Flutterby™! (short)

Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hamoud cut racial disparities in traffic stops by changing what cops enforce (YouTube short video)

Told 'em to focus on moving violations, and... the video says that when he first came into office, nearly 50% of traffic violations were given to Black African American drivers. Dearborn is 3% Black, and day to day moving population is about 25% (and, yeah, we can talk a little bit about housing policy in that, huh?). After going after moving violations, tickets are down to 23-25% Black drivers.

Harpers: The End of Reading Is Here Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. (Gift Link via Elf Sternberg.)

That thread, and Elf's quote skeet of his link have some other choice bits.

The essay aggregates and touches on all sorts of ideas, from the Harvard student using LLMs to translate A Clockwork Orange into "modern English" to short-form videos, to...

One of the things I've been a cranky old man about, what with the decline of programming tools leading into the era of LLMs and vibe coding, is how programming used to be a skill, and when we let people who hadn't actually learned programming but had gotten college degrees in "computer science" into the workforce, we both got the extreme financialization of the activity, but also the decline of understanding.

And it occurs to me that LLMs are enabling these people to actually write code, and I'm not sure how I feel about that...

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            url: vnode.attrs.row_id
} as unknown as string);

statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged...

Seeing a number of people commenting on "A Metallurgist’s Doubts About Self-Replicating Probes", and it's making me think about "what if amino acids are the probe?"

https://www.centauri-dreams.or...s-about-self-replicating-probes/

Sigh. Web frameworks: Because one of the hardest problems in Computer Science is cache invalidation, and we're gonna try to abstract away the fact that caches exist, making the problem even harder.

Yes, it's Amazon, but the first in Cooper S. Becket's "Osgood" horror series, which I really enjoyed, is free on your Kindle app today: https://www.amazon.com/Osgood-...8acabde870449d400&language=en_US

Kotaku: A Train Sim Created By Just One Person Is Being Called The Best Ever Made

Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.

The pictures do make it look amazing. The game is Running Train (on Steam) . This has also introduced me to the Zuiki Mascon railway controller.

Via MeFi.

What would "heirloom quality" products, things worth passing down generations, look like, and is that even a goal worth pursuing?

Do we bother to build things to last, or do we just melt down the parts and repurpose them?

(Buildings, furniture, tech, tools, etc...)

Don’t 'never- skill' yourself with AI

If you rent your abilities from AI companies, other people can rent them too

Via.

And, yeah, don't de-skill yourself, either. And don't fool yourself that knowing how to pull the trigger press the button will lead to being respected in a decision making role...

Okay, so the line number error reported by the build process was from the bundler, not from Typescript, which is why it had nothing to do with the code I was looking at.

When I say that the appeal of LLMs for programming comes from modern languages and tools being shit: this is why.