Flutterby™! From 2025-02-01 to 2025-02-28

Holy shit, this administration really is gonna kill us all. https://sjvwater.org/trumps-em...r-dump-from-tulare-county-lakes/

Just in case it gets lost in the current crop of WTF, the Portland chief of police has just acknowledged that the the Portland police department lied. A lot. In order to cover for a MAGA gunman. And Ted Wheeler is a spineless instigator.

https://www.theguardian.com/us...portland-police-chief-apologizes

[ related topics: Law Current Events Law Enforcement ]

A Whole Lotta Nothing: When everything becomes a profit center. In which Matt Haughey talks about calling the fire department to track down the source of some smoke in the evening, and being woken up by a high pressure Servpro salesweasel knocking on the door in the morning.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics ]

RT Angela Glansbury 🚽 @floppyplopper@todon.nl

Whoever decided ad hominem isn't a valid form of argument is clearly a complete shithead.

I know, I don't know any Rust geeks, but just in case there's someone out there while I'm hollering into the void: is there a way to step an iterator backwards, or am I stuck with calling .clone() before .next() to return the first place where my comparison failed?

[ related topics: Law ]

"We Americans of today—all of us—we are characters in this living book of democracy.

"But we are also its author. It falls upon us now to say whether the chapters that are to come will tell a story of retreat or a story of continued advance. I believe that the American people will say: "Forward!""

Franklin D Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Campaign Address at Cleveland, Ohio November 2, 1940.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.ed.../campaign-address-cleveland-ohio

[ related topics: Books Nature and environment ]

Yay, got my first basic numeric expression parser up with Rust, now trying to add the features my Objective-C version has, better debugging, figuring out how I tie code to the nodes, but I can express a BNF-like language directly in code, inspect the parse tree at run-time for things like autocomplete, and it's teaching me how to think in Rust.

Which seems to involve a lot of .clone() calls, I'm gonna have to look at the output machine code to see what it's really doing.

As the destruction of society continues, the USAID server has gone off the web, Musk and cronies are apparently dumping all of the Social Security data for personal use, just a little reminder that Trump voters were told exactly what was going to happen.

MarketWatch October 31, 2024: Brett Arends's ROI — Opinion: Elon Musk predicts ‘hardship,’ economic turmoil and a stock-market crash if Trump wins

Speaking Tuesday on a “telephone town hall” with supporters, Musk promised deep federal budget cuts, austerity and economic pain ahead in a new Trump administration.

So, yeah. The US has apparently ceded its place on the world stage to China and Russia. The dreams of the 9/11 hijackers, of Vladimiar Putin, and Xi Jinping, have been realized.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Phreaking Economics ]

Hanan Cohen, who is bad at math (grin), reminds me that we're up to 27 years of the Flutterby blog.

[ related topics: Weblogs Mathematics Archival ]

The horrors persist, *and* so do I.

Let's not sugar coat this.

Ugh. Thought I was being all smart by zip-tying my audio stuff (mixer, wireless headset receiver, hearing impaired transmitter, Bluetooth receiver) to a board with a power strip on it to power all those things.

Turns out having the power supplies close to the transmitter, and having the power cables neatly bundled, causes all sorts of noise. And that unbundled, my Landmark transmitter is actually less noisy than the Williams.

Need to figure out another configuration for easy setup.

[ related topics: Wireless Music Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Harvard Business Review: Research: How Work From Home Can Actually Strengthen Bonds Between Coworkers

Academy of Management Journal: A Window Into Coworkers’ Worlds: The Relational Outcomes of Learning Vivid, Unintentional, and Nonwork-Related Information About Coworkers

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

The White House Plumbers of this generation... I hope there are enough Republican legislators who look at the actions taken this weekend and are willing to stand up and say that the Constitution still matters.

Wired: The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover

[ related topics: moron Law Civil Liberties Race Real Estate ]

As if there weren't already a lot of reasons to find American football problematic... NFL emails reveal extent of Saints’ damage control for clergy sex abuse crisis. I was looking for a pull quote, but this whole thing just got worse and worse the further down I read.

Via

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Sports ]

Sometimes a song that's completely out of my usual listening comes along and completely slaps. Vienna Vienna - God Save The Queens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGFNdhua9wo

[ related topics: Religion Movies ]

Well, it doesn't appear to be Covid or the common flu strains, but it still sucks.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Today I learned about Magic Wormhole...

...which makes it possible to get arbitrary-sized files and directories (or short pieces of text) from one computer to another. The two endpoints are identified by using identical "wormhole codes": in general, the sending machine generates and displays the code, which must then be typed into the receiving machine.

And fowl: Forward Over Wormhole, Locally, which lets you use that to forward streams

[ related topics: Clowns ]

Dear Apple: It's already annoying that your layout engine is non-deterministic, but if I call `x = [[X alloc] initWithNibName:...]` and then call `[x loadView]` and then reference x.view, *somewhere* in there I'd hope that `-viewDidLoad` got called.

I'd be wrong, but I could hope.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Graphic Design Machinery ]

The thing about having been through several "listening to the other side" workshops, and listening to the current Musk supporters, is coming to grips with how many people are just fine with a coup.

I don't know how we got to this place turn ignorance of history and how these things out, but the Musk supporters are pretty clear.

[ related topics: Pop Culture ]

Same lap, different cat.

Whoah. cite>Brainwide silencing of prion protein by AAV-mediated delivery of an engineered compact epigenetic editorScience 28 Jun 2024 Vol 384, Issue 6703

Editor’s summary

Prion diseases are devastating neurodegenerative disorders that are invariably fatal, but removal of the prion protein from neurons can protect against disease progression. Neumann et al. developed a compact epigenetic silencer called CHARM that could efficiently shut off the prion gene throughout the mouse brain when delivered systemically by a viral vector without changing the underlying DNA sequence (see the Perspective by Whittaker and Musunuru). The epigenetic editor can also be programmed to turn itself off after silencing its target, thus limiting potential adverse effects from long-term expression. CHARM represents a therapeutic modality that could be applied to a range of other diseases caused by the toxic buildup of unwanted proteins. —Di Jiang

DOI: 10.1126/science.ado7082

As rahaeli ‪@rahaeli.bsky.social‬ said:

Holy SHIT. Okay, this needs an "in mice" caveat, but the tactic they took means it's less of a caveat than usual and also HOLY FUCKING SHIT

[ related topics: Bioinformatics Graphics Mathematics ]

A use for "AI" that I can get behind:

PC Mag: This 'AI Granny' Bores Scammers to Tears

After a survey found that 71% of Brits want revenge on scammers, mobile operator O2 deploys Daisy, an AI tool that keeps fraudsters on the line to waste their time.

