave McCarty, who said “After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.”

However, emails and files released by another member of that Hugo administration team, Diane Lacey, shows that the rules “we must follow” were in relation to Chinese laws related to content and censorship.

Diane Lacey's apology letter. Same Letter on Facebook

Kat Jones wrote:

I would not be willing to participate in any way in the administration of an award under such circumstances again. I don’t think we, as a community, should put our Hugo Award administration teams in this kind of no-win situation.

Scalzi: The 2023 Hugo Fraud and Where We Go From Here

[ related topics: Free Speech Law Television Civil Liberties Mathematics Community Government ]

RT Jared White @jaredwhite@indieweb.social

The breathless coverage of AI right now on The Verge is a prime example of how media *choosing* to give oxygen to a technology increases its perception of legitimacy whether they intend to or not.

Imagine a major news publication writing story after story like:

"And here's another person cheerfully going about their day getting work done, and they aren't using any generative AI.”

“How does it feel not to use AI today?”

“I feel pretty great, actually.“

“Aren't you behind?”

“No.”

“Well OK!”

Dan Sugalski @wordshaper@weatherishappening.network

It's pretty clear that the big winners from the AI revolution are going to be those companies who manage to not destroy themselves before the AI revolution flames out.

Josh Collinsworth: I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind

[ related topics: broadband Writing Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Race ]

RT Joseph Thomas @josephthomas@beige.party

Why do people think reporting a company to the Better Business Bureau does anything? It’s not an enforcement agency. It’s a just a private company. The BBB is basically Yelp in a wig and sunglasses.

announcing freenginx.org

As such, starting from today, I will no longer participate in nginx development as run by F5. Instead, I’m starting an alternative project, which is going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities:

http://freenginx.org/

Air Canada's chatbot gave a B.C. man the wrong information. Now, the airline has to pay for the mistake

Air Canada, for its part, argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by the bot.

"In effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. This is a remarkable submission. While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website," Rivers wrote.

Civil Resolution Tribunal: Moffatt v. Air Canada

[ related topics: Aviation Law ]

RT Lalit Patnaik @lalitpatnaik@mastodon.cloud

@davidho When I was working at CERN, they conducted an independent safety and hazards audit for all employees. In presence of particle accelerators with high energy proton beams, radioactive materials, powerful lasers, and cryogenic systems, the most dangerous aspect of work was found to be the daily commute to work.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Portland Police Bureau officer admits traffic enforcement messaging was politically motivated

Various people have looked at San Francisco's enforcement suggestions say that it sure looks like SFPD has stopped doing traffic enforcement.

Via Matt Haughey 🦣 @mathowie@xoxo.zone who notes:

During covid, the Portland Police Bureau's budget was cut by 5% and the cops revolted, stopped enforcing crimes, and claimed it was due to defunding. The city is less safe due to the last few years of cops not doing their jobs.

I missed last summer when during a press conference a cop admitted they disbanded their traffic enforcement, told everyone in public there was no traffic enforcement, and all to score political points and get their funding back.

And:

it's kind of amazing when something dumb happens in city politics, and everyone says hey it looks like they're faking a story to push fear into the public while holding the city hostage until we pay the cops off (cops are already the biggest portion of the city budget), and then two years later a cop admits on record yeah, we totally made all that shit up to force everyone into a funding increase for cops.

[ related topics: Bay Area Law Enforcement California Culture ]

RT BlueLegend @threlm4280@dragonscave.space

Absolutely mind blown today. Found a website that summarizes terms of service for lots of services out there such as Facebook, Reddit, Amazon and others; ranking them from grade A, very good, to grade E, awful. Take a look and you might be shocked by some of the stuff we all miss because we don't read TOS. Needless to say, this is going in my important sites list. tosdr.org. Additionally, you can follow @ToSDR which is the official account for the site.

[ related topics: Books Space & Astronomy ]

So I can find it again: Vox: Is J.K. Rowling transphobic? Let’s let her speak for herself.

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture ]

Stored because we're starting to get some home automation stuff, and integration with non-cloud systems is a priority for me: Can you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes. If you're tired of Alexa and Google listening, a DIY option is possible.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Real Estate ]

Just a #GiftArticle link to Washington Post: The final repudiation of 2000 Mules to go along with the AP News article about the producers of 2000 Mules acknowledging in court that they have no evidence to support Georgia ballot box stuffing claims

#GiftArticle

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Just realized that Stardew Valley is completely colonialist and extractive, as you rampage through advanced underground civilizations that are capable of building gorgeous tiled spaces and woven cloth, collecting advanced magics and technological wonders, but isn't really capitalist, in that at some point you peak out on the resources you can accumulate without personal effort.

