Flutterby™! From 2024-04-01 to 2024-04-30

Went down to Roy's Redwoods today, much of the grove is closed, but it was still quite nice

[ related topics: Photography ]

And it's easy to get jaded by scale...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Running water...

https://youtu.be/l5wKBUCSigw?si=QboLIg7pSCPcCk1_

https://youtu.be/l5wKBUCSigw?si=iA94l5iXjhZl2uog

[ related topics: Sports ]

Currently deep in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, "Unwanted Housing: Localism and Politics of Housing Development", by Michael Manville and Paavo Monkkonen:

Survey data from California, where housing development is a controversial and often incendiary topic, show that most people approve of state proposals to curb or override local power and allow more development. Those who disapprove — localists — are disproportionately likely to be white, affluent, and homeowners.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture Education Race Real Estate ]

RT squifish @thesquirrelfish@sfba.social

One of the things about caring about infrastructure, particularly transportation but really all of it, is how quickly people reveal ideas based in eugenics. They don't even connect it.

Ultimately when you hear people say that pedestrians and cyclists need to look where they're going instead of drivers driving more carefully that effectively means people of limited capabilities shouldn't be safe in public.

Not everyone can look where they're going. Brains aren't developed for that kind of responsibility for like a decade or more! And then that capability gets intermittently lost again on the other side of life. Then there's stuff like medication, drunkenness, blindness, distractions, being tired, etc etc.

These are all reasons people shouldn't be driving, and if they're also excuses for why people aren't safe walking, people with these conditions aren't safe anywhere.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area ]

RT Grimm :bc: @GrimmReality@beige.party

COP: Know why I pulled you over?

ME: Austerity policies and tax-cuts for the rich made you a cheap bagman for corrupt revenue quotas?

COP:

ME: Blink if yes.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

As we're still reeling from the implications of the xz attack, a good reminder to make sure that what you're downloading is what you think you're downloading, and this includes not trusting Google. And probably running a good ad blocker, but I'd imagine that that's an arms race. Hackers Target macOS Users with Malicious Ads Spreading Stealer Malware

[ related topics: Sports Macintosh ]

MS Power User: Windows users don't want Copilot on their taskbar; they want it in the bin.

Via Windows CoPilot, via Mark Pesce @mpesce@arvr.social.

[ related topics: Microsoft Current Events ]

josh buermann @buermann@mastodon.social

James Hansen insists the sudden 0.2 °C temperature rise in the last year is due to IPCC climate models underestimating greenhouse warming by underestimating sulfur aerosol cooling.

Aerosol pollution from international shipping was geoengineering the planet all along and disguised how fucked we already were, in other words.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/.../2024/AnnualT2023.2024.01.12.pdf

#climate

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Global Warming ]

Searched for myself on YouTube. Got a whole bunch of ads promising to reveal my personal information, okay, but then also suggested that it could "Find Old Girlfriends" and "Find Old Boyfriends", and now I'm curious about who it thinks are my old girlfriends, and definitely intrigued by who it thinks are my old boyfriends...

[ related topics: Photography ]

So if my view is over the NSScrollView stack, it gets its -mouseMoved: events just fine, if an instance of that view is over a WKWebView (with innocuous static content), it gets weird hiccups, where the events drop out for a second or two occasionally.

(Trying to recreate in a stand-alone app the thing where the scroll view drag is getting interrupted by other views.)

Edit: Well, and now it's not doing the herky jerky thing. Computing was a mistake.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT Elda King @eldaking@weirder.earth

Thinking about the Butlerian Jihad.

In the Dune universe, they had a war on computers and must now rely on drugs.

While in our universe, we had a war on drugs and rely on computers.

[ related topics: Drugs Health History ]

Huh. I wonder how much other "AI" is gonna turn out like this... Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

[ related topics: Books Movies Artificial Intelligence ]

Lori writes Why I lost faith in Kagi. I subscribed for a little while, hoping that this was a new search engine, but when it became clear that they were going down the "AI" route, and it was degrading their search capability, I lost interest.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

LinkedIn just emailed me offering a "Financial Fraud job at AirBNB", and some jokes just write themselves...

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

Oh look, someone else has reinvented suburban sprawl and is selling it as "agrihoods". Most telling: the renderings have no sidewalks.

Yay for selling to rich white people who want to cosplay peasants, I guess...

[ related topics: Race ]

RT modula t. @mod@mastodon.social

"or" and "else" are both common constructs in programming languages, but "or else" is typically a syntax error. this is a major deficiency. we need to be able to threaten our code.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Minimal 64x4: The Oddball in Home Computer Development (YouTube video)

A VGA output B&W machine built from TTL parts about 4x the speed of a C64, with integrated assembler and environment.

