Flutterby™!

This observation about social media and "No one... goes to a bar with 20,000 people" works well when we consider that what so many people want isn't social media, but parasocial media, and they're seeking the stadium experience.

And some of us think that's what's wrong with culture.

https://mastodon.roundpond.net/@CartyBoston/112875286675783006

RT 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not the VP" @Lana@beige.party

NEW MUSICAL TERMS

ALLEREGRETTO: When you're 16 measures into the piece and suddenly realize you started way too fast

ANGUS DEI: Play with a divinely beefy tone

A PATELLA: Accompanied by knee-slapping

APOLOGGIATURA: A short flourish you immediately regret playing

APPROXIMENTO: A musical entrance that is mostly somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch

DIMINNUENDO: Gradually play quieter you sexy thing

FERMANTRA: A note held over and over and over and over and...

FRUGALHORN: A sensible and inexpensive alternative to a brand name brass instrument

GREGORIAN CHAMP: The title bestowed upon the best singing monk

SPRITZICATO: Play while spitting

VIVACHU: gotta catch them all, real fast

Alcoholism. LOL.

(Thinking about this vs the "Day without weed is like... Just kidding I have no idea" T-shirts, and how we'd respond to that on a sandwich board on the sidewalk in a tourist town. And how when we finally get a dispensary in this town it's not gonna be walkable...)

CalcGPT.io, a calculator that uses an LLM to do arithmetic.

Via

Seeing some conservative commenters complaining about the eroticism of the drag queen "Last Supper" Olympics thing, and oh, honey, I did not need to know that about your sexuality. TMI

Tailscale: The New Internet

I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.

In modern computing, we tolerate long builds, and then docker builds, and uploading to container stores, and multi-minute deploy times before the program runs, and even longer times before the log output gets uploaded to somewhere you can see it, all because we’ve been tricked into this idea that everything has to scale. People get excited about deploying to the latest upstart container hosting service because it only takes tens of seconds to roll out, instead of minutes. But on my slow computer in the 1990s, I could run a perl or python program that started in milliseconds and served way more than 0.2 requests per second, and printed logs to stderr right away so I could edit-run-debug over and over again, multiple times per minute.

Holy crap, yes, that's the right attitude. I just checked, this < $10/month Hetzner instance is serving on the order of 600k requests/month. But it also makes me super interested in Tailscale, which seems to be a framework for actual peer to peer Internet communication the way we used to envision it back in the days of protocols like finger, albeit with some authentication layers over it.

I'm intrigued.

Via.

Oh Jira, showing the board as empty even when I navigate, but if I copy and paste the same URL.... there's my data!

I've been trying to stick with using it with Safari, but the "you glanced away, we've logged you out" coupled with 2FA is gonna run me to Chrome.

(Yes, I know, Firefox, but I try to keep that to my personal use.)

The Beaverton: Danielle Smith: The loss of Jasper is tragic, but we can all take comfort in how much money the oil industry is still making

(Yes, this is satire. Barely.)

Was thinking that maybe, despite all the reasons that Passkey sucks, I should implement Passkey for my blog engine.

So of course the official line is that Web Authentication is rapidly evolving and incredibly complex, you should use libraries instead (which... it shouldn't need to be) and... there are no libraries in Perl.

And if I believed that this was a good spec, rather than a bad one with lots of money behind it, I might dig deeper, but. Ugh.

Mentioned in the comments to my whine about Mountain View Ave collisions and today on the Fediverse, Roadway.Report is a map of some (maybe about 1 in 4? The data is hard to gather) of traffic deaths between 2001 and 2022.

Made by Ben Carneiro.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but it's really past time to change that screen protector on your phone, because it's so much nicer to use a phone with an uncracked screen protector.

(It's me last week. I needed to hear this.)

You could take Amazon's advice about how to avoid Prime scams, or... hear me out... you could just avoid buying from Amazon, and especially avoid Prime...

