Friday October 18th, 2024
RT SpookJ 👻 @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io
Realization: unconstrained chat language models are "yes, and" taken to a toxic extreme
Honestly can't tell if I'm getting straw-manned in a Nextdoor conversation, or if that person's reading comprehension is just so bad that it explains why we've come to dramatically different conclusions of what various documents that we've read actually say.
Thursday October 17th, 2024
The Sonoma Vegetation Mapping and LIDAR program includes some really cool slide-back-and-forth to compare modern aerial imagery to 1942 images.
The more I delve into the official Firebase libraries and what they're doing to us, the more irate I am that we're not using the sockets directly and foregoing that whole massively inefficient abstraction layer.
Findings indicate an association between acute COVID-19 rates and increased car crashes with an OR of 1.5 (1.23-1.26 95%CI). The analysis did not find a protective effect of vaccination against increased crash risks, contrary to previous assumptions. The OR of car crashes associated with COVID-19 was comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol at legal limits or driving with a seizure disorder.
I have been on the fence on Sonoma County's Measure J. Every time I read something against it, I'm like "what is this defending?", every time I read something for it I'm "this makes claims that seem overboard".
I think the thing that might have tipped me one way is the "No on J" flyer on the door of a local environmental lawyer whose work I respect.
Wednesday October 16th, 2024
“Let me assure you, in the wake of The Onion’s recent decision to relaunch its print product, shutting down The New York Times was not a difficult decision,” said Sulzberger, adding that immediately shuttering all 53 Times bureaus around the world was tantamount to a “mercy killing.” “While we are devastated to see so many employees go, we are happy that we can finally put them out of their misery and no longer force them to work in an environment where The New York Times is out-scooped, out-reported, and outwritten by The Onion at every turn.”
The problem with so many of these "conversations across the political divide" workshops and programs that I've participated in is that I discover that, oh, no, I am, in fact, hearing them loud and clear.
Huh. My own mental shift when I change "homeless encampments" to "refugee camps" in my language sure is interesting.
I have been wondering where some of the exploration of gender and sexuality that we saw back in the '90s, Carol Queen and Pat Califia and so forth, have gone. It's good to see some of it back: i am here to ruin your gender
gender, like Judith Butler famously says, is a performance—but some of us don't follow the script. some of us won't follow the script.
and some of us aren't even satisfied with not following the script either. no, we want to burn the whole stage down. trans, not as in transition, but in transgression.
In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants, and soil—as a net category—absorbed almost no carbon.
RT mhoye but spooky @mhoye@mastodon.social
I don’t think we had a term for going out of your way to make sure that every rake in the yard gets stepped on but it sure seems like “a mullenweg” is a word crying out for a definition these days, so I have a proposal.
BYU study finds diesel exhaust can contribute to poor metabolism, weight gain
The study, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, found exhaust gas produced by diesel engines is tied to increased fat mass, enlarged fat cells, insulin resistance and inflammation. These changes can lead to metabolic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and heart diseases, a release from BYU says.
At some point when Czechoslovakia was still a country, around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, my parents did a trip over there with some group or another. One of the tours was of the Moser glass factory, and part of the sales pitch involved the rep telling about some Soviet bigwig touring the factory, and saying "In Russia we have same, but better: is plastic".
As I read through Notion: AI is the new plastic, I wonder how self-aware the author is.
Via 2Spooky4Cederbs @cederbs@infosec.exchange, who noted "You ever seen something so painfully out of touch and oblivious it hurts?", and... maybe? But maybe this author wrote what their boss asked them to, with a wink and a nod. Maybe even with LLM assistance.
Somehow I got on a psychology continuing education marketing mailing list. The email subject "Discover the course: Navigating Narcissism" sounded intriguing because I could compare it with my lived experience, but today's "Attachment and Trauma the Complete Collection" made me ask how many more items I needed to fulfill the whole set?