[ related topics: Movies Nature and environment Video ]

The future is just going to be reading documentation to figure out how this particular environment that someone else has set up wants to deal with its database accesses because someone had a good idea and someone else fell for it, forever, right?

This rant brought to you by accessing Postgres from Typescript. Fuck I just want $dbh->quote(), is that so hard?

(And, yes, I'm muddling through this on MacOS, so apparently that involves compiling Perl from scratch.)

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Nature and environment Macintosh Databases hubris ]

I mean, sure, you could use Gentoo and compile everything from scratch, but for a real challenge have you thought about using Perl on MacOS?

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Macintosh hubris ]

"No, you can't be trusted to have a .quote(...) method, just use parameterized queries where you pass in the SQL as text in an object and the actual value in an array, and we'll opaquely drop your update with a {..."status":"UPDATE 0"} response" <-- statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

[ related topics: Databases ]

Josiah and the Bonnevilles — Anti-Hero (Country Version)

(the Bandcamp album)

[ related topics: Movies ]

RT Catbus @ancient_catbus@jorts.horse

for Godzilla, every city is walkable

RT Matt Blaze @mattblaze@federate.social

I've taken to calling the Bitcoin price ticker "ransomware futures".

[ related topics: Economics ]

Giggle: Ars Technica: The fine art of human prompt engineering: How to talk to a person like ChatGPT

RT nazgul@infosec.exchange Kee Hinckley @nazgul@infosec.exchange

@daviddlevine Why does this sound like Neuro Linguistic Programming?

Which is kind of funny, because both are NLP.

[ related topics: Humor Software Engineering Art & Culture ]

I like much of the Strong Towns message, and that they've been successful. I've enjoyed talking to Chuck Marohn the couple times I've met him. But there's often something just... off... in the messaging, some "gold standard" stuff in the original book stood out.

The latest email from them links to Bari Weiss talking with Jonathan Haidt, and I'm happy that several times when people have discussed stronger ties between organizations I've said "uhh, take a step back".

[ related topics: Books ]

Just a reminder to those expecting to whip up general categorization systems that are broadly applicable in an afternoon: The Dewey Decimal System is a 2 semester course.

Thinking this morning about software bloat, how we just keep adding features and let hardware take care of the interim stuff, what I actually end up using on my computers, and what libxz is actually used for.

There doesn't seem to be an energy or efficiency argument for cleaning up our software and systemic technical debt.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

RT lenazun @lzg@mastodon.social

years ago I annoyed some people saying that the one-laptop-per-child project would be better if it was one-bycicle-per-child in terms of usefulness, local repair potential, economic activation, production costs, electronic garbage, learning curve, access to school and overall happiness. I WAS RIGHT fuckers.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Education Economics ]

Today in "not really a productive use of my time", but they're decent condiment dispensers, just gotten a little grody over the years. It's fascinating to see what color lies under there. The ones on the right have been sanded down and given a couple of coats of walnut oil.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Dear FireFox: all I want is a stable url from which I can download an APK for my Kindle Fire.

Okay, that and better PDF handling on Mac and a few other browser parity issues, but that's the big one this morning.

[ related topics: Macintosh Pyrotechnics ]

Hearing people asking for things that terminal users have had in their toolbox for decades kinda wants to make me say "how about using tools that respect your intelligence, rather than buying crap from vendors who prioritize the shiny over use".

Unrelated, Microsoft is making it harder to use non-Edge browsers... https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...om-changing-default-web-browser/

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Invention and Design Software Engineering moron Current Events ]

Ben Werdmuller: I tried Tesla Full Self Driving:

So would I pay the money for it? Fear on this level seems like a pretty poor use of $12,000 or $199 a month. You can rent a horror movie for $2.99, and paying attention to America is free.

[ related topics: Movies Currency ]

Relevant to work discussions: Keith Kurson: Souring on Arc Browser

However, my once unwavering loyalty to Arc Browser has started to waver, all due to the introduction of new AI features that have left me unsettled. While I’m no stranger to using AI tools (I’ve got a Claude and OpenAI subscription!), I find myself at odds with the way Arc now aggregates sources from various areas without regard for my preferences. In a world where trust in news sources is paramount, the inability to curate the content that shapes my browsing experience raises red flags. ...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

*Takes toke*... "Well, I don't think I'm losing my cognitive faculties": Current Alzheimer Research: Association Between Cannabis Use and Subjective Cognitive Decline: Findings from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)

Results: Compared to non-users, non-medical cannabis use was significantly associated with 96% decreased odds of SCD [Subjective Cognitive Decline] (aOR=0.04, 95% CI=0.01-0.44, p<.01). Medical (aOR=0.46, 95% CI=0.06-3.61, p=.46) and dual medical and non-medical use (aOR=0.30, 95% CI=0.03-2.92, p=.30) were also associated with decreased odds of SCD, although not significant.

