Flutterby™!

HTTP response codes for food servers

'Solano Gap': California Forever scrambles to create a need.

The Backstory: With a poll showing 70% of Solano County voters opposed to California Forever, the tech mega city a group of Silicon Valley billionaires wants to build between Fairfield, Vacaville and Rio Vista, the project appears dead on arrival. But don't expect the tech billionaires, who have unlimited money, to give up without a fight.

California needs a ton more housing, but... we need it as infill, and I've seen enough "we're gonna rearchitect everything" fail in the face of "the current system evolves" to be extremely skeptical of attempts to build utopias. Of course there's not nearly as much profit in fixing things as there is in ignoring the problems and doing greenfield development, and that's a social problem we need to be fixing.

snuffleupagus on MeFi:

The singularity is the new cold fusion.

Bike Portland: New ODOT map shows fatal traffic crashes in real time

Beyond engineering, enforcement, education, data is a huge part any good road safety program. Similar to the City of Portland and Metro, ODOT wants zero deaths to occur on the entire system. They’ve stated a goal of “no deaths or life-changing injuries on Oregon’s transportation system by 2035.” And that’ll be an extremely tall order given current trends.

Meanwhile, in California... Active Transportation Program Cut Because Administration Wants to Prioritize Highways

The Newsom administration wants to cut the ATP because Caltrans is tired of having its state highway funding tapped.

Just realized that I'm so old, I remember when AI was going to be the sorts of information models and "expert systems" and knowledgebases that people are now saying is the necessary technology to tie to LLMs to give them the reasoning ability...

AI is *so* useful for summarizing. To be fair to Bing, it did give better info a little further down in excerpts from actual search results, but the summary to "how many calories are in a 34oz serving of Stouffer's meat lover's lasagna?" was "360 calories".

OpenAI strikes deal to bring Reddit content to ChatGPT and... uh... someone thinks this is going to improve the quality of OpenAI answers?

The future is people acting on shitpost derived generated text as legal advice.

Seeing a lot of people condemn Harrison Butker's speeches, but not a whole lot of people pointing to the college administrations that hired him for commencement speeches, knowing *exactly* what he was going to say.

And, like, the Catholic schools, sure, they're dedicated to suppression of women and covering for child abusers, I get that, but Georgia Tech? Can you imagine being a woman and a student there knowing the administration signed off on that?

In a speech to the CALLERLAB convention recently, Ted Lizotte (and the Board of Governors) suggested coalescing the Basic 1 & 2, SSD, Mainstream, and Plus square dance programs into just MS and Plus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUaSE0LbyvE

Feeling very much like we need a few more callers in this area so I can just dance, and continue exploring my voice by finding a band to sing with. Calling is fun, but but I don't think square dancing is the activity to build my community around.

Yesterday's LLM goofiness, and various stuff about the value of "prompt engineering", is definitely a window into how much humans will contort their own mechanisms for interaction in order to support the social biases around them.

I have been thinking a lot about things like "Do I need to learn Rust?", and ... I'm beginning to think maybe I don't?

References are like jumps:

Unfortunately, most people seem to have taken the wrong lesson from Rust. They see all of this business with lifetimes and ownership as a dirty mess that Rust has had to adopt because it wanted to avoid garbage collection. But this is completely backwards! Rust adopted rules around shared mutable state and this enabled it to avoid garbage collection. These rules are a good idea regardless.

I'm thinking about how I religiously avoided goto until Tom Duff pointed out how silly my code looked with all of those nested error checks. Maybe they're not a good idea regardless, and the reason we're not all using functional languages today is that trying to build programs that way just doesn't work very well?

I dunno, I'm kind of in a contrarian mood this morning...

facebook: because a laugh reaction on that meme 2 months ago when it was fresh, and from a friend, definitely means you want to see it fourteen gazillion times from every content thief who reposts it without attribution for the rest of time, while actual friends are posting life updates that get buried.

Inspired by https://toot.cat/@devopscats/112445057997076822 I asked Gemini to help me get a man and his 5 chickens across the river on a boat.

https://g.co/gemini/share/547a3f1855a5

Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR): CNN Needs to Buy Its Economic Reporters Access to the Internet

This story of people no longer being able to afford restaurant people is 180 degrees at odds with the data from Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on meals at restaurants. According to data from the BEA (Line 236), real spending at restaurants was 11.0 percent higher in the first quarter of this year than in the fourth quarter of 2019, the last quarter before the pandemic hit. Real spending at fast food restaurants (Line 242) increased even more rapidly, rising by 11.8 percent.

The problem with reporters willing to be stenographers for Applebee's marketing campaigns...

When ‘Lol, No’ Is Not Enough: Lawyer Explains Why Bogus Takedown Over ‘Fuck The LAPD’ Shirt Should Result In Paying Legal Fees

the Bluesky post.

In other news, don't actually fuck the police.

Went to a new to me book club last night (because they were talking about Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise) called "Books and Brews", that was held outside in Wickersham park.

When the "Brews" part was brought up, the consensus was that there wasn't really a place in Petaluma to go and have a beer with a group discussion any more. With Maguire's upstairs gone, everything else is too loud.

