Flutterby™! From 2024-07-01 to 2024-07-31

The Juice Media: Honest Government Ad | AI

The Government™ has made an ad about the existential threat that AI poses to humanity, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative

Via Pivot To AI

[ related topics: moron Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]

Jason Davies linked to this interview with George Benson a few days ago, and I started watching it, and a lot of it was like "wow, dude can ramble", but as so often happens in Rick Beato interviews, it takes a while for the musician to figure out who they're talking to, and... it's been a stressful day, so I've been listening to this to zone out, and it's pretty darned good. And how come nobody told me Benson did a version of Stardust that's *amazing*.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrkvnzdKObY

[ related topics: Language Movies Pop Culture ]

Tonight, Petaluma City Council "...will be hearing a second reading of the new On-Site Retail Cannabis Ordinance, hearing a resolution on weed abatement...", and I realize the second is about fire suppression, but it took me a moment to parse that with those agenda items back to back.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Pyrotechnics ]

Just summed up my response to a friend's LLM enthusiasm as "The bear dances, great, but I don't get value from waltzing with a bear."

Generation that gave us Ross Douthat and David Brooks complaining that kids these days get their news from Logan Paul or Mr Beast.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events ]

Goldman Sachs: Gen AI: too much spend, too little benefit? Turns out $50B for $3B in revenue might not be a great trade-off.

Business Insider: Goldman Sachs says the return on investment for AI might be disappointing

Via @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange who points out that, among other things:

Experienced developers using Copilot are 20% less productive.

Which I think we knew, we also know that Copilot generated code creates technical debt. And that training costs are going up faster than capability increases.

RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

An AI thing I'm watching play out at another org:



1: Expert A, with a deep understanding of a nuanced and difficult problem answers a question they've been given, offering several options.



2: Director B, recipient, uses an AI to summarize it and then runs it up to leadership saying, "A says this." That generated summary is subtly and very wrong.



3: A is now being held responsible for plans made based on B's AI-generated and very wrong rewriting of his recommendations.



Fun times.

To which Amelia Bellamy-Royds @AmeliaBR@front-end.social replied:

@mhoye New addendum to "A computer can never be held accountable, so a computer should never make a management decision":

Managers who think their job can be replaced by a computer, and who will do anything to avoid being held to account, they should never make a management decision, either.

Edit, just because I needed a place to hang it 'cause I don't think it's actually worth following, but it's nice to have: Vox: What, if anything, is AI search good for? (tl;dr: nobody knows)

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Among the many "gee, it'd be nice to..." is updating my drawing skills, but after years of not doing so I've started letting go of art supplies. However, I should make note of this repost of a Renae De Liz thread originally posted to Twitter on how to deobjectify women when drawing comics.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Comics Douglas Adams ]

RT Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus @Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net

Stilllll not really back, but just wanted to highlight the fact that Google just released an internal paper about the epistemic, ethical, and sociopolitical threats of generative "AI," and that the exploits which facilitate those threats are inherent to the kind of things GPTs are and golly gee whiz if that doesn't sure as shit sound familiar. 🤔🧐😒🙄 https://www.404media.co/google...-reality-is-a-feature-not-a-bug/

I mean the paper literally admits that "hallucinations" and bias are "limitations of GenAI systems themselves"—JUST LIKE I FUCKEN SAID https://youtu.be/9DpM_TXq2ws

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/bias-optimizers

My god 😂😭

Anyway. Bye.

Includes a screencap which says (emphasis in the original in blue):

Throughout the paper, building on the definition proposed by Blauth et al. (2022) we refer to GenAl 'misuse' as the deliberate use of generative Al tools by individuals and organisations to facilitate, augment or execute actions that may cause downstream harm, as well as attacks on generative Al systems themselves. This definition excludes accidents or cases where harm is caused by malfunctions or limitations of GenAI systems themselves, such as their tendency to hallucinate facts or produce biassed outputs (Ji et al., 2023; Maynez et al., 2020), without a discernible actor involved.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Movies Ethics Artificial Intelligence ]

Normally when people in other parts of the country complain about weather I take a screenshot of the 5 day forecast and post it. As this is the coldest summer of the rest of your life, maybe it's still bragging?

Screenshot of the National Weather Service forecast from today (Wednesday) through Saturday, showing Excessive Heat Warnings through Saturday, predicted highs of 101, 96, 97 and 99F, and a Coastal Flood Advisory through Thursday night.

[ related topics: Photography ]

What 3 Words is a Mess, documenting all the ways in which the "What 3 Words" location system fucks up, including delayed and wrongly deployed emergency services response, confusions with homophones and plurals, insulting phrases.

Work with your local public services agencies to make sure they're not using this disaster.

Via

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

USA Today: Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota, Porsche, Tesla among 1M vehicles recalled: Check car recalls here

In the NHTSA report, the automobile manufacturer said the driveshaft can get tired and break. A broken driveshaft can cause a driver to lose drive power, or the vehicle may roll away when the gear is shifted to park without applying the parking brake. Nissan warns that both scenarios can increase the risk of a crash.

So, yeah, "metal fatigue", and that's a hell of a way for USA Today to reveal that they're using an LLM to rewrite press releases to introduce errors...

Via spaf @spaf@mstdn.social

[ related topics: Eric's Life Automobiles Currency ]

QOTD: User "Gene" on the comments to the most recent Patreon entry for the Questionable Content web comic:

Gently glancing off the fourth wall, like a roomba

[ related topics: Quotes Bioinformatics ]

Nina Power, editor of the online magazine Compact sued artist Luke Turner for calling her a "Nazi". She lost, hard enough to declare bankruptcy, partially because email chains shown at trial revealed that she referred to herself as such.

Via David Gerard. Trying to come up with the right "TERF Nazis" reference that doesn't involve certain death...

[ related topics: Movies Art & Culture ]

David Rosenthal: X Window system at 40. A really good look back at the origins of X and NeWS and regrets and successes.

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events ]

ProPublica: We’re Releasing Our Full, Unedited Interview With Joe Biden From September

Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.

[ related topics: Photography Video Gambling ]

I'm particularly aware of the mercaptan smell because I'm processing some old propane tanks to turn them into drums, but why am I smelling that as I walk through downtown?

[ related topics: Music ]

I'm particularly aware of the mercaptan smell because I'm processing some old propane tanks to turn them into drums, but why am I smelling that as I walk through downtown?

[ related topics: Music ]

With the assistance of a 2x4, some cam straps, a pipe wrench and a Burke bar, valves successfully removed from the propane tanks. I understand why a bunch of tank/tongue drum makers suggest buying new tanks rather than recycling...

