Tuesday June 3rd, 2025
That moment when you read the Nextdoor complaints about Petaluma's "Slow the fast down" campaign, and realize that many of your neighbors would be totally against the "Slow the *flock* down" campaigns that real cities like Portland and Seattle do.
SF Standard: The ICE agents disappearing your neighbors would like a little privacy, please
“While we always weigh legitimate concerns around privacy and safety, we believe that censoring images from this news event would set a harmful precedent for the media’s right to report and the public’s right to know,” managing editor Jeff Bercovici said.
If I were a member of an agency that's horrifically disappearing people on the pretext that employers should have access to what's essentially a slave under-class, I would simply, you know, not do things that history is gonna judge me really fucking harshly for.
Monday June 2nd, 2025
Nextdoor post asking about how many signatures have been received for the zoning overlay referendum vs how many are needed, and I do not want to interact with that post, so I'm gonna leave it here to check up on...
Obviously I think the best of all possible outcomes is that they can't get enough signatures to put this on the ballot.
Well that's a fascinating twist: Legal Newsline: Judge rejects claim AI chatbots protected by First Amendment
Judge Anne C. Conway of the Middle District of Florida denied several motions by defendants Character Technologies and founders Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. Setzer killed himself with a gun in February of last year after interacting for months with Character.AI chatbots imitating fictitious characters from the Game of Thrones franchise, according to the lawsuit filed by Sewell’s mother, Megan Garcia.
“... Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are speech,” Conway said in her May 21 opinion. “... The court is not prepared to hold that Character.AI's output is speech.”
Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
When the job lets you dig your own hole, that’s re-moat work.
Google AI making everyone smarter.
If you get one of those fancy wifi enabled dryers, and when your laundry is finished it notifies your phone, is that a ...
... clothes call?
Sunday June 1st, 2025
Wacky. Hopefully this will get that picture of Jeff and me duded up at yesterday's square dance...
Login login Temu style.
WVU study shows ripple effects from World War II detainment camps on Japanese Americans’ health
TheJournal of Public Economics published the findings by Grossman and his coauthors. Their paper illuminates the health effects of in utero and early life shocks, and the ongoing reverberations generated by events like forced migrations.
As Tara notes:
There needs to be more discussion around the idea that traumatic events echo. They don't impact just one generation.
Irenes (many) @ireneista@irenes.space
be gay do crime
🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️
🏳️⚧️❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🏳️⚧️
🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️
d@nny disc@ mc² @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run
make sure to do crimes if you're not gay to contribute to the statistical noise that drowns out the gays doing crimes
Be sure to break small rules so that when it comes time to break big rules, you're in practice.
This is marvelous: The West Australian — Andrew Miller: Classic car chases educate a child’s mind in ways the classroom just can’t
I was supposed to be helping the six-year-old with reading practice, but we got distracted and ended up watching classic car chases on YouTube.
Specifically, comparing and contrasting wanton automotive carnage in the movies The Italian Job and The Blues Brothers.
This naturally led to explaining the historical relevance of the Illinois Nazis — who met their demise by driving off an incomplete flyover while pursuing Jake and Elwood Blues — and why popular culture so often circles back to the dark risks of fascism.
Two videos and a pic from yesterday's J St potluck square dance.
Today in questionable life decisions, I'm rolling out my "garage sale detritus plus a bunch of scrap wood" trash can.
Called a bit of square dancing on J Street today, the 5th and 6th St crowds were there. Fun potluck, got told they had a great time, looking forward to trying this for other blocks.
Got invited to do it at a July 4th party, but we'll be at IAGSDC.
Saturday May 31st, 2025
Got a bunch of vinyl at the JoAnn's liquidation, practicing our bonding technique using nothing more than an iron and an old T shirt....
Friday May 30th, 2025
LEO is a valuable resource that must be protected and shared in a way that benefits the most people while simultaneously protecting LEO for use by future generations. We cannot have tens of thousands of satellites in LEO without severe consequences for the atmosphere and an increasingly high likelihood of Kessler Syndrome, which will limit our use of satellites for decades to centuries.