The Guardian: ‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall

Daisy’s dithering frustrates phone fraudsters and wastes time they could be using to scam real people

Via /.

[ related topics: moron Current Events Currency Artificial Intelligence Flowers ]

I mean, sure, it could just be that oligarchs flock, and Musk's interests are aligned with Putin, or that USAID had a role in the downfall of South African apartheid, or any of a number of other reasons, but sometimes the answer might be simple?

Elon Musk Reportedly Has a Huge Conflict of Interest Motivating Him to Gut USAID

Now, it's starting to sound like Musk's seething hatred towards the aid organization can be traced back to at least one conflict of interest at one of his business ventures: according to The Lever, USAID's inspector general was investigating Musk's Starlink partnership with the Ukrainian government around the time DOGE shut down the organization.

Elon Musk’s Enemy, USAID, Was Investigating Starlink’s Contracts in Ukraine

[ related topics: moron Current Events Race ]

This is very worth a read: Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?

https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494

Via /.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Current Events Global Warming ]

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò ‪@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social‬

attempting to describe the vibes of the moment. have yet to do better than: "imagine watching a documentary reenacting the burning of the Library of Alexandria set to the soundtrack of 'Yakety Sax'"

[ related topics: Language Books ]

David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run

they laughed at generative AI. but they laughed at NFTs, the Metaverse and web3 too.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@vmst.io

Be the asteroid you are praying will hit the planet

[ related topics: Astronomy ]

Just so I can find it later, it's all stuff you already know: Rachel Maddow: To defend ‘DOGE’ efforts, White House clings to weird, lazy lies

[ related topics: Race Real Estate ]

Hard to view Pam Bondi's shutdown of the USDOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture (PDF) as anything other than a straight-up giveaway to Putin's croniess.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Skating ]

Today in "unfamiliar with the Streisand Effect": UnitedHealthcare Is Mad About ‘In Luigi We Trust’ Comments Under a Doctor’s Viral Post

The Instagram post.

[ related topics: Health ]

“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed — Meta's alleged torrenting and seeding of pirated books complicates copyright case.

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the "decision to use LibGen occurred" after "a prior escalation to MZ," authors alleged.

[ related topics: Books Law Machinery Trains Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

I'm... kinda annoyed with Rust. The lack of reuse of references in expressions is making code way more verbose, in a less readable way than it should be. The ownership stuff looks really kludgy, and it feels like it's hard to write code that's actually going to be performant unless the compiler is *really* smart.

Is there a systems language out there that's balancing safety and efficiency with expressiveness? Zig, Go, and Rust don't seem to be that.

Again, this is my shocked face: Conservative Writer Who Accused Drag Queens of ‘Grooming’ Is Arrested on Child Molestation Charges. The accused is Aaron Craig Gleason, author who's written for The Federalist and The Daily Wire, and taught Bible at Rocky Bayou Christian School.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Privacy Writing Civil Liberties Government ]

I don't know what the legal impediments are to municipalities buying out the PG&E lines and running their own electrical grid, I know Healdsburg has done it since before PG&E, but seems like something all California cities, including Petaluma, should consider.

https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/norcal-cities-new-utility/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law California Culture Sports ]

Donald Shoup will be missed. He made visible a huge tax that we pay on everybody, a tax which subsidizes pollution, injury and deaths. The data he collected and examined lights the way to reform, and he was generous in helping start a movement.

https://parkingreform.org/donald-shoup/

[ related topics: Politics ]

Reflective clothing causes target fixation in drunk drivers and confuses car automatic breaking technology.

Fuck it, wear what you want.

https://youtu.be/uyVk_VVr2Y8?si=4dvpZGIvBA0tKUcp

[ related topics: Automobiles Clothing ]

A few more superb owls for your Sunday.

https://www.flutterby.net/2012-07-05_Owls

When I was a kid, my dad had the requisite 3 different tin snips, the straight cut one had two blades on the near side, one on the far, and cut a little ribbon, to keep the handles on one side.

3 hardware stores later, I have not found this, and am going home with angle grinder cutting wheels. Sigh.

[ related topics: Nostalgia ]

Microsoft Research: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers

Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort.

Via Pivot To AI: Microsoft research: Use AI chatbots and turn yourself into a dumbass

404 Media: Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

The Register: Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

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

Does anyone else find themselves pondering that 12 Steps is 4 measures if you're dancing two step or waltz, 3 for a chacha?

The first step may be admitting you have a problem, but it's also with your left if you're dancing lead. In the traditions that I'm learning, at least.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Education ]

I thought I'd linked to something about how Google's Super Bowl commercial had to be edited because the LLM generated content was bogus, something like Ars Technica: Not Gouda-nough: Google removes AI-generated cheese error from Super Bowl ad, but I'm not seeing it. So, anyway...

Brilliant Crank: AI wants to rule the World, but it can’t handle dairy, which begins:

One of my first projects at IBM Design was to find a way to make business process outsourcing “lovable again.”

and talks a bit about how snake oil gets sold to people who don't actually understand the business processes, and then gets crammed back in by the people reacting to edicts from above.

Edit: PC Mag: Google Edits 'Gouda' Gemini Super Bowl Ad After Cheese Fan Notices Inaccuracies

A screenshot of the AI chatbot in the ad claimed Gouda accounted for 50-60% of global cheese consumption. Was it funded by Big Gouda, or was it just an AI hallucination?

[ related topics: Sports Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence ]

American Bar Association: The ABA supports the rule of law

We call upon our elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law and the legal processes and procedures that ensure orderly change. The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. These are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent. We must stand up for the values we hold dear. The ABA will do its part and act to protect the rule of law.

[ related topics: Politics moron Law Current Events Archival ]

And the cronyism is kicking into extra high gear: CNN: Justice Department to drop federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams

The Department of Justice is moving to drop the federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, according to a memo obtained by CNN.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement New York ]

Huh. I use bash. I'm copying file from the house server to Charlene's machine. I pop up a terminal, type scp with a wildcard in the remote source file name. Get a "no matches found:" error.

