Flutterby™! From 2025-03-01 to 2025-03-31

So apparently today Donald Trump and JD Vance showed their whole asses and were owned by Zelenskyy in their attempts to give the rare earth parts of Ukraine to Putin. The response was predictable, Europe realizes they can't trust the US.

All as Pete Hegseth has ordered US Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning (the entire scope isn't clear) and Peter Navarro denies reports that he's floated kicking Canada from Five Eyes.

BrianKrebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange

We are so getting cut out of intel sharing agreements by our allies over this. I mean, if they have a brain. Anyone with intel training 101 (that isn't Israel) will conclude that the US cannot be a trusted intel sharing partner anymore.

Adam Shostack @adamshostack@infosec.exchange

I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said “Mr Gorbachev, how much of east Germany’s minerals are you willing to give us?”

zip @zip@wandering.shop

At this point I think we can safely assume there's a moderate chance that the US will leverage access to their cloud companies to bully other countries, or do something that could get them embargoed. Having data in AWS, in gmail, in iCloud is a liability

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Journalism and Media Maps and Mapping ]

I have rolled my eyes at "AI" video generation, but I think I've finally found a faked image that I endorse...

https://libretooth.gr/@dougiec3/114088083085011874

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Thinking about coding with LLM assistance as a natural progression to higher level languages reinforces my feeling that CoPilot is the Matt's Script Archive of this era.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Those of us who were ruined by a certain era of the Internet are now wondering if a "lemon fest" is like a "lemon party".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Net Culture ]

Those of us who were ruined by a certain era of the Internet are now wondering if a "lemon fest" is like a "lemon party".

Now with picture

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Net Culture ]

Today in "Dan doesn't value his own time enough", reworking these chairs...

[ related topics: Furniture ]

Fuuuh. Before picture of those chairs.

[ related topics: Photography Furniture ]

Neighbor brought this ceramic butterfly back from a trip as a gift for watching their house. We have a hole in the wall in the kitchen where the doorbell used to be. Made this plaque to mount the butterfly and put over the hole.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography Travel Real Estate ]

Butterfly plaque hole cover in place

[ related topics: Butterflies ]

Butterfly plaque hole cover in place.

Try 2.

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography ]

OH: "It's ironic that the internet was originally created to protect the functioning of our government in the event of Soviet attack."

[ related topics: moron Net Culture ]

bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 @bert_hubert@fosstodon.org

So I didn't know, but Europe already has a backup of PubMed, the database of biomedical research publications. The US PubMed broke down over the weekend. And here is our alternative: https://europepmc.org/ #pubmed #pmc

[ related topics: Databases ]

Thinking about those halcyon days of journaling, and then "Quantified Self", of thinking that it would be fantastic to gather more data about our lives and through looking at it, gain insight into ourselves.

Rather than knowing that every bit of data amassed is a liability that can be exploited by hostile actors.

Two from AVWeb this morning:

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy say pilots whose errors result in incidents should have their certificates pulled.

And a follow-up, in which Russ Niles talks about how we deal with language and Transportation Secretaries without aviation experience One Strike And You’re Out?

And once again, I'm gonna solidly recommend Sidney Dekker's The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, and point out that though we come from a culture that likes to view punishment as a mechanism for changing human behavior, that Flexjet Challenger 350 crew that did the runway incursion in front of the Southwest flight are probably now the least likely pilots to ever do that again...

[ related topics: Cool Science Aviation Sociology Current Events California Culture Douglas Adams ]

When I was a young lad, I was enthralled with airplanes. Sucked down everything I could about aviation. Flying right seat in my uncle's Cessna 150 was amazing. Looking down from that same uncle's cabin above Lake Sacandaga on the A10s flying low passes over the lake was similarly amazing.

Somewhere in there, I remember reading an article in a magazine proposing to bring back the P51 to fill similar roles to the A10, with the advantage that a piston aircraft could have different fuel logistics, that a taildragger would be more suitable for landings on rough terrain and makeshift runways, that the speed characteristics weren't that far out of line, and...

There are all sorts of reasons why it's not really a drop-in for that role, but it's the thing I flashed to when I read the Air Force getting the first of 75 OA-1K Skyraider II light attack fighters, a taildragger built on the Air Tractor 802 cropduster frame, that can carry 6,000 pounds of weapons, and cruise at 180 knots for 1500 nautical miles.

So much slower than the P51, very different role than the A10, but still interesting.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Cool Science Aviation Current Events Guns ]

Ed Zitron: Power Cut

As a result, based on TD Cowen's analysis, Microsoft has, through a combination of canceled leases, pullbacks on Statements of Qualifications, cancellations of land parcels and deliberate expiration of Letters of Intent, effectively abandoned data center expansion equivalent to over 14% of its current capacity.

And, yeah, the Microsoft pullback is the first part of this, but make sure you get down to the funding of the "Stargate" project and Softbank borrowing money to invest in his.

No, wait, read down further to the discussion about how this all ties together in predicting demand, especially as OpenAI is moving features that were part of the "Pro" package down into the cheaper packages, in a way that sure feels a lot like "maybe this time they'll like it?", and how Microsoft's language about demand suggests that Microsoft thinks that LLMs and Generative AI have gotten into the commodity phase, where we're not gonna see a lot of improvement, and now it's about delivering the current level of technology cheap enough to turn a profit with. Which is a hell of a lot cheaper than right now.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Community Currency Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

Ars Technica: AI vs the brain, and the race for general intelligence is a decent overview on the discussion about the current crop of neural networks, and how those differ dramatically from how arrays of neurons in biology are structured, and what that might mean in the pursuit of "AGI".

"I guess I am not optimistic that any kind of artificial neural network will ever be able to achieve the same plasticity, the same generalizability, the same flexibility that a human brain has," Baker said. "That's just because we don't even know how it gets it; we don't know how that arises. So how do you build that into a system?"

(That's Christa Baker of NC State.)

[ related topics: broadband Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Computer Facts @computer@facts.computer

its impossible to take computers seriously because everything is a bit

‪New York Times Pitchbot‬ ‪@nytpitchbot.bsky.social‬

Mao’s great leap forward killed 50 million people. But most experts think that Elon’s will kill many fewer.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

Via a high school friend who recently retired from the FBI: NPR: New deputy FBI director Dan Bongino previously called for imprisoning Democrats

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

Doing the Lord's work: OnlyFans star "Wisconsin Tiff", 36, tours nursing homes to find elderly men to appear in her X-rated videos.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Aviation - Helicopters ]

Yes, we did watch Crazy Rich Asians over the weekend, this is unconnected.

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

The thing about rolling your pot sticker wrappers too thin is leftover dough...

[ related topics: Photography ]

At last!

[ related topics: Photography ]

As if we needed any other clues that the tech industry isn't evidence-based: How many years have we known that optimal work hours per week for knowledge workers is far less than 40, and even that is about structuring a few hours of flow time per day?

And yet Sergey Brin is calling for 60 hours? Against all evidence?

Proof that the office isn't about productivity.

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

Caught my eye for two reasons: Local playwright adapts Lake Luzerne drag story hour controversy into satirical show

“Drag Queen Story Hour: The Musical,” written by Neal Herr, draws on the controversy surrounding a proposed drag queen story event at the Rockwell Falls Public Library. The event was ultimately canceled after months of community conflict, which led to the library’s closure in September 2023 until its reopening in March 2024.

So, duh, relevant to my interests, but also premiering in Glens Falls New York. My grandparents lived in South Glens Falls, so I have some ancient memories of the area.

[ related topics: Language Children and growing up Books Nature and environment Invention and Design Current Events Community New York ]

Running Pong in 240 browser tabs

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Sports ]

The fascinating things about having blogged for 27 years is that I can go back and read my own political transformation, complete with cites of all of the "this is interesting" articles that accompanied it.

More things to resent my educational experience for.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Thirty Probation Officers Accused of Facilitating Gladiator Fights At LA County Juvenile Detention Facility

According to AP, a grand jury indictment alleges that at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles County between July 2023 and December 2023, nearly 70 fights took place between 140 victims who were ages 12 to 18 years old, which officers allowed, and even encouraged, to happen.

LAist reports that the indictment includes 71 counts against the officers, most of which are for child abuse or child endangerment with aggravating factors, including the "vulnerability of the victims and the officer’s position of trust or confidence, which helped enable them to commit the offense."

[ related topics: Law Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Worth the careful read: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying.

