Friday March 14th, 2025
Neighbor gave me kumquats. Given that maple syrup has gone unaffordable, I decided that kumquat marmalade was a suitable pancake topping.
I dunno, is it even news when yet another evangelical Christian goes down for sexual abuse of children? Megachurch founder Robert Morris indicted on charges of "lewd acts" with a child
Thursday March 13th, 2025
Fucking yikes. "Well, he spoke out against genocide, so that gives us the right to yoink his green card" sure is a take. DHS official defends Mahmoud Khalil arrest, but offers few details on why it happened.
C Plus Prolog is a half-serious exploration of macros in a systems programming language. In the process of making this, it became clear I prefer the compile-time evaluation and reflection offered by languages like D and Zig over syntactic macros.
Out for a lunch walk, listening to podcasts, and thinking about how ads for Better Help made me rethink who a podcast is serving, and how Land Rover ads are similarly making me evaluate my listening habits.
Having a weird crash that I can't track down, so figured I'd let XCode do static analysis.
Wow is this... of questionable value.
If you'd come to Know Before You Grow this evening, you'd have heard Anders Engnell talk about his experience developing a walkable community. Luckily, you can watch the presentation, too.
Dear Apple: I never ever ever want camera reactions. Stop asking me to turn them on. Don't ever let me turn them on accidentally somehow. Like just happened.
As someone who struggles with XCode and AppKit regularly, it is not lost on me that if you turn off Apple Intelligence, your devices are smarter.
Wednesday March 12th, 2025
Thinking about optimizing redundant view state updating, and I am once again reminded that framebuffers are caches, and managing cache invalidation is hard.
I had a recent realization: Country music used to make us feel sorry for the murderers and thieves, those who'd shot a man in Reno just to watch him die and whatnot.
Today it tries to evoke sympathy for rich dudes with monster trucks. People who casually kill and are bad for society. So maybe it hasn't changed as much as I thought?
Seeing a lot of AI/LLM pushers being described as "Man selling shovels says we’re gonna need more shovels", and I think that's slightly unfair.
With all the bullshit being sold, we're gonna need the shovels.
Typescript is getting a native compiler, written in Go.
(Closed this tab this morning without actually getting it, then Zellyn Hunter mentioned it.)
Angela Glansbury 🚽 @floppyplopper@todon.nl
can 2025 be the year we stop using the term ponzi scheme. frauds of the style named after charles ponzi were pioneered by Adele Spitzeder in Germany and Sarah Howe in the US. I'm more than a little sick of women's excellence in crime being overlooked. I will be calling it a spitzeder-howe scheme from now on, take my account away if i don't.
Spitzeder was lesbian btw, shame on people not taking pride in our #LGBT criminals
#IWD
Chris Armstrong @Rhodium103@mastodon.social
@floppyplopper
"I support women's rights. But, more importantly, I support women's wrongs."
Thinking about the '90s, when school boards were all gaga over "technology in education", that was not driven by a curriculum need, that was diverting budgets from known solutions, and was teaching skills that were obsolete before they hit the students.
Anyway, discussions about LLMs in schools...
Making sense of the fatality rate associated with Teslas, even as they do well on NHTSA tests: Tesla's Cars Have the Worst Drivers in America, New Study Finds
There are plenty of stereotypes in the automotive world about which kinds of cars are chosen most by those with poor driving etiquette. (Priuses and Nissans often receive a strong degree of scorn.) To settle the score scientifically, the folks over at LendingTree have analyzed and categorized real-life driving data to give us a definitive answer: Tesla is ranked at the top of the "car brands with the worst drivers" list, under the quantitative model used by LendingTree.
Interesting to look at the Lending Tree brand incidents "best" table, Mercury and Pontiac leading, Cadillac right below. Might imagine that those Mercury cars still on the road are owned by older cautious drivers who want to protect their cars...
Bwahahaha. Maybe we are approaching "AI" with LLMs after all: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it + limit of 800 locs.
I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.