Think about it for a little while, then run bash. It works.

Fucking zsh...

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Not news to anyone who's been using LLMs to create summaries, but AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds.

In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer.

It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants.

Deborah Turness - AI Distortion is new threat to trusted information

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media Monty Python Artificial Intelligence ]

Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies: New Research Unveils Why NIMBYism Alone Can’t Explain Anti-Development Sentiment

The researchers have received a grant to build on the work prior to submitting it to a journal. In a working paper, they suggest that groups trying to spur more development can win popular support by emphasizing in their messaging or in the language of the policy itself how the effort will benefit groups with wide popularity, such as nurses, firefighters, and teachers. They write that government officials should consider that many voters do not have internally consistent or firm views on many housing policies, despite state and local laws that encourage gathering detailed community input prior to making policy changes or approving projects.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Invention and Design moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Community Real Estate Government ]

Report details 17 cases of abuse by IHOPKC founder Mike Bickle

If the acronym isn't ringing any bells for you, that's the "International House of Prayer".

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Real Estate ]

Designing e-bike-friendly cities: Cycle lanes with minimal traffic impact

In the paper "Bike Network Planning in Limited Urban Space," published in the journal Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, researchers led by Professor Martin Raubal and Nina Wiedemann at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation at ETH Zurich introduce a novel optimization method for improving bikeability with minimal impact on other travel modes.

[ related topics: broadband Space & Astronomy Current Events Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Clean Air Is As Serious As A Heart Attack (Thousands, Actually)

Recent news out of the UK shows us just how serious the hidden effects of air pollution can be. After one year of implementing a “clean air zone,” one city found that hospital and doctor spending reduced by over 30,000 pounds per month! More important than the money is the improvements to human health, with respiratory illnesses going down 25% and heart problem visits reduced by 24%.

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment Current Events Television Currency ]

Oooh. Not that Petaluma has the staff to implement something like this, but I can dream.

https://www.portland.gov/transportation/planning/trees-curb-zone

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

There's an AI company called "Bubble" https://bubble.io/

This... This is like a memecoin called... uh.... Memecoin. Or Shitcoin.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji. Abusing Unicode to stash arbitrary data in characters, that persist across copy and paste. In particular, this raised an eyebrow:

There are techniques for using subtle variations in text to “watermark” a message, so that if it is sent to a number of people and then leaked, it’s possible to trace it to the original recipient. Variation selector sequences are a way to do this that survives most copy/pastes and allows arbitrary data density. You could go so far as to watermark every single character if you wanted to.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Searching through .xcodeproj and .pbxproj files by hand, as one does, to try to figure out why one is correctly referencing its "Package Dependencies" and the other isn't.

PLOS One: X [Twitter] under Musk’s leadership: Substantial hate and no reduction in inauthentic activity

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313293

Via.

FuelArc: It’s Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto

Fire fatality rate per 100k units of 14.2? (Extrapolated from 34,438 units sold). Holy crap! When I was looking at recall rates for the Bolt battery, there were recalls for that many fires per 100k units in cars you wouldn't think of, and most of those were smoldering in the door panels 'cause water got in and flooded the power window motor.

Futurism: The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis

[ related topics: Invention and Design Automobiles Pyrotechnics Fabrication ]

Allstate Is Demanding We Delete These Quotes by Its Exec About How It's Using AI to Write Insurance Emails

Asked again why Allstate was so bluntly contradicting its own CIO, the spokesperson again ignored the question — in another email, we couldn't help but notice, that sounded a bit like it might have been written with AI itself.

Via Tara Calishain, who notes

...I'm annoyed this article isn't headlined "You're In Good Six-Fingered Hands With Allstate"

[ related topics: Quotes Artificial Intelligence ]

The vandals who are "auditing" the US government can't secure a freakin' WordPress site...

Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website, in which security testers update the DOGE (pronounced "douchy") web site with tags such as:

"THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."

I hope that we can get these fuckers up on Watergate style hearings before they end up in Nuremberg style trials.

[ related topics: moron Databases ]

How a hedge fund has created a monopoly on fire trucks and is artificially reducing supply to increase demand to extract money from your town.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Machinery Currency ]

In San Francisco, Men claiming to be DOGE enter City Hall and demand records on wasteful spending, fraud

“City Hall Building Management has received multiple reports of individuals entering public and private specs in City Hall through unlocked doors, while [filming] their interactions,” the manager wrote. “The individuals told occupants they are from the Department of Government Accountability and that they want to insert flash drives to download evidence of corruption. They did not present a judicial warrant, and therefore, had no authority to access computers or non public spaces.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE Posts Classified Data On Its New Website (Same content on Huffington Post)

But an easy search shows that DOGE’s database provides details on the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains U.S. intelligence satellites. Not only are NRO’s budgets and head counts classified, but the prospect of Musk’s tech team meddling in sensitive personnel information is setting off alarms for some in the intelligence community.

It's here, currently claiming 1,097 Headcount and a $165.9M total wages.

Interestingly, the About NRO page at Intelligence Careers dot gov says:

We're a hybrid organization of 3,000 personnel from the Intelligence Community, members of the armed services and Department of Defense civilian personnel.

[ related topics: Privacy Invention and Design Bay Area moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Television California Culture Community Databases ]

Office-mate reports that Apple's XCode LLM Swifth auto-suggester is suggesting that he use an "NSImageRenderer".

Which doesn't exist.

Other office-mate is fighting with Finder sorting UUID directory names by the decimal number leading them. So, yeah, 6BA7... is sorting long before 358F...

This fucking platform...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Sociology ]

The hardest working font in Manhattan:

Some searches quickly led me to George Gorton Machine Co., a Wisconsin-based company which produced various engraving machines. The original model 1 led to model 1A and then 3U and then, half a decade later, P1-2. They were all pantograph engravers: They allowed you to install one or more letter templates and then trace their shape by hand. A matching rotating cutter would mimic your movements, and the specially configured arms would enlarge or reduce the output to the size you wanted.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Typography Graphic Design ]

Yesterday, an office mate who uses more LLM stuff than I do reported that XCode, Apple's development environment, was suggesting using an NSImageRenderer object (which doesn't exist in the Mac, though there is a counterpart, UIImageRenderer, on the iPhone). Other office mate was experimenting with the $200/month OpenAI product, and the results were initially interesting, but fell apart on deeper inspection.

