Flutterby™! From 2024-10-01 to 2024-10-31

On the 100th birthday of Jimmy Carter, looking back at the speech he gave June 20th, 1979: Solar Energy Remarks Announcing Administration Proposals, on the occasion of installing solar hot water heating panels on the white house.

[ related topics: Race Real Estate Photovoltaics ]

Anyone I know use Jupyter or similar notebooks extensively? Care to share what environment you run them in, how you manage the resources they access, how you avoid leaving VMs running up bills remotely, whether you leave tabs to them open, etc?

[ related topics: Nature and environment Sports ]

After the warm day, sitting outside in the cool of the evening, and smelling smoke, and not seeing anything on Watch Duty, and I'm concerned.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Anybody else interested in aviation safety mix up AITA and IATA?

[ related topics: Cool Science Aviation ]

Streetsblog Opinion: We Need More Consequences for Reckless Driving. But That Doesn’t Mean More Punishment

"Punishment" and "consequences" aren't synonyms — and when we confuse the two, we lose lives on our roads.

Shit. More to read: Bloomberg CityLab Housing: How Americans Voted Their Way Into a Housing Crisis

A new book from Jerusalem Demsas explores how local elections, community meetings and other democratic structures brought on a national shortage of affordable homes.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Current Events Community Real Estate ]

The greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported from the United States Robert W. Howarth

Overall, the greenhouse gas footprint for LNG as a fuel source is 33% greater than that for coal when analyzed using GWP (160 g CO2-equivalent/MJ vs. 120 g CO2-equivalent/MJ). Even considered on the time frame of 100 years after emission (GWP100), which severely understates the climatic damage of methane, the LNG footprint equals or exceeds that of coal.

https://doi.org/10.1002/ese3.1934

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

I am prepared to forgive Apple for a number of things, but a case insensitive file system is not one of them.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Law ]

Digital spelunking: Did I get my blog back? Maybe? Looking positive?

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Well, I suppose if I'm gonna discover that my backups went kablooie, having to install Postgres 12 to dump the old database and then restore to 16 isn't the worst thing that could have happened to me.

So I haven't broken my 26 year blogging streak, I guess, and I've got some new backups, and should probably make sure these backups get on an S3 store somewhere or something.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Open Source Invention and Design Databases ]

Dear XCode: I'm not even mad that somehow you let a ^S file into my source code.

It's that you didn't freakin' show me that it was there somehow...

[ related topics: Open Source ]

YCombinator funded techbros search and replace open source of other YCombinator funded techbros, drop license, call it a startup.

Pivot to AI: Ex-coiner Y Combinator startup bro: ‘dawg i chatgpt’d the license, can’t be bothered with legal’.

[ related topics: Free Software Law Artificial Intelligence ]

I have often decried the impact of Nextdoor on our community, but I have to admit: without the bigots showing their whole asses there I never would have made the connection between certain factions around downtown development patterns and the anti "drag queen story hour" hate. Daaang.

[ related topics: Community ]

"This America does not respond kindly to our sort of person." Noxeema Jackson (played by Wesley Snipes), in "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar"

Modern computing is just trying to keep up with all of the places where people have changed things for bullshit reasons, and fixing the resulting broken processes, until you die.

I recently saw a rant about this in which one of the examples was that BSD still uses ifconfig, and I get it. With the bloat of glibc, I have occasionally wondered how much of a desktop machine one could build with Busybox (session clean-up bugs in wget notwithstanding).

And, of course, as I use the Mac as my daily driver, holy shit I want something that just works well and continues to do so.

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Stability? Predictability? Reliability? Where's the fun in that?

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Macintosh Embedded Devices - Linux Woodworking ]

Frogger: Walkable City (in-browser game)

Via.

[ related topics: Games ]

In 2024, hearing "backslash" in spoken URLs in podcast ads. We're doomed.

RT Tilde Lowengrimm @tilde@infosec.town

It's so weird talking to lawyers about important court cases right now. In the past, you'd ask about a case and they'd be like "Aah yes, the doctrine of Bibbity Bobbitus first promulgated under the Smithers court in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram which pertained to the rights of ranchers to interfere in the curtilage of unincorporated Res Materia…" and then make the Charlie Brown teacher noise for twenty minutes. But now you just ask something innocent like how many crimes the former president did and they say things like "Law is just an exercise of raw political power through another form; hundreds of years of precedent, gone in an instant; there is no justice in the world, or meaning in life…" and then make an inhuman keening wail which awakens all the dogs for miles around as the they sob into their hands. It's just different now, you know?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics History moron Law Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Dogs ]

RT Sbectol :twt: @Sbectol@toot.wales

Wait. So this Nobel prize was won by a guy for a seminal paper first authored.. by his wife.

Who wasn’t even mentioned in the citation by the Nobel committee.

Erm.

My wife is Not Amused.

RT Annalee @Annalee@wandering.shop

@Sbectol the part where her name is ROSALIND is one of those things where if you put it in a novel the editor would suggest it was too on the nose

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Marriage ]

Just riffing on that MTG quote about "controlling the weather". Yes, we have the technology, it's written in your local zoning code.

Google Labs once again adding AI value, this time telling me about the difference between sauces and dressings...

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Today in "is that *really* necessary?", Ubuntu upgrade renamed libgeographic-dev to libgeographiclib-dev.

And of course it doesn't want to link.