Via Sam Lawler herself, who rose to prominence helping the Saskatchewan farmers who found SpaceX junk in their fields navigate international space law.
"An exciting new career" as a dance instructor? Ballroom is doing way way better than square dance, or Fred Astaire is going MLM...
Procreate statement on generative AI:
Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.
Edit: Ars Technica: Procreate defies AI trend, pledges “no generative AI” in its illustration app
In a video posted on X, Procreate CEO James Cuda laid out his company's stance, saying, "We’re not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products. I don’t like what’s happening to the industry, and I don’t like what it’s doing to artists."
Amanda Katz @katzish.bsky.social
If you put two NYT stories together you do get “man allegedly completely strung out on drugs uses the US government to kill 300,000 people”
I've been thinking a lot about the "learning styles aren't a thing", and yet different people clearly learn better through different presentations of the material. My working hypothesis is that a lot of this is based on what background related to the material people already have, and it turns out PNAS: An astonishing regularity in student learning rate suggests pretty much that.
Instead, the number one determinant of rate of learning and mastery comes down to a single factor: prior knowledge. Students exposed to a broader array of information in a field before beginning study learn faster than their peers. No other factor approaches prior knowledge as an indicator.
Thursday May 29th, 2025
Our results show that beyond a certain point, increases in car dependence yield a decrease in people’s satisfaction with life. For instance, we find that, in a typical week, relying on a car for more than 50 percent of the time for out-of-home activities is associated with a decrease in life satisfaction. These findings suggest that planners and decision-makers should promote multimodality and land use patterns that may help to reduce car dependence and its potential negative effect on subjective wellbeing (SWB).
Good rant about AI/LLM assisted coding: The CoPilot Delusion
We really need some proper comeuppance for using bullshit generators to generate bullshit, but 'til we do the LLM users are gonna keep substituting AI for actual intelligence. The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist
The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.
Two films we're putting on the to-watch list: Ay Mariposa:
Ay Mariposa tells a story of three characters in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas whose lives are upended by plans to build a US-Mexico border wall. As the director of the National Butterfly Center, Marianna Trevino Wright has become a leader of wall resistance in the Valley, a position that has resulted in violent threats from pro-wall factions and an emotional odyssey as she tries to navigate the ever-shifting sands of border policy. Zulema Hernandez, a life-long migrant worker, immigrant and great grandmother, has been a dedicated advocate for all migrants, both wild and human-kind. Meanwhile the butterfly, la mariposa, fights its own daily battle for survival in a landscape where more than 95 percent of its habitat is long gone and much of what remains lies directly in the path of the wall.
and The In Between:
Embedded in the lives of Texas/Mexico border kids, a filmmaker explores how fronterizo identity takes shape and what it means today.
The video is quite the thing.
I strongly suspect that the robo-taxis won't hit the road in 2 weeks.
Realization: venv is static linking for Python.
I remember when dynamic linking and versioning protocols for object systems in libraries were so cool...
Uh, XCode, there's no 'badEnding' in scope, is there something you're trying to tell me more broadly here?
(Picture: Error message saying "Use of undeclared identifier 'padding'; did you mean 'badEnding'?)
Wednesday May 28th, 2025
Mr. Encyclopedia @mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza
No multitool is complete without a radioactive test source.
Of course this lands on a URL that looks like HorizonHobby(dot)com, but isn't. I don't understand why Meta allows scam ads like this, but it reinforces my feeling that there are no legitimate Facebook ads.
And it makes me wonder how anyone's taking Mark Zuckerberg's promise that AI is going to allow them to create more compelling ads, when everything on FB is making me even more cynical about ad content there.
There is no JavaScript on this page. All the logic is made 100% with pure HTML & CSS. For the best performance, please close other tabs and running programs.