Today comes the news that a weird conjunction of a couple of words across columns is making its way into scientific papers through the use of these automated bullshit generators.

(And if you missed it a few days ago, the BBC had a great takedown of using bullshit generators for summarizing.)

I can see why the dancing bears are impressive, and I get why people think these techniques have promise, but I also remember Eliza and Animals...

Retraction Watch: As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Movies Nature and environment Sociology Current Events Monty Python Macintosh Artificial Intelligence Woodworking iPhone ]

Hmmm... Seems like it's the drivers? iSeeCars study reveals Tesla tops fatal accident rate

When you're too cheap and lazy to run down to the music store for a guitar winder, a piece of white oak scrap and a drill work wonders...

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

Honesty in guitar labeling: "We guarantee this Supertone instrument to be free from defects and flaws and to compromise the best materials and workmanship and tone that is available for the price. Sears, Roebuck and Co."

For the price...

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Maybe it's not worth reusing for the fret board. Look at that bow... Probably should have checked that before I bothered disassembling it...

[ related topics: Photography ]

The best part about this recommendation to sprinkle diatomaceous earth around your home to get coffee stains out of clothing is that the author, reviewer, and fact checker, are all independently credited... https://www.thespruce.com/remo...fee-stains-from-clothing-1901014

[ related topics: Photography Clothing ]

Just keeping this link around as the clusterfuck goes critical, so that when things really go tits up I've got more to point to and say "you were fucking told".

Because we're, at this point, beyond "I'm sorry you were lied to".

Trump administration wants to un-fire nuclear safety workers but can’t figure out how to reach them

The individuals, who work in an agency that oversees the nation's nuclear stockpile, had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts.

[ related topics: Politics moron Work, productivity and environment Pyrotechnics ]

After Censorship, Santa Rosa Students Write Their Own Play — and Take the Gold

And you know what? Over the weekend, [REDACTED] won the gold medal at the Lenaea Festival, a statewide theater competition of over 70 high schools. Santa Rosa also won 12 other awards at the festival, including the Spirit of Lenaea award, one of the festival’s very top honors.

This is the outgrowth of the idiotic cancellation of the same students' performance of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Free Speech Theater & Plays Dogs ]

I'm In which Google provides a search result summary for "Music Box: Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary - HBO" as "Focusing on a year in the life of rapper Earl “DMX” Simmons, the film bears witness to a man searching for reinvention and redemption", and... I wonder what language model failure led to this, 'cause I'm not able to replicate it on my laptop.

[ related topics: Music Photography Archival ]

Aha moment: "AI" (LLM) generated code is the "Matt's Script Archive" of this generation.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Don't see that every day: a pair of C-17s(?) over Petaluma. High wing 4 engine T tail in dark, presumably US military, livery.

[ related topics: Photography Machinery ]

Karol Herbst's email removing himself from the Linux kernel maintainers:

The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

A response to Theodore Ts'o's comment.

[ related topics: Free Software Politics Open Source Nature and environment moron Community Archival ]

I've been thinking recently about how much modern technology is bullshit to turn off. And it's not just "AI assistants" or zsh or video reactions that conferencing things have to turn off because they're built into the Mac camera handling. Design Thinking comic nails the lack of creativity in coming up with actually helpful things, in this case in the context of VR, but it applies generally these days.

[ related topics: Photography Law Macintosh Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Just a reminder, from 2019: Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free

[ related topics: Politics Government ]

It's good to know that in an era where Mozilla could be working towards browser parity, or making PDF handling not suck, or reducing memory consumption, increasing speed, and making sure I see fewer spinning beachballs, they're working on what's really important.

An AI sidebar.

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

Florida man shot Israeli visitors thinking they were Palestinians, police say

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Interesting to read this from Namanyay, who self-pitches as "I’m now making developers more productive with AI": New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code

RT Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop

Study after study also shows that AI assistants erode the development of critical thinking skills and knowledge *retention*. People, finding information isn't the biggest missing skillset in our population, it's CRITICAL THINKING, so this is fucked up

AI assistants also introduce more errors at a high volume, and harder to spot too

https://www.microsoft.com/en-u..._ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

https://slejournal.springerope...icles/10.1186/s40561-024-00316-7

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ai-generated-code-outages/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11128619/

[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft Invention and Design moron Work, productivity and environment Television Education Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Bolts Magazine: Who runs our elections?

This page compiles, state-by-state, the local offices that administer elections at the state, county, and municipal level.

It lays out who oversees the preparation and conduct of the election, from the voter registration process to the casting and processing of ballots. The tabulation, canvassing, and certification of results is often conducted in a separate process, covered in our accompanying page, “Who Counts Our Elections?”

[ related topics: Fabrication ]

RT geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

New ager: "Listen to Nature and you'll find the answers to life"

Nature: KILL AND EAT THINGS AND THEN FUCK A LOT

[ related topics: Nature and environment Invention and Design Food ]

RT Leonard Ritter @lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place

master: welcome to my Smart Home

student: wow. how is the light controlled?

master: with this on-off switch

student: i don't see a motor to close the blinds

master: there is none

student: where is the server located?

master: it is not needed

student: excuse me but what is "Smart" about all of this?

master: everything.

in this moment, the student was enlightened

RT Gwen Nova @Gwen_Nova@girlcock.club

you claim to love women yet you only have one girlfriend, curious

Sure, you knew that you could run Doom in a PDF by compiling C to JavaScript and using the PDF execution engine, but did you know that you can run a Risc-V emulator in a PDF and boot Linux on it?

The Register: The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux — What's next, Crysis-in-a-CSV?

Via

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Shoes Machinery ]

AP: NAACP lists companies that dump DEI in its tactical spending guide for Black Americans

Keisha Bross, an economic strategist at the NAACP, says they are not calling for a “boycott” of companies but instead encourage consumers to “buy-in” on companies that back their values. People of all backgrounds are encouraged to use the <span class="LinkEnhancement">Black Consumer Advisory</span>.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Douglas Adams Economics ]

Argentinian President Javier Milei Backtracks on $4.4B Memecoin After 'Insiders' Pocket $87M. They say "$4.4B Memecoin", but they also say that after the rug pull it fell 95%, so I assume it's a $220M memecoin, at best.