Yep, matching the subsidy of cars in public transport can help: Flat-rate train ticket reduced Germany’s transport emissions by 5% in first year – analysis.
Seeing that one candidate has adopted "Save Downtown" as his campaign slogan, and this feels a lot like the "Save the Fairgrounds" campaign, where when the city managed to wrest control back from those people we ended up with a space that much better serves the residents of Petaluma.
Live your life so that you end up with an obituary like this: Robert Adolph Boehm: "We have all done our best to enjoy/weather Robert's antics up to this point, but he is God's problem now."
https://www.robertsonfuneral.c...ituaries/Robert-Boehm-2/Memories
Come, from our neighborhood.
Reminder that when you hook up with a computer, you're hooking up with every computer that that computer might ever hook up with... AI girlfriend site breached, user fantasies stolen:
A hacker has stolen a massive database of users’ interactions with their sexual partner chatbots, according to 404 Media.
The breached service, Muah.ai, describes itself as a platform that lets people engage in AI-powered companion NSFW chat, exchange photos, and even have voice chats.
Tuesday October 15th, 2024
RT geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party
They say not to judge people, but they also say to do what you're good at so which the fuck is it
RT David D. Levine @daviddlevine@wandering.shop
The existence of the "Uncanny Valley" implies the existence of a "Canny Valley." Which is presumably where all those Scottish engineers come from.
Missed posting this earlier, but the inventor of XModem and CBBS deserves some press: Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78.
Wow. I thought the friend whose Facebook photo was stolen and reconstituted in another account was just a victim of run-of-the-mill scammers, but now that that account is engaging in threads on FB, it's clear that it's probably the Nextdoor trolls trying to upend fact-based discussions of local policy.
This is back from 2011, but the deep dive into supply & demand vs amenity effects in this UCLA Housing Voice podcast with Evan Mast.
The takeaway seems to be that by the time the new buildings go in, they're responding to already occurring gentrification.
This is just about residential, and the fear in Petaluma is about retail, but...
https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/202...ighborhood-rents-with-evan-mast/
Monday October 14th, 2024
Seen people recommending this a lot, started watching it and was like "why?", and then suddenly it caught fire and, yes, I endorse this message.
Cabel Sasser at the XOXO Festival: Panic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_K7pIsfvg
Watching someone's attempts to troll me on Nextdoor get deleted, and I'm kinda bummed that they're getting flagged, because nothin' like people showing their whole selves on Nextdoor to make my point...
Self-driving cars. Fusion energy generation. World peace. Getting read-only and editable NSTextFields to draw consistently aligned with each other.
Don't know when/if I'd ever get to the Czech Republic, but... Old tower clock mechanisms on display at Dečín Chateau
Back in the... must have been the late '70s, maybe very early '80s, GE in Pittsfield MA had a huge open house. My Dad worked there, and it was a time we could go see where he worked. The guys in the high voltage lab associated with power transformer were doing all of the big arcs, and over in the naval defense department they had a little robot that was wandering around and interacting with people. And was obviously remote controlled by someone off-screen.
That has stuck with me in the current craze of demonstrating robots as "AI"...
Tesla's Beer-Serving Optimus Robot Was Controlled By A Human The Whole Time.
As a former Ocoee guide, a former Outdoor Adventures Rafting guide, even, NBC reporting on the whitewater guides helping with rescues and clean-ups in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton gives me all of the warm fuzzies.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/r...rews-hurricane-helene-rcna174716
Sunday October 13th, 2024
I try to avoid Amazon, but ended up signing up for a free Prime trial to watch a movie last night, and... I could either, on Tuesday, drive 25 miles to hope that Electronics Plus in San Rafael has what I want in stock, or have 20 of them delivered for ten bucks tomorrow.
And given the number of things delivered in my neighborhood, I'm sure that that's dramatically fewer vehicle miles traveled.
hi, i'm daniel. i'm a 15-year-old with some programming experience and i do a little bug hunting in my free time. here's the insane story of how I found a single bug that affected over half of all Fortune 500 companies:
The fun bit is how Zendesk blew him off with the initial reports...