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Music Photography Invention and Design ]

Lots of stuff in the shop today that doesn't photograph well ("really bland doors. I want them unremarkable."), but I think these door pulls are working, even within those parameters.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

A neighbor is out of town, so we went and checked on their pets before bed, and texted a question. At 11:30, Charlene got up to go to the bathroom, checked her phone, and we got dressed to walk up the hill for a bit of follow up. The fireworks explosions were numerous, with some very large air bursts, so I popped up Watch Duty to see where the local fires were.

We're not gonna make it as a species, are we?

[ related topics: Movies Pyrotechnics Furniture ]

RT Felicity Shoulders @faerye@pie.gd

If Americans showed the same energy for civil disobedience about anything else that they do when it comes to setting off fireworks against the laws of city, state, courtesy, and self-preservation, we would have a three-day workweek, robust national healthcare, and a twenty-year plan for solar-powered luxury space communism.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Pyrotechnics Archival Photovoltaics Government ]

Car brain gone wild. Real estate sign advertising a location in terms of 21,000 cars average daily traffic.

Not all the foot traffic that could be in this space ...

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Consumerism and advertising Automobiles Gambling Real Estate ]

"Flammable liquid" with "hundreds of uses around the home", you say? Hell yeah I'm in.

Sierra Leone ends child marriage, with jail terms for grooms, and fines for parents and wedding guests.

Thinking about how fraught trying to implement similar legislation in the US would be...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/03...arriage-with-new-bill/index.html

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sociology California Culture Marriage ]

In role playing games, whether person to person like D&D, or online in MMORPGs, you play the hero, wandering from town to town, engaging in combat to build skills to level up. This is all fun and games, until someone says "murder hoboes".

A teenager who has this realization probably giggles a little, and carries on. An adult may... start playing their character differently.

Back in 2016, a game called "Stardew Valley" was released. Building on the whole farming thing, the premise is that you, the player, inherit a farm from your grandfather, and over time restore it to its apparently former glory, all while building relationships with the local townspeople, and exploring the local mines. When you buy an animal (or when one is born on your farm), you're asked to name it, and there's no meat: the pigs dig truffles for you, the sheep and goats and cows are for milk (which, of course, you can process to cheese) and so forth.

It's a game that's kind-of impossible to lose. There are things to unlock, but if you stay out too late or run out of health, you're returned to your bed, perhaps wallet a little lighter, with a note on your mailbox saying that you overdid it and maybe don't do that again.

So it's all cozy and awesome and giving gifts to the non-player characters (NPCs) to get more hearts with them, until...

As one progresses downward in the mines, first the space is natural and the enemies are crab things, your first strikes (or explosives) de-shell them and they run and cower in the corner, or they're slime monsters, but then there's a level all carved stone, with bipedal skeletons, some wearing capes.

And I started wondering "wait, are these part of the civilization that built this space? Am I just a colonial, rampaging through this civilization for ore and gems?"

Another plot point in the game involves "Junimos". These are "forest spirits" who give tasks, and those tasks are fulfilled various parts of the town get repaired and the player gains more access and skills, and then at some point they're so grateful for the assistance that some of them come help on your farm.

So you build them little huts, and you get free harvesting labor. Okay, interesting...

And, oh, look, you can even ... wait ... change the color of them by placing gems inside their huts?

This is where I go from pondering colonialism to staring straight at the camera.

I don't know whether "Concerned Ape" (aka Eric Barone), the author of this game, did this intentionally. It could all just be a reflection of the culture around us, but that's the moment where I realized just how deeply the colonialism was embedded in my expectations.

Which brings me to this Partial Historians interview with Stephanie McCarter, translater of a version of Ovid's Metamorphoses, about deliberately trying to avoid gendered language in her translations when it wasn't in the original.

Which, of course, is reminding me of all sorts of places where the myths as I was originally taught them sure have some assumptions in them. Deep assumptions.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Photography Games Health Robotics Space & Astronomy Sociology California Culture Chocolate Embedded Devices Furniture ]

Whoah: American Society for Microbiology: Host-Microbial Interactions : Research Article : The histamine receptor H1 acts as an alternative receptor for SARS-CoV-2

To verify whether other antihistamine drugs could also inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection, we evaluated six first-generation antihistamine drugs, namely, brompheniramine, clemastine, cyproheptadine, diphenhydramine, promethazine, and triprolidine, as well as five second-generation antihistamine drugs, namely, acrivastine, astemizole, azelastine, desloratadine, and loratadine. The PsV inhibition assay showed that all of these antihistamine drugs potentially inhibited SARS-CoV-2 PsVs infection...

https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01088-24

Via

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

Cutting the propane tank...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Cut up 2 propane tanks, nobody got blowed up, between the baking soda and the bleach, the mercaptan is pretty neutralized. Looks like good seams for rejoining them after we cut the tongues.

But one of these tanks is just gonna be tone bowls.

[ related topics: Photography ]

$700bn delusion: Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective? Latest studies suggest not. I know that getting interminable ads for a product category that I just bought seems silly to me, apparently data backs this up.

But the reason that article caught my eye was that I've seen similar numbers thrown around recently: Tom's Hardware: AI industry needs to earn $600 billion per year to pay for massive hardware spend — fears of an AI bubble intensify in wake of Sequoia report. Sequoia Capital: AI’s $600B Question (which isn't as skeptical as the articles reporting on it).

Awful Systems: [long] Some tests of how much AI "understands" what it says (spoiler: very little) is, yeah, the sort of silliness we often see when asking LLMs questions, but something stuck out: There seems to be a bunch of micro-iteration on pattern matching, which seems to be done shy of model retraining. I remember back when we did English parsing with large pattern databases (and, frankly, for most applications I think we got better "plain English" interfaces), but that micro-iteration sure looks like we're back to pattern matching.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence Databases ]

Thread from Cecilia Tan on the 24th anniversary of the "Paddleboro" warrantless raid by Attleboro MA police on a consensual BDSM party, including charges for "possession of instruments of masturbatory use," and assault, for a consensual wooden spoon spanking.

And now they're coming after all recreational sex.

https://wandering.shop/@ceciliatan/112751561933336428

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement ]

It's not that Google returning a shitpost as the first result is a novel thing, it's that they're burning down rainforest to amplify the shitpost.

When I do the search with &udm=14, that result is pushed even further down, so, yeah: the old results continue to be better in every way.