Abu Dhabi’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Discloses $463M Bitcoin ETF Holdings

With the news that Trump is pushing some sort of national fund to prop up crypto.... fuck it, burn it all down.

Also, if you think that an immutable public ledger of transactions is a reasonable replacement for cash, fuck you.

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

As if exhaust and tire dust and asphalt particles and collision trauma weren't enough: Science Alert: Cars Make One Thing Even More Toxic Than Diesel Fumes, Study Reveals

Particle and Fibre Toxicology: Copper-enriched automotive brake wear particles perturb human alveolar cellular homeostasis

We demonstrate here that brake-wear PM may perturb cellular homeostasis more than diesel exhaust PM. Our findings demonstrate the potential differences in effects, not only for non-exhaust vs exhaust PM, but also amongst different sources of non-exhaust PM. This has implications for our understanding of the potential health effects of road vehicle-associated PM. More broadly, our findings illustrate the importance of PM composition on potential health effects, highlighting the need for targeted legislation to protect public health.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12989-024-00617-2

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health ]

RT Myles Eftos @madpilot@aus.social

One of the advantages of the downfall of the United States will be eradicating the mm/dd/yyyy date format

Toby @tobestewart@mastodonapp.uk

Be kind. Not everyone remembers they can go fuck themselves. Sometimes you have to remind them

All of Humane's AI pins will stop working in 10 days

On the one hand I've got some schadenfreude for the people dumb enough to plunk down a couple of hundred bucks for something that should have been a phone app, on the other hand that's somewhere on the order of 10k bits of ewaste.

(It is a shame that their projector technology didn't really work, 'cause that could have been cool.)

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

RT David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run

@compassDoesWhat my computer runs an agentic AI where I tell it what to do and it goes and does it, it's called bash

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

RT Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life@mas.to

Find someone that loves you like OpenAI execs love leaving OpenAI to create an identical startup to the one they just left.

The Verge: Mira Murati is launching her OpenAI rival: Thinking Machines Lab

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence ]

Beware QR codes and joining groups: Wired: A Signal Update Fends Off a Phishing Technique Used in Russian Espionage

Google warns that hackers tied to Russia are tricking Ukrainian soldiers with fake QR codes for Signal group invites that let spies steal their messages. Signal has pushed out new safeguards.

Google Threat Intelligence Group: Signals of Trouble: Multiple Russia-Aligned Threat Actors Actively Targeting Signal Messenger

Via Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social who notes:

👉 No, Signal has not been compromised

👉 No, Signal encryption has not been broken

👉 No, there is no back-door in Signal

You should continue using Signal. The update is responding to a sophisticated, state-level attack targeting specific groups.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Cryptography ]

Advice for the AI era: RT ·J Mopp @jmopp@masto.ai

Forget about S.M.A.R.T. goals; focus on V.O.L.U.M.E. — Vague, Open-ended, Lofty, Unmeasurable, Minimal, Ephemeral

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

For work I'm playing around with hierarchical summarization techniques and ChatGPT4-o, and it's kind of astounding how different the output from separate runs with the same input text can be.

Like bullet points that are present in one query completely disappear on the second query, and of course the prioritization of such things is always very different.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

RT evacide @evacide@hachyderm.io

Today I encountered my first AI-generated news article that included a manufactured quote from me on a topic I did not speak or post about, just in case you're wondering how AI is going.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

The party of "states rights" comes down in favor of killing people and slowing economic growth: Trump administration terminates approval of New York City congestion pricing

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Civil Liberties New York Economics ]

The Zen Lady @thezenlady@toot.community

I hope America is as lucky as the delta jet - everyone survives but the right wing explodes

Still gonna see some injuries

[ related topics: Religion Community ]

I haven't been following such things, but I just learned that GE was delisted from the DJIA in 2018, and completed a 3 way split last year, and Wikipedia sarcastically notes:

"Upon his retirement from GE in 2001, [Jack] Welch had stated that his effectiveness as its CEO for two decades would be measured by the company's performance for a comparable period under his successors."

That's been a long slide, but one that many predicted...

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Economics ]

Somehow simultaneously unsurprising and still disappointing: Texas Observer: ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X Account

Since GlomarResponder was first created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”

Via

[ related topics: Privacy Civil Liberties Race Handicaps & Disabilities Government ]

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series: The Effect of US COVID-19 Excess Mortality on Social Security Outlays/cite>

The pandemic resulted in approximately 1.7 million excess deaths among individuals aged 25 and older between 2020 and 2023. These premature deaths reduced future retirement payments, which increased the Social Security fund by $294 billion. However, this gain was offset by reductions in future payroll tax flows ($58 billion) and increased payments to surviving spouses and children ($32 billion), resulting in a net impact of $205 billion.

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Anyone else read a recipe, run across a phrase, and just wanna table flip? From a David Lebovitz recipe: "Kosher salt is also discussed in the book as some brands are saltier than others", and... okay, yeah, if it makes a difference, this is why we don't specify some ingredients by volume, kids.,

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Furniture ]

SpaceX rocket debris crashes into Poland

"Once ze rockets go up, who knows vere zey come down, that's not my department"...

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Current Events Monty Python ]

Listening to the Re: Dracula podcast.

"I suppose that nature works on such a hopeful basis that we believe against ourselves that things will be as they ought to be, not as we should know that they will be."

https://redracula.live/

[ related topics: Nature and environment Theater & Plays Pop Culture ]

Interesting ChatGPT Pro results this morning, we asked it for a timeline of the recent Israel-Hamas-Palestinian conflict, looks like it plagiarized a Reuters timeline, introduced some weird language, and a few weird date mismatches.

Former NFL player Chris Kluwe arrested during Huntington Beach City Council meeting

Chris Kluwe‬ ‪@chriswarcraft.bsky.social‬

I posted a copy of the 3 minute version of my speech from yesterday (with citations) if anyone is interested. Feel free to steal from it if you want!