I occasionally think about finding ways to self-host video. It's not like my videos get a lot of watches, I'd rather deliver the content than just let YouTube monetize it, surely just putting it on an S3 host, or serving it via some sort of proxy from home, wouldn't be that onerous. But I've also hosted things from home before, including, ages ago, a friend's relatively low volume forum that someone decided to spider with no rate limiting, DDOSing everything.

When that shit happens on Flutterby, I do a little ipfw deny ... and everything's fine (and have some of that automated), but the fuckwits always find some new way through, and I'm getting tired.

And, of course, I see stuff like this: Read The Docs: AI crawlers need to be more respectful:

One crawler downloaded 73 TB of zipped HTML files in May 2024, with almost 10 TB in a single day.

... with no bandwidth limiting or support for ETags or Last-Modified.

And Anthropic AI Scraper Hits iFixit’s Website a Million Times in a Day.

I think one of the huge problems we have is that either the crawler companies aren't hiring the best and the brightest (likely, because they're the ones sucked in by promises of "AI"), or there's no incentive to not fuck over the world in the mad dash.

Anyway, if I can find a way that I trust, I could see maybe doing some sort of actual user detection which does a temporarily signed S3 key that I served from... But... there's been a lot of discussion recently about the challenges with self-hosting blogs, and now Fediverse, sites, and this is just more in the "why we can't have nice things" category.

Via

So with the wave of unmanaged spam on the ipfs-users mailing list, I'm guessing that the whole crypto thing took all of the wind out of IPFS and it's essentially dead now?

Some nights at the asylum, Dan thinks he's an illustrator, and the kindly attendants indulge him with drawing instruments...

Logging just because I feel like this is kind of a turn that I'll want to go back to: Scientific American: The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

My eero router this morning was giving me 3% of my expected throughput (given old WiFi transceivers, so I'd only expect around 300mbit). Going hard-wired gave me as close to gigabit as makes no never-mind.

WiFi Analyzer was whining about not running on this modern a version of Android, and gave me some issues. And looks like it doesn't really know about the 5GHz bands? What's y'all's favorite WiFi debugging tool?

Upwork: From Burnout to Balance: AI-Enhanced Work Models

Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect. Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.

RT Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

stop doing consciousness

- brain was never supposed to have "theory of mind"

- millions of years development and yet no real world use found for having self-recognition in mirrors

- "please transfer internal cognitive states to other organisms by means of sequential tokens obeying grammatical relationships", "I am not a cognitive zombie" - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

THEY HAVE PLAYED US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!

I mean, the whole point of the "amateur" sport of the Olympics was to give an economic class the ability to say they were better at *something* physical than the laboring classes.

So, yeah, fuck the Olympics.

LA Times: Chasing the Olympic dream isn’t cheap, and U.S. athletes often are stuck with the bill

Cocoa/AppKit: Because the whole lvalue/rvalue thing is lost on us, and wouldn't you rather just have random crashes saying we couldn't converge on a layout rather than have a deterministic way to define how your UI works?

Went to the neighbor's house to feed their cats, and this dude is hanging on the front walk completely unloaded by our attempts to leave. Pretty sure I could take him if he came at me, but it would hurt, so we're trapped here for a bit.

Showed up this morning to pick up a free "lathe" off of FB Marketplace, we were double-booked, and it turned out the "lathe" was a fluting machine, which was cool and gorgeous cast iron, but which I don't have room for in my shop.

So I helped the other guy load it into his truck, and... maybe it's just me, but I'd think that if *I* were going to pick up a piece of big ol' heavy cast iron machinery, I'd empty the truck bed of scrap rocks and bricks first.

Powerful read: Martin Pollack in The Guardian: My family, and other Nazis

This is an edited version of the Krzysztof Michalski Memorial Lecture, given at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (iwm.at) in June 2024

Via Metafilter.

Related: I've been listening to The Bellingcat Podcast series which is starting with a deep dive into the downing of flight MH17, and it's remarkably well produced and I'm well aware that every story is telling a story, but the idea that you start your invasion by riling up, and then arming, the local drunks and goons is kinda unsettling.

