Notices by Don Whiteside (donw@mastodon.coffee)

@Lana @inthehands Or a plain and simple “ew.”

@jwz See number 15. It came up a lot back when a restaurant in central Virginia told that Huckabee Sanders woman to piss off.

https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits

@jwz @emag Not in SF, anyway. Don’t open a club in DC - political orientation IS protected here.

@jasonkoebler @inthehands I’d believe what I read in tea leaves before something about technology that “cops theorize.” I’ve lost track of the number of false news reports I’ve seen about technology concerns from credulous police departments.

Seems far more likely that if they can’t get a cell signal that they’re burning a lot more battery trying to connect to a tower and then running out of juice/overheating and rebooting. But the update explanation conveniently makes it someone else’s fault.

@MisuseCase @futurebird @inthehands That’s my belief, and it jibes well with the growing picture that turnout was similar to 2020 except a lot of democrats simply didn’t vote this year. “I’m not gonna put a woman in charge” abstainers explains that difference pretty well.

@inthehands I can no longer count the things that were disqualifying and now are just Tuesday. It’s mind boggling to imagine we bounced cabinet members because they didn't pay taxes on a nanny. I’m not sure keeping a nanny as an involuntary unpaid prisoner would stay in the news 3 days anymore.

I just meant to point out that the attack vector here is a very foreseeable result of that 90s era action that continues to cause problems to this day. It's easier to hide something in a haystack.

@inthehands Bills drafted by lobbyists is a thing that happens across the board. It’s in large part a function of how Gingrich and his ilk cut huge quantities of the support staff in Congress as well as fucking up pay such that it’s hard to retain skilled staff. Where thirty years ago the offices would have people inside to turn to to write legislation, now they’re much more reliant on outside resources.

@nafmo @scott The culture didn’t. Car culture did. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history#

@inthehands hey look @jwz brought us an example. https://mastodon.social/@jwz/113092305920577266

@inthehands Shit, we can't even get the paper to stop reporting percentage changes without any basis. I can't count the number of times WaPo has published stories about a percentage increase in crime on the Metro without any indication of how many crimes there were before or after, much less a context of how many rides there are a day.

Up 43% in daily incidents! Ok.... from 20 crimes or 200,000? Compared to how many trips?

It boggles my mind that people leave j-school so innumerate.

@inthehands The whole LLM situation makes me flash back on the daily; I remember clearly what it looked and felt like siting in that software class in the early 90s, talking about expert systems vs neural networks.

The neural networks part shared the story of the tank spotting system that they trained to perfection till it consistently found the tanks. Till they “tried it in prod” and it turned out the training set tank photos were all on a cloudy day.

That data set was at least consistent.

@inthehands I think you’re right on all of this. I do wonder if perhaps it would still represent an improvement. After all, one of the biggest mistakes people make (IMNSHO) is they compare a flawed outcome to a utopian possibility, not the way something will actually happen otherwise.

I’m less worried right now about the flawed self drive solutions than I am flawed legal structures around them. This situation in Cali where nobody currently can be fined for their misbehavior is untenable.

@inthehands Our local school district has instituted a fairly aggressive policy on retakes and the dialog in local parent forums is just an astonishing wall of folks telling on themselves that way. Whenever I interact with them with my stock “are we doing better for the student long-term by working towards mastery of the subject or by issuing grades to assess knowledge at a specific point in time?” I get back various sputtering about consequences and rewards for high achievers.

@inthehands @Lana Yeah the operation that manages our meal accounts charges $2 to reload, regardless of how much you’re adding to the account. If you can afford to drop $100 at a time it’s less than the CC processing fee (which leads me to suspect they’re paid by the district above and beyond this fee) but for anyone else it’s pretty punitive when lunches are $3.50.

But the cost of these programs don’t count when they’re paid by citizens and are not on a budgetary line item, right?

@inthehands They really should be asking Trump on camera why he’s not running with Pence again. He wouldn’t be able to keep his stupid mouth shut on the matter.

@inthehands I put this together for a game design class I taught. https://youtu.be/t-KKMYE0s4Q?si=U6XLAAm5zBV2n-MZ

@inthehands Recon that depends on where you are, pal. In my day they only had 32 booleans in there; hell, down some more primitive parts they’d just put in 16 or even 8, though we’ve done come a bit farther now.

We heard some tales of locales where they’d have more but us, we had to accomplish that sort of thing in shifts.

@girlonthenet @lisamelton My wife and I have a specific place on our bodies where if we scratch an itch that means “I have forgotten this person’s name” so the other knows to use it as soon as possible.

Sometimes on very forgetful days I worry folks will think I have fleas but it’s good motivation to try hard before using it.

@thomasfuchs @donmelton I had a terse email exchange with the people behind a certain popular crm/blogging system a number of years ago. I wrote to complain that they didn't prominently link the release notes for each new release and it was a number of steps to find them. That made it a hassle to go look and see if the release covered issues I would have and thus made it worth installing and testing. They responded that "most of our users just want to run the most current thing.”🙄

@aral I only ever wrote code against authorize.net not stripe but it absolutely had a way to cancel a pre authorization. Coincidentally I never had a need to IMPLEMENT it because of the purpose we were using it but I guess someone could just decide not to bother to implement it because f—- you.

Even then, this is almost certainly something they could choose to do via a management portal if they just, again, GAF.