Flutterby™! From 2025-01-01 to 2025-01-31

The Atlantic: The Walmart Effect (hopefully with gift link attached)

New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.

IZA Institute of Labor Economics: Monopsony Power and Poverty: The Consequences of Walmart Supercenter Openings Zachary Parolin, Bocconi University (PDF)

Using a stacked difference-in- differences approach, we find that the opening of a Supercenter leads to a 2 percentage point (16%) increase in poverty. This increase is channeled through declining annual earnings and persists for 10 years following the Supercenter’s entry. Increases in poverty are particularly strong for younger and less-educated adults, and for adults with pre-treatment incomes below the national median. Moreover, Walmart Supercenter openings lead to a $200 (or 16%) per household per year increase in government income transfers received, and a $920 (or 5%) per household per year decrease in tax revenues.

Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets Justin C. Wiltshire

I first show Supercenter entry sharply increased labor market concentration. Supercenters were able to hire large numbers of retail workers with zero increase in average earnings, in- dicating Walmart had wage-setting power. I then show Supercenter entry caused large declines in overall local employment and earnings, particularly among local goods-producers, indicating Walmart displaced manufacturing demand away from local producers and to its own national and international suppliers. In counties with a Supercenter, subsequent exogenous minimum wage increases led to significant growth in aggregate and retail employment. These results run counter to predictions for competitive labor mar- kets, and indicate Walmart Supercenters gradually accumulated and exercised monopsony power, with negative consequences for workers.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design moron Work, productivity and environment Community Education Economics ]

Argh. Got to the end with three pieces missing! But aside from that...

After our last puzzle (which may have been that mediocre print of Starry Night?) I thought I might be over puzzles, but my mom had sent us a this one and with the holidays it felt right. started it, and really enjoyed it, the mix between large structure and deep detail meant it felt nicely paced, lots of similar but different texture in ways that made sense to the art, well printed.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture ]

Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M

In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri."

Apple to pay $95 million to settle Siri privacy lawsuit

Among other places, Via Ashley M. Gjøvik and Micah Lee.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Privacy ]

As investigators pick through the wreckage of the Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump Tower Las Vegas, private rental facilitator company Turo is trying hard to distance itself from that event and the dude who drove a similarly rented vehicle into the crowd down in New Orleans, and Tesla is secretly recalling Cybertruck batteries, a Cybertruck caught fire at an Atlanta dealership, and people are wondering if we have a U.S. servicemember problem.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Theater & Plays Current Events Pyrotechnics Machinery Gambling Hurricane Katrina ]

Argh. Okay, so after much reading, it seems like the "Arena" method is the way to handle circular data structures in Rust: Keep a usize handle into a Vec<Rc<dyn ParseNode>> data structure, dereference all of those before use.

Great. Except that I add my numeric value node, get back an integer, further down dereference out of the arena to add a further integer reference, and get 'the size of `dyn ParseNode` cannot be statically determined'.

Like it's an Rc, why does it need? Sigh.

[ related topics: Model Building ]

A Knight Rider reboot where the Hasselhof character is played by an anthro fox, and the car is a slightly down-market Pontiac commuter with sports stylings.

Call it The Fiero and the Furry.

[ related topics: Automobiles Economics David Hasselhoff ]

The Rust "aha"-ness continues, I figured out a lot of my assumptions about references vs borrowing, but I'm still trying to figure out the right way to borrow for write from my arena.

I was smirking, until I hit their footer, and now my office-mates are looking at me weirdly 'cause full-on guffaw. https://getfullyear.com/

As we ponder how dedicated the search for Luigi Mangione was, and that Yeremi Colino's killers are still at large, and that Brianna Boston is facing terrorism charges while Brad Spafford has not been so charged, I'm finding this a worthwhile read on differential justice: Qasim Rashid: America's HELL Corporations

In the 30 days since the UnitedHealth CEO was killed, nearly 6000 Americans have died due to lack of healthcare access due to these exploitative HELL Corporations. And 30 days from now, some 6000 more Americans will have died a similar fate.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Really enjoyed this latest episode of Switched On Pop crossover with the OFF BOOK podcast, on performing improv musicals, and the structure of musicals vs pop songs, and the evolution of musical theater structure.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/...book/id934552872?i=1000682219145

[ related topics: Apple Computer Books Theater & Plays Macintosh ]

Just put a reminder in my calendar to post "I don't want a lot for Christmas, abolish parking minimums" in December...

Not to catastrophize, but what's gonna happen to the economy when Tesla stock collapses and OpenAI is revealed to be just another player in a commodity market for a product that isn't all that useful?

[ related topics: Economics ]

Just for the opening paragraph: Cato Institute: Why legal immigration is nearly impossible

America traditionally had few immigration restrictions, but since the 1920s, the law has banned most aspiring immigrants. Today, fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. Immigrants cannot simply get an exception to immigrate any more than restaurateurs in the 1920s could simply get an exception to sell alcohol. Instead, just as Prohibition granted only a few exemptions for religious, industrial, or medical uses of alcohol, people seeking an exception to immigration prohibition must also fit into preexisting carve-outs for a select few.