Even as the desert, beach and road are filled with fermentation barrels and jewel creation machines.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Jira. Requires regular shift-reloads, randomly logs you out, *and* uses significant energy.

Image: Safari telling me "this web page was reloaded because it was using significant energy" on a Jira page...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Second force-quit of XCode today. Too much more of this and I'm not going to feel special....

Why State Land Use Reform Should Be a Priority Climate Lever for America

RMI analysis shows enacting state-level land use reform to encourage compact development can reduce annual US pollution by 70 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2033. This projection, based on 2023 data, underscores the potential for significant impact within a decade. It would deliver more climate impact than half the country adopting California’s ambitious commitment to 100% zero-emission passenger vehicle sales by 2035. Here’s another way of looking at this: addressing America’s chronic housing shortage intelligently — by building more housing where people most need it — can deliver similar climate impact as the country’s most aspirational transportation decarbonization policy. How’s that for a two-for-one deal?

Via Kurt Nordback @kurtn@toot.bldrweb.org

Related: RT Mark Ingalls @ingalls@pdx.social

Something that stood out to me at AMS is that without significant change to GHG emissions, we’re likely to see CO2 levels around those of the Miocene within the next 50 years or so.

Temps during the Miocene were 3-4°C warmer on average than today. Iceland had a subtropical #climate, Greenland was ice free.

It will take temps time to catch up with GHG content, but us changing the atmosphere this rapidly was shocking to me. This CO2 concentration is likely to occur before I die.

#ClimateChange

[ related topics: Television California Culture Real Estate Global Warming ]

Fantastic post about the racism in ChatGPT that we are not talking about

[ related topics: Race ]

It's been a long time since high school French, and I'm not sure I can trust any of the online pronunciation guides since they don't match my memory on several other words, but a special "fuck you" to the sheet music writer who wrote "peine" with the "pein" on a quarter note, and the "-e" on a whole note, because I don't think there's any way to actually pronounce this appropriately that way.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Writing Currency ]

Pair of vegan raw Meyer lemon "meringue" tarts being prepped for delivery to unsuspecting neighbors, 'cause the tree is coming in and ya gotta get rid of that fruit somehow...

The Cafe Gratitude cookbooks strike again.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Kara Swisher in The Washington Post: How Trump pushed Silicon Valley off the rails

#GiftArticle https://wapo.st/49BZfo7

RT S March Nevan Sarah Aureli @Aurelianite@estrogen.network

you thought banning flipper zero was bad? get on Germany's level:

banning f12 and looking at the source code.



punishable with 3000 bucks.



and not for doing anything malicious with it. no. for responsible disclosure. IE: reporting a vuln to the company running it, waiting for it to be fixed, then reporting on it widely so people affected know they are pawned.



the company in question: Modern Solution (yes, that is actually their name.)

the sentencing: www.justiz.nrw/nrwe/lgs/aachen/ag_juelich/j2024/17_Cs_230_Js_99_21_55_23_Urteil_20240117.html (in german, but you can probably google translate)



what this means worst case: don't have any data stored with german companies, if you do, assume you are pawned and nobody can tell you, for fear of legal retribution.



#flipperzero

#flipper_zero

#modernsolutions

#modernsolution

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Open Source Law Sports Gambling ]

College of Law mourns Jan Graham, alum and former Utah attorney general, who first became famous for pointing out the hypocrisy in BYU's Testing Center rules about women's attire:

Graham, who attended BYU when women were unable to take tests while wearing jeans, went to the Testing Center in jeans and was denied permission to take a test.

She contested to no avail, and didn”t want to face winter winds and snow to go home and change.

She went into the bathroom, took off her pants, buttoned her long coat and went back to take her test.

The Testing Center employee believed Graham had a skirt on underneath her coat and let her take her test.

Graham wrote into the Daily Universe afterwards complaining.

“She said there was something perverse about a dress code that would prohibit a woman wearing blue jeans testing privileges, but permit the same student wearing no pants at all to take a test,” said Wood.

Via 🌈Dr. Frizzle @swilua@mastodon.world

[ related topics: Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment Education Clothing Woodworking ]

Just putting this in a place I can find it again, because I know I'm gonna get a message from someone at some point and I'm going to want to find this again: Ezra Klein’s Plan For Replacing Joe Biden Is Bad 'West Wing’ Fan Fiction

Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice: California Law Enforcement Agencies Are Spending More But Solving Fewer Crimes

This steep decline in crime-solving has occurred despite ballooning law enforcement budgets. From 1990 to 2022, Californians’ per-capita spending on law enforcement rose by 52% in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars to a total of roughly $25.5 billion...