Reason: Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities
Sigh. Another one. It's almost like it's baked into the ideology or something. Long Island Pastor Pleads Guilty to Sexual Exploitation of a Child
“The defendant not only admitted to sexually abusing young children, but also discussed his church and his congregants as targets of additional abuse. His sustained exploitation of children—in person and online—is clear, and this plea is a step forward on the road to justice for his victims. Children are among the most vulnerable in our communities, and the FBI will stop at nothing to make sure they are protected and the monsters who would do them harm are put behind bars,” stated FBI Acting Assistant Director in Charge Backschies.
Testimony Reveals Doors Would Not Open on Cybertruck That Caught Fire in Piedmont, Killing Three
Roirdan said that when he approached the burning vehicle, and tried to open the doors, they would not open. He said he “pulled for a few seconds, but nothing budged at all.” He also said “I then tried the button on the windshield of [survivor Jordan Miller’s] door, then [victim Krysta Tsukahara’s] door.”
He said he then pounded the windows with his fists, which did not work, and then struck the windows with a thick tree branch around a dozen times until he was able to crack and dislodge a passenger-side window. That was how he was able to pull Jordan Miller out of the vehicle.
Subscriber only: East Bay Times: Witness who rescued teenager recounted details of fatal Piedmont Cybertruck crash to authorities
Via, which also links to this incident with one of the other models in which 4 people were killed:
Harper told CBC News and the Toronto Star that when he came upon the crash, there were others already gathered outside the vehicle who were pounding at the back passenger window as they couldn’t open the doors. He recalled to CBC News, "Then somebody was yelling, 'You got a bar? You got a bar? Somebody's in there.' "
The brains of transgender women ranged between cisgender men and cisgender women (albeit still closer to cisgender men), and the differences to both cisgender men and to cisgender women were significant (p = 0.016 and p < 0.001, respectively). These findings add support to the notion that the underlying brain anatomy in transgender people is shifted away from their biological sex towards their gender identity.
Via.
We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this literature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.
After exercises in hearing "the other side", Braver Angels and the like, and being complimented in how much nuance I'm repeating back to people about what I'm hearing, the problem isn't that we're talking past each other. I'm hearing it just fine.
And it's horrifying and naive.
As Gavin Newsom makes a further ass of himself with his podcast, remember that he has consistently sided with automobiles and against climate and pedestrian and bicyclist safety, and maybe these stances are an indication of an asshole who is not to be trusted with power.
Tuesday March 11th, 2025
Hell yeah, let's go: Katie Porter enters race for California governor
Wired nails it: DOGE Is the Deep State
A shadowy group of unelected figures reshaping the federal government to their own benefit from the inside? Sounds familiar!
We need to start ticketing people who claim public parking space for their own exclusive parking.
'The cone people have gone too far': Chaos is brewing on SF's Billionaires' Row
Ham on Wry @HamonWry@mastodon.world
Human beings are like a box of chocolates. Some are cloyingly sweet while others are just nuts.
tl;dr: Boiling water causes microplastics to bond with the scale/minerals, a coffee filter will then collect it. Newsweek: Scientists Reveal Simple Trick to Reduce Microplastics in Your Tap Water
In their study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, the team, led by Zhanjun Li and Eddy Zeng, collected samples of hard tap water from Guangzhou, China, and spiked them with different amounts of nano- and microplastics. The samples were than boiled for five minutes and allowed to cool before the team measured the amount of free-floating plastic present in each sample.
Columbia Journalism Review: AI Search Has A Citation Problem
Chatbots’ responses to our queries were often confidently wrong
Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.
TechMeme rounds up coverage, got this from Their Fediverse feed.
There has been a tendency on a number of security issues to say "OMG, privileged code can accomplish things, this is a security hole!". The recent ESP32 Bluetooth kerfluffle is one such. Espressif’s Response to Claimed Backdoor and Undocumented Commands in ESP32 Bluetooth Stack
What was found
The functionality found are debug commands included for testing purposes. These debug commands are part of Espressif’s implementation of the HCI (Host Controller Interface) protocol used in Bluetooth technology. This protocol is used internally in a product to communicate between Bluetooth layers. Please read our technical blog to learn more.
Via.
