Flutterby™! From 2024-03-01 to 2024-03-31

That troll on your local group? Did Reddit year-end recaps expose Russian interference in Alberta?

“It appears that we were actually being brigaded by Russian troll farms.”

Along with Sherwood Park, the subreddits for Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Grande Prairie, and a handful of other small cities throughout Canada also recorded Russia in their top three countries of origin for users last year — results that alarmed both local users and experts on foreign interference.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Starting to correlate some of the talking points of the pro-hyper-restrictive-zoning folks in my area with the interests of some of the major landholders, and... huh. Eeenteresting.

It's amazing how often I find myself ssh-ing into a Linux server to do basic everyday tasks, because MacOS's versions of the standard command-line tools lack functionality.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Macintosh Cryptography ]

At least my mom is smart enough to recognize that the "your computer is infected!" warnings are attempts at installing malware, now if I can just get her to realize that the conspiracy theory web sites that she's browsing are the source of them...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Conspiracy Government ]

Eric Swalwell in the recently released transcript of the House oversight committee's questioning of Hunter Biden is on fire.

Mr. Swalwell. I can tell you the date wasn't any time recently, because this is from a Blackberry. They don't make those anymore. We might get the pager code later from the majority.

It goes beyond the excerpts in the HuffPost excerpts: Eric Swalwell Expertly Roasts Donald Trump In Inquiry Exchange With Hunter Biden, though that snark kicks in about page 135...

Via.

[ related topics: moron Current Events Travel Pyrotechnics Real Estate ]

Let’s Talk About Magic Dick Theory in ‘Dune’

Magic Dick Theory holds that chosen-one narratives are actually about adolescent boys’ relationships with their, um, sexuality. Spend enough time bumming around university libraries and you’ll eventually come across the argument that, essentially, the acquisition of magical powers in these stories is a metaphor for entering sexual maturity, and that one of the functions of these stories is to give readers a spectacularly dramatic framework for processing masturbation. And look, ugh, I know, but here’s the thing: The Freudian gymnastics required to arrive at this interpretation are actually … pretty reasonable?

Ending on the exploration of "cake narratives", as in having and eating, that both critique a trope while reveling in it.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Sports Education Clowns Food - Cake ]

The Facebook ad reads "Untucked guys can finally wear suspenders.", and it took me quite a while to figure out which definition of "tucking" they were using, one that was inconsistent with suspender use...

Realizing it's been a long time since my last Flutterby redesign, like pre the popularity of tablets and web browsing cell phones, and I should see how people are doing the comments sidebar on mobile devices and the right CSS incantations to make that work...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

I've been playing around with some parser ideas, in Objective-C because I see some need for those concepts in work, but I'm thinking a language that works for other applications would be cool, so I'm like "maybe I should write that in C++, or... I've been wanting to learn Rust!"

And then I start to look at Rust, and all of the other things I could be learning, and man I'm just unmotivated to be learning technologies for their own sake right now. And that's kinda sad.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Education ]

Ugh. Work changed payroll providers, which led to a change in health insurance providers (and all sorts of other ancillary costs, and I'm not looking forward to taxes next year), but holy shit how in the year 2023 is UX so fucking broken?

Really, this level of suck on a web site has to be deliberate.

Also: Nationalize this shit now. Let's have healthcare like a developed nation does.

[ related topics: Politics Health Work, productivity and environment Government ]

Dear Anthem web site: It makes me extremely suspicious that someone is misusing types when my text number is "0" rather than something indicating that you don't have a phone number on file for texting.

Radley Balko writes about the current bullshit to try to clear the name of Derek Chauvin:

The retconning of George Floyd

Bari Weiss's Free Press is the latest outlet to tout a conspiratorial documentary alleging that Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted. It's all nonsense.

The retconning of George Floyd, part two: the autopsy

Breaking down the lies, deception, and misdirection Derek Chauvin's defenders use to claim that the forensic evidence vindicates him

The retconning of George Floyd, part three: the great flattening

The revisionist campaign to exonerate Derek Chauvin is about one thing: preserving police impunity

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Conspiracy Government ]

A round dance cuer friend of mine has just had his second incident of Siri calling me out of the blue when he practices to a particular version of "Always".

Careful, your phone is listening...

I know I'm gonna have to end up doing this for someone: Ars Technica: Windows-as-a-nuisance: How I clean up a “clean install” of Windows 11 and Edge

Tips and tricks for making Microsoft leave you alone while you use your PC.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

RevK®'s ramblings: 2038. Given how many people apparently fucked up the leap year, it's time to start looking ahead to the Unix epoch rollover...

Anyway, if you do anything with dates, now is the time to make sure you're using a 64 bit time_t.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

A New Jersey city that limited street parking hasn’t had a traffic death in 7 years.

“That goal is obviously bold,” said Leah Shahum, founder and director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit advocating for street safety. “It’s also meant to help us kind of shake off the complacency that we’ve had for too long that traffic deaths are inevitable, that what we’re experiencing today is just an unfortunate and unavailable byproduct of modern society. That’s not the case.”

[ related topics: broadband Invention and Design Law ]

"Washington Post: TurboTax and H&R Block now use AI for tax advice. It’s awful." #GiftArticle https://wapo.st/49CShQb

In our trying to figure out the debacle of our healthcare benefits right now, Charlene also tried to use Anthem's AI chatbot, and... yeah.

The best thing you can do for your company's reputation is not deploy this bullshit.

[ related topics: Politics Artificial Intelligence ]

RT Erik Uden @ErikUden@mastodon.de

How much money do you think the United States has spent since 1945 on the Cold War? Sometimes they ask this question then from the back of the audience comes in answer ‘billions and billions‘. A huge underestimate – billions and billions. The amount of money that the United States has spent on the Cold War since 1945 is approximately 10 trillion dollars. Trillion, that’s the big one with the ‘T’. What could you buy with 10 trillion dollars? The answer is: You could buy everything in the United States except the land. Everything. Every building, truck, bus, car, boat, plane, pencil, baby’s diaper. Everything in the United States except the land, that’s what we have spent on the Cold War.

So, now let me ask: How certain was it that the Russians were going to invade? Was it 100% certain? Guess not since they never invaded. What if it was only let say 10% certain? What would advocates of big military buildup have said? We must be prudent. It’s not enough to count on only the most likely circumstance. If the worst happens and it’s really extremely dangerous for us we have to prepare for that. Remote contingencies if there is serious enough have the prepared for. It’s classic military thinking – you prepare for the worst case.