[ related topics: Law Enforcement California Culture Flowers Economics ]

Wall Street Journal: We Tested an AI Tutor for Kids. It Struggled With Basic Math.

Khanmigo, a ChatGPT-powered bot, made frequent calculation errors during a Journal reporter’s test

Apparently Khan Academy thought it'd be great to teach arithmetic with an LLM, and that's going exactly as horrifically as you could have predicted.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

UK Tax Policy Associates: The invisible campaign to censor the internet

There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running the campaign, but we do know it’s facilitated by Google’s amazingly trustworthy approach to DMCA complaints made by companies that don’t exist.

[ related topics: Politics Free Speech Sports Net Culture Copyright/Trademark ]

Hey kids, careful about using biometrics: First ever iOS trojan discovered — and it’s stealing facial recognition data to break into bank accounts

[ related topics: Children and growing up virus ]

When a square dance caller asks for recommendations of recent releases of modern pop, and an MWSD music producer responds with a version of something that peaked on the Billboard charts in January of 1990...

Modern Western Square Dancing may have a bit of an age/culture issue, huh.

[ related topics: Music Sociology California Culture ]

Journal of Transport Geography Volume 115, February 2024, 103817: Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment:

Highlights

• Summarises car-related harm including crashes, pollution, land use, and injustices.
• 1 in 34 deaths are caused by cars and automobility with 1,670,000 deaths per year.
• Cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people since their invention.
• Car harm will continue unless policies change; example interventions are discussed.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2024.103817

[ related topics: Nature and environment Automobiles Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

I occasionally think about moving from Emacs as my basic editor. I know VSCode is kind of the "npm" of modern editors: Don't think about the build process for this platform, just install this plugin and everything "works", but I also know that VSCode is deliberate Microsoft lock-in.

Pulsar, the best code editor makes a case for the MIT Licensed offshoot of VSCode, Pulsar. Many of the justifications are kinda sketch, the fact that it's GUI only means that it likely doesn't work terribly well over an SSH session (it's been a while since I used X forwarding, and I think Wayland is deprecating that?), but it seems worth a try.

Looks like it has basic block operations (similar to how XCode does it), but lacks built-in record and playback features, which feels like a deal-breaker. I'll have to dig further. It also looks like the window/pane management, and file management, wants a lot of mousing...

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

Today I learned that the outer layer of skin is called the Stratum Corneum which Wikipedia reports is "Latin for 'horny layer'".

Spain: Priest arrested in Don Benito for 'selling Viagra'

Via Girl on the Net @girlonthenet@mastodon.social who observed:

Looks like he'll be doing some...

... hard time.

😎

RT Thank Fuck January’s Over @guffo@topspicy.social

@girlonthenet I bet he received a stiff sentence

Chris (so far) @perigrin@nerdfight.online<?a>

@pdcawley @girlonthenet @guffo I’d be surprised if the church doesn’t rise to the occasion here and make a hard stand against this kind of dickery.

Thank Fuck January’s Over @guffo@topspicy.social

@girlonthenet @perigrin @pdcawley I assume the church has the situation firmly in hand. I'm surprised the priest managed to pull it off for so long!

RT Chris (so far) @perigrin@nerdfight.online

@guffo @girlonthenet @pdcawley Fair. I think we can agree he has likely shafted his future with the church … just tossed it out

Matt Jones @solearther@dustbuster.club

@guffo @girlonthenet @perigrin @pdcawley I expect there’ll be a lot of criticism of the higher clergy for allowing this to occur - we’re sure to see a lot of bishop bashing over this

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Current Events Monty Python ]

Oh MacOS... Text field not showing up, so I use the view inspector in XCode to see that it's indeed there, click "continue" in XCode, and now suddenly it appears.

Woohoo. I love this platform.

I miss when computing at least kinda felt deterministic.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

Amaranth Hardware Definition Language (HDL) playground

I've long thought about how seemingly subtle changes in UX of online applications can have dramatically different impacts on the social dynamics of the community that surrounds them. This is a great read on that: Every Game Has the Community It Deserves

Original version on the author's blog: Rhys Frampton: Every Game Has the Community It Deserves

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Community ]

Every time I see "We have updated our terms of service" (privacy policy, whatever), I mentally append "pray that we don't update them any further."

[ related topics: Privacy ]

Kinda what I expected to see happening: Tell HN: To be honest.. GPT copilots aren't that great for programming

[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events ]

Whiskey Riff: Going To Have To Kick This Dude In The Pecker” – Billy Strings Addresses Backlash Over Alleged AI T-Shirt Designs

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Clothing ]

Google summarization gets it wrong again. https://streetmix.net/ is awesome, but not a musical artist...

