If there's a kind of cringe porn I can enjoy, the Horizon scandal is it. I'm seeing a bunch of little crimes and sorta-kinda engineering all stacking up to produce catastrophes. Looking forward to the definitive pop-tech-history full-length book.
A draft report that may have undermined the prosecution case was changed, documents seen by the BBC show.By Nalini Sivathasan and Lorna Acquah (BBC News)
Weird to recognise myself in the first part of a "history of" video 🧓 So glad to see 春游 only going from strength to strength!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0O9UDQKpH_c
The time has come!Like Jupiter revolves around the sun, Chun You has been in orbit for twelve years. From the Morning Bar courtyard in Flower Town to our cur...YouTube
Author:
Perrin pressed forward through the beech woodlands. Where an oak or a larch broke through the tree cover he enjoyed the cool breeze. At a creek he could pick a few hawthorne berries. But as he rested under an old willow, he wondered if he could reach the pine forest before nightfall.
My brain:
Dude is in trees. There are trees and also trees and trees. There was wind. At a water he ate tree fruit. He sat under a tree. He wants to get out of the trees and into different trees.
I've never had any accountancy training. But at one point zaomengshe.com needed financial reports, and I said "How hard can it be? I'll write some Python scripts." So the one thing I do know about accountancy, is that it is FUCKING HARD with financial partners who are incapable of attaching unique IDs to transactions. Which is all of them.
That's why, although I barely dare to say it, I kinda have some sympathy for Fujitsu here.
Woah! I did not expect this to go through at all. I had fully expected to begin the process of giving up my existing citizenships this year.
https://ard.social/users/tagesschau/statuses/111781537631783164
This seems like the perfect chance to pitch my phone OS based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Instead of calling malloc() like godless communists, apps bid for memory in an on-device currency. And not just memory! CPU time, network connectivity, storage. Programs can trade off space/time performance based on the device's current market conditions. As the consumer, you can mint as much currency as you like, and allocate it to apps according to how much you value their use. Preorders will open soon, as soon as I get my Bahamas bank account set up.
(Not a reply because I believe Charlie has blocked me. And this post isn't likely to do me any favours either.)
Every time I see some well-meaning folks advocating "tax the rich!!" I wonder, why not think big and abolish money instead? Money isn't merely a symptom of poverty, as Iain Banks pointed out: money creates poverty—there's a potentially infinite supp…The Wandering Shop
The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.WordPress.org
Interesting quote from Google's #gemini team:
"LLMs also struggle with tasks requiring high-level reasoning abilities like causal understanding, logical deduction, and counterfactual reasoning even though they achieve impressive performance on exam benchmarks."
Which is another way of saying LLMs are the exact opposite of critical thinking. That could be a useful shorthand. "Is critical thinking important in this task?" "Yes" ⇒ "LLM-free zone".
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/google_gemini_ai/
Gemini accepts text, images, audio, and video and comes in three flavorsKatyanna Quach (The Register)
"Ford’s methods were so influential that they became known simply as Fordism (something that Google and Facebook still haven’t achieved.)"
I dearly hope "Googlism" becomes a term for something you keep vague when telling people you have a doctor's appointment.
https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/08/silicon-valley-is-the-detroit-of-the-future/
In the U.S., there is a city where industrial visionaries, state leaders, and financial titans all clamor to go. They want to see the future being made today. Revolutionary new ways of working are …Crooked Timber
Oh, interesting. I saw a brief popup at the station on the weekend and ignored it.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/flipper-zero-gadget-that-doses-iphones-takes-once-esoteric-attacks-mainstream/
No cure yet for a popular iPhone attack, except for turning off Bluetooth.Ars Technica
"We're migrating the company wiki, as part of the cleanup all pages without an edit in the last 6 months will be archived."
-- real thing said by a free-roaming employee not wearing a Hannibal Lecter muzzle.
