Saturday January 18th, 2025
Here just so I can find it: California Fire Facts
Friday January 17th, 2025
If you are one of the single-digit people in the world who understands this, I am so, so sorry.
document.querySelector("div[role='banner']:has(div > a[href='https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864'])").style.display="none";
This is fascinating for someone who, back in the '90s, did a little work with Apple's QuickTime MOV format files, and also has some interesting notes about why you may have experienced audio sync issues: OBS Studio: Writing an MP4 Muxer for Fun and Profit
If one were to go back through the history of this blog, one would find me ranting again and again that the standardization of the web, and JavaScript, was going to lead to lock-in and monoculture and too much control by the big players.
It is, frankly, surprising that it took this long, but Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search.
FTC takes action against General Motors for sharing precise location and driving behavior. Yep, your OnStar subscription was a way to get you to pay to have your privacy violated.
I'm trying to debug why our password fill isn't working, and run into the "Boomerang" framework, and under features I see a list like:
- Web browser client No plugins required!
- Node.js command line client
- WebCL support in progress
Okay, but, like, what the fuck does this actually *do*? Besides frob the egos of middle management or something?
Whee: "Atmospheric CO2 rise now exceeding IPCC 1.5°C scenarios"
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/r.../forecasts/co2-forecast-for-2025
Just imagine if we'd spent that $150B that's burning up in Southern California, or the ~$60B that Helene inflicted on North Carolina (>$80B total), or the... pre-emptively, rather than making the world worse.
In this age of dynamic languages which protect ourselves from raw pointers, and widget sets which manager their own string storage, how are people managing secure text, like passwords?
Used to be we'd memset() out our passwords as soon as we were done with them, now... Do we just hope that the allocator overwrites them, that the garbage collector discards them, or do we just depend on memory protection keeping others from finding them?
Thursday January 16th, 2025
Doh. Of course there are situations where atan2(y,x) ends up giving floating point different factors of pi values for axis aligned vectors of different length.
I've been programming how long? SMH.
A while back for work I was traveling to Hong Kong, and even into China, and it was always impressive to me how many people there spoke English. I was, for a while, trying to learn enough written Chinese to at least be able to flag down the right cart in a dim sum restaurant (I have eaten way more types of intestine than I ever thought I would), and when people saw me practicing glyphs they'd engage me to practice their English with an American. A few people tried to teach me some Cantonese words, but generally shook their heads sadly at my pronunciation and difficulty hearing some of the sounds.
So I find it very amusing that Americans are learning at least written Chinese, if not Mandarin, because US social media companies decided that the best way to compete with a video platform was to dupe lawmakers into enacting a protectionist ban.
Oh look, Google AI is hep to the lingo the kids these days are using.
Aha! Got back to Rust and figured out how to express the Arena code I wanted to!
Now working on specifying my parse tree. Despite all the wacky punctuation, this is not a language that encourages terse expression like Perl...
Wednesday January 15th, 2025
Seeing various commentary around this article on how insufficient "in-lieu" fees from developers mean San Jose is having trouble paying for infastructure, so...
Impact fees are a Ponzi scheme, housing responds to supply and demand, and this is mostly an issue because of Prop 13. If you're gonna hate on someone, hate on Howard Jarvis.
https://sanjosespotlight.com/i...ose-with-infrastructure-backlog/
RT Amy Dentata @amydentata@tech.lgbt
If you want a mood boost, consider that you, personally, are exactly as close to developing AGI as a company valued at over one hundred billion dollars
Very interesting: I've got a friend who's got a drone, he'd love to be able to inspect his roof and solar panels with it, but he's a few miles north of an (uncontrolled) airport, and the drone won't let him fly in his back yard.
I've also looked at the FAA regs for RC model airplanes recently, and if I'm reading it right it's become super complex to fly anything larger than 1lb anywhere around me, even below 400'.
DJI will no longer stop drones from flying over airports, wildfires, and the White House, they provide a warning, but don't stop the platform from flying. And, today I learned:
But it turns out the DJI drone that damaged a Super Scooper airplane fighting the Los Angeles wildfires was a sub-250-gram model that may not require Remote ID to operate, and the FBI expects it will have to “work backwards through investigative means” to figure out who flew it there.
Wow. If you have memories of Zork, "Interactive Fiction" or ever looked at the Infocom game language/Z-machine stuff, Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) has released The Visibile Zorker, and a blog post talking about the thing.
Vietnam fines reckless drivers half the average annual salary
Under the penalties introduced from January 1, car drivers can be fined 20 to 22 million dong ($1,273 to $1,400) for causing an accident when opening a car door.
US TikTok users flock to Chinese app Xiaohongshu in protest with TikTok ban looming
“TikTok possibly getting banned doesn’t just take away an app, it takes away jobs, friends and community,” Garman said. “Personally, the friends and bond I have with my followers will now be gone.”
and
“A lot of us are smarter than that though so we decided to piss off our government and download an actual Chinese app,” she said. “We call that trolling … in short we’re here to spite our government and to learn about China and hang out with you guys.”
Only in music is a third two wholes...
Tuesday January 14th, 2025
+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist.
To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:
It's twenty freaking twenty five. Stop building web forms that leave the submit button disabled after my password manager fills in fields, so that I have to go hit space and backspace to make your fucking interface work.
