Flutterby™! From 2024-05-01 to 2024-05-31

JFC: Stunning accusations of sex abuse in Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans seminary pool; secret signals from one church abuser to others

“Additionally, it was reported that in some instances, ‘gifts’ were given to abuse victims by the accused [molesters] with instructions to pass on or give the gift to certain priests at the next school or church,” the warrant contended. “It was said that the ‘gift’ was a form of signaling to another priest that the person was a target for sexual abuse.

I have been kind of taking casually that the Petaluma St Vincent de Paul high school was "reorganizing", presumably to shield assets from paying out to victims of Santa Rosa diocese abuse, but I think the horrors are becoming less removed.

Via ResearchBuzz

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Invention and Design Current Events California Culture Hurricane Katrina ]

I'm gonna go with: the purpose of a University is to indoctrinate, free thinkers are outside agitators. Academia is based on abuse, let us not defend that.

"When students begin to defy established authority it often appears to besieged administrators that “someone must be behind this,” the implication being that young people are incapable of thinking or acting on their own." — Howard Zinn, 1971

https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/outside-agitators/

[ related topics: Current Events Education ]

Listening to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, episode 26: "Ain't That A Shame", he hit the Pat Boone version and... I had a moment of very uncomfortable self awareness about the progress of my vocal lessons. Hopefully I have left that era of the development of my voice behind.

[ related topics: Music Pop Culture ]

Today in Mac app development woes: is it Sonoma 14.4.1 vs 14.3.1, WkWebView based on Safari 17.4.1 vs 17.3.1, or my own incompetence with CSS?

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

Whoah, Nixle alert from the Petaluma PD says AT&T customers in the area don't have 911. It as only 2 weeks ago that they fixed it, and a week before that it was out before, and... does AT&T know how to run phone networks?

It's not in the current development path, but some features prototyped for work use a prefix notation math system, and that's bugged me, and wrote a little framework that let me use Objective-C to specify a parser in Backus–Naur form, and because that created an in-memory tree and had some good intermediate information that I could use for command completion.

I've done stuff with the peg/leg recursive descent parser generators in C, and realized that I want the ability to introspect the parse tree better, for things like command completion and better error messages.

I've been both thinking that this is a tool I'd like to have generally for implementing configuration and scripting kinds of things, and that this might be my opportunity to learn a new language. I've been thinking that I should learn Rust, although as I dig through a lot of it it (and Go) feel pretty prescriptive, on the other hand I've also looked at some of the side effects that sneak into Perl and Python and realize that whipupitude is not always great for long term maintenance of the code.

Anyway, I started thinking about what it might look like in C++, and that reminded me of how much the language informs my design thinking, even as I think that many of those ideas are portable across languages. Which got me back towards Rust, although...

LogLog Games: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years is a fascinating look at how Rust's proscription about memory management can make it difficult to build. Especially as we start to think about "data oriented design" as a response to Object-Oriented design, maybe that isn't a great idea.

On the other side, The Brain Dump — One year of C is some musings about C99 (vs C89) and thinking about design and memory in C vs C++, and it's making me think that maybe I even need to go back to my preprocessor abusing ways and implement this thing in C.

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Perl Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Mathematics Graphic Design Python hubris ]

Tire toxicity faces fresh scrutiny after salmon die-offs

California has begun taking steps to regulate the chemical, last year classifying tires containing it as a "priority product," which requires manufacturers to search for and test substitutes.

"6PPD plays a crucial role in the safety of tires on California's roads and, currently, there are no widely available safer alternatives," said Karl Palmer, a deputy director at the state's Department of Toxic Substances Control.

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture ]

So the legit uses for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at this point have been pretty much reduced to malware and helping North Korea and Russia evade sanctions.

I've been thinking about LLMs in the context of cryptocurrencies, how much of the early hype was in glossing over the core flaws which make both technologies unsuitable for purpose.

And realized, with the rise of automated spam from LLMs, that the end uses of both technologies are the same. The parallels run deeper than I thought.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

Holy shit. Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died

Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and one of the first whistleblowers to allege Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 MAX, died Tuesday morning after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection.

Known as Josh, Dean lived in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit is based. He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.

[ related topics: Health Aviation ]

I've been playing around with parsing recently, and I've been trying to figure out how to deal with UTF-8 data. The various C/C++ "is...()" tests all seem locale specific, which feels completely wrong when I'm trying to figure out "does this character start an identifier?", which, maybe, is (!(isspace(x) || ispunct(x) || isdigit(x)))?

I guess I can assume anything with the high bit set qualifies.