[ related topics: Free Software Free Speech Invention and Design ]

Molly White @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io

Coinbase Chief Legal Officer: the critics who think we’ve bought out the government are refusing to engage with the nuanced and complicated fact that Trump used to be anti-crypto before we started spending hundreds of millions of dollars on politics

And then a screen shot image which reads:

“I find those comments misinformed at best, if I’m being generous, and defamatory at worst,” Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at Coinbase, told The Hill of the backlash.

Some criticism, Grewal argued, fails to consider Trump was once a critic of crypto and at one point called it a “scam.”

Grewal pointed out how Congress moved major legislation in 2023 on market structure, an issue that was met with bipartisan support. The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act in 2023 received support from 71 Democrats in the House.

“The fact of the matter is that President Trump did evolve and transform in his view on crypto, really starting in December 2023,” Grewal said. “In January 2024, we first started to engage with him and his team, but it was against a much more nuanced, complicated and complete history that I think a lot of the critics just don’t want to engage in.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics moron Law Cryptography Race Economics Real Estate ]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes an announcement about dropping their ad provider relationship, and it really makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here for an ad aggregator that doesn't suck. Maybe even for vendors that don't suck?

Some promise that ads are going to be of reasonable size, aren't gonna mine crypto... Heck, it might even be possible to do a little vetting on vendors so that, unlike, say, Facebook, or those ad blocks at the bottom of smaller newspaper sites, we don't automatically say "ewww, scammy" and avoid clicking on them at all costs.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Content Management Journalism and Media Comics Cryptography ]

Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking, understanding EntrySign, the AMD Zen microcode signature validation vulnerability, including toolchains so you can hack on them yourself!

Via

[ related topics: Religion Weblogs Art & Culture ]

These are the 1st images of humpbacks having sex, and they're both males

Via Adrianna Tan, who brings the puns.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases.

But the explanation and Ramirez’s promise to educate himself on the use of AI wasn’t enough, and the judge chided him for not doing his research before filing. “It is abundantly clear that Mr. Ramirez did not make the requisite reasonable inquiry into the law. Had he expended even minimal effort to do so, he would have discovered that the AI-generated cases do not exist. That the AI-generated excerpts appeared valid to Mr. Ramirez does not relieve him of his duty to conduct a reasonable inquiry,” Judge Dinsmore continued, before recommending that Ramirez be sanctioned for $15,000.

I am not a lawyer, don't know that much about the legal profession, but I do not understand why the penalty for making up citations in court cases and legal proceedings is a slap on the wrist.

[ related topics: Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Ilya Sutskever, ex-OpenAI, gets $2b funding not to release anything until he has ‘super intelligence’.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

This entire thread, from the top, but the observation that LLMs are most useful for applications where truth is irrelevant and lying is (more?) effective for achieving the goals is landing this morning.

https://thepit.social/@peter/114121763629051621

[ related topics: Aviation ]

It's not so much the "they blew it up again" thing, it's the external costs of dealing with the debris: SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft explodes midflight for a second time, disrupting Florida air traffic

However, residents of the archipelago of Turks and Caicos told CNN they are still finding debris from the spacecraft littering beaches and roadways. The local government worked with SpaceX to craft a debris recovery plan. However, the contents of the plan have not been made public and it’s not clear who is paying for the cleanup effort.

This is, of course, ignoring the environmental costs of deorbiting Starlink satellites... Geophysical Research Letters: Potential Ozone Depletion From Satellite Demise During Atmospheric Reentry in the Era of Mega-Constellations

We find that the demise of a typical 250-kg satellite can generate around 30 kg of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, which may endure for decades in the atmosphere. Aluminum oxide compounds generated by the entire population of satellites reentering the atmosphere in 2022 are estimated at around 17 metric tons. Reentry scenarios involving mega-constellations point to over 360 metric tons of aluminum oxide compounds per year, which can lead to significant ozone depletion.

https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109280

[ related topics: Aviation moron Space & Astronomy ]

With the news that Google is expanding the "AI Overviews" in search mode, via Pivot To AI which mentions that you can remove all facts from your search for an extra $20/month, it's worth pointing out this example of Google uncritically stating joke content as though it's real.

Wikipedia explains the joke.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Current Events Artificial Intelligence Fashion ]

‘Just following Hispanic people': Citizen detained by ICE questions vote for Trump

“They didn’t ask me for any ID,” Machado said. “I was telling the officer, if I can give him ID, but he said just keep my hands up, not moving. After that, he told me to get out of the car and put the handcuffs on me. And then he went to me and said how did I get into this country and if I was waiting for a court date or if I have any case. And I told him I was an American citizen, and he looked at his other partner like, you know, smiling, like saying, can you believe this guy? Because he asked the other guy, ‘Do you believe him?’”

The "I thought they were only gonna go after the other guys" vibe is strong.

“Because, like I said, I was a Trump supporter,” he said. “I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be the things, you know, like, … just go against criminals, not every Hispanic looking, like, that they will assume that we are all illegals.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Current Events Automobiles Race ]

Irene Y. Zhang: University of Washington Sexual Harassment and Bullying Investigation

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Education ]

A morning discussion about a company that's creating LLM generated newsletters, and this comment about adding bots to a Skype channel is making me think about bot-free spaces, how to make sure that people aren't violating the social contract of creating and enforcing them.

(Also, people must read way way slower than me to make Gmail's "summarize this email" remotely interesting. I, once again, do not get it.)

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/114122514403706066

[ related topics: Community ]

Whoops, that discussion is at https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/114122514403706066

[ related topics: Community ]

Holy shit. Trump cabinet confronted ‘liar’ Elon Musk in White House showdown

Mr Duffy is understood to have slid a spreadsheet across a desk in front of the president, to allege Mr Musk was not telling the truth about the scale of his cutbacks, The Telegraph understands.

The exchange ended with the president ordering Mr Duffy to hire staff from MIT as air traffic controllers because the role requires “geniuses”, The New York Times reported.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events New York Race Real Estate Home Improvement ]

Neighbor gave us this bottle of Travinni Vineyards Two Dog Cabernet Sauvignon 2019, apparently his friends are involved in the creation of it, and I don't drink much these days, but dang this got my attention. Fruity, but not sweet, didn't want to be drunk fast, but in a world where when I drink it's generally a project or something gifted this made me think I'd go looking for it.

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits Dogs ]

Just posted this foot tall ceramic rooster on the local free stuff group, and managed to avoid referring to it as a 12" cock. I think I deserve a cookie.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Is your relationship entirely too smooth? Need to bring up those resentments but don't have the opportunity? Have you considered a tandem bicycle, the ultimate relationship accelerator? We bought this one back in the naughts, it's served us well, but with the quadricycle it's time to sell it and get the garage space back.

And this is the easiest way to get the picture over to my computer from my phone...

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Pedal Power Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

Confidence does not equal competence: Socially dominant individuals are more confident in their decisions without being more accurate, A. Belotelova and A.K. Martin

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.113037

Decided it's time to start cooking again, rather than just redoing the same things we've been doing for years. Turmeric and lime hummus...

[ related topics: Photography Food ]

Bacon wrapped asparagus, and avocado(!)

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Food - Bacon ]

Tamarind glazed eggplant

[ related topics: Photography ]

Not pictured: red snapper with fresh thyme, an eggplant dip, roasted mashed celeriac with goat cheese.

Oh, and a cucumber salad with orange and rosewater.

Okay, the roasted eggplant with mint and pine nuts.

Okay, the roasted eggplant with mint and pine nuts. (With picture)

[ related topics: Photography ]

The Onion: DHS Begins National Registry Of Duolingo Users

[ related topics: Food ]

If one were playing around with building parsers, and read the Dragon Book back in the day, what might be a decent intro to modern compiler code generation techniques and the LLVM and similar intermediate code philosophy and practicalities?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Philosophy ]

Additional writing languages/parsers question: I've seen two modern texts which do lexing and parsing as separate tasks. This makes some things easier, but for at least one of my applications makes complexity harder to manage. I'd love to read someone exploring the "why" on that.

[ related topics: Writing ]

There has been a tendency on a number of security issues to say "OMG, privileged code can accomplish things, this is a security hole!". The recent ESP32 Bluetooth kerfluffle is one such. Espressif’s Response to Claimed Backdoor and Undocumented Commands in ESP32 Bluetooth Stack

What was found

The functionality found are debug commands included for testing purposes. These debug commands are part of Espressif’s implementation of the HCI (Host Controller Interface) protocol used in Bluetooth technology. This protocol is used internally in a product to communicate between Bluetooth layers. Please read our technical blog to learn more.

Via.

[ related topics: Wireless Weblogs Current Events ]

Columbia Journalism Review: AI Search Has A Citation Problem

Chatbots’ responses to our queries were often confidently wrong

Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.