The fact that this gives state enforcement of undercompensated labor is a design feature.

Via and Via.

[ related topics: Religion Law Graphic Design ]

Okay, Rust geeks, dumb newbie Q: I need a circular reference, so I'm going to just keep indices in a `Vec<Box<dyn ParseNode >>` arena.

The ParseNode trait has a `fn add_node(&mut self,...)` so that I can add the reference.

I want a `pub fn node(&self, idx : usize) -> &mut Box<dyn ParseNode>` to access that node, but I cannot figure out how to annotate the array to let me return the mutable reference that would let me call my `p.node(idx).add_node(other_idx)` method.

[ related topics: Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Tara turned me on to The Talented Mr Altman from Ed Zitron's podcast Better Offline (YouTube video), and it's kind of astounding how much society has just accepted that "bag culture", as in "yeah, it's all a scam, just make sure you're not the one left holding the bag" has become normalized.

Like crypto opened the gates to "yeah, it's a scam, and it's gonna collapse, but if you don't get in...", and now it's companies selling fusion power, or, of course, AI, and whatever else, and everyone's just like "yep, but can you pass the bag?"

And, of course, the banks who've been lending huge sums are gonna, once again, call for bailouts, and we're once again gonna have to pony up national debt to pay off those who enabled the scammers, and the scammers are gonna continue to have an outsized influence on policy...

The "good" news is that maybe when this all comes tumbling down we'll have excess electrical capacity and can shut down all of the fossil fuel excess capacity that's spinning up. But we're gonna have a shitload of empty data centers.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies moron Sociology California Culture Cryptography Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Yeesh, what do you do with people who send you Lex Fridman links in the year twenty twenty five?

(Speaking of this morning's various threads on bullshit over substance, and how we're gonna have to recover society from the coming destruction by the followers of cults of personality.)

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Doom: The Gallery Experience (playable in-browser game)

[ related topics: Games ]

Re "Apple Intelligence" getting warning labels because their notification summaries keep massively misrepresenting the news stories that they're notifying of (Gruber, Six Colors, Apple responding to the BBC) Guy English @Gte@mastodon.social suggests:

Use the Apple logo. If you’re going to usurp the hard won decades of trusted reporting the BBC has with your own automated hot take you should put your reputational wood behind the arrow. Put your logo on what you generate from other people’s work.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Current Events Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Woodworking ]

Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths

“A comparison of Tesla’s design choices to those of L2 peers identified Tesla as an industry outlier in its approach to L2 technology by mismatching a weak driver engagement system with Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities,” the agency said.

NHTSA Additional Information Regarding EA22002

Throughout the PE21020 and EA22002 investigations, ODI observed a trend of avoidable crashes involving hazards that would have been visible to an attentive driver

(Yesterday's Lex Fridman comment was a reminder to me that he got his big break with a non-peer reviewed paper shilling for Tesla.)

[ related topics: Graphic Design Archival ]

Writing intersection code, and just put the divide outside the test for the position along the line against the denominator, so I could just do (t>=0 && t<=1), rather than having an additional sign check.

I feel so dirty, and like I need to hand in my graphics geek card.

(In other news, modern hardware and code only run on major user choices, baybee)

[ related topics: Writing Current Events Graphics ]

RT John-Paul Keates @jpkeates@mastodon.social

Remember, if you misspell armageddon it’s not the end of the world.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT Erin 💽✨ @erincandescent@erincandescent.net

Remember: If a "second" is 1/86400th of a day, its UT1

If a "second" is "defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1", its UTC/TAI.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

U.S. Department of Transportation, Climate Change Center Climate Strategies that Work: Improved Travel Demand Modeling (PDF)

Account for National Studies: Many studies assert that long-term travel demand elasticity associated with new lane miles is consistently around 1.0. This means that highway travel demand tends to rise to fill new capacity over time, reducing the congestion relief of highway capacity expansion projects, while negatively impacting regional air quality through induced vehicle miles traveled. Project environmental and other analyses should incorporate best-in-class research and analysis on travel demand.

Via

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Global Warming ]

Account security gets harder:

Brian Krebs says

If you're an Apple user and I spoof your phone number in a call to the legitimate Apple Customer Support line (800-275-2273), I can force Apple to send you a system level "Apple Account Confirmation" prompt to all of your signed-in devices.

Which means that a phishing operation has a fairly credible pathway in which to convince you that they're Apple from a phone call... That they initiated, true, but still, it's a vector.

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Graphics Mathematics Archival ]

Echoing my experiences with trying to get Google Maps to navigate: RT Les Orchard @lmorchard@hackers.town

But, like, a voice interface? In a car?