And so now, I ask my friends who are comfortable with that argument, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, why doesn’t that same argument apply to Global Warming. You don’t think it’s 100% likely? Fine. You are entitled to think that. If it’s only a small probability of it happening since the consequences are so serious, don’t you have to make some serious investment to prevent it or mitigate it? I think there’s a double standard of argument working and I don’t think we should permit it.

— Carl Sagan, An excerpt of a speech given on the 2nd of September in 1990 at the 5th Emerging Issues Forum at NCSU

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Law Work, productivity and environment Automobiles Boats Machinery Community Currency Economics Public Transportation Real Estate Woodworking Global Warming ]

RT fraggle @fraggle@octodon.social

A reminder to everyone to stay safe and only use basic text editors this month. Beware the IDEs of March

A reminder that I should probably figure out how to get LSP-mode for Emacs configured...

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Grocery Outlet has a special on "Pioneer Woman Latex Gloves Print", and I can't help but try to square "Pioneer Woman" with William Stewart Halsted being credited for the development of rubber gloves in 1894 or so...

RT fraggle @fraggle@octodon.social

take me down to parallax city where the back moves slow and the front moves quickly

Well... Either my Facebook account with my 20+ character randomly generated password has been somehow compromised, or Facebook is having a bad day.

Dear Zenni: So my Facebook feed became filled with knock-off alternatives to you after I loaded one of your web pages.

You might want to carefully look at who your advertising partners are, if they're gonna focus on taking your business...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Consumerism and advertising ]

Thinking about how many security failures are memory overwrites, and how many are not sanitizing CGI inputs... Hackaday: The White House Memory Safety Appeal Is A Security Red Herring

[ related topics: Business New Economy Race Real Estate ]

I've recently been seeing hate for the C preprocessor, and... unless your build system makes it *super* easy to use something like Perl to take a single spec and output the appropriate bindings and introspections and UI things, the lack of a preprocessor means you're probably repeating yourself, and making code harder to maintain.

Or efficiency doesn't matter and everything's completely introspectable in your system. Which is okay, Objective-C is like that, but also weird.

[ related topics: User Interface Perl Open Source hubris ]

Jordan Peterson Whines Over ‘Woke’ Report on Drop in Traffic Deaths

On Saturday, the Associated Press reported that since implementing “daylighting,” the removal of parking spaces near intersections seven years ago, the city had recorded zero traffic deaths.

The news incensed the conservative psychologist, and he took to X to slam the outlet for reporting the story. “You have become pathetic beyond comprehension @AP and the woke death will soon visit you,” he wrote.

The Tweet

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

Okay, one of our La Crosse LCD clocks fell off the wall, and isn't powering back on, and was always kinda finicky about setting from the WWVB signal anyway.

So... I could put a movement on some nice wood, or buy another one, but I have no way of evaluating the different movements at the different price points.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

I have been trying to figure out what people are seeing in LLMs. I'm like "if I wanted an overconfident 8th grader spewing the sort of bullshit they think would impress their English teacher, but doesn't, I'd find one of those". I'm extremely skeptical of the ability of LLMs to add value to any process. LLMs seem like the late night TV kitchen appliance thing, looks really cool when the shysters shyst with it, but in practice not as handy as good sharp tools.

I have told often the tale of talking with a brilliant and fairly well known mathematician back when the memory consumption difference between floats and doubles was a thing, about some details of entropy in coordinate spaces used to represent geometry, and I said "wait a minute, that doesn't feel right", and we both kinda thought and scribbled for a moment before coming to the same conclusion, but it was plain that we'd gotten to that result through different means: He was doing symbolic manipulation, I was visualizing.

And my visualizing worked in 3 dimensions, his symbolic manipulation could be generalized to more.

In learning square dance choreography, and all of the different ways that people maintain mental state around square dance choreography, I'm seeing similar things: People who track dancers, people who track Xs and Os, people who track resolve points.

So I think that part of what I'm seeing with LLMs and the praise for them is people whose mental models revolve around a certain sort of language and symbolic manipulation see them as pretty good at that. They don't do well with the mental models that I carry, so I look at their output and roll my eyes.

And then there's just that they show potential, and some people are seeing that potential carried forward, and some aren't.

Anyway: Maxim Lott: AIs ranked by IQ; AI passes 100 IQ for first time, with release of Claude-3

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Television Education Artificial Intelligence ]

So far as I can tell, the Santa Rosa diocese, notoriously "conservative", is going through bankruptcy and restructuring in order to avoid paying for some of the damages they've done by sheltering abusers and encouraging abuse, and these aren't really layoffs as much as they are a shell game to move the operations of St Vincent's out from under those liabilities.

But the newspapers are doing a decent job of getting those sad face reacts. And the Argus Courier is doing a better job of reporting this than SFGate...

SFGate: Report: 106-year-old North Bay Catholic school set to close in May, 68 layoffs.

Petaluma 360 / Argus-Courier: St. Vincent readies for title change

A notice sent to the city, county and state regarding “layoffs” and “permanent closure” was just a “procedural step,” school leaders said.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Games Current Events Heinlein California Culture ]

Can't frame this any better than Cyberpunk Librarian:

Okay, I found this on Reddit and I had to share it.

A guy shows up in r/bbs, a subreddit dedicated to classic and new computer bulletin board systems. I'm a big fan. Anyway, this guy shows up and says: Hey, does anyone remember the BBS game my dad wrote? It was called Buccaneer, and it was a pirate game you played on BBSes. Dad died six and a half years ago and I just wonder if anyone heard of his game?

Turns out... people have heard of Buccaneer.

One person has it running on their board. Another person was able to share the ZIP file for others to put it on their boards. Oh no! It was software you had to buy if you wanted the full version of it. But Dad is gone, and the kiddo has no idea how to open up the software to everyone.

No problem, someone posted a quick C programme that will generate keys for you. The kid might be crying because now even more people can play his dad’s game.

There’s some kinda lesson here in abandonware, but also in humanity. This kid may or may not own the copyrights to his dad’s stuff. Who knows? But one thing he certainly doesn’t have is the ability to make it work.

But because of a few folks on the Internet, running some old software, and someone who took a few minutes to write a keygen? Well, his dad is still out there somewhere, and he’s playing pirates.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/c...e_remember_my_fathers_door_game/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Invention and Design Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Television Sports Net Culture ]

How a celebrity CEO’s rule of fear helped bring down hot startup Zilingo

Who is JTA, Investree’s lead investor in its $231m funding round?

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Baptist News: Southern Baptist theology set me up for sexual abuse

So, by participating in my abuse, I was choosing to engage in sexual sin. My prayer, then, was not for God to make my abuse stop; my prayer was for God to give me the strength to make it stop. Every time I “allowed” myself to be abused, I prayed for God’s forgiveness because I did not stop the abuse.