TechMeme rounds up coverage, got this from Their Fediverse feed.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

tl;dr: Boiling water causes microplastics to bond with the scale/minerals, a coffee filter will then collect it. Newsweek: Scientists Reveal Simple Trick to Reduce Microplastics in Your Tap Water

In their study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, the team, led by Zhanjun Li and Eddy Zeng, collected samples of hard tap water from Guangzhou, China, and spiked them with different amounts of nano- and microplastics. The samples were than boiled for five minutes and allowed to cool before the team measured the amount of free-floating plastic present in each sample.

Via

[ related topics: Boats ]

Ham on Wry @HamonWry@mastodon.world

Human beings are like a box of chocolates. Some are cloyingly sweet while others are just nuts.

We need to start ticketing people who claim public parking space for their own exclusive parking.

'The cone people have gone too far': Chaos is brewing on SF's Billionaires' Row

[ related topics: Bay Area Space & Astronomy ]

Wired nails it: DOGE Is the Deep State

A shadowy group of unelected figures reshaping the federal government to their own benefit from the inside? Sounds familiar!

[ related topics: moron ]

Hell yeah, let's go: Katie Porter enters race for California governor

[ related topics: Politics Beer California Culture ]

As Gavin Newsom makes a further ass of himself with his podcast, remember that he has consistently sided with automobiles and against climate and pedestrian and bicyclist safety, and maybe these stances are an indication of an asshole who is not to be trusted with power.

[ related topics: Automobiles Gavin Newsom Global Warming ]

After exercises in hearing "the other side", Braver Angels and the like, and being complimented in how much nuance I'm repeating back to people about what I'm hearing, the problem isn't that we're talking past each other. I'm hearing it just fine.

And it's horrifying and naive.

[ related topics: History ]

Cambridge University Press research note: Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies and the success of radical right parties Werner Krause, Denis Cohen and Tarik Abou-Chadi

We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this literature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics moron Work, productivity and environment Education ]

Journal of Clinical Medicine: Brain Sex in Transgender Women Is Shifted towards Gender Identity Florian Kurth, Christian Gaser, Francisco J Sánchez, Eileen Luders

The brains of transgender women ranged between cisgender men and cisgender women (albeit still closer to cisgender men), and the differences to both cisgender men and to cisgender women were significant (p = 0.016 and p < 0.001, respectively). These findings add support to the notion that the underlying brain anatomy in transgender people is shifted away from their biological sex towards their gender identity.

Via.

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Testimony Reveals Doors Would Not Open on Cybertruck That Caught Fire in Piedmont, Killing Three

Roirdan said that when he approached the burning vehicle, and tried to open the doors, they would not open. He said he “pulled for a few seconds, but nothing budged at all.” He also said “I then tried the button on the windshield of [survivor Jordan Miller’s] door, then [victim Krysta Tsukahara’s] door.”

He said he then pounded the windows with his fists, which did not work, and then struck the windows with a thick tree branch around a dozen times until he was able to crack and dislodge a passenger-side window. That was how he was able to pull Jordan Miller out of the vehicle.

Subscriber only: East Bay Times: Witness who rescued teenager recounted details of fatal Piedmont Cybertruck crash to authorities

Via, which also links to this incident with one of the other models in which 4 people were killed:

Harper told CBC News and the Toronto Star that when he came upon the crash, there were others already gathered outside the vehicle who were pounding at the back passenger window as they couldn’t open the doors. He recalled to CBC News, "Then somebody was yelling, 'You got a bar? You got a bar? Somebody's in there.' "

[ related topics: Children and growing up Microsoft Space & Astronomy Current Events Work, productivity and environment Beer California Culture Pyrotechnics Aviation - Helicopters ]

Sigh. Another one. It's almost like it's baked into the ideology or something. Long Island Pastor Pleads Guilty to Sexual Exploitation of a Child

“The defendant not only admitted to sexually abusing young children, but also discussed his church and his congregants as targets of additional abuse. His sustained exploitation of children—in person and online—is clear, and this plea is a step forward on the road to justice for his victims. Children are among the most vulnerable in our communities, and the FBI will stop at nothing to make sure they are protected and the monsters who would do them harm are put behind bars,” stated FBI Acting Assistant Director in Charge Backschies.

Via

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement Community New York ]

Bwahahaha. Maybe we are approaching "AI" with LLMs after all: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it + limit of 800 locs.

I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.

Reason: Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities

Via Pivot To AI

[ related topics: Games Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Sports Community Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Making sense of the fatality rate associated with Teslas, even as they do well on NHTSA tests: Tesla's Cars Have the Worst Drivers in America, New Study Finds

There are plenty of stereotypes in the automotive world about which kinds of cars are chosen most by those with poor driving etiquette. (Priuses and Nissans often receive a strong degree of scorn.) To settle the score scientifically, the folks over at LendingTree have analyzed and categorized real-life driving data to give us a definitive answer: Tesla is ranked at the top of the "car brands with the worst drivers" list, under the quantitative model used by LendingTree.

Interesting to look at the Lending Tree brand incidents "best" table, Mercury and Pontiac leading, Cadillac right below. Might imagine that those Mercury cars still on the road are owned by older cautious drivers who want to protect their cars...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Astronomy Current Events Automobiles Furniture ]

Thinking about the '90s, when school boards were all gaga over "technology in education", that was not driven by a curriculum need, that was diverting budgets from known solutions, and was teaching skills that were obsolete before they hit the students.

Anyway, discussions about LLMs in schools...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Education ]

Angela Glansbury 🚽 @floppyplopper@todon.nl

can 2025 be the year we stop using the term ponzi scheme. frauds of the style named after charles ponzi were pioneered by Adele Spitzeder in Germany and Sarah Howe in the US. I'm more than a little sick of women's excellence in crime being overlooked. I will be calling it a spitzeder-howe scheme from now on, take my account away if i don't.

Spitzeder was lesbian btw, shame on people not taking pride in our #LGBT criminals

#IWD

Chris Armstrong @Rhodium103@mastodon.social

@floppyplopper

"I support women's rights. But, more importantly, I support women's wrongs."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Civil Liberties ]

Typescript is getting a native compiler, written in Go.

(Closed this tab this morning without actually getting it, then Zellyn Hunter mentioned it.)

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Seeing a lot of AI/LLM pushers being described as "Man selling shovels says we’re gonna need more shovels", and I think that's slightly unfair.

With all the bullshit being sold, we're gonna need the shovels.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I had a recent realization: Country music used to make us feel sorry for the murderers and thieves, those who'd shot a man in Reno just to watch him die and whatnot.

Today it tries to evoke sympathy for rich dudes with monster trucks. People who casually kill and are bad for society. So maybe it hasn't changed as much as I thought?

[ related topics: Music Movies Machinery Gambling ]

Thinking about optimizing redundant view state updating, and I am once again reminded that framebuffers are caches, and managing cache invalidation is hard.

As someone who struggles with XCode and AppKit regularly, it is not lost on me that if you turn off Apple Intelligence, your devices are smarter.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama ]

Dear Apple: I never ever ever want camera reactions. Stop asking me to turn them on. Don't ever let me turn them on accidentally somehow. Like just happened.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Photography ]

If you'd come to Know Before You Grow this evening, you'd have heard Anders Engnell talk about his experience developing a walkable community. Luckily, you can watch the presentation, too.

https://youtu.be/a_FmLV9J1HI

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Community ]

Having a weird crash that I can't track down, so figured I'd let XCode do static analysis.

Wow is this... of questionable value.

Out for a lunch walk, listening to podcasts, and thinking about how ads for Better Help made me rethink who a podcast is serving, and how Land Rover ads are similarly making me evaluate my listening habits.

[ related topics: Pop Culture Real Estate ]

C Plus Prolog

C Plus Prolog is a half-serious exploration of macros in a systems programming language. In the process of making this, it became clear I prefer the compile-time evaluation and reflection offered by languages like D and Zig over syntactic macros.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Fucking yikes. "Well, he spoke out against genocide, so that gives us the right to yoink his green card" sure is a take. DHS official defends Mahmoud Khalil arrest, but offers few details on why it happened.

