Links and Notes for September 29th, 2023

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun

Economy & Finance

AI: Profit vs. Freedom by Richard D. Wolff (CounterPunch)

“In capitalism, employers decide when, where, and how to install new technologies; employees do not. Employers’ decisions are driven chiefly by whether and how new technologies affect their profits.”

“If new technologies enable employers to profitably replace paid workers with machines, they will implement the change. Employers have little or no responsibility to the displaced workers, their families, neighborhoods, communities, or governments for the many consequences of jobs lost. If the cost to society of joblessness is 100 whereas the gain to employers’ profits is 50, the new technology is implemented. Because the employers’ gain governs the decision, the new technology is introduced, no matter how small that gain is relative to society’s loss. That is how capitalism has always functioned.”

“If we imagine for a moment that the employees had the power that capitalism confers exclusively on employers, they would choose to use AI in an altogether different way. They would use AI, fire no one, but instead cut all employees’ working days by 50 percent while keeping their wages the same. Once again keeping our example simple, this would result in the same output as before the use of AI, and the same price for the goods or services and revenue inflow would follow. The profit margin would remain the same after the use of AI as before.”

“it is simply false to write or say—as so many do these days—that AI threatens millions of jobs or jobholders. Technology is not doing that. Rather the capitalist system organizes enterprises into employers versus employees and thereby uses technological progress to increase profit, not employees’ free time.”

“Across capitalism’s history, employers and their ideologues learned how best to advocate for technological changes that could enhance profits. They celebrated those changes as breakthroughs in human ingenuity deserving everyone’s support. Individuals who suffered due to these technological advances were dismissed as, “the price to pay for social progress.” If those who suffered fought back, they were denounced for what was seen as anti-social behavior and were often criminalized.”

Public Policy & Politics

Putin Doesn’t Think US Foreign Policy Will Change If Trump Is Re-Elected (And He’s Probably Right) by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“The US, according to the Russian president, “views Russia as a permanent adversary, or even an enemy, and has hammered this into the heads of ordinary Americans.” “The current authorities have tuned American society into an anti-Russian vein and spirit — that’s what it’s all about. They have done it, and now it will be very difficult to somehow turn this ship in the other direction,” Putin said.”

“The claim that Trump was a secret agent of the Kremlin has always been a ridiculous conspiracy theory made possible by mass-scale journalistic malpractice and intervention by the US intelligence cartel , and it has been debunked and discredited from pretty much every angle you could think of. But the strongest evidence that it was false was always the fact that Trump spent his entire presidency directly attacking Russian interests with actions like sanctions, shredded treaties, aggressive Nuclear Posture Reviews, efforts to shut down Nord Stream 2, occupying and repeatedly bombing Syria, and arming Ukraine.”

“The truth of the matter is that if you were to only watch the movements of troops, war machinery, resources and money from year to year, you wouldn’t be able to tell when one president’s term ended and another began, or what party they belong to or what their campaign platform was. The empire marches on completely uninterrupted, regardless of who Americans elect to be the face at its front desk. The bureaucracy is very strong, and it is that bureaucracy that rules the world.”

A year of lying about Nordstream by Seymour Hersh (SubStack)

“What if Russia had responded by saying: You blew up our pipelines and I’m going to blow up your pipelines and your communication cables.”

“Within days of the bombing, officials in Denmark and Sweden announced they would conduct an investigation. They reported two months later that there had indeed been an explosion and said there would be further inquiries. None has emerged.”

The Lesser of Two Evils is a Democracy for Psychopaths by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“[…] this Hammer House monster of a political supervillain could very well take the White House back with a vengeance again in 2024. The mind boggles at such madness. How? How could any sane human being possibly justify voting for such an unapologetically revolting sewer mutant? The answer is actually pretty simple, because Joe Biden has to be stopped. After all isn’t he also a geriatric career gangster with an insatiable appetite for debauchery? Pretty much every mortal sin that Donald Trump has ever committed, Joe Biden has committed at least twice. The man is a barely veiled racist sexual predator and serial plagiarist who has built a seemingly endless career pushing Black children in front of armored police trucks before posing for selfies with Bono and telling a crowded Baptist church that he was the first white member of the Jackson Five.”

