Flutterby™!

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.

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.

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.

IZA Institute of Labor Economics: Monopsony Power and Poverty: The Consequences of Walmart Supercenter Openings Zachary Parolin, Bocconi University (PDF)

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.

Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets Justin C. Wiltshire

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.

RT Benjamin Ross @BenRossTransit@mastodon.social

Waymo (aka Google) admits that it trains its robotaxis to break the law. When WaPo reporter finds robotaxis fail to stop for pedestrians in marked crosswalk 70% of the time, Waymo says it follows "social norms" rather than laws. Expert explains: When robotaxis obey law, they don't go fast enough to compete successfully with Uber, so Google execs ordered engineers to ignore laws.
https://wapo.st/3ZZDifm

"Flourish" describes powders that one can mix with some liquid and leavening and create baked goods, and I will die on this hill.

Just wrote "I don't want to tar all car drivers with the same brush, just like gun owners there are responsible ones..." on Nextdoor, now casually walking away while *that* explodes.

Wanna know why your local bar band sounds like crap? Mixing "One Day More" from Les Miserables (YouTube video),video of the sound guy's hands on the mixer...

Cool little puff piece on the Brienna Hall, a woman who runs one of the ASML extreme ultraviolet lithography machines in the Micro facility in Boise: It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman

Whistleblower finds unencrypted location data for 800,000 VW EVs

According to Motor1, a whistleblower gave German publication Der Spiegel and hacking collective Chaos Computer Club a heads-up about the misconfiguration. Der Spiegel and CCC then spent some time sifting through the data, with which allowed them to tie individual cars to their owners.

Volkswagen leak exposed location data for 800,000 electric cars

I was listening recently to the excellent "Dark Star" by the Grateful Dead episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and reminded of John Perry Barlow and the techno-utopianism of the '90s, and I think we have a new corollary for "information wants to be free", which is "if you collect it, it will eventually be world readable".

Heath Robinson: Another AI cautionary tale

Google CEO says AI model Gemini will be the company’s ‘biggest focus’ in 2025 (Hat tip to Tara)

Google Gemini knows what's going on...

Hat tip to https://labyrinth.social/@nash/113523679892181031 and https://labyrinth.social/@nash/113716846756817088

I was gonna just let this moment in history slip by, but I think it's worth taking a moment to celebrate Jimmy Carter. It's easy to remember Carter for his willingness to go inside a damaged nuclear reactor to repair it, or being so threatening to the GOP that Republican operatives collaborated with the Ayatollah Khomeini's government in Iran to delay the release of American hostages in order to damage Carter politically, but...

One of the things I've been pondering recently is how it's not, generally, enough to be first, or right, it's about how you get your ideas spread. It's easy to say "Jimmy Carter was the best ex-President the US has ever had", but it's harder to acknowledge that the US was willing to put someone who appears to have actually been a good person into the seat because Nixon was so bad and Ford was just a lackey, that Carter actually did accomplish a lot of good things that were then deliberately and systematically obstructed or dismantled.

So, yeah, I'm gonna celebrate that he fucking tried.

The Onion (2017): You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President

Wonkette: Rest in Power, Jimmy Carter:

He prioritized conservation, insisting his inaugural reviewing stand be made of steel, which was disassembled, shipped to Atlanta, and recycled as a bandstand. He had solar panels installed on the White House in 1979, which Ronald Reagan later had torn off, just to be an asshole.

CBC: Jimmy Carter will be buried in the same tiny, gentle town he put on the map

First, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and his wife, Roselynn, sat down and enjoyed a lovely homemade meal at Jill Stuckey's home in Plains, Ga. Then, he got up and took the chair home with him. It was wonky. Maybe the leg was loose — Jill doesn't recall. But she does remember that when she got up the next morning, there it was on the porch. Carter had taken the chair home, fixed it, and brought it back. He was maybe 92 at the time.

Qasim Rashid: President Jimmy Carter has died:

In 2007 President Carter sat down with Democracy Now! to discuss what motivated him to write, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” In this book, President Carter cogently argues that the main obstacle to peace in Israel and Palestine is in fact the hundreds of thousands of illegal settlements that Israel continues to build, all with U.S. backing and support. As you watch the short clip below, note that President Carter warns how “powerful forces” remove any member of Congress who speaks out against this unjust policy. Then note how those “powerful forces” that he names have only since grown in power and influence to the detriment of U.S. democracy and world peace.