Via

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

California Launches New Transportation Equity Tool

The Transportation Equity Index calls attention to inequitable distribution of transportation benefits and harms - and creates a new way to map multimodal access

Via

[ related topics: Invention and Design California Culture Maps and Mapping ]

To Combat NYPD Lawlessness, DOT Will Move Second Ave. Bus Lane. Acknowledging that the New York Police Department is overrun by those who don't care about silly concepts like "legal" and "the law", they're throwing up their hands.

The Department of Transportation will move the dedicated rush-hour bus lane on Second Avenue from the curbside lane, where it is frequently blocked by NYPD vehicles and other cars, and repaint it one lane over — a plan that the agency says will improve transit along the nation's busiest bus route.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement New York Public Transportation ]

Rising microplastics in seas puts pressure on tyre industry

In every sample of water taken by sailors along the route, they have found microplastics, and in concentrations far greater than were seen during the last race in 2017-2018. Although scientists noted that their instruments were more sensitive than previously, concentrations are up to 18 times higher. Even at Point Nemo, 320 microplastic particles were found per cubic metre, compared with between nine and 41 in the last race. The highest concentrations were found in coastal areas, with up to 1,712 per cubic metre discovered off the coast of South Africa.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

RT brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

the porpoise of a system is what it eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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

Black couple rented to a Chinese American family when nobody would. Now, they're donating $5M to Black community.

The Dongs are selling the home their family rented and eventually bought from Gus Thompson, a former slave, and his wife, Emma. The Dongs will donate the proceeds to Black students.

1939. Coronado California.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events California Culture Community Marriage ]

RT Brilliantcrank @Brilliantcrank@mastodon.social

I scooped the media by two days!

https://defector.com/road-trac...e-about-formula-1-power-dynamics

https://www.washingtonpost.com...mula-one-road-track-kate-wagner/

@anildash is right, blogs are where to find out what's going on.

/ @dangillmor

Astute readers will notice that the WaPo link now says "Sorry, we can’t seem to find the page you’re looking for", and searching for "Formula One" and "Kate Wagner" aren't giving me anything interesting, which suggests that maybe the Post's editors are as cowardly as Daniel Pund?Brilliant Crank has fixed the original link, but still makes me wonder why search wasn't turning up the article...

Brilliant Crank: Behind F1's velvet curtain, and Road & Track's delete button.

The other link is to Defector: Road & Track EIC Tries To Explain Why He Deleted An Article About Formula 1 Power Dynamics

Kate Wagner's story on Formula One that was published at Road & Track on Archive.com

[ related topics: Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture Automobiles ]

Wanna thank @paul_e_cooley@vyrse.social for his recommendation of Jo Firestone's Murder on Sex Island podcast. I'm giggling, and entranced.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

RT Jens Ohlig @johl@mastodon.xyz

Who called it “intellectual property problems around the acquisition of training data for Large Language Models” and not Grand Theft Autocorrect?

RT veast / Chloe :3 @veast@mstdn.social

STOP DOING ELECTRON

- WEB PAGES WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE SEPERATE BROWSERS THAT TAKE UP 1GB OF RAM

- MILLIONS OF YEARS OF CHROME EMBEDDED FRAMEWORK AND YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND FOR MAKING YOUR MUSIC PLAYER A WEB APP

- "hello yes please take away 1gb of my ram for Discord" statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

- WANTED TO PUT YOUR WEB APP AS A SHORTCUT ON YOUR DESKTOP? WE HAD A TOOL FOR THAT - WE PUT THE LINK INTO A SHORTCUT FILE

THEY HAVE PLAYED US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS

Though I would like a good cross-platform widget set that isn't going the way of everything being styled by CSS... (looking sideways at Qt here...).

[ related topics: Music Robotics Embedded Devices ]

RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

Happy Did You Notice That The Body-Horror Xenomorph Lifecycle In The Aliens Movies Where The Victim Is Muzzled, Forcibly Impregnated And Then Made To Give Birth In A Way That Kills Them Is Indistinguishable From GOP Policy Day to all who celebrate.

[ related topics: Movies ]

RT Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com

And this quote by Marcus Aurelius is both insightful and telling, especially in relation to the previous quote. The purpose of #SocialMedia algorithms is not only to force an opinion on you, but to get you worked up about it.

> [Marcus Aurelius] "You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone."

#quotes #philosophy #Stoicism

[ related topics: Quotes Philosophy ]

RT Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

Tired of the SF Downtown is dying stories when (1) downtown has always been dead (2) it was planned that way (3) most of the businesses complaining about crime and poor sales are simply not relevant (4) no SF resident goes downtown for fun or voluntarily (even me, and I'm only a mile away)

It's so easy to blame homeless people, when imho it's much clearer to blame poor planning and poor business people for most of it

RT Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

Homeless people are not gathering in Union Square in great numbers. Have you seen the number of police cars there?

You can't build a downtown with little to no housing, fill it with bad restaurants, and then say no one's coming

No one was going to Macy's even pre-pandemic except tourists

I always had to explain to my European and Asian friends that American downtowns are not... downtowns you think of. SF downtown was already underwhelming before any of these breathless stories

[ related topics: Food Bay Area Law Enforcement Fashion Real Estate ]

A fantastic thread by ⋆✧Catherine✧⋆ @whitequark@mastodon.social about "... one of the most violently unhinged CSB reports i've ever read ...

U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board: Tank Explosions at Midland Resource Recovery

Before starting the MP odorizer draining operation, SPSI’s business development and special project manager, a former DuPont employee with 30 years of emergency response experience and at that time a governor-appointed officer on the West Virginia State Fire Commission, conducted a briefing for MRR and agency representatives. When asked by a representative from a state agency why SPSI thought this operation would be safe – given that a similar approach to draining the MP odorizer had resulted in the May 24, 2017, explosion – the SPSI manager asserted, “If our science is right, this will be fine.”

Unable to directly engage SPSI about the safety issues regarding its plan and lacking confidence that MRR or SPSI understood either the cause of the May 24, 2017 incident or the full range of possible reactive chemistry involved, CSB investigators took shelter behind a shipping container (conex box) located behind a building more than 150 feet away from the SPSI operation.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Pyrotechnics ]

When The Hill acknowledges it, you know your propaganda has lost... Big oil’s big deception: That plastics are recyclable.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

The problem with using XCode is kind of the reverse of the "give developers the latest fastest hardware" problem.