[ related topics: Photography ]

I realize I'm the cranky old man who hollers about "programmers" typing "npm install ..." without having any idea of what they're doing, but... I'm having trouble figuring out WTF https://tembo.io/ is.

Best I can tell it's selling a concept to the C-Suite so that your outsourced coders don't have to know how to type "apt install ..." (or the RPM equivalent) and "CREATE EXTENSION postgis;"

Where's your Ed at: Pop Culture

A week and a half ago, Goldman Sachs put out a 31-page-report (titled "Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) that includes some of the most damning literature on generative AI I've ever seen. And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble I've been warning you about since March.

The essay goes on to talk about how not that long ago, Goldman Sachs was on the "AI is showing ‘very positive’ signs of eventually boosting GDP and productivity" bandwagon, so for them to concede that the hope is gone is a big thing.

And, of course, that when we talk about how much better than GPT3.5 GPT4 and then 4o and then Anthropic's Claude and whatever are, we're talking in grades of "sucks less" with absolutely zero indications that the there's any progress on changing the core underlying flaws of the LLM technologies.

(But we're apparently supercharging the shit out of 1990 era sentence template "AI" technology.)

[ related topics: Apple Computer Sociology Writing Work, productivity and environment California Culture Macintosh Pop Culture Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

RT Shrig 🐌 @Shrigglepuss@godforsaken.website

Forgot the word "optician" for a moment and settled on "eye dentist". Close enough, it'll do

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of DOMs? The .shadowRoot knows...

In other news, just had to follow up a el.elementFromPoint(...) call with an "if you didn't find it there, call el.shadowRoot.elementFromPoint(...) and try to find it that way" strategy.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events ]

Good to see DeMarco & Lister mentioned in this. It's amazing how much modern software development stuff ignores things that we knew back in 1987: RT david_chisnall @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

@bbbhltz @hacks4pancakes When people join my team, I tell them to go and look at productivity studies. Across different industries (I originally thought this was solely for knowledge workers, but I recently chatted to a researcher who has reproduced the same result in the construction industry), they all show roughly the same shape:

Productivity increases up to 20 hours a week.

It then plateaus up to 40.

It then starts to decrease and is typically negative by about 60.

This is the total net productivity, not the delta. If you are working 60 hour weeks, you would probably be more productive if you just stayed in bed all day.

For programmers, just think about how long it takes to fix a bug that you introduced when you were tired. Fixing mistakes (in any field) is often slow and expensive. Reducing the likelihood of making mistakes is usually much cheaper.

This is for sustained periods. People can often be productive for a 60-hour week if they are well rested, so if you have a one-off urgent deadline, it *may*be okay to work longer hours to meet it, as long as you take enough time off to recover. Averaged out (factoring in the recovery time), this tends to be less productive overall (ignoring the secondary impacts on people who have other commitments, like to see their families, and so on), so it’s generally a bad idea.

I want the most productive 20 hours of each employee each week. I don’t care when they happen (I’ve worked with some people who find they are most productive 2-4am, and that’s fine). Employees are responsible for getting enough rest to make sure that they can be productive for 20 hours each week.

I wrote our vacation policy to be explicit about the point of leave. It is not a gift from the company. It is not a reward for good behaviour. It is an obligation from the employees to the company to ensure that their brains are taken care of so that they can be productive. My contract (which is the model for new employees) has a minimum amount of leave I must take each year and a maximum time I can go without taking at least two days of leave.

The book I most recommend to new managers is PeopleWare and the most important point in that book is that, as a manager, it is not your job to make people work. Most people take pride in their work and want to do it well. Your job is to remove obstacles that stop them from being able to do good work. I don’t think it goes quite far enough because sometimes the biggest obstacle is the employee. If you’re hiring smart and motivated people, the most likely failure mode is that they work too hard and don’t notice their productivity dropping off. Sometimes you have to force them to take a week off (and you need a leave policy that supports you in doing so).

Sorry for the long rant, I haven’t had coffee yet and bad management annoys me, even when it’s depressingly accurate satire.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Invention and Design Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Machinery Fabrication Model Building Furniture ]

Harvard Business School Working Knowledge: Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

This caught my eye both because yesterday I linked to the $700B on targeted advertising and $600B needed to justify "AI" investment and it's interesting to keep numbers in perspective, but also because I've been thinking a lot about how value gets generated, and where revenue is associated with value creation and where it isn't, and... No answers.

[ related topics: Free Software Children and growing up Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics Archival ]

RT ResearchBuzz @researchbuzz

Remember when Elon was spouting nonsense about a billion Twitter MAU by 2024? Pepperidge Farm does.

Business Insider, November 2022: Elon Musk predicts 'Twitter 2.0' will have 1 billion users by 2024

This was in the context of a Google News fail, labeling investor complaints about Twitter growth stalling at 320M users as 4 days ago (actually 2016) when searching for articles about the current complaints of 250M users.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Mekka Okereke has an interesting thread on potential replacements for Biden, and how white voters vote for racism, so the Democrats win on Black voter turnout. This echoes other numbers I've seen for Harris as a potential replacement for Biden (the candidate who's as or more popular than Biden), but points out that she'd raise GOP turnout.

Also delves into Buttigieg's history in South Bend, replacing the Black police chief who was trying to reform the department, and works down the list.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Race ]

Patricia has been tooting observations about various economics works she's been reading recently, a lot of good stuff in her threads, but I'm also seeing some of the "aha" that I had when recently reading George's Progress and Poverty (and, of course, the path that led me away from Rand's work), that trying to build right and wrong from "first principles" is far too often just rationalizing privilege and circumstance: RT Patricia Aas @Patricia@vivaldi.net

Which brings us back to the thread yesterday: Capitalism and Communism are methods to conform the actual world to simplistic economics models, because the models themselves are wholly unsuited to say anything meaningful about the world.

They are forcing the world into a dress that doesn’t fit and then blaming the world for being the “wrong” shape.

That is not science.

https://social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/112753008412755464

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Be careful about how you use biometrics, part umpteendiddly in an ongoing series: Women accused of murdering alleged ‘sugar daddy,’ using his severed — and still missing — thumb to make app purchases

Linksys Velop routers send Wi-Fi passwords in plaintext to US servers.

According to Testaankoop, the Belgian equivalent of the Consumers’ Association, two types of Linksys routers are sending Wi-Fi login details in plaintext to Amazon (AWS) servers.

Given that we've known that TCP/IP MitM attacks, let alone snooping, are real and occurring and have been happening for a while now, wow does software like this get deployed? What is broken in Linksys's internal processes to let something like this happen?

