I downloaded the zip, did "compileAndBuildVLCKit.sh -x", which took like 4 hours but eventually completed seemingly-successfully. But then BasicPlayerWithPlaylist.xcodeproj can't find VLCkit.framework or VLCKit/VLCKit.h. This sounds like a build settings problem (Framework Search Paths had "../../../build/Release" on it but it seems to be in "../../../build/macOS" instead? But adding that didn't help it find the .h). Trying to build VLCKit.xcodeproj instead gets me complaints about missing static-libvlc and/or install-iphone-device/libvlc-device-static.a (I am not interested in iOS at all.)

The record hot summer has caused a disastrous crop failure in Europe. Both vegetables and grains are affected; in some crops, the loss is over 50%.

Global heating is accelerating, and I've covered the threat of food shortages for many years. Sooner than you expect, every year will be at least this bad — unless we give the planet roasters a knock-out blow, so they can't stop us from preventing that disastrous future.

US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to direct tariff refunds to consumers who paid them.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: call on your state officials to limit Orwellian monitoring systems in order to protect everyone's freedom.

Here is what I wrote:

I urge you to pass legislation prohibiting governments and agencies in our state from setting up cameras that identify and record individual people or vehicles, except based on a warrant limited this surveillance to specified places and time intervals.

It is not enough to ban contracts with Flock. The issue is not limited to that one company. The issue is the danger of Orwellian surveillance and tracking, and the repression they make possible. As shown by recent deportation practices, we must not allow systems to operate which track the movements of people in general.

When and where recognition cameras are authorized, they should not allow remote access to their records. Rather, someone should have to go to the camera itself to retrieve its list of identifications and date/times. For investigating a serious crime, we can afford that. For our safety, it should not be feasible to get each cameras records for every day, or every month.

Please see https://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html.

Sincerely,

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to oppose SEC deregulation.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: sign up to be a poll worker for your city's election.

*3M knew for more than 50 years that its [firefighting] products could harm humans, Australian government alleges in court documents.*

These products are made with PFAS.

*Finland halts deportation of Russian family who "risked everything" to oppose Ukraine invasion.*

What shocks me is that Finnish intelligence acted unaware of the reasons why the Belovs deserved protection. If it was truly ignorant, it was incompetent. If it disregarded the reasons, it was vicious. Which one was it?

* Harvard study finds traffic fatalities increase by 15% on release dates [of major music albums] compared with similar days either side.*

A suggestion for countries that wish to negotiate with the Taliban: insist on sending a delegation composed of women, and insist that the Taliban do likewise.

The wrecker has decided to distance the US from South Korea and cozy up to Dictator Kim in North Korea.

This is disappointing, of course, but not surprising. He often prefers dictators to democracies. He has tried to cozy up to Putin, Chairman Xi, Orbán, Crown Prince Bone Saw, and Modi.

Maximal Fences

I got nerd sniped by this video and with some help from my friend Claude was able to optimize some of the existing records and set some new ones.1

Infinite Tetration

There are a bunch of videos talking about how the infinite tetration function is only defined in a specific range and strangely only hits finite values at the ends of the range, but they don’t show what it actually looks like as a function, so here it is:

You might wonder what’s going on at the end points here. On the right it’s going completely vertical. There’s nothing actually funny happening on the left, that’s just where the formula for it using the W function splits into two value. But we can make an analytic continuation of it like so:2

Since we’re defining tetration we can make the rules and there’s no reason to limit it to the happenstance constraints of W. But this still leaves the question of what’s going on on the right. It turns out it does extend, but going up, like this:

Looking at it this way raises the question of what the inverse of this function is. It turns out it’s y=x^(1/x). So the natural way of defining this stuff is to start with that function then wonder what happens if we take its inverse and wonder what happens at the points where the W function splits. But in that direction it seems like a bunch of bizarre leaps and generalizations which require justification, where if we instead work backwards from infinite tetration they’re strange phenomena which need explanation.

The big lesson to take away is that if you see W turn up you’re probably looking at the inverse of something, and being able to support that is how W has worked its way into the canon of standard functions.

Unit Distances

After thinking about the unit distance conjecture I came to the surprising realization that for any asymptotic bound it must be possible to constrain the points to being in a ‘barbell’ of two discs exactly a unit distance apart and only take a constant factor hit based on the diameters of the discs. Writeup over here3. I was hoping that this would result in better bounds but it works out that the amount of constant factor on tightening the disc radii exactly cancels out the reduction in number of points covered by their areas. But it does seem to imply that you can find solutions whose points are within arbitrarily tight disc pairs by taking subsets of ever larger solutions. So maybe the optimal solutions all have this form and have some parameterizable epsilon how big the discs can be where any value works.

I don’t know if this observation is novel or is something obvious to people actively studying the problem and they just haven’t written it up because it hasn’t lead anywhere. But I found it interesting and surprisingand hopefully you do too.

So, you know, if someone were tempted to give this guy $700, maybe instead they could give DNA Lounge $20 or $30 a month. Then in addition to maybe getting a little souvenir while supplies last, they'd also be helping keep this place alive so that memorable shows like that can keep happening.