A small lathe built in a Japanese internment camp. But the rest of the story is great.

Via.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Swing Sets Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore

New parks in Philadelphia, Memphis and Tulsa show that the key to making playgrounds fun for all ages is designing them for teenagers

Bugs the hell out of me when we reduce neighborhood playgrounds to "tot lot"s.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design ]

As the local Catholic school reorganizes itself to avoid being liquidated to pay damages to abuse survivors and slanders its former Principal, I think this is an interesting juxtaposition: Associated Press: ‘A step back in time': America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Current Events ]

Unicode is fun!

int main(int argc, char **argv) { int ２= 4; printf("%d\n",２); }

The email subject line reads "POSTPONED! Solstice in Palo Alto", and I was momentarily confused: how does one postpone the solstice?

Then I remembered that, yeah, the female vocal ensemble... http://www.solsticesings.com/

Don't use cloud services for critical stuff without workarounds in place: Wired: What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs

[ related topics: Writing ]

Ran out of polyurethane. Learning a lot, got a bunch of methods of work to improve, some of these are pretty rough....

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Education ]

Ran out of polyurethane. Learning a lot, got a bunch of methods of work to improve, some of these are pretty rough.... Doh, with picture.

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

Definitely learning methods here...

[ related topics: Photography Education ]

Friend described their use of LLMs as "I use the GPS on my phone as merely a guide."

As I hear people talking about using LLMs to do things like "summarize insurance documents", I suspect we're gonna see their metaphorical car towed out of the metaphorical mud before too long...

[ related topics: Automobiles Douglas Adams Maps and Mapping ]

Kitt Hirasaki, with whom I worked at Pixar, pipes into a Reddit thread about his father John Hirasaki's work with quarantined astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Work, productivity and environment Graphics ]

As everyone's trying to figure out WTF is up with Elon Musk firing Tesla's supercharger team, and the Model 2 is on again and off again, and "real soon now" claims are made for self-driving that mirror the timespan of that 2016 faked video, another for the vaults: Slate, September 29, 2017: Elon Musk Now Plans to Send People to Mars in Seven Years, Via.

[ related topics: Astronomy Video ]

Goslings!

[ related topics: Photography ]

More goslings!

[ related topics: Photography ]

A WKWebView in one window silently failed to load a .css file from the app bundle. All of the other web views in other windows configured identically were fine.

So that's fun.

I miss when computing at least tried to be deterministic.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

I occasionally wonder if I'm falling behind on software development process stuff, but every time I read a book on the topic it feels like it's rehashing stuff that was pretty settled 40 years ago (and coming to the same recommendations, which, still, nobody's actually implementing).

Which... walking by the movie theater shows that they're rehashing TV shows from 40 years ago, so maybe I'm not falling behind.

I do need to catch up on syntax, but doing that for all of the languages is tiring.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Technology and Culture Movies Software Engineering Theater & Plays Television ]

Well, I have been trying to use Safari as my main work browser, but after the 4th forced Jira login today, and coming back to it unresponsive after I go through Google 2FA (even when I check "remember this device"), I'm back to Chrome for my Jira stuff, and Safari just do deal with debugging WKWebView crap.

Sigh. "Web Standards" that have anything to do with display and JavaScript were a mistake.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

RT Andrew Goldstone @agoldst@mastodon.social

@siracusa's remark that "There has not been millions of years of reproductive selection to help produce a modern-day population that inherently knows how to convert a PDF into a Word document" provokes the disquieting thought that we are NOW living in an era in which the selective pressures are in favor of precisely that. What monsters are we becoming? Time to get to work on my dystopian short story, "Homo pandocus."

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Holy crap. Nixle alert warning of an AT&T 911 outage at 9:13 on May 1st, alert clearing that warning today, May 7th, at 8:40. I can hear the collective eye-rolling of my friends who've provisioned mission critical systems...

[ related topics: Aviation - Helicopters ]

Attempting to create a Bing API key for some work stuff. Holy shit, does Microsoft just not employ anyone who's ever thought about user experience, or has this shit been A/B tested in order to extract the maximum revenue?

It's hard to believe the latter, given how hard it is to get to a point when anything's usable, even having given them my credit card...

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

on my own "Azure Services" resource page, clicking on a configured resource and copying "Key 1" or "Key 2" and putting that in the headers is currently giving me a 401 error, but holy crap, the number of different answers on this page shows that Microsoft has some *serious* process issues:

https://stackoverflow.com/ques...ubscription-key-in-windows-azure

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Television ]

RT Edmonds_Scanner @Edmonds_Scanner@universeodon.com

My advice?

Embrace the Muppet lifestyle.

Tell bad jokes. Sing off key. Dance for no reason.

And most importantly, pants are always optional.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

Great Big Bollards: A Manifesto

Just so I can find it from all of my machines:

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

It is hogwash like this rant on design which show that it was a mistake to ever give designers control over colors on the web, and CSS is awful, and we should go back to HTML v1 and let users set their own colors.

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesi...black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

[ related topics: Typography Graphic Design ]

Of all of the things I got from this amazing two hour masterclass with Steve Albini at SAE Australia, the incredible discussion about why use analog is the least of what I expected, but was so good.

[ related topics: Movies Community ]

How do I know Google search sucks now? I just went searching for a ChatGPT logo mashed up with Goatse, and found nothing.

And I *know* the Internet got there before I did.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

All I need now is a band... And talent... Uhhh... Okay, maybe not the best project, then. Two of these are okay, two of these are pretty rough, all could use some attention to finishing, and I'm going back and forth on whether the legs need a locking mechanism. But I learned a lot about methods of work, know where I need to tune process, and got a couple of music stands that I'm not sure where to store...

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

Another shot of the music stands.

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Whoah: Tornado in Lincoln Nebraska on 04-26-2024. Dash-cam in parking lot. (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Movies Automobiles Video ]

That moment when you go "oooh" to the marketing mail from the fitness music vendor because their senior-focused "Retro Revival (Ok Boomer)" collection is likely exactly the right speed for square dancing.

And that uncomfortable dawning realization...

(It's okay, it has lyrics, it's not gonna work...)

[ related topics: Music Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Marketing ]

Bagheera the cat is being inconspicuous.

Bagheera the cat is being inconspicuous.

With picture

[ related topics: Photography ]

Okay, that excursion to Lake Sonoma was totally worth it.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Though the colors didn't look this intense to the naked eye...

[ related topics: Photography Nudity ]

The moon did probably diminish seeing a bit

[ related topics: Photography ]

So many pictures from last night's aurora, so much "that one is cool", but did I already upload it? So... Pretty sure I didn't post this one yet.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Unclear whether "plant-based barista milk" is milk from plant-based baristas, or...?

[ related topics: Photography ]

My mom.posts Weston A Price Foundation events on Facebook, but every time I see "WAPF" in a post I wonder what her community has to do with Cardi B and Megan The StallIon

[ related topics: Community ]

Skimming through this thread on "does CoPilot actually increase productivity", and I have this feeling that a lot of people using programmer-"helper" tools like that aren't using expressive languages.

And I include the C preprocessor in "expressive languages".

https://lobste.rs/s/u9kgo4/did_github_copilot_really_increase_my

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

Damn it, Facebook, it's "fewer".

(Image is of a Facebook prompt adding if I'd like to "...see more or less posts like this in Feed".)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

@yhancik @darius The old thinking was that you should be rotating your gender every 90 days for security reasons but that’s proven to be an ineffective approach. Modern best practices are to use a unique and complex gender for every interaction, to avoid repetition and store them in a secure gender manager. This makes it easier to change genders when one relationship is compromised, and protects you against gender-stuffing attacks.

Seems like this is kinda related to "don't use biometrics for identity" thing.

Slate: Nonmonogamy by the Numbers — Does having multiple partners make for less-satisfying relationships? We don’t have to judge—we can look at the data.

Because any time someone does a data driven takedown of the New York Times and The Atlantic, you know I'm in, especially if they're quoting Elisabeth “Eli” Sheff.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Law New York ]

So on the one hand, I'm on board with the context in which Kamala Harris is saying "We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that fucking door down."

On the other hand I'm like "once a cop, always a cop"...

https://mastodon.social/@charlotteclymer/112434684126138741

Making an emulsified cheese sauce with non-aspirin Alka Seltzer to act as an emulsifier.

1/4 c. water, 2 non-aspirin Alka Seltzer tablets, let sit until the fizziness goes, add 2 T. butter, warm (they suggest a microwave, which I don't have), melt in 1½ cups shredded cheese, plus whatever other flavors (mustard, jalapeño, cayenne)...

[ related topics: Food ]

I use Google voice recorder on my phone to record my vocal lessons, and go back and work on songs from that. It helpfully marks regions of the recording with "Speech", "Music", and during my warm-up, when we're exploring the upper reaches of my range, "Dog".

Now need to go back to one of the sessions where we worked on "Hey There Lonely Girl" and see what it did with *that*....

[ related topics: Music Work, productivity and environment Dogs ]

So are people posting videos of themselves doing cover songs to YouTube actually getting sync licenses?

RT Kenn White @kennwhite@mastodon.social

Incredible research at BlackHat Asia today by Tong Liu and team from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (在iie.ac.cn 的电子邮件经过验证)

A dozen+ RCEs on popular LLM framework libraries like LangChain and LlamaIndex - used in lots of chat-assisted apps including GitHub. These guys got a reverse shell in two prompts, and even managed to exploit SetUID for full root on the underlying VM!

Pictures of conference slides omitted, continuing: RT Kenn White @kennwhite@mastodon.social

Liu et al's preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.02926.pdf

BlackHat abstract: https://www.blackhat.com/asia-...grated-frameworks-and-apps-37215

and

Tong's Google Scholar for related work: https://scholar.google.com/citations

And Kevin Riggle @kevinriggle@ioc.exchange

@kennwhite I keep saying that LLM output should be treated like any other kind of untrusted arbitrary user-generated text

https://free-dissociation.com/...023/12/what-ai-safety-should-be/

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Race Conferences ]

Went to a new to me book club last night (because they were talking about Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise) called "Books and Brews", that was held outside in Wickersham park.

When the "Brews" part was brought up, the consensus was that there wasn't really a place in Petaluma to go and have a beer with a group discussion any more. With Maguire's upstairs gone, everything else is too loud.

I think we need to do some serious consideration of our "third spaces".

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Beer Community ]

When ‘Lol, No’ Is Not Enough: Lawyer Explains Why Bogus Takedown Over ‘Fuck The LAPD’ Shirt Should Result In Paying Legal Fees

the Bluesky post.

In other news, don't actually fuck the police.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Law Enforcement Clothing ]

Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR): CNN Needs to Buy Its Economic Reporters Access to the Internet

This story of people no longer being able to afford restaurant people is 180 degrees at odds with the data from Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on meals at restaurants. According to data from the BEA (Line 236), real spending at restaurants was 11.0 percent higher in the first quarter of this year than in the fourth quarter of 2019, the last quarter before the pandemic hit. Real spending at fast food restaurants (Line 242) increased even more rapidly, rising by 11.8 percent.

The problem with reporters willing to be stenographers for Applebee's marketing campaigns...

[ related topics: Food Consumerism and advertising Net Culture Marketing Currency Economics ]

Inspired by https://toot.cat/@devopscats/112445057997076822 I asked Gemini to help me get a man and his 5 chickens across the river on a boat.

https://g.co/gemini/share/547a3f1855a5

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery Birds ]

facebook: because a laugh reaction on that meme 2 months ago when it was fresh, and from a friend, definitely means you want to see it fourteen gazillion times from every content thief who reposts it without attribution for the rest of time, while actual friends are posting life updates that get buried.

[ related topics: Marketing ]

I have been thinking a lot about things like "Do I need to learn Rust?", and ... I'm beginning to think maybe I don't?

References are like jumps:

Unfortunately, most people seem to have taken the wrong lesson from Rust. They see all of this business with lifetimes and ownership as a dirty mess that Rust has had to adopt because it wanted to avoid garbage collection. But this is completely backwards! Rust adopted rules around shared mutable state and this enabled it to avoid garbage collection. These rules are a good idea regardless.

I'm thinking about how I religiously avoided goto until Tom Duff pointed out how silly my code looked with all of those nested error checks. Maybe they're not a good idea regardless, and the reason we're not all using functional languages today is that trying to build programs that way just doesn't work very well?

I dunno, I'm kind of in a contrarian mood this morning...

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

Yesterday's LLM goofiness, and various stuff about the value of "prompt engineering", is definitely a window into how much humans will contort their own mechanisms for interaction in order to support the social biases around them.

In a speech to the CALLERLAB convention recently, Ted Lizotte (and the Board of Governors) suggested coalescing the Basic 1 & 2, SSD, Mainstream, and Plus square dance programs into just MS and Plus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUaSE0LbyvE

Feeling very much like we need a few more callers in this area so I can just dance, and continue exploring my voice by finding a band to sing with. Calling is fun, but but I don't think square dancing is the activity to build my community around.

[ related topics: Movies Community ]

Seeing a lot of people condemn Harrison Butker's speeches, but not a whole lot of people pointing to the college administrations that hired him for commencement speeches, knowing *exactly* what he was going to say.

And, like, the Catholic schools, sure, they're dedicated to suppression of women and covering for child abusers, I get that, but Georgia Tech? Can you imagine being a woman and a student there knowing the administration signed off on that?

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Education ]

OpenAI strikes deal to bring Reddit content to ChatGPT and... uh... someone thinks this is going to improve the quality of OpenAI answers?

The future is people acting on shitpost derived generated text as legal advice.

[ related topics: Law Economics ]

AI is *so* useful for summarizing. To be fair to Bing, it did give better info a little further down in excerpts from actual search results, but the summary to "how many calories are in a 34oz serving of Stouffer's meat lover's lasagna?" was "360 calories".

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

Just realized that I'm so old, I remember when AI was going to be the sorts of information models and "expert systems" and knowledgebases that people are now saying is the necessary technology to tie to LLMs to give them the reasoning ability...

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Bike Portland: New ODOT map shows fatal traffic crashes in real time

Beyond engineering, enforcement, education, data is a huge part any good road safety program. Similar to the City of Portland and Metro, ODOT wants zero deaths to occur on the entire system. They’ve stated a goal of “no deaths or life-changing injuries on Oregon’s transportation system by 2035.” And that’ll be an extremely tall order given current trends.

Meanwhile, in California... Active Transportation Program Cut Because Administration Wants to Prioritize Highways

The Newsom administration wants to cut the ATP because Caltrans is tired of having its state highway funding tapped.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Television California Culture Education Maps and Mapping Bicycling ]

snuffleupagus on MeFi:

The singularity is the new cold fusion.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

'Solano Gap': California Forever scrambles to create a need.

The Backstory: With a poll showing 70% of Solano County voters opposed to California Forever, the tech mega city a group of Silicon Valley billionaires wants to build between Fairfield, Vacaville and Rio Vista, the project appears dead on arrival. But don't expect the tech billionaires, who have unlimited money, to give up without a fight.

California needs a ton more housing, but... we need it as infill, and I've seen enough "we're gonna rearchitect everything" fail in the face of "the current system evolves" to be extremely skeptical of attempts to build utopias. Of course there's not nearly as much profit in fixing things as there is in ignoring the problems and doing greenfield development, and that's a social problem we need to be fixing.

[ related topics: California Culture Currency Real Estate ]

HTTP response codes for food servers

[ related topics: Food Graphics ]

Leonardo ELSAG EOC Plus is an integrated automated license plate reader (ALPR) plus Bluetooth, long-range RFID, and WiFi scanner, to fingerprint your car and its occupants based on things like AirTags and library book RFID tags.

Forbes: New Police Tech Can Detect Phones, Pet Trackers And Library Books In A Moving Car, Archive.is link to the Forbes article.

[ related topics: Language Books Wireless Invention and Design Law Enforcement Automobiles RFID ]

AudioCap

With macOS 14.4, Apple introduced new API in CoreAudio that allows any app to capture audio from other apps or the entire system, as long as the user has given the app permission to do so.

Unfortunately this new API is poorly documented and the nature of CoreAudio makes it really hard to figure out exactly how to set things up so that your app can use this new functionality.

This project is provided as documentation for this new API to help developers of audio apps.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Music Nature and environment Invention and Design Macintosh ]

I'm hearing a lot of chatter about various encrypted messaging systems, and I want to adapt the first system that makes it easy for me to:

• set up a server that uses my domain.
• pipe incoming messages to processes, and send from my system.
• retrieve and read my messages on a variety of devices.

In other words, give me the basic functionality that email used to have. And we can solve the spam problem with something like Brian Warner's PETMail proposal, though cryptologically verified senders will help with that.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python Cryptography ]

I'm so old, I remember when web developers tried to get a page's initial load size under 40k so that readers would see content in less than 30 seconds...

Now "Waiting for www.google-analytics.com..." is up long enough for me to look around a bit, get bored, grab a screenshot, and post snark.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sigh. It's "the smell of gasoline" weekend* in Petaluma, and the increase in careless driving has commenced. Gotta hunker down at home or get out of town this weekend.

• "Salute to American Graffiti", which means lots of carbureted engines, unburned hydrocarbons, and even more than usual care needed in sidewalks. And squealing tires.

Holy crap, these Roland Emmerich disaster movie trailers are getting terrifying.

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

Google's attempts to insert "AI" into every orifice through anti-patterns that get accidentally invoked is going just great.

Image reads "Related insights: key points from this page: unable to generate key points from this page."

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

We had some glass butterflies and a hummingbird that we picked up somewhere, and a piece of lemon verbena that came from Charlene's grandmother's house in San Francisco, so I made a lamp

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Bay Area California Culture Real Estate ]

Cutting the recess for the lamp...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Trying to figure out how to print a banner on a Mac. Finding out that all of the answers people found online have disappeared as the operating system has lost features.

So I reverted back to "poster" on an Ubuntu box, and I can't believe how much of the progress of personal computing has been the removal of capabilities.

And ... I'm really sick of the Mac as a primary platform. It's just a pain in the ass relative to real OSes. But, I have the hardware from work....

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

So OpenAI claims a user base of 180.5 million, with 1.6 billion "visits" in December 2023. Okay, 8.8 uses per user, seems low. Dig deeper, find a more recent $133M monthly revenues. $20/user, that's 6.5M paid users. Except a good bit of that's probably API charges, not direct users.

I mean, 6.5M paid users is a 35th of a Spotify, 163% of Notion, nothing to sneeze at, but...

I mean, the real solution is to get people the hell out of their cars, but... Inside EVs: I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked

If the U.S. and Europe get what they want—a crackdown on Chinese imports—it doesn’t feel like it would result in better cars. It feels like it would keep buyers of those markets locked to cars that aren’t executed as well. It’s nakedly protectionist because deep down, all of the Western auto executives and some hawkish China pundits understand that Chinese EV and PHEV models are more compelling than what European, other Asian, and American brands have come up with.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Economics ]

Not really news, but: 98 Percent of Drivers Who Try Tesla's Full Self-Driving Demo Ditch It After the Trial Period Is Over

[ related topics: Current Events ]

This one took a long time in transit from my tablet, I meant to attach it to the "China EV car companies haven't taken over the world because of protectionism" entry below, but... Nearly all major car companies are sabotaging EV transition, and Japan is worst, study finds.

Car companies aren't sucking because they don't have the ability, they're sucking because it's easier to not change. I mean, sure, maybe they're sucking because they don't have the ability as well, but...

[ related topics: Automobiles Public Transportation Archival ]

this space intentionally left blank

[ related topics: Marketing ]

Okay, this is long overdue, because the whole "rather run into a man or bear in the woods" meme is completely played out, but someone posted a reference to this again, and Charlene has made her choice *absolutely* clear.

(Taken at a wildlife rescue where they were trying to acclimate the bear cub to humans before the little bundle of cuteness became a large bundle of dangerous cuteness.) (This time with pic)

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Marketing Embedded Devices ]

RT Urzl @gooba42@mastodon.social

@deilann To borrow a phrase learned from black Twitter, the proper measurement of garlic is "add garlic until the ancestors tell you to stop".

It's like dividing by zero, there is no numeric value if you're doing it right.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Holy crap. Why does every web browser think it can do better than the damned system printer dialog? Holy crap stop fucking things up and just give me the real damned thing.

Look, memory is cheap these days, why don't we just double Unicode out to 8 bytes per character and just store 8�8 bit rasters?

https://transmom.love/@elilla/112484801016659228

The existential risk from "AI" isn't "are they going to become hyper-intelligent and wipe us out", they still need us to do the work.

The way that Meta's algorithms have fueled the rise of fascists, humans are already doing the work. The existential threat is here. Now.

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

Apparently the Kagi/Vlad thing is up again, and I'm thinking about some discussion in the local political scene, where someone is very vested in the process they participated in 2+ decades ago, and I'm like "dude, look at the outcomes".

If the response is "yeah, that's why we need more of the process that got us here", then we're not going to find agreement.

https://hackers.town/@lori/112491062169046101

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics moron Community ]

So I turned on the https://udm14.com/ hack in Firefox to take the summarization out of my Google results. Last night we got home from an event and realized we needed distilled water for Charlene's CPAP, so I went searching for who might be open after 11PM. A lot of grocery store web site information design really sucks, and Google is better than I thought at extracting information from their web pages.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

AI is going just great...

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Kabosu, the shiba inu dog behind the 'doge' internet meme, has died

No pupper is a meme,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the zeitgeist,

A part of the milieu.

If a doge scroll off the timeline,

the feed is the less.

As well as if Cyanide & Happiness were.

As well as if Sarah's Scribbles

Or of thine friend’s were.

Each doggo’s death diminishes me,

For I am involved in memekind.

Therefore, check not to know

For whom the notification sounds,

It sounds for thee.

Via MeFi, which is where the John Donne ripoff occurred to me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Net Culture Marketing Dogs ]

The picture for that AI is going great post

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

So far this weekend, project #1 is taking some scrap conduit and making a trellis..

[ related topics: Photography ]

Project #2 is fixing siding.

[ related topics: Photography ]

I mean, the numbers don't lie, but Google's AI summarization could probably use some context.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

Very rough from scraps, but worth documenting because a number of things are working through the shop this weekend. A cat food organizer.

[ related topics: Photography Food Work, productivity and environment ]

I Do Not Like These LLMs

I would not like them

here or there.

I would not like them anywhere.

I do not like these LLMs.

I do not like them, Sam Altman.

Study Finds That 52 Percent of ChatGPT Answers to Programming Questions Are Wrong

What's especially troubling is that many human programmers seem to prefer the ChatGPT answers. The Purdue researchers polled 12 programmers — admittedly a small sample size — and found they preferred ChatGPT at a rate of 35 percent and didn't catch AI-generated mistakes at 39 percent.

Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow Questions, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11– 16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. https: //doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642596

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence New York Conferences ]

Watched this for work, and, okay, I get that texture fills and plagiarism are attractive for image generation, but two things from Microsoft vs. Apple: Satya Nadella Says AI-Focused Copilot+ PCs Beat Macs | WSJ (YouTube video) stood out.

The first was "For people who love Windows...", and I chatted with my Mom this weekend. I've been trying to keep her on Windows or Mac because of local support, but she is so done with Windows, saying things like "it's like they're trying so hard to bring back clippy".

But then I got to "It's sort of like, the browser was born on Windows, and it went beyond Windows...", and... I guess the key to success is to just keep repeating bullshit with a straight face, knowing that the sycophants passing themselves off as journalists won't call you on it?

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Microsoft Movies moron Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Macintosh Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Ad on a podcast for "Method" hair care products used the tag line "unleash your inner shower" and... I didn't connect with it, not least because I'm bald and shave my head, but also because I think of myself more as a grower.

RT mos_8502 :verified: @mos_8502@studio8502.ca

Top comments that annoy C programmers:

“This is easier in $LANGUAGE.”

Yeah, and your dad is easy after three pints.

“C is so verbose.”

Okay. Big whoop.

“Nobody uses C anymore!”

Wow, I didn’t know I didn’t exist. Am I a pattern screamer?

“C is unsafe!”

If your parents worried as much about safety as you seem to, you wouldn’t be here right now to annoy me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Today in fuckwits with footguns: Company "Sheepishly" Admits Its Employee Handbook Was Generated With ChatGPT, Doesn’t Have Anti-Harassment Policy — So much for saving time

In an interview with Forbes, the CEO of the HR consultancy Humani said that one of her clients was faced with a peculiar and self-inflicted fiasco: in the midst of an escalating harassment claim, its AI-generated employee handbook just straight up didn't have the policy to handle it.</blockquotes>

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

Oh cool. You know that thing in Safari where Jira appears to be locked up? Turns out you can click in the "Assignee" field, and then use "M" to comment and keyboard navigation to get to the save button.

Modern app development is going *great*.

Sports have never been about celebrating human endeavor, they're most often a way to create a tranche which pushes a particular social narrative, but/and, with that background, I'm happy to see that the Negro League data is being combined with the Major League baseball data. RT Waldo Jaquith @waldoj@mastodon.social

It's 2024, and Major League Baseball is finally integrating the record books, which will no longer protect white baseball players’ stats from the superior performance from Negro Leagues players. As a result, Ty Cobb is no longer recorded as the leading hitter, and Babe Ruth is no longer recorded as the best slugger—those titles both now belong to Josh Gibson.

USA TODAY — Negro Leagues' statistics will be incorporated into Major League Baseball’s historical records on Wednesday

[ related topics: Books Theater & Plays Mathematics Sports Race ]

Russian disinformation sites linked to former Florida deputy sheriff, research finds

More than 150 fake local news websites pushing Russian propaganda to U.S. audiences are connected to John Mark Dougan, an American former law enforcement officer living in Moscow, according to a research report published Wednesday by NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation.

[ related topics: broadband Current Events Law Enforcement ]

The Sinclair C5 as it should have been, on hacking and upgrading an electric recumbent tricycle from the '80s.

[ related topics: Pedal Power ]

I can just feel the confirmation bias as I type this: People who are obsessed with celebrities tend to score lower on measures of cognitive ability

“Interest in the topic of celebrity worshipers spans almost two decades. From several studies, over that period, research showed a weak to moderate tendency for those who showed the strongest admiration for their favorite celebrity to have lower cognitive skills, using a variety of cognitive measures,” explained study authors Lynn E. McCutcheon, Ágnes Zsila, and Zsolt Demetrovics in a joint statement to PsyPost.

BMC Psychology: Celebrity worship and cognitive skills revisited: applying Cattell’s two-factor theory of intelligence in a cross-sectional study Lynn E. McCutcheon, Ágnes Zsila & Zsolt Demetrovics.

[ related topics: Drugs Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Summed up as Most People Couldn't Give a Crap About Using AI, Survey Finds.

Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford: What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news?

We find that most of the public are aware of various generative AI products, and that many have used them, especially ChatGPT. But between 19% and 30% of the online population in the six countries surveyed have not heard of any of the most popular generative AI tools, and while many have tried using various of them, only a very small minority are, at this stage, frequent users.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Education Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm told that Nine Inch Nails' song "Closer" is now 30 years old, which is about how long it was between Buddy Holly recording "That'll Be The Day" and me graduating high school...

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Lots of buzz over this WaPo thing that's suggesting that the US peaked whenever you were 11, and... I kinda think we were doing pretty well in the '90s, which would make me... in my 30s now? Yeah, I'll sign on to this...

#NotHowItWorks

Not sure if my endorsement helps the campaign, but I'm solidly behind Blake Hooper's candidacy for Petaluma city council in my district, and there's a fediverse account! https://union.place/@HooperForCouncil

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

And sometimes it's a rough day, but you go to the Brian Barnacle city council run kickoff event and that brings the optimism of knowing people care and are working towards improvement, and ya come home, and someone left a book in the library box that's *right* up the alley of my current interests.

[ related topics: Language Books Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Pondering this view from a hospital/doctor's office window, and thinking about how much effort was put into framing the landscape (though the architects probably didn't anticipate this much fire scar), and how the electrical infrastructure imposes on the aesthetic...

[ related topics: Photography Health Pyrotechnics ]

Just used Google to search for "i will survive lyrics", and wow the difference between what it showed me on the results page vs clicking through the first link to Genius(dot)com is striking. I know there's often a difference between the sheet music and what gets recorded, but this is like the meaning of the lyrics changing.

Need to add that extra "give me the old style" things to my phone, not just my laptop browser.

[ related topics: Music ]

RT Kate Morley @kate@fosstodon.org

In the same way most of us say “goodbye” without realising it derives from “god be with ye”, maybe one day people will end conversations with “likensubscribe”

[ related topics: Religion ]

Adults raised in the ‘Christian parenting empire’ of the ’70s-’90s push back.

In the podcast queue is Slow Burn: Gays against Briggs, and the second episode has a lot of interview with his son, and... yeah.

[ related topics: Religion History ]

Stanford University Human Centered Artificial Intelligence: AI on Trial: Legal Models Hallucinate in 1 out of 6 (or More) Benchmarking Queries

In a new preprint study by Stanford RegLab and HAI researchers, we put the claims of two providers, LexisNexis (creator of Lexis+ AI) and Thomson Reuters (creator of Westlaw AI-Assisted Research and Ask Practical Law AI)), to the test. We show that their tools do reduce errors compared to general-purpose AI models like GPT-4. That is a substantial improvement and we document instances where these tools provide sound and detailed legal research. But even these bespoke legal AI tools still hallucinate an alarming amount of the time: the Lexis+ AI and Ask Practical Law AI systems produced incorrect information more than 17% of the time, while Westlaw’s AI-Assisted Research hallucinated more than 34% of the time.

So, yeah, "Retrieval Augmented Generation" is "here's your search results, but with an additional layer of bullshit generation".

In linking to it, Peter Krupa notes

GenAI is this poison pill that every monopoly business is frantically swallowing because of FOMO, it’s crazy, honestly almost like this whole thing was planned by the “Fight Club” weirdos to bring everything down at once.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Current Events Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Oh, look, OpenAI lied about the results of the ChatGPT taking the bar exam thing: Springer Link: Artificial Intelligence and Law: Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance

Fourth, when examining only those who passed the exam (i.e. licensed or license-pending attorneys), GPT-4’s performance is estimated to drop to 48th percentile overall, and 15th percentile on essays. In addition to investigating the validity of the percentile claim, the paper also investigates the validity of GPT-4’s reported scaled UBE score of 298. The paper successfully replicates the MBE score, but highlights several methodological issues in the grading of the MPT + MEE components of the exam, which call into question the validity of the reported essay score.

Via

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Writing Artificial Intelligence ]

Today I learned that there's a film set version of the famous Shibuya Station crossing. Open Street Map, Google Maps aerial view.

Via.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Gambling ]