[ related topics: Books Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Woodworking ]

Giggle: SFGate: I drove a Cybertruck around SF because I am a smart, cool alpha male

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary drove the (in)famous Tesla vehicle around the city and lived to tell the tale

Shades of the 2002 Car & Driver review of the Cadillac Escalade EXT that I've mentioned previously.

[ related topics: Humor Bay Area Automobiles Archival ]

Whistleblower: L.A. Schools’ Chatbot Misused Student Data as Tech Co. Crumbled

Through an algorithm that analyzes troves of student information from multiple sources, the chatbot was designed to offer tailored responses to questions like “what grade does my child have in math?” The tool relies on vast amounts of students’ data, including their academic performance and special education accommodations, to function.

So, not like "here's your child's current grades" on whatever platform's being used for grade tracking?

Via Pivot to AI on the demise of AllHere and their "Ed" platform

[ related topics: Children and growing up Theater & Plays Mathematics Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Mad props to the PG&E crew chasing the short circuit around my neighborhood last night for 7 hours... The log of a outage update text messages last night, with changing numbers of affected customers tells a story...

The Know Before You Grow forum went on without slides, glad it was an in-person speaker.

[ related topics: Community ]

Started a new podcast (Derelict) on the walk to work yesterday, and just not feeling grimdark. I don't mind peril, but...

So looking for fiction podcasts with heart and humor. Examples: Where The Stars Fell, Unwell, Kingmaker Histories, Amelia Project, Super Suits, Starship Q Star, Murder on Sex Island, Moonbase Theta Out, Midnight Burger, Girl in Space, Fawx & Stallion, Alba Salix, The Strange Case of Starship Iris, Unwell...

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Law Work, productivity and environment Aviation - Helicopters ]

Kinda miffed at OhmConnect right now: We put our fridge on a smart plug so that they can turn it off during high load periods. We had a power outage last night during said high load period. Refrigerator never came back on. I just rolled out the fridge and yanked the smart plug, but this seems like a pretty bad failure mode.

RT Florian Haas @xahteiwi@mastodon.social

You know, some Germans are really grumpy and obnoxious when they're old, but do you ever wonder what they were while young?

Kinder.

Needs running, but got some preliminary sounds from the propane tank tongue drum. #hankdrum #tonguedrum

https://youtube.com/shorts/ZN9HXu9ukOQ?si=ewdCpRmq-3KJrX95

[ related topics: Music Sports ]

Propane tank bowl gongs.

https://youtu.be/UqGxR8MLMbA?si=sVv-Nmf3wNscf8Jw

RT Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social

STOP DOING SPECULATIVE EXECUTION MITIGATIONS

observeable side effects are unavoidable.

years of spex-ex bugs and no real world exploitation because it's effort.

wanted to break systems anyway, for a laugh? we can do that already, all the user code is buggy AF.

"SRBDS/MFBDS in SGX EGETKEY. we targeted RAPL with PLATYPUS" - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

"Hello I would like one STIBP please."

"Please give me some IBRS/IPBP."

They have played us for absolute fools.

RT green-threaded gay @dysfun@treehouse.systems

@gsuberland stop doing speculative execution. years of security holes and no use found for GOING FAST

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

High schooler lands a thrust-vectored solid fuel model rocket vertically: JRD Propulsion — I Landed A Model Rocket! (YouTube video) (mad props that it starts with the money shot). Two stage, one engine for ascent, one for descent.

More stuff at JRD Propulsion . com

Via /.

[ related topics: Movies Aviation Space & Astronomy Machinery Currency Video ]

RT Alice McFlurry @Alice@beige.party

Who cares that Biden accidentally used the wrong names?

I use the wrong names all of the time and my husband doesn't even care because he's just happy to be having sex.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Pop Culture Marriage ]

AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach

Stolen data includes millions of AT&T customer phone numbers, calling and text records, and location-related data.

Some speculation that maybe this involved a breach of their law enforcement portal data, this appears to be via AT&T's use of Snowflake, which "...Provides Faster Insights While Lowering Estimated Annual Costs by 84%", and, of course, observations except for the poorest 10%, phone number is a pretty solid long-term identifier, so, yeah, if you communicate with someone on AT&T, your social graph just leaked.

With the regular Nixle alerts about AT&T's 911 service going up and down like a horse on a merry go round, ya gotta wonder what's happening with AT&T these days.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement ]

Dear Zapier: I'm gonna suggest that a 1.6MB RSS entry that's packed with pages of inline CSS is perhaps not in the spirit of the format?

I'm kind-of in a pissy mood this morning, but in what kind of dumb-ass world do whatever dipshit decisions that led to this particular asshattery allow people to rise to decision-making levels?

JFC, people.

[ related topics: Content Management Skating Handicaps & Disabilities ]

San Francisco is healing: ‘Nailed the guy’: Nudists tackle ‘pirate’ after random attack on tourist in the Castro

The naked samaritans—Pete Sferra of San Jose and Lloyd Fishback of San Francisco—were letting it all hang out on a July 2 stroll through the neighborhood when they spotted a “crazy kind of pirate guy” threatening a man with a blowtorch.

[ related topics: Bay Area Nudity California Culture ]

All this talk about Web Rings is making me realize how much I miss Nibelung. Not sure I will ever forgive JavaScript for taking that from us.

I'm guessing that AntennaPod is giving me these Apple Podcast recommendations because they get some money to shovel this shit at me, but... The Joe Rogan Experience? Like what if Art Bell but malicious? Ben Shapiro? Inflicting intergenerational trauma rather than pursuing therapy? Big media hates us, is the only answer I can come to, and truth is I will consider podcast player recommendations if I can get away from this shit (or get good recs).

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Journalism and Media Art & Culture Currency Conspiracy ]

Rolling Stone: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Famed Sex Therapist and Talk Show Host, Dead at 96

AP: Richard Simmons, a fitness guru who mixed laughs and sweat, dies at 76

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology Current Events California Culture ]

Last night's dance at Circle 'n Squares was super fun! Mike Seastrom is always amazing, and for the last couple of tips Mike invited each of the callers in attendance to share a tip.

Karl Joost captured us singing the middle break of Wagon Wheel...

https://youtu.be/vN3TsKqj8OM

Gartner Survey Finds 64% of Customers Would Prefer That Companies Didn’t Use AI For Customer Service

Via Futurism's The Byte: Ordinary People Are Absolutely Repulsed by AI-Powered Customer Service

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

From Saturday 's Mike Seastrom dance at Circle 'n Squares: Sherrie and Dean Black, Lisa and Mike Seastrom, Charlene Marie, Dan Lyke, Lawrence Johnstone, Allison and Dan Drumheller.

