Flutterby™!

Automated bullshit generation comes to policing: AP: Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court?

“It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate. It flowed better,” Gilbert said. It even documented a fact he didn’t remember hearing — another officer’s mention of the color of the car the suspects ran from.

It'll be interesting to see if there's any more attention paid to the correctness of these. It's not like police officers ever get prosecuted for perjury, but will GPT?

When Pirate Bay does it, everyone is up in arms, but when Facebook shows me all of these pirated webcomics with the credits clipped off from scammy link farms with "source unknown" (when the source is immediately obvious to anyone who reads web comics or spends 30 seconds with Google) they're "generating engagement".

Homogenization Effects of Large Language Models on Human Creative Ideation

<blockqutoe>Coupled with evidence that ChatGPT users exhibit greater fluency, flexibility, and elaboration than users of an alternative CST, these results suggest that current general-purpose instruction- tuned LLMs (such as ChatGPT) are capable of functioning as useful CSTs by enabling the rapid enumeration of relatively obvious possibilities that users might otherwise fail, or take longer, to consider. However, these systems are not currently well-suited to helping users develop truly original ideas.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3635636.3656204

Via Mark Gritter, who links to some additional resources used in the paper.

Copying here so that I can link people to it. Written to The Petaluma Argus-Courier, published on August 9. I think I missed something in editing, because the point of the police parking the dynamic speed trailer under the 15MPH yellow sign is that it has a big "30MPH" white speed limit sign on it. So... uh... Anyway, the scuttlebutt is that we may get stop signs!!! Yay!

EDITOR: The short stretch of Mountain View Avenue between Olive Street and Fairview Terrace has seen three automobile collisions in the past five weeks. Pedestrians and bicyclists cross this racetrack with trepidation, and a local power wheelchair user reports having been hit by drivers several times.

Residents of Mountain View Avenue have talked about trying to get traffic calming and safety improvements for literally decades. I've only lived here for 16 years, but in that time the speed limit along the straightaway was raised from 25 mph to 30 mph so that it could be enforced.

The enforcement we've seen involves parking an electronic speed sign underneath the 15 mph recommended speed sign for the curve. Meanwhile, the safety improvements of paint and reflectors installed in 2022 have already worn off, and guerilla safety enhancement efforts are removed within a few business hours. Resident-installed speed monitors record speeds of over 40 mph within 150 feet of stop signs.

I would be irate at the inaction of city processes, but as I look around I realize that there are many roads and intersections in Petaluma that are much higher priority to fix than our neighborhood. If we truly care about climate, and about the livability of the city, we need to prioritize rebuilding our infrastructure in ways that makes it accessible to all users, not just automobile drivers speeding recklessly through our neighborhoods.

Door by slow door, the reclaimed white oak is replacing the painted trim. Not gonna contemplate the doors right now...

Trying to figure out how to do as much work flat as possible and still have the necessary precision so that the existing door hangs.

Comparing and contacting, one of these boards may be worth pulling the nails from and reusing....

Startup Alarmed When Its AI Starts Rickrolling Clients — "Literally f*cking Rickrolling our customers."

Though he's not entirely sure how it happened, the Lindy CEO and founder told TechCrunch that he has a theory about how his AI assistants figured out how to execute this specific brand of internet humor.

"The way these models work is they try to predict the most likely next sequence of text," Crivello explained. "So it starts like, 'Oh, I’m going to send you a video!' So what’s most likely after that? YouTube.com. And then what’s most likely after that?"

Been trying to be super skimpy on spending money, but got a new pressure regulator for my air compressor, and I have been trying to find good nails that feed reliably through my Bostitch 23ga pin nailer, and I finally broke down and bought the $320 Senco device, and holy crap that is night and day. Between decent less leaky consistent air pressure and the higher end gun... Gonna make the rest of this trim and the baseboards so much nicer.

Dear Microsoft. I want you fuckers to try to talk an 85 year old former mortician and home appraiser through using Windows 11 vs Windows 10.

I'm trying to help him via Zoom screen share, and holy shit the attempting to be "helpful" with arranging windows. We have no idea what it's trying to do.

Also, if it's gonna be glacial I wanna see what's happening in the task manager.

Argh. I have a Bostitch 1 3/16" 23 ga pin nailer. I have 1 1/4" pin nails. I have Senco 1" pin nails, but they don't feed reliably. I'd really like to drive something longer, but...

I don't wanna buy another nailer, or try to find nails that will fit this thing. Ugh.

When I manifest the cosmos, there will be a special hell for people who paint hinges.

Empty lots and vacant houses for DeCarli.

