Flutterby™!

SpaceX rocket debris crashes into Poland

"Once ze rockets go up, who knows vere zey come down, that's not my department"...

Anyone else read a recipe, run across a phrase, and just wanna table flip? From a David Lebovitz recipe: "Kosher salt is also discussed in the book as some brands are saltier than others", and... okay, yeah, if it makes a difference, this is why we don't specify some ingredients by volume, kids.,

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series: The Effect of US COVID-19 Excess Mortality on Social Security Outlays/cite>

The pandemic resulted in approximately 1.7 million excess deaths among individuals aged 25 and older between 2020 and 2023. These premature deaths reduced future retirement payments, which increased the Social Security fund by $294 billion. However, this gain was offset by reductions in future payroll tax flows ($58 billion) and increased payments to surviving spouses and children ($32 billion), resulting in a net impact of $205 billion.

Via

Somehow simultaneously unsurprising and still disappointing: Texas Observer: ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X Account

Since GlomarResponder was first created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”

Via

I haven't been following such things, but I just learned that GE was delisted from the DJIA in 2018, and completed a 3 way split last year, and Wikipedia sarcastically notes:

"Upon his retirement from GE in 2001, [Jack] Welch had stated that his effectiveness as its CEO for two decades would be measured by the company's performance for a comparable period under his successors."

That's been a long slide, but one that many predicted...

The Zen Lady @thezenlady@toot.community

I hope America is as lucky as the delta jet - everyone survives but the right wing explodes

Still gonna see some injuries

The party of "states rights" comes down in favor of killing people and slowing economic growth: Trump administration terminates approval of New York City congestion pricing

RT evacide @evacide@hachyderm.io

Today I encountered my first AI-generated news article that included a manufactured quote from me on a topic I did not speak or post about, just in case you're wondering how AI is going.

For work I'm playing around with hierarchical summarization techniques and ChatGPT4-o, and it's kind of astounding how different the output from separate runs with the same input text can be.

Like bullet points that are present in one query completely disappear on the second query, and of course the prioritization of such things is always very different.

Advice for the AI era: RT ·J Mopp @jmopp@masto.ai

Forget about S.M.A.R.T. goals; focus on V.O.L.U.M.E. — Vague, Open-ended, Lofty, Unmeasurable, Minimal, Ephemeral

Beware QR codes and joining groups: Wired: A Signal Update Fends Off a Phishing Technique Used in Russian Espionage

Google warns that hackers tied to Russia are tricking Ukrainian soldiers with fake QR codes for Signal group invites that let spies steal their messages. Signal has pushed out new safeguards.

Google Threat Intelligence Group: Signals of Trouble: Multiple Russia-Aligned Threat Actors Actively Targeting Signal Messenger

Via Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social who notes:

👉 No, Signal has not been compromised
👉 No, Signal encryption has not been broken
👉 No, there is no back-door in Signal

You should continue using Signal. The update is responding to a sophisticated, state-level attack targeting specific groups.

RT Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life@mas.to

Find someone that loves you like OpenAI execs love leaving OpenAI to create an identical startup to the one they just left.

The Verge: Mira Murati is launching her OpenAI rival: Thinking Machines Lab

RT David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run

@compassDoesWhat my computer runs an agentic AI where I tell it what to do and it goes and does it, it's called bash

All of Humane's AI pins will stop working in 10 days

On the one hand I've got some schadenfreude for the people dumb enough to plunk down a couple of hundred bucks for something that should have been a phone app, on the other hand that's somewhere on the order of 10k bits of ewaste.

(It is a shame that their projector technology didn't really work, 'cause that could have been cool.)