[ related topics: Photography ]

CORECURSIVE #102 Navigating Corporate Giants : Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell

...the mouse is antisocial, The GUI is antisocial, So what’s that mean? you have a problem to solve and you solve it with the GUI. What do you have? A problem solved. But when you solve it with a command line interface in a scripting environment, you have an artifact. And all of a sudden that artifact can be shared with someone.

Via

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Seirdy: MDN’s AI Help and lucid lies

If all web development questions were easy to answer by browsing MDN, this tool wouldn’t be necessary. Uncommon and specific questions are the hardest questions to answer without expert assistance. A tool designed to answer hard questions that is so likely to fail under these conditions is worse than no tool all.

I think this is related to the concerns people have with AI "help" agents: By the time the FAQ and the user-accessible tools have failed, inserting a chatbot into the process is a net negative that removes value from the interaction.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Ugh. Digging through Apple Messages on my laptop because no matter how many times I try to fill out the "I don't have a fucking iPhone any more" form, critical messages end up sent to that.

Apple: Not even once.

[ related topics: Apple Computer iPhone ]

Here’s how carefully concealed backdoor in fake AWS files escaped mainstream notice

Files available on the open source NPM repository underscore a growing sophistication.

Including a piece of JavaScript code that nominally calculated an average brightness for a .JPG file, but extracted code embedded in the JPEG to run. One of the JPEGs included (interestingly, not the one that JPEG loading code reported as corrupt) code to hit a C&C HTTP server for further instructions...

[ related topics: Free Software Robotics Embedded Devices ]

I'll write something longer at some point, but damn Chuck Tingle's "Bury Your Gays" hit me in all the right feels. And given the voice talent for the audiobook, I may have to experience it that way too.

Charlene just asked me if we could turn off AI search on her phone, because it lied to her one too many times. I didn't quite get her on to Firefox, but I did put a link to https://udm14.com/ on her phone's home screen to slightly deshittify Google.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Copying my response to an AskMeFi "Why don't we already have AI powered voice assistants?" question here:

Charitably? A lot of people in the VC and tech communities are unable to distinguish bullshit language generation from intelligence. The LLMs are remarkably good at generating language that sounds plausible, and even sounds plausible in the context of the text that you prime them with, but if you look at what Google's "AI" results are giving you, it's rarely even in the ballpark of correct.

The whole reason that Humane AI and Rabbit had to ship what were essentially cut down phones with their product was that when you run a scam, you need to have enough different moving parts that people can't tie them all together. Yes, the assistant which reliably did what they said their assistant did, just through your existing phone, would totally be a useful product that people would pay for, but if you don't have those other moving parts as a part of your scam, then people start to look at the individual items more closely and realize what's going on.

The bullshit generation is getting "better", as in "more plausible more often", but there's no indication that the technology can get good enough to do a lot of what's getting claimed for it without a lot better feedback loop in terms of verification from the user (witness the problems with Android Auto, where it can say "sure, I can navigate you to...", and then navigate you to some place miles away that's plausibly what you asked for, because it didn't have a clarifying pass).

Given who's done the training of these systems, and what they're currently able to pose as, the question to ask about AI applications is: Would this communications process be enhanced by the insertion of an insecure Nigerian teenager with the tendency to make shit up rather than admit that they don't know? And, yes, there are totally applications where that might be useful (if you don't have coworkers you can talk out a problem with, for instance), and there are attempts at bolting on augmentation for answerable questions when the pattern can be identified, but until there's a solid breakthrough on building a knowledge model that's more than just language probabilities, this is just a bunch of people who've been educated to confuse language generation with smarts pushing their career bets on you.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama moron Machinery Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Jailbreaking RabbitOS (The Hard Way), using an exploit in the secure boot process of the hardware to boot the original firmware in an inspectable way, with revelations about GPL compliance (not) and... well...

[ related topics: Weblogs Shoes ]

Enjoyed this episode of Sundman Figures It Out particularly because I've been reading about the 3 story walk-up form-factor in "Escaping the Housing Trap", and it really brought home (sorry) the culture around the form.

https://johnsundman.substack.com/p/all-star-break

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

As some of you know, I was laid off last year. It's been 14 months during which time I have applied for about 200 positions, had about 20 interview, and zero offers. The way the current tech job market works, you rarely get any actual response from recruiting. Due to the massive tech layoffs, the job of the "talent acquisition engineer" in HR has changed. Before the spate of layoffs, TA would reach out to top candidates via LinkedIn or email. Now, TA gets 500-1000 applications per day while the position is posted. So, now, instead of fostering a relationship with a candidate (like me) the TA has to filter several thousand applications down to about 10 to give to the hiring manager, who will further filter that list to about 3 candidates who will be interviewed by the team. This means instead of relationship building, TA engineers (or recruiters) have to focus on how to quickly sort through thousands of applications.

I have had a few recruiters using the older methodology reach out to me. The advantage here is I don't have to worry about the initial culling. Unfortunately, this has not had good results, as I see it I have 3 strikes against me:

1. I am a transgender woman, when people see my name on a resume that evokes a particular image. When I am seen, they feel "duped" or at least that there is some discrepancy which results in a strike against me. TBH, I encounter far less outright hatred than expected.
2. I have been working in tech a very long time, Dan and I worked together (1990-1992) in what was actually my second job as a professional developer. I've been turned down 3-4 times with comments like "we intended the position for a more junior person" which means either they are afraid I won't work for how little they want to pay, or the hiring manager has trouble with someone reporting to them who has more experience than they do. I'm thinking of restricting experience to just the past two decade (which means removing a lot from LinkedIn).
3. I am mostly interested in working in Berlin and my German language skills are only at an A2 level (demonstrated at Goethe Institut in Berlin), and I don't yet have a work visa in Germany. These two factors get me culled early in the process when I apply in Berlin.

A 4th strike is that my resume references DEI a lot. I was active with DEI at Netapp and have continued since being laid off (mentoring with Out in Technology and participating in Unicorns in Tech in Berlin). Evidently DEI might be the next big target for the right-wing now that being transgender or advocating critical thinking about history has slowed. Evidently even Microsoft is crapping on DEI.

I am currently in London and will be return to Berlin at the start of September.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Microsoft Software Engineering History moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

I've been thinking a lot about the external costs of things. Automobiles are easy, except that even now, in twenty freakin' twenty four, we're still finding direct ways (tire dust) that cars have huge external costs, let alone all of the far down the list effects like increased personal mobility allowing decreased density which means ideas propagate more slowly leading to less innovation.