"wait wait everybody shut up, turn down the music, roll up the windows, i need to tell the car something"

[ related topics: Music Microsoft Automobiles Maps and Mapping ]

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

https://genius.com/Raymond-chandler-red-wind-chapter-1-annotated

[ related topics: Beer Marriage ]

I'm not saying that epoxying flex posts to this fog line at 5AM, that we're removed by city workers a few business hours later, led to the stop signs and actual concrete that just went in on the corner of Mission Dr & Mountain View Ave, there was a lot of other stuff that happened too, but hell yeah.

Picture of the Mission & Mountain View concrete

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

In light of the LA area fires: If you are not yet aware that you live in fire country (it's coming, it's just a matter of probability), you may not be familiar with Watch Duty. Watch Duty is an app and web site that stemmed out of the 2022 organizing to capture an arsonist in the Russian River area. It's run by a 501c3 non-profit, and the app is invaluable for the latest info on fires, and the organization is worthy of membership/recurring donation.

And you can set up alerts for counties, so you can know when you need to worry about that smoke...

And if you don't know about that 2022 organizing, the "Manhunt on Bohemian Highway" episode of the Nocturne podcast (mentioned previously) is well worth a listen.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Theater & Plays Pyrotechnics Archival ]

RT Hein Ragas @heinragas@mublog.nl

Looking at the news coming out of LA about the wildfires, I am reminded on a tweet I once read:

"You will experience climate change as a series of increasingly wild disaster videos, until one day you are the one making the video."

[ related topics: Current Events Video Global Warming ]

When your feed checker code trips up because an RSS feed in the wild is a framework of empty elements...

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Hugs to my friends with trauma from the Tubbs Fire who are having their social media feeds filled with all of the pictures from the Southern California fires and having flashbacks.

[ related topics: Photography Journalism and Media California Culture Pyrotechnics ]

My sheets are versatile.

[ related topics: Photography ]

If I've got friends who are Mac (relatively recent with decent quantities of RAM) users who'd be willing to give me a bit of Zoom time to discuss work project and prospects, I'd love to have some conversations and honest feedback.

And, yes, even if, or perhaps especially if, you bounced off the videos I sent around last year.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

Back from calling my second Saturday night dance, this one for Circle n Squares in Santa Rosa. 4 hours (ish, double rounds and a snack break), but dang I put it all out there and will sleep well.

A lotta compliments, it feels good.

Greater Greater Washington: Road pricing could make transportation in the District more equitable

We need more cities following in the footsteps of NYC. Heck, we need VMT, generally.

Github fall down go boom.

In light of the Vulture article about Neil Gaiman's abuses, and the discussion of his parents' Scientology, I'm thinking even deeper about growing up in a Waldorf community, and some of the expectations and beliefs that I grew up with.

Because the thing is, I can see very clearly how a man can be socialized into feeling that the behaviors that lead to that sort of harm is normal and accepted.

[ related topics: Scientology Sociology California Culture Community Neil Gaiman ]

It's twenty freaking twenty five. Stop building web forms that leave the submit button disabled after my password manager fills in fields, so that I have to go hit space and backspace to make your fucking interface work.

It is astounding to me, and an indication of how far software development as a discipline has fallen, that big companies make products this shitty.

(This message also brought to you by having to go find a security Torx driver to reset a camera from a grid fluctuation.)

[ related topics: Photography Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Handicaps & Disabilities ]

How to be a -10x Engineer

+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist.

To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:

Only in music is a third two wholes...

[ related topics: Music ]

US TikTok users flock to Chinese app Xiaohongshu in protest with TikTok ban looming

“TikTok possibly getting banned doesn’t just take away an app, it takes away jobs, friends and community,” Garman said. “Personally, the friends and bond I have with my followers will now be gone.”

and

“A lot of us are smarter than that though so we decided to piss off our government and download an actual Chinese app,” she said. “We call that trolling … in short we’re here to spite our government and to learn about China and hang out with you guys.”

[ related topics: Civil Liberties Community ]

Vietnam fines reckless drivers half the average annual salary

Under the penalties introduced from January 1, car drivers can be fined 20 to 22 million dong ($1,273 to $1,400) for causing an accident when opening a car door.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Automobiles ]

Wow. If you have memories of Zork, "Interactive Fiction" or ever looked at the Infocom game language/Z-machine stuff, Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) has released The Visibile Zorker, and a blog post talking about the thing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Weblogs ]

Very interesting: I've got a friend who's got a drone, he'd love to be able to inspect his roof and solar panels with it, but he's a few miles north of an (uncontrolled) airport, and the drone won't let him fly in his back yard.

I've also looked at the FAA regs for RC model airplanes recently, and if I'm reading it right it's become super complex to fly anything larger than 1lb anywhere around me, even below 400'.

DJI will no longer stop drones from flying over airports, wildfires, and the White House, they provide a warning, but don't stop the platform from flying. And, today I learned:

But it turns out the DJI drone that damaged a Super Scooper airplane fighting the Los Angeles wildfires was a sub-250-gram model that may not require Remote ID to operate, and the FBI expects it will have to “work backwards through investigative means” to figure out who flew it there.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Aviation Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture Pyrotechnics Toys Race Real Estate Model Building Photovoltaics ]

RT Amy Dentata @amydentata@tech.lgbt

If you want a mood boost, consider that you, personally, are exactly as close to developing AGI as a company valued at over one hundred billion dollars

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Seeing various commentary around this article on how insufficient "in-lieu" fees from developers mean San Jose is having trouble paying for infastructure, so...