Huge news if true. This would be a worrying escalation that could throw the whole region into chaos, with implications for the supply chain worldwide. #bbc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-66887236
BBC Breakfast presenters react to footage showing a bird flying into an unsuspecting man's head.BBC News
Ow ow ow my eyes! Sadly, much as I'd like to blame this on ChatGPT, I'm betting a human is responsible.
When Duke University’s art museum asked ChatGPT to organize an exhibition, it chose some unexpected artworks. But it also mistitled objects and wrote errant descriptions.Zachary Small (The New York Times)
I would definitely have gone with the headline "Repair company lobbies for law change to permit expanding business into commercial machinery." Sometimes clickbait tactics are used for good, not evil. #ifixit https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA
You’ve got to feel sorry for those poor McDonald's employees. Why is it that their ice cream machines are always broken? If you check the historical data, y...YouTube
My reaction when Naomi Wu went offline was basically "that's a shame, but you're probably right not to make a big fuss or fight this." Guess I misinterpreted that.
"Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me. Now that they know that I could be dead in a ditch tomorrow and no one would give a shit or say a word I’m 1000x less safe here."
https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-that-speaks-volumes/
Booking a flight with a layover in the city that’s the real destination for the traveler can net big bargains, but airlines prohibit the practice.Christine Chung (The New York Times)
I bumped into the name "Horatio Alger Association" but decided I couldn't be bothered following up. Slacktivist puts it in context:
Hard work and clean living were never enough for the street urchins and matchstick boys in his books. The ones who achieved success only managed to do so because they were assisted by older, wealthy, unmarried men who took those boys off the streets and into their homes.
If you think there might be a creepy subtext to that, you’re wrong. It’s not a subtext at all.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2023/08/11/ragged-dick/
The "Horatio Alger Association" is called that because it's members are basically Billy Zane in "Titanic," not because they approve of grooming young boys for sex.Fred Clark (slacktivist)
Oops, maps.me finally went away. It used to be a good app, it worked offline and almost all the screen was map. They gradually cluttered the screen with more and more junk, and now you can't download more than ten regional maps, not enough even for a whole country. It's now useless as an application for, like, viewing maps.
Are there any free apps for viewing OSM offline any more? #openstreetmap
Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Mapsf-droid.org
Meat Lego Gnosticism put on a good show, but anything after the first two albums is unlistenable. https://crookedtimber.org/2023/08/09/mary-harrington-on-the-family/
Late July, The Wall Street Journal published five short pieces under the title, “Have We Ruined Sex?” Among the five pieces was one by Mary Harrington. In her contribution she argues that the sexua…Crooked Timber
I see. We're going with "x-en" are we? "Du x-st". "Sie hatte ge-x-t". This is how it's gonna work?
https://ard.social/users/tagesschau/statuses/110800392909844182
This MS Teams parody account I follow never fails to disappoint. If you love kafkacapitalist cyberhorror with a surreal twist, you can't do much better. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/announcing-the-new-maybelline-beauty-app-in-microsoft-teams/ba-p/3877999
Regardless of where they are working, employees want to stay engaged and feel empowered when collaborating with their colleagues. The new Maybelline Beauty app..TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM
The illustrators have seen their Weibo following far exceed their Twitter following just a few days after joining the Chinese microblogging platform.#SixthTone
Been too long since I've been in touch with the music scene in Chengdu. So good to hear something new from 开山刀! #ElectronicMusic #ChineseArt #Trance
Released 9 April 2023Music by KaishandaoMusic Video by TanzmanYouTube
Thanks @Charlie Owen for the tip to get a MH-Z19. I now know that the CO2 levels in here are AAAHH FUCK AAAAHH.
Is There Any Twinge of Regret Among the Anti-Abortion Justices?
First thought was, Betteridge's law says "no".
Second thought, I bet the final paragraph says "no".
Final paragraph:
So no, I don’t think the Dobbs justices are sorry...
The great thing about the NYT is that it's so digestible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/opinion/abortion-supreme-court-dobbs.html
A year later, the consequences for women have been alarming.Linda Greenhouse (The New York Times)