Advertising is a cost. I remember writing a very angry screed to a science fiction author who spammed a bunch of us who'd signed on to an ITAR export violation (eg: potential felony) with a "you like freedom, maybe you'd like my book!" ad. Spoiler: Dude had not signed on to the same list. But while that, and, of course, the original Canter & Siegel thing, was something worthy of outrage. Today we've accepted the destruction of all of those amazing email lists, indeed, of email itself, as we buckle under the weight of all of the crap.

Looking back at the early electronic currencies of the '90s, or Bitcoin starting in 2008, I'd like to see who predicted this incredible load on our critical infrastructure that it enabled: Ransomware continues to pile on costs for critical infrastructure victims. and as we hear that AT&T reportedly paid $370k for a video of someone allegedly deleting their stolen call records the external costs of cryptocurrencies that are imposed on all of us are only gonna get worse.

[ related topics: Books Privacy Writing Consumerism and advertising Civil Liberties Automobiles Video Government ]

Yeah, Newsweek, we see what you're doing there. Emphasis in the quotes is mine: Newsweek: Who Is JD Vance's Wife Usha Vance? What to Know About Family

The Vance children are Ewan Blaine, born in 2017, another son, whose name is not widely known and was born in 2019, and Mirabel Rose, who was born in December 2021.

Today: Who are JD Vance's children? Everything to know about Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Sociology Flowers Marriage ]

RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

Someone on Bluesky just made a point that stabbed me in the eye:

The ENTIRE STORY about the current US presidential election campaign is: it's Joe Biden vs. the fat cats—Business Plot 2.0, as Shiv Ramdas put it.

And look what newspaper of record carried water for the coup conspirators in 1933/34?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

RT Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Making all the golfers (& only the golfers) on the team happy by rating their effort as subpar.

RT 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not cool Garfield" @Lana@beige.party

Kyle Gass should go on a solo tour and call it Tenacious Me

RT David Penfold :verified: @davep@infosec.exchange

A robber pulled a gun on the bank clerk and manager saying, “Give me all the money! I need it to set myself up in a trade or profession. You know, an initial investment is needed to cover the overheads until my cash flow is established and turned into passive income.”

"I think he means business," said the manager

[ related topics: Guns Currency Economics ]

Patricia Aas has been on a tear recently, reading economics books and destroying them, RT Patricia Aas @Patricia@vivaldi.net

Here I am innocently watching Edward Tufte’s keynote on data visualization and then he absolutely MURDERS economics 💀

https://youtu.be/rHUDJ8RyseQ?si=nYtoIKWyArcwbBu_

The punchline:

There have been 6 Nobel prizes in economics trying to rescue this curve

When every point on the two dimensional plane fits your model, that’s called prayer, that’s astrology!

[ related topics: Religion Books Mathematics Economics Woodworking ]

AP Fact Check: No, Starbucks is not sponsoring the Republican National Convention

I remember when we were aghast that in the Soviet Union typewriters had to be registered. Now there's discussion about rooting through your phone's pictures with automated systems, and whether or not "law enforcement" should be able to read your texts. in a thread about Photobucket's TOS changes around biometrics, Kyle Memoir 🍉 @f800gecko@mastodon.online notes

It’s not hard to envision or predict a time not far off when the only computers and phones available to the public will have zero ungoverned user storage space available.

We’ll have plenty of time-wasting options like these to contemplate, and background colour options, etc., but no real choice.

For ‘security reasons’ naturally.

And it won’t matter particularly who’s elected where in the next few years, the way things are going.

We’ve been seeing that already if we’ve had our eyes open.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Space & Astronomy Law Enforcement Community ]

Pivot to AI: Proton Mail goes AI, security-focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’

Not since Signal messed around with cryptocurrencies has a security-focused brand managed to burn so much goodwill in such a short time.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

In case you're unaware, last night there was a major Azure outage, and this morning a faulty Crowdstrike update has caused outages across the world.

The difference between security software vendors and ransomware extortionists is that security software vendors get you to pay before they destroy your systems.

RT LittleAlex @littlealex@infosec.exchange

Too funny: In 2010 McAfee caused a global IT meltdown due to a faulty update. CTO at this time was George Kurtz. Now he is CEO of #crowdstrike

Defective McAfee update causes worldwide meltdown of XP PCs

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft virus Aviation Software Engineering moron Law Current Events ]

SpaceX rivals are trying to capitalize on Elon Musk’s move to Texas by poaching his employees. Stanislas Maximin, of Latitude:

"For SpaceX employees misaligned with these values and looking to join an inclusive and highly ambitious rocket company in a great living city near Paris, my DMs are open," he wrote on X.

"We take care of everything for you; moving out, visas, full healthcare, your house/apartment, finding your spouse a job… a few have already taken the plunge, join them!" Maximin said. He added that he would offer 12 bottles of champagne to every engineer making the move.

Via.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Marriage Real Estate ]

RT deilann v -0.2 :neodog_hyper: :neodog_nom_verified: @deilann@tech.lgbt

sorry if you find golang somehow aesthetically pleasing i don't think i can trust you

it doesn't mean you're invalid or that you're wrong

just that i find this aspect of you incredibly disturbing to the point that it gives me pause and it's something that could not stand alone, something that necessarily requires a deep foundation of troubling perceptions of the world

we can still hang, but essentially what i'm saying is, if i were about to jump out of a plane and you, a JavaScript enthusiast, and a complete stranger all tried to hand me a parachute

i'm trusting a stranger in that moment

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Woodworking ]

"I may be nearly 82, but I don’t see why I should spend my evenings in a bingo hall when I could be being hoisted into a rescue helicopter. This is much more fun."

[ related topics: Aviation - Helicopters ]

14 years ago, the guy who just fucked up and took down Windows computing infrastructure worldwide with the CrowdStrike debacle yesterday did something similar as head of McAfee.

A blast from the past, How Linux Saved A Fast Food Giant is about rescuing 700 Burger King restaurants from disaster in the age of many connections still being dial-up.

Via.

Also, I thought I linked it elsewhere, but just in case: How Windows 3.1 is saving Southwest's butt

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft virus Open Source Food History Seattle ]

The things about taking the time and intention to actually hear what people are saying is that I can no longer tell if this high pitched background noise is tinnitus or dog whistles.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Dogs ]

Gathering with the unicorns to ride into Rivertown Revival.

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

With Charlene

With Charlene (fixed pic)

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

Currently weighing the future of civilization against whether donation to any Democrat PACs will make any difference at all against the wave of spam and whether a donation will just encourage them to further destroy the capability of my phone to be used as a communications device by overwhelming me with appeals.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

Hard-wire your home automation, kids!