It is astounding to me, and an indication of how far software development as a discipline has fallen, that big companies make products this shitty.
(This message also brought to you by having to go find a security Torx driver to reset a camera from a grid fluctuation.)
In light of the Vulture article about Neil Gaiman's abuses, and the discussion of his parents' Scientology, I'm thinking even deeper about growing up in a Waldorf community, and some of the expectations and beliefs that I grew up with.
Because the thing is, I can see very clearly how a man can be socialized into feeling that the behaviors that lead to that sort of harm is normal and accepted.
Github fall down go boom.
Greater Greater Washington: Road pricing could make transportation in the District more equitable
We need more cities following in the footsteps of NYC. Heck, we need VMT, generally.
Sunday January 12th, 2025
Back from calling my second Saturday night dance, this one for Circle n Squares in Santa Rosa. 4 hours (ish, double rounds and a snack break), but dang I put it all out there and will sleep well.
A lotta compliments, it feels good.
Friday January 10th, 2025
If I've got friends who are Mac (relatively recent with decent quantities of RAM) users who'd be willing to give me a bit of Zoom time to discuss work project and prospects, I'd love to have some conversations and honest feedback.
And, yes, even if, or perhaps especially if, you bounced off the videos I sent around last year.
My sheets are versatile.
Hugs to my friends with trauma from the Tubbs Fire who are having their social media feeds filled with all of the pictures from the Southern California fires and having flashbacks.
Thursday January 9th, 2025
When your feed checker code trips up because an RSS feed in the wild is a framework of empty elements...
RT Hein Ragas @heinragas@mublog.nl
Looking at the news coming out of LA about the wildfires, I am reminded on a tweet I once read:
"You will experience climate change as a series of increasingly wild disaster videos, until one day you are the one making the video."
In light of the LA area fires: If you are not yet aware that you live in fire country (it's coming, it's just a matter of probability), you may not be familiar with Watch Duty. Watch Duty is an app and web site that stemmed out of the 2022 organizing to capture an arsonist in the Russian River area. It's run by a 501c3 non-profit, and the app is invaluable for the latest info on fires, and the organization is worthy of membership/recurring donation.
And you can set up alerts for counties, so you can know when you need to worry about that smoke...
And if you don't know about that 2022 organizing, the "Manhunt on Bohemian Highway" episode of the Nocturne podcast (mentioned previously) is well worth a listen.
Picture of the Mission & Mountain View concrete
I'm not saying that epoxying flex posts to this fog line at 5AM, that we're removed by city workers a few business hours later, led to the stop signs and actual concrete that just went in on the corner of Mission Dr & Mountain View Ave, there was a lot of other stuff that happened too, but hell yeah.
"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."
https://genius.com/Raymond-chandler-red-wind-chapter-1-annotated
Wednesday January 8th, 2025
Echoing my experiences with trying to get Google Maps to navigate: RT Les Orchard @lmorchard@hackers.town
But, like, a voice interface? In a car?
"wait wait everybody shut up, turn down the music, roll up the windows, i need to tell the car something"
Account security gets harder:
If you're an Apple user and I spoof your phone number in a call to the legitimate Apple Customer Support line (800-275-2273), I can force Apple to send you a system level "Apple Account Confirmation" prompt to all of your signed-in devices.
Which means that a phishing operation has a fairly credible pathway in which to convince you that they're Apple from a phone call... That they initiated, true, but still, it's a vector.
Account for National Studies: Many studies assert that long-term travel demand elasticity associated with new lane miles is consistently around 1.0. This means that highway travel demand tends to rise to fill new capacity over time, reducing the congestion relief of highway capacity expansion projects, while negatively impacting regional air quality through induced vehicle miles traveled. Project environmental and other analyses should incorporate best-in-class research and analysis on travel demand.
RT Erin 💽✨ @erincandescent@erincandescent.net
Remember: If a "second" is 1/86400th of a day, its UT1
If a "second" is "defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1", its UTC/TAI.
RT John-Paul Keates @jpkeates@mastodon.social
Remember, if you misspell armageddon it’s not the end of the world.
Tuesday January 7th, 2025
Writing intersection code, and just put the divide outside the test for the position along the line against the denominator, so I could just do (t>=0 && t<=1), rather than having an additional sign check.
I feel so dirty, and like I need to hand in my graphics geek card.
(In other news, modern hardware and code only run on major user choices, baybee)
Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths
“A comparison of Tesla’s design choices to those of L2 peers identified Tesla as an industry outlier in its approach to L2 technology by mismatching a weak driver engagement system with Autopilot’s permissive operating capabilities,” the agency said.
NHTSA Additional Information Regarding EA22002
Throughout the PE21020 and EA22002 investigations, ODI observed a trend of avoidable crashes involving hazards that would have been visible to an attentive driver
(Yesterday's Lex Fridman comment was a reminder to me that he got his big break with a non-peer reviewed paper shilling for Tesla.)
Re "Apple Intelligence" getting warning labels because their notification summaries keep massively misrepresenting the news stories that they're notifying of (Gruber, Six Colors, Apple responding to the BBC) Guy English @Gte@mastodon.social suggests:
Use the Apple logo. If you’re going to usurp the hard won decades of trusted reporting the BBC has with your own automated hot take you should put your reputational wood behind the arrow. Put your logo on what you generate from other people’s work.