Via Boing Boing: Boomers find brain boost in bong rips: slashes risk of self-reported cognitive decline by 96%

I'm reading Jensen Huang talking about a marketplace for NIMs, and I honestly can't tell if there's useful application for LLMs somewhere in here, or if I'm being told with great enthusiasm that I can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

The most relatable part of the Star Wars sequel trilogy is the characters’ problems stem from terrible decisions made by their grandparents' generation.

[ related topics: Star Wars tolkien Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

Got a Facebook ad for "You(dot)com", decided to check it out. "AI" is going just great.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

And, eeenterestingly, Google Firebase seems to be having load problems today. Wonder if this is eclipse related.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Astronomy Java ]

Hey, if you are a user of Steve Bogart's awesome Sankeymatic Javascript library (and if you need to generate Sankey diagrams on the web, it's definitely worth looking at), he's got a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sankeymatic

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books ]

Oh dear, I've done a little more screwing around with You(dot)com, and, functionally, it appears to be a GPT layer over Reddit. This... uh.... does not improve the quality of the information presented vs straight up Google search results.

A review of Cowboy Carter by a certified hillbilly son of the South from the streets of Nashville

This matters because most of us down here know this, and it has shaped the character of our community. This is what it means to be be country, fighting together for our neighbors, and we keep on winning. The South didn’t lose, the Confederacy did. The South won the right to stay part of the Union. This is essential to understand because it not only a critical <emn>formation of what it means to be country but it also explains why it has remained important to Beyoncé not to let us forget that she is from here too.

[ related topics: Community ]

RT Jeff Spencer @revjss@sfba.social

Tar sands oil producers in Canada get to self-report their own greenhouse gas emissions. It turns out their emissions are 60 times greater than their official estimates. https://www.independent.co.uk/...ns-toxic-oil-sands-b2485599.html

Scientists “noted that the total oil sands carbon emissions were larger than those from all human-made sources, from chemical products to cars, in megacities like Los Angeles.”

Perhaps this practice should change.

RT Benjamin Carr, Ph.D. 👨🏻‍💻🧬 @BenjaminHCCarr@hachyderm.io

It could well be a blockbuster #hurricaneseason, and that’s not a good thing #Atlantic #Ocean is on fire right now.

The Colorado State forecast calls for 23 named storms, more than 50% higher than a typical season of 14.4 named storms; and 11 #hurricanes, above a normal total of seven. Additionally, the forecast predicts that the season's accumulated #cyclone energy—a summation of the duration and intensity of storms across the whole basin—will be 70% greater than normal

Ars Technica: It could well be a blockbuster hurricane season, and that’s not a good thing

Yeah, sorry, next generation, y'all are fucked.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Current Events Pyrotechnics Global Warming ]

As a Modern Western Square Dance caller, I approve: All music must be 4/4, 126BPM.

Limited exceptions may be made for cued round dances on a case-by-case basis.

Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow

“(I) have announced the final decision, agreed with the head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov, that from now on all musical, vocal and choreographic works must correspond to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute,” Dadayev said, according to TASS.

Well, shit.

[ related topics: Music Law ]

I had to verify the "eyes hurt" Google trends theme for myself, and, sure, the graph is eye-rollingly worth a giggle, but the map... Sigh. I weep for humanity.

https://trends.google.com/tren...hurt&date=now%201-d&geo=US&hl=en

[ related topics: Humor Photography Maps and Mapping ]

From back in February, but totally pertinent right now: Andrea Grimes: The AI Zeitgeist is for Alpha Dudes Who Love to Be Wrong. I'm just gonna use a small pull quote because there are so many awesome bits in here.

The AI zeitgeist is rooted in white men being so worried that they are on the verge of having to trust the expertise of people who aren’t just like them that they would rather get their information from a wrong robot./blockquote>

Via ErosBlog: The Gender Nuanced View of AI

[ related topics: Weblogs Robotics Artificial Intelligence Race ]

Well, maybe some humans. Like humans who believe that AI will be smarter than them... Elon Musk: AI will be smarter than any human around the end of next year.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

This is powerful: Walter C. Long: An Open Letter to Richard Linklater on Our Texas Death Penalty.

There are Linklater films that I love, like the "Before" series, I found Boyhood stunning. I don't know if I could manage God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, usually when I turn to the screen I'm looking for light escape, but it sounds like it's powerful. This essay sure is.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Writing ]

Anyone else play with XKCD 2916: Machine and flash back to the Mary Walton book on W. Edwards Deming, about sorting balls?

