Saturday December 21st, 2024
Some test data has me looking at Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014, the huge 4-8-8-4 steam locomotive that was recently restored.
Anyway, I'm now pretty much convinced that if such a locomotive were built today it would unironically be called "Hekkin' Chonker".
Friday December 20th, 2024
I had closed several tabs on this without posting them on Flutterby because it's... awful and if you have any sorts of issues around non-consensual sexual attacks triggering as hell, and please don't feel compelled to follow any of these links, but...
BBC: New name, no photos: Gisèle Pelicot removes all trace of her husband
NBC: Dozens of men found guilty in Gisèle Pelicot mass rape trial that shocked France
...the reason I'm now posting these is reading through the Disabled Ginger on how this exposes medical misogyny (among a whole bunch of other effects), and how the husband was recruiting people for this horror on some sort of online messaging system, and nobody stepped in. Nobody said "holy shit, this is awful".
And there's probably some strong vetting to get access to those forums. It's not something that one is likely to just stumble across. And even, unlike the early days of say, alt.sex.stories on Usenet, you're not gonna run across NC fantasizing of this sort and maybe be able to tie pieces together.
But there's clearly a branch of "masculinity" where it's a stepping stone from one place to another, and long before legal lines get crossed there are moral lines where we need to be saying "oh fuck no, that's hella not acceptable".
Maybe knowing that this evil is out there will help us all say that sooner.
RT Capital @capital@scalie.zone
Incompatible functions, aka O(LOL NO)
If you ever think your own work has no meaning, just remember that some one put that "remember this device" checkbox on your bank's web site, and your payroll provider's web site, and...
I hate to think of how many wasted hours that was, let alone the wasted hours of people clicking them thinking that they might actually have any effect.
Yet again seeing people ask what's so disruptive about a cell phone ban in schools, so I'll point out that if the kids don't have cell phones, how are they gonna call 911 when there's a school shooter?
(Also, so much of the problem with schools is that the classroom as we know it is a fucking lousy way to learn, and schools are a horrible reinforcement of the worst social patterns, and we should maybe try to fix that shit?)
We know that a good amount of the anti-immigrant rhetoric comes from the businesses that can use the state to enforce what's essentially slavery by employing undocumented workers, but the return to slavery is more explicit than just that:
AP: Alabama profits off prisoners who work at McDonald’s but deems them too dangerous for parole
Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among the more than 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S. in the past five years alone, The Associated Press found as part of a two-year investigation into prison labor. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnished from prisoners’ paychecks.
So my awesome ISP, Sonic, recently offered me an upgrade to 10gigabit fiber, same price I'm paying now, but $300 in one-time ONT fees. We've been a bit price sensitive lately, and it would require upgrading a bunch of hardware (I'm still using 300megabit era WiFi transceivers, my hub is only 1 gigabit, etc).
But I've been thinking about what one might use that much bandwidth for. When I was working with map data, even the bidirectional gigabit I've got now would be handy.
Turns out one application might be malware: This VPN Lets Anyone Use Your Internet Connection. What Could Go Wrong?
A free VPN app called Big Mama is selling access to people’s home internet networks. Kids are using it to cheat in a VR game while researchers warn of bigger security risks.
Yesterday at lunch I was reminded that, when a local City Council member whom I admire said something about "policies that reflect our values", I quietly observed that the cynical among us might say that they already do. And apparently the room, more than I noticed at the time, went "oh, damn." (and "that's cold", and...)
Anyway, there's a polarizing figure on the nerd social media that has a long rant this morning on culture and kindness and this pull-quote is repeated here, for emphasis.
Soatok Dreamsoaker: The Better Daemons Of Our Profession
The in-practice consequences of any policy is your actual goddamn policy.
Skepchick: Why Did We Throw Away Our Black Plastic Utensils?