View on GitHub, CodePen, benjaminaster.com
The Release notes for BBEdit 15.5 explicitly call out that "Note that BBEdit is still not a spreadsheet." and "BBEdit is not a replacement for Preview or any other PDF tool."
No mention of email, which is making me think about where it lies vis-a-vis Emacs in terms of Zawinski's law that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
The existence of top surgery and bottom surgery implies the existence of up surgery, down surgery, strange surgery and charm surgery
Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫ @petealexharris@mastodon.scot
@sabik
From my observations, I infer the waiting list for charm surgery must be really long.
The linkbait headline reads AI Finds What Humans Missed: OpenAI’s o3 Spots Linux Zero-Day, the actual blog post is a bit more measured: How I used o3 to find CVE-2025-37899, a remote zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s SMB implementation talks about how random Claude Sonnet and OpenAI ChatGPT are, how difficult it is to dig through the noise, and how this is an intriguing but difficult to wield technology.
The Needling: Phew! City Always Has Enough Seattle Police Officers Around to Harass Queer Community
“Can our police respond to every domestic violence call? No. Can they respond to the scene of every shooting with a victim 5 minutes away in less than 20 minutes? Also, no,” said Mayor Harrell. “But I give you my word that there will always suddenly be a phalanx of cops available and quickly on-hand any time a queer person is legally naked at public longtime nude beach, exercising their First Amendment rights at a public park named after a gay legislator in the middle of a gay neighborhood, or asserting they have just as much a right to be at Seattle City Hall as any right-wing, religious nut-job does. Men baring nipples at a gay club? We always have enough cops to shut that shit down too.”
Non-satirically: 8 more arrests at dueling protests, this time at Seattle City Hall
The religious group arrived downtown first, finding a section of Fourth Avenue barricaded. They occupied the space behind the barricade and blocked exits with their private security, backed up by Seattle police officers, controlling the flow of people allowed onto the steps of City Hall.
I'm summoned to jury duty this week, and using a tool called eJuror to check nightly to check to see if I'm still on standby, and it's just another sad fucking example of how UX and testing on multiple platforms is dead.
And I would hate to be someone low income, without a car, accessing the Internet only by phone, attempting to participate in jury duty.
Elderly friend needs the easiest simplest plug into the computer printer. I assume that's still a Brother laser, though he just returned one because it stopped working plugged in (and I didn't get a chance to get up there to debug why before he gave up on it). Is there anything that sucks less?
Holy shit, Jira: If I "pin" a field for issues, that means I want it quickly accessible, not hidden behind an exposure chevron.
I saw yesterday, someone saying they were blocking/unfollowing/whatever Anil Dash because his web site did the whole wait a few seconds and then pop up the "subscribe to my email list!" thing, and today Anil Dash wrote:
At a certain point you’re asking everyone to take a vow of poverty, unsustainability, or irrelevance. By all means, hold people to an ethical standard, and then beyond that, get over your aesthetics.
and some content has moved domains and URLs over the years, but I'm at over 3 decades of publishing stuff on the web, and longer before that paying for a phone line so I could host a BBS, without pestering you for your email address or your "real name" or whatever, and I'm thinking about what differing notions of why we maintain online presences.
Anthropic brings web search to free Claude users. Well, some technology is gonna free Claude users, and actual web search might.... wait, what?
Neil Brown @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk
My business model of selling tours of people's homes doesn't work if I have to get their consent.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in The Register: Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves, starts with some of the symptoms of feeding the web with AI generated spew, and:
You'd think RAG would produce better results, wouldn't you? And it does. For example, it tends to reduce AI hallucinations. But, simultaneously, it increases the chance that RAG-enabled LLMs will leak private client data, create misleading market analyses, and produce biased investment advice.
Made the mistake of checking Nextdoor. Oh, look, someone from Chileno Valley is commenting on Nextdoor development patterns...
Out of towners telling the city how it should be ...
