Friday January 10th, 2025
If I've got friends who are Mac (relatively recent with decent quantities of RAM) users who'd be willing to give me a bit of Zoom time to discuss work project and prospects, I'd love to have some conversations and honest feedback.
And, yes, even if, or perhaps especially if, you bounced off the videos I sent around last year.
My sheets are versatile.
Hugs to my friends with trauma from the Tubbs Fire who are having their social media feeds filled with all of the pictures from the Southern California fires and having flashbacks.
Thursday January 9th, 2025
When your feed checker code trips up because an RSS feed in the wild is a framework of empty elements...
RT Hein Ragas @heinragas@mublog.nl
Looking at the news coming out of LA about the wildfires, I am reminded on a tweet I once read:
"You will experience climate change as a series of increasingly wild disaster videos, until one day you are the one making the video."
In light of the LA area fires: If you are not yet aware that you live in fire country (it's coming, it's just a matter of probability), you may not be familiar with Watch Duty. Watch Duty is an app and web site that stemmed out of the 2022 organizing to capture an arsonist in the Russian River area. It's run by a 501c3 non-profit, and the app is invaluable for the latest info on fires, and the organization is worthy of membership/recurring donation.
And you can set up alerts for counties, so you can know when you need to worry about that smoke...
And if you don't know about that 2022 organizing, the "Manhunt on Bohemian Highway" episode of the Nocturne podcast (mentioned previously) is well worth a listen.
Picture of the Mission & Mountain View concrete
I'm not saying that epoxying flex posts to this fog line at 5AM, that we're removed by city workers a few business hours later, led to the stop signs and actual concrete that just went in on the corner of Mission Dr & Mountain View Ave, there was a lot of other stuff that happened too, but hell yeah.
"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."
https://genius.com/Raymond-chandler-red-wind-chapter-1-annotated
Wednesday January 8th, 2025
Echoing my experiences with trying to get Google Maps to navigate: RT Les Orchard @lmorchard@hackers.town
But, like, a voice interface? In a car?
"wait wait everybody shut up, turn down the music, roll up the windows, i need to tell the car something"
Account security gets harder:
If you're an Apple user and I spoof your phone number in a call to the legitimate Apple Customer Support line (800-275-2273), I can force Apple to send you a system level "Apple Account Confirmation" prompt to all of your signed-in devices.
Which means that a phishing operation has a fairly credible pathway in which to convince you that they're Apple from a phone call... That they initiated, true, but still, it's a vector.
Account for National Studies: Many studies assert that long-term travel demand elasticity associated with new lane miles is consistently around 1.0. This means that highway travel demand tends to rise to fill new capacity over time, reducing the congestion relief of highway capacity expansion projects, while negatively impacting regional air quality through induced vehicle miles traveled. Project environmental and other analyses should incorporate best-in-class research and analysis on travel demand.
RT Erin 💽✨ @erincandescent@erincandescent.net
Remember: If a "second" is 1/86400th of a day, its UT1
If a "second" is "defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1", its UTC/TAI.
RT John-Paul Keates @jpkeates@mastodon.social
Remember, if you misspell armageddon it’s not the end of the world.
Tuesday January 7th, 2025
Writing intersection code, and just put the divide outside the test for the position along the line against the denominator, so I could just do (t>=0 && t<=1), rather than having an additional sign check.
I feel so dirty, and like I need to hand in my graphics geek card.
(In other news, modern hardware and code only run on major user choices, baybee)
Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths
“A comparison of Tesla’s design choices to those of L2 peers identified Tesla as an industry outlier in its approach to L2 technology by mismatching a weak driver engagement system with Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities,” the agency said.
NHTSA Additional Information Regarding EA22002
Throughout the PE21020 and EA22002 investigations, ODI observed a trend of avoidable crashes involving hazards that would have been visible to an attentive driver
(Yesterday's Lex Fridman comment was a reminder to me that he got his big break with a non-peer reviewed paper shilling for Tesla.)
Re "Apple Intelligence" getting warning labels because their notification summaries keep massively misrepresenting the news stories that they're notifying of (Gruber, Six Colors, Apple responding to the BBC) Guy English @Gte@mastodon.social suggests:
Use the Apple logo. If you’re going to usurp the hard won decades of trusted reporting the BBC has with your own automated hot take you should put your reputational wood behind the arrow. Put your logo on what you generate from other people’s work.
Monday January 6th, 2025
Yeesh, what do you do with people who send you Lex Fridman links in the year twenty twenty five?
(Speaking of this morning's various threads on bullshit over substance, and how we're gonna have to recover society from the coming destruction by the followers of cults of personality.)
Tara turned me on to The Talented Mr Altman from Ed Zitron's podcast Better Offline (YouTube video), and it's kind of astounding how much society has just accepted that "bag culture", as in "yeah, it's all a scam, just make sure you're not the one left holding the bag" has become normalized.
Like crypto opened the gates to "yeah, it's a scam, and it's gonna collapse, but if you don't get in...", and now it's companies selling fusion power, or, of course, AI, and whatever else, and everyone's just like "yep, but can you pass the bag?"
And, of course, the banks who've been lending huge sums are gonna, once again, call for bailouts, and we're once again gonna have to pony up national debt to pay off those who enabled the scammers, and the scammers are gonna continue to have an outsized influence on policy...
