Thursday March 6th, 2025
Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases.
But the explanation and Ramirez’s promise to educate himself on the use of AI wasn’t enough, and the judge chided him for not doing his research before filing. “It is abundantly clear that Mr. Ramirez did not make the requisite reasonable inquiry into the law. Had he expended even minimal effort to do so, he would have discovered that the AI-generated cases do not exist. That the AI-generated excerpts appeared valid to Mr. Ramirez does not relieve him of his duty to conduct a reasonable inquiry,” Judge Dinsmore continued, before recommending that Ramirez be sanctioned for $15,000.
I am not a lawyer, don't know that much about the legal profession, but I do not understand why the penalty for making up citations in court cases and legal proceedings is a slap on the wrist.
These are the 1st images of humpbacks having sex, and they're both males
Via Adrianna Tan, who brings the puns.
Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking, understanding EntrySign, the AMD Zen microcode signature validation vulnerability, including toolchains so you can hack on them yourself!
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes an announcement about dropping their ad provider relationship, and it really makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here for an ad aggregator that doesn't suck. Maybe even for vendors that don't suck?
Some promise that ads are going to be of reasonable size, aren't gonna mine crypto... Heck, it might even be possible to do a little vetting on vendors so that, unlike, say, Facebook, or those ad blocks at the bottom of smaller newspaper sites, we don't automatically say "ewww, scammy" and avoid clicking on them at all costs.
Wednesday March 5th, 2025
Molly White @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer: the critics who think we’ve bought out the government are refusing to engage with the nuanced and complicated fact that Trump used to be anti-crypto before we started spending hundreds of millions of dollars on politics
And then a screen shot image which reads:
“I find those comments misinformed at best, if I’m being generous, and defamatory at worst,” Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at Coinbase, told The Hill of the backlash.
Some criticism, Grewal argued, fails to consider Trump was once a critic of crypto and at one point called it a “scam.”
Grewal pointed out how Congress moved major legislation in 2023 on market structure, an issue that was met with bipartisan support. The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act in 2023 received support from 71 Democrats in the House.
“The fact of the matter is that President Trump did evolve and transform in his view on crypto, really starting in December 2023,” Grewal said. “In January 2024, we first started to engage with him and his team, but it was against a much more nuanced, complicated and complete history that I think a lot of the critics just don’t want to engage in.”
Worth the careful read: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)
According to AP, a grand jury indictment alleges that at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles County between July 2023 and December 2023, nearly 70 fights took place between 140 victims who were ages 12 to 18 years old, which officers allowed, and even encouraged, to happen.
LAist reports that the indictment includes 71 counts against the officers, most of which are for child abuse or child endangerment with aggravating factors, including the "vulnerability of the victims and the officer’s position of trust or confidence, which helped enable them to commit the offense."
The fascinating things about having blogged for 27 years is that I can go back and read my own political transformation, complete with cites of all of the "this is interesting" articles that accompanied it.
More things to resent my educational experience for.
Caught my eye for two reasons: Local playwright adapts Lake Luzerne drag story hour controversy into satirical show
“Drag Queen Story Hour: The Musical,” written by Neal Herr, draws on the controversy surrounding a proposed drag queen story event at the Rockwell Falls Public Library. The event was ultimately canceled after months of community conflict, which led to the library’s closure in September 2023 until its reopening in March 2024.
So, duh, relevant to my interests, but also premiering in Glens Falls New York. My grandparents lived in South Glens Falls, so I have some ancient memories of the area.
Tuesday March 4th, 2025
As if we needed any other clues that the tech industry isn't evidence-based: How many years have we known that optimal work hours per week for knowledge workers is far less than 40, and even that is about structuring a few hours of flow time per day?
And yet Sergey Brin is calling for 60 hours? Against all evidence?
Proof that the office isn't about productivity.
At last!
The thing about rolling your pot sticker wrappers too thin is leftover dough...
Yes, we did watch Crazy Rich Asians over the weekend, this is unconnected.
Via a high school friend who recently retired from the FBI: NPR: New deputy FBI director Dan Bongino previously called for imprisoning Democrats
New York Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social
Mao’s great leap forward killed 50 million people. But most experts think that Elon’s will kill many fewer.
Computer Facts @computer@facts.computer
its impossible to take computers seriously because everything is a bit
Ars Technica: AI vs the brain, and the race for general intelligence is a decent overview on the discussion about the current crop of neural networks, and how those differ dramatically from how arrays of neurons in biology are structured, and what that might mean in the pursuit of "AGI".