It's that when most of the tools we use are either command-line, web browsers, or XCode, we become used to a certain level of suck and WTF? in our GUI applications, and when the users say "this is unacceptable" it's like "well, Apple does that shit to me all the time, isn't that kinda the state of modern software?"

[ related topics: Apple Computer Software Engineering ]

So do I just give up on that "Resilient Futures" podcast that opened with a puff piece on the American Society of Civil Engineers, or do I accept that organizations dedicated to lobbying for automobile infrastructure are gonna have a place at the table and all voices, even those dedicated to our social destruction, are valid?

[ related topics: Automobiles Economics Furniture ]

It is a failure of something that I was aware of every single superhero movie, but somehow missed that "Southside With You" was released in 2016.

It's not "Before Sunrise", but I can see why people make the comparisons, and we really enjoyed the sense of place that the film gave, and the exploration of human dynamics. It's inspired us on some neighborhood organizing this morning.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Long-term risks of respiratory diseases in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2: a longitudinal, population-based cohort study

Compared to those with one SARS-CoV-2 infection, reinfected patients were at a higher risk of asthma (3.0; 1.32–6.84), COPD (3.07; 1.42–6.65), ILD (3.61; 1.11–11.8), and lung cancer (3.20; 1.59–6.45). Similar findings were noted when comparing with a historical cohort serving as a control group, including asthma (1.31; 1.13–1.52); bronchiectasis (1.53; 1.23–1.89); COPD (1.41; 1.24–1.59); ILD (2.53; 2.05–3.13); PVD (2.30; 1.98–2.66); and lung cancer (2.23; 1.78–2.79).

So your first infection raises your chances of various respiratory diseases, a subsequent infection raises those chances by 3X(!). Yikes.

Via

the Apple curl security incident 12604. There's a command line option in curl meant to restrict queries to specific keychains. Apple broke it.

Compile your own shit if you're on Apple.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

I have been having a lot of realizations about being overcommitted, about all of the implicit volunteering because my technical skills mean I'm seen as a leader in a community which means that people come to me for advice with social problems, about how people who represent themselves as project managers are often good at face, but not much at management, and I'm picking up pieces in the background.

I have a lot of "no"s queued up, but first I have to get through all these implicit "yes"s.

[ related topics: Community ]

Billy Cobb: 2005 (1985 Parody)

Apparently if 1985 by Bowling For Soup were released today, it would be about 2005. Anyways, here's what that would probably sound like.

(Bowling For Soup - 1985)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies ]

Woke up this morning to a message from yet another friend who was hit by a distracted driver while walking. Meanwhile, spent a good bit of the weekend talking to neighbors about street safety, and while people are sympathetic to the dangers, I'm pretty sure that if you asked most people to choose between an on-street parking spot in front of their house and the life of a child, they'd express sympathies for the parents' loss.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Archival Real Estate ]

Krebs on Security: Incognito Darknet Market Mass-Extorts Buyers, Sellers

Borrowing from the playbook of ransomware purveyors, the darknet narcotics bazaar Incognito Market has begun extorting all of its vendors and buyers, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000. The bold mass extortion attempt comes just days after Incognito Market administrators reportedly pulled an “exit scam” that left users unable to withdraw millions of dollars worth of funds from the platform.

So it turns out that maybe recording all of your illegal transactions on an immutable public ledger might be problematic after all? And that the limitation of 7 global transactions per second means that you have to use a shadow banking system, and that has additional problems? Who'd have thought.

[ related topics: moron Economics ]

"So why don't we..."

We have no experience with crowd management. We don't have the spare people to make sure that the social predictions you're trying to make work correctly with people in line.

I am tasked with making the AV work correctly for this event, which has become "interface with the venue operator", so I already have no control.

Trying to get me to make you a plan for crowd behavior is outside of my area of expertise, and a distracting from tasks I'm already wigged out about.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

I mean, sure, people are complaining about the lack of turn signal stalk on the newer Tesla Model 3s, but how many Tesla drivers are using turn signals anyway?

We should probably just remove the capability altogether, they're only using it for misinformation...

Also, if I'm ever trying to set up an event for you and your rider is detailed enough to say anything about brown M&Ms or favorite brand of bottled water, I will be freakin' overjoyed. "Yeah, we're gonna bring a computer" is okay, until I have to verify projector compatibility, and wrangle everyone's slide formats....

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Thomas 🔭✨ @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Remember 10 years ago when the tech industry promised we’ll “3D print everything from food to houses”?

Now think about the promises about AI.

[ related topics: Food Graphics Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

Friend asked Bard for a "picture of an Amazon woman". After all of the caveats about no historical evidence and whatnot, it gave him a picture of a woman modeling Amazon(dot)com branded products.

[ related topics: Books ]

RT gsuberland@chaos.social Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social

lewd

OH: "porn should not have a plot. I don't wanna be trying to figure out who the Lisan al-Gaib is mid-wank"

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

A reminder to myself that I should probably put `rm -fr /Users/*/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/*` in my XCode startup script. I bet a lot of funky behavior will be reduced.

[ related topics: Language Books ]

Once the internet became completely pervasive within society, low-information religious fundamentalists finally became aware that their side had totally and completely lost all scientific and historical arguments. This has been extremely traumatizing psychologically because all of the authorities they have been conditioned to believe (pastors, the Bible, political leaders) proclaimed themselves to be infallible. Instead, they were completely defenseless against anthropologists, biologists, and historians.

But rather than admit they were wrong and adapt to modernity, religious fundamentalists have decided to attack it and to force the majority who disbelieve their ideas to genuflect before them. Having failed to convince people of their beliefs, they have decided to mandate them. In so doing, they are embracing their core epistemology, that knowledge comes from authority rather than from the scientific method. ...

Via

[ related topics: Religion Politics moron Net Culture ]

Metafilter question about "Songs about being in love for a long time".

Y'all have read about this New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick complaining about the conditions in headquarters, and that rats are eating evidence?

"Golly, I don't know where that cannabis went, the rats must have eaten it" is about the most bullshit line a cop can deliver.

[ related topics: Drugs Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Law Enforcement Hurricane Katrina ]

Fuuu! When did Apple break USB file transfer from Android devices? I can't get my phone to go into "Connected device" any more.

Fucking Apple.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Got someone looking for more info about Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster Pennsylvania, as a potential attendee. If anyone in my circles is willing to chat, they'd appreciate it!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Education ]

Ugh. And I can't seem to get any Android SFTP transfer apps to find my voice recorder files. Fucking walled gardens trying to get me into their damned cloud services that I can't script with anything.