“The reasonably dire need to stop a creature like Donald Trump is the only reason why a creature like Joe Biden is even in the White House and the equally reasonably dire need to stop Joe Biden is simultaneously making Donald Trump’s seemingly unthinkable return to the scene of the crime a very real possibility.”

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy in 2024 and everybody is doing it. While polls show the two grabbiest perverts in the convalescent home neck in neck in their crawl to the White House, they also show a country horrified by these options with CNN finding more people who despise both of these candidates than anybody who actually likes either one of them. This is the rotten fruit of the lesser of two evils, that despicably American fetish shoved down ever bored teenager’s throat by jingoistic civics teachers since Jefferson was in nipple clamps.”

““There are only two monsters to choose from and you have to vote for whichever one nauseates you the least, otherwise you forfeit the right to bitch about getting raped by one of them at your local drinking hole for the next four years.””

“You will find loving stay-at-home moms defending Donald Trump’s attempts to shred the votes of other loving stay-at-home moms because Joe Biden had his flunkies in the media kick sand over the latest escapades of his crackhead son. You will hear hippie peaceniks justify Biden sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because Trump sold worse to the Saudis. This is sick and it just keeps getting worse.”

“If it’s Bundy vs Gacy 2028 then which is the responsible choice for American democracy? Bundy is great on taxes but pretty vile on women’s lib but hey, at least he’s straight and most of his victims are over the age of consent and somebody has to stop that killer clown.”

“Even if some knight in white shining armor from a third party managed to jump the barricade, what difference would it make? You could put Eugene goddamn Debbs in charge of a slaughterhouse, and it would still be a fucking slaughterhouse. So, let’s boycott the slaughterhouse and demand something better as loudly as humanly possible.”

“[…] start living like human beings again. But whatever you do, stop making excuses for people that we all know are evil just because the other guy sickens you more. That kind of relationship is abusive and believe it or not, you deserve better than to be governed by a democracy of psychopaths. We all do.”

there was an attempt at not getting caught lying (Reddit)

This link shows a video of a Joe Biden campaign event from 1987. Joe Biden is and has always been an arrogant, lying asshole without an ounce of empathy. His personality is such that he will lie four times just to make himself look better than whomever he happens to be arguing with, not at all concerned that he will be caught out later. This is not only sociopathic, but deeply stupid. It’s the kind of recklessness you absolutely don’t want in a leader.

I wasn’t sure about the context, so I looked it up.

You can see the original video in Biden Campaign Appearance on April 7, 1987 (C-SPAN)

The article Joe Biden’s worst-ever campaign moment, revisited by Glenn Kessler on July 27, 2020 (Washington Post) corroborates C-SPAN, providing a transcript,

“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”

The fact-checker from the Washington Post goes on to point the four main lies that Biden told.

• Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
• He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
• He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
• He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.

Not only was he spectacularly boorish, but his superiority was based on nothing. Absolutely nothing. He in the bottom 15% of his class. That’s terrible. He was one of the worst students that year. Joe Biden is a pathological, sociopathic narcissistic liar—and he always has been.

Journalism & Media

The News Has Nothing To Do With Newsworthiness by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“It’s not that editors are coordinating with each other across outlets or receiving instructions on what to report from oligarchs and government agencies, it’s that if they were the type who needed to do such things to know what to report, they wouldn’t be working where they’re working.”

““I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” In a 1997 essay , Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.””

Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)

What an incredible crash blossom. The author used one hyphen but more punctuation would have been better.

How about:

Original

Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety

Add punctuation

Vacuum-suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines off faulty walls to safety.

Remove redundancy

Vacuum-Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines off faulty walls to safety.

Restore phrase

Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines to safety off faulty walls to safety.

Use preposition

Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines to safety from faulty walls.

Precise condition

Suction-mounted, wireless TV zip-lines to safety if wall fails.

When Even The Nazis Aren’t Nazis by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“For generations the US empire has been manufacturing a cultural obsession with the second world war in order to frame all its subsequent wars as “Good Guys vs Hitler Guys”, then the millisecond that framework became inconvenient it’s “Actually the Nazis weren’t all that bad if you think about it.””

So let’s recap.

