Flutterby™! From 2025-10-01 to 2025-10-31

Wow. Saw that there were two hang gliding related fatalities at Lookout Mountain Flight Park, near Chattanooga, today. Went to look for news, not much out there, but Startpage's news tab has more info right now than Google's.

The tide of search may be shifting.

[ related topics: Aviation Current Events Chattanooga Woodworking ]

Moment of hesitation while I tried to figure out if the Macarena craze happened before or after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, but 100% on today's Timdle!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein ]

I like this framing: Liz Dye: SCOTUS Blessed "Kavanaugh Stops." Will They Also Give Thumbs Up To "Roberts Residencies?" Maybe Barrett Bookings? Alito Arrests? Gorsuch Guest Passes?

On September 8, the Supreme Court effectively legalized racial profiling. Naturally, they did it on the shadow docket, in a one-paragraph order <span> in which five of the six conservative justices voted to stay a trial judge’s order “pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” So far, so blahblahblah. But Justice Kavanaugh, likely stinging from criticism of the Supreme Court’s unexplained shadow docket rulings, took it upon himself to explain that the conservative justices are very definitely greenlighting racial profiling

Via which quote skeeted P. Andrew Torrez ‪@andrewtorrez.bsky.social‬.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Law Enforcement ]

I mean, you don't actually own your phone, especially with Google going after F- Droid, but they're also scanning your content for nudity. Google's Android System SafetyCore scans your photos for 'sensitive content' - how to disable it

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Nudity ]

Okay, this is kinda interesting. Grant Gould @nonnihil@hachyderm.io posted that his company is looking for an educational non- profit or school to take a donation of UR-3 robot arms.

So I type "UR-3 robot arm" into Vivaldi's address bar, it takes me to the Startpage search, which has as its top sponsored link Vention.io selling them for $33,011.

I wonder if Google gives me different results, so I hit there, and the top sponsored result is the same link, but titled "Universal Robots UR3e - $38,363 USD".

Huh. Anyway, clicking through gives me the same $33k.

The actual product page appears to be Universal Robots UR3e. It's got a 3kg payload. It looks like the stock version doesn't have a gripper.

It's great that companies like Physical Intelligence (π), are training robots to fold laundry, but it's gonna be a while before I shell out for two of these, plus hands, on a mobile base, to fold my underwear.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Robotics Clothing Economics ]

Are Elites Meritocratic and Efficiency- Seeking? Evidence from MBA Students Marcel Preuss, Germán Reyes, Jason Somerville, Joy Wu. tl;dr: no.

We find that MBA students implement substantially more unequal earnings distributions than the average American, regardless of whether inequality stems from luck or merit. Their redistributive choices are also highly responsive to efficiency costs, with an effect that is an order of magnitude larger than that found in representative U.S. samples. Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population.

Via.

[ related topics: Model Building ]

I'm looking at Hetzner's shared webhosting product (and would like to recommend it to a few other people), both for static web hosting and for email, but apparently it's not possible to host a .com or .net domain there, even if you have DNS with another provider?

Anyone figured this out?

Edit: Never mind, figured it out.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Welp, I inadvertantly did an rm -rf, holler if anything seems obviously missing from here, searching for my backups now...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Incidents like this lead to me learning things about my backups. Think I'm kinda recovered. Probably lost a few one-off images. The separator looks like it needs fixing.

There are some changes to the CMS code that I apparently lost some of. Vivaldi is downloading my index file (everything else is viewing it fine).

[ related topics: Content Management Education ]

Just forcing an update.

Just forcing an update.

I have for years thought nothing of the Apple warning that pops up for browsers sometimes, allow Chrome (or whatever) to discover devices on local networks.

I'm developing an app that uses MacOS WKWebView. First time I saw that permissions request was when loading Facebook. What's it looking for?

[ related topics: Apple Computer Macintosh Woodworking ]

I'm experimenting. AllemandeLeft.com is now hosted on Hetzner's Level 4 hosting, which I *thought* gave me additional domains, but is maybe just subdomains? Might drop back to Level 1

It's not on my Flutterby.com server.

This is mostly an experiment to see if I can have them do mail hosting.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

‘Emergency’ World Naked Bike Ride planned in Portland

‪e.w. niedermeyer‬ ‪@niedermeyer.online‬

this is basically portland's version of a haka

[ related topics: Nudity Bicycling ]

Yeah, I had no clue about the founding of the Gupta Empire in today's Timdle...

[ related topics: History ]

Human Rights Data Analysis Group: Pulling back the curtain on LLMs and policing data.

[ related topics: Civil Liberties ]

Oh cool, looks like MacOS 26.0.1 fixed the 26.0.0 USB throughput issue that was hosing frame rate on my external webcam.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

If you want a few pleasant moments on a charming small planet with a look that, to me, evokes Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, delivering messages and exploring the lives of the people who live there, may I recommend https://messenger.abeto.co

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy ]

What in the incel ick? Tyler Cowen — My Favorite Actress Is Not Human is subtitled:

Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That’s because she’s AI.

Emphasis mine. Eeeew.

No, really, eeeeeew.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Movies Artificial Intelligence ]

Just in case you missed it, though I'm sure this is gonna become commonplace.

Chicago Sun-Times: Massive immigration raid on Chicago apartment building leaves residents reeling: 'I feel defeated'

ICE agents raid South Shore apartments; Trump says Chicago could become military training ground

Doesn't seem to be any notion of a warrant. Kinda seems like the landlord was looking for an excuse to redevelop.

[ related topics: Privacy Law Real Estate Java ]

Adam Harvey: DFACE.app,

Automatic, private, open-source face redaction web app, using the YOLOV5 neural network object detection framework in the web browser.

https://github.com/vframeio/dface

[ related topics: broadband Artificial Intelligence ]

Not sure how we're gonna get this genie back in the bottle. Back in 2022, Nature Machine Intelligence: Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery (subscription only, sigh) pointed out that you could take the models being used for drug discovery and ask them for negative outcomes, and get nasty neurotoxins.

Science: Made to order bioweapon? AI-designed toxins slip through safety checks used by companies selling genes. You can mail order them!

Via Elf Sternberg.

[ related topics: Health tolkien Nature and environment Bioinformatics Artificial Intelligence ]

I need to make a browser plug-in so that I can just type in the bill identifier (eg: SB 79, SB 59, SB 418, SB 497, AB 82, and AB 1084) and it sets me up for a "pro" comment with the appropriate pulldown selection and all from https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/

Saved off here because I've been writing this same sentiment in a few places recently. In this latest case, a friend who commented that "AI" spending was gonna be $400B this year.