Fuck it. Statically compile everything. Don't actually upgrade anything until you need to. Also, I'm assuming that I'll never find the gtest repo again, because that seems to be giving all sorts of warnings now.

Also: fuck Boost. I should have just written this code to raw POSIX calls to begin with; changing signatures mean I'm converting last_write_time(f) to just using stat(f.c_str(),&...).

It's times like every time I upgrade and C++ breaks that makes me think I should just port all this shit back to C. Or Perl. Some environment that doesn't think dicking around with my legacy code for its own sake is good.

It really shouldn't be this much of a PITA to keep stable systems running.

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

Seeing if I

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Seeing if I have fixed the upload: Google Labs once again adding AI value, this time telling me about the difference between sauces and dressings...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

If I wanted a USB camera with a narrower field of view and longer focus distance for Zooming our KBYG talks, anyone got a suggestion? This garage sale Logitech would be fine if it focused at 20' or so, but it's set up.for a person at a desk.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Reporting Non-Consensual Intimate Media: An Audit Study of Deepfakes

Abstract: Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) inflicts significant harm. Currently, victim-survivors can use two mechanisms to report NCIM—as a non-consensual nudity violation or as copyright in- fringement. We conducted an audit study of takedown speed of NCIM reported to X (formerly Twitter) of both mechanisms. We uploaded 50 AI-generated nude images and reported half under X’s “non-consensual nudity” reporting mechanism and half under its “copyright infringement” mechanism. The copyright condition resulted in successful image removal within 25 hours for all images (100% removal rate), while non-consensual nudity reports resulted in no image removal for over three weeks (0% removal rate). We stress the need for targeted legislation to regulate NCIM removal online. We also discuss ethical considerations for auditing NCIM on social platforms.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Nudity Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark Model Building ]

Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.

Via Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io, who talks about this in the context of finding therapists who are culturally attuned.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events California Culture Education ]

Zoom is floundering. Just sent me an email saying "Upgrade to Zoom Workplace Pro and get 1 year of Perplexity Pro free", and... is that like a threat?

I've used Perplexity, and... no, just no.

Juice Rescue ⚡🔌🚗 — A collective effort to save and maintain Juicebox EV Chargers

Enel X Way USA is shutting down their support of Juicebox chargers, this is an attempt to keep those devices running.

[ related topics: Sports Aviation - Helicopters ]

RT Sohan Murthy @sohan@freeradical.zone

A friend of mine suggested that we stop using the sparkle ✨ emoji as the symbol for AI and replace it with a magic eight ball 🎱 as it more realistically conveys how the technology works. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. 😂

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

Tesla’s surprise announcements: Robovan and Optimus

Reminder that back in 2021 the humanoid robot was just someone in a robot suit, the ones yesterday were remote controlled by people, and in 2019 Musk said “Next year for sure we will have over a million robotaxis on the road.”.

Art Nouveau mock-ups aside (and, let's face it, it'd be kickass to see the whole carbeurated hot rod culture replaced with electric vehicles with wicked cool body sculpture and paint jobs), the whole thing is summed up nicely in Pivot to AI: Elon’s double nothingburger: robotaxis any year now, bro. And robots, bro. Trust us, bro.

[ related topics: Robotics Sociology Art & Culture California Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

I was recently involved in a discussion, stemming from my whine about Ubuntu renaming libgeographic-dev to libgeographiclib-dev, about the value of code, about building assets, and about operations vs capital improvement.

We in software kind of casually say that every line of code is a liability. And it's true. We say that the value of software is in how little it costs to change it, and this is a little less true, because a working system has value, and, yes, changing it costs and agility has value, but...

I'm not sure what my thesis is, but when we build external dependencies, we're making it so that we must, randomly, spend on changing our software, on updating, and the constant churn means that we don't have value for craft.

Why should I bother to build it beautifully if it's gonna get torn down in 6 months? Why should I build it for a decade, or a month, if I'm going to have to gut it and rebuild it in two weeks?

As someone drawn to the startup world, I have struggled with this often, on the other hand the code running this website has legacy that runs back two and a half decades, and a good portion of it has been running largely unchanged for two.

And it pisses me off when an apt upgrade, even across releases, breaks shit.

Which is why I recommend today's rant: Get me out of data hell:

Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Sports Community Archival ]

What does it mean when your vacant downtown restaurant space is being used to advertise a catering event in the not really a town next town over?

[ related topics: Photography Food Space & Astronomy ]

When someone realizes that maybe the candidate whose sign they put up isn't all that...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Interesting to see what triggers Google Gemini and what doesn't. Matching the pronoun to the plural/singular gives the (in)appropriate search results, but "how do french women hold their liquor" gives this botsplaining...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Apple Machine Learning Research: GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer.

Via Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

Here in one paper is the probable reason why Apple abruptly pulled out of OpenAI's current funding round a week ago, after previously being expected to buy at least a billion bucks of equity.

(AI is peripheral to Apple's business model and not tarnishing their brand in the long term is more important than jumping on a passing fad.)

https://appdot.net/@jgordon/113294630427550275

Marcus on AI: LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem

[ related topics: Apple Computer Theater & Plays Art & Culture Mathematics Macintosh Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Ugh. Two things that didn't survive the server upgrade that I have to figure out. One appears to be database triggers of some sort, because I don't think my edits, or comments, are triggering a front page rebuild.

The other is in PNG file handling somewhere.