"I guess I am not optimistic that any kind of artificial neural network will ever be able to achieve the same plasticity, the same generalizability, the same flexibility that a human brain has," Baker said. "That's just because we don't even know how it gets it; we don't know how that arises. So how do you build that into a system?"
(That's Christa Baker of NC State.)
As a result, based on TD Cowen's analysis, Microsoft has, through a combination of canceled leases, pullbacks on Statements of Qualifications, cancellations of land parcels and deliberate expiration of Letters of Intent, effectively abandoned data center expansion equivalent to over 14% of its current capacity.
And, yeah, the Microsoft pullback is the first part of this, but make sure you get down to the funding of the "Stargate" project and Softbank borrowing money to invest in his.
No, wait, read down further to the discussion about how this all ties together in predicting demand, especially as OpenAI is moving features that were part of the "Pro" package down into the cheaper packages, in a way that sure feels a lot like "maybe this time they'll like it?", and how Microsoft's language about demand suggests that Microsoft thinks that LLMs and Generative AI have gotten into the commodity phase, where we're not gonna see a lot of improvement, and now it's about delivering the current level of technology cheap enough to turn a profit with. Which is a hell of a lot cheaper than right now.
Monday March 3rd, 2025
When I was a young lad, I was enthralled with airplanes. Sucked down everything I could about aviation. Flying right seat in my uncle's Cessna 150 was amazing. Looking down from that same uncle's cabin above Lake Sacandaga on the A10s flying low passes over the lake was similarly amazing.
Somewhere in there, I remember reading an article in a magazine proposing to bring back the P51 to fill similar roles to the A10, with the advantage that a piston aircraft could have different fuel logistics, that a taildragger would be more suitable for landings on rough terrain and makeshift runways, that the speed characteristics weren't that far out of line, and...
There are all sorts of reasons why it's not really a drop-in for that role, but it's the thing I flashed to when I read the Air Force getting the first of 75 OA-1K Skyraider II light attack fighters, a taildragger built on the Air Tractor 802 cropduster frame, that can carry 6,000 pounds of weapons, and cruise at 180 knots for 1500 nautical miles.
So much slower than the P51, very different role than the A10, but still interesting.
Two from AVWeb this morning:
And a follow-up, in which Russ Niles talks about how we deal with language and Transportation Secretaries without aviation experience One Strike And You’re Out?
And once again, I'm gonna solidly recommend Sidney Dekker's The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, and point out that though we come from a culture that likes to view punishment as a mechanism for changing human behavior, that Flexjet Challenger 350 crew that did the runway incursion in front of the Southwest flight are probably now the least likely pilots to ever do that again...
Thinking about those halcyon days of journaling, and then "Quantified Self", of thinking that it would be fantastic to gather more data about our lives and through looking at it, gain insight into ourselves.
Rather than knowing that every bit of data amassed is a liability that can be exploited by hostile actors.
bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 @bert_hubert@fosstodon.org
So I didn't know, but Europe already has a backup of PubMed, the database of biomedical research publications. The US PubMed broke down over the weekend. And here is our alternative: https://europepmc.org/ #pubmed #pmc
OH: "It's ironic that the internet was originally created to protect the functioning of our government in the event of Soviet attack."
Sunday March 2nd, 2025
Butterfly plaque hole cover in place.
Try 2.
Butterfly plaque hole cover in place
Neighbor brought this ceramic butterfly back from a trip as a gift for watching their house. We have a hole in the wall in the kitchen where the doorbell used to be. Made this plaque to mount the butterfly and put over the hole.
Fuuuh. Before picture of those chairs.
Today in "Dan doesn't value his own time enough", reworking these chairs...
Those of us who were ruined by a certain era of the Internet are now wondering if a "lemon fest" is like a "lemon party".
Now with picture
Saturday March 1st, 2025
Those of us who were ruined by a certain era of the Internet are now wondering if a "lemon fest" is like a "lemon party".
Thinking about coding with LLM assistance as a natural progression to higher level languages reinforces my feeling that CoPilot is the Matt's Script Archive of this era.
I have rolled my eyes at "AI" video generation, but I think I've finally found a faked image that I endorse...
So apparently today Donald Trump and JD Vance showed their whole asses and were owned by Zelenskyy in their attempts to give the rare earth parts of Ukraine to Putin. The response was predictable, Europe realizes they can't trust the US.
All as Pete Hegseth has ordered US Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning (the entire scope isn't clear) and Peter Navarro denies reports that he's floated kicking Canada from Five Eyes.
BrianKrebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
We are so getting cut out of intel sharing agreements by our allies over this. I mean, if they have a brain. Anyone with intel training 101 (that isn't Israel) will conclude that the US cannot be a trusted intel sharing partner anymore.
Adam Shostack @adamshostack@infosec.exchange
I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said “Mr Gorbachev, how much of east Germany’s minerals are you willing to give us?”
At this point I think we can safely assume there's a moderate chance that the US will leverage access to their cloud companies to bully other countries, or do something that could get them embargoed. Having data in AWS, in gmail, in iCloud is a liability
Friday February 28th, 2025
Mozilla deletes promise not to sell Firefox users’ data
The hits just keep on coming. Mozilla not only changed its Privacy Notice and introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time with some pretty onerous terms, they also removed a rather specific question and answer pair from their page with frequently asked questions about Firefox, as discovered by David Gerard. The following question and answer were removed:
"Does Firefox sell your personal data?"
"Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise."
I have the David Gerard toot cued up in my saved Fediverse posts, so I'll just link that here (I suspect that the one up there will go stale after a bit):
New Mozilla TOS diff. This is what they just removed:
* Does Firefox sell your personal data?
> Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
The purpose of the new TOS appears to be to enable them to do this - such as for their advertising and AI sidelines.
Edit: Mozilla responds to backlash over new terms, saying it’s not using people’s data for AI
Edit Edit: Mozilla Blog: Firefox: An update on our Terms of Use
As the sort of person who's found bugs in compilers, and who's spent time looking at the output machine code and with an oscilloscope, this comment about compilers as abstraction layers, and LLMs as an extension of the abstraction layer, is making me think a little more charitably about AI as code generator.
Apropos of nothing, you know what I like about USB-C driven HDMI? You can test the individual components and they can all work. They can all even work with every bit of low end display hardware you can throw at them.
But plug them into a mid-six figure projector, and it's a crapshoot...
Great. Declare the marked crosswalk "not a crosswalk" and blame the pedestrian:
City of Atlanta to remove faded crosswalk on Peachtree Street after traffic death
Pew: Small Single-Stairway Apartment Buildings Have Strong Safety Record. IBC currently doesn't allow single-stairway buildings above 3 stories, which strongly dictates the building forms that we see in the US.
The two-stairway requirement makes it especially difficult to build apartments or condominiums on small or irregularly shaped pieces of land in already built-up areas (known as infill lots), which are often the main type of land available for development (or close to jobs, commerce, and schools) in expensive U.S. cities and towns.
Via this thread, which notes:
It was amazing to me how much the discussion changed in the Virginia code process once these numbers were shared. We started with heavy concern and criticism over safety and ended talking about how best to get fire deaths in Virginia to zero while ending homelessness, especially for children and families. This is not typical for a public process, and definitely not over a period of months.
I thought this was going to be about Spain's easy temporary visa requirements for remote tech workers, but it's not. The first example is people working in food processing/ham production: Foreign workers help Spain's economic growth outpace US, rest of Europe
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight" @Lana@beige.party
An army of lesbians is called a Militia Etheridge. In this essay, I will
Boycott day, working from home, woke up way too early, the motivations to shower or shave this AM are low.
Anybody know how to calculate efficiency loss for a solar panel at 0� (flat) vs 25� oriented south at latitude 38.23N?
Trying to figure out how much to push back on our solar install.
Police behaving badly, Alice Hutchings of the University of Cambridge
Abstract—Police officers and employees misusing access to police database now account for over half of all cybercrime prosecutions in the UK. The harms this can cause are considerable. Yet police continue to call for encryption to be weakened to allow for greater access to communication data.
JFC, AT&T door to door salespeople, starting out the conversation with two obvious lies (beyond ignoring our "no solicitors" sign) is not a good way to start.
Thursday February 27th, 2025
Well huh. Neil Brown @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk points out this bit of bullshit in the new Firefox Terms of Use
Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy
And that the Mozilla acceptable use policy says:
You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to … Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality
As he notes:
“Mozilla’s services”, but the general terms say that “your use of Firefox” must follow the AUP.
If porn is at the root of technological innovation, maybe there is something to this GenAI craze after all? 404 Media: Alibaba Releases Advanced Open Video Model, Immediately Becomes AI Porn Machine
Just one more lane, bro, one more lane and we'll solve congestion! Nvidia CEO Huang says AI has to do ‘100 times more’ computation now than when ChatGPT was released
I mean, I believe that intelligence and likely consciousness is computational, I just don't believe that intelligence will come from the current crop of people pushing chatbots as AI. I also don't think Jensen Huang has any clue about how many orders of magnitude of compute we are away here.