Toby @tobestewart@mastodonapp.uk

Be kind. Not everyone remembers they can go fuck themselves. Sometimes you have to remind them

RT Myles Eftos @madpilot@aus.social

One of the advantages of the downfall of the United States will be eradicating the mm/dd/yyyy date format

As if exhaust and tire dust and asphalt particles and collision trauma weren't enough: Science Alert: Cars Make One Thing Even More Toxic Than Diesel Fumes, Study Reveals

Particle and Fibre Toxicology: Copper-enriched automotive brake wear particles perturb human alveolar cellular homeostasis

We demonstrate here that brake-wear PM may perturb cellular homeostasis more than diesel exhaust PM. Our findings demonstrate the potential differences in effects, not only for non-exhaust vs exhaust PM, but also amongst different sources of non-exhaust PM. This has implications for our understanding of the potential health effects of road vehicle-associated PM. More broadly, our findings illustrate the importance of PM composition on potential health effects, highlighting the need for targeted legislation to protect public health.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12989-024-00617-2

Argentinian President Javier Milei Backtracks on $4.4B Memecoin After 'Insiders' Pocket $87M. They say "$4.4B Memecoin", but they also say that after the rug pull it fell 95%, so I assume it's a $220M memecoin, at best.

Abu Dhabi’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Discloses $463M Bitcoin ETF Holdings

With the news that Trump is pushing some sort of national fund to prop up crypto.... fuck it, burn it all down.

Also, if you think that an immutable public ledger of transactions is a reasonable replacement for cash, fuck you.

AP: NAACP lists companies that dump DEI in its tactical spending guide for Black Americans

Keisha Bross, an economic strategist at the NAACP, says they are not calling for a “boycott” of companies but instead encourage consumers to “buy-in” on companies that back their values. People of all backgrounds are encouraged to use the <span class="LinkEnhancement">Black Consumer Advisory</span>.

Sure, you knew that you could run Doom in a PDF by compiling C to JavaScript and using the PDF execution engine, but did you know that you can run a Risc-V emulator in a PDF and boot Linux on it?

The Register: The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux — What's next, Crysis-in-a-CSV?

Via

RT Gwen Nova @Gwen_Nova@girlcock.club

you claim to love women yet you only have one girlfriend, curious

RT Leonard Ritter @lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place

master: welcome to my Smart Home

student: wow. how is the light controlled?

master: with this on-off switch

student: i don't see a motor to close the blinds

master: there is none

student: where is the server located?

master: it is not needed

student: excuse me but what is "Smart" about all of this?

master: everything.

in this moment, the student was enlightened

RT geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

New ager: "Listen to Nature and you'll find the answers to life"

Nature: KILL AND EAT THINGS AND THEN FUCK A LOT

Bolts Magazine: Who runs our elections?

This page compiles, state-by-state, the local offices that administer elections at the state, county, and municipal level.

It lays out who oversees the preparation and conduct of the election, from the voter registration process to the casting and processing of ballots. The tabulation, canvassing, and certification of results is often conducted in a separate process, covered in our accompanying page, “Who Counts Our Elections?”

Interesting to read this from Namanyay, who self-pitches as "I’m now making developers more productive with AI": New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code

RT Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop

Study after study also shows that AI assistants erode the development of critical thinking skills and knowledge *retention*. People, finding information isn't the biggest missing skillset in our population, it's CRITICAL THINKING, so this is fucked up

AI assistants also introduce more errors at a high volume, and harder to spot too

https://www.microsoft.com/en-u..._ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
https://slejournal.springerope...icles/10.1186/s40561-024-00316-7
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ai-generated-code-outages/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11128619/

Florida man shot Israeli visitors thinking they were Palestinians, police say

It's good to know that in an era where Mozilla could be working towards browser parity, or making PDF handling not suck, or reducing memory consumption, increasing speed, and making sure I see fewer spinning beachballs, they're working on what's really important.

An AI sidebar.

Just a reminder, from 2019: Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free

I've been thinking recently about how much modern technology is bullshit to turn off. And it's not just "AI assistants" or zsh or video reactions that conferencing things have to turn off because they're built into the Mac camera handling. Design Thinking comic nails the lack of creativity in coming up with actually helpful things, in this case in the context of VR, but it applies generally these days.

Karol Herbst's email removing himself from the Linux kernel maintainers:

The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

A response to Theodore Ts'o's comment.

Don't see that every day: a pair of C-17s(?) over Petaluma. High wing 4 engine T tail in dark, presumably US military, livery.

Aha moment: "AI" (LLM) generated code is the "Matt's Script Archive" of this generation.

I'm which Google provides a search result summary for "Music Box: Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary - HBO" as "Focusing on a year in the life of rapper Earl “DMX” Simmons, the film bears witness to a man searching for reinvention and redemption", and... I wonder what language model failure led to this, 'cause I'm not able to replicate it on my laptop.