Saturday October 12th, 2024
RT Josh Jersild @JoshJers@peoplemaking.games
One thing that I was trying to describe to the 15-year-old is that, when I was in college, google worked *so well* to find basically exactly what you were searching for that there was a site called "Let Me Google That For You" where you could snarkily send someone their question back and they'd see it animate the process of typing their question into google, then get the search results and bam, there's the answer to their question
I would *never* consider doing that now because almost never is the first hit the actual thing you want (and, honestly, it's getting rarer that it's top 10)
Shades of the old Elf Sternberg "Balkanize Usenet" proposal: The Oliphant: Islands
Islands are opt-in federated networks consisting of a chain of allowlist or “limited federation” servers linked together. Everyone in the network federates with each other, and as such the entire network is more resilient and able to handle moderation challenges simply impossible in the wider fediverse.
Although I think Tara is doing an amazing job at moderating the Mastodon instance I use.
Running Clang in the browser using WebAssembly
Discover how to compile C programs directly from JavaScript or any browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), and explore the powerful capabilities of the Wasmer JS SDK
Ugh. Two things that didn't survive the server upgrade that I have to figure out. One appears to be database triggers of some sort, because I don't think my edits, or comments, are triggering a front page rebuild.
The other is in PNG file handling somewhere.
Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer.
Via Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop
Here in one paper is the probable reason why Apple abruptly pulled out of OpenAI's current funding round a week ago, after previously being expected to buy at least a billion bucks of equity.
(AI is peripheral to Apple's business model and not tarnishing their brand in the long term is more important than jumping on a passing fad.)
https://appdot.net/@jgordon/113294630427550275
Marcus on AI: LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem
Interesting to see what triggers Google Gemini and what doesn't. Matching the pronoun to the plural/singular gives the (in)appropriate search results, but "how do french women hold their liquor" gives this botsplaining...
When someone realizes that maybe the candidate whose sign they put up isn't all that...
What does it mean when your vacant downtown restaurant space is being used to advertise a catering event in the not really a town next town over?
I was recently involved in a discussion, stemming from my whine about Ubuntu renaming libgeographic-dev to libgeographiclib-dev, about the value of code, about building assets, and about operations vs capital improvement.
We in software kind of casually say that every line of code is a liability. And it's true. We say that the value of software is in how little it costs to change it, and this is a little less true, because a working system has value, and, yes, changing it costs and agility has value, but...
I'm not sure what my thesis is, but when we build external dependencies, we're making it so that we must, randomly, spend on changing our software, on updating, and the constant churn means that we don't have value for craft.
Why should I bother to build it beautifully if it's gonna get torn down in 6 months? Why should I build it for a decade, or a month, if I'm going to have to gut it and rebuild it in two weeks?
As someone drawn to the startup world, I have struggled with this often, on the other hand the code running this website has legacy that runs back two and a half decades, and a good portion of it has been running largely unchanged for two.
And it pisses me off when an apt upgrade, even across releases, breaks shit.
Which is why I recommend today's rant: Get me out of data hell:
Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.
Friday October 11th, 2024
Tesla’s surprise announcements: Robovan and Optimus
Reminder that back in 2021 the humanoid robot was just someone in a robot suit, the ones yesterday were remote controlled by people, and in 2019 Musk said “Next year for sure we will have over a million robotaxis on the road.”.
Art Nouveau mock-ups aside (and, let's face it, it'd be kickass to see the whole carbeurated hot rod culture replaced with electric vehicles with wicked cool body sculpture and paint jobs), the whole thing is summed up nicely in Pivot to AI: Elon’s double nothingburger: robotaxis any year now, bro. And robots, bro. Trust us, bro.