I think we need to do some serious consideration of our "third spaces".

RT Kenn White @kennwhite@mastodon.social

Incredible research at BlackHat Asia today by Tong Liu and team from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (在iie.ac.cn 的电子邮件经过验证)

A dozen+ RCEs on popular LLM framework libraries like LangChain and LlamaIndex - used in lots of chat-assisted apps including GitHub. These guys got a reverse shell in two prompts, and even managed to exploit SetUID for full root on the underlying VM!

Pictures of conference slides omitted, continuing: RT Kenn White @kennwhite@mastodon.social

Liu et al's preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.02926.pdf
BlackHat abstract: https://www.blackhat.com/asia-...grated-frameworks-and-apps-37215

and

Tong's Google Scholar for related work: https://scholar.google.com/citations

And Kevin Riggle @kevinriggle@ioc.exchange

@kennwhite I keep saying that LLM output should be treated like any other kind of untrusted arbitrary user-generated text

https://free-dissociation.com/...023/12/what-ai-safety-should-be/

So are people posting videos of themselves doing cover songs to YouTube actually getting sync licenses?

I use Google voice recorder on my phone to record my vocal lessons, and go back and work on songs from that. It helpfully marks regions of the recording with "Speech", "Music", and during my warm-up, when we're exploring the upper reaches of my range, "Dog".

Now need to go back to one of the sessions where we worked on "Hey There Lonely Girl" and see what it did with *that*....

Making an emulsified cheese sauce with non-aspirin Alka Seltzer to act as an emulsifier.

1/4 c. water, 2 non-aspirin Alka Seltzer tablets, let sit until the fizziness goes, add 2 T. butter, warm (they suggest a microwave, which I don't have), melt in 1½ cups shredded cheese, plus whatever other flavors (mustard, jalapeño, cayenne)...

So on the one hand, I'm on board with the context in which Kamala Harris is saying "We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that fucking door down."

On the other hand I'm like "once a cop, always a cop"...

https://mastodon.social/@charlotteclymer/112434684126138741

Slate: Nonmonogamy by the Numbers — Does having multiple partners make for less-satisfying relationships? We don’t have to judge—we can look at the data.

Because any time someone does a data driven takedown of the New York Times and The Atlantic, you know I'm in, especially if they're quoting Elisabeth “Eli” Sheff.

mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

@yhancik @darius The old thinking was that you should be rotating your gender every 90 days for security reasons but that’s proven to be an ineffective approach. Modern best practices are to use a unique and complex gender for every interaction, to avoid repetition and store them in a secure gender manager. This makes it easier to change genders when one relationship is compromised, and protects you against gender-stuffing attacks.

Seems like this is kinda related to "don't use biometrics for identity" thing.

Damn it, Facebook, it's "fewer".

(Image is of a Facebook prompt adding if I'd like to "...see more or less posts like this in Feed".)

Skimming through this thread on "does CoPilot actually increase productivity", and I have this feeling that a lot of people using programmer-"helper" tools like that aren't using expressive languages.

And I include the C preprocessor in "expressive languages".

https://lobste.rs/s/u9kgo4/did_github_copilot_really_increase_my

My mom.posts Weston A Price Foundation events on Facebook, but every time I see "WAPF" in a post I wonder what her community has to do with Cardi B and Megan The StallIon

Unclear whether "plant-based barista milk" is milk from plant-based baristas, or...?

So many pictures from last night's aurora, so much "that one is cool", but did I already upload it? So... Pretty sure I didn't post this one yet.

The moon did probably diminish seeing a bit

Though the colors didn't look this intense to the naked eye...

Okay, that excursion to Lake Sonoma was totally worth it.

Bagheera the cat is being inconspicuous.

With picture

Bagheera the cat is being inconspicuous.

That moment when you go "oooh" to the marketing mail from the fitness music vendor because their senior-focused "Retro Revival (Ok Boomer)" collection is likely exactly the right speed for square dancing.

And that uncomfortable dawning realization...

(It's okay, it has lyrics, it's not gonna work...)

Whoah: Tornado in Lincoln Nebraska on 04-26-2024. Dash-cam in parking lot. (YouTube video)

Another shot of the music stands.

All I need now is a band... And talent... Uhhh... Okay, maybe not the best project, then. Two of these are okay, two of these are pretty rough, all could use some attention to finishing, and I'm going back and forth on whether the legs need a locking mechanism. But I learned a lot about methods of work, know where I need to tune process, and got a couple of music stands that I'm not sure where to store...

How do I know Google search sucks now? I just went searching for a ChatGPT logo mashed up with Goatse, and found nothing.

And I *know* the Internet got there before I did.

Of all of the things I got from this amazing two hour masterclass with Steve Albini at SAE Australia, the incredible discussion about why use analog is the least of what I expected, but was so good.

It is hogwash like this rant on design which show that it was a mistake to ever give designers control over colors on the web, and CSS is awful, and we should go back to HTML v1 and let users set their own colors.

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesi...black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

Just so I can find it from all of my machines:

git config --global init.defaultBranch main