[ related topics: Books ]

Gazetteer: Hoodline using AI to generate news stories and journalist profiles

Following a Gazetteer SF inquiry, the neighborhood news site publicly confirmed its use of artificial intelligence to power an 'In-House Writing Collective'

Broke Ass Stuart: Hoodline caught using AI generated writers to make AI generated articles

To be fair, it seems like maybe they're feeding it things like police press releases and getting overly flowery summaries out, and unlike some other recent breaks, don't appear to be outright spreading lies.

Yet.

But this sure is a consequence of the Google created SEO environment.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Writing Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Artificial Intelligence Real Estate Aviation - Helicopters ]

Slapped a dark mode on Flutterby.com and Flutterby.net. Not sure I like it.

And at some point if the tuits align I could stand to re-skin all the things, but... yeah... web content is kinda down on my list of things to fight these days.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The "to read" queue is currently way too deep, but... Feminist City — Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern should probably go on there somewhere.

[ related topics: Books Space & Astronomy ]

Today I learned about GCC XML.

There is one open-source C++ parser, the C++ front-end to GCC, which is currently able to deal with the language in its entirety. The purpose of the GCC-XML extension is to generate an XML description of a C++ program from GCC's internal representation. Since XML is easy to parse, other development tools will be able to work with C++ programs without the burden of a complicated C++ parser.

Emphasis mine...

(It's been superceded by CastXML)

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment ]

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con By Baldur Bjarnason

Knowing Machines: Models all the way, a look at how the training sets for image data have been generated, and what sorts of very interesting biases are the basis for image selection.

The concepts of what is and isn't visually appealing can be influenced in outsized ways by the tastes of a very small group of individuals, and the processes that are chosen by dataset creators to curate the datasets.

In the case of Midjourney, by a handful of esoteric nerds, and by a 65-year old mechanical engineer living in Southeastern Wisconsin.

[ related topics: Law ]

The 2024 Proceedings of the SIGBOVIK conference, of the Association for Computational Heresy includes Programming Socks: Is it high time for thigh-highs? An investigation into the perceived unreasonable effectiveness of Programming Socks on productivity levels in the field of Software Engineering by one Ian F.V.G. Hunter. From the "Results and Analysis" section:

From this data, we can only conclude that either: Programming Socks have become more main-stream and non-programmers wearing these socks are developing into programmers themselves — or that Programming Socks are so effective that the majority of wearers in our dataset simply finished their software and did not need to do any additional coding. Either way, this result is a clear endorsement of their usage.

The thing is... I have so many PDFs open right now, and have been reading so many papers of late, that even though this is an obvious send-up, the conclusion from the methodology reads as more legit than some.

That may just be based on how many of those are about "AI".

[ related topics: Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Clothing Conferences ]

Ugh. Okay, I have some further technical issues to resolve before the next hybrid Know Before You Grow. I need a second monitor, and should probably not even be on site, which sucks, but....

RT Shae Erisson @shapr@recurse.social</a

OH:

J: Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month" paraphrased: the engineering manager is a low-pass filter over inputs to the development team.

B: I find very funny the implication that changes in project requirements should be viewed in the frequency domain.

Agile is an attempt to make the resistor in the RC network as small as possible.

[ related topics: broadband Model Building ]

Thinking today about how different history would have been if Mark Furhman and his fellow thugs hadn't tried to frame OJ, and had just done a straight up above-board investigation.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

This a good time to mention that Firefox on mobile keeps going non-responsive, viewing, and even downloading, PDFs on MacOS is giving me zalgo, or worse, documents which look legit but are wrong (hi insurance cards!), and they fucking moved the place I was downloading APKs to use Firefox on my Kindle Fire tablet?

https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/112253468123323423

[ related topics: Open Source Macintosh Pyrotechnics ]

Better to take a snack than to snake attack.

Someone recommended listening to Erich Jarvis on the Huberman podcast, and... The discussions of how he thinks language works are not resonating with me, and I'm totally experiencing this as "Really? That's how normies think and process language?"

Bizarre.

[ related topics: Pop Culture ]

Waiting at the dealer for warranty service on the Bolt, and... I wonder how many of the inefficiencies here vs the shoi take my truck to are intentional. I think an interaction at North Bay Automotive takes me less than 5 minutes, we're headed for half hour for the drop off at Victory Chevrolet.

[ related topics: California Culture Automobiles Machinery Fabrication ]

This prompt engineering is bullshit. We need more lackadaisical engineering.

