Thursday April 25th, 2024
As campus administrators across the country are solidly positioning themselves on the wrong side of history, I'm reminded of my Dad, who had a stint in the army that he actually really enjoyed (he was in Germany along the Iron Curtain and didn't re-up because Vietnam was finally catching up with him), observing that when his peers were protesting, he was enlisting, and that he should have been protesting.
Seriously, if anyone has recommendations for USB-C power cables that last any amount of time, please mention them. I'm, down to one 3' long one that I bought because it was $20 vs the $15 for the other ones, the original Apple one died, the magsafe connector on this M2 MBP seems to have died, and I'm sick of shoveling money down the USB-C hole.
Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search. TLDR: They took the ex-McKinsey guy who ran Yahoo! search into the ground and let him degrade search so that people would spend more time looking at ads.
Hacker News thread, linked to because it's rare to see that many comments about a Google personality, with nobody stepping up to defend him.
Oh that's A powerful observation: "It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible."
Email from Chevrolet informs me that "Dan, there’s a world of tech in Blazer EV", and... no, I work with this stuff, let's limit that tech as much as possible...
For all of the horrible things McKinsey has done to the US, this feels an awful lot like taking down Al Capone via tax fraud, but I'll take it: McKinsey Faces US Criminal Probe Over Opioids Work, Sources Say
Wednesday April 24th, 2024
Not sure if "8 Cheese Pizza" means like 7 bladed razor, or "we had leftovers and a grater" or ... But that many seems excessive for a blend.
Charles Buhler's "reactionless drive" is making the rounds again, just as the reviews of all of these half-baked cell phones that talk to "AI assistants" are starting to come out. This morning it's The Verge talking about the Rabbit R1, in the wake of all of the hullabaloo over Marques Brownlee's review of the Humane AI pin titled "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now" (YouTube).
And I'm reminded of that thing where it's useful to look at "what's the enabling technology here?". If Buhler's right, space travel is the absolutely least interesting thing about what he's pushing. If a company has developed interesting "AI assistant" technology, carrying around another device is the least interesting part of that.
A few years ago I was thinking "well, I could learn to play another instrument, or I could use my voice to generate MIDI", so I went looking for those technologies, and holy shit the number of people who were selling plugins that promised to do that, but bundling it with a cheap USB mic, were legion (especially once I triggered the Facebook ad demons). And, of course, none of them found any third party who'd credibly say "yeah, this works".
Anyway, wish more "AI" reviewers would do head-to-heads against the current state of Siri or Alexa.
Tuesday April 23rd, 2024
An Ask MeFi question for "Fluffer pro tips" did *not* go in the direction I was expecting...
It's been a while since I've been cycle counting, but this is interesting: The Performance Impact of C++'s `final` Keyword
In case you skimmed to the end, here's the summary:
- Benefit seems to be available for GCC.
- Doesn't affect Apple's chips much at all.
- Do not use
finalwith Clang, and maybe MSVC as well.
At the very least, it's another one of those things to hide behind the preprocessor so you've got options.
Study: Alphabetical order of surnames may affect grading
An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students’ submissions in Canvas — the most widely used online learning management system — which is based on alphabetical rank of their surnames.
Monday April 22nd, 2024
Mike Masnick: The Coddling of the American Parent
Jonathan Haidt’s new book “The Anxious Generation” blames youth mental health issues on social media in a way that’s easy, wrong, and dangerous.
Great article on the politicization of insurance risk, perverse incentives, and rebuilding in flood zones: Mother Jones: These Floridians Rebuilt Houses in Flood Zones. Now FEMA Is Cracking Down.
...We find that prescribing of the associated drug increases 4\% in the twelve months after a payment is received, with the increase beginning sharply in the month of payment and fading out within a year. A marketing payment also leads physicians to begin treating cancer patients with lower expected mortality. While payments result in greater expenditure on cancer drugs, there are no associated improvements in patient mortality.
College applications rose in states that legalized recreational marijuana
Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences model, we investigate the effects of local recreational marijuana (RMJ) policy changes on college applications and find that the three largest state public schools reaped, on average, an almost 54% increase in applications. This increase does not appear to come solely from low-ability students as both first and third quartiles of admitted student composite SAT scores to the largest three public schools do not decrease. Rather, they both increase by almost 3.8% though these estimates are not statistically significant. Robust difference-in-difference and event study models support the signs and magnitudes of these gains and show they diminish over time.
Saturday April 20th, 2024
The CVS pharmacy in the Petaluma Target/Kenilworth location is closed today. Presumably for 4/20 celebrations?
Why did it take me so long to realize that Tesla is just taking "move fast and break things" a little too literally?
Friday April 19th, 2024
Whoah, it's Bicycle Day, already! How'd I miss that?
Thursday April 18th, 2024
Interesting: Zrythm, "A highly automated and intuitive digital audio workstation".
Currently okay with Logic Pro as my DAW for the things I do, but should I get back on Linux I'm definitely intrigued, because this looks like there's a lot of stuff that's more built for usability for people like me rather than skeuomorphism for musicians.
“One of the reasons — no, two of the reasons — we hired Yvonne are being smushed by this costume.”
Yvonne Craig: An Interview with the First Actress to Play Batgirl
Changes in Permanent Contraception Procedures Among Young Adults Following the Dobbs Decision
We observed an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures among adults aged 18 to 30 years following Dobbs. The increase in procedures for female patients was double that for male patients. These patterns offer insights into the gendered dynamics of permanent contraceptive use and may reflect the disproportionate health, social, and economic consequences of compulsory pregnancy on women and people with the capacity to become pregnant.
doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2024.0424
Oh, look, the cryptodweebs are reporting me for offering up cited debunking of their bullshit. Apologies to the my awesome instance admin for wading through their crap. A good reminder to block and move on, rather than engaging the idiots.