[ related topics: Databases ]

Running Clang in the browser using WebAssembly

Discover how to compile C programs directly from JavaScript or any browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), and explore the powerful capabilities of the Wasmer JS SDK

[ related topics: Sports ]

Shades of the old Elf Sternberg "Balkanize Usenet" proposal: The Oliphant: Islands

Islands are opt-in federated networks consisting of a chain of allowlist or “limited federation” servers linked together. Everyone in the network federates with each other, and as such the entire network is more resilient and able to handle moderation challenges simply impossible in the wider fediverse.

Although I think Tara is doing an amazing job at moderating the Mastodon instance I use.

[ related topics: broadband tolkien Writing Heinlein Net Culture ]

RT Josh Jersild @JoshJers@peoplemaking.games

One thing that I was trying to describe to the 15-year-old is that, when I was in college, google worked *so well* to find basically exactly what you were searching for that there was a site called "Let Me Google That For You" where you could snarkily send someone their question back and they'd see it animate the process of typing their question into google, then get the search results and bam, there's the answer to their question

I would *never* consider doing that now because almost never is the first hit the actual thing you want (and, honestly, it's getting rarer that it's top 10)

[ related topics: Games Education ]

1 bug, $50,000+ in bounties, how Zendesk intentionally left a backdoor in hundreds of Fortune 500 companies

hi, i'm daniel. i'm a 15-year-old with some programming experience and i do a little bug hunting in my free time. here's the insane story of how I found a single bug that affected over half of all Fortune 500 companies:

The fun bit is how Zendesk blew him off with the initial reports...

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

I try to avoid Amazon, but ended up signing up for a free Prime trial to watch a movie last night, and... I could either, on Tuesday, drive 25 miles to hope that Electronics Plus in San Rafael has what I want in stock, or have 20 of them delivered for ten bucks tomorrow.

And given the number of things delivered in my neighborhood, I'm sure that that's dramatically fewer vehicle miles traveled.

[ related topics: Books Movies Bay Area Economics ]

As a former Ocoee guide, a former Outdoor Adventures Rafting guide, even, NBC reporting on the whitewater guides helping with rescues and clean-ups in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton gives me all of the warm fuzzies.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/r...rews-hurricane-helene-rcna174716

[ related topics: Current Events Chattanooga Douglas Adams Whitewater ]

Back in the... must have been the late '70s, maybe very early '80s, GE in Pittsfield MA had a huge open house. My Dad worked there, and it was a time we could go see where he worked. The guys in the high voltage lab associated with power transformer were doing all of the big arcs, and over in the naval defense department they had a little robot that was wandering around and interacting with people. And was obviously remote controlled by someone off-screen.

That has stuck with me in the current craze of demonstrating robots as "AI"...

Tesla's Beer-Serving Optimus Robot Was Controlled By A Human The Whole Time.

[ related topics: Robotics Beer Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

Don't know when/if I'd ever get to the Czech Republic, but... Old tower clock mechanisms on display at Dečín Chateau

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Self-driving cars. Fusion energy generation. World peace. Getting read-only and editable NSTextFields to draw consistently aligned with each other.

Watching someone's attempts to troll me on Nextdoor get deleted, and I'm kinda bummed that they're getting flagged, because nothin' like people showing their whole selves on Nextdoor to make my point...

Seen people recommending this a lot, started watching it and was like "why?", and then suddenly it caught fire and, yes, I endorse this message.

Cabel Sasser at the XOXO Festival: Panic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_K7pIsfvg

[ related topics: Movies Pyrotechnics Douglas Adams ]

This is back from 2011, but the deep dive into supply & demand vs amenity effects in this UCLA Housing Voice podcast with Evan Mast.

The takeaway seems to be that by the time the new buildings go in, they're responding to already occurring gentrification.

This is just about residential, and the fear in Petaluma is about retail, but...

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/202...ighborhood-rents-with-evan-mast/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Architecture Economics Real Estate ]

Wow. I thought the friend whose Facebook photo was stolen and reconstituted in another account was just a victim of run-of-the-mill scammers, but now that that account is engaging in threads on FB, it's clear that it's probably the Nextdoor trolls trying to upend fact-based discussions of local policy.

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Missed posting this earlier, but the inventor of XModem and CBBS deserves some press: Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78.

[ related topics: Architecture ]

RT David D. Levine @daviddlevine@wandering.shop

The existence of the "Uncanny Valley" implies the existence of a "Canny Valley." Which is presumably where all those Scottish engineers come from.

RT geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

They say not to judge people, but they also say to do what you're good at so which the fuck is it

[ related topics: Law ]

Reminder that when you hook up with a computer, you're hooking up with every computer that that computer might ever hook up with... AI girlfriend site breached, user fantasies stolen:

A hacker has stolen a massive database of users’ interactions with their sexual partner chatbots, according to 404 Media.

The breached service, Muah.ai, describes itself as a platform that lets people engage in AI-powered companion NSFW chat, exchange photos, and even have voice chats.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Current Events Journalism and Media Television Artificial Intelligence Databases ]

Come, from our neighborhood.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Live your life so that you end up with an obituary like this: Robert Adolph Boehm: "We have all done our best to enjoy/weather Robert's antics up to this point, but he is God's problem now."

https://www.robertsonfuneral.c...ituaries/Robert-Boehm-2/Memories

[ related topics: Religion Theater & Plays ]

Seeing that one candidate has adopted "Save Downtown" as his campaign slogan, and this feels a lot like the "Save the Fairgrounds" campaign, where when the city managed to wrest control back from those people we ended up with a space that much better serves the residents of Petaluma.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Yep, matching the subsidy of cars in public transport can help: Flat-rate train ticket reduced Germany’s transport emissions by 5% in first year – analysis.

[ related topics: Current Events Machinery Trains ]

Somehow I got on a psychology continuing education marketing mailing list. The email subject "Discover the course: Navigating Narcissism" sounded intriguing because I could compare it with my lived experience, but today's "Attachment and Trauma the Complete Collection" made me ask how many more items I needed to fulfill the whole set?

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Consumerism and advertising Marketing Education ]

At some point when Czechoslovakia was still a country, around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, my parents did a trip over there with some group or another. One of the tours was of the Moser glass factory, and part of the sales pitch involved the rep telling about some Soviet bigwig touring the factory, and saying "In Russia we have same, but better: is plastic".

As I read through Notion: AI is the new plastic, I wonder how self-aware the author is.

Via 2Spooky4Cederbs @cederbs@infosec.exchange, who noted "You ever seen something so painfully out of touch and oblivious it hurts?", and... maybe? But maybe this author wrote what their boss asked them to, with a wink and a nod. Maybe even with LLM assistance.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Travel Artificial Intelligence ]

BYU study finds diesel exhaust can contribute to poor metabolism, weight gain

The study, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, found exhaust gas produced by diesel engines is tied to increased fat mass, enlarged fat cells, insulin resistance and inflammation. These changes can lead to metabolic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and heart diseases, a release from BYU says.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

RT mhoye but spooky @mhoye@mastodon.social

I don’t think we had a term for going out of your way to make sure that every rake in the yard gets stepped on but it sure seems like “a mullenweg” is a word crying out for a definition these days, so I have a proposal.

Mother Jones (in collaboration with The Guardian): Scientists Alarmed by Signs of Collapse in Earth’s Natural Carbon Sinks

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants, and soil—as a net category—absorbed almost no carbon.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Real Estate Gardening ]

I have been wondering where some of the exploration of gender and sexuality that we saw back in the '90s, Carol Queen and Pat Califia and so forth, have gone. It's good to see some of it back: i am here to ruin your gender

gender, like Judith Butler famously says, is a performance—but some of us don't follow the script. some of us won't follow the script.

and some of us aren't even satisfied with not following the script either. no, we want to burn the whole stage down. trans, not as in transition, but in transgression.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Theater & Plays Woodworking ]

Huh. My own mental shift when I change "homeless encampments" to "refugee camps" in my language sure is interesting.

The problem with so many of these "conversations across the political divide" workshops and programs that I've participated in is that I discover that, oh, no, I am, in fact, hearing them loud and clear.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

The Onion: ‘New York Times’ To Cease Publication — ‘We Just Can’t Compete With The Onion’s Newly Relaunched Print Edition,’ Says Publisher

“Let me assure you, in the wake of The Onion’s recent decision to relaunch its print product, shutting down The New York Times was not a difficult decision,” said Sulzberger, adding that immediately shuttering all 53 Times bureaus around the world was tantamount to a “mercy killing.” “While we are devastated to see so many employees go, we are happy that we can finally put them out of their misery and no longer force them to work in an environment where The New York Times is out-scooped, out-reported, and outwritten by The Onion at every turn.”

[ related topics: Nature and environment Invention and Design Food Work, productivity and environment New York ]

I have been on the fence on Sonoma County's Measure J. Every time I read something against it, I'm like "what is this defending?", every time I read something for it I'm "this makes claims that seem overboard".

I think the thing that might have tipped me one way is the "No on J" flyer on the door of a local environmental lawyer whose work I respect.

[ related topics: Law Work, productivity and environment ]

Neurology Driving Under the Cognitive Influence of COVID-19: Exploring the Impact of Acute SARS-CoV-2 Infection on Road Safety

Findings indicate an association between acute COVID-19 rates and increased car crashes with an OR of 1.5 (1.23-1.26 95%CI). The analysis did not find a protective effect of vaccination against increased crash risks, contrary to previous assumptions. The OR of car crashes associated with COVID-19 was comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol at legal limits or driving with a seizure disorder.

https://doi.org/10.1212/01.wnl.0001051276.37012.c2

[ related topics: Law Automobiles ]

The more I delve into the official Firebase libraries and what they're doing to us, the more irate I am that we're not using the sockets directly and foregoing that whole massively inefficient abstraction layer.

The Sonoma Vegetation Mapping and LIDAR program includes some really cool slide-back-and-forth to compare modern aerial imagery to 1942 images.

https://sonomavegmap.org/1942/#

[ related topics: Software Engineering Maps and Mapping ]

Honestly can't tell if I'm getting straw-manned in a Nextdoor conversation, or if that person's reading comprehension is just so bad that it explains why we've come to dramatically different conclusions of what various documents that we've read actually say.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT SpookJ 👻 @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io

Realization: unconstrained chat language models are "yes, and" taken to a toxic extreme

UK Health Alliance on Climate Change: Traffic may be as important as industrial farming for destroying wildlife

Riffing off the book Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It which, surprisingly, I seem to have not mentioned here, I know I was aware of it but too much to read...