Trying to walk some people through the realization that, no, LLMs are not actually useful for what they think they might be useful for is bringing me to some great 404 pages, but for some reason I'm liking the German Wikipedia's "this article does not exist" text....

Dieser Artikel existiert nicht.

Möglichst ganze Wörter eingeben, die im Artikeltext, insbesondere aber im Lemma vorkommen sollen.

If I loathe LLMs for no other reason, the fact that so much energy needs to go into getting people to understand that they're experiencing confirmation bias, and it's just making up stuff, we can't base core features on that, is enough.

But mad props to Perplexity(dot)AI for returning different info from their API than from their front page, and giving me both dramatically wrong summarization and lots of bogus URLs, to help me make that case just a leetle bit faster.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Wall Street Journal: How I Built an AI-Powered, Self-Running Propaganda Machine for $105

I paid a website developer to create a fully automated, AI-generated ‘pink-slime’ news site, programmed to create false political stories. The results were impressive—and, in an election year, alarming.

I've spent the past two days deep in LLM territory, and I think our best hope for humanity is that we poison these things on their own output.

[ related topics: Politics History moron Current Events Sports Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Elon Musk's Grok [AI] Creates Bizarre Fake News About the Solar Eclipse Thanks to Jokes on X

Via

[ related topics: Astronomy Current Events Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Java Photovoltaics ]

Jeff Jarvis at Nieman Lab: The California Journalism Preservation Act would do more harm than good. Here’s how the state might better help news

“If there are resources to be put to work, we must ask where those resources should come from, who should receive them, and on what basis they should be distributed.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment California Culture Archival ]

At the Oaktown 8s Tea Dance

[ related topics: Photography ]

When you misread the Apple Music icons, and accidentally buy the "clean" version of Beyoncé's Carter Country. Damn it.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Music ]

At the Blue Zones kickoff expo at the SRJC campus. They've waived parking fees for the event. This feels like a symptom of the problem.

Reading Stratechery: Gemini 1.5 and Google’s Nature, I'm struck by how many conditionals there are. It's about how Google's large context window for their LLM system could enable things like reading a vendor's TOS and checking for compliance with policy, or really pie in the sky stuff, and

Again, leave aside the implausibility of this demo: the key takeaway is the capabilities unlocked when the model is able to have all of the context around a problem while working; this is only possible with — and here the name is appropriate — a long context window, and that is ultimately enabled by Google’s infrastructure.

This reminds me a lot about the discussion around self-driving automobiles, where, leaving aside the issues of geometry and pollution and whatnot, is it possible that autonomous cars could be better drivers than humans? Sure. But every time someone digs through the deliberate obfuscation of the stats and looks at the numbers of what's happening right now, we're a long way the other side of that.

Or, of course, the discussion around cryptocurrencies.

Anyway, Futurism: Disillusioned Businesses Discovering That AI Kind of Sucks:

"'This is super cool, but I can't actually get it to work reliably enough to roll out to our customers.'"

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

Ugh. Something's broken in my CMS's UTF-8 handling, this is from Firefox desktop.

àëǐöü

[ related topics: Content Management ]

So Oakland airport is renaming themselves to include "San Francisco" in the name, and... if you can figure out how to get people from one airport to the other in less than 30 minutes or so, I bet you can print money.

Those travelers showing up at the wrong airport who *need* to get across the bay...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Aviation Bay Area California Culture Currency ]

RT Guy Boyd @resync@mastodon.social

@The_McJones @davidgerard

We use a constraint solver model in our product, we’ve stopped describing it as AI because we found customers no longer trusted its output if we did

That component is simply known as “the algorithm” now 😓

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Open Source Security (OpenSSF) and OpenJS Foundations Issue Alert for Social Engineering Takeovers of Open Source Projects

The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to “address any critical vulnerabilities,” yet cited no specifics. The email author(s) wanted OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. This approach bears strong resemblance to the manner in which “Jia Tan” positioned themselves in the XZ/liblzma backdoor.

[ related topics: Free Software Weblogs Invention and Design ]

Mother Jones: The spectacular implosion of the Libertarian party. I think Ron Paul was kind of the swan song there, the acknowledgement that the party had lost any sense of ideological coherence and was just becoming the racist rural subsidy-and-externality-leech party, but this goes into some of the internal factions of that decline and disruption.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian ]

RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

why are we calling it machine learning when we could be calling it stochastic errorism

[ related topics: Education ]

RT R Tyler Croy 🦀 @rtyler@hacky.town

Now that residential solar is a solved problem, I would like to see residential pumped-storage hydroelectricity

kthx

[ related topics: Photovoltaics ]

RT BrianKrebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange

The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...-systems-in-smart-lock-key-leak/

BrianKrebs @briankrebs

BTW in case you need help with Chirp Systems products, here is their user guide:

"User Guide

What do we want this to say? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."

https://www.chirpsystems.com/user-guide-copy

Via Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange who notes:

I told everyone. And nobody cared.