• Jeremy Corbyn supporters: ⛔️ Nazis.
• Palestinian rights activists: ⛔️ Nazis.
• People who criticize Israel: ⛔️ Nazis.
• People who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton: ⛔️ Nazis.
• Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi insignia and Nazi ideology: ✅ not Nazis.
• Actual SS Nazis: ✅ not Nazis.

“I doubt I’ll ever care about any US president being investigated for corruption or misconduct or collusion with a foreign nation. All US presidents are corrupt liars, and that will always be the least of their crimes. Get back to me when they’re jailed for war crimes and mass murder.”

I watched the following interview a few weeks ago.

Extended interview: Oliver Stone Goes Nuclear by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

The movie sounded interesting and the web site claims that it’s available on Apple TV. Hey, cool, I have Apple TV!

Nuclear Now thinks its available on Apple TV

However, when I follow the link, I get the following page in the TV app.

Nuclear Now is no longer available on Apple TV

What’s the reason for this? Is it because I don’t like in the US and the content is unavailable in my region? What does “This content is no longer available” mean? Am I to take them at their word that the movie used to be available but that they pulled it? That they are preventing me from watching a movie produced by one our preeminent directors on a streaming service that I pay for? The mind leaps to censorious conclusions.

I’ve received a couple of these messages on Signal so far.

Signal Crypto Spam

“Wir verfügen über in professionelles Team, das Sie dabei unterstützt, das
Wisen über Kryptowährungen zu verstehen, um geringe Investitionen und
eine hohe Rendite zu erzielen. Klicken Sie af den folgenden WhatsApp-Gruppenlink,
um am Lernen teilzunehmen: [redacted]”

That translates to “We have a profession team that will support you in understanding knowledge about cryptocurrencies, in order to yield high returns from small investments. Click on the following WhatsApp Group link to learn how to participate.”

Cool invite, Jennifer. Your German’s more than a bit clunky—and it has a few typos—but I imagine that so was and did the original English.

Blocked.

A friend of mine told me that he gets more interesting ones: invitations to meet up for a quickie at the airport. I guess we travel in different circles.

Why do Facebook users keep commenting “amen” on stuff? by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“It’s easy to imagine that Facebook is now completely overrun by out-of-work magicians porn-moaning while they make bad casseroles and comment sections full of old people praying to potato memes. Which, yeah, is definitely happening. Both of the top posts on Facebook based on total interactions in August and September came from a page called Supercar Blondie, which makes videos about cool cars. But there are still news publishers growing on the site and third-party links to “news” content being shared in huge numbers. It’s just not happening in the US.

“The biggest publisher on Facebook right now is a Nigerian digital tabloid called Legit. It’s been growing all summer and beat The Daily Mail in August, which was formerly the top publisher on Facebook. Legit is owned by Genesis Media Emerging Markets, a Ukrainian company that acquired a bunch of African digital publishers. And in July, GMEM’s Kenyan outlet, Tuko, overtook MLive, a Michigan-based news outlet, for the number five spot. Since then, no US publisher has cracked the top five.”

“Meta has finally given up pretending it cares whether its users are informed about the world around them or not. […] Meta is saying, “we have decimated the American media, removed our competitors, built our advertising monopoly, and we are done pretending we care.””

Have They Gone Mad? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“[…] on September 8th, Joe Biden renewed the original State of Emergency issued three days after 9/11 by George W. Bush. We spent the last 22 years giving presidents the ability to surveil, isolate, and detain even American citizens.”

“Biden has most recently cited the 2001 authorization to justify drone strikes against al-Shabab militants in Somalia in 2021. He said Friday that the U.S. remains committed to fighting terrorism.”

Is anyone even still aware that the U.S. has its military deployed in Somalia?

“A brief White House press release, signed by Biden, just says that the “terrorist threat continues” and “[f]or this reason,” he has decided to extend it.

“Biden also extended two other national emergency declarations Thursday night, the first initiated by Bush related to sanctions on terrorists, and the second covering instability in Ethiopia, which Biden implemented in 2021.

“So far, Biden has declared eight new emergencies, continued 34 from his predecessors and ended three.

“As of Friday, there are 42 active national emergency declarations. The oldest was declared by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 in response to the Iranian hostage crisis.”