Via Keith Hoodlet @securingdev@infosec.exchange who observes: “Remote work literally reduces the impacts of climate change”

[ related topics: Books Health Nature and environment Current Events Work, productivity and environment Global Warming ]

Timing markets is always fraught, but Nvidia has been flat since June, we decided it was time to get out...

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113319524266088617

[ related topics: Graphics Economics ]

When a local candidate describes his approach to affordable housing as creating a "company town", where, presumably, they can kick out residents when they're no longer useful to the family dynasty, I think we understand how disrupting meetings, abusing city staff, and complaining about "process" that privileges those with the spare cycles to exhaust everyone else serves that vision of our future.

[ related topics: Sociology Real Estate ]

Okay, it's plastic posts, on a stroad, but even Fresno is making separated bike lanes. Of course the dude is still riding on the sidewalk because holy crap, on this road who wouldn't...

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Bicycling ]

Whoah. Check out Alex DeCarli, in his own words, proposing the "company town" model for affordable housing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci6YAxx1AXI&t=4037s

[ related topics: Movies Real Estate ]

Google Gemini thinks Benjamin Franklin was a U.S. President... Asked "which us president spoke the most languages", got back a list that included him...

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

Ah, Nextdoor, where "Public shaming" is the reason given when people report fact-checking that they don't like.

Between California Forever and Esmeralda, I have this "tech bros discover the housing market" vibe...

[ related topics: California Culture Economics Real Estate ]

Email from the California Attorney General's office crows about "Continuing the Fight Against Organized Retail Crime", but apparently it's about shoplifting, not price-fixing...

[ related topics: Law California Culture ]

Voted.

Democrats want DOJ to prosecute tax prep companies that allegedly shared user data with Meta and Google. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) are leading the charge.

All this is the latest in a series of events that kicked off after The Markup published a report in 2022 revealing how tax prep companies shared financial information with Meta and Google through a common piece of code known as a pixel. (At least one of the companies told The Markup at the time that it hadn’t realized the information was being shared and deactivated the pixel.) Lawmakers responded with a congressional probe, which was in turn followed by an audit from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The results of the audit were released by the TIGTA last month, and the senators say that the audit confirms their own findings, which were released back in July 2023.

[ related topics: Politics Graphics Beer Personal Lubricant ]

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

If you're looking for policy ideas to get people to stop driving, I've got a bunch: try ending the car lane halfway down a block or it's just got a shopping cart or fallen tree branch completely blocking it. If a storm drain clogs and the car lane is flooded, don't worry those people didn't need to go for a drive today anyway. #climateAction #transportation #banCars #legalizeBikes

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Design your car lanes to accumulate broken glass and debris. Block the entire car lane with signs like "road work ahead" and "share the road".

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

If there are no car lanes between a neighborhood and the nearby schools or shops, schedule a lot of meetings to talk about how we would like to build them in ten years if we can find the money.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

If someone shows up to a meeting by car, ask if their bike quit working.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Ask if customers need their parking validated, and when they say they didn't drive give them a cookie but if they did, charge them market rate.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Spend about $5/mile subsidizing bicycles and when somebody reports that their car was stolen, the police should just chuckle and tell them to fill out a form.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Say things like "not everyone can drive a car" in defense of protected bike lanes, and insist on accessibility-focussed bike parking with weather protection and good lighting near the door.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Create bike and pedestrian-scale entrances to your buildings with ease of access to adjacent transit stops. If you have a parking lot for cars, make sure it has just one entrance with a difficult turn and like a shopping cart corral or a rack full of plants in the way.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Television Automobiles Graphic Design Currency Architecture Bicycling Economics Public Transportation Gardening ]

Realization: LLMs are automating Malcolm Gladwell's job.

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

Woven fabric without warp is what's weft.

Learning Swift, and the XCode completion assistance... Every mumbled years someone tries to bring back a graphical programming environment, like draw out the flowchart, and I realize how close to that we've gotten in modern IDEs.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Software Engineering Education ]

Wow, wanna bring out the Russian trolls? Suggest that speed limit enforcement is good, actually...

Interesting hypothesis (with support): The American housing crisis is a theft, not a shortage:

By returning income inequality to the levels found in 1970, the United States could reduce the rate of extreme house poverty sixfold, and cut the rate of extreme rent poverty eleven-fold.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

RT Dan Sugalski @wordshaper@weatherishappening.network

Turns out that LLM summaries are actually useful.

Not for *summarizing* text -- they're horrible for that. They're weighted statistical models and by their very nature they'll drop the least common or most unusual bits of things. Y'know, the parts of a message that are actually important.

No, where they're great is as a writing check. If an LLM summary of your work is accurate then indicates what you wrote doesn't really have much interesting information in it and maybe you should try harder.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Nature and environment Writing Work, productivity and environment ]

The Conversation: Do electric cars greatly increase the average mass of cars on the road? Not in Australia

Proving mostly that electric car buyers like smaller cars, but...

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

RT JP @jplebreton@mastodon.social

@mhoye IMO the closest thing to the "men's radium belts, that are supposed to increase your Vigour & Virility or whatever, but actually they render you sterile / give you testicular cancer" in this current hype wave are orgs using LLMs to screen resumes

[ related topics: Graphics ]

Nature: Do disruptive climate protests work? Real-time survey finally offers answers

Support for a moderate environmental group rose after a motorway closure, substantiating the ‘radical flank effect’.