Pretty sure Rust programmers just never deal with recursive structures. Object has a Vec<Rc<dyn Foo>> in it, after adding an Rc of it to one or more other object's Vec, I want to be able to add to its Vec, and danged if I can figure out the magic incantation.

(Yes, I know I'm gonna have to do careful handling to free this, I'm good with that.)

Governing: Criminalizing Homelessness Can Lead to More Crime, talking about policy in the wake of the Grants Pass decision:

Criminalization policies also bear a significant financial cost. The cyclical churn between homelessness, shelter and incarceration is estimated to cost taxpayers $83,000 per individual annually — far more than providing treatment and housing. A study of Seminole County, Fla., found that the annual cost of repeatedly arresting 33 frequently homeless people is roughly $171,225 per person. In New York City, the daily cost for supportive housing is $48 per person, compared to $1,414 for incarceration and $3,609 for hospitalization.

Just because you can arrest the homeless, doesn't mean you should...

BMJ Group: Almost all leading AI chatbots show signs of cognitive decline

Age against the machine—susceptibility of large language models to cognitive impairment: cross sectional analysis doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-081948

Not only are neurologists unlikely to be replaced by large language models any time soon, but our findings suggest that they may soon find themselves treating new, virtual patients—artificial intelligence models presenting with cognitive impairment.

RT Ambulocetus @Ambulocetus@mefi.social

Please don't open a new can of whoop ass when there is already an open one in the fridge.

I... uh... forgot it was there, and it went bad.

A little cheerleading to help motivate me to learn more Rust: Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus.

Via @genehack@dementedandsadbut.social, but somehow I missed that link, so thanks to @davepolaschek@writing.exchange.

In response to Amanda Marcotte linking to Tradwives, incels and cat ladies: The year MAGA broke heterosexuality, GhostOnTheHalfShell @GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai wrote

Sociopaths like Nick Fuentes or Jordan Peterson first tell boys to become monsters, and to be repellent, and then tell them they should be angry that nobody wants to be around them.

And I think the creepiest and saddest thing about this that even if they get sex, they’ll never be well laid by their own acts.

In a recent Fediverse exchange about some fash indoctrination nofap YouTube video, agatha wrote

re: masturbation

@dysfun @kescher @danlyke “i could’ve done something more productive with my time, like nothing…”

And... I think this is related to that whole Elf Sternberg thing about how straight men resent sex, and ties in to how the traditional masculinity roles have become so perversely awful that nobody really wants to perform them, the people who do are so desperate to fit in, and so susceptible to being told to get in line, that they think "if only I do more of this" when it doesn't work for them.

Augie Ray's Google spreadsheet of COVID-19 studies that suggest the longer-term or chronic issues of COVID infections and reinfections.

The Fediverse/Mastodon/what-have-you has been a weird place. The "We want this to be a place we can become influencers/sell our shit" crowd has been trying to push it to be a Twitter drop-in, some of us are just happy that we can communicate with the people we've met who found blogs too much work (and that we never really found an RSS solution to keep up with), and there's a lot of drama.

Barks by Aria Salvatrice: Actually, it’s about Ethics in Transgenderism (the title a nod to the disruption of social spaces by the Gamergate movement) is a long rant that's entirely too in love with its own language and conceits, but makes a good case that several of the attempts to create shared blocklists and moderation for the Fediverse have been assholes just looking to profit off of our social spaces.

There's a lot to unpack in here, and I'm not the best person to do so. I've got gobs o' privilege in online spaces I've inhabited over the years, and I've mentioned before that in the early '90s we had this optimism that if we brought the world online we'd create this fantastic space, and instead we brought all of the shit of the world into that space and destroyed it.

Undoubtedly some of that is related to making it a more inclusive space.

But it's also definitely the case that the people who want to profit off of our communities have destroyed my connections with all sorts of people over the years.

Via Soatok Dreamsoaker

If you can't beat the scammers and catfishers at their own game, bring the technology in-house: Facebook Planning to Flood Platform with AI-Powered Users — "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do."

So, yeah, expect Facebook to be even less focused on connecting you with friends and colleagues, in ways that LinkedIn can only dream of.

You really can get everything as an app these days...

Interesting. Sounds like the Santa Cruz wharf collapse may be due to historic preservationist NIMBYs...

https://www.kqed.org/news/1201...-collapse-a-rebuild-is-uncertain

Neighbor has a Shopsmith he's trying to pawn off on me, and I could use a lathe, but I just went to Google and auto corrupt changed it to "shouldn't"...

Now that I am turning out a little more Rust, I am becoming even less sensitive to complaints about Perl: <'a>? "{?:}" (or is it "{:?}")? Vec<Box<Type>>? Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged...

Third party security/anti-virus software is mostly just increased attack surface, part #87942 in an ongoing series: If you're running Chrome extensions from Cyberhaven, Internxt VPN, VPN City, Uvoice, or ParrotTalks, you might wanna have that looked at.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...on-hijacked-to-steal-users-data/

Further Rust learning, got to the point where I'm realizing my data structures need to be circular, and I'm learning about Rc, and... wow I hope the payoff for this is good.

Driver crashes into Golden Gate Bridge toll collection booth. If only they could have painted the building bright orange or something so that drivers could see it...

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea...oll-booth-christmas-20000931.php

C/C++ coders who've learned to love the Rust language: what was your path there? I'm finding that a lot of the ways I'd like to express, for instance, a parser aren't super convenient to do so, and I'm trying to figure out how to think in the sort of data structures that Rust encourages, while working in idioms that are going to be relatively performant (like I *think* that Char iterators to track the parsed location, rather than using indices, is a good idea unless I want t odo my own UTF-8).

Happy Boxing Day to all of the would be Mike Tysons and Mohammed Alis of the world.

I'm seeing a lot of "LLMs will be amazing when" and "are showing promise". We're now past the initial swarm of obviously scammy things like "personal assistants" which would have been amazing if they delivered what was promised, but ya could tell they were scams because they bundled some unrelated technology along with it. Now we're deep into something else, and I'm offering even more side-eye at people who are telling me how amazing these things are.

Which brings me to this long post by David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange that goes into attempting to use GitHub Copilot.

Okay, starting to see what people mean about refactoring to satisfy the borrow checker in Rust, because, yeah, i can't figure out how to tell it that the "Chars" I'm passing around have an str that's safe.

But now I'm in the "how does one keep generic behavior when structuring code like this?", and maybe the answer is one doesn't?

I can see making a bunch of cheat sheets and trying to make notes about ways to think about data structures differently as I move forward.

Just finished Rob Wilkins' "Terry Pratchett: a life in footnotes". Good read.

So has Trump threatened to take back the Sudetenland yet, or is that just implied?

Nextdoor discussion about homelessness, to which I'm bringing citations, but... Who'd have thought that a generation which grew up on "search your feelings, you know it to be true" would take vibes based on the one time they talked to an unhoused person rather than the wealth of information from smart people who've been deeply studying society.

Star Wars ruined a lot...

So we watched the "Finding Mr Christmas" movie ("Happy Howlidays"), and they were saddled with an awful script, but I can't help but think of how it might have been with Elijah or Hayden. But, it's media designed for a particular audience and purpose, ya don't look for emotional depth and backstory on the metaphorical pizza delivery guy.

Anyway, can drop the Hallmark+ subscription now, and for those braindead nights where we want something to watch look for things with a more redeeming message.

Oh damn: " One of the ugliest things to point out about American white supremacist culture is that it’s not viewed as rape until the victim is old enough (18+) to give consent." Metafilter user Callisto Prime on media using "underage sex" vs "statutory rape" in talking about the Gaetz report.

https://www.metafilter.com/206...Laws-and-Violates-Ethics#8664934

Taking the time this week to do some Rust learning, and figured I'd do so with moving a little parsing toolkit I wrote for some work projects from Objective-C to Rust.

So I'm now in the "what's the idiomatically correct way to compare and classify characters from strings?" stage, and... I'm not having warm fuzzy vibes right now.

I *think* the answer is to process everything as bytes with str references? And just assume that > 127 is identifier territory?

Merry Christmas Adam, everyone!

One of the things I'd love to do with this week off is learn a little Rust. So I "cargo new foo; cd foo; cargo run", and, friends, is it normal that on a modern Mac M2 machine this takes close to a minute?

But then the same process with "bar" takes about 3/4 of a second?