[ related topics: Gardening ]

Hey, I remember those! RT Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@octodon.social

In the old days, they used to have little vending machines at the airport where you could buy a life insurance policy. Maybe Boeing’s just trying to bring them back

Insurance News: A look back: Whatever happened to airport insurance vending machines?

[ related topics: Aviation Current Events ]

I think maybe we've found a tell for LLM use? Surfaces and Interfaces — Volume 46, March 2024, 104081: The three-dimensional porous mesh structure of Cu-based metal-organic-framework - aramid cellulose separator enhances the electrochemical performance of lithium metal anode batteries

Introduction

Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2].

Via @hugo@assemblag.es who notes "boy oh boy. there goes peer review."

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Mathematics Model Building ]

RT Missing The Point @MissingThePt@mastodon.social

If you are patient enough, you can build your very own Boeing airplane out of parts that fall from the sky.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Aviation ]

Car and Driver: First IIHS Semi-Autonomous Testing Fails Nearly Every Automaker

Of the 14 systems the Insurance Instiute for Highway Safety tested, none earn the top Good overall rating, only one is rated Acceptable, two are graded as Marginal, and 11 are given the lowest rating of Poor.

The "Acceptable" one is Lexus's system. GM & Nissan (with the NaviLink option) get "Marginal".

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles ]

Rewatching bits of the September 18, 2023 City Council meeting, with the hearing on Oyster Cove, to try to figure out how the project went from being so awesome to being so "meh".

Associations between 11 parental discipline behaviours and child outcomes across 60 countries

Conclusions: Psychological and physical aggression were disadvantageous for children's socioemotional development across countries. Only verbal reasoning was associated with positive child socioemotional development. No form of psychological aggression or physical aggression benefited child socioemotional development in any country. Greater emphasis should be dedicated to reducing parental use of psychological and physical aggression across cultural contexts.

doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-058439.

Research Brief: Is Your Child Misbehaving? Try Reasoning With Them

These results are consistent with a recent study of U.S. families that found that young children who receive harsh physical discipline, such as spanking, are more likely to exhibit aggressive, impulsive, or antisocial behaviors. Researchers following American mothers and their children from birth to age 9 found that children who were spanked had higher levels of these “externalizing behavior problems” at later ages—with the effects more consistent and longer lasting among families facing economic hardship.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology Economics ]

For whatever reason, the Blink EV charging network has been emailing blow-by-blow status updates through some recent network travails, and just emailed "Blink charging network fully operational".

And I completely read that in a menacing Darth Vader voice: ""Now, witness the power of this fully operational charging network."

[ related topics: Star Wars Photography broadband ]

Ugh. Several days recently of trying to figure out why Apple is sometimes not sending -mouseMoved: events to my views (and then suddenly starting to send them again), and what combination of gesture recognizers is causing drags within a scroll view that happen to put another scroll view under the cursor to sometimes stop the original drag.

I long for the days when we had a freakin' memory map for what showed up on screen and dealt with all of this ourselves.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Maps and Mapping ]

I love how staff and consultants put subtext into contextual documents.. "The downtown was a mix of commercial and residential uses during the late-nineteenth century, as lack of easy transportation led people to live near their place of business or job."

This Berkeley Shattuck Avenue Commercial Corridor Historic Context and Survey is a thing of beauty.

https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/pages...ttuck%20context%2005-28-2015.pdf

[ related topics: Bay Area Theater & Plays Heinlein ]

Ya know, I try, I really do, to use Firefox. Despite bullshit like Pocket, and partnering with extortionists for "reputation management" protectionism, but holy shit they make it hard.

This morning it's all the security failures because Firefox can't get its fucking clock right, and won't let me easily override the SSL failures because the idea that someone's gonna MiTM SmugMug pictures is soooo scary.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wondering what the aircraft loss rate was back when Boeing was "an engineering company" vs now. Not to dismiss the current shenanigans, and I know that we've learned a lot about engineering and air travel in the intervening decades, but I think there may be some "good old days" stuff going on....

[ related topics: Aviation ]

I'm not totally up to code, but unless those are low voltage I'm thinking that the exposed unsecured wires, dangling wire nuts, and open junction boxes wouldn't pass inspection.

But it's in a bathroom, so those have to be GFI protected, right?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Well this doesn't bode well for the study of societal issues...

(Sign advertising the Institute For The Study Of Societal Issues in front of a fenced off boarded up building.)

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

Not even sure how to describe this building, kind of castle over cliffs, that at once feels twee and too much, and at the same time makes me want to stand up and cheer for the architect and developer willing to take the risk and bring art like this to a neighborhood.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture Architecture ]

Absolutely loving @jwgoerlich@infosec.exchange's reposting of the foreword to "Learning Perl". https://jwgoerlich.com/we-were-wizards-learning-perl/

I've been reading through the learning Rust book (again), and thinking about how we used to aspire to expressiveness in computer languages, and now...

It feels like the sense of possibility needs to come back to computing. LLMs and GANs make it feel like the most we're aspiring to is bloviating and bad drawing. I want my future back!

[ related topics: Books Perl Open Source Education hubris ]

Java users on macOS 14 running on Apple silicon systems should consider delaying the macOS 14.4 update. I mean, Sonoma has been a shitshow generally, but it's good to know that Java's mission of being the platform which will semi-randomly segfault on all of the platforms is still being actively pursued, despite the Oracle acquisition.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Software Engineering Sports Macintosh Databases ]

Excerpts from a study done in 1893 that found that students don't learn well in classroom environments with over 700ppm of CO2.

From this experience it would seem that students can work well in a clean room with about seven parts ber 10,000 of carbon dioxide; much more than this causes dullness, and anything over thirteen parts causes in most cases an almost impassable barrier to the full ackquisition of knowledge.

Anyway, enjoy that interior conference room...

Via Kee Hinckley @nazgul@infosec.exchange

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Birds Conferences Global Warming ]

I'm a huge fan of moderating how casually people brandish deadly weapons (like cars) in our community, but every time I read stats from the local police on a checkpoint like "1368 Vehicles through the checkpoint", with 3 arrests for impaired driving and 13 citations for driving without a license, I read it as "Ihre papiere, bitte"...

https://local.nixle.com/alert/10790029/?sub_id=0

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Community Guns ]

How far has the net fallen? I'm trying to find an old comic, it was about mixing Christianity, and the punchline was on the order of "There's no wrong way to eat a Jesus™". It was of the era of Bob the Angry Flower, but I'm pretty sure was another comic.

Google, Bing, Stract and Marginalia are being of no help here.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Food ]

The upside of recessions: New research confirms it: The worse the economy gets, the longer we live. But why?