RT Sohan Murthy @sohan@freeradical.zone
A friend of mine suggested that we stop using the sparkle ✨ emoji as the symbol for AI and replace it with a magic eight ball 🎱 as it more realistically conveys how the technology works. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. 😂
Thursday October 10th, 2024
Juice Rescue ⚡🔌🚗 — A collective effort to save and maintain Juicebox EV Chargers
Enel X Way USA is shutting down their support of Juicebox chargers, this is an attempt to keep those devices running.
Zoom is floundering. Just sent me an email saying "Upgrade to Zoom Workplace Pro and get 1 year of Perplexity Pro free", and... is that like a threat?
I've used Perplexity, and... no, just no.
Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says
Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.
Via Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io, who talks about this in the context of finding therapists who are culturally attuned.
Reporting Non-Consensual Intimate Media: An Audit Study of Deepfakes
Abstract: Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) inflicts significant harm. Currently, victim-survivors can use two mechanisms to report NCIM—as a non-consensual nudity violation or as copyright in- fringement. We conducted an audit study of takedown speed of NCIM reported to X (formerly Twitter) of both mechanisms. We uploaded 50 AI-generated nude images and reported half under X’s “non-consensual nudity” reporting mechanism and half under its “copyright infringement” mechanism. The copyright condition resulted in successful image removal within 25 hours for all images (100% removal rate), while non-consensual nudity reports resulted in no image removal for over three weeks (0% removal rate). We stress the need for targeted legislation to regulate NCIM removal online. We also discuss ethical considerations for auditing NCIM on social platforms.
If I wanted a USB camera with a narrower field of view and longer focus distance for Zooming our KBYG talks, anyone got a suggestion? This garage sale Logitech would be fine if it focused at 20' or so, but it's set up.for a person at a desk.
Seeing if I have fixed the upload: Google Labs once again adding AI value, this time telling me about the difference between sauces and dressings...
Seeing if I
Also: fuck Boost. I should have just written this code to raw POSIX calls to begin with; changing signatures mean I'm converting last_write_time(f) to just using stat(f.c_str(),&...).
It's times like every time I upgrade and C++ breaks that makes me think I should just port all this shit back to C. Or Perl. Some environment that doesn't think dicking around with my legacy code for its own sake is good.
It really shouldn't be this much of a PITA to keep stable systems running.
Today in "is that *really* necessary?", Ubuntu upgrade renamed libgeographic-dev to libgeographiclib-dev.
And of course it doesn't want to link.
Fuck it. Statically compile everything. Don't actually upgrade anything until you need to. Also, I'm assuming that I'll never find the gtest repo again, because that seems to be giving all sorts of warnings now.
Google Labs once again adding AI value, this time telling me about the difference between sauces and dressings...
Wednesday October 9th, 2024
Just riffing on that MTG quote about "controlling the weather". Yes, we have the technology, it's written in your local zoning code.
RT Sbectol :twt: @Sbectol@toot.wales
Wait. So this Nobel prize was won by a guy for a seminal paper first authored.. by his wife.
Who wasn’t even mentioned in the citation by the Nobel committee.
Erm.
My wife is Not Amused.
RT Annalee @Annalee@wandering.shop
@Sbectol the part where her name is ROSALIND is one of those things where if you put it in a novel the editor would suggest it was too on the nose
RT Tilde Lowengrimm @tilde@infosec.town
It's so weird talking to lawyers about important court cases right now. In the past, you'd ask about a case and they'd be like "Aah yes, the doctrine of Bibbity Bobbitus first promulgated under the Smithers court in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram which pertained to the rights of ranchers to interfere in the curtilage of unincorporated Res Materia…" and then make the Charlie Brown teacher noise for twenty minutes. But now you just ask something innocent like how many crimes the former president did and they say things like "Law is just an exercise of raw political power through another form; hundreds of years of precedent, gone in an instant; there is no justice in the world, or meaning in life…" and then make an inhuman keening wail which awakens all the dogs for miles around as the they sob into their hands. It's just different now, you know?
In 2024, hearing "backslash" in spoken URLs in podcast ads. We're doomed.