Flutterby™! (short)

Google's attempts to insert "AI" into every orifice through anti-patterns that get accidentally invoked is going just great.

Image reads "Related insights: key points from this page: unable to generate key points from this page."

Holy crap, these Roland Emmerich disaster movie trailers are getting terrifying.

Sigh. It's "the smell of gasoline" weekend* in Petaluma, and the increase in careless driving has commenced. Gotta hunker down at home or get out of town this weekend.

• "Salute to American Graffiti", which means lots of carbureted engines, unburned hydrocarbons, and even more than usual care needed in sidewalks. And squealing tires.

I'm so old, I remember when web developers tried to get a page's initial load size under 40k so that readers would see content in less than 30 seconds...

Now "Waiting for www.google-analytics.com..." is up long enough for me to look around a bit, get bored, grab a screenshot, and post snark.

I'm hearing a lot of chatter about various encrypted messaging systems, and I want to adapt the first system that makes it easy for me to:

• set up a server that uses my domain.
• pipe incoming messages to processes, and send from my system.
• retrieve and read my messages on a variety of devices.

In other words, give me the basic functionality that email used to have. And we can solve the spam problem with something like Brian Warner's PETMail proposal, though cryptologically verified senders will help with that.

AudioCap

With macOS 14.4, Apple introduced new API in CoreAudio that allows any app to capture audio from other apps or the entire system, as long as the user has given the app permission to do so.

Unfortunately this new API is poorly documented and the nature of CoreAudio makes it really hard to figure out exactly how to set things up so that your app can use this new functionality.

This project is provided as documentation for this new API to help developers of audio apps.

Leonardo ELSAG EOC Plus is an integrated automated license plate reader (ALPR) plus Bluetooth, long-range RFID, and WiFi scanner, to fingerprint your car and its occupants based on things like AirTags and library book RFID tags.

Forbes: New Police Tech Can Detect Phones, Pet Trackers And Library Books In A Moving Car, Archive.is link to the Forbes article.

HTTP response codes for food servers

'Solano Gap': California Forever scrambles to create a need.

The Backstory: With a poll showing 70% of Solano County voters opposed to California Forever, the tech mega city a group of Silicon Valley billionaires wants to build between Fairfield, Vacaville and Rio Vista, the project appears dead on arrival. But don't expect the tech billionaires, who have unlimited money, to give up without a fight.

California needs a ton more housing, but... we need it as infill, and I've seen enough "we're gonna rearchitect everything" fail in the face of "the current system evolves" to be extremely skeptical of attempts to build utopias. Of course there's not nearly as much profit in fixing things as there is in ignoring the problems and doing greenfield development, and that's a social problem we need to be fixing.

snuffleupagus on MeFi:

The singularity is the new cold fusion.

Bike Portland: New ODOT map shows fatal traffic crashes in real time

Beyond engineering, enforcement, education, data is a huge part any good road safety program. Similar to the City of Portland and Metro, ODOT wants zero deaths to occur on the entire system. They’ve stated a goal of “no deaths or life-changing injuries on Oregon’s transportation system by 2035.” And that’ll be an extremely tall order given current trends.

Meanwhile, in California... Active Transportation Program Cut Because Administration Wants to Prioritize Highways

The Newsom administration wants to cut the ATP because Caltrans is tired of having its state highway funding tapped.

Just realized that I'm so old, I remember when AI was going to be the sorts of information models and "expert systems" and knowledgebases that people are now saying is the necessary technology to tie to LLMs to give them the reasoning ability...

AI is *so* useful for summarizing. To be fair to Bing, it did give better info a little further down in excerpts from actual search results, but the summary to "how many calories are in a 34oz serving of Stouffer's meat lover's lasagna?" was "360 calories".

OpenAI strikes deal to bring Reddit content to ChatGPT and... uh... someone thinks this is going to improve the quality of OpenAI answers?

The future is people acting on shitpost derived generated text as legal advice.