Today in "are you fucking kidding me?", our new Enphase controller didn't like one of "&" or "!" in our wifi password. So now I have to reconfigure our cameras and laptops and... Ugh.
#ClownShow #WTF #WhatMilleniumIsItAgain
Wednesday February 26th, 2025
Become ungovernable
(Cows blocking road with "keep driveway clear")
Doom in World of Warcraft by compiling to RISC-V and running a RISC-V emulator in Lua
Michael Lucas :flan_set_fire: @mwl@io.mwl.io
When BSDCan started, there was discussion about starting a yearly BSD conference in the US.
Then we looked at the Patriot Act and said, "Y'know, maybe it's best to just have everyone go to Canada."
I'm feeling rather prescient these days.
Why bother rephrasing, I'll just quote: Chris is. @offby1@wandering.shop
Bruce Schneier, on the demand by the UK that Apple build a back door into their end to end encryption: https://www.schneier.com/blog/...d-make-our-phones-less-safe.html
The key takeaway here is that if you use an Apple device you should immediately enable Advanced Data Protection: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756
Apple may be forced to disable it in the future, but if they do they can't do so in secret; it will be immediately obvious to you that it's happening.
Dear Damon Connolly
I'm writing to oppose the recently introduced Assembly Bill 1178. California already has a problem with bad police officers being unaccountable to the public, moving from department to department. Making it even harder to figure out who the bad cops are, and keep our police departments accountable and upstanding, undermines law enforcement and belief in the justice system.
We need to be working to make law enforcement more transparent and more accountable, not less.
More blog to blog linkage (yeah, it's Substack, I hate that, but a number of people I respect are writing there, sigh): Burningbird: Dear Buddy Carter. On how the US is blowing trust in the world.
Let's bring back blog to blog links! Rasterweb: Be The Expert in 2025 — Your voice matters…
Seeing a lot of people talk about boycotts and shutting down the economy, and I get the sentiment, but these fuckers are doing their damnedest to destroy the economy anyway. They've publicly said that there is going to be economic pain.
Just not sure more of that makes the point to them.
Tuesday February 25th, 2025
Federal technology staffers resign from DOGE rather than help Musk
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans. On trying to get useful information out of ChatGPT, using OpenAI's examples:
We’re asking for a deterministic answer from a probabilistic question, and there it looks like the model really is failing on its own terms. In my opinion, or given my expertise, it shouldn’t be using Statcounter or Statistica, but even if it should, it hasn’t taken the correct number from them.
Every: I Created a Hacker News Simulator to Reverse-engineer Virality
Given a more detailed persona based on a two-hour interview with a human, ChatGPT can replicate their answers on surveys with as much as 85 percent accuracy.
Uh. Yay?
Back to Benedict Evans, in his summary he notes:
... OpenAI and all the other foundation model labs have no moat or defensibility except access to capital ...
Emphasis mine. With Microsoft dialing back on data center leases, maybe we're starting to see the bubble deflate.
Recent podcast discovery: "Oh F*ck Yeah with Ruan Willow".
Based on the one interview with Anna Sansom episode, I'm hooked.
Objectophilia is hitting the mainstream via Random House: ‘Sky Daddy’ Takes Airplane Fetishization to New Heights
I'm intrigued, though with cash flow being what it is, and culture being what it is, I think I'd rather get further ahead of the trend with Tinglers.
Wired: DOGE’s USDS Purge Included the Guy Who Keeps Veterans’ Data Safe Online:
“There were these interviews we all had to do with the DOGE people the day after the inauguration,” he says. “In mine, one of them asked me to describe what I was doing at VA and then said something like, ‘If you’re doing all that work, why aren’t you working in the private sector where you could be making twice as much money?’ And I said, ‘Because I don’t care about the money. I care about serving veterans.’
“I think the fact that someone asked me that question at all is really telling.”
Via Jonathan Kamens (the subject of the piece).
You've probably already read about the particular bit of Musk-y bullshit that was this email to federal workers telling them they must justify their work in 5 bullet points.
You may have wondered how this genius was gonna process all of that email? Then came the news that DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email, as in "We're gonna feed your prose into a bullshit generator and..."
There's a reason DOGE is pronounced "douchy". Anyway, apparently there's a little bit of sanity:
HHS warns employees that responses to Elon Musk's request may 'be read by malign foreign actors'.
The email said employees who wish to respond should keep “a high level of generality and describe your work in a manner to protect sensitive data.”
“Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly," the email read.
And, yeah, it's email, so malign foreign actors beyond a particular South African.