(Chain link fences in this town sure do have opinions. Also people who are pissed off that they can't develop in the flood plain.)

Square dance music producer released a recording of a song that I am unfamiliar with, "Too Wet To Plow", so I had to go find the lyrics.

And I am extremely disappointed that I didn't find a lick of innuendo there.

Kentucky State Fair removes winning miniature depicting pornography set

Last week, Shepherdsville native Preston Poling won third place in the Kentucky State Fair’s miniature contest. Poling said the white ribbon-winning piece was “a simple design.” The miniature scene was a room with white walls, a black leather couch in the corner, a wooden office desk, a computer and a desk chair. The simple design Poling created was a smaller version of “The Casting Couch,” a popular pornography set.

In practice, requiring human oversight of automated decision making doesn't correct for bias or errors -- people tend to defer to the automated system. Ben Green's excellent paper on this focuses on government use of automated systems, but the dynamic applies more generally. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3921216

First, evidence suggests that people are unable to perform the desired oversight functions. Second, as a result of the first flaw, human oversight policies legitimize government uses of faulty and controversial algorithms without addressing the fundamental issues with these tools.

And sure, as you point out, mistakes are made today by human moderators ... but those mistakes contaminate any training set. And algorithms typically magnify biases in the underlying data.

@Raccoon@techhub.social @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io

From poisoning LLMs to "nostalgia" for the Reagan years, this captures so much of the zeitgeist: RT monkϵyborg 🦾🐵 @monkeyborg@triangletoot.party

Leading causes of death in the U.S., 1980-89:

Ages 0-1: Demonic possession

2-5: Failure by parents to apply “Mr. Yuk” stickers to caustic household chemicals

6-10: Razor blades in Halloween candy

11-14: Being gagged with a spoon

15-19: Ritual sacrifice by Satanists (D&D players)

20-34: Cocaine

35-49: Injuries sustained while Jazzercising

50-64: Communism

65: Last day on the force before retirement

66-79: Lung cancer

80+: Encounters with disrespectful juvenile street gangs

This has all of the hallmarks of someone asking an LLM for quotes about Francis Ford Coppola's movies, and having it create an amalgam of quips about other films and flat out bullshit...

Lionsgate pulls Megalopolist trailer due to made-up critic quotes

Admittedly a password on a PDF isn't the end-all of copy protection, but it's interesting to see the Modern Western Square Dance community intent on finding out about suppression of interest and usability in a market of a few hundred people.

Anyway, I started to read those, rebooted, and now if have to go to the email to find the password again, and it's hard to get enough out of this to feel like I'll have a reason to resubscribe.

Closing tabs: American Psychologist: Evidence of Bias Against Girls and Women in Contexts That Emphasize Intellectual Ability, Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian

DOI:10.1037/amp0000427

If I haven't grabbed you by the lapels and said "You have to listen to the Tested podcast from NPR and CBC" yet, I'm doing it now.

Also, fuck the Olympics and the IOC and most organized sport.

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/10...roducing-tested-from-npr-and-cbc

"It is never surprising to find human errors at the heart of system failure because people are at the heart of making these systems work in the first place." -- Sidney Decker, in "The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error", which I am finding to be a really good read, and recommend.

JAMA Pediatrics: Notice of Retraction: Hahn LM, et al. Post–COVID-19 Condition in Children. JAMA Pediatrics. 2023;177(11):1226-1228.

We had concluded that the incidence of PCC was 0.4% (1/271). In correcting these errors, we found that the incidence of PCC was 1.4% (4/286).

PCC being "post–COVID-19 condition".

Time to go back to masking, I suppose. That sucks.

Via.

Fantastic read: Infrequently Noted: Reckoning

Modern websites don't have to feel broken. Better is possible. This series walks through today's network and device ground truth, stares into abyss of developer practices, and closes with advice for managers and engineers who want to avoid the same mistakes.

With a good drop into how JavaScript first, especially in public services websites, disenfranchises the users that the sites should be most set up to serve.

Subpixel Text Encoding — Matt Sarnoff, 10.22.08 Or: If you take LCD pixel layout into account, how small a font can you make?

Today I learned about Valetudo "Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation".

We are looking at robot vacuums. We have a number of recommendations. Right now one of the leading ones is the Roborock S7. It navigates with LIDAR and ultrasonics.

One of the factors we're favoring is technologies other than onboard cameras, and no onboard human frequency mics or speakers. This may seem paranoid, but...

https://digipres.club/@foone/112990496866634756

Matthew Garrett: Client-side filtering of private data is a bad idea. It's about the Feeld dating app, but it's also about how one goes about deconstructing an Android app to see what sort of web traffic is occurring.