Although the article claims that gain in support, it notes that "the researchers did not find a statistically significant effect on support for climate-friendly proposals", and that other looks at the effects of disruptive protests have found negative effects.

So I guess the point is that if you position your environmental group well, you can take advantage of the protests of more radical behavior.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Flowers Global Warming ]

Whole bunch of these traffic data collection units along Kentucky St from Western to Washington. Looking at parking, perhaps?

https://miovision.com/scout-plus/

Sonic offered 10G fiber for a $300 upgrade, same subscription price as I'm paying now. I should upgrade my WiFi so we can get closer to the Gig we've got now....

Nixle alert that AT&T's 911 service is out... again. Good to know that AT&T's network is going for five neins, or something.

[ related topics: broadband ]

Krebs on Security: The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Last week, Atlas invoked Daniel’s Law in a lawsuit (PDF) against Babel Street, a little-known technology company incorporated in Reston, Va. Babel Street’s core product allows customers to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slightly dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area.

So by my read, anyone, with a free trial, can draw a box around a house, and see where the residents of that house go. Or draw a box around a business (gun shop, abortion clinic, etc) and see where the customers and staff of that business go...

Brian Krebs thread on infosec.exchange

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Guns Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

Best summary and follow-ups I've seen on this so far: Phoronix: Some Clarity On The Linux Kernel's "Compliance Requirements" Around Russian Sanctions

Other random links:

LWN: Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

Linus Torvalds' post to the kernel mailing list.

Ted Ts'o (of ext4 fame) on the kernel list

a toot with excerpts

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Current Events ]

Google Gemini just told me that Intel's market cap on January 14, 2019 was $19,193,900. StatMuse says $184-190B. I'm not sure who to believe any more...

[ related topics: Business Photography Economics ]

Perplexity's answer to "Please make a table of the CEOs of Intel in order, INTC market cap when their CEO-ship began, and Intel revenue when their tenure began".

Note that Intel went public October 13, 1971, pre Gordon Moore, and a spot check of the Swan and Ottelini numbers reveal them to be bullshit.

[ related topics: Business Machinery Economics Furniture ]

Good morning, San Francisco Bay!

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area California Culture ]

I have become the guy whose letters to the editor get turned down because they're too frequent.

Feeling accomplished on the commute home...

[ related topics: Photography ]

About to feel more accomplished about my commute home

[ related topics: Photography ]

Hmmmm... Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

A speaker in another recording described “two other girls and one lady.” Whisper invented extra commentary on race, adding "two other girls and one lady, um, which were Black.”

In a third transcription, Whisper invented a non-existent medication called “hyperactivated antibiotics.”

Some of the examples in Careless Whisper: Speech-to-Text Hallucination Harms are pretty amazingly egregious.

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08021

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Killing a few hours in the South Bay between engagements, walking around downtown Mountain View... Connect 4, putting greens, corn hole... A lot Petaluma could borrow from where, maybe, we've got our chess tables..

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Furniture ]

I am here for the "Spangler Mortuary" traditional funeral home across the street from the "Direct Cremation $695.00" cut rate strip mall funeral services company

[ related topics: Photography ]

Spending the day down in the South Bay has made us way more open to the prospect of relocating out of the North Bay. I realize everyone in tech is holding their breath waiting for "AI" to do something or not, but if an opportunity occurred down that direction, or somewhere else cool, I'm suddenly more willing to chat.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

We're seeing the "how many people are we willing to kill in the name of public safety" writ large: Pedestrian’s killing by truck was likely unavoidable, transit boss says. Lots of discussion about how they can't make the intersection safer because of a local emergency room that gets a lot of fire/ambulance traffic, but the kicker is how victim blaming has come to policy:

Correction: A previous version of this article stated the intersection had a walk sign, according to SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin. The intersection does not have a walk sign.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Machinery Community Public Transportation ]

RT dr2chase @dr2chase@ohai.social

@DrTCombs Olds on NextDoor, *incensed* that I would suggest that main danger to kids popping wheelies in the road, is from impatient drivers. "They're adults, all they have to do is wait for the kids to clear. The brake pedal is right there."

Apparently popping wheelies in the road is intrinsically dangerous because it can cause licensed responsible adult drivers to fly into a rage and do a tantrum with their car, AND THIS HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH DRIVERS OR CARS.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Automobiles Pedal Power ]

Bwahahaha: Alaska Beacon: False citations show Alaska education official relied on generative AI, raising broader questions. The best part is the dissembling about how this was a draft version, making it extremely plain that the "authors" (I hesitate to use that word if they're just fixing AI output after being repeatedly being called out on bullshit by third parties) were trying to backfill reasoning.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Education Artificial Intelligence Alaska ]

Local giveaway group has a post: "Iso an adult costume size S/M please and thank you". And I was about to offer up an S/M costume, but then I re read it.

"You want plot twists, songs, everything, but kind-of bad? Go to me."

I'm gonna replace AI — Olivia Squizzle

[ related topics: Movies Artificial Intelligence ]

Tesla Crashes Into Oncoming Car, Saves the Life of a Pedestrian

A Tesla might have just saved the life of a pedestrian. Footage captured by a dash cam shows the car suddenly veering to avoid the man who fell onto the roadway and crashing into an oncoming vehicle. It is, though, unclear if the driver had a super quick reaction or if it was the FSD that saved the life of the pedestrian.