I've got uncut sheets of these things too, so if that's your jam, make me an offer...

The reason I have so many extras is because of how big printers work. Or worked, at the time, anyway. We needed like 3,200 tickets, but these things were stamped in large galleys, so if you ordered 3,200 they ended up printing 5,000 and threw the rest away. And for a show like this, we did not want those discards falling into the wrong hands and ending up on the scalper market, so we had them send us the entire batch from the print run.

A couple of years ago I asked the World's Biggest Prince Fan whether this stuff was worth anything, and their answer was (my loose interpretation) "Yes definitely, but only if you put a bunch of effort in to trying to act like an auctioneer, and are cagey about how much you have" and that sounded like a bunch of work and also kind of dirty, so I never bothered. (It would require more finesse and salesmanship than just dropping them on our merch page, in other words.)

But hey, literally nobody but me currently possesses one of these uncut sheets, sooooo... Scarcity!

[ Butterfly meme ] "Is this... Captialism?"

Armed with 29 external cameras, LiDAR, radar, and microphones, each robotaxi stays powered up between rides so it can respond to emergencies and reposition when needed. What Waymo won't say: how long that footage is stored, whether a residential street gets treated differently than a public plaza, and what "reasonably appropriate amount of time" actually means in practice. That phrase is doing enormous work for a very small amount of transparency. [...]

Where Ring doorbells marked the first wave of consumer-grade street surveillance, autonomous fleets are the next layer -- and they connect. Waymo holds a research agreement with Nexar, the dash-cam network embedded in hundreds of thousands of Uber and Lyft vehicles. Flock Safety, the license plate reader company, previously explored accessing that same Nexar footage for its law-enforcement clients. That deal collapsed. The architecture still exists. Think of it less like a coordinated surveillance state and more like a surveillance potluck -- everyone brought a dish, nobody planned the menu, and you weren't invited.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

DA officials did not say whether they agreed with Helvestine's argument that the footage showed only a handshake. But the DA's office subsequently motioned to dismiss the case ahead of its preliminary hearing, records show. That motion was granted on May 8 last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Michelle Tong. [...]

Deputy Public Defender Brian Cox, the head of the office's Integrity Unit, argued police officers regularly mischaracterize normal interactions as drug transactions, and that drones amplify those risks. [...]

"SFPD interprets otherwise innocent behavior as criminal because to a hammer, everything is a nail," said Cox. "Drones and other surveillance technologies simply give police more power -- and greater reach -- to do that." [...]

The police hub that deploys San Francisco's police drones is also backed by billionaires.

The Real Time Investigations Center, which helps the police department find suspects on the streets and aids arrests using drones and Flock Safety automatic license plate reading cameras, has bulked up through benefactors including Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, former Y Combinator partner Michael Seibel, and Michael Moritz's family foundation Crankstart.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

The two customers were, in fact, recording Hinkle, and the entire exchange was turned into content for social media. Another Target manager came across the video while scrolling online, without even looking for it. [...]

There's little recourse for those who have been unknowingly recorded. In one of the videos posted to social media that Hinkle is featured in, the Meta glasses wearer is seen chumming it up and dancing with a police officer who arrived at the Target store.

"You boys stay out of trouble," the cop says as he fist bumps the person recording. [...]

"Are your glasses blinking?" she asks.

He responds that he's recording her.

"Oh, could you not?" she says.

"That's what they're there for," he says, defiantly. "I'm here to watch you, and you're here to perform for me." The audience member refuses to stop filming even after being asked to. Rather than argue back and forth, Telesford cuts her set short and walks offstage. [...]

"We know that when people are being watched, they feel less free. They chill their behavior, they feel pressure to conform. They worry about even minor deviations from norms being used against them," he says. "It's just a sort of suffocating atmosphere to be a part of."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Anyway, go read that post instead for the juicy gossip. No need to re-hash it all here.

We can see from the release notes that 3.0 contained such exciting new features as background colors in table cells, the <FONT FACE> attribute, and <SCRIPT SRC>. Plus better uuencode support! For porn!

Oh yeah, and I think 3.0 was the first release with "Gold", the WYSIWYG HTML editor, but Gold only worked on Windows and Mac. This was the first violation of what had been, until then, two of our guiding principles, which I was unable to stop:

• Simultaneous feature parity on all platforms;
• Never allow C++ into the cross-platform code base.

You get one guess why there was no Unix version. If you listen carefully, you can hear Ghosts of JWZs Past howling down the cubicle farm hallways, "I fucking told you so, did I not fucking tell you??" But Lloyd thought the way you write cross-platform code was to write for Windows and then port it once you were finished. "It'll be fine," he said. (Narrator: It was not fine.)

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon's book buying operation, which hasn't been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. [...]

We first learned that AI companies wanted to scan millions of books for training data because of a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which revealed Anthropic's "Project Panama." The goal of the project was to acquire books from commercial bookselling marketplaces, cut the spines off the books, and scan them. It's possible to scan books without destroying them, but cutting the spine makes it cheaper and faster.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.