But here’s where we get to the same old story that I see again and again with these environmental watchdog groups: the hyperbole. And in this case, it wasn’t just the organization saying that your spatula is going to give you cancer. The study specifically noted that the levels of DecaBDE they found in the utensils could result in a person consuming 34,700 nanograms per day, which they said approached the EPA’s safety limit, which is 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight. They claimed that for a 60-kilogram (or 130-pound) adult, that was 42,000 nanograms per day. Which…it isn’t. It’s 420,000 nanograms per day. The levels they found actually didn’t even hit 10% of the EPA’s limit.
I mean, lots of reasons plastics aren't great, but...
who decided on the name Secret Santa when Nondisclosure Claus was right there for the taking
I'm not sure whether this indicates that the NYPD understands iconography, or doesn't... RT Jef Poskanzer @jef@mastodon.social
Compare & contrast:
I have cynical said that the Saudis bought Twitter to destroy it in retaliation for the Arab Spring. With what's happening with Elon Musk in US and German politics, it's become clear that, no, they did it to continue the destruction that the Saudi funded 9/11 hijackers were working towards.
Thursday December 19th, 2024
RT Mike [SEC=OFFICIAL] @mike@chinwag.org
"Free Copilot in your GitHub account" is the 2020s version of "Free U2 album on your iPod".
Joe Cardillo (they/them) @joecardillo@federate.social
Reminder that technology isn't bad, we have bad tech
It doesn't have to be this way, information doesn't have to be controlled/owned/driven by extreme profits system & billionaires
RT Max Leibman (Taylor's Version) @maxleibman@beige.party
Men are often told that we aren’t good at coping with our feelings, but I want to discuss the real issue, which is that feelings are stupid.
Where's your Ed at: Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user.
Awwww, we missed the excitement. At roughly 2am someone missed the curve on Mountain View Ave coming up to Olive and took out a sign and much of the landscaping.
Picture with two kids on the way to school picking their way through the debris because of course the automobile lanes were cleared...
Apparently there are typing twisters too: I'm working on some features today related to "set sharing", and the number of times I've typed "shet sar..."
Wednesday December 18th, 2024
Dear zeitgeist: The "sheet music with lyrics from one Christmas carol and melody from a different one, or just nonsensical" was funny the first... maybe two or three times. Several years ago.
But it's played out. It really is.
infinite-horizon219 — Unix-Privilege-Escalation-Exploits-Pack (2001-2014)
Fun bit, my anonymous lead to this says they found it inside a device they were examining. Which... do you trust that the machines you attach to your network aren't trying to get shell on things?
When I saw that the latest episode of Today's Lucky Winner was titled "Rita's Holiday Special: A Christmas Carol", I was like "Oh great, another Dickens rework", but on my drive home from voice lessons yesterday I was laughing out loud.
And, no, it's not a 3 ghosts take. And I'm not sure how much it needs the background of the rest of the podcast story. But if juvenile sex and scatological jokes are your thing (they're apparently mine), yeah. I LOLed.
Tuesday December 17th, 2024
Another day, another "fuck you Apple for your dumb-ass bottom up view layout system that randomly blows the window has been marked as needing too many layout passes errors.
Basis:
People increasingly use phones for their internetting rather than full-size computers.
News sites are so full of popups and other advertising dreck that they are frustrating to use, sometimes even impossible to use.
Thesis:
This has driven people to use lower-quality news sources— tweets, friends comments, etc —which has then made it easier for Trumpists and others to spew lies.
Sometimes I wish I had a little better visibility into what it is that browser tabs are chewing up CPU on, because it sure seems like the crypto mining in ads on sites like Wired is out of freakin' control.
I think these two things are related:
David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Microsoft refuses pull request to put documentation in readable table form because LLMs are bad at parsing tables https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/pull/2021
Edit: Same sentiment with more text at Pivot To AI.
Jef Poskanzer :batman: @jef@mastodon.social
Which is worse, newspaper websites or restaurant websites?
