Flutterby™!

"You want plot twists, songs, everything, but kind-of bad? Go to me."

_ I'm gonna replace AI Olivia Squizzle_ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g)

Local giveaway group has a post: "Iso an adult costume size S/M please and thank you". And I was about to offer up an S/M costume, but then I re read it.

Bwahahaha: Alaska Beacon: False citations show Alaska education official relied on generative AI, raising broader questions. The best part is the dissembling about how this was a draft version, making it extremely plain that the "authors" (I hesitate to use that word if they're just fixing AI output after being repeatedly being called out on bullshit by third parties) were trying to backfill reasoning.

RT dr2chase @dr2chase@ohai.social

@DrTCombs Olds on NextDoor, *incensed* that I would suggest that main danger to kids popping wheelies in the road, is from impatient drivers. "They're adults, all they have to do is wait for the kids to clear. The brake pedal is right there."

Apparently popping wheelies in the road is intrinsically dangerous because it can cause licensed responsible adult drivers to fly into a rage and do a tantrum with their car, AND THIS HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH DRIVERS OR CARS.

We're seeing the "how many people are we willing to kill in the name of public safety" writ large: Pedestrian’s killing by truck was likely unavoidable, transit boss says. Lots of discussion about how they can't make the intersection safer because of a local emergency room that gets a lot of fire/ambulance traffic, but the kicker is how victim blaming has come to policy:

Correction: A previous version of this article stated the intersection had a walk sign, according to SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin. The intersection does not have a walk sign.

Spending the day down in the South Bay has made us way more open to the prospect of relocating out of the North Bay. I realize everyone in tech is holding their breath waiting for "AI" to do something or not, but if an opportunity occurred down that direction, or somewhere else cool, I'm suddenly more willing to chat.

I am here for the "Spangler Mortuary" traditional funeral home across the street from the "Direct Cremation $695.00" cut rate strip mall funeral services company

Killing a few hours in the South Bay between engagements, walking around downtown Mountain View... Connect 4, putting greens, corn hole... A lot Petaluma could borrow from where, maybe, we've got our chess tables..

Hmmmm... Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

A speaker in another recording described “two other girls and one lady.” Whisper invented extra commentary on race, adding "two other girls and one lady, um, which were Black.”

In a third transcription, Whisper invented a non-existent medication called “hyperactivated antibiotics.”

Some of the examples in Careless Whisper: Speech-to-Text Hallucination Harms are pretty amazingly egregious.

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08021

About to feel more accomplished about my commute home

Feeling accomplished on the commute home...

I have become the guy whose letters to the editor get turned down because they're too frequent.

Good morning, San Francisco Bay!

Perplexity's answer to "Please make a table of the CEOs of Intel in order, INTC market cap when their CEO-ship began, and Intel revenue when their tenure began".

Note that Intel went public October 13, 1971, pre Gordon Moore, and a spot check of the Swan and Ottelini numbers reveal them to be bullshit.

Google Gemini just told me that Intel's market cap on January 14, 2019 was $19,193,900. StatMuse says $184-190B. I'm not sure who to believe any more...

Best summary and follow-ups I've seen on this so far: Phoronix: Some Clarity On The Linux Kernel's "Compliance Requirements" Around Russian Sanctions

Other random links:

LWN: Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

Linus Torvalds' post to the kernel mailing list.

Ted Ts'o (of ext4 fame) on the kernel list

a toot with excerpts

Krebs on Security: The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Last week, Atlas invoked Daniel’s Law in a lawsuit (PDF) against Babel Street, a little-known technology company incorporated in Reston, Va. Babel Street’s core product allows customers to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slightly dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area.

So by my read, anyone, with a free trial, can draw a box around a house, and see where the residents of that house go. Or draw a box around a business (gun shop, abortion clinic, etc) and see where the customers and staff of that business go...

Brian Krebs thread on infosec.exchange

Nixle alert that AT&T's 911 service is out... again. Good to know that AT&T's network is going for five neins, or something.

Sonic offered 10G fiber for a $300 upgrade, same subscription price as I'm paying now. I should upgrade my WiFi so we can get closer to the Gig we've got now....

Whole bunch of these traffic data collection units along Kentucky St from Western to Washington. Looking at parking, perhaps?

https://miovision.com/scout-plus/

Nature: Do disruptive climate protests work? Real-time survey finally offers answers

Support for a moderate environmental group rose after a motorway closure, substantiating the ‘radical flank effect’.

Although the article claims that gain in support, it notes that "the researchers did not find a statistically significant effect on support for climate-friendly proposals", and that other looks at the effects of disruptive protests have found negative effects.

So I guess the point is that if you position your environmental group well, you can take advantage of the protests of more radical behavior.

RT JP @jplebreton@mastodon.social

@mhoye IMO the closest thing to the "men's radium belts, that are supposed to increase your Vigour & Virility or whatever, but actually they render you sterile / give you testicular cancer" in this current hype wave are orgs using LLMs to screen resumes

The Conversation: Do electric cars greatly increase the average mass of cars on the road? Not in Australia

Proving mostly that electric car buyers like smaller cars, but...

RT Dan Sugalski @wordshaper@weatherishappening.network

Turns out that LLM summaries are actually useful.

Not for *summarizing* text -- they're horrible for that. They're weighted statistical models and by their very nature they'll drop the least common or most unusual bits of things. Y'know, the parts of a message that are actually important.

No, where they're great is as a writing check. If an LLM summary of your work is accurate then indicates what you wrote doesn't really have much interesting information in it and maybe you should try harder.

Interesting hypothesis (with support): The American housing crisis is a theft, not a shortage:

By returning income inequality to the levels found in 1970, the United States could reduce the rate of extreme house poverty sixfold, and cut the rate of extreme rent poverty eleven-fold.

Wow, wanna bring out the Russian trolls? Suggest that speed limit enforcement is good, actually...

Learning Swift, and the XCode completion assistance... Every mumbled years someone tries to bring back a graphical programming environment, like draw out the flowchart, and I realize how close to that we've gotten in modern IDEs.

Woven fabric without warp is what's weft.

Realization: LLMs are automating Malcolm Gladwell's job.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

If you're looking for policy ideas to get people to stop driving, I've got a bunch: try ending the car lane halfway down a block or it's just got a shopping cart or fallen tree branch completely blocking it. If a storm drain clogs and the car lane is flooded, don't worry those people didn't need to go for a drive today anyway. #climateAction #transportation #banCars #legalizeBikes

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Design your car lanes to accumulate broken glass and debris. Block the entire car lane with signs like "road work ahead" and "share the road".

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

If there are no car lanes between a neighborhood and the nearby schools or shops, schedule a lot of meetings to talk about how we would like to build them in ten years if we can find the money.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

If someone shows up to a meeting by car, ask if their bike quit working.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Ask if customers need their parking validated, and when they say they didn't drive give them a cookie but if they did, charge them market rate.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Spend about $5/mile subsidizing bicycles and when somebody reports that their car was stolen, the police should just chuckle and tell them to fill out a form.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Say things like "not everyone can drive a car" in defense of protected bike lanes, and insist on accessibility-focussed bike parking with weather protection and good lighting near the door.

RT 😀🚲 @enobacon@urbanists.social

Create bike and pedestrian-scale entrances to your buildings with ease of access to adjacent transit stops. If you have a parking lot for cars, make sure it has just one entrance with a difficult turn and like a shopping cart corral or a rack full of plants in the way.

Democrats want DOJ to prosecute tax prep companies that allegedly shared user data with Meta and Google. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) are leading the charge.

All this is the latest in a series of events that kicked off after The Markup published a report in 2022 revealing how tax prep companies shared financial information with Meta and Google through a common piece of code known as a pixel. (At least one of the companies told The Markup at the time that it hadn’t realized the information was being shared and deactivated the pixel.) Lawmakers responded with a congressional probe, which was in turn followed by an audit from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The results of the audit were released by the TIGTA last month, and the senators say that the audit confirms their own findings, which were released back in July 2023.

Voted.

Email from the California Attorney General's office crows about "Continuing the Fight Against Organized Retail Crime", but apparently it's about shoplifting, not price-fixing...

Between California Forever and Esmeralda, I have this "tech bros discover the housing market" vibe...

Ah, Nextdoor, where "Public shaming" is the reason given when people report fact-checking that they don't like.

Google Gemini thinks Benjamin Franklin was a U.S. President... Asked "which us president spoke the most languages", got back a list that included him...

Whoah. Check out Alex DeCarli, in his own words, proposing the "company town" model for affordable housing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci6YAxx1AXI&t=4037s

Okay, it's plastic posts, on a stroad, but even Fresno is making separated bike lanes. Of course the dude is still riding on the sidewalk because holy crap, on this road who wouldn't...