Notices by Kee Hinckley (nazgul@infosec.exchange)

Tl;dr Rural counties went redder, but they got outnumbered by the blue ones going bluer.
I'll take what I can get, but I think it's going to get messy.

https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2024/11/12/washington-state-election-blue-shift

❝ The study found that just having a first-class section on an airplane quadrupled the chance of an air rage incident and that loading economy passengers through first class doubles that again. "We advance an alternative view: the modern airplane reflects a social microcosm of class-based society, making inequality salient to passengers through both the physical design of the plane (the presence of a first class cabin) and, more subtly, the boarding procedure (whether economy passengers must pass through the first class cabin)," the preamble of the study reads. ❞

Class 'Inequity' Fuels Air Rage - AVweb https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/class-inequity-fuels-air-rage/

It’s going to be a very exciting decade for anyone interested in Greek history and mythology. This is amazing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00346-8

@anildash I like rereading this every time you post it.

@az Very funny and wonderful geekness.

Somewhat more seriously.

I forwarded that to my daughter (post production supervisor and editor (Black is King, Beyoncé’s videos…), assistant editor in “Making Waves”, an amazing documentary about the history of sound in the cinema https://tubitv.com/movies/541289/making-waves) and her bf (foley editor, worked on Dune, Moonlight, Frozen 2…).

My daughter’s response (after laughing).

> Next they’re gonna be like. “In Top Gun, that’s not what a jet engine sounds like because they added lion roars, and there are no lions in a jet engine.”

And she’s right, that’s what I really learned from that documentary. Sound effects aren’t _supposed_ to sound real. They’re meant to evoke emotions. And that means they use things familiar to the listener. Mind you, I’m not saying that a 50hz buzz would have evoked different emotions, that’s a bit extreme. But sometimes using something more visceral to a listener is intentional. The foley editor for Top Gun recorded jet engines, but they were boring. She wanted to capture the emotions of a dog fight, so she used wild animals.

But yeah, often they’re lazy and use what they’ve got on file.

Although not her bf (Chris Bonis). He carries a recorder whenever he goes. The ice sword breaking free in Frozen II is him stepping on a frozen stream at my mom’s place. A creaking door in it is her basement door. The muaddib (desert mouse) in Dune has the sound of its feet carefully synced with its movement. His attention to detail is amazing.

I’ve been reading a lot of non-computer-related informational and how-to sites the past few months, and I’m starting to realize why LLM generators have such a verbose and roundabout description style. They didn’t make it up, that’s become the voice of the web and they adopted it.

The other day I was looking for tips on reducing back pain while washing dishes and the site went on for pages before saying “use a step stool”.

The old style web, similar to old style newspaper articles was to immediately get to the point, and then provide increasing levels of detail. This allowed the reader to immediately learn what they needed to know, and then get more information if they wanted it, up to the depth they wanted.

The new style is to make the article large to increase SEO, and to put the answer at the end to increase advertising revenue.

I hate it.

Although at least nobody will ever suspect my writing to be generated by a generic LLM.

There’s a great printer review on the web where the author was recommending the best laser printer for a home-office. The answer was clearly (and I happen to agree) a Brother laser printer. The author didn’t care about the additional ad revenue, but they couldn’t ignore the SEO issue. So they answered the question in the first paragraph, then told the reader to stop reading, and the let an LLM generate fill for the rest. (Read it, it’s amusing, in a dystopian way. https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine).

The down side of LLM-generated content of course is that now every time you see something odd in an article, you start to wonder if it’s generated and shouldn’t be trusted. And while there’s something to be said for trusting stuff less, this isn’t the right path.

Today I was reading a helpful article about plumbing S-Traps vs. P-Traps and I hit this gem.

> Do you live in a very dry climate?
>
> Then it would be great to check the level of water within the trap.
>
> There’s a chance all the water from there will evaporate.
>
> If this happens, flush a large amount of money through the line and refill the trap.

Human mistake? Easter egg? LLM. I don’t know, but I laughed at least.

Random thought: If you want to make something useful from “AI”, make a browser plugin that reformats articles to work the old way.

#LLM #AI

@jwz @vaurora @timbray I definitely agree that there’s a serious lack of smarts among the decision makers. The VC investment model has become all or nothing. They don’t know how to build anything sustainable, because sustainable companies can’t make up for their losses.

But also, more and more of the tech investments are extractive. They aren’t creating new wealth, they are sucking it from other people. And “AI” is ideal for that. You don’t need to create anything new, just use it to lower the cost (and quality) of existing services by replacing people. I doubt it will be cost effective in the long run, and it certainly will be worse for the environment, but they’ll have made their money by then. And the whole long-termism religion lets them feel justified.

@jwz @vaurora @timbray I keep thinking of how Sequoia Capital, a storied and once serious company, had a profile of Sam Bankman-Fried which mentioned that he was once caught playing video games during a meeting with investors. They *bragged* about it.

That’s not investors looking for a startup with potential. That’s investors thinking, “This guy is just like I was when I was his age,” and assuming therefore that he’ll become rich like them.

Logic aside, that’s also why it’s still a rich boys’ club.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.

I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.

One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.

But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?

Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.

Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death *because* of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.

Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things *well*; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.

The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.

They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.

#ML #TESCREAL

Does anyone have experience with travel medical insurance? The ones that cover just emergencies, accidents, and shipping you home?

As far as I can tell, they are all focused on short trips of a month or less, and charge accordingly ($700-$1200 month). But the next step up is yearly plans for people there full time. Nothing inbetween.

Unless you’re just getting evacuation alone. Those are cheaper, but are just focused on getting you home. (Some of those come with fun additional plans like, “rescue at over 15,000’”, and “extraction from a war zone”.)

LOLSOB.

Original at Cyanide and Happiness: https://explosm.net/comics/big-tech

@tess @davidgerard @lrhodes I assume that’s one reason the OPS proposal didn’t fly in 1997. Nobody stepped up to do it. (I know more about this than I should because my very first blog post back then was about OPS. Working on getting that stuff back up as we write.) But also, since it was a per-user browser standard, it was actually just a way for labeling orgs to suck up lots of info about users.

I’m not sure the “why would anyone want to set one up” question is actually that hard to answer. Fediverse instance owners might band together to set one up in order to reduce their overall workload. And they’d all chip in for it.

But without a specification on how one does it, it’s certainly not useful. Given how long Bluesky has been under development, it amazes me how much on the moderation side is an afterthought.

Okay, maybe “amazes” isn’t the right word. “Frustrates” is closer. I’m certainly not surprised.

I don’t really trust anything to stay available on the web anymore.

A few months ago I moved all my bookmarks (you don’t want to know how many decades of bookmarks I have) to Anybox, a Mac and iOS bookmarking app. It’s tag-based, and has a lot of nice features, but one of the most useful is that I can tell it not just to bookmark something, but also to download it (in a variety of formats). So if I toss something in my “I should write about this” folder, I can be confident that when I finally get around to writing about it, I’ll still have a copy. Plus I can read things when I’m offline. And Anybox is all local, so I’m not depending on some cloud service other than iCloud for device syncing.

I’ve also started saving notes to it, since it supports notes, images, and files as well. I suspect that over time it may become my main repository “quick things I want to record for later”.

I might start using it instead of Mastodon bookmarking as well, although I do have a half-started project to write something that imports my Mastodon bookmarks to Obsidian. Generally if I bookmark something on Mastodon, I’d also like to include any links the post references as well.

#Anybox #WritingTips #Bookmarks

❝ Texas doctors have been required to submit patients’ private medical information into a state-run website without their knowledge or consent—adhering to a mandate that forces them to report women as suffering from abortion complications even when they’re not.

This rarely reported on section of Texas law lists 28 medical issues as abortion complications—conditions that reproductive health experts point out often have nothing to do with abortion. ❞

https://jessica.substack.com/p/texas-is-fabricating-abortion-data

Far too accurate.

Now this is SEO.

1. Holy shit there’s a lot going on when you unlock a car with a smart key.
2. And then the cars get shipped to Africa‽!!

As always, if they can get physical access to your internal network, you have to secure your internal network. https://mastodon.social/@kentindell/110141548855901353

@oliphant Are they going to stop stripping the markdown?

Given that twitter is going to start charging for api usage next week, but has neglected to give anyone any info about rates, I recommend running https://www.movetodon.org/ one last time while you still can.

None of the migration tools will work after the 8th (give or take some timezones).

I keep seeing articles, about people trying to violently overturn election results, that use phrases like “motivated by election lies”.

They aren’t motivated by lies, they are motivated by not liking the result. Repeating the lies just makes them feel powerful because it makes them part of the grift. They think they’re fooling people.

Blaming the lies lulls us into thinking that this is an education/disinformation problem which, if addressed, will eliminate the violence.

These folks aren’t deluded. They’ve learned from their leaders that violence and lying are the route to power.

For most of my life I thought these problems could be solved by education. I no longer do. As far as I can tell, about 30% of the population believes that getting away with grifts and bullying people is proof of power and leadership that should be respected, worshiped, and emulated.

We can’t educate these folks. We can only build a society that ensures that they cannot gain control. Unfortunately, the entire human race has largely failed to do so, and we’re suffering the consequences on a planetary scale.

Every day we act as though they don’t *know* that the elections were valid, is a day we risk losing the fight for democracy, equality, and a stable environment.

#brazil #JAN6