Almost as good as when the Meese Commission found out that pornography wasn't in fact all of the evil... Plentiful Data, No Regret: What the Utah Review on Youth Trans Care Found
A 1,000-page report by the College of Pharmacy at the University of Utah, which found care safe and effective, stands out from others: It’s both independent and an actual review of the evidence.
Tuesday May 27th, 2025
Two on why OpenAI going after Jonny Ive is not a symbol of a healthy business. Ed Zitron: Desperate Times, Desperate Measures. Among other things, Ed tears down the hagiography:
He was a consultant at Apple until 2022, though it's not exactly obvious what it is he did there since the death of Steve Jobs. People lovingly ascribe Apple's every success to Ive, forgetting that (as mentioned) Ive oversaw the truly abominable butterfly keyboard, as well as numerous other wonky designs, including the trashcan-shaped Mac Pro, the PowerMac G4 Cube (a machine aimed at professionals, with a price to match, but limited upgradability thanks to its weird design), and the notorious “hockey puck” mouse.
Blood in the Machine: OpenAI's desperate quest to become an AI monopoly.
A lot of these initiatives feel pretty flimsy, to me, and there’s a mad dash, rush-to-make-a-deal-with-the-Saudis, see what sticks kind of vibe to a lot of what OpenAI’s up to these days. So the question becomes: What happens if you aim for monopoly—on a scale that no tech company has attempted as fast before—and you miss?
Might wanna grab this file and drop it on your favorite server. It includes one framework thing that I haven't investigated and don't know if it's necessary, but a wget https://justaqrcode.com/ into /justaqrcode/ seems to work fine: Just A QR Code, no tracking links, no ads.
So wait, two crypto "investors" kidnapped and duct taped a third crypto "investor" and dangled him off a balcony to try to get the password to a wallet, and I hate that their culture and neighborhoods give rise to this kind of violent behavior, but I really don't have an opinion about crypto-on-crypto violence.
https://nypost.com/2025/05/27/...-sick-soho-torture-case-sources/
I grew up with the term "Male Chauvinist Pig" (1 article in the NYT using it in my birth year, 8 the next), so the the whole LLM "M.C.P." thing feels like existing technology to me.
https://www.theswaddle.com/origins-male-chauvinist-pig-sexism
Uhhhh. Obviously a company that takes consent seriously. The thing I miss about Twitter is being able to publicly shame things like this at scale.
Young Pete Toms @petetoms.bsky.social
Don’t know if this would work for everybody, but I started doing this thing when I’m driving where I look through the windshield and if someone is crossing in front of my car I slow down or even stop.
“I’ve been typing this way for about two years,” I say.
I’ve been typing this way for about tears, the computer writes.
“About two years,” I repeat, raising my voice and enunciating each word clearly.
A button here, it types.
Anyway, we're using this thing as a Mad Libs generator when there's so much more to be gotten in actually augmenting human interaction...
Just so I can find it later: BlueSky thread about a guy using ChatGPT to interpret/pirate Wheeler's Spacetime Physics and getting it very wrong.
Lot of work to de-pistil the flower shoots, and the plating with coconut milk needs more color; maybe Fresno chiles, and some plantain? But interesting texture, I'd do banana flowers again.
First for me, Lola's had banana flower so now I have to figure out how to cook it...
First for me, Lola's had banana flower so now I have to figure out how to cook it...
Monday May 26th, 2025
Wait, how do I get BlueSky to show me only posts from people I'm following? I tapped the "Following" tab, but that's giving me reskeets from the content farmers who follow me. Do I need to block followers I don't want to see skeets from?
Since I spent much of today in and around the workshop, today's Oglaf lands in a weird way. Anyway, yeah, woodworking...
The lid is gonna be the hard bit
I had some veneer taking up space.
Cutting a nicer replacement for the metal cover on the foot pedal.
Beat up trash can garage sale about to become something...
Sunday May 25th, 2025
And then comes that moment in a man's life when he's measuring a tortilla with Vernier calipers and questioning his very sanity.
Yes, I should have just bought a twenty dollar tortilla press, but... well... sanity.
I must be hungry...