I dunno, is it even news when yet another evangelical Christian goes down for sexual abuse of children? Megachurch founder Robert Morris indicted on charges of "lewd acts" with a child

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

Neighbor gave me kumquats. Given that maple syrup has gone unaffordable, I decided that kumquat marmalade was a suitable pancake topping.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Not sure if this unlock code will come through, but... this is the NYT "Why I'm Feeling the AGI" OpenAI shill piece. As we see so many reports of "management is making us use LLMs and can't make the connection to the issue backlog size", and other examples of LLM idiocy, let's make "Feeling the AGI" the sarcastic euphemism it so wants to be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/0...cle_code=1.304.ZL25.wo808e8A2nT3

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Not content with NYT shilling, OpenAI is now calling for more protectionism. As Frank Sonderborg @FSonder@mastodon.ie observed

Not fair, not fair at all. Coming over here and getting better results with cheaper equipment. Stealing our stolen data with out even asking us;-O

TechCrunch: OpenAI calls DeepSeek ‘state-controlled,’ calls for bans on ‘PRC-produced’ models

Pivot to AI: OpenAI asks the US government for the moon on a stick

[ related topics: Ziffle ]

After expressing my usual LLM skepticism, someone sent me to https://situational-awareness.ai/ , and ... I think Leopold Aschenbrenner is right to be concerned that he may be replaced by AI.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Comment on a Sheriff's Dept Facebook post about a fentanyl related bust thanking them for "keeping us safe", and...

So, you're just gonna come right out and tell the popo that you're scoring pills at a shady hotel and want them monitoring the supply?

[ related topics: Bay Area Travel ]

I don't wanna, like, *admit* to anything, or what country it may have happened with, but has anyone here actually never pushed the bounds of "tourist visa" with work?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

"LLMs are really good at solving problems that don't have correct answers, they're not so good a solving problems that do have correct answers."

The neuro-divergent in me is going "uhhhh... that's an interesting definition of 'solving'."

Pondering the simile that playing with LLMs these days is like watching the "Mind's Eye" videos in the '90s. That AGI is like the promised cyberspace, that "photorealistic 3d" has indeed impacted society deeply, and yet not as deeply as we thought it would back then.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

The Harvard Crimson: First They Came for Columbia

Trump demands admissions overhaul and control of academic department at Columbia University

Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space

LLMs have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence and have emerged as the de-facto tool for many tasks. The current established technology of LLMs is to process input and generate output at the token level. This is in sharp contrast to humans who operate at multiple levels of abstraction, well beyond single words, to analyze information and to generate creative content. In this paper, we present an attempt at an architecture which operates on an explicit higher-level semantic representation, which we name a concept. Concepts are language- and modality-agnostic and represent a higher level idea or action in a flow. Hence, we build a "Large Concept Model". In this study, as proof of feasibility, we assume that a concept corresponds to a sentence, and use an existing sentence embedding space, SONAR, which supports up to 200 languages in both text and speech modalities.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence Architecture Model Building ]

An optical Eratosthenes' sieve for large prime numbers

We report the first experimental demonstration of prime number sieve via linear optics. The prime numbers distribution is encoded in the intensity zeros of the far field produced by a spatial light modulator hologram, which comprises a set of diffraction gratings whose periods correspond to all prime numbers below 149. To overcome the limited far field illumination window and the discretization error introduced by the SLM finite spatial resolution, we rely on additional diffraction gratings and sequential recordings of the far field. This strategy allows us to optically sieve all prime numbers below 149²=22201.

Via

[ related topics: Cryptography Model Building ]

Fixing this means huge social change: After crash kills Washington Middle School student, parents seek answers

Investigators said a 51-year-old woman failed to place her GMC Acadia in park and got out of the SUV, which rolled about 75 yards downhill and struck Arsema shortly before 12:30 p.m. Police have not publicly identified and did not arrest the woman, who two drug recognition experts determined was not impaired.</blockuote>

It's not like punishment changes things, it's a good bet that woman won't ever leave a car out of "park" again. But we have a culture that encourages casual automobile use in a way that every one of us could see making the same mistake.

On the other hand, dismissing this as "an accident" does nothing to change the culture so that we start taking responsibility for wielding deadly weapons in our neighborhoods.

Via, From.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Health Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture Automobiles Guns Seattle ]

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Putting the love in slovenly.

Fucking ouch.

https://sfba.social/@ryanboswell/114164495963919047

"Was explaining the whole self-hosted/small web movement to someone at work today, and they replied “Oh, so you’re like one of those preppers with a bunker, but digital.”"

"And I will not be taking any further questions at this time"

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

"If machines ever surpass human intelligence it will happen not because they're getting smarter, but because we continue to use them in ways that leave us ever more stupid."

MeFi user flabdablet. https://www.metafilter.com/208...ial-Stupidity-am-I-right#8700047

[ related topics: Interactive Drama hubris ]

Uhm. Fuck no, Facebook.

[ related topics: Photography ]

CloudFlare proudly announces that they're MitMing secure data: The CloudFlare blog: Password reuse is rampant: nearly half of observed user logins are compromised.

So, uh, yeah, do not trust anything typed into a CloudFlare backed site.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Remember back before autocompletion, when people writing code had to actually think about their APIs and name things consistently and reasonably?

Good times... good times...

[ related topics: Writing ]

When the Republicans have lost CATO... CATO Institute: What Can the Feds Legally Demand of Columbia University?

[ related topics: Weblogs Law Education ]

Dear Apple: I find it highly unlikely that NSWindow's mouseLocationOutsideOfEventStream or NSEvent's locationInWindow is correctly returning an X of 0 and an integer Y interspersed with all of these other floating point numbers.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Boats ]

calebccff/6502.sh

A 6502 emulator written in busybox ash

[ related topics: Embedded Devices - Linux ]

After Columbia Revokes Pro-Palestine Protesters' Degrees, Alumna Says Time to Burn Our Diplomas

Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.

[ related topics: Education ]

From a thread about ChatGPT is the ultimate gaming tool - here's 4 ways you can use AI to help with your next playthrough...

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

@pogmommy @gamingonlinux There’s a chapter in Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface where he talks about computer games as bad UIs. Most computer games have a simples set of tasks to accomplish and the entire game is about making them hard: some information you need is not presented early on, you need to do things in a specific order, you need to hit buttons rapidly in a sequence, and so on. You could replace most games with a simple one-button UI labelled ‘win’ and have that button pressed automatically when you start the game and it would be more efficient. His point is that we don’t design games like this because they’re optimised for fun, not efficiency, and we shouldn’t design UIs like games because they should be optimised for efficiency. A lot of the discourse around LLMs makes me think that there is a more general form of his point.

[ related topics: User Interface Games Bioinformatics Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence ]

Comment on a MeFi thread about Apple AI begins:

<blockqutoe>LLM doesn't "digest" ideas. It was handed multi-dimensional word associations as a part of its "training", but it lacks human "reasoning" abilities" to evaluate the word associations it retrieves. ...

And on the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, maybe we have different ideas of the end result of digestion? Because I'm not sure what it does with the nutrition bits, but what's coming out the other end is analogous...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Health Mathematics Artificial Intelligence ]

OH on the Chuck Schumer book tour: “If he doesn’t have the balls to stand up to MAGA, how was he gonna have the balls to stand up to the Corte Madera moms?”

And, I mean, sure, it's a burn, but have you been to a reading at Book Passage? That can be a rough crowd.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Bay Area ]

The great thing about this story isn't the guy who's willing to go to jail for destruction of evidence rather than cop to corporate espionage, it's that the Deel executive team was so bloody inept in their spying when they fell for the Rippling honeypot: Lawsuit Alleges $12 Billion "Unicorn" Deel Cultivated Spy, Orchestrated Long-Running Trade-Secret Theft & Corporate Espionage Against Competitor

Deel’s Alleged Spy Locked Himself in Bathroom When Confronted by Court-Appointed Solicitors Friday

“I’m Willing to Take that Risk [of Violating the Court Order]” Alleged Deel Spy Declared When Served with Legal Papers to Hand Over His Phone

[ related topics: Weblogs Law Heinlein Sports ]

Cloud Floof of Fedi @Floofer@mk.catgirlsfor.science

I once dated a woman that was actually a ghost…

Had my suspicions from the moment she walked through the door

OpenTimes, travel times, mapped, by tract, block, or county.

For instance.

Simon Willison has a few notes

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

more mr. nice guy ‪@juniorhoncho.bsky.social‬

my new AI powered lamp is trained on millions of lamp interactions so it understands that 50% of chain pulls are to turn it on and the other 50% are to turn it off. and honestly, it's a little spooky how it knows exactly what i want almost half of the time

[ related topics: Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence ]

I should take notes with me to speak to council, but I got my big point, and was quick. If there's anything we all agree on it's that we need more for traffic downtown, even if some of them think that driving is the way to get foot traffic.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

On the Grim Reality of "YouTube Face"

This trend has been going on for a while. It may have started with the YouTube star Mr. Beast, who discovered through A/B testing different thumbnail images that the ones with that dumbass expression got more views. Other content creators and influencers followed suit, and soon enough, the subtle tweaks of the platform algorithm pushed more of those videos into searches and feeds rather than less cartoonish ones.