Emphasis mine. The collision was in a 30kph zone, it was unclear if the vehicles involved were traveling that.

Meanwhile... Tesla Using 'Full Self-Driving' Hits Deer Without Slowing, Doesn't Stop

Photos and video posted to Twitter by @TheSeekerOf42 show the before and after of a deer strike, during which the poster claimed he was using Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software. Video shows the car approaching a deer in the road without slowing, and a photo of the front of the car shows the resulting damage: A cracked bumper, and a hood that’s both dented and “shifted almost an inch toward the windshield.”

Which... pretty sure most modern cars have automatic braking with forward-looking radar, so you'd at least get the beeping alert and a hard brake event.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Interactive Drama Photography Software Engineering Current Events Television Automobiles Video Archival ]

Jon Gould on LinkedIn posts a video excerpt of a candidate using LLMs and image manipulation to interview

What I’m really not sure about though is what the endgame is for this person? How will they pass 3-4 rounds of interviews? What will they achieve if offered a job? When does the time spent on this pay off?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Julia Evans does a great job of demystifying things like Git, and recontextualizing a lot of technologies that olds like me take for granted for the kids these days.

It's fascinating to see this "what do the control characters do" chart, because there's so much "yeah, but, and...", and yet it's kinda mostly right and I can see that contextualization.

https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/113392535388687769

[ related topics: Children and growing up Heinlein ]

The Parkdale Haunt podcast was good, but also... not the vibe I need right now, so I took a while to start the next from those creators, Woodbine.

But on today's walk I started it, and... I'm hooked.

https://woodbinepod.com/

RT Joe Groff @joe@f.duriansoftware.com

now that the "m4" imac is out, i can finally share some exciting news. we're migrating the Xcode build system to autoconf

[ related topics: Apple Computer Current Events ]

RT Darth Putin @DarthPutinKGB@mastodon.world

The problem with appeasement is that you eventually run out of other people’s countries.

Michael W Lucas's kickstarter for Dear Abyss: the FreeBSD Journal Letters Column, Years 1-6, if only for the intro quote:

Decades in the computing industry have taught me several undeniable lessons: Computers were a mistake. The IT business is terrible. The Web is a cancer, email is a nightmare, and overclocked monkeys are evolutionarily unsuited to chat. But here we are.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Star Wars ]

RT Dgar @dgar@aus.social

We haven't found a solution for climate change yet, but we're getting warmer.

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

RT May Keable 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @Keab42@kind.social

I think that fact that we're using AI to write emails because we find it hard and AI to summarise emails because we can't be bothered to read them suggests that we should take a look at how we communicate rather than boiling the oceans to have LLMs hallucinate at each other on our behalf.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

dr2chase @dr2chase@ohai.social

@DrTCombs Olds on NextDoor, *incensed* that I would suggest that main danger to kids popping wheelies in the road, is from impatient drivers. "They're adults, all they have to do is wait for the kids to clear. The brake pedal is right there."

Apparently popping wheelies in the road is intrinsically dangerous because it can cause licensed responsible adult drivers to fly into a rage and do a tantrum with their car, AND THIS HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH DRIVERS OR CARS.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Automobiles Pedal Power ]

Worth remembering in discussions about local politics: RT Urban Hermit @Urban_Hermit@mstdn.social

Remember, compromise for the sake of compromise alone is designed to give legitimacy to outrageous positions.

Knee jerk both sidesism is a strategy of the extremist, to get a seat at the table for people who have no interest in solving the problem.

[ related topics: Politics Furniture ]

Forget rapscallion, I'm going for full-on hip hop allium.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

RT Christie Koehler @christi3k@toot.cat

Can you imagine CEOs breathlessly showcasing “25% of new code copied from StackOverflow”??

Because it’s pretty much the same thing.

I hate this timeline.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

RT Dan Fixes Coin-Ops @ifixcoinops@retro.social

My idea: CLOTHES SHOP FOR DADS

You roll up at the facility, drive over to the JEANS hut. Dinnerlady-type in her wee hole says "What size luv," you go "thirrehfourthirrehtwoluv" while making a mental note to go easy on the pies so you can get back to 32/32, she goes "Right you are luv, tenner alright?" and chucks you a bin bag full of dead blokes' jeans that aren't too far gone and you give her a tenner and you're done, move on. T-shirts next.

T-shirts are more complicated, your jeans were the simple one to ease you into it. Pull round to a bloke eating a pasty. He asks "Size," you go "Medium or large depending y'know," he nods, "You wanting colour, drab, black or mixup?" you think about it a moment and go aye, go on then, "Mix it up mate, colours and drab," he goes "Plain or wi' shite on, plain's two quid extra," you're sure as hell not gonna advertise some bugger else's T-shirt business on your body, so you give him twelve quid and he hands you Bin Bag 2.

There's a pub on-premises that'll do you some chips or a pasty and you can watch the JCB sorting out the clothes while you drink your pint and furtle through your bags to see what you've bought.