Impact fees are a Ponzi scheme, housing responds to supply and demand, and this is mostly an issue because of Prop 13. If you're gonna hate on someone, hate on Howard Jarvis.

https://sanjosespotlight.com/i...ose-with-infrastructure-backlog/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Real Estate ]

Aha! Got back to Rust and figured out how to express the Arena code I wanted to!

Now working on specifying my parse tree. Despite all the wacky punctuation, this is not a language that encourages terse expression like Perl...

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

Oh look, Google AI is hep to the lingo the kids these days are using.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Artificial Intelligence ]

A while back for work I was traveling to Hong Kong, and even into China, and it was always impressive to me how many people there spoke English. I was, for a while, trying to learn enough written Chinese to at least be able to flag down the right cart in a dim sum restaurant (I have eaten way more types of intestine than I ever thought I would), and when people saw me practicing glyphs they'd engage me to practice their English with an American. A few people tried to teach me some Cantonese words, but generally shook their heads sadly at my pronunciation and difficulty hearing some of the sounds.

So I find it very amusing that Americans are learning at least written Chinese, if not Mandarin, because US social media companies decided that the best way to compete with a video platform was to dupe lawmakers into enacting a protectionist ban.

TikTok users flock to Chinese app RedNote as US ban looms

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Education Hong Kong Video Woodworking ]

Doh. Of course there are situations where atan2(y,x) ends up giving floating point different factors of pi values for axis aligned vectors of different length.

I've been programming how long? SMH.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Boats ]

In this age of dynamic languages which protect ourselves from raw pointers, and widget sets which manager their own string storage, how are people managing secure text, like passwords?

Used to be we'd memset() out our passwords as soon as we were done with them, now... Do we just hope that the allocator overwrites them, that the garbage collector discards them, or do we just depend on memory protection keeping others from finding them?

Whee: "Atmospheric CO2 rise now exceeding IPCC 1.5°C scenarios"

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/r.../forecasts/co2-forecast-for-2025

Just imagine if we'd spent that $150B that's burning up in Southern California, or the ~$60B that Helene inflicted on North Carolina (>$80B total), or the... pre-emptively, rather than making the world worse.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture Global Warming ]

I'm trying to debug why our password fill isn't working, and run into the "Boomerang" framework, and under features I see a list like:

• Web browser client No plugins required!
• Node.js command line client
• WebCL support in progress

Okay, but, like, what the fuck does this actually *do*? Besides frob the egos of middle management or something?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

FTC takes action against General Motors for sharing precise location and driving behavior. Yep, your OnStar subscription was a way to get you to pay to have your privacy violated.

Verge, /.

[ related topics: Privacy Current Events ]

If one were to go back through the history of this blog, one would find me ranting again and again that the standardization of the web, and JavaScript, was going to lead to lock-in and monoculture and too much control by the big players.

It is, frankly, surprising that it took this long, but Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

This is fascinating for someone who, back in the '90s, did a little work with Apple's QuickTime MOV format files, and also has some interesting notes about why you may have experienced audio sync issues: OBS Studio: Writing an MP4 Muxer for Fun and Profit

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

If you are one of the single-digit people in the world who understands this, I am so, so sorry.

document.querySelector("div[role='banner']:has(div > a[href='https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864'])").style.display="none";

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Here just so I can find it: California Fire Facts

[ related topics: California Culture Pyrotechnics ]

I'm trending remarkably vanilla, but this is interesting: Is cinema sexy again? How 'Babygirl' is inspiring important conversations about kink

“I think that Babygirl does an excellent job of portraying two people, new to BDSM/kink, trying to understand and act on their desires,” Dr. Stefani Goerlich, a clinical sexologist and award-winning author, says.

“Unfortunately, it does an excellent job of showing the risks, dangers, and pitfalls of trying to stumble into kink - without calling them out as such in the film. So the end result is a film that accurately depicts the ways in which people new-to-BDSM can get themselves into trouble (physical and emotional) but it is NOT a positive portrayal of BDSM, because it shows these negative outcomes without critical analysis or discussion of how to do things correctly.”

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Sociology Television Heinlein California Culture Community ]

In a world of climate change disasters and insurers pulling out of high risk locations and skyrocketing premiums, what's something easy we could do to help control insurance costs? Simply, I dunno, kill fewer people?

UK 20 mph speed limits are cutting car insurance costs

[ related topics: Automobiles Currency Global Warming ]

In a world of climate change disasters and insurers pulling out of high risk locations and skyrocketing premiums, what's something easy we could do to help control insurance costs? Simply, I dunno, kill fewer people?