God save us all from these maniacs.

Science & Nature

NASA spacecraft returns to Earth with pieces of an asteroid by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)

“Lauretta compared the dynamics of the sampling run as akin to dropping yourself into a ball pit at a children’s playground. “It literally is a droplet made out of rock, gravel, and boulders that are barely held together by their own microgravity.” So much material went into the sampling system that its lid was wedged open, and smaller pieces of rock started floating out.”

Rhetoric as music by Mark Liberman (Language Log)

“The English orthographic system doesn’t offer a very good way to transcribe […] non-syllable patterns.”

“It should not be surprising that almost 10% of George Carlin’s “words” are fluent initial repetitions of this kind — as I said, these events are ubiquitous in spontaneous speech, though they’re essentially never found in fluent reading. […] But if we look at George Carlin’s stand-up comedy, “interpolations” (or whatever we choose to call them) are absent […] Presumably this means that he’s performing prepared and memorized material, which makes it like reading — though I also have the impression that his different performances of the same routine are not transcriptionally identical.”

Even if he’s not citing verbatim from a memorized script, his deep familiarity with the material helps him avoid filler words. If you’re on well-traveled ground in a conversation, you don’t stumble. It’s only when you’re formulating new relatively new arguments that you seek words—and use placeholders.

Art & Literature

Dumb Money, the New Movie About the 2021 GameStop Short Squeeze, Is Very Funny by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)

“[…] nurse Jennifer Campbell is depicted caring for patients in an overcrowded hospital typical of the COVID era. Campbell rants at a certain point about getting a measly $600 from a government that then turns around and bails out failing multibillion-dollar investment firms because their vampire capitalist plan to drain GameStop dry didn’t work out as planned.”

“The insanity of our era is summed up there — we’re just going to ignore ever-huger catastrophes, forced to continue to work and pay bills, if we can, right up to the actual apocalypse.”

The Academic Assembly Line (A Brief Personal History) by Mike Bendzela (3 Quarks Daily)

“Sometimes we’re called upon to teach a fourth section of comp., in which case we must sign a waiver so that we don’t get the idea that we are entitled to any extra benefits or anything. That makes the term “part-timer” a bit of a misnomer. Thus, “adjunct.””

“This place contains some ignorant, desperate students along with the brilliant, calm ones, some of them on Adderall, all of them up to their armpits in debt. They are majoring in subjects that baffle me: Recreation and Leisure, Exercise Science, Media Studies. Regardless, they all are required to take my class. This particular section of college comp. is remedial, but we don’t dare call it that. We call it “enriched.” The students are barely literate—some even borderline illiterate—but that term is strictly verboten.”

“Failing students is not an easy thing to do. It is easier to fail papers and exams full of errors and omissions than boys and girls full of dreams and aspirations. To fail them on a paper is one thing, but to fail them in the course is to cut them from the team. But if they write the way I played baseball, then it is a judicious cut. If they want to play that much, let them try out again.”

“I’m advised that the student is very concerned about reading in class because of an anxiety problem. “Perhaps you should switch to a voluntary policy for reading aloud,” the counselor, or whoever, tells me.

“The gall of this only occurs to me much later. This is not an adviser for a student with a disability; this is an apologist for a student who doesn’t like my class policy. Who is this person to tell me how to run my class? But I agree to switch to a voluntary policy for reading work, which is a terrible step backward, because a voluntary policy encourages long class silences.”

“To me, this is the most important idea humans have ever discovered—hence, the Darwin poster on my wall—and this is the idea that I enjoy teaching. But for this, I am deeply hated by a significant number of students. They call the department to say that I make fun of their religion. They accuse me of shoving Darwin down their throats.”

“After a semester has passed, I can request access to the cabinet and read them if I wish. But I learned long ago to ignore them. It’s not just the stupidity of the whole concept—having students who are required to take a course they hate and do poorly in to review the course itself—it’s that I know damned well I will read them in the most self-serving way possible, taking credit for the “good” ones and dismissing the “bad” ones as retaliatory comments made by failing students who have no other recourse.”

“There is no way of telling whether students who make such comments just hate the fact that they are failing, or whether they resent having Darwin “shoved down their throats,” or whether I actually suck. But it feels like being dumped on. Twenty years of teaching, for this?”