The "good" news is that maybe when this all comes tumbling down we'll have excess electrical capacity and can shut down all of the fossil fuel excess capacity that's spinning up. But we're gonna have a shitload of empty data centers.
Okay, Rust geeks, dumb newbie Q: I need a circular reference, so I'm going to just keep indices in a `Vec<Box<dyn ParseNode >>` arena.
The ParseNode trait has a `fn add_node(&mut self,...)` so that I can add the reference.
I want a `pub fn node(&self, idx : usize) -> &mut Box<dyn ParseNode>` to access that node, but I cannot figure out how to annotate the array to let me return the mutable reference that would let me call my `p.node(idx).add_node(other_idx)` method.
Just for the opening paragraph: Cato Institute: Why legal immigration is nearly impossible
America traditionally had few immigration restrictions, but since the 1920s, the law has banned most aspiring immigrants. Today, fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. Immigrants cannot simply get an exception to immigrate any more than restaurateurs in the 1920s could simply get an exception to sell alcohol. Instead, just as Prohibition granted only a few exemptions for religious, industrial, or medical uses of alcohol, people seeking an exception to immigration prohibition must also fit into preexisting carve-outs for a select few.
The fact that this gives state enforcement of undercompensated labor is a design feature.
Not to catastrophize, but what's gonna happen to the economy when Tesla stock collapses and OpenAI is revealed to be just another player in a commodity market for a product that isn't all that useful?
Sunday January 5th, 2025
Just put a reminder in my calendar to post "I don't want a lot for Christmas, abolish parking minimums" in December...
Really enjoyed this latest episode of Switched On Pop crossover with the OFF BOOK podcast, on performing improv musicals, and the structure of musicals vs pop songs, and the evolution of musical theater structure.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/...book/id934552872?i=1000682219145
Saturday January 4th, 2025
As we ponder how dedicated the search for Luigi Mangione was, and that Yeremi Colino's killers are still at large, and that Brianna Boston is facing terrorism charges while Brad Spafford has not been so charged, I'm finding this a worthwhile read on differential justice: Qasim Rashid: America's HELL Corporations
In the 30 days since the UnitedHealth CEO was killed, nearly 6000 Americans have died due to lack of healthcare access due to these exploitative HELL Corporations. And 30 days from now, some 6000 more Americans will have died a similar fate.
Friday January 3rd, 2025
I was smirking, until I hit their footer, and now my office-mates are looking at me weirdly 'cause full-on guffaw. https://getfullyear.com/
The Rust "aha"-ness continues, I figured out a lot of my assumptions about references vs borrowing, but I'm still trying to figure out the right way to borrow for write from my arena.
A Knight Rider reboot where the Hasselhof character is played by an anthro fox, and the car is a slightly down-market Pontiac commuter with sports stylings.
Call it The Fiero and the Furry.
Argh. Okay, so after much reading, it seems like the "Arena" method is the way to handle circular data structures in Rust: Keep a usize handle into a Vec<Rc<dyn ParseNode>> data structure, dereference all of those before use.
Great. Except that I add my numeric value node, get back an integer, further down dereference out of the arena to add a further integer reference, and get 'the size of `dyn ParseNode` cannot be statically determined'.
Like it's an Rc, why does it need? Sigh.
As investigators pick through the wreckage of the Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump Tower Las Vegas, private rental facilitator company Turo is trying hard to distance itself from that event and the dude who drove a similarly rented vehicle into the crowd down in New Orleans, and Tesla is secretly recalling Cybertruck batteries, a Cybertruck caught fire at an Atlanta dealership, and people are wondering if we have a U.S. servicemember problem.
Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M
In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri."
Apple to pay $95 million to settle Siri privacy lawsuit
Among other places, Via Ashley M. Gjøvik and Micah Lee.
Thursday January 2nd, 2025
Argh. Got to the end with three pieces missing! But aside from that...
After our last puzzle (which may have been that mediocre print of Starry Night?) I thought I might be over puzzles, but my mom had sent us a this one and with the holidays it felt right. started it, and really enjoyed it, the mix between large structure and deep detail meant it felt nicely paced, lots of similar but different texture in ways that made sense to the art, well printed.
Wednesday January 1st, 2025
The Atlantic: The Walmart Effect (hopefully with gift link attached)
New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.
Using a stacked difference-in- differences approach, we find that the opening of a Supercenter leads to a 2 percentage point (16%) increase in poverty. This increase is channeled through declining annual earnings and persists for 10 years following the Supercenter’s entry. Increases in poverty are particularly strong for younger and less-educated adults, and for adults with pre-treatment incomes below the national median. Moreover, Walmart Supercenter openings lead to a $200 (or 16%) per household per year increase in government income transfers received, and a $920 (or 5%) per household per year decrease in tax revenues.
I first show Supercenter entry sharply increased labor market concentration. Supercenters were able to hire large numbers of retail workers with zero increase in average earnings, in- dicating Walmart had wage-setting power. I then show Supercenter entry caused large declines in overall local employment and earnings, particularly among local goods-producers, indicating Walmart displaced manufacturing demand away from local producers and to its own national and international suppliers. In counties with a Supercenter, subsequent exogenous minimum wage increases led to significant growth in aggregate and retail employment. These results run counter to predictions for competitive labor mar- kets, and indicate Walmart Supercenters gradually accumulated and exercised monopsony power, with negative consequences for workers.