UK 20 mph speed limits are cutting car insurance costs

[ related topics: Automobiles Currency Global Warming ]

5 Assumption University college students plead not guilty in alleged 'catch a predator' kidnapping plot.

The victim, an active-duty military member who was in town for a funeral, believed he was meeting an 18-year-old woman at the Worcester campus, police said. But while in a campus basement lounge in early October, he was confronted by a large group of students holding up cellphones in what appeared to be a "deliberately staged event," according to the complaint. He was called a pedophile, prevented from being able to leave and, after breaking free, chased to his car, according to the complaint.

Via BlueSky (which requires a login)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Law Enforcement Automobiles Education ]

HardBreak hardware hacking Wiki is encouraging me to break out the soldering iron more.

Via my favorite enabler, Researchbuzz through BoingBoing

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Careful about your abandoned domains (as in startups that were using SAAS HR tools) Millions of Accounts Vulnerable due to Google’s OAuth Flaw

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Casually wondering how many people in the great TikTok migration end up confusing RedBook with RedTube...

The original Eliza script has been recovered! No news about whether it outperforms Claude...

https://www.livescience.com/te...d-from-60-year-old-computer-code

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06707

[ related topics: Current Events Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

If you're in the Petaluma area in the near future, a drop in to the fairgrounds to see Naga is a nice stop.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

More Naga

More Naga with pic

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Thinking about "teams" in the context of activist organizations that often do good bc work and sometimes fuck it up, more than ever I'm a fan of issues advocacy, and let the organizations, or candidates, or personalities, catch up.

Issues first.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Huh. TikTok playing Trump against Zuckerberg is a twist I should have seen coming, if I was paying attention.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I'm so old I remember when we looked askance at the Soviet Union and China for heavily controlling media access.

This morning my feed is full of discussions of using shady VPNs to route Internet traffic through other places to bypass state and federal media access controls.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Net Culture ]

I just like that we use 'conveying donkey' as our expression for 'really fast'.

The Commonwealth Club web site isn't responding right now, but that latest to outside interviewing Gabe Metcalf about the "California Forever" development in Solano County is fascinating, and I would love to have/hear a longer conversation with him to a more sophisticated and knowledgeable audience.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Quadricycle test ride. Got as far as 5th and I yesterday before we lost a bolt on the steering, today we tweaked a bunch o'stuff and our neighbor Mark, who helped with welding, shot video.

https://youtube.com/shorts/hOm7tLxQAG0 https://youtube.com/shorts/bElHIAMynXU

[ related topics: Fabrication Pedal Power Video ]

Google AI gives a plausible answer if you ask it of water will freeze at 23F, but 27F? I saw a the screen caps and had to try myself and: "No, water will not freeze at 27�F; water freezes at 32�F (0�C), so any temperature below 32�F will cause water to freeze."

Sigh. The world has just gone bizarro.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]

Fuck. California abandons diesel truck ban and 3 other clean-air rules before Trump is sworn in

California drops zero-emission truck rules after inaction by Biden's EPA

We had such hopes.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Invention and Design Current Events California Culture Machinery ]

Digging through some third party code, and...

// let it crash?

seems like a good mood summary.

BBC: The pointy-shoed corruption of medieval London

According to the London Museum, young men would "stand on street corners wiggling their shoes suggestively" at people walking by.

If that shoe-wiggler had bells sewn to the ends of the points, it indicated that the wearer was available for sexual frolics.

And now shoes with a reasonable toe box are completely unfashionable, when you can get them.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Monty Python Art & Culture Shoes Douglas Adams Fashion ]

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾 @liztai@hachyderm.io

OK this is hilarious. So, some Chinese on #RedNote don't believe the stories Americans are telling them about America because they thing it's too unbelievable.

So this OP is asking Malaysians to confirm if it's true 😆

Why Malaysians? We are rather famous (in China anyway) for being able to speak multiple languages including English and Chinese so... 😅😆🤣

Translation of post:

The situations that TT talked about, aren’t they just fooling us?

Are there any Malaysian friends who can answer this? Since you’re fluent in multiple languages, and there’s no "firewall" (referring to internet restrictions), you’re exposed to both sides. But it feels like even you don’t seem to fully understand if such situations exist in the US. Things like having to work three or four jobs, struggling just to survive, not being able to afford food, etc. It sounds so exaggerated. It feels like it’s even worse than the lower class in our small towns earning a 2,000 monthly salary. Are they fooling us, waiting for us to believe it and then turning around to laugh at how gullible we are? I really want to know!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Fashion ]

I have a strong feeling that this is old news, and there's plenty of research before this on the topic, but MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

The convoluted “legalese” used in legal documents conveys a special sense of authority, and even non-lawyers have learned to wield it.

In my lifetime, the nature of authoritative prose has changed dramatically, but/and it's interesting to see where the hack still works on humans and where it doesn't. The signalling through language, and the ways that authority have been installed in us through education, is fascinating.