RT Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
When someone calls you “dear,” it means that they’re fawned of you.
RT Davey :sugar_approved: @sugar@goblin.camp
almost posted "if he's your man why does his breath smell like my toes 😏" but i didn't, pretty proud of myself
How to talk about the Bitcoin reserve dumb idea
In July Senator Cynthia Lummis proposed the so-called BITCOIN Act which would establish a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve." Shortly after, Trump promised Bitcoin enthusiasts that he would create a "strategic national stockpile." Naturally, Bitcoin holders are rapturously elated: The USG buying Bitcoin represents massive exit liquidity at guaranteed high prices for the rest of the decade.
In particular, this talks about what happens when the math naturally leads to asymmetry in mining capacity. Which, I mean, we're kinda at the stage where a few consortiums control the mining, and anyone who's not bought into the scam deeply understands that there have already been some concerns about this, but...
Anyway, holy shit we do not need to be propping up the scam, other ways of talking about this, other than that it's a big ol' Ponzi scheme, might help?
Discussions about prompt engineering and leading with "you are a competent professional" vs "you are a helpful assistant" are helping me to see that, at best, LLMs are a bad improv scene.
Still adding LLM features to work project. Still having the "dancing bear" reaction and not happy with what I can prompt ChatGPT 4o to give me.
Anyone have a "smart person's guide to prompting LLMs" suggestion? I'm already cueing it to give me extra stuff in machine readable form, but it all seems like such bad SEO inspired insipid elementary output, and, of course, gets facts wrong.
So how are people seeing these things as valuable, and getting useful output?
Monday December 16th, 2024
RT 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not Christmas Cake" @Lana@beige.party
Reluctantly crouched at the starting line
Waiting, and ready, and pacing in time
When what to my wondering eyes did appear
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer
More rapid than eagles his coursers they flew
With a sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too
Reckless and wild, they pour through the turns
Their prowess is potent and secretly stem
As they speed through the air they don't dare look down
At the tops of the roofs of this slumbering town
All the world is asleep except for one man
Still driving and striving as fast as he can
So the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave a lustre of midday to objects below
But he's driving and striving and hugging the turns
And thinking of someone for whom he. still. burns.He's going the DISTANCE
He's going for SPEED
He's all alone (all alone)
All alone on this CHRISTMAS EVE
Because he's racing and pacing and flying his sleigh
To every part of the world in a single day
He's going the DISTANCE.
RT Colin Beveridge @icecolbeveridge@mathstodon.xyz
There's no point in complaining about a tautology. It is what it is.
RT Simon Tatham @simontatham@hachyderm.io
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED BUT REPULSIVE", "WRONG BUT WROMANTIC", "FREQUENTLY MISUNDERSTOOD", "NOBODY BOTHERS WITH THIS BIT", "SHOULDN'T REALLY BUT WE WON'T JUDGE", "REQUIRED IN ORDER TO WORK AROUND EVERYONE ELSE'S BUGS", "YOU DO YOU", and "OBVIOUSLY ABSURD BUT VERY COMMON FOR SOME REASON" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
At various times I have tried to make https://retroshare.cc/ work with friends, and never gotten enough uptake to continue, but has any third party looked at the code and ... is the issue vs all of the other distributed messaging things that are attempting to get my attention just that ya can't do mobile without some sort of relay system?
Interesting, with various caveats: Cannabis Use and Age-Related Changes in Cognitive Function From Early Adulthood to Late Midlife in 5162 Danish Men
Results Men with a history of cannabis use had less cognitive decline from early adulthood to late midlife compared to men without a history of cannabis use. Among cannabis users, neither age of initiation of cannabis use nor frequent use was significantly associated with a greater age-related cognitive decline.
https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.70136
Via Science Alert: Male Cannabis Users Seem to Show Less Cognitive Decline, Study Finds
Sunday December 15th, 2024
So Android Firefox Beta appears to still respect the "keep my fucking address bar at the top where it belongs" flag, but has moved the rest of the buttons down to a bar at the bottom.
