Flutterby™! (short)

While your local PD is crowing about the arrests they've made because of Flock cameras, it's worth thinking about one-way technology... Ars Technica: Man jailed for a month despite Flock showing he was 5 miles from crime scene... Which is a slightly different story than A Flock license plate reader linked a San Diego man to a violent crime. He was five miles away, making me think that maybe Ars is using AI summarization or AI headline writing or something?

Anyway, yeah...

The victim said he recognized Parra. “I know, because the jacket and the beard. The skin color,” reads the police report.

Emphasis mine.

Tyler Jagt in The Chronicle of Higher Education: My Students Can’t Read — The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near- infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

If you don't want to wrangle a login/subscription. Via.

LibreOffice: An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement

In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010.

These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty.

Electrek: Carvana’s bet on Slate is ACTUALLY a bet on itself, as the future of automotive retail.

If you're intrigued by thinking about story structure, I really enjoyed Uncanny Magazine: The Protagonist Problem by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton

In talking about the BoingBoing link to Vadim Drobinin: Am I a Bad Friend? , an observation of something I've felt, from ‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

It was at one party that I ran into a couple of friends I hadn't seen in a few weeks, and after a round of "How ya doin?" we ran out of things to talk about because we were so on-line we KNEW what was going on in their broader lives.

Elf M. Sternberg ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

We didn't have the gaps that took time to fill, that justified talking to each other, that justified spending time together.

Maybe the rise of TTRPGs and the like is a way to create a context for being together and trading synthetic experiences since the real experiences we used to trade are gone.

Short little video of an easter egg in the Lego Batman game that's awesome for those of us of a certain age. Via.

Edit: Fediverse post and thread, including BASIC source code and Browser based Commodore 64 emulator.

Arkansas state trooper resigns after wife files 'white supremacist' messages in divorce records

In a court filing, Alana requested sole custody of the children, with Michael given visitation rights so long as he completes a parenting course "in order to limit the hatred and prejudice that he has towards people."

The comments from the Arkansas State Police rep are extremely telling. Yikes.

Via.

Good read on why conversations with LLMs aren't protected as attorney-client privilege: Elizabeth X Guo writing in the Harvard Law Review re United States v. Heppner.

The Heppner court assumed sub silentio that Claude was more like a non- attorney human than a tool. One might reasonably question that assumption. On the very same day of Judge Rakoff’s oral decision, the district court for the Eastern District of Michigan (in a civil case concerning work-product protection for a pro se litigant’s ChatGPT- generated materials) emphasized that “ChatGPT (and other generative AI programs) are tools, not persons” and represent “a litigant’s internal mental impressions reformatted though software.”

With the news that Meta's AI bot is being used to steal accounts, hat tip to everyone who's used "Facebook Login" to trust Meta with their identity on third party services.