Via

[ related topics: Nature and environment Writing Law Current Events Archival Government ]

kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@agora.echelon.pl quotes and links to Ryan Chenkie reminding us to never trust Google ads, in this case because Google's serving a sponsored link for Homebrew that says it goes to brew.sh, but actually goes to brewe.sh, and serves malware via the cURL pipe command to install.

[ related topics: Quotes Law ]

The more I'm involved with performing, the excitement I have for the "no brown M&Ms" concept in the rider, and for throwing an absolute shirtstorm tantrum when ya find 'em.

Like, okay, I'm bringing my sound system, so I'm gonna need access to the halls with time to set up and adjust and... no, you're not gonna send me a contract that specifies 8:00 to 9:30 and assume that the doors open then with no setup time and no teardown time afterwards.

Boy, Musk throwing the Bellamy salute sure is on the nose... https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/113862569196650878

Doom ported to a standalone Microsoft Word document — plays well but there's no sound

6.6MB document runs on x86 systems with modern Microsoft Office installations.

Following up on Doom in a PDF

[ related topics: Humor Games Microsoft moron Video ]

I'm beginning to think this code is just messing with me:

hiddenPasswordField.isHidden = true;

OpenAI o3 beats FrontierMath — because OpenAI funded the test and had access to the questions. OpenAI has been bragging that the o3 model achieved "...87.5%, beating the previous best AI score of 55.5%."

Besiroglu says there is also a “hold-out” set of tests that OpenAI has no access to.

Imma go out on a limb here and ask if the hold-out tests are, perhaps, 12.5% of the corpus?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

University of Montreal: Canada’s black market cannabis sites shun crypto dollars

The study used a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to understand merchants’ decisions. This model analyzes technology adoption through two lenses: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. For black-market merchants, cryptocurrency offers neither.

Phys.org: Canada's black market cannabis sites shun crypto dollars

Why don’t You Want My Money: A Study of the Acceptance of Cryptocurrencies in Online Cannabis Markets Patricia Saldaña-Taboada, Mélina Girard, David Décary-Hétu

https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2024.2418451

Via

[ related topics: Current Events Cryptography Currency Education Economics ]

RT Bean-to-Crab Machine @bean@twoot.site

The existence of "earbuds" implies the existence of "mouthpals"

From the department of "don't anthropomorphize computers, they hate that": The Conversation: Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives

EXPRESS: Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity Stephanie Tully, Chiara Longoni, and Gil Appel

This lower literacy-greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251314491

Via

[ related topics: Language Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence ]

While we're thinking about marketing and AI this morning: Google has no faith in its ability to launch new products.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Consumerism and advertising Marketing Artificial Intelligence ]

USDOT NHTSA Bicyclist Stop-as-Yield Law Analysis

Results indicate that SAY laws were associated with reduced crash rates, with reductions most prominent at suburban stop-controlled intersections and urban signal-controlled intersections. The analysis found little evidence that SAY laws reduce injury severity or lead to more crashes involving children.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Government ]

This note reminds me a lot of when there was push back on "lint" or compiler warnings. that sense of "yeah, there's a code smell, but I can't see the bug so I'll ignore it" is real, and not good for our practice.

Too Many People Don’t Value the Time of Security Researchers

(Thinking in particular about how someone trolling Github found a $dbi->param(...) without a scalar coercion in the Flutterby content management code, and it didn't look exploitable, but I fixed that so fast...)

[ related topics: Content Management ]

RT Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969@universeodon.com

Herman stepped into the dining room and gently placed a plate in front of each of his mother's two younger sisters. Looking the first directly in the eyes, he winked and asked, "Who wants some of my delicious sausage?" He smiled to himself, pleased with his double aunt entrée.

[ related topics: Food ]

RT Spectral Jon @jontv@tvwatch.party

when you tell your friend you like their new van

sick Transit, Gloria

[ related topics: Invention and Design Public Transportation ]

Teacher sets Guinness World Record running ice marathon dressed as a polar bear

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Monty Python Sports ]

Teacher sets Guinness World Record running ice marathon dressed as a polar bear

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Monty Python Sports ]

You know what I really love? When an NSView stack is drawing itself wrong after I set the frame, I've called -layoutSubtreeIfNeeded, -setNeedsDisplay:YES, the view hierarchy inspector in XCode even shows the right geometry, but there it is on my screen, drawn wrong.

[ related topics: Television ]

Okay, "parakeets" for "parklets" wins the auto-corrupt of the evening.

Have restaurants "...talk about how the parakeets improved their revenues"

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food ]

Oooh, I hadn't thought about using the new California curb daylighting law to sneak in excess red curbs while corners are getting cleared...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf...king-law-fake-curbs-20050123.php

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area California Culture ]

For your LLM/AI fuckery: Misguided Attention: A collection of prompts to challenge the reasoning abilities of large language models in presence of misguiding information

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

RT John Peden @johnpeden@nashtodon.com

So I learned recently that there are #RSS feeds for bills being discussed in congress as well as an RSS feed for Presidential Actions (executive orders, memoranda, etc.)