“Please feel free to write whatever you wish about this instructor. It doesn’t have to be well-written or even true. You can be assured that you will remain completely anonymous and that your comments will be repeated in personnel reports distributed throughout the English department.”

“I sit down and face the class. They are all sitting there with their papers, in a half-circle of chairs, facing me. I will be failing nearly half of these students, either because they haven’t come to class regularly, or because they haven’t turned in all their work, or because the work they have turned in looks as if it was composed a half an hour before class and they haven’t even checked to see that they’ve used the correct font and double spacing. It is a class to grind through, to endure to the end.”

“Again, as with her stammered comment, I cannot recall a word of what I said in response. The gist was that I had been putting up with this student’s emotional bullying all semester and I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. Complain, wheedle, pester, and if none of that works get staff involved and turn on the tears to prove what a meany I am.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Unprecedented Times Call For Unprecedented Measures by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“That at no time has there ever been a large industrialized civilization wherein human behavior was driven by collaboration rather than competition; wherein the profit motive was eliminated as a driver of civilization; wherein humans work in cooperation with the ecosystem for the good of all beings; wherein peace and harmony prevail and everyone has enough.”

But that’s what we need for a sustainable society at this level of development and quality of life. If you tell me you want to get to the moon in five minutes, then my answer will be that you need a conveyance that travels at a heretofore unseen speed … or that it’s impossible. That’s our choice now: adapt (try something new) or die out. That it’s never been done before is obvious…because it’s difficult. We like to take the easy way out, especially when people we don’t know pay for our luxury with their suffering.

“Though from the outside we might look more or less the same way we looked three decades ago, in reality there have probably been more significant changes in our species in the last three decades than in the previous three millennia. Humans are functionally a very, very different kind of organism than they were before you and I were born.”

“The fact that billions of human beings now have access to (A) all the information known to man and (B) instantaneous communication with each other is far and away the most significant thing ever to happen to our species since the evolution of the human brain, and it will get even more significant as improved translation services network us even further.”

I’m less hopeful here. Nobody watches the videos I watch or reads the articles I read. We’re communicating more, sure, but about what?

“Even if you could wave a magic wand and have our biosphere perfectly healthy again and all nuclear weapons reduced to atoms, our behavior patterns would just cause us to destroy the biosphere again and rebuild the nukes in a matter of years.”

“If it’s impossible to create a wildly different kind of civilization than the kind we’ve been living in, then it’s also impossible that humans exist in future centuries, because we will necessarily wipe ourselves out with our self-destructive patternings otherwise.”

“If there are future generations, they will necessarily be living in a society that functions in a completely different way than our current one does.”

Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster by Henry Farell & Cosma Shalizi (The Economist)

“[…] we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.”

On Shoggothim by Cosma Shalizi (Three-toed Sloth)

“[…] an LLM is a way of taking the vast inchoate chaos of written-human-language-as-recorded-on-the-Web and simplifying and abstracting it in potentially useful ways. They are, as Alison Gopnik says, cultural technologies, more analogous to library catalogs than to individual minds. This makes LLMs recent and still-minor members of a larger and older family of monsters which similarly simplify, abstract, and repurpose human minds: the market system, the corporation, the state, even the democratic state. Those are distributed information-processing systems which don’t just ingest the products of human intelligence, but actually run on human beings.”

Technology

3 iOS 0-days, a cellular network compromise, and HTTP used to infect an iPhone by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)

“[…] most people will never be targeted in these types of attacks. Exploit chains like the ones used against Eltantawy typically sell for millions of dollars. In this case, the exploit also required the compromise of a cellular network through either a separate exploit or the participation of an insider. Once such a campaign comes to light, the attackers must start over from scratch. The high price and the fragility of the exploits makes attackers extremely selective when choosing targets.”

Deepfake Election Interference in Slovokia by Bruce Schneier

“Countries like Russia and China tend to test their attacks out on smaller countries before unleashing them on larger ones. Consider this a preview to their actions in the US next year.”

As ever. Schneier can’t even begin to imagine that the U.S. may very do this thing to itself. 🤦‍♂️

In his article Political Disinformation and AI by Bruce Schneier, he writes,

“First it was just Russia, then Russia and China, and most recently those two plus Iran. As the financial cost of foreign influence decreases, more countries can get in on the action.”