The answer was pollution. Counties that experienced the biggest job losses in the Great Recession, the economists found, also saw the largest declines in air pollution, as measured by levels of the fine particulate matter PM2.5. It makes sense: During recessions, fewer people drive to work. Factories and offices slow down, and people cut back on their own energy use to save money. All that reduced activity leads to cleaner air. That would explain why workers without a college degree enjoyed the biggest drops in mortality: People with low-wage jobs tend to live in neighborhoods with more environmental toxins. It would also explain why the recession reduced mortality from heart disease, suicide, and car crashes — causes of death all linked to the physical and mental effects of PM2.5. Overall, the economists found, cleaner air was responsible for more than a third of the decline in mortality during the Great Recession.

National Bureau of Economic Research: Lives vs. Livelihoods: The Impact of the Great Recession on Mortality and Welfare Amy Finkelstein, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, Frank Schilbach & Jonathan Zhang

Via.

[ related topics: Ziffle Nature and environment Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Automobiles Currency Education Economics Woodworking ]

Jessamyn's question about giving her What 3 Words location as activating.potato.noodle or groans.accompanying.hugs made me realize I'm sitting at entire.agenda.bleat...

https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/112123493551763005

[ related topics: Food ]

People following my frustrations and grumblings closely may have realized that in the past year or two I've implemented most of browser password management. And it has a couple of flaws, isn't the most seamless thing in the world, but it mostly works.

And it's not Safari, and holy crap does Apple manage to get password management incredibly wrong. I just spent a few minutes untangling Charlene's Amazon password change, and: annoying handholding that makes it difficult to do the right thing...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Books History ]

John Sundman: 100% Bafflegab — My year as a crypto/DeFi tech writer

[ related topics: Writing Cryptography ]

If you missed the Know Before You Grow forum last Wednesday in which folks from David Baker Architects talked about 9 ways to design housing for people, it's here: https://youtu.be/qP2MXz8jbco

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Graphic Design Community Real Estate ]

Julia Evans has a great series of posts talking about her experience in how she interacts with people on the fediverse, from phrasing questions, to responding to responses. It's in the context of "talking about git", but there's a lot of good stuff here:

https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/112128313009699377

Ugh. I have an NSScrollView that contains other views. Two finger panning works. There are some views that interfere with this. In my simplified test app, I cannot recreate the interference, in our app this includes all scroll views, and a few other views outside of the hierarchy (but that track inside scroll view motion, so can end up under the cursor).

And I am out of ideas for debugging this.

When you go to the corporate-speak single sign-on integrator's web site and want to create a test account, and it says "Sign up with Google", so you think "Hey, SSO is kinda cool, I should do that", and click that button, and... Nothing. Yeah, this looks like middleware we should *definitely* integrate, huh...

Confession: When I read "Jenkins", "automation server" is waaaay down my semantic associations.

Far far beyond "Leroy".

Yes, Kenwood, the things I most want when pulling up your app to turn on noise cancellation because the on earbud controls for this suuuuck is to have to click through "fuck no I don't want Alexa" and then have a firmware update start.

Interesting: The Real C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)

Why, yes, I have been diving back into GPT 4 at the encouragement of coworkers to try to get useful output from it that might augment how our software helps people explore information.

RT jimray @jimray@mastodon.social

Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”

VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Software Engineering moron Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Some days on https://rootlgame.net/ I'm like "yeah, that took me 5 guesses, no shame", today I took two guesses on the last one and am all "doh!".

Bwahahahaha! No, I'm not gonna edit PDFs in Firefox when I can't even save, let alone print, my proof of insurance cards in Firefox, and I don't shop for music on MusicNotes in Firefox because PDF rendering, and...

[ related topics: Music Photography Graphics Gambling ]

Oh, Apple, the GNU versions of your command line tools have had this option since 1999, why am I having to `brew install coreutils` and prefix regular commands with "g" to make things work?

Edit: It's worse than that, Apple's date -Iseconds is equivalent to GNU's date --iso8601=seconds.

Edit Edit: It has been pointed out to me that this boils down to FreeBSD vs GNU.

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

Working through my West Coast Shaving sampler pack: Derby blades were nice, but didn't last super long. The Barco ones were better on that. Opened a pack of Personna, and first shave was super smooth. We'll see how that lasts, but I may prefer these to the Barco.

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

TinyGL : a Small, Free and Fast Subset of OpenGL.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

Tennessee friends: Is there something in the water? Although if the language really is “the intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight …” maybe we can use this to address CO2 and PM2.5 emissions.

AvWeb: Tennessee Lawmakers Propose Legislation Banning ‘Chemtrails’

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Cool Science Aviation Current Events Chattanooga Global Warming ]

Wow. Really enjoying Lara Downes talking about Rhapsody in Blue in this latest episode of Switched on Pop. https://switchedonpop.com/episodes/rhapsody-in-blue-lara-downes

Just thinking about all of those kids rotting in Riker's Island because they were merely accused of something...

Trump wins partial stay of fraud judgment, allowed to post $175 million https://wapo.st/3PB2eFC #GiftArticle

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

In cities in civilized countries, garbage collection happens via underground pneumatic tubes... The future is not evenly distributed. The Envac Automated Waste Collection System

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

As our understanding of sources for environmental microplastics keep getting revised to indicate that even more of them come from car tires, further indication that we need to get away from automobiles: Hyundai — What Makes EV Tires Different from Regular Tires

The tires of electric vehicles wear 20% faster than those of internal combustion engines, which is due to the acceleration of electric vehicles that generate strong instantaneous power.

Also, in the EU, new sensors on cars are yielding data: First Commission report on real-world CO2 emissions of cars and vans using data from on-board fuel consumption monitoring devices

The first data from a sample of 600 000 cars indicates that the real-world fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from diesel and petrol vehicles on the road are around 20% higher than indicated by the official values from the standardised WLTP type-approval test used for regulatory purposes. This discrepancy is in line with what the Commission had anticipated.

For plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the real-world CO2 emissions were on average 3.5 times higher than the laboratory values, which confirms that these vehicles are currently not realising their potential, largely because they are not being charged and driven fully electrically as frequently as assumed.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Automobiles Global Warming ]

I'm thinking right now about all of those anecdotes that doctors, especially those who've done work in developing nations, tell about medicine with awful side effects, but that patients seek out because those side effects make them feel like it's working...

RT Ted Kaminski @tedinski@hachyderm.io

@inthehands This has been my near-universal experience with junior developers using ChatGPT.

It somehow *feels* amazingly productive and helpful to them. One mentee did a mini-postmortem on a project that didn't go well, and really, really, powerfully struggled with the cognitive dissonance between "chatgpt helped me be so productive, really useful!" and "I just spent 2 weeks instead of 2 hours on a task because I asked chatgpt instead of reading the documentation."

