Flutterby™! (short)

Finished CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring last night. Read it on the suggestion of a friend. I forget the context in which it came up, but...

It makes a compelling case that the LAPD and DA's office told a story about what happened that wasn't consistent with the facts, and that there was a lot of bumbling between the LASD and the LAPD. It raised a lot of questions about why Manson and his entourage may have been treated very leniently before the murders by both law enforcement and the judiciary. It points out a whole lot of intersections between the CIA's MKUltra program and various aspects of the '60s counterculture that intersected with Mason and crowd.

What I don't know after reading this is how out of the norm these various connections are. We know from so many cases in the intervening years that the LAPD and the LASD as institutions have practices of altering crime scenes and reports to fit a DA's narrative, and that judges are wont to, say, give young women who are having their first interactions with the court a little leniency in hopes that they can straighten themselves out without punishment (since, let's be fair, that's the main remedy courts have).

We also know that various US federal agencies engage in some sketchy shit in terms of internal US policies, and what university research gets funded, and a lot of this stuff may have been cleaned up a bit in the intervening years, with IRBs and all.

And the book acknowledges all of this.

So, yeah, a good read in understanding how, for instance, "conservative" factions act to make sure that the counter-culture acts in the ways that they fear, in seeing a lot of how prosecutors and "law" enforcement act to reinforce their initial suspicions, in how so much of society is intertwined. I recommend it from that front.

But frustrating (and, again, the author acknowledges this) that in the end this is the tangled yarn of a connection board without a clear picture emerging. It's the tale of the decisions a society makes, without an overarching story.

Fascinating read, I'm glad I went through it, but still trying to figure out what it means.

OpenAI CRO Tells Staff Anthropic Inflates Run Rate by $8 Billion:

The compute section reads like a second front. OpenAI told its investors four days earlier that Anthropic is "operating on a meaningfully smaller curve," projecting 30 gigawatts of OpenAI capacity by 2030 against 7 to 8 gigawatts for Anthropic by end-2027. Today OpenAI runs roughly 1.9 gigawatts. Anthropic runs 1.4. "Even at the high end of that range, our ramp is materially ahead and widening," the investor memo read.

Gotta say that, on the one hand, I get it, on the other hand measuring success by energy consumed is kinda like measuring programmer productivity with lines of code written or AI tokens billed or something.

Car headed to strip club crashes into Avondale violin shop

“We also were able to recover seven cellphones, one of which was on and indicated that the party was traveling to Pin-Ups,” Bryant said.

Via Tara Calishain, who noted:

🎶 That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia 🎶

Remember those pictures of ChongLy Scott Thao, a U.S. citizen of Hmong ancestry, in a plaid blanket and blue shorts, and nothing else, being escorted through the snow by ICE thugs?

Ramsey County officials investigate alleged kidnapping of St. Paul man by federal officers

Fuck yeah. Take them down.

In linking to Politico: The whisper network that caught up to Eric Swalwell, David Dayen ‪@ddayen.bsky.social wrote:‬

Several important nuggets in here:

• Swalwell was rebuilding Newsom's inner circle; he was the establishment hope

• One lobbyist: "Were we willing to delude ourselves or not ask questions that should have been asked? 1000%"

• His campaign started sending cease-and-desists last year

Via

Dragon in a Fez:

keep thinking about how I wrote in my dissertation about how every time a new form of public/social space emerges it’s immediately popular with kids and teenagers who see it as a chance at freedom and then adults colonise it and kick them out. this happened with malls in the 80s and diners in the 50s and pool halls in the 20s. my dad was doing research on this trend in like 1975. and I was like “yeah so this is going to happen to the internet” and then five years later every government suddenly decided to ban kids from everywhere online. I hate being right especially when I don’t even get paid for it

The Onion: Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto.

Via.

OMG. There have been a number of companies making plastic construction toy bricks compatible with Lego bricks. Now Utah has entered the chat: Brick 'em Young, including sets for various Mormon temples, and a nativity set.

Via Sean Conner.

Futurism: The Effects of AI-Generated Code Tearing Through Corporations Is Actually Kind of Funny — Womp womp!

Prior to modern technology, wealthy patrons had to pay actual artists to create grotesque charicatures using religious imagery to valorize themselves.

Just pondering about what's "easy" with an LLM coding assistant, and what's hard, and how the languages I've used have influenced the kinds of code I've written, and how the use of an LLM assistant is going to change what our software looks like.

Like: If we can't get our LLM assistant to fix a UI issue, are we just gonna abandon that interface mode?

Fascinating article on people deliberately colliding automobiles into trucks for the insurance payout: New Yorker: Letter from New Orleans: The Car-Crash Conspiracy — High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy.

Via.

Neville Park @nev@status.nevillepark.ca

ahem In the original novel Dracula, it must be a crucifix (that is, a fancy schmancy cross with Jesus on it) to properly repel Dracula. In later works, a simple cross suffices. This implies Dracula is getting more Protestant over time. In this essay I will

Oh, yes, this object has the method as_secs_f64(), that's definitely letting me abstract out the code to the appropriate floating point size for whatever target platform this ends up running on.

Jewish Currents: When Jewishness Means Genocide

My partner and I were hiking recently on an international trail in Spain. People passing each other on the trail would say hello in different languages. I was joking about the possibility of saying “shalom” to people. And it immediately became clear to both of us that today saying “shalom” would be provocative. I was thinking about how the word “shalom,” which is a nice word, a word of greeting, opening, peace, has become a marker of hate, in a sense. And then it dawned on me that there was a different but comparable process with the word “heil.” In German, it basically means holiness, peace, wholesomeness— good things. But it became the word for evil. You would not utter it today, in Germany or anywhere. And the comparison between these two words was very heavy, but it was there. It was not an intellectual process. It was kind of an instinctive feeling.

Via

Soatok Dreamseeker @soatok@furry.engineer

Some furries: "hehe I'm furry trash"

Me: "yiff-raff"

Finally, we've found the corporate role that AI can replace: Meta spins up AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to engage with employees

The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI.

Via