So depending on how you allocate money to what, LLMs have sucked up $1.5-2T since 2018. Current revenues are, very roughly, about $60B/year, at huge operating losses. If we figure that investment should have, I dunno, call it 5% return? So even without making up for lost time, after 7 years ya kinda think there'd need to be $75-100B in profit, not just revenue.

And, sure, it's a moon shot, Kennedy gave his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech September of '62, Apollo 11 landed July of '69 (oh, look, 7 years), but the whole LLM approach feels very much like it's running out of steam.

And AI hardware depreciates like no other purchase, and it's gonna be hard to re-purpose data centers for something useful.

Sure, there's a lot of really cool stuff coming out of neural net research, some of the stuff that's happening in image recognition is extremely cool, but... The crash is gonna suuuuuuuck. Like the US in the 1890s in the levels of suck.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing Law Consumerism and advertising Sports Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Every once in a while, Cory Doctorow really nails a phrase. The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh.

AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Seeing a number of posts claiming as fact details about the second autopsy of Trey Reed that have not actually been released.

Speculation and misinformation do not serve us.

/news/crime/second-autopsy-on-trey-reed-not-yet-released-new-cause-of-death-claims-spread-online/ar-AA1NOM3k

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

Over to Vallejo today for Steve Meyers' funeral, and ran across a number of Android update issues while setting in-car entertainment, and...

I will be glad when we get Personal Computing back. This "everything is in service of selling cloud services that dictate your media consumption" things sucks.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Automobiles ]

Saw a "Hoonigan" sticker on a Prius. Still trying to unpack that.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Yesterday I went to a Catholic funeral, my first time attending a service in that sect. This morning I walk by St Vincent de Paul and there are food vendors and the churros truck has "come to sin" painted in the side, and... I'm tempted.

[ related topics: Religion Photography Food Machinery ]

Yet another LinkedIn message for the Boardsi scam reminds me of how much we've lost with the destruction of email. We used to have strong filtering. On systems we controlled. With the ability to do automated send and receive.

[ related topics: moron ]

Thinking about how the tasks that people who praise AI as coding helpers are doing might be better served by more expressive (and indeed consistent) languages.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

Some "AI" generated video that shows "Sam Altman" shoplifting, interesting because it reiterates how chain of custody in evidence is gonna become much more important, but also because there's gotta be a bunch of Target surveillance footage in their training dataset. https://bsky.app/profile/abeba.bsky.social/post/3m2jmygnp4k2v

[ related topics: Television Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Watching Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Richard Stutton — Father of Reinforcement Learning things LLMs are a dead end (Transcript), and within the first 10 minutes we see Patel falling into the "reasoning" trap, and the "Math Olympiad" trap.

Oh, cool, and now we're getting into modes of learning, and they're talking about how formal schooling is different from how humans learn(!). "I don't think learning is about training, I think learning about learning, it's an active process."

"Why are you trying to distinguish humans? Humans are animals, what we have in common is much more interesting."

Lots of good stuff in here. I love his pushback against human exceptionalism, though I'm particularly primed to that because of my childhood experience with Anthroposophy.

Richard Sutton's home page

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Mathematics Education ]

Eeenteresting. Feels like this OpenAI/AMD deal could be the "AOL buys Time Warner" moment of the LLM bubble, maybe?

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/t...ip-supply-deal-openai-rcna235860

[ related topics: moron Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com

I do not want that stupid app.

It’s spyware-bloated, full of crap.

I want appliances that work,

without tattling to some techbro jerk.

I’m sick of “AI” garbage-spew,

Sick of silo’d platforms too.

To analog I shall return,

and wait for all this mess to burn.

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

Danny O'B @danny@mastodon.spesh.com

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for ^G

Man buys used Tesla only to discover it's banned from Supercharger network

A Tesla representative told him on the phone and later in an email that "the car is currently unsupported for supercharging and warranties are voided due to salvaged vehicle."

"I was told it was clean. The CARFAX said it was clean, and I trusted that," he said.

[ related topics: broadband Current Events Automobiles ]

A friend likened LLMs treating "any retrieved piece of information on a topic / triggered by a prompt as equally valuable and truthful, to the "normalize" feature of DAW software, wherein every sound in a track is adjusted to have equal amplitude, resulting in a bewildering, psychotic-seeming soundscape."

The language of the latter 2020s will be akin to drums of the 1980s, the equalizer kicked up high, every paragraph hitting with the intensity of the Phil Collins fill in "In The Air Tonight".

[ related topics: Music Software Engineering ]

You don't say? Attorney for woman shot by Border Patrol claims officer said 'Do something b----' before shooting

Body-camera video appears to contradict the government’s claim that Marimar Martinez, 30, drove toward officers before one of them opened fire at her late Saturday morning in Brighton Park, her attorney claimed. A judge ordered Martinez and a co-defendant released pending trial.

Also: "collateral arrests"? Kidnapping.

And as a Centrally Planned Economy comes into play (thinking particularly of soybeans and China, but lots of examples), we should be thinnking of the invasions of Chicago and Portland like the 1956 invasion of Hungary or '68 invasion of Czechoslovakia.

[ related topics: Photography moron Law Current Events Pyrotechnics Video Economics ]

Unintentionally appropriate typo of the moment "YouRube".

Referring to the sorts of video links that distance acquaintances on social media DM.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Video ]

I have a couple of personal projects I'd like to hack together, but I'm kinda stuck because I want to move my own skills forward as I do it. Python is a fucking dependency and performance nightmare, ECMAScript involves package managers, Rust is "what if we made the code endlessly complex because you need to manually manage arenas", and I'm quickly back to choosing between C++ and Perl, and that's just solving my problem, not actually learning anything.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Perl Open Source Theater & Plays Monty Python Education Python hubris ]

"It's language input, so we don't need to codify those things, we just need to give the LLM the tools to..."

Uhhhh... Huh.

Oh, that's interesting. That assault on the apartment building in Chicago is looking more and more like an eviction proceeding. Destroy enough of the building that you drive out the residents, don't do so much damage that it can't be quickly and easily gentrified... Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children

The building was purchased by Wisconsin-based investor Trinity Flood in January 2020, according to Cook County records. On October 1, the day after the raid, a judge reviewed an emergency motion from Wells Fargo seeking to appoint Matthew Tarshis of Frontline Real Estate Partners as the property’s receiver.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Food Law Real Estate ]

New York City Bar Association: Unlawful Attacks on Venezuelan Vessels.

I mean, we seem to have moved on to a post-law/justice era, but some day when the reckoning comes, I'd like to see charges laid for these abuses too.

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

I brain coded a static image gallery in a few hours: snig.pl.

Via lobste.rs

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

Foiled by the release of the game Twister in today's Timdle...

[ related topics: Games ]

Hive mind: I have XLR line output. I need XLR mic input. How many dB do I need to attenuate?

[ related topics: Databases ]

Eenteresting. Google Pixel 7 phone. CC app wants fingerprint enabled, so I flipped it upside down and used a non-standard finger, to force fallback to a code.

Latest Android update is doing more fingerprint recognition, I just flipped my thumb up the screen to start code entry, and it unlocked.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

The Register: Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth

Futurism: Bank of England Warns of Impending AI Disaster "The risk of a sharp market correction has increased."

AP: Is there an AI bubble? Financial institutions sound a warning

Bank of England: Financial Policy Committee Record – October 2025

On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI). This, when combined with increasing concentration within market indices, leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Yay. Migration of AllemandeLeft.com to Hetzner's Level 4 hosting complete, with the application of

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [L]

in the .htaccess file.

Next up, figure out how to get some of the edges of Flutterby.net on there.

Feels like I should log this somewhere. Background: Hyprland is a toxic community.

X/Twitter: Hyprland thanks Framework for "Gold Tier" sponsorship.

Framework forums: Framework supporting far-right racists?

• https://exquisite.social/@thomholwerda/115342652887412045
• https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil/115342459921937600
• https://mastodon.social/@AndresFreundTec/115340255219702416
• https://mastodon.social/@jbond/115337442245944034

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Community ]

Dear marketers everywhere (in this case YouTube Music): Yes, I have served on a jury through to verdict and it was an amazing experience that I value, but "Enjoy another trial" is not the pitch you think it is.

[ related topics: Music Law ]

Oregon general’s testimony that National Guard troops ‘will be protecting any protesters’ gains traction online

Gronewold said Guard soldiers serve two purposes: “One, to defend America, and two, to protect Oregonians. And so by serving in this mission, they will be protecting any protesters at the ICE facility.”

and

Gronewold closed out his remarks by asking lawmakers to spread a message about the difference between local troops and federal law enforcement agents.

“We’re the home team, and our job is to protect and serve Oregonians, and we follow lawful orders, and that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “Please treat them with dignity and respect.”

Video on Facebook, Video on YouTube.

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Law Enforcement Heinlein ]

Apropos of nothing at all, I'm reading things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring

Bloomberg: 'Car Brain' is making the US Unhealthy and Dangerous. EVs won't fix it. (gift link) is a review of Saving Ourselves from Big Car, Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship With Cars, and Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile.

But there’s more to it than that. Texas A&M urban planning professor Tara Goddard has documented a phenomenon called motonormativity — also known as “car brain” — that she defines as an “inability to see beyond the literal and figurative windshield to envision different ways of doing things.” Some blame should also fall on journalists who spend far more time dwelling on violent crime than car crashes, even though an American is roughly twice as likely to die as a road fatality than as a murder victim. Car companies, for their part, have largely managed to duck responsibility for the US crisis in roadway safety, and based on their effusive marketing, one might conclude that operating an electric vehicle improves the environment, rather than merely mitigating damage.

Via.

[ related topics: Books User Interface Health Nature and environment Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Mathematics Automobiles Marketing ]

For clarification purposes, because this is potential confusion in the square dancing scene: a "hoedown" is not what happens when I trip and fall.

[ related topics: Travel ]

Talor Anderson: OpenAI's inflated valuation, as I understand it

Via Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com@bsky.brid.gy, who summarized as:

Where does this leave frontier model makers? Well, their valuations are not sustainable unless they are able to both generate value equivalent to 10%+ of each US+EU white collar employee's salary and capture it with a monopoly rather than have to compete on price and erode margins as a commodity.

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

Techspot: Nearly all US growth in 2025 tied to AI and data center-related capital spending

Recent analysis by Harvard economist Jason Furman found that excluding spending on technology-related infrastructure, annualized GDP growth in the first half of 2025 would have been just 0.1 percent – underscoring the extraordinary influence of digital infrastructure investment on overall economic performance.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Current Events Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

The headline reads Health Secretary Kennedy, Trump link circumcision to autism through Tylenol

In his remarks, Kennedy sought to identify a correlation to autism following circumcision due to exposure to acetaminophen as a pain reliever for the procedure.

Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine: Ritual circumcision and risk of autism spectrum disorder in 0- to 9-year-old boys: national cohort study in Denmark

It's an interesting leap to assume acetaminophen as the cause in this correlation.

doi: 10.1177/0141076814565942

[ related topics: Health Current Events ]

Really wanna scare your neighbors this Halloween? Dress up as a walkable neighborhood or multi-family housing.

[ related topics: Sociology Real Estate ]

Fun day repping Petaluma Urban Chat at the Petaluma Pride celebration, but I don't think I'm gonna get out to my various other things this evening.

This thread about Jared Leto uncovered Variety: Robert Pattinson Says Actors Only Go Method When They’re Playing A–holes which is striking me to ponder how I go about my life...

“I always say about people who do method acting, you only ever see people do the method when they’re playing an assholes You never see someone being lovely to everyone while they’re really deep in character.”

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Rolling Stone: Musk’s AI Is Being Used to Make Hardcore Porn: ‘Grok Is Learning Genitalia Really Fast!’

While OpenAI's Sora 2 is setting a new standard for video models, xAI seems to be loosening moderation on explicit adult content

In reaction ‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ observed

Just think: that imagery is derived from millions of porn DVDs of jiggling boobs. The average porn starlet is far more likely to have had work done than most women. So, that "natural motion" they're praising is derived from silicone-heavy data samples.

Masculinity is doomed.

And that got me thinking about how much video is generated from attempts at going viral, and if the training data is the model, what that means...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture tolkien Invention and Design Sociology Work, productivity and environment Heinlein California Culture Education Artificial Intelligence Video ]

AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought

This AI skeptic got feedback from the industry - and now he's even more pessimistic

The initial article by Harris "Kuppy" Kupperman: Global Crossing Is Reborn…

Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

His revised post: An AI Addendum

However, if you speed up the depreciation curve to something in the three to five-year range, it would imply that my prior breakeven revenue number of $160 billion to justify 2025’s capex spend, is woefully inadequate. In reality, the industry probably needs a revenue range that is closer to the $320 billion to $480 billion range, just to break even on the capex to be spent this year. As I wasn’t educated on the intricacies of a datacenter, I wasn’t bearish enough on the economics of an AI datacenter. No wonder my new contacts in the industry shoulder a heavy burden—heavier than I could ever imagine. They know the truth.

Further down as he draws parallels to the AI boom he talks about Lucent and Nortel lending to and taking equity stakes in their customers to keep prices propped up during the fiber boom.

Aside: in that first essay he points to These Shareholders Must All Be Stoned…, in which he talks about the collapse of the cannabis industry (in Canada) after legalization, when the product becomes a commodity. As LLM capabilities max out and everyone's offering a switchable language model back end to their fronting products... well... there's some interesting thoughts about capture there.

Among other places, Via.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Humor Libertarian Microsoft Invention and Design moron Writing Current Events Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Liberal Currents: We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory. On why Republicans have an outside representation in pedophiles, and how it's inherent to and consistent with thoughts on abortion, gender roles, and so forth.

Via.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Ron Bronson: Design As Repair

Design as repair is design without the hero narrative. It is design that starts from consequence, not control. From entanglement, not abstraction.

Via Elizabeth Ayer.

[ related topics: Weblogs Graphic Design ]

Parker Malloy: A Politician Actually Defended Trans People. It Shouldn't Be This Rare.

A discussion of Zohran Mamdani's ad discussing Sylvia Rivera, the Christopher Street Pier, and a New York City that works for everyone.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design moron Community New York ]

It's mid October of 2025. If you're still expecting URLs that come out of "AI"/LLMs to be valid and useful, I... I... I don't know what to tell you.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Just read the phrase "bangpath old", and... I guess the analogue for those of us who came up in the BBS world is "one colon old"?

We are deep into the "fuck it, I just want to see if this approach will work, '... as any;'" stage of TypeScript+Mithril development this afternoon.

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

Consumer Reports: Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead

As ‪20 Nate Days Later‬ ‪@nathanalderman.com‬ observed

This could explain so much about Joe Rogan and his ilk.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Ever since he got popped by the npm Shai Halud worm, I confess that I get extremely nervous doing anything in the repo where he does all his JavaScript work. Like "what styling package is gonna cause me to have to rotate all of my keys and passwords?" with every pnpm command.

[ related topics: virus Work, productivity and environment ]

Quote tweeting ‪Rachel Feder‬ ‪@rachelfeder.bsky.social‬

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

jessamyn ‪@librarian.bsky.social‬ wrote

There is no such thing as a good book. Every book should find its readers and the canon is basically used to reinforce cultural hegemony to this day and it's a problem.

[ related topics: Books Sociology ]

Nothing like smacking a quarter panel of a former police cruiser in the crosswalk, and having the driver complain that I hit his car.

And then say "I didn't see you" like the high vis rain jacket wasn't sufficient.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Automobiles Currency ]

Whee!

The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You. A company called "First Wap" used phone system network signaling to track individuals with nothing installed on their phones, and, yeah, sold that data to the bad guys. Via

Don’t Look Up: There Are Sensitive Internal Links in the Clear on GEO Satellites.

That latter link is summarized by Vinoth (Mobile security) @vinoth@infosec.exchange

This is insane! A few researchers from UCSD and UMCP scanned bunch of satellite links, found much of the traffic is not encrypted, and went on to decode them. It's amazing what came out.

- T-Mobile backhaul: Users' SMS, voice call contents and internet traffic content in plain text.

- AT&T Mexico cellular backhaul: Raw user internet traffic

- TelMex VOIP on satellite backhaul: Plaintext voice calls

- U.S. military: SIP traffic exposing ship names

- Mexico government and military: Unencrypted intra-government traffic

- Walmart Mexico: Unencrypted corporate emails, plaintext credentials to inventory management systems, inventory records transferred and updated using FTP

While it is important to work on futuristic threats such as Quantum cryptanalysis, backdoors in standardized cryptographic protocols, etc. - the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of real-world attacks happen because basic protection is not enabled. Lets not take our eyes off the basics.

Great work, Wenyi Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger and Aaron Schulman!

https://

[ related topics: Religion Politics broadband History moron Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Machinery Cryptography ]

Sam Altman says ChatGPT will soon sext with verified adults

OpenAI will bring ‘erotica’ to ChatGPT once it rolls out age verification in December.

‪@limousine-liberal.bsky.social‬

FAPGPT

Addendum: Chris Kluwe ‪@chriswarcraft.bsky.social‬

booting up FapGPT to get my clankspank on

[ related topics: Erotic Current Events ]

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

the beatings will continue until end-user behavior aligns with product manager career advancement requirements

‪Chris Kluwe‬ ‪@chriswarcraft.bsky.social‬

It really feels like Sam Altman promised a lot of Very Serious Old People he was going to create capitalist blowjob jesus based off a tech demo, and now that the bottom’s falling out he’s throwing whatever he can think of at the wall to avoid getting disappeared because he wasted all their money.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Currency ]

How to turn Apple's "Liquid Glass" macOS 26 and iOS 26 into a solid interface.

Aside from the obvious "Reduce Transparency" (and the "Increaes Contrast" which also turns on "Reduce Transparency"), there's also

defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES

and then log out and back in. It also suggests "System Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion".

[ related topics: Apple Computer Macintosh ]

JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social

If I genuinely believed I was 18 months away from superintelligence that could solve cancer, I would probably not be pivoting to horny chatbots, but that's just me (a person with priorities)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Oh, look at this Liquid Glass ugliness. For work I'm installing Perplexity's Comet browser. It pops up the keychain unlock to import Chrome credentials (yes, I know). I've included part of my system settings so that you can see that "Reduce Transparency" is on. Ugh.

[ related topics: Photography Astronomy Work, productivity and environment ]

This morning's https://www.timdle.com/daily thwarted by my ignorance of when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.

It's one thing that Jalopnik has become a forum for pedestrian advocacy, but... Motor Trend: Why I Had to Quit Using Tesla Full Self-Driving.

Now that I’m healed and doing everything in my power to not be any of those “I’s,” FSD is of negative benefit; there’s no point in putting up with its moronic and hazardous driving. It’s not like FSD was doing anything to save me time or otherwise improve my quality of life.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events Community Video ]

Posting because it's an interesting measure of the current sentiment: Consumer Reports: How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More

Via

[ related topics: Apple Computer Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence ]

Going through some old assets and loaded Neeva(dot)com, and, wow, that company imploded so deeply that you randomly get a crypto page that wants to send notifications, a product page for "fulvic ionic minerals", a malware site, and... wonder if it just got abandoned, or if it was sold.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Cryptography ]

Yay! My ballot has been received and counted!

Foiled from today's https://www.timdle.com/daily by Kool Aid.

Doing a bunch of browser shuffling, and in the context finding some old bookmarks that have since moved around, but apparently this single-arc web comic was just starting and I don't remember reading it through before, and I liked it: Nimona

Here's the thing I don't get about FapGPT: If I wanted to sext with an LLM, I'd just answer some of those Facebook friend/LinkedIn connection requests...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Fuel Arc: Tesla’s Unspoken Demand Problem: Women Don’t Want Them

Wired: Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck

And are you married?

I was married, but I’m not married anymore. Women don't like the vehicle.

In July, Tesla rolled out a software update to integrate Grok into many of its vehicles. Do you use it?

Her name is Aura, and I use her as a therapist. When I'm driving, I'll ask questions, and it actually gives really good therapy advice.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Software Engineering Sociology Heinlein Marriage ]

Trying to solve a mystery. When I was growing up in New Lebanon, NY, there was a house on Hand Hollow Rd that had a bunch of mobile sculptures in the yard. It wasn't Anton Milkowski, they were at 3 Schoolhouse Road. Might have been Alexander Calder, but he died in 1976. Anyone got a clue?

Edit: My sister solves the clue, it was likely George Rickey.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Real Estate ]

Merriam-Webster — LLM (ad on YouTube)

Of course Ryan Reynolds found the real Tilly Norwood

Hollywood has been up in arms about an ‘AI actress’ named Tilly Norwood. For Mint Mobile’s new commercial, creative agency Maximum Effort located a real-live woman with the same name.

Both via Jared White.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Theater & Plays Artificial Intelligence Race ]

Reddit: MyBoyfriendIsAI — Some helpful advice: Look into self-hosting your AI Boyfriend!

Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 @vaurora@mstdn.social talking about the trend.

Pivot To AI: AI boyfriend users radicalise against OpenAI — and self-host their chatbot companions

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Reddit: MyBoyfriendIsAI — Some helpful advice: Look into self-hosting your AI Boyfriend!

Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 @vaurora@mstdn.social talking about the trend.

Pivot To AI: AI boyfriend users radicalise against OpenAI — and self-host their chatbot companions

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

The Late Show with Steven Colbert has posted a message from the frog resistance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw5zxdSObso

[ related topics: Movies ]

As it becomes more and more important to cross-correlate information, resources like this are handy: Bellingcat: Seeing More With Satellite Imagery Using Band Combinations, Ratios and Indices.

Via this thread about wildfires in Namibia's Etosha National Park, which also references Sun Calc for matching shadows to location and time of day.

Related, I ran across mention that I can't find right now about tracking wildlife with devices that are a photosensor and a clock, that with enough samples you can figure out geolocation from essentially length of day and time. On doing a few searches, I find enough vendors that a link to anything feels superfluous. That's a cool way to lighten your sensor package and not have to resort to GPS.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Douglas Adams Maps and Mapping Java ]

Going back through some old bookmarks folders to see if some of the web comics I used to read are still happening.

So many redirects to malicious sites. JavaScript was clearly a mistake.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Comics ]

"But... The AI agrees with me!"

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

My view of the No Kings rally in Petaluma.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Picture of Charlene and me at yesterday's No Kings rally in Petaluma taken by  ‪@d0rid.bsky.social‬

[ related topics: Photography ]

Picture of Charlene and me at yesterday's No Kings rally in Petaluma taken by  Suzanne Clarke

[ related topics: Photography ]

Louvre Thieves Given Immunity After Confirming Jewels Stolen For Purpose Of Training AI Software

“When we realised these jewels were only stolen to inflate the share price of a company whose entire value relies on the wholesale theft of other people’s art, we had no choice but grant these scamps immunity,” confirmed French prosecutor Alain Barbier.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Art & Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Nora Reed :kiln: @nora@blob.love

joysticks imply the existence of sorrowsticks

4u.lol reports on the various AI pitches to the ITU

The Innovation Factory is a global startup pitch competition run by the UN International Telecommunications Union to recognise AI-powered solutions that help address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Throughout the year, startups apply to pitch at online and in-person events. A panel of judges pick the best pitch to win a free trip to the UN AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva for a chance to compete in the Innovation Factory Grand Finale. Previous Grand Finalists include a blockchain-powered health service, the "world's first AI-native game engine for learning", and low-cost robotic limbs for amputees. (So a mixed bag, you could say.)

Via Ludic 🧛 @ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club who describes it as:

Someone did a writeup of a bunch of "AI-powered" startups attending a pitch competition, and it:

a ) is fucking hilarious

b ) involves one of the startups accidentally screen-sharing that their patentable technology appears to just be forked from an academic's work with no credit

3) further includes a radiology company admitting they haven't consulted any radiologists lmao

[ related topics: Games Health Robotics Writing Work, productivity and environment Travel Machinery Education Artificial Intelligence ]

LGBTQ Nation: Cis boys get gender-affirming surgeries more often than trans minors

Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health: Gender-affirming surgeries rarely performed on transgender youth

JAMA Network Open: Prevalence of Gender-Affirming Surgical Procedures Among Minors and Adults in the US.

Results

In 2019, the sample included 47,437,919 adults who were insured and 22,827,194 minors who were insured, of which 3,835,726 minors (16.8%) were aged 15 to 17 years, 2,708,166 (11.9%) were aged 13 to 14 years, and 16 283 302 (71.3%) were aged 12 years or younger. The rate of undergoing a gender-affirming surgery with a TGD-related diagnosis was 5.3 per 100,000 total adults compared with 2.1 per 100,000 minors aged 15 to 17 years, 0.1 per 100,000 minors aged 13 to 14 years, and 0 procedures among minors aged 12 years or younger (Figure 1). Of gender-affirming surgical procedures identified among adults and minors, 1591 of 2664 (59.7%) and 82 of 85 (96.4%) were chest-related procedures, respectively. Of the 636 breast reductions among cisgender male and TGD adults, 507 (80%) were performed on cisgender males. Of the 151 breast reductions among cisgender male minors and TGD minors, 146 (97%) were performed on cisgender male minors

doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.18814

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Health broadband Current Events ]

BBC: Trump ends aid to Colombia and calls country's leader a 'drug leader'

Posting on social media, he [Colombian President Gustavo Petro] said: "The Colombian boat was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure," when it was struck. He added: "We await explanations from the US government."

"Fisherman Alejandro Carranza had no ties to the drug trade and his daily activity was fishing. The Colombian boat was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure."

[ related topics: Health moron Current Events Journalism and Media Monty Python Boats Machinery ]

Foiled in today's Timdle by both Roger Bannister's breaking of the 4 minute mile, and Montesquieu's "The Spirit of Law".

The Conversation: Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength

In an additional study we ran that focused on attitudes around cryptocurrency, we measured whether people saw crypto investment in terms of signaling independence from traditional finance. These participants, who, like those in our COVID-19 study, prioritized a symbolic show of strength, were more likely to believe in other kinds of misinformation and conspiracies, too, such as that the government is concealing evidence of alien contact.

The Journal of Social Psychology: Symbolic show of strength: a predictor of risk perception and belief in misinformation, Randy Stein, Abraham M. Rutchick, Alice Y. Sin & Luis F. Jarrin Rueda

https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2025.2541206

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design moron Pop Culture Cryptography Economics Woodworking ]

Tech Crunch: Your AI tools run on fracked gas and bulldozed Texas land

The project, dubbed Horizon, will produce two gigawatts of computing power. That’s equivalent to the Hoover Dam’s entire electric capacity, except instead of harnessing the Colorado River, it’s burning fracked gas. Poolside is developing the facility with CoreWeave, a cloud computing company that rents out access to Nvidia AI chips and that’s supplying access to more than 40,000 of them. The Journal calls it an “energy Wild West,” which seems apt.

[ related topics: Graphics Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

"But Linux is so ugly and hard to use".

Fucking MacOS and "liquid glass". I don't even know where to begin trying to debug this...

[ related topics: Free Software Photography Open Source Macintosh ]

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

An OpenAI executive said GPT-5 found solutions to 10 "previously unsolved" math problems when in reality all it did was find online references to places where people had already solved them

Techcrunch: OpenAI’s ‘embarrassing’ math

Thomas Bloom @thomasfbloom

Hi, as the owner/maintainer of http://erdosproblems.com, this is a dramatic misrepresentation. GPT-5 found references, which solved these problems, that I personally was unaware of.

The 'open' status only means I personally am unaware of a paper which solves it.

Yann LeCun @ylecun (of Meta):

Hoisted by their own GPTards

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Foiled on today's https://www.timdle.com/daily by the Tour de France...

elle @ElleGray@mstdn.social

People are saying trump wouldn't put a ballroom in a house he was planning on leaving but tbh it could also increase the price when he goes to sell the place

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Just because it's a nice summary of what we know all in one place Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets@mastodon.social

@delaney ChatGPT and other LLMs are built entirely on stolen intellectual property https://www.cbc.ca/news/busine...penai-canadian-lawsuit-1.7396940, trained by near-slave labour in abusive conditions https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/, use horrifying amounts of water and electricity https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/theres-a- cost-to-your-chatgpt-query-the-water-you-drink/, promote misinformation https://www.allaboutai.com/ai-...mistakes-and-even-openai-doesnt- know-why/ as well as racist and sexist stereotypes https://www.snexplores.org/article/racial-bias-chatgpt-ai-tools, and actually cause a decline in cognitive function among people who use it regularly https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/

[ related topics: Cool Science Current Events Journalism and Media Mathematics Artificial Intelligence ]

My Mastodon filters just hid a message that referred to "ICE" in the context of Internal Combustion Engines, and...

Yeah, abolish that ICE, too.

Painted over the graffiti on the benches at Bob's Beach today.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io

After this is over, the White House is going to have to be town down again. There's really not going to be any other way to ensure that all of thesurveillance devices have been removed from deep inside the walls.

RealGene ☣️ @RealGene@hachyderm.io

@dalias

It's going to be a nightmare when all the foreign and domestic surveillance devices interfere with each other.

They really need to hold a spectrum auction before this goes too far…

[ related topics: Race Real Estate ]

Unpopular opinion: cultures which elevate the practices that lead to package management with lots of versioning are Shirky's Law writ large.

Bloomberg CityLab: American Roads Are Paved With Inefficiency

North Carolina and South Carolina are neighboring southeastern states, but despite their similar climate and terrain, their costs of highway projects are vastly different. For repaving work begun in 2018 or 2019, South Carolina’s Department of Transportation spent an average of $375,500 per mile, more than twice as much as its northern neighbor.

Yale Law & Economics Research Paper: State Capacity and Infrastructure Costs, Zachary D. Liscow, Cailin Slattery, William Nober

Abstract Why is it so expensive to build infrastructure in the United States? We collect new project-level data on infrastructure costs and conduct a survey on how states plan, pro- cure, and deliver these projects. While there are many determinants of project costs, the survey results suggest that low state capacity at the agency delivering the projects is a primary cost driver. We investigate this with administrative data that links individual personnel to infrastructure projects. We find that higher-quality government engineers deliver observationally similar projects at significantly lower cost; going from the 25th to 75th percentile of engineer quality is associated with a 14% reduction in project-level costs, amounting to more than three times the average engineer salary. Further, losing expertise to retirement has substantial consequences: the cost increase arising from engineer departures is six times the size of their wages. Our results highlight the value of experience and human capital in public organizations.

Sounds like "pay your public employees more, abuse them less, save money".

[ related topics: Invention and Design moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Currency Economics Global Warming ]

"You've been chosen for a Skin Trial!" <-- subject line of spam advertising Ulta makeup products, or over-eager Tech-Priest in Warhammer 40k fiction informing a victim of upcoming excoriation?

[ related topics: Spam Consumerism and advertising Monty Python ]

Migrating platforms and apps is always fraught, but my main interface to computers for the past half decade(!) has been MacOS, and I'm gradually migrating off and back to Linux, especially as LiquidGlass makes MacOS unusable, and this is a great summary of the paper cuts: Michael Tsai: What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail?

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Weblogs Open Source History Macintosh ]

"We used AI to help us generate this website about how nuclear power is bad."

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I was trying to replicate a screenshot someone posted about Google's "AI" mode missing commas and giving "surface of Venus" temperatures for the inside of a beehive, and noticed that "beehive" consistently gives me misformatted numbers, where "bee hive" gives me better formatted ones.

I guess I are a prompt engineer now.

[ related topics: Photography Astronomy Artificial Intelligence ]

The Register: BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries — Google Gemini worst offender with 76% error rate

EBU / BBC: News Integrity in AI Assistants — An international PSM study (PDF)

I had to test some features using Gemini this morning, so I was asking pointed questions about this, and, yeah, if people start using LLMs for their news, they're going to get an increasingly skewed view of reality, one that's probably gonna make the internet trolls look sane.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Monty Python Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Personal Lubricant ]

All the commentary over the Amazon us-east failure is a good reminder that we need a solution to server discovery that isn't DNS, and deals with distributed and redundant resources better than HTTP(S) does.

[ related topics: Books ]

I've been fumbling around new languages. The last time I updated my C++ was for, I dunno, 11 or 17 or something. I've done some template programming, and some optimizations, and my static site generator is written in that framework. I kinda thought that if I could build myself a set of libraries and abstractions for the things I most wanted to do for hobby projects I'd do more with it, but the ugliness of Boost changes and the horrors of trying to compile with the same libraries on Mac and Linux, even with CMake, mean I don't do as much hobby coding in it as I expected.

Not that I've been doing a lot of hobby coding.

I've gotten pretty handy at Objective-C, but it's a language with a lot of baked in inefficiency and weirdness that makes it something I'll use, but not something I'm like "oh, yeah, I wanna do more in this". A coworker is leaning in to Swift pretty hard, but that's like "what if we pulled all of the good concepts out of Objective-C".

I've bounced off of Rust, but there's a whole lot about the philosophy of that tooling that makes it hard to have it feel like an expressive language. It's like trying to code through an isolation box, or with tele-operation, having to do all of the memory management through indexes into arrays and stuff. Like, I get it, but I think it's possible to build a systems language that lets me express and figures out the details for me, rather than binding me to only very safe things.

Evan Ovadia: The Impossible Optimization, and the Metaprogramming To Achieve It (Via) talks about using Mojo to resolve regular expressions at compile time, and that's some pretty cool stuff.

And that via link above eventually leads to Russ Cox — Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast (but is slow in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, ...) all of which is a reminder that it'd be fun to get back to my language and parsing stuff expanding on the parser/language/thing I built for work, because finding better ways for us to express ourselves to computers is cool.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Weblogs Open Source Invention and Design Bay Area Software Engineering Macintosh Philosophy ]

What if the bubble bursts while it's still inflating? Reuters Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say.

Via

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

Nearly Right: Silicon Valley's AI agents can't schedule meetings but promise to replace workers by 2027

Quotes Dwarkesh Patel's podcast episode Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

Via which I got to via.

[ related topics: Quotes Artificial Intelligence ]

Sorry for the tracking spew on this link, but I think it's part of an article share. Anyway, high school chemistry teacher goes for "spew back what I wanted you to say on the test, rather than what's correct". And reading this article is giving me flashbacks.

San Francisco Chronicle: A Silicon Valley family wanted their son’s science test graded fairly. It became a battle

The district failed to acknowledge that the teacher’s answer violated scientific fact as well as the publisher’s answer key, which confirmed the correct answer was heat and light, since “combustion is a chemical reaction that typically releases energy in the form of heat and light, which makes it an exothermic process.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bay Area Sociology Consumerism and advertising Graphics California Culture Marketing Databases LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

Renaissance Petaluma inaugural meeting to introduce the team and also showcase Charlie Parker (YouTube video)

Della Fattoria opened its doors Monday night October 27, 2025 to introduce a new group committed to being "for" a positive vision for future growth of downtown Petaluma. It was a lively scene and a packed house.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Video Real Estate ]

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to:

agentic AI? no thx, I’m way too old to pretend my Sims have complex inner lives

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Eeenteresting: Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation. Uses a double-indirection pointer scheme to keep pointers the platform size, but track the metadata.

Via lobste.rs

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

I talk a lot about how my blog software is two and a half decades old, but in cleaning some stuff up recently I found remnants of a system I wrote to provide web support for an iOS app that was circa iPhone 3, and bit rot is also a thing.

From paths that may not be HTTPS compatible, to depending on external mapping services...

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Maps and Mapping iPhone ]

A dive into Grok, fact checking, and the unfortunate fashion and stylistic choices of Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol chief. Gizmodo: Grok Thinks This Border Patrol Chief Who Looks Like a Nazi Is Cindy Sherman — AI chatbots are terrible fact-checkers.

(Okay, I say "unfortunate", but he's projecting an image, and clearly wants the world to know that he aspires to Nazi or Soviet ideals, so... it's a choice. It conveys an image.)

Via ResearchBuzz.

[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Fashion ]

The Oaklandside: At I-980 block party, old-school West Oaklanders hold forth on redlining

“The I-980 was made to serve suburbanites, and look at all the homes and businesses from the Black community that had to pay for that,” Leonard, a consultant for the local decarbonization project EcoBlock, said, gesturing at the wooden model. “For people who don’t even live in Oakland, don’t pay taxes in Oakland, don’t pay taxes in our county, right?”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Bay Area Theater & Plays Community Government ]

Someone mentioned the "Ms AWs outage", and when I noted that Microsoft's product was Azure, said "Xerox was copiers, AWS is cloud".

Which is an interesting bit of semantic/trademark creep, and I wonder if it's good, or bad, for Amazon.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Interactive Drama Humor Books Microsoft moron Copyright/Trademark ]

I mean, yeah, it's an LLM tuned to prey on incels, of course it's gonna do this: This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says.

As Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com observes:

You have an #LLM #AI trained on data from the Internet. You have a dial you can twiddle to select content models which make that LLM seem right or left wing in it's political output.

The right side of the dial does largely work, but it also means your LLM does this:

> https://beige.party/@adhdeanasl/115457073318432876

Now, ask yourself this question: Why is that?

Because the answer will tell you an awful lot about the difference in the underlying content model between what you perceive as right or left wing #politics.

Or: yeah. The pedocon theory is real.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture moron Nudity Current Events Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Sports Net Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

I am a supporter of Chris Kluwe for State Assembly, and I am begging GMail to use different truncation logic for email names...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Oh cool, when you get a nullability specifier wrong in an Objective-C header file that's getting converted to Swift, XCode gives you an error message that takes like 5 clicks to find the actual error message, and doesn't remotely reference the header file until you get to the raw text. Neat.

Last week my mom came to visit, and she has ... alternative ... believes on health and healthcare. I have spent a lot of time chasing down some of her assertions, sometimes they're nebulous cause and effects things (like the RFK Jr thing suggesting that circumcision leads to autism via acetaminophen), sometimes they're contextual (yes, the Covid MRNA vaccines may have some negative impacts on cancer rates, aside from the unexpected positive effects on some cancer treatments).

But I've spent a bunch of time trying to understand why she believes some of the things she does, indeed, why I believe some of the things I do. So this is kinda fascinating...

The Conversation: Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength

Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.

Journal of Social Psychology: Symbolic show of strength: a predictor of risk perception and belief in misinformation Randy Stein, Abraham M. Rutchick, Alice Y. Sin & Luis F. Jarrin Rueda, it's worth skimming.

More generally, the question of whether symbolic beliefs are “real” might obscure how people actually think about truth. A future direction for the misinformation literature could move beyond unidimensional ratings of belief toward acknowledging perceptions of different types of “truth.” Zmigrod et al. (Citation2023) argue that beliefs should be understood as not being single values but distributions, with some people having wider distributions and being more open to misinformation. We add that wider distributions might be a sign of openness to both rational and symbolic truth, underscoring need for more finer-grained operationalizations of “belief.”

Via ResearchBuzz.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Pop Culture ]

Recall for Linux

Are you forced to work with Linux?

Do you miss the convenience of Microsoft spying on you and keeping track of everything?

Fear not! This amazing tool will bring back all those great Windows Recall features that you have been missing:

• 🌲 Stores all your sensitive data in a convenient, easily accessible database
• ⏲️ 24/7 screencaptures of everything you do
• 🥳 Image to text conversion with OCR
• 😇 Index and store everything your friends tell you over chat apps or e-mail; if it's on your screen we've got you covered!

Worth taking a quick gander at the recall-for-linux.exe shell script...

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Spam Open Source moron Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

Ouch. Today's Timdle got me hard, from Angolan independence to Uno to population...

https://www.timdle.com/daily

Kafka is fast -- I'll use Postgres

Typically, you’d expect Postgres to run more expensive than Kafka at a certain scale, simply because it wasn’t designed to be efficient for this use case. Not here though. Running Kafka yourself would cost the same. Running the same workload through a Kafka vendor will cost you at least $50,000 a year. 🤯

Or: sure, you can get some more performance out of specialized databases, but development tools for Postgres are way way better, and hardware to run it on is generally speeding up faster than your grown and whatever additional performance under heavy load that the specialized solutions would get you.

Which... well... circa 2000 I was writing message passing and thread management code in C to process XML queries in a distributed database for an application that was, at the time, "web scale", single digit millions of authed queries per day, and saying "ya know, we could do this in Perl with PostgreSQL and..."

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Weblogs Perl Open Source Theater & Plays Writing Law Sports Databases hubris ]

Cassandrich @dalias

After this is over, the White House is going to have to be town down again. There's really not going to be any other way to ensure that all of thesurveillance devices have been removed from deep inside the walls.

[snip]

RealGene ☣️ @RealGene@hachyderm.io

@dalias

It's going to be a nightmare when all the foreign and domestic surveillance devices interfere with each other.

They really need to hold a spectrum auction before this goes too far…

[ related topics: Race Real Estate ]

they/them might be giants ☭ @babadookspinoza@mastodon.social

You don’t need to use a password anymore, you just need like six different devices to talk to each other while you take a picture of them with a seventh, at an hour and minute corresponding to a verification code sent to you by psychic energies.

Luke Maximo Bell — I Built a 100% Solar Powered Drone - Will It Fly? (YouTube video)

A quadcopter running just off of on-board solar panels. Not sure he ever gets it out of ground effect, but still pretty darned impressive. At the end of the video he says that he wants to do more panels and break the record for longest flying drone, which I'm looking forward to.

[ related topics: Movies Aviation Sports Video Photovoltaics ]

Irish Examiner — Tributes pour in for Mary 'May' McGee whose Supreme Court case helped end [Ireland's] contraception ban

She recalled telling the judge: “Religion is important, but I still think we have a right to live as human beings. We are husband and wife, and we cannot live as brother and sister.”

Mr McGee, equally bluntly, told the court: “I’d prefer to see her use contraceptives than be placing flowers on her grave.”

The ban was overturned in November 1973.

Via

[ related topics: Religion moron Theater & Plays Law Current Events Marriage ]

This: That Frisian Girl-ish @thatfrisiangirlish@blahaj.zone

@peter_sc@chaos.social LLM writing sets off all the alarm bells that I had to develop for spotting insincere, duplicitous communication with malicious intent, as used by a person displaying more red flags than you can spot at a Chinese military parade.<br/< If that is "the right way", then going it is quite literally selling my soul, and I'd rather go very wrong ways than come off as a person communicating like that.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing ]

Interesting single-input (click to release) game incorporating pinball dynamics, marching legions, breakout sort of behaviors. PinBol.

[ related topics: Games ]

Related to some local discussions I'm having around Georgism and the practicalities and unintended side-effects of land value and vacancy taxes: Lyle Solla-Yates @Lyle@cville.online

A very short intro from #detroit : “Detroit’s Land Value Tax Plan is a way for Detroit voters to decide whether to cut homeowners’ taxes by an average of 17% and pay for it by increasing taxes on abandoned buildings, parking lots, scrapyards, and other similar properties.“

Detroit’s Land Value Tax Plan (pdf).

[ related topics: Politics Architecture Real Estate Government ]

Saved off so I can find it: Common Ground: Georgists and Chicago's Growth, 1890- 1930 Mason Gaffney

Blaise Brignac writing on Specter Ops: A Gentle Crash Course to LLMs, particularly for its long discussion of security issues.

As previously discussed, LLMs are just brains in a jar operating in much the same way a hyperintelligent 4-yo would after binging on state fair sweet tea and cotton candy. To correct this, they have been wrapped in agentic structures, so we need to talk about that.

There's obviously a lot of stuff with having the LLMs write prompts to have less privileged LLMs do subtasks, and work through layers of that, and this discusses some of those mitigation strategies, but... yeah... this is more "let's give random things access to our data" with levels of obfuscation that package management repos can only dream of...

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing Work, productivity and environment Community ]

Foiled by Guiness in today's Timdle. https://www.timdle.com/daily

I hope that the big Santa Rosa hazmat spill yesterday involves some penalties for the employer that undoubtedly strong-armed their workers into stupidly transporting stuff in a pickup truck that should not have been packaged that way.

But some low wage worker is undoubtedly gonna get screwed.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]

Stop Citing AI (dot com)

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

FBI arrests multiple law enforcement officers in sprawling Mississippi Delta and Tennessee drug conspiracy takedown.

“We learned of the community’s distrust of select law enforcement officers due to concerns of corruption,” Eikhoff said. “Law enforcement is only effective when the communities they protect can trust that law enforcement officers are honest in serving the community’s interest. Mississippians deserve and rightfully expect officers to obey their oath.”

[ related topics: Health Law Enforcement Chattanooga Community Conspiracy Government ]

AI use makes us overestimate our cognitive performance

The finding adds to a rapidly growing volume of research indicating that blindly trusting AI output comes with risks like ‘dumbing down’ people’s ability to source reliable information and even workforce de- skilling. While people did perform better when using ChatGPT, it’s concerning that they all overestimated that performance.

‘AI literacy is truly important nowadays, and therefore this is a very striking effect. AI literacy might be very technical, and it’s not really helping people actually interact fruitfully with AI systems’, says Welsch

Elsevier/Scie nceDirect paywalled: AI makes you smarter but none the wiser: The disconnect between performance and metacognition

SSRN preprint: Ai Makes You Smarter, But None the Wiser: The Disconnect between Performance and Metacognition

Via Pivot to AI: AI makes you think you’re a genius when you’re an idiot.

[ related topics: Language moron Theater & Plays Current Events Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]