(And if your WiFi mysteriously goes down, *do not* answer the door.)

DHS Has a DDoS Robot to Disable Internet of Things ‘Booby Traps’ Inside Homes

https://www.404media.co/dhs-ha...things-booby-traps-inside-homes/

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Robotics Net Culture ]

Woohoo! Third collision in 5 weeks at the Mountain View Ave intersection with Mission Drive. Regular reminder that residents along Mountain View have been asking for safety improvements for decades, but the car-brained municipal systems mean that not only have we not gotten those, guerilla attempts to install safety upgrades are ripped out within business-hours.

And the worst part is that we've kinda given up because there are other intersections in the city that definitely take priority.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

iTerm2, VLC, it's really kind of horrifying how Apple leaves essential system utilities to third parties.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

I would like it if every web comics author would try to read their comic from the beginning on their web site, and try to come back and read the latest updates occasionally.

Holy crap some artists make it really difficult to get into their work.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Comics ]

California Forever removes initiative from November Ballot

Originally hoping to secure zoning approval this year, then work on an EIR and Development Agreement in 2025 and 2026, the organization will now attempt to secure those first. The letter still makes clear that California Forever is eager to stay in the county and work to make the East Solano Plan a reality.

“We recognize now that it is possible to reorder these steps without impacting our ambitious timeline,” Sramek wrote.

Oh, also good that someone's paying attention to the finances:

The county estimates that the project’s first phase would have led to an estimated annual fiscal deficit of $5.9 million for the county and $6.5 million for the fire district, and the full buildout to annual deficits of $103.1 million and $88.8 million, respectively.

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

Conversation at lunch about progress in computing, and "Southwest runs Windows 3.1" came up, and I got to thinking: What have we really got since '94? Most new web browser capabilities and increased memory and graphics are used to deliver ads.

Word processing and spreadsheets are pretty similar (Emacs is still my editor of choice). We have nicer photo and video editing, and MP3s have replaced WAVs, but... it's amazing how much of modern computing doesn't feel like actual progress.

[ related topics: Music Photography Microsoft Invention and Design Graphics Video ]

Poetry break: Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat by Caitlin Seida

[ related topics: Birds ]

RT Hector Martin @marcan@treehouse.systems

@dysfun Reminds me of gr"let's crash on integer overflows that aren't a security bug, and then let's try to fix one such overflow with a hilariously broken obviously unreviewed patch that instead of working around it replaced it with an actual overflow bug that still crashed, thus creating a local kernel panic DoS that anyone can trigger with a shell one-liner, also we don't count DoSes as CVEs so don't bother responsibly disclosing this but we're going to flame you on Twitter and embarrass ourselves so bad we end up deleting our Twitter account but at least we banned your dynamic IP address from our website and forum, take that!!!!!"security.

(Yes, this really happened after I crashed my grsecurity kernel Gentoo box years ago by pasting too much text into a terminal, then tweeted a repro. I stopped using grsecurity after that.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/progr..._twitter_how_to_panic_a_current/

[ related topics: Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Pyrotechnics Community Douglas Adams ]

When ChatGPT summarizes, it actually does nothing of the kind.

... I just realised the situation is even worse. If I have 35 sentences of circumstance leading up to a single sentence of conclusion, the LLM mechanism will — simply because of how the attention mechanism works with the volume of those 35 — find the ’35’ less relevant sentences more important than the single key one. So, in a case like that it will actively suppress the key sentence.</blockqutoe>

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law ]

New "before going on stage" self-talk just dropped: RT evacide @evacide@hachyderm.io

I don't know who first said "Walk into a room like you are a punishment sent by God," but I think about it a lot before stepping into a certain kind of meeting.

[ related topics: Religion Invention and Design ]

Josh Weathers live at The Kessler Theater in Dallas, Texas, singing I Will Always Love You.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays ]

For various reasons, news of Wendy Carlos has been crossing my feed lately, which has brought up discussion of synthesizers, and the British musician's union trying to ban the use of synths and drum machines, and...

Just thinking about the parallels to modern machine learning generated music...

[ related topics: Music Current Events Community Education ]

Powerful read: Martin Pollack in The Guardian: My family, and other Nazis

This is an edited version of the Krzysztof Michalski Memorial Lecture, given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (iwm.at) in June 2024

Via Metafilter.

Related: I've been listening to The Bellingcat Podcast series which is starting with a deep dive into the downing of flight MH17, and it's remarkably well produced and I'm well aware that every story is telling a story, but the idea that you start your invasion by riling up, and then arming, the local drunks and goons is kinda unsettling.

[ related topics: Music Aviation Sociology Television Pop Culture ]

Showed up this morning to pick up a free "lathe" off of FB Marketplace, we were double-booked, and it turned out the "lathe" was a fluting machine, which was cool and gorgeous cast iron, but which I don't have room for in my shop.

So I helped the other guy load it into his truck, and... maybe it's just me, but I'd think that if *I* were going to pick up a piece of big ol' heavy cast iron machinery, I'd empty the truck bed of scrap rocks and bricks first.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Machinery Furniture Woodworking ]

Went to the neighbor's house to feed their cats, and this dude is hanging on the front walk completely unloaded by our attempts to leave. Pretty sure I could take him if he came at me, but it would hurt, so we're trapped here for a bit.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Real Estate ]

Cocoa/AppKit: Because the whole lvalue/rvalue thing is lost on us, and wouldn't you rather just have random crashes saying we couldn't converge on a layout rather than have a deterministic way to define how your UI works?

[ related topics: User Interface Graphic Design ]

I mean, the whole point of the "amateur" sport of the Olympics was to give an economic class the ability to say they were better at *something* physical than the laboring classes.

So, yeah, fuck the Olympics.

LA Times: Chasing the Olympic dream isn’t cheap, and U.S. athletes often are stuck with the bill

[ related topics: Sports Economics ]

RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

stop doing consciousness

- brain was never supposed to have "theory of mind"

- millions of years development and yet no real world use found for having self-recognition in mirrors

- "please transfer internal cognitive states to other organisms by means of sequential tokens obeying grammatical relationships", "I am not a cognitive zombie" - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

THEY HAVE PLAYED US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!

Upwork: From Burnout to Balance: AI-Enhanced Work Models

Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect. Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.

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

My eero router this morning was giving me 3% of my expected throughput (given old WiFi transceivers, so I'd only expect around 300mbit). Going hard-wired gave me as close to gigabit as makes no never-mind.