He seems to be congenitally incapable of suggesting that there are definitely agencies in the U.S.—and Israel!—that would be more than happy to hack the election.

And that’s just state actors, which aren’t even the most technically savvy or well-funded ones. He writes,

“Companies like Meta have gotten much better at identifying these accounts and taking them down.”

So, first of all, we’re trusting Meta to police our national discourse—but we don’t suspect them at all of manipulating it? They would have the best opportunity to do so. And motive? Political influence, what else?

All of the trillion-dollar tech companies are doing a ton of AI. I just can’t believe that Schneier is so myopic about possible sources of hacking.

Technology Sucks: Weather

That’s a weather forecast showing that it’s going to be sunny all day, with 0% chance of rain. The little gadget at the bottom is chirpily informing me, though, that “Die Regenwahrscheinlichkeit ist ziemlich hoch. Pack lieber eine wasserdichte Jacke ein. Wenn du deine Tour jetzt startest.” Translated to English, that would be “The chance of rain is quite high. You should pack a rain-jacket. If you start your tour now.”

First of all, that’s supposed to be a single sentence, but we can’t even get that right. Second of all, which weather forecast was the software making the “suggestion” drawing from when it so pessimistically saw rain?

I don’t know why people are so excited for a bunch of LLMs to take over the world. We already have a whole bunch of shitty software, the mechanics of which are completely open to us. I can’t imagine how things will get better when the mechanics of the software making suggestions for how we should be spending our precious time are completely unknown and perhaps unknowable to us.

Programming

Enabling Software Literacy by zells (GitHub)

“Instead of learning to express our own ideas, and understand those of others enough to change and reproduce them, we are content with the limited interpretations and options that user interfaces give us, making their designers our priests, their companies our churches, and their developers our monks. To enable Software Literacy, we need a printing press for software. A way to make software cheap enough to start a spiral of accessible dynamic models and software literate citizens, which could lead to the next cognitive revolution.”

A problem with .NET Self-Contained Apps and how to pop calculators in dnSpy by Washi

“This is a nice example of a pretty fundamental limitation of self-contained applications that ship their own versions of a runtime or standard library. An update in the runtime requires an update of the program. This means a security update in the runtime requires a security update of the program as well. Developers that ship self-contained applications really need to stay aware of any vulnerabilities that may be present in their dependencies. Luckily, for most developers, this is the only thing they would need to do, but they cannot rely on Windows Update to update their own DLLs!”

Fun

Who had Zombie apocalypse for Wednesday? Be careful out there people…. (Reddit)

Marburg Virus

Just doing a little light reading before bed and … it looks like it’s gonna be a crazy day tomorrow. 🤣

Brace yourselves.

Actually, only one person in my close family has to be worried. The rest of us are either not vaccinated or out of the reach of the EBS. 😂

God, I love the Internet.

meirl (Reddit)

“Friend making normal wages- “no worries bro, I’ll cover this one. You got next!”
Friend who works in tech making over 300k − “can you Venmo me $3.74 for the sip of my
drink you took?””

To which people ended up replying things like “I agree splitting costs is such a nice to not have any obligation for another meeting where someone has to return the favour.” and then “It’s also nice to give gifts and graciously accept them and just be appreciative when they are given. Not everything is a debt. Sometime it is. Knowing the difference is important.” and, finally, “But there is an expectation especially among friends, sometimes it’s just nice to not have money involved.”

Are we still talking about $4 to someone making $300K per year? Just checking because I’m confused as to how that amounts to an obligation. It’s $4. If I buy my buddy a coffee once or twice and we can’t remember who paid the last time, but it turns out that it was me, and then it becomes 5 or 10 times in a row and he keeps pretending that he’s pretty sure we’ve bought coffees an equal number of times or he keeps letting me buy him coffees without batting an eye, then lesson learned, but I’m still only out about $20 total over a couple of months and there was literally no financial discomfort on my part. If he picks up the third, fourth, and fifth coffees, and then it’s my turn again, then holy shit, it looks like we’re acting like real-life human friends, and we can pat ourselves on our respective backs – or maybe each others’! – for a job well done. /r/totallynotrobots

The other members of the conversation quickly jumped in to continue bitching about having shitty friends and acquaintances for whom they feel obligated to buy things. If you’re letting someone sip from your soda, then I hope you’re not just casual acquaintances. They also claimed that the numbers were exaggerations, when a $300k tech salary in cities like San Fransisco are not at all unrealistic for senior staff. I’m not saying it’s right, but that it’s not at all out of the question.