Ugh.
Saturday December 14th, 2024
Big winds this morning, a tree went down across half our road, power lines blocking the boulevard, so there was a ton of traffic diverted onto ours. The usual "get to it" guys looked outside, saw that traffic was slowed, went back inside. Eventually some passers by (maybe city) stopped and cut it out of the way with an electric chainsaw, and we're all bummed that the speeders are no longer impeded.
Charlene, in the waffle of me grinding off a fingertip, burning the crap out of a hand by catching a recently welded piece, and more: "You do stupid things with those hands."
Dan: "That needs to be a country song."
Abortion bans are killing women — and states like Texas want to hide the truth
An analysis published in September by the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that, from 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal deaths in Texas increased by 56%, compared with 11% nationwide.
'Bodies are piling up': Reporter finds GOP-led states are hiding abortion ban death toll
Friday December 13th, 2024
Careful about relying on your bullshit generator, even if it is from Apple:
BBC: BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline
Additionally, the BBC pointed to a post on Bluesky that shows Apple Intelligence mischaracterizing a New York Times headline about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
We quantify the effect of public transportation fare subsidies on air quality by exploiting the sharp discontinuity in the cost of ridership introduced by policy intervention. We identify this effect by taking advantage of four months of massive discounts for transit services introduced in Spain on September 1, 2022, as part of the national plan to tackle the global energy crisis. Across pollutants and specifications, we find no evidence that low-cost or free-of-charge public transportation financing schemes have improved air quality. Our results reveal that measures aimed at reducing transit prices may fail to achieve the claimed environmental benefits through a modal shift from private to collective modes of transport, which suggests that massive fare discounts may not represent an efficient allocation of public funds.
So if you were part of an organization with a bunch of static pages currently using SquareSpace, and considering switching to something else largely because of bad search, what would you consider?
I want something the non-profit can just buy, with a focus on an admin assistant able to update pages, and users being able to find linked to YouTube videos and programs of past events.
WordPress has been batted around, but that seems overly complex for our needs, and given the current meltdown...
RT Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone
can the hallmark channel seize the moment and release a new Christmas film before dec 25 where another healthcare CEO is visited by three ghosts of people who died after their medical claims were denied
Last night on the season finale of Finding Mr Christmas they referenced that it takes roughly 2 weeks to shoot a Hallmark movie, so...
The lead time to get it in the line-up is probably way way longer than that, though.
RT Helen Czerski @helenczerski@fediscience.org
11 yrs ago I found this funny: 'How many Microsoft designers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just define darkness as “industry standard”
But now I can't unsee this:
'How many huge companies does it take to fix the climate? None. They just define global warming as “industry standard”
RT Peter Krupa @peter@thepit.social
pretty interesting how everyone in the genAI space has moved on from RAG. now it’s agents that are going to fix all the problems with generative AI (while making each query 20x more expensive).
RT Peter Krupa @peter@thepit.social
trust me bro, generative AI is going to be **huge** for enterprise bro, please bro, just a few more iterations and we’ll have it bro, we are so close bro.
Thursday December 12th, 2024
Yeesh, Apple, fix your "this window has been marked as needing another layout pass" shit already.
This was posted to Facebook by a high school friend of mine who recently retired from a career with the FBI, and I think it's worth reading for the subtext, and for what it's trying to help the members of the agency aspire to: Director Wray’s Remarks for the FBI All-Employee Town Hall Address
I'm old enough to remember when the tech industry at least publicly gave a little credence to the notion that technical competence mattered: Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger calls for prayer and fasting for employees
"Every Thursday I do a 24 hour prayer and fasting day," Gelsinger wrote on X on Sunday morning. "This week I'd invite you to join me in praying and fasting for the 100K Intel employees as they navigate this difficult period. Intel and its team is of seminal importance to the future of the industry and US."