Presidential actions: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/feed/

Bills on the house floor today: https://www.congress.gov/rss/house-floor-today.xml (edited to fix link)

Bills on the senate floor today: https://www.congress.gov/rss/senate-floor-today.xml

[ related topics: Politics Web development Content Management Real Estate ]

Facebook asking me about whether I'll consider Honeylove next time I'm shopping for bras indicates both that Meta's advertising algorithms are highly tailored to me as a consumer, and gives me confidence in their AI efforts.

#sarcasm

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence ]

Anyone got some good examples of best practices for open source license acknowledgements in an application? Hang it off the Help menu, or the About dialog?

How are the included projects acknowledged, how are the license files displayed, things like that?

[ related topics: Free Software ]

Thinking this evening about how we used to have a bunch of people implementing web stuff personal projects in languages like PHP and Perl, nowadays everyone is struggling to use various platforms that don't work for them.

We have made software unnecessarily hard, and we have poorer ecosystems because of it.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

Saw an example of more Google AI bogosity, and spent some time getting egregiously wrong answers out of it (this is, correct would be between 85 and 135 ft.lbs.), but what surprised me was how many slightly wrong and subtly different answers it gave me for different searches.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]

Pee break in Salinas, interesting planes on the ramp.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Just closing "we're fucked" tabs:

Trump Disbands Cybersecurity Board Investigating Massive Chinese Phone System Hack

Mayor Ras J. Baraka's statement on ICE raid on Newark business establishment

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Not So Super, Apple — Frankly, “Use ChatGPT” is the best answer Siri has offered.

Asking Siri who won each Superbowl.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Sports ]

Adrianna Tan summarizes the "Deepseek" news:

@kims short version: an eccentric Chinese billionaire set out to try to make something better than ChatGPT, apparently accomplished it with way fewer resources than the U.S. companies are throwing at things, made some breakthroughs, published a paper revealing all the secrets, and showed that you can do what they do for a fraction of the price and resources, which is going to mean that the U.S. companies are going to struggle to raise as much money or will be expected to do much more with less, which means an AI winter might be coming, or that we really can’t compete as well as we think. But also frankly a lot of weird ‘I can’t believe the Chinese can actually do anything’ in this narrative.

This is especially bad for the nerds because their recent wins (cash grab and power) are pegged to them getting to ‘AGI’ and ‘world dominance’ first. I think they didn’t think there was any real competition. This is sort of a Soviets getting to space first type of moment

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Current Events Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Prepping to leave Pismo Beach after a very fun Beach Bash 408 square dance yesterday. Did not drink enough water yesterday or at the after-party, trying to balance rehydration with the circa 250 mile drive home.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Rest stop archeological finds.

Rest stop archeological finds.

With picture.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Thinking about the result of a trade war with Colombia, I'm guessing coffee is about to get more expensive than cocaine, with the obvious effects on border porosity that that would bring.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/26...p-deportation-flights/index.html

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Aviation History ]

Just trying to get an updated head shot/portrait for square dance publicity

[ related topics: Photography ]

Really good read. Advance manuscript of American Journal of Epidemiology: Tracking vaccine effectiveness in an evolving pandemic, countering misleading hot takes and epidemiological fallacies, Jeffrey S Morris.

https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwae280

RT Amélia Liao @amy@types.pl

why do we call it a stick of butter when sticks are round and have higher aspect ratio. that is an ingot of butter

I haven't been doing much hardware recently, but this is a good read on capacitor selection, and one that I should probably read again a few times, 'cause most of my hardware has just been plugging app notes together until things work. Code In Security: Proper decoupling practices, and why you should leave 100nF behind

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Saved for the next time I see those ignorant "I was spanked and turned out just fine" Facebook memes: PsyPost: Harsh parenting linked to poorer emotional and social outcomes in children

Journal of Affective Disorders: Harsh parenting trajectories from childhood through adolescence and socioemotional competences at age 18: 2004 Pelotas Birth Cohort Study, Luciana Tovo-Rodrigues, Iná S. Santos, Joseph Murray, Jessica Mayumi Maruyama, Alicia Matijasevich

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2024.08.112

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Model Building ]

RT GhostOnTheHalfShell @GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai

As a Californian, I’d like to encourage Governor Newsom to apply for membership in the EU.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

OH: "Keeping up with React changes is a full-time job".

So, uh, tell me again what this framework is offering?

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

Nextdoor thread on woodburning stoves really brings out into the open how much many of my neighbors would rather kill me than suffer minor inconveniences.

I mean, beyond how much that lesson is given to me every day I cross the street.

Trying to understand a complex codebase that makes extensive use of XCode's "Package Dependencies", and all of a sudden we're back to find and grep to try to figure out WTF.

Also, love (as in "hate") that XCode 16 won't compile code that XCode 15 will.

Daily Kos: What is happening inside the Office of Personnel Management?, referencing this Reddit thread.

Via

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Gotta love the "why hasn't there been a Planning Commission meeting in months?" conspiracists. Because the Planning Commission exists to hear development proposals, and nobody wants to try to build in Petaluma because they keep losing money when they try. This isn't hard to figure out.

