*The government's decision to roll out the red carpet for President Herzog while simultaneously establishing "exclusion zones" for the public is a misstep, one likely to deepen the rift between already polarised communities. People must be able to peacefully voice their objections to the horrors of war in Gaza, against the violence of ultra-Orthodox settlers in the West Bank, the massacre of Iranian protesters or the terror unleashed by Hamas. Protest, when done peacefully and without hate, is not only legitimate – it is vital.*
I think Australia should not have invited Herzog, but since it did, it should not silence Australians' condemnation of the violent actions that he stands for.
Ai Wei Wei talks about facing Chinese censorship and British censorship.
*Recently, the Rowsons accidentally invented a new game that anyone can play at home. I have yet to come up with a world-beating name for it, so for now let's just call it "How bloody stupid is [some so-called] AI?" The playing of the game will change from player to player, depending on their circumstances – but essentially the rules remain the same. Ask [some so-called] AI a simple question about yourself, and see just how wrong it gets it.*
He that knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool -- shun him.
It that knows not, and knows not that it knows not, is an LLM -- switch it off.
The essence of a state built on terror is that no one can rely on being safe, and people who were not persecuted this week can only guess why not.
Who was or who wasn't persecuted is usual a minor detail, which is why it often operates based on quotas.
Substack does not censor right-wing and Nazi views -- its owner dislikes their views but doesn't believe in censoring views he dislikes. I find that honorable and proper.
What makes US Nazis dangerous is not the fact that they can publish their views in the same way anyone else can. Rather, it is the support they get from powerful people such as the persecutor and his henchmen.
*[The corrupter]'s family is embroiled in a $500m UAE scandal. We've hardly noticed.*
A court quashed the bully's demand to have Penn Station renamed with his name.
US citizens: call on your senators to block corruptive bills about cryptocurrency.
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 Demand Congress Address the Housing Crisis: Pass the Make Housing Affordable Act!
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Bezos bought the Washington Post for small change, then decided to ruin it totally to gain more valuable rewards from the corrupter.
Many subscribers dropped the Washington Post in response to his first turn toward the right wing. Now his flunkies cite that setback as a reason for another turn toward the right wing.
Foreign correspondent Lizzie Johnson was fired while freezing in Kyiv.
I feel no regret about the dismissal of sports reporters.
The "very poor," as well immigrant communities and the very young and old, the amendment read, "fall outside the non-cash financial system." [...]
Nationwide, those levels are decreasing, but remain significant. A survey conducted by the FDIC found that in 2023, Black and Latino households were overrepresented in the unbanked population, with 10.6 percent of Black and 9.5 percent of Latino households in the U.S. were unbanked, down from 17 and 14 percent in 2017.
Today, approximately 4 percent of San Francisco households are "unbanked," or do not have a checking or savings account, and nearly 14 percent are "underbanked" -- have bank accounts but primarily use cash or use check cashers or money orders. [...] "These residents are often the most financially vulnerable and can face higher costs and barriers in everyday transactions," Manke said.
The destruction of cash is part of the advertising panopticon agenda. Paper money doesn't have a utm_source on it so it is useless.
Let us also keep in mind that this "vocal contingent of local business owners" are the same business geniuses who are always, always certain that a bike lane will ruin them.
My vendetta against tape on the walls is endless. I just think it looks really tacky. Plus, one of the things about paper that it is famous for is always showing the same thing. Whereas these screens have all kinds of complications. (In watchmaking, anything that a timepiece does beyond showing hours, minutes and seconds is called a "complication", and I love that term.)
For example, they are sensitive to the room they are in and the genres of the show that is currently happening, so if it's a metal night, they're going to show flyers for other metal shows much more often. They are likewise skewed toward showing shows happening sooner than later.
And another recent complication is the dancing QR codes. I put a bunch of work into making the underlying URLs as short as possible so that the QR codes have big chunky pixels that you can scan from across the room (or from space.)
We also use a couple of screens in the Pizza checkout lane to hype our appetizers.
In summary, digital signage is a land of complications.
Please enjoy jwz mixtape 257.
The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security.
Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn't have a podcast. He didn't track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn't appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don't talk about being a vampire.
Johnson, Thiel, and their cohort have broken this rule comprehensively. Whether this represents a new era of transparency or a catastrophic strategic miscalculation remains to be seen.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
This is an example of "Silicon Valley CEOs and their inability to divorce ICE and the complete lack of understanding of why that makes them monsters," a Salesforce employee told 404 Media. "Employees are going absolutely apeshit in internal Slack about how completely awful it was." Another employee told 404 Media that Benioff "then followed it up with a joke about not understanding the message of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance. On its own just seems out of touch, but coupled with the previous joke it does seem worse."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I've stopped trying to debate software developers on LLMs. It's a fruitless debate. Even if the believers in agents and copilots could be budged on empirical grounds, and the past few years have given us plenty of evidence that they can't, this is still a crowd that is explicitly fine with using tools that are themselves deeply unethical. [...]
Somebody who is capable of looking past "ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes", generated abuse, or how chatbot-mediated alienation seems to be pushing vulnerable people into psychosis-like symptoms, won't be persuaded by a meaningful study. Their goal is to maintain their personal benefit, as they see it, and all they are doing is attempting to negotiate with you what the level of abuse is that you find acceptable. Preventing abuse is not on their agenda.