(also, this is literally less than half of the Nazi shit they're currently pulling)

Library Council Speech.rtf

Longer Bluesky thread on the event

And an elected official talks about how the arrest seems disproportionate.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Nature and environment Current Events Sports ]

Running the US like private equity runs a business. Load it up with debt, extract the assets, declare bankruptcy and leave the debt holders holding the bag. House Republicans unveil blueprint to extend $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and lift the debt ceiling

[ related topics: Politics Sports Real Estate ]

CBS puts the gentlest spin on idiocy wasting California water reserves: Why the water Trump ordered released in California won't help Los Angeles firefighting

Mr. Trump had claimed that California withheld water supplies that could have made a difference in fighting the flames. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials disputed those claims.

Now, the water released from dams at Lake Kaweah and Lake Success is rushing into a dry lakebed in the Central Valley, where experts say it can't flow to Southern California and will likely go to waste.

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture Handicaps & Disabilities Gavin Newsom ]

watchTowr labs: 8 Million Requests Later, We Made The SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack Look Amateur. Leveraging abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for fun, including .exe files from CISA alerts, control systems for "Major Unnamed SSLVPN Appliance Vendors", and VSCode plugins for...

Truth be told - we’ve had some difficulty ascertaining what Anaconda is or does, other than ‘full of buzzwords’. Something about AI.

So I think that's Anaconda.com, not the Python distribution? Although maybe AI is a pivot for them?

[ related topics: Books Monty Python Artificial Intelligence Python ]

Of interest, especially because I've lost a couple of friends to this and another was just diagnosed (early, so fingers crossed, but...): mRNA vaccines show promise in pancreatic cancer in early trial

Fewer than 13% of people live more than five years after diagnosis. In a small trial, half of the participants mounted a lasting immune response against their cancer cells.

[ related topics: Health Theater & Plays ]

Playing around with rosette and inlay techniques. Learning a lot, from bandsaw resawing and alignment techniques to glueups), but clearly not yet ready for prime time...

[ related topics: Photography Education ]

The case for more bike parking. 4 on the sign, 2 on the rail.

But thank deities we provide sufficient space for drivers to park close to the beer garden.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Law Beer Trains Bicycling Gardening ]

Drivers stop for pedestrians in crosswalks challenge: cause damn some of y'all could use some skill improvement and we need to start with the little things.

I remember at some point coming to (falsely) believe that the Venus of Willendorf was the oldest clearly anthropomorphic sculpture that could be attributed to human activity. Recently I learned that the Löwenmensch figurine, also called the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, predates it by a lot.

Via Rabbit @ra6bit@infosec.exchange who points out that:

Fun fact: The oldest statue made by human beings ever discovered, the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, is an anthropomorphic cat.

By current evidence, furry art is literally the oldest form of art that still exists, and arguably all visual arts are descended from it.

[ related topics: Astronomy Art & Culture ]

Gotta post the failures along with the successes. This was gonna be some boxes for square dance Christmas parties, then it spiraled into bad decisions, and today I decided to take the remaining parts and do something.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Thinking about how there are so many interesting cool challenges that people have that software could assist with, but most development these days seems to be focused on how to get recurring revenue for services that users would rather not have at all.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Charlene wanted dessert last night, so I went into the freezer, found a Makrut lime and a couple of leaves and some cranberries left over from Thanksgiving

Tossed those in a pan with some sugar and a can of coconut milk, simmered for 15 minutes, added some starch , and... Would make again.

As I've been learning how to use Rust, I've been a little frustrated with the "don't use pointers, use indices into arena arrays" model, it feels super clunky to this ol' assembly and C hacker, but Aapo Alsuutari on the Nova blog: Memory hell talks about how that's the direction that languages are going under the hood.

Lobste.rs discussion.

[ related topics: Weblogs Community Education ]

Jennie Breeden at The Devil's Panties is speaking to me right now... Ukraine and Nazis.

[ related topics: Archival ]

Crypto trader kills himself on X live to create a meme coin.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Marketing Cryptography Currency ]

Public comment submitted in writing for tonight's City Council meeting:

We are writing to support moving forward with the overlay plan.

It is well established that housing responds to supply and demand: that even high end housing increases supply that helps make housing overall more affordable.

We can see that to enhance a vibrant, but sometimes struggling, downtown, we need more people walking around downtown.

In order to meet our climate goals, we need more density, so that people can get around without using automobiles, and can live with the lower carbon emissions, and ecological impact, of multi-family dwellings.

Petaluma is in a housing crisis. Our children leave. Our low wage workers commute in from elsewhere, and our homelessness rate is staggering. Allowing more housing to be built densely, around downtown, will help alleviate that housing crunch and bring more people into our downtown.

Much has been made of second-guessing the economics of the hotel, but even if the hotel fails, hotel to condo or rental conversions have happened very successfully in other cities. And if it succeeds, the hotel brings in high end tourist dollars which will help our downtown thrive. Along with the direct TOT revenue.

A few years ago we visited Philadelphia, and as buildings from the 1700s stand along side skyscrapers, it's clear that density and height take nothing away from historic buildings.

We would also urge the Council to not put too much stock in calls for more parking. Years of accumulated evidence clearly demonstrate that if we are going to thrive in the coming decades, we need to be moving away from automobiles as our mode of transportation. We do that by building dense neighborhoods that are attractive to walking and other active transportation modes, and that can support transit. And we don't do that by continuing to make developers subsidize automobile travel.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Theater & Plays Sociology Writing Work, productivity and environment Travel Automobiles Architecture Economics Public Transportation Real Estate Global Warming ]

The politicization of the federal workforce continues: DOGE’s USDS Purge Included the Guy Who Keeps Veterans’ Data Safe Online

The dozens of USDS cuts last week hit teams like product management, design, and procurement. Kamens and other sources told WIRED that he is the only person from the USDS engineering team who was fired. He and others speculate that he was targeted because he had been publicly critical of DOGE in the weeks before the USDS cuts. DOGE did not return a request for comment about his removal.

[ related topics: Bay Area Graphic Design ]

RT FeloniousPunk @FeloniousPunk@beige.party

Recently the Swedish government republished a brochure on what to do if war breaks out. I don’t say this lightly: It might be in your best interest to download and read it. It’s in English.

https://www.msb.se/en/advice-f...ochure-in-case-of-crisis-or-war/

You can click on the "Download or order..." button, and then the "Ladda ner" button gives you the document in English.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History moron Law ]

The long wait for a glimpse of Luigi

But one moment in court felt especially notable in this case driven by the public’s consumption of it. In court, Agnifilo said New York City mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny shared key evidence in the case in a documentary before sharing it with the defense.

“This week on HBO in a documentary, I see the Chief of Detectives and the New York City mayor, full hair and makeup done, sitting down and giving an interview for television talking about the evidence in Luigi’s case,” Agnifilo said to reporters. “It’s outrageous that they have time to go and prejudice Mr. Mangione’s ability to receive a fair trial.”

If Adams and the NYPD fuck up the prosecution here after all of the glory hounding and iconography they've been doing, I will laugh so hard.

RT haliey welch-fargo @esvrld@normal.style

putting luigi in a bulletproof vest is a really funny attempt to make him look like a Dangerous Terrorist. if he walked the streets of new york unguarded the greatest danger he'd face would be having his dick sucked clean off its hinges

Although it seems like most of the work to destroy the case against Mangione is being done by the aforementioned Kenny and Adams, his defense team has a website.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Movies Invention and Design Law Work, productivity and environment Television Civil Liberties New York ]

While HP rolls back a mandatory 15 minute tech support call wait time, that was introduced in order to inconvenience customers into searching out web site answers first, Anthropic launches a new AI model that ‘thinks’ as long as you want.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence ]

In the Pipeline by Derek Lowe: Paxlovid: You'd Have Expected More

The other way to interpret this is that the vaccinations themselves have done enough to help keep people out of the hospital that Paxlovid treatment can't do much more. I think it's very likely that if there had been a Paxlovid trial early on with a median age of 70 among unvaccinated adults (instead of the real median age of 42) that it would have shown much more than that 5.5% improvement in hospitalization risk! But vaccinating these patients makes any benefit of Paxlovid drop back into the statistical noise. So to me, these data are disappointing for Paxlovid, but likely reinforce the benefits of the vaccines.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

How Trump’s government-cutting moves risk exposing the CIA’s secrets

The CIA is conducting a formal review to assess any potential damage from an unclassified email sent to the White House in early February that identified for possible layoffs some officers by first name and last initial and could’ve exposed the roles of people working undercover, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Via Raw Story.

[ related topics: Politics moron Work, productivity and environment Race Real Estate ]

Saw a meme recently about how US cities weren't built for the car, they were destroyed for the car. And I often think "but California was mostly built up post WWII", and then there are reminders, like this, that even cities like Santa Rosa were destroyed for the car.

Might make a fun afternoon to map out the parking lots and 1 story bank buildings in Petaluma that sit on the sites of once grander multi-story buildings.

SR YIMBY: Half of Santa Rosa is missing.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design California Culture Automobiles Marketing Maps and Mapping Architecture Woodworking ]

You've probably already read about the particular bit of Musk-y bullshit that was this email to federal workers telling them they must justify their work in 5 bullet points.

You may have wondered how this genius was gonna process all of that email? Then came the news that DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email, as in "We're gonna feed your prose into a bullshit generator and..."

There's a reason DOGE is pronounced "douchy". Anyway, apparently there's a little bit of sanity:

HHS warns employees that responses to Elon Musk's request may 'be read by malign foreign actors'.

The email said employees who wish to respond should keep “a high level of generality and describe your work in a manner to protect sensitive data.”

“Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly," the email read.

And, yeah, it's email, so malign foreign actors beyond a particular South African.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Race ]

Wired: DOGE’s USDS Purge Included the Guy Who Keeps Veterans’ Data Safe Online:

“There were these interviews we all had to do with the DOGE people the day after the inauguration,” he says. “In mine, one of them asked me to describe what I was doing at VA and then said something like, ‘If you’re doing all that work, why aren’t you working in the private sector where you could be making twice as much money?’ And I said, ‘Because I don’t care about the money. I care about serving veterans.’

“I think the fact that someone asked me that question at all is really telling.”

Via Jonathan Kamens (the subject of the piece).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Currency ]

Objectophilia is hitting the mainstream via Random House: ‘Sky Daddy’ Takes Airplane Fetishization to New Heights

I'm intrigued, though with cash flow being what it is, and culture being what it is, I think I'd rather get further ahead of the trend with Tinglers.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Aviation Sociology California Culture Real Estate ]

Times of Israel: Israel joins US, North Korea, Russia to vote against UN resolution reaffirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity (Via)

Joey deVilla: Be wary of the company you keep highlights those voting against a U.N. resolution urging Russia's withdrawal from Ukraine.

Recent podcast discovery: "Oh F*ck Yeah with Ruan Willow".

Based on the one interview with Anna Sansom episode, I'm hooked.

The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans. On trying to get useful information out of ChatGPT, using OpenAI's examples:

We’re asking for a deterministic answer from a probabilistic question, and there it looks like the model really is failing on its own terms. In my opinion, or given my expertise, it shouldn’t be using Statcounter or Statistica, but even if it should, it hasn’t taken the correct number from them.

Every: I Created a Hacker News Simulator to Reverse-engineer Virality

Given a more detailed persona based on a two-hour interview with a human, ChatGPT can replicate their answers on surveys with as much as 85 percent accuracy.

Uh. Yay?

Back to Benedict Evans, in his summary he notes:

... OpenAI and all the other foundation model labs have no moat or defensibility except access to capital ...

Emphasis mine. With Microsoft dialing back on data center leases, maybe we're starting to see the bubble deflate.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Current Events Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Federal technology staffers resign from DOGE rather than help Musk

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

[ related topics: Drugs moron Law Civil Liberties Gambling ]

Seeing a lot of people talk about boycotts and shutting down the economy, and I get the sentiment, but these fuckers are doing their damnedest to destroy the economy anyway. They've publicly said that there is going to be economic pain.

Just not sure more of that makes the point to them.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Let's bring back blog to blog links! Rasterweb: Be The Expert in 2025 — Your voice matters…

[ related topics: Weblogs Graphics ]

More blog to blog linkage (yeah, it's Substack, I hate that, but a number of people I respect are writing there, sigh): Burningbird: Dear Buddy Carter. On how the US is blowing trust in the world.

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing ]

Dear Damon Connolly

I'm writing to oppose the recently introduced Assembly Bill 1178. California already has a problem with bad police officers being unaccountable to the public, moving from department to department. Making it even harder to figure out who the bad cops are, and keep our police departments accountable and upstanding, undermines law enforcement and belief in the justice system.