WiFi Analyzer was whining about not running on this modern a version of Android, and gave me some issues. And looks like it doesn't really know about the 5GHz bands? What's y'all's favorite WiFi debugging tool?

[ related topics: Sports Woodworking ]

Logging just because I feel like this is kind of a turn that I'll want to go back to: Scientific American: The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Some nights at the asylum, Dan thinks he's an illustrator, and the kindly attendants indulge him with drawing instruments...

[ related topics: Photography ]

So with the wave of unmanaged spam on the ipfs-users mailing list, I'm guessing that the whole crypto thing took all of the wind out of IPFS and it's essentially dead now?

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python Cryptography ]

I occasionally think about finding ways to self-host video. It's not like my videos get a lot of watches, I'd rather deliver the content than just let YouTube monetize it, surely just putting it on an S3 host, or serving it via some sort of proxy from home, wouldn't be that onerous. But I've also hosted things from home before, including, ages ago, a friend's relatively low volume forum that someone decided to spider with no rate limiting, DDOSing everything.

When that shit happens on Flutterby, I do a little ipfw deny ... and everything's fine (and have some of that automated), but the fuckwits always find some new way through, and I'm getting tired.

And, of course, I see stuff like this: Read The Docs: AI crawlers need to be more respectful:

One crawler downloaded 73 TB of zipped HTML files in May 2024, with almost 10 TB in a single day.

... with no bandwidth limiting or support for ETags or Last-Modified.

And Anthropic AI Scraper Hits iFixit’s Website a Million Times in a Day.

I think one of the huge problems we have is that either the crawler companies aren't hiring the best and the brightest (likely, because they're the ones sucked in by promises of "AI"), or there's no incentive to not fuck over the world in the mad dash.

Anyway, if I can find a way that I trust, I could see maybe doing some sort of actual user detection which does a temporarily signed S3 key that I served from... But... there's been a lot of discussion recently about the challenges with self-hosting blogs, and now Fediverse, sites, and this is just more in the "why we can't have nice things" category.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs broadband Invention and Design Community Artificial Intelligence Video ]

You could take Amazon's advice about how to avoid Prime scams, or... hear me out... you could just avoid buying from Amazon, and especially avoid Prime...

[ related topics: Books Photography ]

I don't know who needs to hear this, but it's really past time to change that screen protector on your phone, because it's so much nicer to use a phone with an uncracked screen protector.

(It's me last week. I needed to hear this.)

[ related topics: History ]

Mentioned in the comments to my whine about Mountain View Ave collisions and today on the Fediverse, Roadway.Report is a map of some (maybe about 1 in 4? The data is hard to gather) of traffic deaths between 2001 and 2022.

Made by Ben Carneiro.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Archival ]

Was thinking that maybe, despite all the reasons that Passkey sucks, I should implement Passkey for my blog engine.

So of course the official line is that Web Authentication is rapidly evolving and incredibly complex, you should use libraries instead (which... it shouldn't need to be) and... there are no libraries in Perl.

And if I believed that this was a good spec, rather than a bad one with lots of money behind it, I might dig deeper, but. Ugh.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Perl Open Source Machinery Currency hubris ]

The Beaverton: Danielle Smith: The loss of Jasper is tragic, but we can all take comfort in how much money the oil industry is still making

(Yes, this is satire. Barely.)

[ related topics: Currency ]

Oh Jira, showing the board as empty even when I navigate, but if I copy and paste the same URL.... there's my data!

I've been trying to stick with using it with Safari, but the "you glanced away, we've logged you out" coupled with 2FA is gonna run me to Chrome.

(Yes, I know, Firefox, but I try to keep that to my personal use.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Tailscale: The New Internet

I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.

In modern computing, we tolerate long builds, and then docker builds, and uploading to container stores, and multi-minute deploy times before the program runs, and even longer times before the log output gets uploaded to somewhere you can see it, all because we’ve been tricked into this idea that everything has to scale. People get excited about deploying to the latest upstart container hosting service because it only takes tens of seconds to roll out, instead of minutes. But on my slow computer in the 1990s, I could run a perl or python program that started in milliseconds and served way more than 0.2 requests per second, and printed logs to stderr right away so I could edit-run-debug over and over again, multiple times per minute.

Holy crap, yes, that's the right attitude. I just checked, this < $10/month Hetzner instance is serving on the order of 600k requests/month. But it also makes me super interested in Tailscale, which seems to be a framework for actual peer to peer Internet communication the way we used to envision it back in the days of protocols like finger, albeit with some authentication layers over it.

I'm intrigued.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Perl Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Monty Python Net Culture Python hubris ]

Seeing some conservative commenters complaining about the eroticism of the drag queen "Last Supper" Olympics thing, and oh, honey, I did not need to know that about your sexuality. TMI

[ related topics: Sports ]

CalcGPT.io, a calculator that uses an LLM to do arithmetic.

Via

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Alcoholism. LOL.

(Thinking about this vs the "Day without weed is like... Just kidding I have no idea" T-shirts, and how we'd respond to that on a sandwich board on the sidewalk in a tourist town. And how when we finally get a dispensary in this town it's not gonna be walkable...)

[ related topics: Photography Clothing ]

RT 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not the VP" @Lana@beige.party

NEW MUSICAL TERMS

ALLEREGRETTO: When you're 16 measures into the piece and suddenly realize you started way too fast

ANGUS DEI: Play with a divinely beefy tone

A PATELLA: Accompanied by knee-slapping

APOLOGGIATURA: A short flourish you immediately regret playing

APPROXIMENTO: A musical entrance that is mostly somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch

DIMINNUENDO: Gradually play quieter you sexy thing

FERMANTRA: A note held over and over and over and over and...

FRUGALHORN: A sensible and inexpensive alternative to a brand name brass instrument

GREGORIAN CHAMP: The title bestowed upon the best singing monk

SPRITZICATO: Play while spitting

VIVACHU: gotta catch them all, real fast

[ related topics: Invention and Design Model Building ]

This observation about social media and "No one... goes to a bar with 20,000 people" works well when we consider that what so many people want isn't social media, but parasocial media, and they're seeking the stadium experience.

And some of us think that's what's wrong with culture.

https://mastodon.roundpond.net/@CartyBoston/112875286675783006

[ related topics: Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture ]

You know what I love most about Apple's using the bottom of the screen as Y 0? NSRectEdgeMinY being the top of the view, in fact, the max Y.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

https://enemy.lol/

(a riff on https://friend.com/ )

From Joey Castillo on this Mastodon thread.