You lost them right at the outset. [...]
Nor do they seem to care, except in a performative way, that "AI" is designed to be an outright attack on labour and education, using the works of those being attacked -- without their consent -- as the tools for dismantling their own communities and industries, all done in overt collaboration with the ultra right. [...]
Going all "but it works great for me" even as the industry burns around you and the "it" is a right-wing political project built on disregarding consent, being applied to dismantle public infrastructure and institutions, is fundamentally a dick move.
And debating dicks is pointless.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
When playing melodies the effects of microtonality are a bit disappointing. Tunes are still recognizable when played ‘wrong’. The effects are much more dramatic when you play chords:
You can and should play with an interactive version of this here. It’s based off this and this with labels added by me. The larger gray dots are standard 12EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave) positions and the smaller dots are 24EDO. There are a lot of benefits of going with 24EDO for microtonality. It builds on 12EDO as a foundation, in the places where it deviates it’s as microtonal as is possible, and it hits a lot of good chords.
Unrelated to that I’d like to report on an experiment of mine which failed. I had this idea that you could balance the volumes of dissonant notes to make dyads consonant in unusual places. It turns out this fails because the second derivative of dissonance curves is negative everywhere except unity. This can’t possibly be a coincidence. If you were to freehand something which looks like dissonance curves it wouldn’t have this property. Apparently the human ear uses positions where the second derivative of dissonance is positive to figure out what points form the components of a sound and looks for patterns in those to find complete sounds.
Derik Kauffman insists it's not a joke. He's actually planning to hold a March for Billionaires in San Francisco this weekend. And he says he's doing so because he's opposed to a proposed state tax on billionaires and, more simply, because he feels as if the billionaire class has been unfairly vilified. [...]
The point of the event is to "change the sentiment on this to recognize that billionaires have done a lot for us and communicate that we're glad they're here," Kauffman said. [...]
He told The Examiner he's neither a billionaire defending his own interests, nor just acting as a front for the ultrarich. Last year, Kauffman founded an artificial-intelligence startup called RunRL that took part in Y Combinator's accelerator program.
Kauffman said he's not in contact with any billionaires or getting any funding from them, nor are there any other groups involved with the event. Instead, he's footing the cost of the March for Billionaires website himself and is the principal organizer of and publicist for it, he said.
Update: "Oh no. anyway"
San Francisco’s billionaire bacchanal a big bust:
Just one percent of Americans hold nearly a third of the nation's wealth. So it was fitting that after organizers announced an apparently earnest "March for Billionaires" for this Saturday at Alta Plaza Park, only a handful of pro-billionaire agitators actually showed. [...]
The tens of billions of dollars that could be raised from this tax would fund healthcare, a journalist said. What did Kauffman think of that?
Kauffman began his rebuttal, but it was drowned out by the hubbub of a "counter protester" wearing a towering papier-mâché chef puppet costume chasing around a man in a crown. "He's coming to eat the rich!" the royal provocateur yelled. "Help me get away from the unwashed masses!" [...]
"I am a Christian," said Annie. "I swear on my God that I am completely genuine." [...] "People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier," she said. "We are beautiful. We're smart. We're strong... We are supporting the billionaires, here."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Mauricio Peña, the company's Chief Safety Officer, confirmed under questioning that the Google subsidiary employs human operators abroad [...]
"They provide guidance. They do not remotely drive the vehicles," Peña told the Senate committee. "The Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input."
When pressed on how many operators are located outside the United States, Peña said he did not have the breakdown available, escalating frustration from senators.
"It just seems kind of curious that you don't know that answer," one senator responded, before asking in which countries the operators are located.
"The Philippines," Peña replied. [...]
"Having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue," the senator said. "The information the operators receive could be out of date. It could introduce tremendous cybersecurity vulnerabilities. We don't know if these people have US driver's licenses." [...]
"It's one thing when a taxi is replaced by an Uber or a Lyft. It's another thing when the jobs just go completely overseas," the senator added.
But hey, at least these jobs aren't being stolen by immigrants!
The insistence on personifying their products eg "the waymo asks for help", "the human recommends" is such a conspicuous odd contortion that it's almost certain there are legal + business imperatives behind it that they don't talk about and won't until a regulator forces them to. [...]
They want to pay remote drivers from whatever country is currently cheapest, none of whom will have US state drivers' licenses. claiming that they're "advising, not driving" is the linchpin of their argument that that's not as illegal and dangerous as it clearly is. they're constructing legal fortifications before the deaths and lawsuits rise.
Let's not forget that these companies are still immune from prosecution when one of their remotely-operated drones commits a moving violation, up to and including a killing. And that Waymo's owner Google have stated in court filings that it is good for business if their competitors' cars kill more people.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
- I'm pretty sure that the Vaillancourt Fountain is still there in the year 3195. It's hard to tell because some palm trees are blocking it, but that looks like the East wall to me. It's directly below the Tulip statue.
Proving that we are in the Terran Empire timeline, that means it will have lasted 1,169 years longer than it will in our universe.
- Not only is the Hyatt still there, but the rotating restaurant at the top is lit up!
But back here in the Terran timeline, while it has finally been repaired, it is now a private club.
- Quark's still exists, so that's a pretty nice 830+ year run, too.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.