We need to be working to make law enforcement more transparent and more accountable, not less.

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

Why bother rephrasing, I'll just quote: Chris is. @offby1@wandering.shop

Bruce Schneier, on the demand by the UK that Apple build a back door into their end to end encryption: https://www.schneier.com/blog/...d-make-our-phones-less-safe.html

The key takeaway here is that if you use an Apple device you should immediately enable Advanced Data Protection: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756

Apple may be forced to disable it in the future, but if they do they can't do so in secret; it will be immediately obvious to you that it's happening.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Weblogs Bay Area Macintosh Cryptography Archival ]

Michael Lucas :flan_set_fire: @mwl@io.mwl.io

When BSDCan started, there was discussion about starting a yearly BSD conference in the US.

Then we looked at the Patriot Act and said, "Y'know, maybe it's best to just have everyone go to Canada."

I'm feeling rather prescient these days.

[ related topics: Star Wars Open Source Pyrotechnics Community Conferences ]

Doom in World of Warcraft by compiling to RISC-V and running a RISC-V emulator in Lua

Via

[ related topics: Sports ]

Become ungovernable

(Cows blocking road with "keep driveway clear")

[ related topics: Photography ]

Today in "are you fucking kidding me?", our new Enphase controller didn't like one of "&" or "!" in our wifi password. So now I have to reconfigure our cameras and laptops and... Ugh.

#ClownShow #WTF #WhatMilleniumIsItAgain

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design ]

Just one more lane, bro, one more lane and we'll solve congestion! Nvidia CEO Huang says AI has to do ‘100 times more’ computation now than when ChatGPT was released

Via /..

I mean, I believe that intelligence and likely consciousness is computational, I just don't believe that intelligence will come from the current crop of people pushing chatbots as AI. I also don't think Jensen Huang has any clue about how many orders of magnitude of compute we are away here.

[ related topics: Graphics Artificial Intelligence ]

If porn is at the root of technological innovation, maybe there is something to this GenAI craze after all? 404 Media: Alibaba Releases Advanced Open Video Model, Immediately Becomes AI Porn Machine

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Well huh. Neil Brown @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk points out this bit of bullshit in the new Firefox Terms of Use

Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy

And that the Mozilla acceptable use policy says:

You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to … Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality

As he notes:

“Mozilla’s services”, but the general terms say that “your use of Firefox” must follow the AUP.

Via

[ related topics: Open Source Invention and Design Law ]

JFC, AT&T door to door salespeople, starting out the conversation with two obvious lies (beyond ignoring our "no solicitors" sign) is not a good way to start.

Coin Desk, Feb 21, 2025: Crypto Market Faces Weak Demand, Needs Trump Initiatives to Kick In, JPMorgan Says

The Onion, June 15, 2023: Crypto Leaders Call For Infusion Of 20 Million Dopes To Stabilize Market

Via

[ related topics: Food Cryptography Currency Gambling Economics ]

Police behaving badly, Alice Hutchings of the University of Cambridge

Abstract—Police officers and employees misusing access to police database now account for over half of all cybercrime prosecutions in the UK. The harms this can cause are considerable. Yet police continue to call for encryption to be weakened to allow for greater access to communication data.

Via

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Pop Culture Cryptography Education Databases ]

Anybody know how to calculate efficiency loss for a solar panel at 0° (flat) vs 25° oriented south at latitude 38.23N?

Trying to figure out how much to push back on our solar install.

[ related topics: Photovoltaics ]

Boycott day, working from home, woke up way too early, the motivations to shower or shave this AM are low.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight" @Lana@beige.party

An army of lesbians is called a Militia Etheridge. In this essay, I will

[ related topics: Writing ]

I thought this was going to be about Spain's easy temporary visa requirements for remote tech workers, but it's not. The first example is people working in food processing/ham production: Foreign workers help Spain's economic growth outpace US, rest of Europe

Alt link, Via.

[ related topics: Food Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Pew: Small Single-Stairway Apartment Buildings Have Strong Safety Record. IBC currently doesn't allow single-stairway buildings above 3 stories, which strongly dictates the building forms that we see in the US.

The two-stairway requirement makes it especially difficult to build apartments or condominiums on small or irregularly shaped pieces of land in already built-up areas (known as infill lots), which are often the main type of land available for development (or close to jobs, commerce, and schools) in expensive U.S. cities and towns.

Via this thread, which notes:

It was amazing to me how much the discussion changed in the Virginia code process once these numbers were shared. We started with heavy concern and criticism over safety and ended talking about how best to get fire deaths in Virginia to zero while ending homelessness, especially for children and families. This is not typical for a public process, and definitely not over a period of months.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Architecture Real Estate ]

Great. Declare the marked crosswalk "not a crosswalk" and blame the pedestrian:

City of Atlanta to remove faded crosswalk on Peachtree Street after traffic death

Apropos of nothing, you know what I like about USB-C driven HDMI? You can test the individual components and they can all work. They can all even work with every bit of low end display hardware you can throw at them.

But plug them into a mid-six figure projector, and it's a crapshoot...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

As the sort of person who's found bugs in compilers, and who's spent time looking at the output machine code and with an oscilloscope, this comment about compilers as abstraction layers, and LLMs as an extension of the abstraction layer, is making me think a little more charitably about AI as code generator.

https://mastodon.social/@mkb/114083167517852985

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Mozilla deletes promise not to sell Firefox users’ data

The hits just keep on coming. Mozilla not only changed its Privacy Notice and introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time with some pretty onerous terms, they also removed a rather specific question and answer pair from their page with frequently asked questions about Firefox, as discovered by David Gerard. The following question and answer were removed:

"Does Firefox sell your personal data?"

"Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise."

I have the David Gerard toot cued up in my saved Fediverse posts, so I'll just link that here (I suspect that the one up there will go stale after a bit):

New Mozilla TOS diff. This is what they just removed:

* Does Firefox sell your personal data?

> Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.

The purpose of the new TOS appears to be to enable them to do this - such as for their advertising and AI sidelines.

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/com

Edit: Mozilla responds to backlash over new terms, saying it’s not using people’s data for AI

Edit Edit: Mozilla Blog: Firefox: An update on our Terms of Use

[ related topics: Privacy Open Source Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence ]