@shauna The Constant. Start with Shipwreckless. I also like Odd Lots. You could start with Nate Soares but if you are tired of AI (and who isn't?), the recent episode on Dangote was interesting. I also like What It's Like To Be (e.g. What It's Like To Be A Forensic Architect).

@bkuhn Some places have banned gas-powered leaf blowers. IIRC LA tried and then it got rolled back because of some idiocy. Maybe write to your city council member?

@jonah Same-sex marriage is legal throughout the US, not to mention most of Western Europe and South America. 25 years ago, it was legal only in the Netherlands.

@danluu You missed the word "ad" before "skipper".

@bkuhn When I was at Twitter, the rule applied to me, and I was a regular old developer -- working on Free Software (though I did sometimes look at Twitter's proprietary code to make sure that it would work with what I was writing -- but really only the build files). Our stock accounts were set up so that we could only sell during the week or so after earnings went out.

I guess it would be possible to imagine that a developer could have no material non-public information, but it would certainly be awkward to explain to a judge: "Your honor, I work for this company, and I think it sucks, but not because I know anything about it from working here -- just for the reason anyone might thing it sucks -- and that's why I shorted it." (I mean, "I'm hedging" is the actual reason you gave, but I still think a judge would be unlikely to buy it.)

@bkuhn You usually have material nonpublic information about a company you work for, and thus can't legally trade their stock (except for RSUs, which you can only sell at certain times). And most of the prediction markets have similar rules.

@jmac @seano Sorry I missed you -- I was there picking up an object for my brother in law.

@danluu You should definitely reach out both to your local police department (just in case you get swatted) and theirs (assuming you are fairly confident of their identity).

@bkuhn Funny enough, I just had it too (along with the flu vaccine), and the side effects are less bad than prior vaccines. No shivering sweats this time!

@mjd @ranjit @eltonfc

Long distance power transmission requires transformers on both ends (and an inverter on the panel end), because low voltage doesn't travel well. You can't just wire them in series because (a) what if some of the panels get shaded and (b) high voltage can cause arcing. So having panels near the users is good. Maybe the canal is near users?

And possibly the frames are a significant enough piece of the cost that evaporation alone isn't enough to make them worthwhile, and solar alone isn't enough, but together they're enough? That would be possible, I think.

Given that this is California, I would bet there are permitting issues that make it harder to build solar in random places, and a loophole that makes this use feasible.

@ranjit @handmade_ghost @catselbow The average season of a show on Entflix takes about three months to watch.

@FeralRobots @matdevdug I'm saying that you can literally go online and buy a custom virus right now (I linked a site earlier). Yes, there are some lab techs involved -- but they are "lab techs as a service".

@FeralRobots @matdevdug I don't want to be dead. I don't really care whether, after I'm dead, we blame humans or machines. I don't want my neighbors to have guns, and I also don't want them to have machines which can design custom viruses. And if it turns out that machines that are good at writing computer code are also good at writing DNA code, which seems rather likely, I would like to stop making those machines better until we have better controls on them.

I don't think you need to believe in anything outside what we can observe to see that AI capabilities are outpacing our ability to control them. HuggingFace is only one example; there have been a few others.

@bkuhn Not the only ingredients -- there's still the other 80-95% random petroleum products.

@FeralRobots @matdevdug I mean, you can just go online and order a virus. To be clear: I'm not imagining that the virus is necessarily present at the data center; I'm imagining that it has already been released. All it takes is a bad AI and one idiot, and the world is full of idiots.

@bkuhn @bignose I just noticed that "which often has information that other sources don't" sounds like the output of a LLM. It's not; I'm just the kind of nerd who knows to check a MSDS. I'm apparently losing my ability to write like a human even though I don't let LLMs generate prose for me. Oy. Anyway, US regulations aren't great, but sometimes they're less bad than they might, on their surface, appear.

@bkuhn @bignose It's d-limonene and orange oil -- see the MSDS, which often has information that other sources don't.

@matdevdug Unforunately, the bioengineered viruses have already spread too far. Shortly after your 30-50 feral Wikipedians exit the building holding garlands of cut fiber, they start coughing blood. By the end of the week, not one of them remains alive, nor does anyone else.

@adapalmer Ah, I see, it's at https://feeds.libsyn.com/622815/rss

@adapalmer I would like to listen, but I would prefer a non-Youtube source so I can use my usual podcast player -- do you plan to have a RSS feed?

@mjd I liked it when it was Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster". In real life, not so much.

@jmac It belongs on the Lateral podcast, not on a bar.

@mjd @Crazypedia I am pretty sure I heard a podcast episode about her -- but which podcast? It's totally a 99% Invisible story but no, it isn't. During peak pandemic, I listened to a ton of podcasts, but at some point I moved phones and forgot to bring my AntennaPod DB with me and lost a lot of history. Anyway, I couldn't remember her name until I searched, but I remembered the idea.

@mjd @Crazypedia "A self-cleaning building construction comprises apparatus for applying a fine spray or mist of water and/or water and detergent to wall, floor and ceiling surfaces, followed by warm air drying. Floors slope in a direction for removing excess moisture via a drain. Also included are closet apparatus for cleaning clothing, cupboard dishwasher apparatus for cleaning stored dishes, self-cleaning bathtub apparatus, and self-cleaning washbasin apparatus." -US patent number 4,428,08, Frances Gabe

@bkuhn What does "cannot reason" mean? Like, they make a lot of reasoning mistakes? So do many higher mammals (I know I have!). They confidently say wrong things? I think we've all done that! But, like, they can go from premises to conclusions (better than many humans).

re: uspol

@bkuhn @starlily The "fall of Rome" was arguably a centuries-long process (not even counting that the Eastern empire lasted until nearly the Early Modern period). By the time Rome (the city itself) fell, there had been centuries of civil war and major changes in the governance structure (was it "regime change" every time a different general took over as emperor? Those changes were, of course, very often violent). And Rome itself was, of course, an empire -- a centralized power structure maintaining that power at the expense of the folks on the periphery.

If we look at the changes that we object to in the world today, they are often achieved non-violently. Orban's rule wasn't violent (except in the sense that all states are fundamentally violent); it didn't start with a coup, and it didn't end violently either. It would be hard to describe Netanyahu as non-violent (LOL), but, again, he was voted in in a nonviolent election.

"Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to." -Hilary Bok.

Anyway, I think we can see women's suffrage as an example of a (almost entirely) nonviolent change that moved us closer to a egalitarian society under the rule of law. Same for LGBTQ rights. Can you imagine any major news outlet using the term "husband" to refer to a man married to man in 1990? But if you look now, you'll see even right-wing outlets (OANN, Newsmax) using it without scare quotes.

re: uspol

@bkuhn @enobacon @starlily

I would not say that the major changes in the UK, from an oligopoly to a parliamentary democracy, happened without violence, but the ultimate success of universal suffrage was not due to violence. I mean here, the 19th and early 20th century expansion of the franchise to nearly all adults. Sure, the Chartists and Suffragettes both engaged in violent actions and suffered from violent repression by the state, but the changes weren't ultimately made at gunpoint. But it also took something like a hundred years (more if we count the House of Lords changes, which, optimistically, are still a work in-progress). Maybe it's odd to describe it as "regime change", but if you sent a modern Brit back to 1831, they would see the idea that they would be unable to vote because they didn't have enough money as insane and backwards.

Imagine the following change in the US (say, to make Senate seats proportional to state size, expand the House to 6k members, and eliminate the Electoral College). This would be smaller, in some sense. It wouldn't change who could vote. Instead of getting rid of rotten boroughs of seven people electing someone to Parliament, we would reduce the power of a Wyoming voter from ~60x a California voter to (roughly) even. It would be a major enough change to completely reshape American politics (while still leaving huge problems unsolved -- I didn't even mention the Supreme Court, or the administrative state's structural weakness). It could, in theory, happen without violence (I think the odds of change happening by violence are higher, but I don't think those specific changes are what violence would give us). Would that be regime change?

The breakup of the USSR, while not completely nonviolent, was certainly not a violent revolution.

And of course, Indian and Pakistani independence. Partition, of course, involved significant violence, but that's not a story about regime change.

@meoralis Pretty sure I've seen pottery glazes that look like that?

@b0rk @mjd I think hashing is by far the most useful for the working programmer (in some sense -- like, it would be hard to imagine life without https, but I mean, direct use). In addition to integrity checking, deduplication/content-addressed storage, there's password hashing, and, if you are a fan of carbon dioxide, proof-of-work. But admittedly my own experience biases me.

@mjd @b0rk I actually think I at least skimmed that paper, a while ago. But I mean, it's known in the sense that we know that nobody has published a way to do it, and people spend billions of dollars online on the assumption that these operations are difficult. And we further are now deploying PQC on the belief that certain operations will not be difficult for very long given newer technology. It's not a mathematical fact, but an engineering value, like the compressive strength of concrete. But it's subject to change because we live in an adversarial world. So maybe it's more like, I dunno, how deadly a bullet is given current armor. You're taking a math mindset, but that is exactly not the mindset that @b0rk is asking about.

@b0rk I don't understand the math well enough to trust in my understanding of it. Why should reversing certain functions be hard?

The only answer I can give is the same as the answer I give on global warming: scientists say this is the fact of the matter, and I trust their general epistemology.

I can plug in a toaster that I couldn't build, and I can toast with it. So I guess I can understand an interface to something I couldn't build. And I know that there are some toasters that are not worth taking a chance on (I guess the public key equivalent would be designing a novel cryptographic protocol).

re: Catfishing.net trivia game #792

@ranjit @futzle @fsvo I just checked and my hardest correct answer is Susan Kare. I don't know why that's so hard -- she's an absolute icon!

@b0rk The reason to choose example.com is that you're setting a good example for others, who might instead use a real domain in a dangerous situation.