Additional writing languages/parsers question: I've seen two modern texts which do lexing and parsing as separate tasks. This makes some things easier, but for at least one of my applications makes complexity harder to manage. I'd love to read someone exploring the "why" on that.
Monday March 10th, 2025
If one were playing around with building parsers, and read the Dragon Book back in the day, what might be a decent intro to modern compiler code generation techniques and the LLVM and similar intermediate code philosophy and practicalities?
Okay, the roasted eggplant with mint and pine nuts. (With picture)
Okay, the roasted eggplant with mint and pine nuts.
Oh, and a cucumber salad with orange and rosewater.
Not pictured: red snapper with fresh thyme, an eggplant dip, roasted mashed celeriac with goat cheese.
Tamarind glazed eggplant
Bacon wrapped asparagus, and avocado(!)
Decided it's time to start cooking again, rather than just redoing the same things we've been doing for years. Turmeric and lime hummus...
Sunday March 9th, 2025
Saturday March 8th, 2025
Is your relationship entirely too smooth? Need to bring up those resentments but don't have the opportunity? Have you considered a tandem bicycle, the ultimate relationship accelerator? We bought this one back in the naughts, it's served us well, but with the quadricycle it's time to sell it and get the garage space back.
And this is the easiest way to get the picture over to my computer from my phone...
Just posted this foot tall ceramic rooster on the local free stuff group, and managed to avoid referring to it as a 12" cock. I think I deserve a cookie.
Neighbor gave us this bottle of Travinni Vineyards Two Dog Cabernet Sauvignon 2019, apparently his friends are involved in the creation of it, and I don't drink much these days, but dang this got my attention. Fruity, but not sweet, didn't want to be drunk fast, but in a world where when I drink it's generally a project or something gifted this made me think I'd go looking for it.
Holy shit. Trump cabinet confronted ‘liar’ Elon Musk in White House showdown
Mr Duffy is understood to have slid a spreadsheet across a desk in front of the president, to allege Mr Musk was not telling the truth about the scale of his cutbacks, The Telegraph understands.
The exchange ended with the president ordering Mr Duffy to hire staff from MIT as air traffic controllers because the role requires “geniuses”, The New York Times reported.
Friday March 7th, 2025
Whoops, that discussion is at https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/114122514403706066
A morning discussion about a company that's creating LLM generated newsletters, and this comment about adding bots to a Skype channel is making me think about bot-free spaces, how to make sure that people aren't violating the social contract of creating and enforcing them.
(Also, people must read way way slower than me to make Gmail's "summarize this email" remotely interesting. I, once again, do not get it.)
‘Just following Hispanic people': Citizen detained by ICE questions vote for Trump
“They didn’t ask me for any ID,” Machado said. “I was telling the officer, if I can give him ID, but he said just keep my hands up, not moving. After that, he told me to get out of the car and put the handcuffs on me. And then he went to me and said how did I get into this country and if I was waiting for a court date or if I have any case. And I told him I was an American citizen, and he looked at his other partner like, you know, smiling, like saying, can you believe this guy? Because he asked the other guy, ‘Do you believe him?’”
The "I thought they were only gonna go after the other guys" vibe is strong.
“Because, like I said, I was a Trump supporter,” he said. “I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be the things, you know, like, … just go against criminals, not every Hispanic looking, like, that they will assume that we are all illegals.”
With the news that Google is expanding the "AI Overviews" in search mode, via Pivot To AI which mentions that you can remove all facts from your search for an extra $20/month, it's worth pointing out this example of Google uncritically stating joke content as though it's real.
It's not so much the "they blew it up again" thing, it's the external costs of dealing with the debris: SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft explodes midflight for a second time, disrupting Florida air traffic
However, residents of the archipelago of Turks and Caicos told CNN they are still finding debris from the spacecraft littering beaches and roadways. The local government worked with SpaceX to craft a debris recovery plan. However, the contents of the plan have not been made public and it’s not clear who is paying for the cleanup effort.