It'd be brilliant. Buying clothes would have nae stress at all, plus if you ended up wearing shite and looking a bit of a muppet you could just go "Aye well it were in the bag weren't it" and everybody'd nod and go aye, fair do's

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Sociology Currency Clothing ]

Cory Doctorow on the fraughtness of AI with "human in the loop", and the resulting "moral crumple zones"

[ related topics: Ethics Artificial Intelligence ]

"when all you have is a hammer ...": use my carefully polished peening hammer for driving nails and there will be hell to pay.

https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/113384427061017890

Retooted both for the observation about Firefox, and for the observation about AI-ness. RT nytpu @nytpu@tilde.zone

Fun fact: I was talking with some very non-tech people today and multiple people said they switched to Firefox because of Google Chrome ruining adblock and because of them shoving AI crap into it. But, they dislike or are ambivalent about all of Firefox other than it having functional adblock and no AI crap (as do I, Firefox sucks a lot), but then half of them said they switched back to Chrome because Mozilla started releasing AI crap and didn't see why they should bother.

So all the people who say “oh Normal People either don't care about AI or actively like it and Mozilla is just trying to expand their userbase” are just lying. Once you get out of the perpetually online sphere you do see a lot fewer people vehemently against AI, but I also have never once met anyone who actually really liked it (at best people tentatively use it for a few things). And Mozilla is actively making the browser as bad as possible and pushing people who don't care about what browser they use beyond a few features away

[ related topics: Open Source Artificial Intelligence ]

The logical successor to buying parachutes off of Temu: Chinese Startup Offers Trips to Edge of Space for an Absolute Bargain, Sells Out in Minutes

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

The Harvard Gazette: Seem like peanut allergies were once rare and now everyone has them?

The AAP committee mimicked what the UK health department had recommended two years earlier: total peanut abstinence. The recommendation was technically for high-risk children, but the AAP authors acknowledged that, “The ability to determine which infants are high risk is imperfect.” Having a family member with any allergy or asthma could qualify as “high-risk” using the strictest interpretation. And many well-meaning pediatricians and parents read the recommendation and thought, Why take chances? Instantly, pediatricians adopted a simple mnemonic to teach parents in their offices: “Remember 1-2-3. Age 1: start milk. Age 2: start eggs. Age 3: start peanuts.” A generation of pediatricians was indoctrinated with this mantra.

And so, the American Association of Pediatrics, in echoing the UK misreading of a 1996 BMJ study, kicked off and created a generation of peanut allergies.

Excerpted from “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary. Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Sociology Current Events Handicaps & Disabilities ]

WebGL amazement of the moment: https://paveldogreat.github.io/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation/

This screen shot looks amazing: Stop-motion animator Amanda Strong creates immersive worlds for Indigenous stories

Inkwo for When the Starving Return trailer. Some video of process at Behind the Scenes with Amanda Strong | X Company | CBC resulting in Breaking Point | X Company | CBC

Via ResearchBuzz

[ related topics: Movies Bay Area Current Events Video ]

Thought I'd mentioned this earlier, but I apparently didn't include enough detail that I can find it: Elizabeth Laraki describes someone using "AI" to stretch a photo of her for a conference flyer, and and the image manipulation inserting extra cleavage and a bit of a bra.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence Birds Conferences ]

Tony Fadell takes a shot at Sam Altman in TechCrunch Disrupt interview

“Right now we’re all adopting this thing and we don’t know what problems it causes,” Fadell pointed out. He noted also that a recent report said that doctors using ChatGPT to create patient reports had hallucinations in 90% of them. “Those could kill people,” he continued. “We are using this stuff and we don’t even know how it works.”

And I thought that this was when I linked to the study he references, but that one appears to be out of Cornell, and the one that Tech Crunch references by way of The Associated Press: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said references a UMich study that I can't find the original of.

[ related topics: Health Education Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

RT Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social

It’s v. important next week if you’re IN LINE to vote then STAY IN LINE and REMEMBER for the case of ONE MACHINE your wait time W can be APPROXIMATED by W = 1/µ + (ρ / 2µ(1-ρ)) where λ is the ARRIVAL rate and µ the service or DEPARTURE rate, and ρ or UTILIZATION is λ/µ, a formulation due to AGNER ERLANG.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law ]

RT Ellie @Subrote@chaosfem.tw

In common parliance the label of "slacker" is generally an insult. However in The Lord of the Rings the entire fate of mortal kind is secured by deliberate divine intervention in the form of God creating Hobbits - a race so bereft of ambition that the ultimate temptation of the One Ring was ineffective at corrupting their hearts. Thus it can be understood that all modern societies benefit from, if not outright require the presence and influence of a group of peoples whose only desire is to smoke weed and putter about in their back yard garden.

In this essay I will

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama tolkien Writing Gardening ]

Adam Conover: Two Computer Scientists Debunk A.I. Hype with Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (YouTube video). Lots of stuff that's familiar to people who've heard me rant, but the observation around 23:30 that "AI snake oil is appealing to broken institutions" is kinda landing.

I have been thinking a lot about the fact that LLM ownership is a commodity market, you'd be a fool to not make your AI veneer product able to exchanged underlying LLMs because the LLM is essentially reduced to commodity, but the realization that when you're dropping all of your decision-making into an underlying monoculture means that business differentation is going to even more depend on not relying on "AI".

And "So many of our rituals in the business world are bullshit" is, perhaps, optimistic, but also...

Via

[ related topics: Aviation moron Artificial Intelligence Video Economics Woodworking ]

"I thought Grace said the security system was state of the art?"

"Yeah, but she didn't say which movement: Dadaist, maybe? Zombie formalism?"

Giggling over Woodbine: A Parkdale Haunts Production, episode 4...

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture ]