Flutterby™! (short)

This photograph of the former Phoenix Assurance Building on St Vincent Street in central Glasgow caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

• 7(!?) stories with a super tall first floor (perhaps short top floor), and yet doesn't dominate the street.
• Architecturally it reminded me of Petaluma's Mutual Relief Building, which at 63 feet for 3 stories is likely shorter, but still doesn't feel as tall as it actually is.
• Also in a city with a tidal river.

Yahoo! Finance: Anthropic warns AI could 'self-replicate' across smart home devices, become 'challenging' to shut down. Via Jon_Alper @jon_alper@mastodon.online who notes that:

It’s not a warning to say “my product could do you harm”. It’s attempted extortion.

The Guardian: AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models ‘months away’ from self- replication on smart devices, via Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@hachyderm.io:

Anthropic CEO Warns There's an LLM Under Your Bed While Holding Flashlight Beneath His Chin

We absolutely need better models for embedded device security and firewalling, and better consumer control over what processes are running where. The Mirai botnet, BADBOX 2.0, Mirai variants and so forth (I started looking, and it just keeps going), are real. Keurig Coffee Makers sometimes use 100G/day of data.

But... we really need to be using the Computer Fraud and Abuse act for its intended purpose against these threats.

aeva @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place

thanks to ai, saying you're "dating a model" is a lot less likely to impress anyone nowadays

Yay! Voted.

mcc @mcc@mastodon.social

@cxiao The version of this that made the situation click for me was tech people saying "ha ha! people are so sloppy about this stuff, they're saying they hate 'data centers' just because they don't like AI! but they need data centers to run their apps!". But the person saying this forgot to wonder whether people *like* their "apps" or whether they just use the "apps" because the non-app way of doing it has been taken away

More Wrong: Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive (Via)

Palantir CTO Says Some AI Researchers Are So Sure It Will Cure Cancer They’ve Started 'Smoking' — Warns Both AI Extremes Reflect ‘Social Delusion’. The other side of "both" is AI doomerism. I'm standing by my feeling that being a meat proxy lacks future value.

Now *this* is how you do a political ad:

• https://www.instagram.com/reels/DeZw-VitCjL/
• https://bsky.app/profile/green...r.bsky.social/post/3mxptc3s6zk2a

(would love to find a better links for the video, the ad is for https://shakeup-la.com , the LA chapter of the DSA)

In linking to Philadelphia Inquirer: The SS United States is set to be sunk in mid-November, Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social noted:

I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards.

Remember back in the early days of computers, there were computer stores in every strip mall...

Charleston AI

Bring us the AI you already use. Our Charleston engineers build skills, connectors, and plugins into it — or fix what is broken — and hand you a working AI before you leave the lab.

The video (on Reddit).

Okay, lazyweb, my voice teacher and I need a break from "Moody's Mood for Love". Suggestions for vocally difficult, musically interesting songs?

Moody's has been good for definition in long runs (great fun asking Logic to analyze notes and looking at each one sharp or flat), and timing.

A good little thread from tef @tef@mastodon.social on being a meat proxy.

it's funny how i got told "you will be left behind" and as it turns out the skill you need to develop is simply spending more tokens when any problems occur

Eric Eggert @yatil@yatil.social

Oh man, don't y'all also hate it when rogue potato chips break containment and access your stomach?

There's just nothing you can do.

zip @zip@wandering.shop

We already had a job in software engineering that involved giving vague instructions and expecting a quick answer, not understanding what the computer is doing, letting technical debt balloon then being surprised when it costs you, and being easily bamboozled by a shiny demo: it's called management.

There are particular annoyances this misses (Munging PDF downloads!), and a good feature to add to attract users would be better reader mode (or maybe that's just uBlock), and also, Brave? Really? but a good read.

I didn't leave Firefox, it left me.

David Timothy: Firefox Didn’t Just Lose the Browser War. Mozilla Slowly Gave It Away | HackerNoon. Via.

Also, truth: :: Asta :: @aud@spectre.asta.lgbt

old browser wars: netscape vs microsoft
new browser wars: browser vs you

A friend with whom I walk for coffee once a week has been working on Rinzler Synth, and I've been a little unhappy with the direction that SquareDesk has been going and thinking about audio processing a bit, so when the extraordinary claims about the Fast Fourier Transform came about I was intrigued. This is a good dive:

Ben Recht — arg min : Faster Fourier Transforms

The OpenAI algorithm for the FFT is less a breakthrough and more a malicious exploit.

Via.

A trip down memory lane trying to find a hobby shop of my childhood lead to finding mention of my dad leading a design of a sulfur hexafluoride gas-insulated transformer. And a neat history of an industry now gone.

https://ethw.org/Archives:Transformers_at_Pittsfield,_part_1

Today's "duh, of course": LR @lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place

that is an attack angle i hadn't even considered yet, which i just learned is actually happening:

1. be scammer
2. advertise claude API access
3. route user requests to cheaper model
4. extract secrets from logs