RT inthehands@hachyderm.io Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io

@tedinski It reminds me of a study I saw once (wish wish wish I had the link now) that compared lecture-based sit-and-listen classroom instruction with hands-on activity-based instruction. They found that the active, activity-based learning led to much better comprehension and retention (duh), but immediately after the class, students •felt• like they’d learned more from the lecture. There’s something infectious about passively listening to a voice with an air of confidence.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Pop Culture Education Woodworking ]

ISIS-K Claims Credit After 137 Killed in Moscow Concert Attack; Russia Tries to Blame Ukraine

The U.S. Embassy had reportedly warned Russia earlier this month that it was, quote, “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow,” unquote, especially concert halls, and U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the U.S. government had, quote, “shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding 'duty to warn' policy.” Putin called the warnings, quote, “provocative” and “outright blackmail” in a speech last Tuesday. Today, a Kremlin spokesperson refused to respond to reporters who asked Friday — if Friday was an intelligence failure.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Heinlein ]

Oooh, Fabrice Bellard, of FFMPEG fame, has a projects page, currently catching my eye are the QuickJS JavaScript engine, TinyGL (a small OpenGL subset), and TCC, "...a tiny but complete ISOC99 C compiler...".

[ related topics: Graphics Machinery ]

If you've been reading Flutterby for 26 years now, you've seen my personal evolution from big-O Objectivist big-L Libertarian, to raving left wing statist kook pragmatist. It's happened a bit at a time, first was realizing that Rand's essay on patents and creating artificial scarcity laid bare that most Libertarians are Monarchists who aren't smart enough to realize it (I think something made horribly clear in the past several years). Somewhere in there was reading A Farewell To Alms and realizing the ways in which the conclusion of that book was flawed.

Anyway, a few years ago I ran across Donald MacKenzie's observation that the study of economics is an engine, not a camera (I haven't yet read his book), and that shattered a few more neurons loose, and last night I started reading Kate Raworth's Donut Economics, and it's good to see that a lot of younger economists are questioning the institution.

So, yeah, unsurprising that Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton savages his own profession as clueless and unethical.

International Monetary Fund : Angus Deaton : Rethinking Economics

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Objectivism Libertarian Books Photography History Writing Machinery Economics Books: A Farewell to Alms ]

From 2014: NY Times Runs Ad From Holocaust Survivors Condemning Israel, Attacking Elie Wiesel

The statement was signed by more than 300 people and issued in response to an ad by Elie Wiesel.

[ related topics: Religion ]

Holy shit: Baltimore Maryland's Francis Scott Key Bridge has collapsed into the Patapsco river after being struck by the Singapore-flagged Dali container ship.

I'm trying to find a way to share the Washington Post coverage of the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse, but it may just be individual articles.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Art & Culture Machinery ]

On Tech Debt: My Rust Library is now a CDO

[ related topics: Language Books ]

Reposted from FB:

Everybody's linking to some aspect of the key bridge collapse today, and everyone's suddenly a bridge and shipping expert, but one thing gave me chills. So when I was a whitewater guide, the *first* thing we tell the crew in our opening speech is "if you fall out of the boat, *do* *not* stand up. The bottom of the river has lots of crevices in it, and if your foot gets caught in one of those, you can drown in a foot of water and there is nothing we can do fast enough to save you." And then we talk about the right way to swim in whitewater, and how there's never been a case of buttock entrapment.

One busy day, I may have been second boat, or just the guy on the scene, but another guide's boat lost the angle coming out of the put-in eddy spun downstream and slammed into Whiteface and pinned hard. Pulled a swimmer or two on shore, but then we had a guide and most of a boat's full of guests stranded in the middle of the river, right above the ledge, and I went running up the bank and started to wade out into the river to get on scene, and I remember slipping on a rock and thinking "crap, I hope we don't have to evac the customers out of here, because we don't want any of them walking in this."

And then I had that moment of "Oh shit. I'm walking in this. I'm standing up."

And then this moment of "but it's okay, because I'm a guide. I know better."

And then this moment of "uuhhhh. I know better. Right. Uhhhh." So, yeah, I repositioned myself, and swam out to help unstick the boat.

Among the many incidents in my teens and twenties where I slowly learned I was not, in fact, a superhero, that's one of them.

So I was listening to the police radio of the response to the out of control boat, and heard the one officer say "Once you get here I'll go grab the workers on the Key bridge, and then stop the outer loop."

And, of course, I knew what was coming, but holy shit, that feeling of "these people are in danger, I'm going to stabilize the situation", without thinking through the consequence.

I'm sad for the loss of life. In listening to the radio traffic I was relieved that the immediately following transmission was that the bridge just fell down, and the officer did not, in fact, get on the bridge. And that what sounded like him in the subsequent transmission wasn't completely freaked out.

But, yeah. Mad props to the dude doin' his job.

Anyway, #GiftArticle to the WaPo on the bridge collapse, that includes the recording. https://wapo.st/3VyBEAK

[ related topics: Nostalgia Interactive Drama Law Law Enforcement Heinlein Sports Pop Culture Boats Machinery Douglas Adams Whitewater ]

Project Ghostbusters: Facebook Accused of Using Your Phone to Wiretap Snapchat

Meta has lots of data through Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, but that’s not enough for them. Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn’t private at all.

So, uh, mad props to the folks who bought a VPN for privacy. This kinda falls nicely on top of "anti-virus" software makers providing additional attack surface, and Mozilla hiring the foxes to guard the henhouse on privacy...

[ related topics: Privacy virus broadband Open Source Nature and environment Software Engineering ]

Saw the toot asking "What coding practices do you implement in your day-to-day that help protect against bad actors?", and immediately started typing...

if (!strcmp("Paris Hilton", name)) {...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Woodworking ]

I have a bunch of Makrut limes and leaves. I could just freeze them, but any suggestions for a chutney or relish or other preserve that incorporates them?

(Particularly looking at @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io ...)

[ related topics: Archival ]

Apropos of current events, July 14, 2023 letter from the US Department of Labor/OSHA to Maersk shipping on their findings regarding the firing of a Seaman whistleblower (PDF).

I hope that the layers of subcontractedness with the Dali can be cut through and those actually responsible can be held to account.

[ related topics: Current Events Art & Culture ]

Ben O'Matic @bennomatic@appdot.net

Since Amazon bought it, Woot! is a different site from what it used to be. It's no longer just a one-deal-a-day overstock clearance place. It's a high velocity funnel for Amazon.