This is, of course, ignoring the environmental costs of deorbiting Starlink satellites... Geophysical Research Letters: Potential Ozone Depletion From Satellite Demise During Atmospheric Reentry in the Era of Mega-Constellations
We find that the demise of a typical 250-kg satellite can generate around 30 kg of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, which may endure for decades in the atmosphere. Aluminum oxide compounds generated by the entire population of satellites reentering the atmosphere in 2022 are estimated at around 17 metric tons. Reentry scenarios involving mega-constellations point to over 360 metric tons of aluminum oxide compounds per year, which can lead to significant ozone depletion.
This entire thread, from the top, but the observation that LLMs are most useful for applications where truth is irrelevant and lying is (more?) effective for achieving the goals is landing this morning.
Thursday March 6th, 2025
Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases.
But the explanation and Ramirez’s promise to educate himself on the use of AI wasn’t enough, and the judge chided him for not doing his research before filing. “It is abundantly clear that Mr. Ramirez did not make the requisite reasonable inquiry into the law. Had he expended even minimal effort to do so, he would have discovered that the AI-generated cases do not exist. That the AI-generated excerpts appeared valid to Mr. Ramirez does not relieve him of his duty to conduct a reasonable inquiry,” Judge Dinsmore continued, before recommending that Ramirez be sanctioned for $15,000.
I am not a lawyer, don't know that much about the legal profession, but I do not understand why the penalty for making up citations in court cases and legal proceedings is a slap on the wrist.
These are the 1st images of humpbacks having sex, and they're both males
Via Adrianna Tan, who brings the puns.
Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking, understanding EntrySign, the AMD Zen microcode signature validation vulnerability, including toolchains so you can hack on them yourself!
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes an announcement about dropping their ad provider relationship, and it really makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here for an ad aggregator that doesn't suck. Maybe even for vendors that don't suck?
Some promise that ads are going to be of reasonable size, aren't gonna mine crypto... Heck, it might even be possible to do a little vetting on vendors so that, unlike, say, Facebook, or those ad blocks at the bottom of smaller newspaper sites, we don't automatically say "ewww, scammy" and avoid clicking on them at all costs.
Wednesday March 5th, 2025
Molly White @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer: the critics who think we’ve bought out the government are refusing to engage with the nuanced and complicated fact that Trump used to be anti-crypto before we started spending hundreds of millions of dollars on politics
And then a screen shot image which reads:
“I find those comments misinformed at best, if I’m being generous, and defamatory at worst,” Paul Grewal, chief legal officer at Coinbase, told The Hill of the backlash.
Some criticism, Grewal argued, fails to consider Trump was once a critic of crypto and at one point called it a “scam.”
Grewal pointed out how Congress moved major legislation in 2023 on market structure, an issue that was met with bipartisan support. The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act in 2023 received support from 71 Democrats in the House.
“The fact of the matter is that President Trump did evolve and transform in his view on crypto, really starting in December 2023,” Grewal said. “In January 2024, we first started to engage with him and his team, but it was against a much more nuanced, complicated and complete history that I think a lot of the critics just don’t want to engage in.”
Worth the careful read: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)
According to AP, a grand jury indictment alleges that at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles County between July 2023 and December 2023, nearly 70 fights took place between 140 victims who were ages 12 to 18 years old, which officers allowed, and even encouraged, to happen.
LAist reports that the indictment includes 71 counts against the officers, most of which are for child abuse or child endangerment with aggravating factors, including the "vulnerability of the victims and the officer’s position of trust or confidence, which helped enable them to commit the offense."
The fascinating things about having blogged for 27 years is that I can go back and read my own political transformation, complete with cites of all of the "this is interesting" articles that accompanied it.
More things to resent my educational experience for.
Caught my eye for two reasons: Local playwright adapts Lake Luzerne drag story hour controversy into satirical show
“Drag Queen Story Hour: The Musical,” written by Neal Herr, draws on the controversy surrounding a proposed drag queen story event at the Rockwell Falls Public Library. The event was ultimately canceled after months of community conflict, which led to the library’s closure in September 2023 until its reopening in March 2024.
So, duh, relevant to my interests, but also premiering in Glens Falls New York. My grandparents lived in South Glens Falls, so I have some ancient memories of the area.