Via

Okay, we're probably not using the Objective-C Firebase client library as it was meant to be used, but did ya ever look at code and say "I can't possibly be understanding this, 'cause it can't possibly be intentionally this O(N^2)"?

ICYMI: Zoom just sent around a "even if you opted out previously we're gonna enable an AI Assistant unless you opt out again" message.

And, yes, I know, Zoom is way down the enshittification rathole, but it's what we still use for forum broadcasts. Sigh.

The Seattle City Council Says Cracking Down on Sex Workers Will Create Services, Stop Sex Trafficking, and End Gun Violence. Don’t Believe Them.

After this lurid display, Moore introduced a panel to speak in favor of her proposal—a group that included Kirkland real estate broker Kristine Moreland, who runs a controversial group called The More We Love. PubliCola has written extensively about The More We Love and Moreland, who originally performed private encampments sweeps at a rate of $515 for each person removed and now holds the sole contract for all homeless outreach in Burien. Moreland didn’t bring up her work in Burien, instead describing The More We Love as “an anti-sex trafficking organization” and talking about the need for more funding for supportive services for victims of trafficking.

The process of wiping off my old Intel MBP to give to my nephew is reminding me of all of the cruft that came across from the M series migration, and maybe I should wipe and reinstall my work machine.

This morning I thought it'd be cool to play with Nodezator, and now I'm down a rabbit hole of homebrew and pip3 and...

Ugh. Mac.

Markov Chains are funnier than LLMs, an interesting short delve into humor and text generation.

Via

So Petco apparently never marked that we'd picked up an order, canceled the order for non-pick-up, and refunded the money. And a good portion of me is like "the honest thing to do is to contact them, tell them what's up, and make sure that I pay for the order."

The other portion of me is like "the only way to contact support is via voice phone call? Fuck that. If they wanted my money they'd accept an email."

I forget which FB friend turned me on to this, but it is fantastic. It's a look at what gender means in sport, and how we demand that women use modern medicine to conform to very narrow definitions of female in order to compete, while those competing as men get every advantage of their biology.

I'm assuming that they're gonna get into some of the examples of when women's categories were created as soon as women started beating men, but haven't gotten there yet. Anyway, recommended.

Introducing Tested from NPR and CBC

Who gets to compete? Since the beginning of women's sports, there has been a struggle over who qualifies for the women's category. Tested follows the unfolding story of elite female runners who have been told they can no longer race as women, because of their biology. As the Olympics approach, they face hard choices: take drugs to lower their natural testosterone levels, give up their sport entirely, or fight. To understand how we got here, we trace the surprising, 100-year history of sex testing.

Hit Em: A Musical Dream Come True

As Drew Daniel woke from uneasy dreams, he found himself at the center of a new musical micro-genre called “Hit Em”.

What can you do with 212 bpm in 5/4? Certainly tie your brain in knots...

Random cat picture

Following yet another analysis that suggests that, yes, housing costs follow a supply and demand curve, even if the supply comes in at the high end (which ties to my observation that "affordable housing isn't what you build now, it's what you built 50 years ago" with a gesture around...), I've gotten to wondering: Does anyone have good resources that look at local induced demand creating housing shortages?

For instance: The story being told about Healdsburg is that the new condos, where a sub 600 sq.ft. studio is over a million bucks plus condo fees, are being bought by people wanting weekend/getaway places for whom the price is no object, and this is driving up the desirability of the Healdsburg core and thus bringing in more housing demand.

(How the multi-family is outpacing the impacting single-family homes just out of town nearly is also one of the things I'd like to read more on, though I know that the glamor of the single family home propaganda is wearing off).

So, yeah, I realize that macroeconomics has more in common with reading tea leaves than with science, but I'd love some good reading on the topic of local demand.

Font with built-in syntax highlighting

Leveraging OpenType features to build a simple syntax highlighter inside the font

Worth just saying: RT mkb @mkb@mastodon.social

Thesis:

If so much of our #writing can be generated for us by #LLMs, maybe that writing should not exist in the first place.

Collectively, how much of what we write is perfunctory and obligatory rather than interesting? Maybe that 50 page report could have been 5 pages. Maybe that news story pretending there is meaning in a trivial stock market move shouldn’t have been written at all.

Add in #AI summarization and it gets even more pointless— computers dancing for each other.

Especially since "AI summarization" isn't, which means that the summaries have no real value.

Los Angeles Review of Books: The Funny Thing About Misogyny

In a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 39: “Air,” Katie Kadue breaks down the misogynist history of the rape joke.

Via Metafilter