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture ]

Washington Post: Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation

#GiftArticle Via

[ related topics: Politics ]

The real question is: how many of the Republicans who were pushing this bullshit knew it was a Kremllin intelligence op? Press Watch: The Hunter Biden story has done a total 180 but the MSM is in denial

Via Lucas Gonze, who asks:

Did James Comer know his one major witness was planted by Russian intelligence?

[ related topics: Star Wars Movies Fashion ]

RT Alex, Oasis Keeper @WizardOfDocs@wandering.shop

somebody sent me a photo of "advertising is the graffiti of the rich" written on a wall, and I'm honestly having trouble coming up with anything truer

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

The cost of doing business: Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘privacy’ software that actually sold users’ browsing data

FTC announcement.

[ related topics: Privacy Software Engineering Current Events Consumerism and advertising ]

RAD Game Tools: Intel Processor Instability Causing Oodle Decompression Failures

RAD has become aware of a problem that can cause Oodle Data decompression failures, or crashes in games built with Unreal. We believe that this is a hardware problem which affects primarily Intel 13900K and 14900K processors, less likely 13700, 14700 and other related processors as well. Only a small fraction of those processors will exhibit this behavior. The problem seems to be caused by a combination of BIOS settings and the high clock rates and power usage of these processors, leading to system instability and unpredictable behavior under heavy load.

As far as we can tell, there is not any software bug in Oodle or Unreal that is causing this. Due to what seem to be overly optimistic BIOS settings, some small percentage of processors go out of their functional range of clock rate and power draw under high load, and execute instructions incorrectly. This is being seen disproportionately in Oodle Data decompression because unlike most gameplay, simulation, audio or rendering code, decompression needs to perform extra integrity checks to handle accidentally or maliciously corrupted data, and is thus likely to spot inconsistencies very soon after they occur. These decode failures then typically result in an error message.

This M2 MacBook Pro goes wacky occasionally. Some of that might be MacOS Sonoma, which has some real doozies fo display bugs in everyday usage, but I kinda wonder if there's non-deterministic behavior in pushing other bits of the hardware too hard.

Via Dan Luu @danluu@mastodon.social

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Games Software Engineering Graphics Macintosh ]

Study finds potential gender stereotypes in kids’ food choice

Some boys think so, according to a new study of kids age 8-10 by researchers in the University of Oregon College of Education. The findings were published recently in the international research journal Appetite.

The children were offered a large spread for lunch, including sandwich fixings, chicken nuggets, fruits and vegetables, chips, candy, and a variety of drinks.

“Please eat until you are no longer hungry and take as much time as you need,” each child was told before being left to dine privately. Researchers later measured what and how much each child had eaten.

The study found that boys with high “social desirability bias, ” or the tendency to act in ways to seem more socially acceptable to others, ate fewer fruits and vegetables. That same association was not found with girls.

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Food Education Birds ]

Discussion at work about committing changes, and how software development is the only discipline where having "committed" something is supposed to be a positive...

Of course one of the examples of committing horrible acts is architecture...

[ related topics: Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Community Architecture ]

Beet coriander cakes on top of a dahl, with saffron "cream" sauce...

[ related topics: Photography ]

I have been trying to make my way through Henry George's Progress & Poverty, and I have to admit that I'm bogged down in the late 19Th c. language, and the self-importance of someone who clearly believes he has discovered Truth independent of academic thought of the era.

Anyone got recommendations for a good modern summary?

Going back through things to sort: Nature: What the climate movement’s debate about disruption gets wrong

The recent debate about whether climate activists should employ disruptive tactics tends to conflate all forms of disruption. The debate typically focuses on the public’s reaction to protesters, yet the more important question is whether a given tactic imposes disruption on elite decision makers. Most external analysts, and many activists themselves, fail to specify what approaches are most disruptive of elite interests and which elite institutions the movement should target. They also often misinterpret the lessons of historical social movements. We reconsider one of those movements, the Birmingham civil rights campaign of 1963, in light of the current strategic debate. We argue that disruption is necessary, but that not all “disruptive” strategies are equally effective. In particular, we advocate a strategy that can impose sustained and escalating costs on the elite sectors that can force politicians to confront the climate emergency. Priority targets include financial institutions that fund and underwrite fossil fuels as well as corporations, universities, pension funds, and other institutions that consume and invest in fossil fuels.

Via

[ related topics: Nature and environment Civil Liberties Education Global Warming ]

With any luck I'm now publishing a better Atom feed at https://www.flutterby.com/feed.xml. If you're reading this on an aggregator of some sort, you might want to switch to that.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management ]

That thing where I used Perl's "and" operator in some code a while back, and now I'm not sure what that code is supposed to do...