Wednesday April 17th, 2024
Strange science facts: In nuclear power, functional nuclear fission reactors were constructed as early as 1942, yet nuclear fusion remains elusive and can only be achieved for short periods. In jazz, on the other hand, jazz fusion was invented in the early 70s, and jazz fission remains purely theoretical even today
On Marques Brownlee's review of the Humane AI pin, and his subsequent Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies?: Clap Or AI Gets It — Can bad reviews kill companies? It’s a start.
Like the threat behind crypto’s “have fun staying poor” slogan, AI needs the rest of us to believe in its unstoppable ascendancy because that belief is basically all it has. AI products aren’t about whether anyone wants or needs AI products. They’re about how people could want or need those products, eventually, if everyone stays the course and also keeps pumping money into AI companies.
Oh, good, I'm glad that after the recent Firefox upgrade I had to restart a couple of times for various things to start working. I thought I was going to have to finally switch away.
In other news, Mozilla has a helpful guide to getting started with LLMs https://ai-guide.future.mozilla.org/
Judge awards $23.5 million to undercover St. Louis officer beaten by colleagues during protest
The attack happened on Sept. 17, 2017, days after Stockley was acquitted in the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith on Dec. 20, 2011. Hall was walking back toward police headquarters when his uniformed colleagues ordered him to put up his hands and get on the ground, then beat him.
So, yeah, dude was undercover in a protest over the acquittal of a white cop shooting a black guy.
Capcom has launched a new website celebrating the company’s 40th anniversary
But, yeah, whatever, you don't want the article, you want to go straight to Capcom Town, with playable versions of some of the video games and all of the nostalgias.
A little LLM optimism for the morning: Molly White: AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.
Not everyone is so optimistic: RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop
@pluralistic @molly0xfff Eh, I think LLMs work really well at their intended purpose—which is to separate investors from their capital. (The claimed "benefits", meanwhile, are mostly a collection of bare-faced lies.)
Reading "If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me", and struck by the pondering of the distinctions between possession, ownership, and status of cultural artifacts (like songs), and how our analytical structures reflect biases on these issues.
Interesting. a bug of mine suggests that OpenAI's "small" embeddings are locations on a sphere? I haven't chased it down, it's ancillary to what I'm trying to accomplish, but that's a dramatically smaller semantic space than I'd intuitively have thought.
Monday April 15th, 2024
RT BrianKrebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...-systems-in-smart-lock-key-leak/
BTW in case you need help with Chirp Systems products, here is their user guide:
"User Guide
What do we want this to say? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."
Via Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange who notes:
I told everyone. And nobody cared.
RT R Tyler Croy 🦀 @rtyler@hacky.town
Now that residential solar is a solved problem, I would like to see residential pumped-storage hydroelectricity
kthx
RT mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social
why are we calling it machine learning when we could be calling it stochastic errorism
Mother Jones: The spectacular implosion of the Libertarian party. I think Ron Paul was kind of the swan song there, the acknowledgement that the party had lost any sense of ideological coherence and was just becoming the racist rural subsidy-and-externality-leech party, but this goes into some of the internal factions of that decline and disruption.
The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to “address any critical vulnerabilities,” yet cited no specifics. The email author(s) wanted OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. This approach bears strong resemblance to the manner in which “Jia Tan” positioned themselves in the XZ/liblzma backdoor.
RT Guy Boyd @resync@mastodon.social
@The_McJones @davidgerard
We use a constraint solver model in our product, we’ve stopped describing it as AI because we found customers no longer trusted its output if we did
That component is simply known as “the algorithm” now 😓
So Oakland airport is renaming themselves to include "San Francisco" in the name, and... if you can figure out how to get people from one airport to the other in less than 30 minutes or so, I bet you can print money.
Those travelers showing up at the wrong airport who *need* to get across the bay...
Ugh. Something's broken in my CMS's UTF-8 handling, this is from Firefox desktop.
àëǐöü
Reading Stratechery: Gemini 1.5 and Google’s Nature, I'm struck by how many conditionals there are. It's about how Google's large context window for their LLM system could enable things like reading a vendor's TOS and checking for compliance with policy, or really pie in the sky stuff, and
Again, leave aside the implausibility of this demo: the key takeaway is the capabilities unlocked when the model is able to have all of the context around a problem while working; this is only possible with — and here the name is appropriate — a long context window, and that is ultimately enabled by Google’s infrastructure.
This reminds me a lot about the discussion around self-driving automobiles, where, leaving aside the issues of geometry and pollution and whatnot, is it possible that autonomous cars could be better drivers than humans? Sure. But every time someone digs through the deliberate obfuscation of the stats and looks at the numbers of what's happening right now, we're a long way the other side of that.
Or, of course, the discussion around cryptocurrencies.
Anyway, Futurism: Disillusioned Businesses Discovering That AI Kind of Sucks:
"'This is super cool, but I can't actually get it to work reliably enough to roll out to our customers.'"
Sunday April 14th, 2024
At the Blue Zones kickoff expo at the SRJC campus. They've waived parking fees for the event. This feels like a symptom of the problem.
When you misread the Apple Music icons, and accidentally buy the "clean" version of Beyoncé's Carter Country. Damn it.
At the Oaktown 8s Tea Dance