Wednesday November 6th, 2024
A new study conducted by Forbes reveals how Waymo, a leader in the robotaxi industry, still lags considerably behind human-driven ridesharing services in two key transportation metrics: time and money.
I don't know if it's statistically significant, but it feels like so many people, including decades military vets, bugging out and leaving the country right now. I don't have that luxury, but I can sure see a future in which the US doesn't make it to 250 years, where the economic engine states decide that enough is enough, the future matters, and carve off. Or one where they don't. The 1930s comparisons seem so apt on so many fronts.
RT Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange
I have the spoons to give you all one or two right now. Americans:
You need to make a risk decision right now about whether to leave the country (particularly if you or family are in a vulnerable group).
Some people do not have the luxury and I deeply respect those who stay to protect them. If you do have the capability to move, there are options, from skills and even apprenticeship visas, to digital nomad, to heritage visas. You have -options. Tons of people have been forced to immigrate for a better life, we have just been privileged to not typically have to. You can sell stuff. It’s just stuff. There are companies who can help you with that. Visas are arcane, but there’s help. Look for the helpers.
It’s expensive, and it takes time and you need to make a plan right now, today. Not three months. Not six months. I’m modeling off the 1930s timetable.
Our federal government and judiciary is done for our lifetime. Period. You have to gauge how much your community and state can protect you from the worst harm, and how self sustaining you can be.
If you can't see because your windshield is sorry and you're driving into the sun, maybe don't accelerate hard away from the stop sign through the cross walk?
Bertrand Russell writing to Sir Oswald Mosley:
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell
Tuesday November 5th, 2024
More on all the helicopter traffic: https://www.petaluma360.com/ar...news/police-petaluma-man-marina/
"Unconfirmed police scanner reports and witness accounts on social media said the man was complaining about Tuesday’s election."
The article says "in the river", others listening to scanner suggest he's stolen a kayak.
Tons more sirens, and a Nixle alert to avoid the Petaluma Marina off Lakeville. This is a large response.
Huh, not only Henry 1, a CHP helicopter, and a whole bunch of police cars (I couldn't see the agency markings), but at least one Petaluma Fire SUV. Activity is now down around 101 and Lakeville. Don't see any smoke.
Huh. Henry 1, a CHP helicopter, and a parade of police cars with sirens and lights headed east on Washington.
RT RolloTreadway @RolloTreadway@beige.party
@davej @RickiTarr There's an old trade unionist saying here in the UK, which I bring up quite often but it often bears repeating:
Vote Labour on Thursday, fight Labour on Friday.
And I think that works in most countries, replacing Labour with the name of the relevant party. You vote for the people you're most able to influence, you do everything you can to help them win, and when they do win, that's when you get to work.
Some years ago I spent the evening at the studio of a local public broadcaster mashing reload on various websites to try to give the on air folks something to talk about on election night. This evening we'll be attending an election night gathering, and I already have the California Secretary of State election results site in a tab on my phone, but there's no way we're gonna know the results before we run out of steam.
So just watch this, and you've got all the news coverage you need until tomorrow: The Onion: Election Touchscreen Map Takes Deeper Look Inside Key Swing Voter (YouTube)
And, because I won't be able to actually keep from horse-race coverage, Time and the AP: See a Map of the 2024 Presidential Race Results
Sonoma County election results (from the County Clerk's office page on the elections)
Dear PDF publishers: It's 2024. We lost the 8.3 filename convention decades ago. There's no reason to continue to name your files "G4149.pdf" or "science.pdf", you can actually tell me what's in the file, by name.
Signed: Someone trying to make sense of his downloads folder.
This space intentionally left blank.
Monday November 4th, 2024
Whatever the results of tomorrow's election, we'll still need to keep our sleeves rolled up and keep working towards a better future. Useful: No-Box Thinking: Navigating Change Resistance in Small Town America
I grew up pretty rural, the school I went to as affiliated with a large dairy farm, my family had goats, sheep, and ducks, the latter two we ate. I enjoy meat.
But I have had some ethical qualms about the impacts of meat on the broader world, and Sonoma County's Measure J has brought up a lot of issues about local factory farming.
So the framing of "4H clubs are the ROTC for factory farming" has me pondering a few things this morning.
There's been talk for years about textbooks being interactive, and with the introduction of the iPad we started to see some of those things (who, among early iPad users, didn't buy The Elements?). Textbooks come alive with new, interactive AI tool, "record" the diagram on an iPad, use Meta's "Segment Anything" tool to make the diagram interactive, with a claimed 60% success rate right now.
The video is worth a watch, they demonstrate some simple ramp and optics/ray tracing problems and experimenting with resistor networks.
Saturday November 2nd, 2024
RT requiem 🏴 @requiem@hackers.town
“GitHub Spark: Can we enable anyone to create or adapt software for themselves, using AI and a fully-managed runtime?”
We had this in the 80’s, it was called BASIC.
It ran on 8 bit computers that you could actually own for a couple hundred bucks, most of which consumed less than 100 watts.
It was so simple that anyone could learn to use it, so concise that entire pieces of software could be distributed via printed magazines and so universal that most programs could be run on completely different computers with little or no modification.
The best part? Using it made you smarter, not stupider.
Facebook for me these days is filled with bullshit link bait posts. The most annoying thing about this is that they look like LLM generated hogwash. In this case, no, The Bee Gees were not Australian, they were born on the Isle of Man. So, yeah, the link bait has negative value, exposing ourselves to it makes us less smart.
Friday November 1st, 2024
Google Gemini still seems to have problems with superscripts and exponent operators... Excerpting the Wikipedia article that says 2^136,279,841 − 1 as: "As of October 12, 2024, the largest known prime number is 2136,279,841 − 1, which has 41,024,320 digits"
Which... well... 2,136,279,840 does not have 41 million digits.
Thousands (in Dublin) Turn Out For Nonexistent Halloween Parade Promoted By AI Listing. AI slop spam SEO sites: +1, humans: +0.
Just discovered Camo to use my cell phone as a camera. With Know Before You Grow done for the year, now I need to find places to practice broadcasting an event so that I can be better at this when we start again next year...
RT jessitron @jessitron@hachyderm.io
One cannot explicitly change what is implicit.
...[beware] the lure of urgent transformation as a controlled process.
- Nora Bateson, Combining
Thursday October 31st, 2024
"I thought Grace said the security system was state of the art?"
"Yeah, but she didn't say which movement: Dadaist, maybe? Zombie formalism?"
Giggling over Woodbine: A Parkdale Haunts Production, episode 4...
Adam Conover: Two Computer Scientists Debunk A.I. Hype with Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (YouTube video). Lots of stuff that's familiar to people who've heard me rant, but the observation around 23:30 that "AI snake oil is appealing to broken institutions" is kinda landing.
I have been thinking a lot about the fact that LLM ownership is a commodity market, you'd be a fool to not make your AI veneer product able to exchanged underlying LLMs because the LLM is essentially reduced to commodity, but the realization that when you're dropping all of your decision-making into an underlying monoculture means that business differentation is going to even more depend on not relying on "AI".
And "So many of our rituals in the business world are bullshit" is, perhaps, optimistic, but also...
In common parliance the label of "slacker" is generally an insult. However in The Lord of the Rings the entire fate of mortal kind is secured by deliberate divine intervention in the form of God creating Hobbits - a race so bereft of ambition that the ultimate temptation of the One Ring was ineffective at corrupting their hearts. Thus it can be understood that all modern societies benefit from, if not outright require the presence and influence of a group of peoples whose only desire is to smoke weed and putter about in their back yard garden.
In this essay I will
RT Kieran Healy @kjhealy@mastodon.social
It’s v. important next week if you’re IN LINE to vote then STAY IN LINE and REMEMBER for the case of ONE MACHINE your wait time W can be APPROXIMATED by W = 1/µ + (ρ / 2µ(1-ρ)) where λ is the ARRIVAL rate and µ the service or DEPARTURE rate, and ρ or UTILIZATION is λ/µ, a formulation due to AGNER ERLANG.