After Censorship, Santa Rosa Students Write Their Own Play — and Take the Gold

And you know what? Over the weekend, [REDACTED] won the gold medal at the Lenaea Festival, a statewide theater competition of over 70 high schools. Santa Rosa also won 12 other awards at the festival, including the Spirit of Lenaea award, one of the festival’s very top honors.

This is the outgrowth of the idiotic cancellation of the same students' performance of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead by Bert V. Royal.

Just keeping this link around as the clusterfuck goes critical, so that when things really go tits up I've got more to point to and say "you were fucking told".

Because we're, at this point, beyond "I'm sorry you were lied to".

Trump administration wants to un-fire nuclear safety workers but can’t figure out how to reach them

The individuals, who work in an agency that oversees the nation's nuclear stockpile, had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts.

The best part about this recommendation to sprinkle diatomaceous earth around your home to get coffee stains out of clothing is that the author, reviewer, and fact checker, are all independently credited... https://www.thespruce.com/remo...fee-stains-from-clothing-1901014

Maybe it's not worth reusing for the fret board. Look at that bow... Probably should have checked that before I bothered disassembling it...

Honesty in guitar labeling: "We guarantee this Supertone instrument to be free from defects and flaws and to compromise the best materials and workmanship and tone that is available for the price. Sears, Roebuck and Co."

For the price...

When you're too cheap and lazy to run down to the music store for a guitar winder, a piece of white oak scrap and a drill work wonders...

Hmmm... Seems like it's the drivers? iSeeCars study reveals Tesla tops fatal accident rate

Yesterday, an office mate who uses more LLM stuff than I do reported that XCode, Apple's development environment, was suggesting using an NSImageRenderer object (which doesn't exist in the Mac, though there is a counterpart, UIImageRenderer, on the iPhone). Other office mate was experimenting with the $200/month OpenAI product, and the results were initially interesting, but fell apart on deeper inspection.

Today comes the news that a weird conjunction of a couple of words across columns is making its way into scientific papers through the use of these automated bullshit generators.

(And if you missed it a few days ago, the BBC had a great takedown of using bullshit generators for summarizing.)

I can see why the dancing bears are impressive, and I get why people think these techniques have promise, but I also remember Eliza and Animals...

Retraction Watch: As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use

The hardest working font in Manhattan:

Some searches quickly led me to George Gorton Machine Co., a Wisconsin-based company which produced various engraving machines. The original model 1 led to model 1A and then 3U and then, half a decade later, P1-2. They were all pantograph engravers: They allowed you to install one or more letter templates and then trace their shape by hand. A matching rotating cutter would mimic your movements, and the specially configured arms would enlarge or reduce the output to the size you wanted.

Office-mate reports that Apple's XCode LLM Swifth auto-suggester is suggesting that he use an "NSImageRenderer".

Which doesn't exist.

Other office-mate is fighting with Finder sorting UUID directory names by the decimal number leading them. So, yeah, 6BA7... is sorting long before 358F...

This fucking platform...

In San Francisco, Men claiming to be DOGE enter City Hall and demand records on wasteful spending, fraud

“City Hall Building Management has received multiple reports of individuals entering public and private specs in City Hall through unlocked doors, while [filming] their interactions,” the manager wrote. “The individuals told occupants they are from the Department of Government Accountability and that they want to insert flash drives to download evidence of corruption. They did not present a judicial warrant, and therefore, had no authority to access computers or non public spaces.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE Posts Classified Data On Its New Website (Same content on Huffington Post)

But an easy search shows that DOGE’s database provides details on the National Reconnaissance Office, the federal agency that designs, builds and maintains U.S. intelligence satellites. Not only are NRO’s budgets and head counts classified, but the prospect of Musk’s tech team meddling in sensitive personnel information is setting off alarms for some in the intelligence community.

It's here, currently claiming 1,097 Headcount and a $165.9M total wages.

Interestingly, the About NRO page at Intelligence Careers dot gov says:

We're a hybrid organization of 3,000 personnel from the Intelligence Community, members of the armed services and Department of Defense civilian personnel.

How a hedge fund has created a monopoly on fire trucks and is artificially reducing supply to increase demand to extract money from your town.