[ related topics: moron Law Douglas Adams ]

Interesting. a bug of mine suggests that OpenAI's "small" embeddings are locations on a sphere? I haven't chased it down, it's ancillary to what I'm trying to accomplish, but that's a dramatically smaller semantic space than I'd intuitively have thought.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Reading "If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me", and struck by the pondering of the distinctions between possession, ownership, and status of cultural artifacts (like songs), and how our analytical structures reflect biases on these issues.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology ]

A little LLM optimism for the morning: Molly White: AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?

AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.

Not everyone is so optimistic: RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

@pluralistic @molly0xfff Eh, I think LLMs work really well at their intended purpose—which is to separate investors from their capital. (The claimed "benefits", meanwhile, are mostly a collection of bare-faced lies.)

[ related topics: Current Events Artificial Intelligence Race ]

Capcom has launched a new website celebrating the company’s 40th anniversary

But, yeah, whatever, you don't want the article, you want to go straight to Capcom Town, with playable versions of some of the video games and all of the nostalgias.

[ related topics: Games Invention and Design Current Events Art & Culture Video ]

Judge awards $23.5 million to undercover St. Louis officer beaten by colleagues during protest

The attack happened on Sept. 17, 2017, days after Stockley was acquitted in the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith on Dec. 20, 2011. Hall was walking back toward police headquarters when his uniformed colleagues ordered him to put up his hands and get on the ground, then beat him.

So, yeah, dude was undercover in a protest over the acquittal of a white cop shooting a black guy.

[ related topics: Law Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Race ]

Oh, good, I'm glad that after the recent Firefox upgrade I had to restart a couple of times for various things to start working. I thought I was going to have to finally switch away.

In other news, Mozilla has a helpful guide to getting started with LLMs https://ai-guide.future.mozilla.org/

[ related topics: Open Source Current Events Work, productivity and environment Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence ]

On Marques Brownlee's review of the Humane AI pin, and his subsequent Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies?: Clap Or AI Gets It — Can bad reviews kill companies? It’s a start.

Like the threat behind crypto’s “have fun staying poor” slogan, AI needs the rest of us to believe in its unstoppable ascendancy because that belief is basically all it has. AI products aren’t about whether anyone wants or needs AI products. They’re about how people could want or need those products, eventually, if everyone stays the course and also keeps pumping money into AI companies.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Cryptography Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

RT mcc @mcc@mastodon.social

Strange science facts: In nuclear power, functional nuclear fission reactors were constructed as early as 1942, yet nuclear fusion remains elusive and can only be achieved for short periods. In jazz, on the other hand, jazz fusion was invented in the early 70s, and jazz fission remains purely theoretical even today

Oh, look, the cryptodweebs are reporting me for offering up cited debunking of their bullshit. Apologies to the my awesome instance admin for wading through their crap. A good reminder to block and move on, rather than engaging the idiots.

Changes in Permanent Contraception Procedures Among Young Adults Following the Dobbs Decision

We observed an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures among adults aged 18 to 30 years following Dobbs. The increase in procedures for female patients was double that for male patients. These patterns offer insights into the gendered dynamics of permanent contraceptive use and may reflect the disproportionate health, social, and economic consequences of compulsory pregnancy on women and people with the capacity to become pregnant.

doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.0424

[ related topics: Health Community Economics ]

“One of the reasons — no, two of the reasons — we hired Yvonne are being smushed by this costume.”

Yvonne Craig: An Interview with the First Actress to Play Batgirl

[ related topics: Movies ]

Interesting: Zrythm, "A highly automated and intuitive digital audio workstation".

Currently okay with Logic Pro as my DAW for the things I do, but should I get back on Linux I'm definitely intrigued, because this looks like there's a lot of stuff that's more built for usability for people like me rather than skeuomorphism for musicians.

[ related topics: Free Software Music Open Source ]

Whoah, it's Bicycle Day, already! How'd I miss that?

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Why did it take me so long to realize that Tesla is just taking "move fast and break things" a little too literally?

The CVS pharmacy in the Petaluma Target/Kenilworth location is closed today. Presumably for 4/20 celebrations?