For various reasons, news of Wendy Carlos has been crossing my feed lately, which has brought up discussion of synthesizers, and the British musician's union trying to ban the use of synths and drum machines, and...

Just thinking about the parallels to modern machine learning generated music...

Josh Weathers live at The Kessler Theater in Dallas, Texas, singing I Will Always Love You.

New "before going on stage" self-talk just dropped: RT evacide @evacide@hachyderm.io

I don't know who first said "Walk into a room like you are a punishment sent by God," but I think about it a lot before stepping into a certain kind of meeting.

When ChatGPT summarizes, it actually does nothing of the kind.

... I just realised the situation is even worse. If I have 35 sentences of circumstance leading up to a single sentence of conclusion, the LLM mechanism will — simply because of how the attention mechanism works with the volume of those 35 — find the ’35’ less relevant sentences more important than the single key one. So, in a case like that it will actively suppress the key sentence.</blockqutoe>

RT Hector Martin @marcan@treehouse.systems

@dysfun Reminds me of gr"let's crash on integer overflows that aren't a security bug, and then let's try to fix one such overflow with a hilariously broken obviously unreviewed patch that instead of working around it replaced it with an actual overflow bug that still crashed, thus creating a local kernel panic DoS that anyone can trigger with a shell one-liner, also we don't count DoSes as CVEs so don't bother responsibly disclosing this but we're going to flame you on Twitter and embarrass ourselves so bad we end up deleting our Twitter account but at least we banned your dynamic IP address from our website and forum, take that!!!!!"security.

(Yes, this really happened after I crashed my grsecurity kernel Gentoo box years ago by pasting too much text into a terminal, then tweeted a repro. I stopped using grsecurity after that.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/progr..._twitter_how_to_panic_a_current/

Poetry break: Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat by Caitlin Seida

Conversation at lunch about progress in computing, and "Southwest runs Windows 3.1" came up, and I got to thinking: What have we really got since '94? Most new web browser capabilities and increased memory and graphics are used to deliver ads.

Word processing and spreadsheets are pretty similar (Emacs is still my editor of choice). We have nicer photo and video editing, and MP3s have replaced WAVs, but... it's amazing how much of modern computing doesn't feel like actual progress.

California Forever removes initiative from November Ballot

Originally hoping to secure zoning approval this year, then work on an EIR and Development Agreement in 2025 and 2026, the organization will now attempt to secure those first. The letter still makes clear that California Forever is eager to stay in the county and work to make the East Solano Plan a reality.

“We recognize now that it is possible to reorder these steps without impacting our ambitious timeline,” Sramek wrote.

Oh, also good that someone's paying attention to the finances:

The county estimates that the project’s first phase would have led to an estimated annual fiscal deficit of $5.9 million for the county and $6.5 million for the fire district, and the full buildout to annual deficits of $103.1 million and $88.8 million, respectively.

I would like it if every web comics author would try to read their comic from the beginning on their web site, and try to come back and read the latest updates occasionally.

Holy crap some artists make it really difficult to get into their work.

iTerm2, VLC, it's really kind of horrifying how Apple leaves essential system utilities to third parties.

Woohoo! Third collision in 5 weeks at the Mountain View Ave intersection with Mission Drive. Regular reminder that residents along Mountain View have been asking for safety improvements for decades, but the car-brained municipal systems mean that not only have we not gotten those, guerilla attempts to install safety upgrades are ripped out within business-hours.

And the worst part is that we've kinda given up because there are other intersections in the city that definitely take priority.

Hard-wire your home automation, kids!

(And if your WiFi mysteriously goes down, *do not* answer the door.)

DHS Has a DDoS Robot to Disable Internet of Things ‘Booby Traps’ Inside Homes

https://www.404media.co/dhs-ha...things-booby-traps-inside-homes/

Currently weighing the future of civilization against whether donation to any Democrat PACs will make any difference at all against the wave of spam and whether a donation will just encourage them to further destroy the capability of my phone to be used as a communications device by overwhelming me with appeals.

With Charlene (fixed pic)

With Charlene

Gathering with the unicorns to ride into Rivertown Revival.