That said, I still feel like it's not a great look for the Apple Vision Pro to be turning up there this soon after its initial release, with a... 4%???... discount?

Weird.

https://electronics.woot.com/o...apple-mql83ll-a-vision-pro-256gb

[ related topics: Apple Computer Books ]

RT Tess dot exe @diffractie@glitterkitten.co.uk

Confession: Whilst I know what testosterone does, and I know progesterone does, I still don't know what minestrone does, or why they let you buy it in tins.

RT c-side cassette :ms_cassette: @aronia@tech.lgbt

analysis textbooks'll be like "let ε>0" and i'll just go "aww i ε> you too"

RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

Every developer in the world thinks reading code is harder than writing code and every devtools vendor in the world is trying to charge you money for a button you can click that lets you read code instead of writing it.

[ related topics: Writing Currency ]

Today I learned about W State Rd 84, near Fort Lauderdale Florida. As one wag commented, "it looks like a road sine".

I wonder what the lane width vs general travel speeds on it are, and collision rates, especially vs the sorts of straight rural roads that often connect these sorts of places...

https://www.google.com/maps/pl...1373174!16zL20vMHJqMHo?entry=ttu

And Seminole Tribune on groundbreaking on efforts to straighten it.

[ related topics: Photography Mathematics Maps and Mapping ]

RT Inertial Invites @intransitivelie@beige.party

Jesus: impossible to kill, reproduced asexually. Jesus is canonically a fungus. Clearly the part the Romans crucified was a fruiting body of some kind, leaving the bulk of the organism below ground, safe and secure. And every Easter, we find Jesus' multi-colored spores hidden in dark places. The rabbits tried to warn us. But now it's too late. He's metastasized across the whole planet. Soon enough, he will come again, and when he does, no cross in the world will be big enough to keep him at bay.

*Twilight Zone music intensifies*

[ related topics: Religion Humor Music Bay Area Space & Astronomy California Culture ]

Because the collapse of the Key bridge is bringing up Francis Scott Key's slave-owning and other problematic aspects, here's the Complete version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" showing spelling and punctuation from Francis Scott Key's manuscript in the Maryland Historical Society collection.

Yeah, that third verse in context makes "land of the free" read a little differently.

For completeness, The Anacreontic Song as Sung at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, the words by Ralph Tomlinson Esquire, the late President of that Society.

...

And long may the Sons of ANACREON intwine

The Myrtle of VENUS with BACCHUS'S Vine.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy Real Estate Aviation - Helicopters ]

Streetsblog SF: Guest Commentary: Traffic Engineers Must Put Safety Over Driver Throughput

No other field would tolerate this level of death and destruction. The tragedy of West Portal is more evidence that the traffic engineering profession is fundamentally broken

I mean, yes, in most other engineering-adjacent professions designing systems like we do for traffic would be career limiting, but... City of Petaluma has two traffic engineers who come out and do walk arounds, point out all of the ways that our roads are awful and deadly, and that our relative lack of pedestrian and cyclist deaths comes primarily from suppressing those activities and ceding our public spaces to automobiles, but they're also hampered by budget and public will.

We need to fix society, not just traffic engineering.

[ related topics: Bay Area Automobiles ]

Looking at this guy's list of challenging software projects to try, and realizing how many of them I've implemented over the years...

I miss mucking about with B-trees...

https://www.andreinc.net/2024/03/28/programming-projects-ideas

[ related topics: Nature and environment Software Engineering ]

Oooh, cool idea: Tamper evident protection via random mosaic: Put device in a bag, put that bag in another vacuum sealed bag that also contains rice, beans, and similar (eg: Red lentils & Beluga lentils), transmit picture of sealed bag along a separate channel from the device.

Via.

Duh. And, yes, again: Research on Cambridge’s guaranteed income pilot shows tangible benefits for cash recipients.

[ related topics: Television ]

Thesis Driven: On Fire Departments — Long untouchable, fire departments are causing death and homelessness in American cities by advocating for bad policies

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics ]

Uh oh: xz, and the liblzma compression library, may have been backdoored.

openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma.

If you (or your upstream providers on Debian based platforms it's in Red Hat Fedora Linux 40 and Fedora Rawhide, too) built from tarballs after 5.6.0, shit just got real.

[ related topics: Language Free Software Interactive Drama Books Open Source ]

Nature: Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it

Nerve cells form long-term memories with the help of an inflammatory response, study in mice finds.

[ related topics: Erotic Nature and environment ]

Uh oh. Fire trucks at Petaluma Coffee and Tea.

[ related topics: Photography Pyrotechnics Machinery ]

RTjacqueline @jacqueline@chaos.social

if u give me ten million dollars, i will guarantee you that ai won’t destroy humanity. that’s quite a deal at the going rate!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Mad props to the person speeding around the corner at Mountain View and 6th who had the gall to honk as they swung into oncoming traffic's lane.

Nothing like reading a "non-fiction" book, thinking that it's pretty good and expanding my thinking, then running into a couple of paragraphs that talk positively about cryptocurrency (specifically Ethereum).

Not quite throw it at the wall disgusted, but certainly taking the rest of the ideas with a little more skepticism than I was...

(Kate Raworth's "Doughnut Economics")

[ related topics: Books Sports Economics ]

RT Serge from Babka @serge@babka.social

@mekkaokereke

Not to take too much away from your post by shifting topic but...

I think what I find most disturbing, not exclusively in the US, but especially the US, is the emphasis on individual crime, violent crime, low level embezzlement like this, and the de-emphasis on serious, systemic crime, like the story that came out this week on the collusion between prison officials and prison phone operators in order to bilk the families of a truly vulnerable population of millions of dollars by denying them basic rights.

So yes, this man embezzled. Maybe it's justified, maybe not, but the real criminals walk free.

Ars Technica: Jails banned visits in “quid pro quo” with prison phone companies, lawsuits say

[ related topics: Sociology Civil Liberties Currency Video ]

The Key bridge carried less than 4k trucks per day Fleet Owner: How the Baltimore bridge collapse impacts trucking

The collapse of Francis Scott Key Bridge also caused the Port of Baltimore to shut down, suddenly closing the nation’s largest port for roll-on/roll-off cargo. Trucking operations are also forced to navigate travel restrictions around a major East Coast traffic area.

So, 30 miles of detours for some set of those vehicles that are carrying hazmat, call it $90/hr operating costs, round up to $50, at a half a billion bucks to replace the bridge we're looking at subsidizing ten million trips to justify this thing. But the real question is: What automobile external costs are we subsidizing if we throw that money at the bridge?

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles Machinery Currency ]