Tony Fadell takes a shot at Sam Altman in TechCrunch Disrupt interview
“Right now we’re all adopting this thing and we don’t know what problems it causes,” Fadell pointed out. He noted also that a recent report said that doctors using ChatGPT to create patient reports had hallucinations in 90% of them. “Those could kill people,” he continued. “We are using this stuff and we don’t even know how it works.”
And I thought that this was when I linked to the study he references, but that one appears to be out of Cornell, and the one that Tech Crunch references by way of The Associated Press: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said references a UMich study that I can't find the original of.
Thought I'd mentioned this earlier, but I apparently didn't include enough detail that I can find it: Elizabeth Laraki describes someone using "AI" to stretch a photo of her for a conference flyer, and and the image manipulation inserting extra cleavage and a bit of a bra.
This screen shot looks amazing: Stop-motion animator Amanda Strong creates immersive worlds for Indigenous stories
Inkwo for When the Starving Return trailer. Some video of process at Behind the Scenes with Amanda Strong | X Company | CBC resulting in Breaking Point | X Company | CBC
WebGL amazement of the moment: https://paveldogreat.github.io/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation/
Wednesday October 30th, 2024
The Harvard Gazette: Seem like peanut allergies were once rare and now everyone has them?
The AAP committee mimicked what the UK health department had recommended two years earlier: total peanut abstinence. The recommendation was technically for high-risk children, but the AAP authors acknowledged that, “The ability to determine which infants are high risk is imperfect.” Having a family member with any allergy or asthma could qualify as “high-risk” using the strictest interpretation. And many well-meaning pediatricians and parents read the recommendation and thought, Why take chances? Instantly, pediatricians adopted a simple mnemonic to teach parents in their offices: “Remember 1-2-3. Age 1: start milk. Age 2: start eggs. Age 3: start peanuts.” A generation of pediatricians was indoctrinated with this mantra.
And so, the American Association of Pediatrics, in echoing the UK misreading of a 1996 BMJ study, kicked off and created a generation of peanut allergies.
Excerpted from “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary. Via.
The logical successor to buying parachutes off of Temu: Chinese Startup Offers Trips to Edge of Space for an Absolute Bargain, Sells Out in Minutes
Retooted both for the observation about Firefox, and for the observation about AI-ness. RT nytpu @nytpu@tilde.zone
Fun fact: I was talking with some very non-tech people today and multiple people said they switched to Firefox because of Google Chrome ruining adblock and because of them shoving AI crap into it. But, they dislike or are ambivalent about all of Firefox other than it having functional adblock and no AI crap (as do I, Firefox sucks a lot), but then half of them said they switched back to Chrome because Mozilla started releasing AI crap and didn't see why they should bother.
So all the people who say “oh Normal People either don't care about AI or actively like it and Mozilla is just trying to expand their userbase” are just lying. Once you get out of the perpetually online sphere you do see a lot fewer people vehemently against AI, but I also have never once met anyone who actually really liked it (at best people tentatively use it for a few things). And Mozilla is actively making the browser as bad as possible and pushing people who don't care about what browser they use beyond a few features away
"when all you have is a hammer ...": use my carefully polished peening hammer for driving nails and there will be hell to pay.
RT Dan Fixes Coin-Ops @ifixcoinops@retro.social
My idea: CLOTHES SHOP FOR DADS
You roll up at the facility, drive over to the JEANS hut. Dinnerlady-type in her wee hole says "What size luv," you go "thirrehfourthirrehtwoluv" while making a mental note to go easy on the pies so you can get back to 32/32, she goes "Right you are luv, tenner alright?" and chucks you a bin bag full of dead blokes' jeans that aren't too far gone and you give her a tenner and you're done, move on. T-shirts next.
T-shirts are more complicated, your jeans were the simple one to ease you into it. Pull round to a bloke eating a pasty. He asks "Size," you go "Medium or large depending y'know," he nods, "You wanting colour, drab, black or mixup?" you think about it a moment and go aye, go on then, "Mix it up mate, colours and drab," he goes "Plain or wi' shite on, plain's two quid extra," you're sure as hell not gonna advertise some bugger else's T-shirt business on your body, so you give him twelve quid and he hands you Bin Bag 2.
There's a pub on-premises that'll do you some chips or a pasty and you can watch the JCB sorting out the clothes while you drink your pint and furtle through your bags to see what you've bought.
It'd be brilliant. Buying clothes would have nae stress at all, plus if you ended up wearing shite and looking a bit of a muppet you could just go "Aye well it were in the bag weren't it" and everybody'd nod and go aye, fair do's
RT Christie Koehler @christi3k@toot.cat
Can you imagine CEOs breathlessly showcasing “25% of new code copied from StackOverflow”??
Because it’s pretty much the same thing.
I hate this timeline.
Forget rapscallion, I'm going for full-on hip hop allium.
Worth remembering in discussions about local politics: RT Urban Hermit @Urban_Hermit@mstdn.social
Remember, compromise for the sake of compromise alone is designed to give legitimacy to outrageous positions.
Knee jerk both sidesism is a strategy of the extremist, to get a seat at the table for people who have no interest in solving the problem.
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.
RT May Keable 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ @Keab42@kind.social
I think that fact that we're using AI to write emails because we find it hard and AI to summarise emails because we can't be bothered to read them suggests that we should take a look at how we communicate rather than boiling the oceans to have LLMs hallucinate at each other on our behalf.
We haven't found a solution for climate change yet, but we're getting warmer.
Michael W Lucas's kickstarter for Dear Abyss: the FreeBSD Journal Letters Column, Years 1-6, if only for the intro quote:
Decades in the computing industry have taught me several undeniable lessons: Computers were a mistake. The IT business is terrible. The Web is a cancer, email is a nightmare, and overclocked monkeys are evolutionarily unsuited to chat. But here we are.
RT Darth Putin @DarthPutinKGB@mastodon.world
The problem with appeasement is that you eventually run out of other people’s countries.
RT Joe Groff @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
now that the "m4" imac is out, i can finally share some exciting news. we're migrating the Xcode build system to autoconf
Tuesday October 29th, 2024
The Parkdale Haunt podcast was good, but also... not the vibe I need right now, so I took a while to start the next from those creators, Woodbine.
But on today's walk I started it, and... I'm hooked.
Julia Evans does a great job of demystifying things like Git, and recontextualizing a lot of technologies that olds like me take for granted for the kids these days.
It's fascinating to see this "what do the control characters do" chart, because there's so much "yeah, but, and...", and yet it's kinda mostly right and I can see that contextualization.
What I’m really not sure about though is what the endgame is for this person? How will they pass 3-4 rounds of interviews? What will they achieve if offered a job? When does the time spent on this pay off?
Tesla Crashes Into Oncoming Car, Saves the Life of a Pedestrian
A Tesla might have just saved the life of a pedestrian. Footage captured by a dash cam shows the car suddenly veering to avoid the man who fell onto the roadway and crashing into an oncoming vehicle. It is, though, unclear if the driver had a super quick reaction or if it was the FSD that saved the life of the pedestrian.
Emphasis mine. The collision was in a 30kph zone, it was unclear if the vehicles involved were traveling that.
Meanwhile... Tesla Using 'Full Self-Driving' Hits Deer Without Slowing, Doesn't Stop
Photos and video posted to Twitter by @TheSeekerOf42 show the before and after of a deer strike, during which the poster claimed he was using Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software. Video shows the car approaching a deer in the road without slowing, and a photo of the front of the car shows the resulting damage: A cracked bumper, and a hood that’s both dented and “shifted almost an inch toward the windshield.”
Which... pretty sure most modern cars have automatic braking with forward-looking radar, so you'd at least get the beeping alert and a hard brake event.
"You want plot twists, songs, everything, but kind-of bad? Go to me."
Monday October 28th, 2024
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.
Sunday October 27th, 2024
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..