[ related topics: Health ]

College applications rose in states that legalized recreational marijuana

Contemporary Economic Policy: Higher education: The impact of recreational marijuana on college applications Christopher D. Blake, Danna Kang Thomas, Joshua Hess

Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences model, we investigate the effects of local recreational marijuana (RMJ) policy changes on college applications and find that the three largest state public schools reaped, on average, an almost 54% increase in applications. This increase does not appear to come solely from low-ability students as both first and third quartiles of admitted student composite SAT scores to the largest three public schools do not decrease. Rather, they both increase by almost 3.8% though these estimates are not statistically significant. Robust difference-in-difference and event study models support the signs and magnitudes of these gains and show they diminish over time.

https://doi.org/10.1111/coep.12633

[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up Current Events Education Flowers Economics ]

Mastodon thread about Sears kit homes.

National Bureau of Economic Research: Nothing for Something: Marketing Cancer Drugs to Physicians Increases Prescribing Without Improving Mortality Colleen Carey, Michael Daly & Jing Li

...We find that prescribing of the associated drug increases 4\% in the twelve months after a payment is received, with the increase beginning sharply in the month of payment and fading out within a year. A marketing payment also leads physicians to begin treating cancer patients with lower expected mortality. While payments result in greater expenditure on cancer drugs, there are no associated improvements in patient mortality.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Consumerism and advertising Marketing Economics ]

Great article on the politicization of insurance risk, perverse incentives, and rebuilding in flood zones: Mother Jones: These Floridians Rebuilt Houses in Flood Zones. Now FEMA Is Cracking Down.

[ related topics: Politics Machinery Fabrication Real Estate Model Building ]

Mike Masnick: The Coddling of the American Parent

Jonathan Haidt’s new book “The Anxious Generation” blames youth mental health issues on social media in a way that’s easy, wrong, and dangerous.

[ related topics: Books Health Invention and Design Journalism and Media ]

Study: Alphabetical order of surnames may affect grading

An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students’ submissions in Canvas — the most widely used online learning management system — which is based on alphabetical rank of their surnames.

30 Million Canvas Grading Records Reveal Widespread Sequential Bias and System-Induced Surname Initial Disparity

[ related topics: Education ]

It's been a while since I've been cycle counting, but this is interesting: The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword

In case you skimmed to the end, here's the summary:

• Benefit seems to be available for GCC.
• Doesn't affect Apple's chips much at all.
• Do not use final with Clang, and maybe MSVC as well.

At the very least, it's another one of those things to hide behind the preprocessor so you've got options.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs Theater & Plays Law Pedal Power Bicycling ]

An Ask MeFi question for "Fluffer pro tips" did *not* go in the direction I was expecting...

Charles Buhler's "reactionless drive" is making the rounds again, just as the reviews of all of these half-baked cell phones that talk to "AI assistants" are starting to come out. This morning it's The Verge talking about the Rabbit R1, in the wake of all of the hullabaloo over Marques Brownlee's review of the Humane AI pin titled "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now" (YouTube).

And I'm reminded of that thing where it's useful to look at "what's the enabling technology here?". If Buhler's right, space travel is the absolutely least interesting thing about what he's pushing. If a company has developed interesting "AI assistant" technology, carrying around another device is the least interesting part of that.

A few years ago I was thinking "well, I could learn to play another instrument, or I could use my voice to generate MIDI", so I went looking for those technologies, and holy shit the number of people who were selling plugins that promised to do that, but bundling it with a cheap USB mic, were legion (especially once I triggered the Facebook ad demons). And, of course, none of them found any third party who'd credibly say "yeah, this works".

Anyway, wish more "AI" reviewers would do head-to-heads against the current state of Siri or Alexa.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Space & Astronomy Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Not sure if "8 Cheese Pizza" means like 7 bladed razor, or "we had leftovers and a grater" or ... But that many seems excessive for a blend.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

For all of the horrible things McKinsey has done to the US, this feels an awful lot like taking down Al Capone via tax fraud, but I'll take it: McKinsey Faces US Criminal Probe Over Opioids Work, Sources Say

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Work, productivity and environment Personal Lubricant ]

Email from Chevrolet informs me that "Dan, there’s a world of tech in Blazer EV", and... no, I work with this stuff, let's limit that tech as much as possible...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Automobiles ]

Oh that's A powerful observation: "It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia

[ related topics: Weblogs Law Enforcement Education ]

Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search. TLDR: They took the ex-McKinsey guy who ran Yahoo! search into the ground and let him degrade search so that people would spend more time looking at ads.

Hacker News thread, linked to because it's rare to see that many comments about a Google personality, with nobody stepping up to defend him.

MeFi thread

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Current Events ]

Seriously, if anyone has recommendations for USB-C power cables that last any amount of time, please mention them. I'm, down to one 3' long one that I bought because it was $20 vs the $15 for the other ones, the original Apple one died, the magsafe connector on this M2 MBP seems to have died, and I'm sick of shoveling money down the USB-C hole.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Currency ]

As campus administrators across the country are solidly positioning themselves on the wrong side of history, I'm reminded of my Dad, who had a stint in the army that he actually really enjoyed (he was in Germany along the Iron Curtain and didn't re-up because Vietnam was finally catching up with him), observing that when his peers were protesting, he was enlisting, and that he should have been protesting.

Software development is just an unending series of discussions in which you attempt to get people to describe what they're seeing or what they want more precisely, continually iterating on what "that", "it", "home", "away", and similar terms mean....

...and then you die.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

This Metafilter comment on the decline of Google is such a wonderful summary of how, once Google has always been somewhere on the spectrum between cooperative player in an ecosystem and extractive, and how the extractive nature has become overwhelming:

My phrasing of this point differs, but not in disagreement or criticism, just as another way to view it through the lens of wnissen's really excellent phrasing above:

"The original intent of Backrub was to profit off of the work of Internet curators without paying them for their time creating high-quality sites."

Which is the essence of the modern AI content theft problem as well, only starting twenty-five years ago. Once Google's full-text search devalued the effort of curators, most of the unpaid ones stopped doing it at all. Later on, the paid ones got replaced by algorithms. Which means that today, Google Search no longer has the data necessary to function as designed.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Mathematics Net Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

”The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter." Wait, I thought London Breed was trying to do this already.

The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco

[ related topics: broadband Bay Area California Culture ]

Itis really quite the thing to see all of the shock and dismay over the Supreme Court when Big Tony Scalia explicitly fucking told us what was up. Great to be outraged, but if you're only noticing now, it's worth doing some introspection.

And find better pundits.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Bunch of scraps I needed to get out of the way, and wanted to fine tune some methods of work for various cuts, so I'm making 4 music stands. And learning things about geometry and what's practical as my design evolves.

[ related topics: Music Photography Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design Education ]

UX Collective: How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? — A digital endorsement process gone wrong

I'm so old, I actually remember when we talked about things like user experience...

I mean, from a perspective other than "how can we A/B test to extract the most value from users?"

[ related topics: Aviation - Helicopters ]

Saturday, Charlene and I were wiped from the Apple Blossom Parade and the activities of the afternoon, and in the evening ended up vegging out in front of "Watch Call Me Country: Beyonc&#eacute; & Nashville's Renaissance", which wasn't long, and MAX recommended the series "We're Here" afterwards, and...

Drag, queer acceptance, and a focus on supporting all of the participants? Yeah, we've watched 3 episodes so far, and will probably let our MAX subscription renew for another month because of it.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Movies ]

sarina-anadyomene

Cocaine was a stimulant used by a priestly caste of the middle period United States called businessmen in order to commune with The Market. [1]

[ related topics: Drugs Economics ]

priscilla @ghoulnoise: DO NOT BUY HISENSE TV'S LOL (Or at least keep them offline).

In which a person's Windows computer is gradually failing, first it started with MIDI device capabilities degrading, then Task Manager stopped working reliably, then video capture, and remote desktop, and then System Settings disappeared, and...

Then they discovered that the Hisense TV on their network was generating a random ID for UPNP discovery every few minutes, and Windows was adding it to their device list, and:

I followed the instructions. I deleted keys generated by our TV for 5 straight minutes. 5 Minutes of like 200BPM clicking. I restarted. Everything worked again. I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I'd solved a murder. The main suspect was the PC but the culprit was the TV in the other room.

But, to be fair, that Windows was brought to a screeching halt by this is *also* a serious issue.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Microsoft broadband Work, productivity and environment Television Video ]

My Zoom renewal is coming up again, and I'm looking at the features list and thinking "wait, could I get this ala carte without all of the bullshit? I don't need "Mail & Calendar", I can't figure out what "Notes" are, and I can definitely do without the "AI Companion".

It's easy for hosting the sorts of events we host, but I am definitely looking for other options.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I mashed the wrong buttons somehow and Android Auto pulled up the Google Virtual Assistant while I was driving.

So I said "oK Google, fuck off", and for a lecture about language.

Which was a good reminder about how advertising parasites leech off our social norms and sense of guilt, and how the norms that guide us when we're interacting with people should not apply when we interact with those who's abuse or good nature.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Consumerism and advertising Douglas Adams ]

Firstyear's blog-a-log — Passkeys: A Shattered Dream

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

@anthrocypher I've got this in an upcoming publication:

"Every line of code written today represents a testing, complexity, maintenance and refactoring burden your team will bear tomorrow, and the reality is that none of our customers want code. Our customers want _utility and functionality;_ code is a liability we accept so we can deliver that functionality. GenAI or not, nobody wants or needs an arbitrary quantity of code for its own sake."