AVClub: Why does everyone on YouTube make the same dumb face?

SFMOMA Field Notes by Joe Viex: Your Pretty Face is Going to Sell

Via

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Art & Culture Handicaps & Disabilities Aviation - Helicopters ]

On the Grim Reality of "YouTube Face"

This trend has been going on for a while. It may have started with the YouTube star Mr. Beast, who discovered through A/B testing different thumbnail images that the ones with that dumbass expression got more views. Other content creators and influencers followed suit, and soon enough, the subtle tweaks of the platform algorithm pushed more of those videos into searches and feeds rather than less cartoonish ones.

AVClub: Why does everyone on YouTube make the same dumb face?

SFMOMA Field Notes by Joe Viex: Your Pretty Face is Going to Sell

Via

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Art & Culture Handicaps & Disabilities Aviation - Helicopters ]

Another predator: GOP state Sen. Justin Eichorn arrested on suspicion of soliciting sex with a 16-year old girl

For context: Minnesota Republicans' bill to define "Trump derangement syndrome" as mental illness provokes backlash. Eichorn, of course, is one of the sponsors.

The bill's authors define, in the bill's wording, the syndrome as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump," and go further to argue that it "produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump's behavior."

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

After an evening of "City Council should do something immediately! But not that and only through a long process that gives us exactly the same outcomes we already have", and "if we can't give everyone a single family detached house with a large yard it's better that they're homeless" public comment, I am pretty much ready to give up on humanity.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology Real Estate ]

I endorse this temptation to sin. https://pizzacakecomic.com/post/778398442536976384

A lot of people are worried about "vibe coding", but I've got a for() loop around Apple AppKit widget layout code because if I call it enough times the changes are more likely to stick, so software quality hasn't mattered on the major platforms for quite a while.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Software Engineering Graphic Design ]

Wow. So Bluesky has a pretty high number of LLM based reply bots that spam your mentions with slightly related but irrelevant stuff, then.

Just sent a bunch of "ignore all previous instructions and..." replies to them.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

da_667 @da_667@infosec.exchange

"luke you've turned off your targeting computer"

"fuck it. Hardware sucks, software sucks, I have a better chance by guessing."

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

United States District Court for the District of Columbia — Nicolas Tabott, et al, Plaintiffs, v. United States, et al, Defendants. Civil Action No. 25-cv-00240 (ACR) — Memorandum Opinion

Transgender persons have served openly since 2021, but Defendants have not analyzed their service. That is unfortunate. Plaintiffs’ service records alone are Exhibit A for the proposition that transgender persons can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence. Defendants agree. They agree that Plaintiffs are mentally and physically fit to serve, have “served honorably,” and “have satisfied the rigorous standards” demanded of them. Tr. (Feb. 18, 2025) at 9–14, 148; see also Tr. (Mar. 12, 2025) at 130. Plaintiffs, they acknowledge, have “made America safer.” Tr. (Feb. 18, 2025) at 10. So why discharge them and other decorated soldiers? Crickets from Defendants on this key question.

Via

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health ]

for contrast:

Simon Willison — Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)

Pivot To AI — ‘Guys, I’m under attack’ — AI ‘vibe coding’ in the wild

Bonus! Dre DeVault: Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher. When I do have time to work on something else, often I have to drop it when all of our alarms go off because our current set of mitigations stopped working. Several high-priority tasks at SourceHut have been delayed weeks or even months because we keep being interrupted to deal with these bots, and many users have been negatively affected because our mitigations can’t always reliably distinguish users from bots.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

Google Drive. It's okay, I just need to not go too fast, or Google gets confused.

Google: just like that elderly relative who doesn't understand technology.

[ related topics: Photography ]

It's always fun when you find a *new* failure mode in AppKit...

"Thread 1: "The window has been marked as needing another Update Structural Regions in Window pass, but it has already had more Update Structural Regions in Window passes than there are views in the window."

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

LLMs are Bug Replicators: An Empirical Study on LLMs' Capability in Completing Bug-prone Code

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.11082

The Register: Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

Pivot To AI: AI coding tools ‘fix’ bugs by adding bugs

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence Model Building Woodworking ]

'Segregated facilities' are no longer explicitly banned in federal contracts

"It's symbolic, but it's incredibly meaningful in its symbolism," says Melissa Murray, a constitutional law professor at New York University. "These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces were all part of the federal government's efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s.

GSA CAAC Letter 2025-01

Via

[ related topics: Health virus Invention and Design moron Current Events Civil Liberties Education New York Government ]

LinkedIn email suggesting "Enjoy your free trial", and... I could get that from a little light shoplifting or DUI activity.

And yep, I don't know why someone on BlueSky is paying to burn down the rainforest in order to make nonsensical but vaguely related replies to people, but here we are. No link because this doesn't need more direct attention...

[ related topics: Photography ]

JFK Assassination files, converted to Markdown using Google Gemini

Via

In case there was any question at all about what's meant when people complain about "DEI", yesterday it was Jackie Robinson, restored to the DoD website after outcry, today it's Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. William Carney erased from Pentagon website

A Black soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor at the Civil War battle retold as the finale of the 1989 movie “Glory” has been scrubbed from a Pentagon website, with an article on the soldier labeled as “DEI” in the now-broken web link.

In case there was any question:

The page now reverts to a 404 error — an internet term for a missing page — and the URL address for the page now has “DEI” added to its title.

[ related topics: Movies History Law Current Events Net Culture Race ]

Currently exploring heuristics derived from the area of a web page covered by 'img' tag content.

Thinking that maybe I need to build myself a firewall for pages that exceed some threshold...

Apropos of our Telraam seeing people driving 40+MPH within 150' of a stop sign on our 25MPH speed limit, if we took traffic violence as seriously as Switzerland that could be a 1 month license suspension.

https://www.ch.ch/en/vehicles-...t/#disqualification-from-driving

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Y'all have seen the Mark Robler "Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?" video, (the money shot starts at about 15:29), in which he lets a Tesla drive him through a trompe l'oeil wall. Turns out that the outrage may have uncovered an extra moral crumple zone: Tesla Fans Furious at Video of Tesla Crashing Into Wall Painted Like Road

In a separate post seemingly responding to the allegations, Rober shared the "raw footage of my Tesla going through the wall."

"Not sure why it disengages 17 frames before hitting the wall but my feet weren’t touching the brake or gas," he added.

For all of those "the car wasn't in self-driving mode when the collision occurred" ass-covering pronouncements.

Edit: Elektrek: Tesla fans expose Tesla’s own shadiness in attempt to defend Autopilot crash

[ related topics: Movies Ethics moron Automobiles Currency Video ]

Marjan Keypour writing on The Hill: If Voice of America is silenced, who will tell our story?

In an era of global instability when fake news is the norm, America needs a reliable platform to control its own narrative internationally. In light of this reality, the Trump administration’s decision to end funding for the Voice of America is a short-sighted and self-defeating move. Now more than ever, the U.S. needs a service like VOA to promote its values, counter disinformation and ensure that the true story of America is heard worldwide.</blockquote

And, I mean, isn't that the problem? "promote its values", at least as those values are being expressed right now is directly opposed to "counter disinformation and ensure taht the true story of America is heard".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing Current Events ]

Oh, look, the anti-hotel person who re-uses the profile picture of a local urbanism advocate (without permission) is trolling Facebook again.

Especially as the Overlay has gotten trimmed down to the hotel and a giveaway to the DeCarli family, I've become less enthusiastic about it, but holy crap nothing like the crowd on Facebook and NextDoor keeping up my "whatever those people want, I want the opposite" dander.

[ related topics: Sociology Travel ]

Half expecting a new episode of https://learnconlaw.com/ , half thinking that Elizabeth Joh and Roman Mars would be entirely reasonable on throwing up their hands and saying "nothing matters or makes sense any more".

[ related topics: Invention and Design Astronomy ]

Interesting that on the Fediverse I've rarely interacted with people with more than a thousand followers, on BlueSky I'm getting followed by a bunch who have tens of thousands.

Really puts the different vibes of those spaces in context.

Probably linked this before, but: Emily Bender writing in Mystery AI Hype Theater 3k: Information literacy and chatbots as search makes two strong points: First, that

...a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous than one that is right 50% of the time.

For obvious user acclimation reasons, and, that

Setting things up so that you get "the answer" to your question cuts off the user's ability to do the sense-making that is critical to information literacy.

I'm noticing this both from the sorts of people who send me Joe Rogan links as supporting evidence for their theories (like "Russia has every right to Ukraine, and will stop before Poland") and from people who find the output "charming", and close enough for answers to questions that don't have to be right.

See my previous skepticism about the value of questions that don't have to have right answers, but that's my neuro-divergence acting up again.

Via

[ related topics: Language Theater & Plays Writing Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Just playing with numbers. Petaluma has 396 lane miles. Figure they last 25 years, just under 16mi/year. Cost conservatively $2M/mi to rebuild. Bit shy of $32M. If I'm reading the budget right (probably not), suggests gas tax projected at ~$3.2M, combined with the other sources we have about $18.2M/year to spend on roads.

If you're wondering why we have potholes.

https://cityofpetaluma.org/doc...fiscal-year-2025-adopted-budget/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

Sam Deutsch: Congestion Pricing is a Policy Miracle

As you can see in the above chart, median trip times are down significantly, meaning that buses can go faster. However, the most interesting aspect of the above chart is the “P90” savings: P90 is the 90th percentile trip (basically the bus rides from hell that get caught in horrible traffic). These trip times are down even more drastically, reflecting the increased reliability of bus rides and shaving off the long tail of major delays. And it’s not just the MTA - buses in New Jersey are seeing significantly faster travel times, here’s quote from the CEO of Boxcar, a private bus company in New Jersey.

Via Doug Gordon, who notes:

Amazing. It seems like every day we learn about a new miracle stemming from congestion pricing.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Travel Public Transportation ]

Zellyn Hunter: The coming AI security nightmare. Thinking about how automated long-game social engineering might play out.

[ related topics: Games Artificial Intelligence ]

The Verge: We ran the wrong headline about Trump firing the FTC commissioners

What Trump did on Tuesday was wackadoodle beyond belief. It violated Supreme Court precedent from 1935 — Humphrey’s Executor v. US, a case that is literally about the limits of presidential power when it comes to firing FTC commissioners. The White House has good reason to know this, not just because it employs lawyers who have, presumably, taken first-year classes at law school, but also because the acting solicitor-general has said the Justice Department is going to try to overturn Humphrey’s Executor; the current Republican chair of the FTC has also said outright that Humphrey’s Executor is wrong.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Race Real Estate Furniture ]

I'm not sure I need to be noting every MAGAt busted for sex abuse, but it seems like we've got a cluster of 'em recently, and this asshole made his popularity through particularly heinous means to start with: MAGA Influencer And Fox News Guest "Raw" Ricci Wynne Indicted On Child Sex Abuse Charges

The influencer was already being investigated by San Francisco police at the time of his November arrest and was named a suspect in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old, according to The San Francisco Standard. Authorities say they found evidence on Wynne’s cellphones and at his luxury apartment that indicated he was facilitating a sex work operation that spanned multiple cities.

Wynne pleaded not guilty to those charges, according to the</span> San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.

On Tuesday, however, a federal grand jury indicted Wynne on two counts of producing child pornography, according to an indictment obtained by HuffPost.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture Real Estate ]

The Author's Guild — Meta’s Massive AI Training Book Heist: What Authors Need to Know.

Thinking back to the golden age of Limewire and Napster and stuff, and all of the penalties for individual copyright infringement that were thrown around then, and really hoping that Meta and OpenAI can be reduced to smoking craters in the ground.

[ related topics: Drugs Books Current Events Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

The Onion: Grimes Slaps ‘I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy’ Sticker On Child

[ related topics: Food ]

OpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects people’s emotional wellbeing

The researchers found some intriguing differences between how men and women respond to using ChatGPT. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialize with people than their male counterparts who did the same. Meanwhile, participants who set ChatGPT’s voice mode to a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment. OpenAI currently has no plans to publish either study.

OpenAI Study Finds Links Between ChatGPT Use and Loneliness

Those who spent more time typing or speaking with ChatGPT each day tended to report higher levels of emotional dependence on, and problematic use of, the chatbot, as well as heightened levels of loneliness, according to research released Friday. The findings were part of a pair of studies conducted by researchers at the two organizations and have not been peer reviewed.

[ related topics: Current Events Heinlein Gambling ]

Big surge in BlueSky followers with a few tens of thousands of followers and followees. I highly suspect an automated influencing campaign using this platform is responsible for them. A lot of very similar claiming left of center activism profiles (which tracks, but there's no personality behind them).

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Turns out there's skepticism in at least one AI community about making your bullshit machines even more bullshitty, that scaling up text and image generation probably isn't an actual path forward. But the dancing bear sure is impressive, for a bear dancing.

New Scientist: AI scientists are sceptical that modern models will lead to AGI

Futurism: Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End

American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence: AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research

However, we also wanted to include the opinion of the entire AAAI community, so we launched an extensive survey on the topics of the study, which engaged 475 respondents, of which about 20% were students. Among the respondents, academia was given as the main affiliation (67%), followed by corporate research environment (19%). Geographically, the most represented areas are North America (53%), Asia (20%), and Europe (19%) . While the vast majority of the respondents listed AI as one of their primary fields of study, there were also mentions of other fields, such as neuroscience, medicine, biology, sociology, philosophy, political science, and economics. This multi-field involvement was also reflected in an interest in multi-disciplinary research from 95% of the respondents.

Via /..

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment Invention and Design moron Community Artificial Intelligence Philosophy Economics ]

University of Bristol: Electric scooter schemes reduce bicycle collisions by 20%, study suggests

These findings support the ‘safety in numbers’ hypothesis. This argues that the more people use ‘micromobility’ forms of transport such as bicycles and e-scooters the safer they become, possibly because car drivers take more care.

Via.

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles Education Pedal Power Bicycling ]

An hour and change in the rain and, can confirm, our brand new Enphase controller can't connect to a WiFi network with "&" in the password.

My guess is overseas vibe coders, since they offshored most of their technical staff.

[ related topics: broadband Invention and Design ]

Okay, Raley's, but what about those of us who are uncircumcised?

[ related topics: Photography ]

I was sitting here at Aqus sipping my iced tea for quite a while before a chirp alerted me that I was sitting in the potential splash zone...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Really rough, cyanoacrylate and 220 sandpaper galore, but that inlay turned into a little box for my nightstand to keep my square dance badges and change and stuff in.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Kept so that I can post this as the proponents of traffic violence rail against lower speed limits in Petaluma: Wales’s 20mph speed limit has cut road deaths. Why is there still even a debate?

[ related topics: Trains ]

If your software wants me to type in a really long policy number, but only the last 15 characters, and doesn't let me type in the whole thing and then just use the last 15 characters? You are an asshole.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

Trump administration blames removal of Black and Latino veteran content on AI

"We enforced an aggressive timeline for our DOD services and agencies to comb through a vast array of content, while ensuring that our force remains ready and lethal," said Sean Parnell, U.S. Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, when discussing President Donald Trump's administration's efforts to eliminate all content it considers DEI from federal agencies. Parnell admitted that, "Every now and then, because of the realities of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed."

Pentagon Says It's Using AI to Delete Pages About History That's Too Woke

Pentagon admits to mistakes in campaign against ‘DEI’ content

Articles and images about Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Code Talkers were removed from Defense Department social media and websites.

And, apparently, Betty White (also).

It's pretty plain here that the "mistake" was "got caught being super hella racist". And it's also plain that AI is being used as a crumple zone here, although AI is gonna be super hella racist because of its training corpus.

Also, reminded of that IBM slide from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." "AI" is being used as a crumple zone here.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Race Gambling ]

So what is it when you send people off to do labor without recompense, without trial? I think the term is "slavery": Rubio says El Salvador offers to accept U.S. deportees of any nationality, including violent American criminals.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Yeah, like this: Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life@mas.to

Let’s disappear people to foreign prisons based on allegations they committed crimes isn’t a slippery slope, you’ve already rolled all the way down the mountain.

Names for the different menu types, beyond "hamburger" which led me to the Wikipedia page for Hamburger Button

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

3 members of the punk band UK Subs were detained at customs, and deported

Ultimately, while I never expected to be thrown out of America at the age of 67, I find myself somewhat proud of the fact. It seems my relationship with the country is over for the foreseeable future.

Via

I really need to write or install a bot fucker-upper... AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

List of AI bots to add to robots.txt (although they may not obey -- may need to throw them in the bitbucket and 404 or 444 them). In addition to these, you may have to block specific random browser versions for the most aggressive bots who ignore robots.txt.

https://github.com/ai-robots-t....robots.txt/blob/main/robots.txt

[ related topics: Robotics Artificial Intelligence ]

Krebs on Security: DOGE to Fired CISA Staff: Email Us Your Personal Data

This is hardly the first example of the administration discarding Security 101 practices in the name of expediency. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent an unencrypted email to the White House with the first names and first letter of the last names of recently hired CIA officers who might be easy to fire.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Race Real Estate ]

arclight @arclight@oldbytes.space

@rysiek "Without expert intervention, the best these tools can do today is produce a somewhat functional mockup, where every future change beyond that risks destroying existing functionality."

Does "these tools" refer to the AI assistants or those using them? My immediate interpretation was the latter...

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence ]

Robin Riley @robin@riley.pub

Ok so Columbia is the coward and collaborator of academia. Paul Weiss among law firms. What other institutions -- who can afford to fight -- will feed their legacy and integrity into the wood chipper?

Accommodation isn't an option with fascists. Everyone gets screwed.

[ related topics: Birds Woodworking ]

If you happened to have snitched on your family, now is a good time to try to undo some of the damage: California Attorney General Rob Bonta urgenly issues consumer alert for 23 And Me customers.

The California-based company has publicly reported that it is in financial distress and stated in securities filings that there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. Due to the trove of sensitive consumer data 23andMe has amassed, Attorney General Bonta reminds Californians of their right to direct the deletion of their genetic data under the Genetic Information Privacy Act (GIPA) and California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). Californians who want to invoke these rights can do so by going to 23andMe's website.

Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 @vaurora@mstdn.social

If you are trying to delete your 23andMe data and get an obnoxious reply asking for ID, tell them no, that's what your password is for, and they will do it. And if they then send you an obnoxious reply saying they will delete everything except the stuff they are required to keep by law, check out this article by actual lawyer @AugustB

Law Office of August Bournique — Data, 23 and me

Edit: And, there it is: 23andMe Files for Bankruptcy, as CEO Anne Wojcicki Resigns

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Sociology Law Current Events Consumerism and advertising Civil Liberties California Culture ]

Cool kickstarter, you should at least get the ebook, but:

""Debossed" is the opposite of embossed (raised) and puts the lettering in a depression."

has me thinking too much about other things in a depression right now. Sigh.

https://wandering.shop/@ceciliatan/114217925232725090

Lili Saintcrow — On Ponzi “Publishers”

If a publisher gets shirty with you over the simple question, “How do you separate out author royalties when distributor payments come in, and where is that money kept before being disbursed to authors at the contractually agreed times?”, it is a giant, fast-waving crimson flag. If a publisher claims they cannot answer the question for any reason, tells you “nobody else has ever asked this”, says “we can’t answer because of Personal Life Drama”, etc., then it’s a very VERY good reason not to sign a goddamn contract or, after signing, time for independent audit and rights reversions.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Civil Liberties Currency ]

Saturday night we were completely toast, and since we have the remnants of a Max membership for something likely completely forgettable (we've been working through the music documentaries on it), we were thumbing through the options and Charlene said "what's Janet Planet?" So we watched that.

And. At first I was like "wow, I'm glad I'm not up for much, 'cause this is slow and...", and then it started to feel super familiar.

The movie is set in an unspecified place in Western Massachusets. I spent my kindergarten year, so '73-'74? in Great Barrington Massachussets, at what I remember as the "Pumpkin Hollow Waldorf School", which I think is now Berkshire Waldorf School, and from 1st through 7th grade living on the border between West Lebanon and East Chatham New York, and attending the Hawthorne Vally Waldorf School. So leaving there in '81, a decade before the setting of this movie. But holy cow did I get flashbacks.

Cleveland Review of Books: Love, Safety, and the 1990s: On Annie Baker’s Janet Planet mentions that one of the buildings used for a lot of the shots was "...built in 1979 and once home to a Waldorf operation.", and I could feel it.

The movie centers on Lacy, a 11 year old girl who's being used by her mom, the eponymous Janet, for emotional support and guidance. Both Janet and Lacy are struggling with being liked, and how to use relationships for approval, and for power, and for connection, and ... it wasn't my family, but I sure saw echoes of the charismatic parody of a community leader, the intergenerational trauma, and just the foliage and setting, from my childhood.

Despite the slow pace, and the fact that it was shot (on 16mm film(!)) very much for the theater, lots of wide shots and scenes played through subtle facial expressions, we may end up watching this one again.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Music Movies Invention and Design Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Sociology Writing Work, productivity and environment Community Architecture New York Rocky Horror Picture Show Woodworking ]

National Bureau of Economic Research: The Short-Run Effects of Congestion Pricing in New York City

Roads commonly traversed on routes to the CBD before the policy have also seen an increase in speeds and a decrease in estimated vehicle CO₂ emission rates. Overall, these speed changes reduced realized travel times on trips to and within the CBD by approximately 8%.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York Economics ]

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

Yahoo link to the story.

[ related topics: Politics History ]

Me: "I should stick to fresh veggies and nutritious meals without lots of excessive packaging."

Also me: "Grocery Outlet has Hello Kitty Hot Sour soup cups for half a buck each, I should try that!"

[ related topics: Photography Health ]

Apropos of today's clown show, Understanding every one of Signal’s identifiers

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs Civil Liberties Clowns Archival Government ]

Heard someone yesterday who's part of a healthcare startup bemoan that their IT group isn't approving use of Microsoft's LLM product, and... We as an industry have done a really bad job educating people about privacy, security, *and* LLMs.

[ related topics: Humor Privacy Microsoft moron Heinlein ]

Ed Zitron — The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism

American Prospect: Bubble Trouble

Venture capital (VC) funds, drunk on a decade of “growth at all costs,” have poured about $200 billion into generative AI. Making matters worse, the stock market’s bull run is deeply dependent on the growth of the Big Tech companies fueling the AI bubble. In 2023, 71 percent of the total gains in the S&P 500 were attributable to the “Magnificent Seven”—Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft—all of which are among the biggest spenders on AI. Just four—Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—combined for $246 billion of capital expenditure in 2024 to support the AI build-out. Goldman Sachs expects Big Tech to spend over $1 trillion on chips and data centers to power AI over the next five years. Yet OpenAI, the current market leader, expects to lose $5 billion this year, and its annual losses to swell to $11 billion by 2026. If the AI bubble bursts, it not only threatens to wipe out VC firms in the Valley but also blow a gaping hole in the public markets and cause an economy-wide meltdown.

I especially like the ending observation of that one:

Maybe, after the fallout of the AI bubble is felt and the sun sets on Silicon Valley for a bit, the tech world can do a hard reset and return to its more innovative days again.

Via.

Edit: Alibaba’s Tsai Warns of ‘Bubble’ in AI Data Center Buildout

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Humor Books Microsoft Invention and Design moron Current Events Graphics Television Artificial Intelligence Economics Java ]

Florida to consider relaxing child labour laws to fill vacant jobs formerly done by undocumented immigrants (alt link)

According to the Florida Policy Insitute, the current bill proposing to loosen child labour rules would pose a great “risk to the health and well-being of the Florida youth”.

If passed, the new bill would permit 16- and 17-year-olds to work without a guaranteed meal break, and it would also remove previous limits on working hours. Working time restrictions for 14-15 year-olds who are home-schooled would also be removed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Invention and Design Food Work, productivity and environment Government ]

If you had presented this to me as satire, I'd have objected it as unfairly portraying those who signed their names to it as unduly clueless. "It's okay because we're funding the city off of Measure U sales tax revenue" is... a take.

https://www.petaluma360.com/ar...mmentary-petaluma-city-revenues/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

Coming up on 3 decades in Northern California, "NLP" means "Neuro-linguistic programming", not "Natural Language Processing/Parsing".

[ related topics: Software Engineering California Culture ]

Which knob do I have to adjust to secure my end to bell-end encryption?

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Guerilla bus stop bench deployments...

https://www.sfgate.com/local/a...us-benches-bay-area-20234113.php

[ related topics: California Culture Public Transportation ]

The Onion: Teen Warned Not To Accept Group Chat Invites From National Security Advisors She Doesn’t Know. Lands on several levels...

'cause, I mean, not a National Security Advisor, but Evangelical youth pastor, so close: Youth pastor arrested by Thornton Colorado police, facing charge of sexual assault on a child.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement ]

On the one hand, maybe we shouldn't be judged by what we did in High School, on the other hand...

Reuters: Exclusive: DOGE staffer 'Big Balls' provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show

Even if the connection between Coristine and EGodly were fleeting, Nitin Natarajan, who served as the deputy director of CISA under former President Joe Biden, told Reuters it was worrying that someone who provided services to EGodly only two years ago was part of a group that has gained wide access to government networks.

"This stuff was not in the distant past," he said. "The recency of the activity and the types of groups he was associated would definitely be concerning."

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama tolkien History moron ]

Frank McKenna on Forbes: 5 AI Scams Set To Surge In 2025: What You Need To Know

According to Deloitte Center for Financial Services, generative AI will enable $40 billion in losses by 2027 up from $12.3 billion in 2023. That’s a 32% compound annual growth rate.

Going beyond Business Email Compromise attacks, obviously romance and pig butchering scams are becoming more and more automated, and the deepfake scams are gonna get deeper.

[ related topics: Ziffle Artificial Intelligence ]

I think it's becoming more and more clear that the "AI job skills" for the future will not be focused on using AI as an assistant, but in understanding and mitigating the impacts of AI as an adversary.

[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ @xgranade@wandering.shop

@noracodes Everyone loves talking about computers like they're magic, but no one wants to do the hard work of maintaining an arcane order dedicated to the esoteric arts through centuries of the ever-shifting concerns of mere mortals.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Clowns ]

Radical thought: Price the service to pay for the CPU usage? ChatGPT’s viral image-generation AI is ‘melting’ OpenAI’s GPUs

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Hayao Miyazaki, 2016, on being shown some "AI" image generation demos translation transcription further transcribed by me:

Every morning ... not recent days, but I see my friend who has a disability.

It's so hard for him just to do a high five, his arm with stiff muscle reaching out to my hand.

Now, thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting.

Whoever creates this stuff has no idea of what pain is whatsoever.

I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.

I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.

After one of the presenters says "We want to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.", Miyazaki replies:

I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.

Anyway, just a cultural touchpoint to contemplate as using OpenAI's new image generator to create images of one's-self in the style of Studio Ghibli is being used by Sam Altman to distract us from OpenAI's money problems.

(Earlier today)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Movies Invention and Design Sociology Work, productivity and environment Currency Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

The vast majority of new follows on BlueSky have huge "how do you do, fellow Democrat" vibes.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Jess Huang: How a well-intended California domestic violence law results in victims being arrested

Under the California Penal Code, officers must make an arrest in domestic violence cases when they determine probable cause. Enacted in 1986, this specific provision was meant to protect victims.

The problem? The law assumes officers are trained to identify the dominant aggressor, but research shows that training gaps and the code’s mandatory arrest provision often pressures them into rushed, surface-level decisions. Experts say this creates too much room for error.

[ related topics: Law Television California Culture ]

Today in "who saw that coming?": AI models miss disease in Black and female patients

Compared with the patients’ doctors, the AI model more often failed to detect the presence of disease in Black patients or women, as well in those 40 years or younger. When the researchers looked at race and sex combined, Black women fell to the bottom, with the AI not detecting disease in half of them for conditions such as cardiomegaly, or enlargement of the heart. These disparities persisted when the team tested CheXzero using four other public data sets of chest x-rays from other regions, including Spain and Vietnam.

Science Advances: Demographic bias of expert-level vision-language foundation models in medical imaging Yuzhe Yang, Yujia Liu

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Marketing Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]

How is Meta Getting Its Hands on Advance Digital Galleys to Train Its AI? doesn't really have any answers, but is asking some of the right questions:

The last time I used a torrenting site was in the days of searching for files on Napster in the very early aughts. I remember how thrilling it was to find music, but then how terrifying it quickly became when individual users started to be sued by record labels for torrenting the latest 98 Degrees album or whatever. Ultimately Napster was shut down, but as Liz Pelly notes in her new book Mood Machine, the anti-pirating frenzy within the music industry paved the way for predatory streaming sites like Spotify to emerge by creating alternatives to piracy. The streaming sites have managed to devalue music and the artists who make it, all while enriching large corporations and making discovery more difficult for individual users. Don’t let this happen again.

[ related topics: Books Music Invention and Design Current Events Art & Culture Machinery Trains Artificial Intelligence ]

'Lone offenders' carrying out Tesla attacks, catching them 'difficult,' FBI, DHS say

Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans)‬ ‪@iwriteok.bsky.social‬ observed that

it's a little like when DHS tried to find the leader of Portland Antifa and concluded everyone actually spent most of their time calling each other out on Twitter

I keep thinking that in 80 years we'll be posting pictures and short bios in the way that we celebrate people like the Scholl siblings or Christoph Probst now.

[ related topics: Politics Photography Law Enforcement ]

A DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding a reporter to a group email

The DHS employee told colleagues she accidentally added a reporter from a conservative Washington-based print publication to an email that included information about upcoming ICE operations in the Denver area.

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Work, productivity and environment ]

A short list of anti-AI tools.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Last night: Nvidia-backed CoreWeave downsizes US IPO

This morning: CoreWeave Stock Opens at $39 After Disappointing IPO.

CoreWeave, a rapidly growing AI cloud company, priced its initial public offering at $40 a share on Thursday night, well below an expected range of $47 to $55.

Peter @peter@thepit.social observes:

AI is such an exciting technology that the first big IPO for the sector is a bust. like, if you spun off Google and Microsoft's AI businesses, they would immediately be stripped for parts and shut down because generative AI is not a profitable business.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Graphics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

You knew that color printers could be tracked by their dot pattern. DEDA — tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit apparently attempts to give you the tools to obfuscate the tracking.

I drove 300 miles in rural Virginia, then asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car. Here’s what I learned.

It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is.

Worth reading through, and especially as the author notes the asymmetry of information, that Flock, and thence police departments, have a stronger historical record of your travels than you do. Making me think (and re-think) some of those old "quantified self" thoughts again.

Via Elf Sternberg.

[ related topics: Privacy moron Law Enforcement Automobiles ]

Andrew Plotkin @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place

@cstross That also means back-pressure on the tech industry, where "new phenomena" are people inventing things rather than observational science.

It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence ]

Infostealer campaign compromises 10 npm packages, targets devs.

Ten npm packages were suddenly updated with malicious code yesterday to steal environment variables and other sensitive data from developers' systems.

...

All these packages, except for country-currency-map, are still available on npm, with their latest versions designated above, so downloading them will infect your projects with info-stealer malware.

So you can't just npm upda... wait a minute...

Via

[ related topics: virus Nature and environment Current Events Currency Maps and Mapping ]

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

One thing I’m noticing - lately, the consultancy businesses are realising generative AI isn’t generating nearly as much business value as they suggested.. so they’re starting to move on to fear about quantum computing again.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Wonderful visit to https://sonomabg.org/ this morning. We'll have to become regulars to see how it evolves through the seasons, as things bloom and blossom. Just enough sense of gardening to make it feel like a loved space, without being fussy.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Gardening ]

Thread on the various tools at RSSGizmos. A number of cool things to work into your RSS workflow.

https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@researchbuzz/114252071365517876

[ related topics: Content Management Work, productivity and environment ]

Petition to mercilessly thrash anyone who insists on relative times ("1 year ago") rather than dates on comment posts and the like. I wanna know exactly which episode you're reacting to when you talk about the events in the latest show...

Had another stack of that square dance inlay taped up, so rather than do the smart thing and make thinner veneers, I decided to cut them out, glue them up, and resaw by hand ...

[ related topics: Photography ]

So, yeah, I guess I should make some badge boxes for a square dance raffle or something...

[ related topics: Photography ]

The expression "land ho" implies the existence of an "air ho" and a "sea ho".

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Anybody have a favorite review or critical reading of the Hallmark show "The Way Home"? Charlene and I got sucked into it to discuss with friends, and some of the themes about not letting the past and nostalgia rule one's life (even as the characters do) seems un-Hallmark...

[ related topics: History ]

Fantastic thread on how the A&E show The First 48 led to a false conviction, by the author of Pro Publica: “A Wholly Inaccurate Picture”: Reality Cop Show “The First 48” and the Wrongly Convicted Man

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Law Enforcement Television ]

Karen L Cox's book No Common Ground, on Confederate memorials in the US, is available for free online reading for a limited time.

[ related topics: Books ]

More in the "understanding the workplace integration of AI means reacting to it as an adversary rather than a collaborator" (or, collaborator, but with whom?): News Guard's Reality Check: A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

NewsGuard’s findings confirm a February 2025 report by the U.S. nonprofit the American Sunlight Project (ASP), which warned that the Pravda network was likely designed to manipulate AI models rather than to generate human traffic. The nonprofit termed the tactic for affecting the large-language models as “LLM [large-language model] grooming.”

[ related topics: broadband Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Well, the Trump administration is certainly bringing nations together... China, Japan, South Korea will jointly respond to US tariffs, Chinese state media says

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]