Wonder what else is down there (Reddit)

China May Be Using Sea To Hide Submarines

The comment is “In Africa, height depends on how tall you are.”

Truck size is getting cartoonish at this point. (Reddit)

Giant truck repair

• “Pavement princess. Emotional support vehicle.”

  • “It’s a gender affirming vehicle.”

    • “It’s got 4 doors, so I call them Manivans.”

      • “Don’t bring my hard working minivan into this. My 2006 T&C can haul full sheets of plywood flat, most pickups can’t do that anymore. And the tailgate is 2 feet of[f] the ground, not 5 feet high, so loading bags of cement or soil is much easier.”

        • “I had a realization the other day too that even SUVs struggle to carry large furniture and you’d still have to lay down trees from the nursery. But a minivan could hold them both upright. If I ever need to get a new workhorse vehicle I think I’d choose a work van over another old truck.”

          • “That’s the thing a lot of trucks guys will hate to admit. A van is much much more practical for work. Trucks have their use but it’s niche, and I don’t think I’d be exaggerating in saying like 90% of truck drivers have no real need for then. Beyond ego and aesthetic.”

I’d sent the post Somewhere in America there is an absolute legend who writes ‘SLUTS’ on box cars in various styles (Reddit) to a friend. He wrote back that they were “majestic sluts indeed”. I realized that I’d finally found a prompt to throw an LLM’s way. So I headed over to Stable Diffusion and prompted it with “Majestic sluts in the style of Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta” and chose a style of sai-fantasy art not because I knew what I was doing, but because I figured I’d give it the best shot I could. It responded with the following image.

Majestic Slut in the style of Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta (generated by Stable Diffusion)

Ok, so let’s analyze that.

• ✅ The LLM didn’t refuse to process my prompt because it had the word “slut” in it.
• ⚠️ The color palette is pretty close, but a bit to happy? Frazetta was darker.
• ⛔️ It assumed that a slut was female (most likely because of ridiculous preponderance in the training data).
• ⛔️ The face is OK, but not really evocative of either of the artist’s styles.
• ⛔️ The pose is very generic and also not sufficiently contorted to evoke either of the two masters’ work.
• ⛔️ The breasts are porn-star breasts, not Vallejo breasts.
• ⛔️ Ditto for the fundament.
• ⛔️ The feet are Barbie-doll feet, posed for high heels, not for springing on a dragon’s back.
• ⛔️ That outfit looks more like lingerie than fantasy mail-armor. No dangly bits.
• ⛔️ There’s no sword, no tiara, no chain-mail bra, no dragon, nothing.
• ⛔️ There’s only one person in the image, when I very clearly wrote “sluts”

So, what’s the conclusion? Well, it’s in the ballpark, but I pretty much put it there by naming two of the artists it was to draw inspiration from. Also, I chose the sai-fantasy art style to seal the deal. From that, a web search would have found thousands of images from which to produce something. To be honest, this image has probably been generated millions of times already by the long-suffering LLM at Stable Diffusion, which probably has to render “HAWT GRRLLL” for 99.9% of its prompts.

I only threw one prompt the machine’s way. It was kind of close, but not good enough to use. According to Images that Bing Image Creator won’t create by Stewart Baker (Reason), this is a typical experience.

“As always, Bing’s first attempt was surprisingly good, but flawed, and getting a useable version required dozens of edits of the prompt. None of the images were quite right.”

That article is about the trust and safety limits that prevent certain content from being created in the first place.

“This is almost certainly the future of AI trust and safety limits. It will start with overbroad rules written to satisfy left-leaning critics of Silicon Valley. Then those overbroad rules will be further broadened by hidden code written to block many perfectly compliant prompts just to ensure that it blocks a handful of noncompliant prompts.”