[ related topics: Currency ]

The Beaverton: China’s new and cheaper magic beans shock America’s unprepared magic bean salesmen

“Society can’t advance without magic beans to grow into bizarre and ultimately worthless simulacrums of real beanstalks,” one investor said. “If we’re only wasting moderate amounts of water on them instead of massive amounts, that’s a plus.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Clowns ]

Nothing makes me feel the warm fuzzies like 2 years of Apple Developer forums thread saying "I have this problem too, how do we fix it?"

I also strongly suspect that this would be way easier if I just had a freakin' Makefile rather than trying to point and click through trying to accomplish what I am.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Community ]

RT ~n @nblr@chaos.social

I used to cut videos with ffmpeg on the commandline if the task was simply "take frame xxx to frame yyy from this file". Because editing software was needlessly complex for that simple task and often I didn't want re-encoding.

Just discovered that this exists:

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

It's a GUI frontend for ffmpeg for exactly that task. It's easy to use yet well featured (stuff like skipping through keyframes) but not beyond what's needed. Nice!

LosslessCut — The swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Software Engineering Video ]

Pete Prodoehl has built a big red button to end all big red buttons.

And I kinda want one.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

My list of things deleted in my "ilyxc" (I love you, XCode) is up to:

rm -fr ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData

rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.dt.Xcode

rm -r /var/folders/*/*/*/com.apple.DeveloperTools/*

rm -r /var/folders/*/*/*/com.apple.dt.Xcode/*

rm -fr ~/Library/Caches/org.swift.swiftpm/*

[ related topics: Language Apple Computer Books ]

Profiling some code that's running on Apple AppKit, and I had no idea that [NSString stringWithFormat:...] and NSRect's `-convertRect:fromView:nil` were so expensive. Like *really* expensive.

(and, for the latter with flipped views, sometimes wrong, there are places I'm trying to do my own calculations, but dang!)

[ related topics: Apple Computer Sports ]

As I click and drool through yet another repetitive project operation that can only be done in the XCode GUI, I wonder... if this had been the dominant computing paradigm when I learned to code, would I have gone into programming? Or would I have run screaming from the absolute horrors of mousing through so many operations that would be trivial if they just gave me a human readable text file.

(And, yes, I have been known to edit project.pbxproj files with emacs.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

Alibaba releases Qwen2.5-max, their entry into the DeepSeek salvo.

Via /., whose

[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

Petaluma's Better Cities Film Fest 2025, Wednesday, February 12, 2025, tickets are available at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/b...-1143087408209?aff=oddtdtcreator

Attorney General Rob Bonta rocks: California’s AG Tells AI Companies Practically Everything They’re Doing Might Be Illegal

On January 13th, California AG Rob Bonta issued two legal advisories that illustrate all of the myriad areas where the AI industry could be getting itself into trouble. “The AGO encourages the responsible use of AI in ways that are safe, ethical, and consistent with human dignity,” the advisory says. “For AI systems to achieve their positive potential without doing harm, they must be developed and used ethically and legally,” it continues, before dovetailing into the many ways in which AI companies could, potentially, be breaking the law.

[ related topics: Ethics Bay Area Law California Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Cal Matters: California is investigating OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit company

In a letter sent to the ChatGPT maker Dec. 6, deputy attorney general Christopher Lamerdin cited clauses in OpenAI’s articles of incorporation under which “OpenAI’s assets are irrevocably dedicated to its charitable purpose,” as Lamerdin put it, as well as the office’s “responsibility to protect assets held in charitable trust.” In addition to asking about asset transfers, it sought information on OpenAI’s restructuring plan and the value of its assets.

[ related topics: Law California Culture Economics ]

RT Duncan Bayne @duncan_bayne@bsd.cafe

"Contrary to our expectations, our findings indicate that AI adoption is negatively impacting software delivery performance. We see that the effect on delivery throughput is small, but likely negative (an estimated 1.5% reduction for every 25% increase in AI adoption). The negative impact on delivery stability is larger (an estimated 7.2% reduction for every 25% increase in AI adoption)".

https://cloud.google.com/devops/state-of-devops

Not contrary to mine.

[ related topics: Open Source Software Engineering Theater & Plays Artificial Intelligence ]

In response to Zuckerberg Says 'Everything I Say Leaks' in Leaked Meeting Audio, Brian Phillips ‪@brianphillips.bsky.social‬ snarks:

If you wanted no leaks you should have gone into Settings -> Security -> Configure privacy & security -> Privacy options -> Other -> Configure -> Media interface and clicked “Disallow.”

The Leak setting is on by default but we understand your privacy is important so we’ve made it easy to opt out

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Privacy Journalism and Media ]

Oh cool, people are using content filters for good: Swear in your Google search to turn off the AI / LLM summaries (y'all already know about &udm=14).

Via MeFi, and I'm mostly posting this to keep track of that thread

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

BlueSky thread of disappearing Federal website health data

[ related topics: Health ]