The vandals who are "auditing" the US government can't secure a freakin' WordPress site...

Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website, in which security testers update the DOGE (pronounced "douchy") web site with tags such as:

"THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."

I hope that we can get these fuckers up on Watergate style hearings before they end up in Nuremberg style trials.

Allstate Is Demanding We Delete These Quotes by Its Exec About How It's Using AI to Write Insurance Emails

Asked again why Allstate was so bluntly contradicting its own CIO, the spokesperson again ignored the question — in another email, we couldn't help but notice, that sounded a bit like it might have been written with AI itself.

Via Tara Calishain, who notes

...I'm annoyed this article isn't headlined "You're In Good Six-Fingered Hands With Allstate"

FuelArc: It’s Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto

Fire fatality rate per 100k units of 14.2? (Extrapolated from 34,438 units sold). Holy crap! When I was looking at recall rates for the Bolt battery, there were recalls for that many fires per 100k units in cars you wouldn't think of, and most of those were smoldering in the door panels 'cause water got in and flooded the power window motor.

Futurism: The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis

PLOS One: X [Twitter] under Musk’s leadership: Substantial hate and no reduction in inauthentic activity

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313293

Via.

Searching through .xcodeproj and .pbxproj files by hand, as one does, to try to figure out why one is correctly referencing its "Package Dependencies" and the other isn't.

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji. Abusing Unicode to stash arbitrary data in characters, that persist across copy and paste. In particular, this raised an eyebrow:

There are techniques for using subtle variations in text to “watermark” a message, so that if it is sent to a number of people and then leaked, it’s possible to trace it to the original recipient. Variation selector sequences are a way to do this that survives most copy/pastes and allows arbitrary data density. You could go so far as to watermark every single character if you wanted to.

There's an AI company called "Bubble" https://bubble.io/

This... This is like a memecoin called... uh.... Memecoin. Or Shitcoin.

Oooh. Not that Petaluma has the staff to implement something like this, but I can dream.

https://www.portland.gov/transportation/planning/trees-curb-zone

Clean Air Is As Serious As A Heart Attack (Thousands, Actually)

Recent news out of the UK shows us just how serious the hidden effects of air pollution can be. After one year of implementing a “clean air zone,” one city found that hospital and doctor spending reduced by over 30,000 pounds per month! More important than the money is the improvements to human health, with respiratory illnesses going down 25% and heart problem visits reduced by 24%.

Designing e-bike-friendly cities: Cycle lanes with minimal traffic impact

In the paper "Bike Network Planning in Limited Urban Space," published in the journal Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, researchers led by Professor Martin Raubal and Nina Wiedemann at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation at ETH Zurich introduce a novel optimization method for improving bikeability with minimal impact on other travel modes.

Report details 17 cases of abuse by IHOPKC founder Mike Bickle

If the acronym isn't ringing any bells for you, that's the "International House of Prayer".

Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies: New Research Unveils Why NIMBYism Alone Can’t Explain Anti-Development Sentiment

The researchers have received a grant to build on the work prior to submitting it to a journal. In a working paper, they suggest that groups trying to spur more development can win popular support by emphasizing in their messaging or in the language of the policy itself how the effort will benefit groups with wide popularity, such as nurses, firefighters, and teachers. They write that government officials should consider that many voters do not have internally consistent or firm views on many housing policies, despite state and local laws that encourage gathering detailed community input prior to making policy changes or approving projects.

Not news to anyone who's been using LLMs to create summaries, but AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds.

In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer.

It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants.

Deborah Turness - AI Distortion is new threat to trusted information

Huh. I use bash. I'm copying file from the house server to Charlene's machine. I pop up a terminal, type scp with a wildcard in the remote source file name. Get a "no matches found:" error.

Think about it for a little while, then run bash. It works.

Fucking zsh...

And the cronyism is kicking into extra high gear: CNN: Justice Department to drop federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams

The Department of Justice is moving to drop the federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, according to a memo obtained by CNN.

American Bar Association: The ABA supports the rule of law

We call upon our elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law and the legal processes and procedures that ensure orderly change. The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. These are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent. We must stand up for the values we hold dear. The ABA will do its part and act to protect the rule of law.