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

At Elsie Allen High School for the Sonoma County District 3 Candidates forum, and I guess this is the school sportsball team, but the "Lobos are safe" banner is just making me think "See the doggy! Pet the doggy! Doggy!"

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Bay Area Community ]

Wild turkey calls at the Indian Tree trailhead this morning https://youtu.be/_M_ZjwZS57I?si=Iyn4oquJjiqURiqY

[ related topics: Food Birds ]

Just pictures from the hike this morning

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Just pictures from the hike this morning

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Just pictures from the hike this morning

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Just pictures from the hike this morning

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Just pictures from the hike this morning

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

@sanae @dx @footsteps @CathyTuttle if it makes sense overall as a network, yes the next step is a protected bike lane, but #banCars as a philosophy says protected bike lanes are car infrastructure. Where we currently have a 10x redundant carway network, we should be ruthlessly shutting off car throughput to create low-stress bike connectivity & transit priority. In most current US design and construction practice, protected bike lanes are locking in narrow & unsafe designs to coddle moar cars💸

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Automobiles Graphic Design Machinery Fabrication Philosophy Bicycling Public Transportation Model Building ]

I mean, I'm just linking this for the headline because couldn't happen to two better people: Raw Story: 'Complete and total fraud': Alex Jones turns on Elon Musk after he's 'massively censored'

I'm lucky that I can only hear to 16 KHz or so.

(Image is of a December '98 Computer Shopper cover advertising "450 MHz Screamers")

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

In the same way that Brussels Sprouts are no longer the same food of our childhood, Jalapeño Peppers are changing based on commercial demand, to be less spicy so that the capsaicin levels can be boosted specifically independently of the pepperiness: Here’s Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Food ]

Argh. I am not sure where in the tool chain between Typescript and Mithril and source maps and whatever other abominations are standing in between the code that's served to Safari with demo data, and is working, and the code in the WKWebView that isn't working, lies, but I am extremely skeptical that digging through the layers of indirection and obfuscation here are globally improving productivity.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Maps and Mapping ]

Eros Blog: “Never Build Your House On Someone Else’s Land”

Fuck yeah I feel some smugness about that, theydies and gentlethems and glitterkittens! Nobody pays me to be a business consultant, but sometimes I do it anyway, for the sheer pleasure of being right on the internet. If you squint and hold your eyes correctly while you look at this situation, Zuckerberg personally lost thirty billion dollars of net worth in one day for not being an ErosBlog reader. And ErosBlog is totally free! So, you know, fuck that guy. Fuck him in particular.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Movies Net Culture Real Estate ]

Rosie Bennet's Fret Not, Episode 2: Brian May on AI, Mental Health, Fame, Plagiarism and the Internet

[ related topics: Health Movies Net Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

JavaScript bloat. Measuring the size of web pages in terms of JavaScript loaded.

A hell of an eye opener for those of us who were carefully tweaking images circa 1994 to try to get load sizes down to 40 or 50k....

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Republicans’ Absurdist Reproductive Policies Are Coming for Us All

When I first heard Roe v. Wade would be overturned, I knew I had to move my embryos out of a red state. The past few weeks have proved why.

[ related topics: Politics History Current Events ]

As someone who has developed software that shipped to hundreds of tHousands on physical media, how did it take me so long to realize that "devops" means "we test in production"?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8Q51ouA_s

H/T @genehack@dementedandsadbut.social

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Movies Software Engineering Theater & Plays Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

RT Sheril Kirshenbaum @Sheril@mastodon.social

Every year, students around the world submit videos to a "Dance Your PhD" contest. The goal is to "explain your research through interpretive dance."

This year's fabulous winner, Weliton Menário Costa, explores kangaroo behavior & promotes diversity. It is, by far, the best I've ever seen.

Go watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoSYO3fApEc #science #dance #art #animals

[ related topics: Movies Art & Culture ]

Google: Stop trying to do this LLM summarization bullshit.

Image is of a Google Search for "time to kill clint black bpm", one box result is for Clint Black's "Killin' Time", 121 BPM, first actual result is actually for "Time To Kill", 92 BPM.

[ related topics: Photography ]

"But that's going to damage the trolley and disrupt service! Why do you hate public transit?"

(Image says that the solution to the trolley problem is to "slip the switch" by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do, in order to cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt, from https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244 )

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Public Transportation ]

total PITA Zoom meeting for KBYG tonight has me thinking about other ways to broadcast and stream these things to make for better moderation and co-hosting.