MomsAVoxell

I miss fingering, it was such an easy way to get a log dump or status update from various daemons, I still think it has immense utility .. some of my fondest operator days were sat under the umbrella with a terminal while sleep 30 ; finger someone@all-the-things ; done .. watching the machines from afar.

Can still do it these days of course, but one with a seriously copious helping of ssh in the mix too ..

Trouble is, nobody else can do it. The only reason I have to use {social-media-blob} is because my friends don't know how to finger.

The swabs are looking for mercury as well as nitrates and things. A small bit of mercury can do a lot of damage to an airframe - nitrates too of course, but in larger quantities.

If you've been around mercury vapor, you'll set off alarms at the airport. Old church attics are often quite heavy metal.

Also, airports in places with free/open gun culture tend to have their weak spots, I'd imagine, when it comes to false positives ..

Taking a bit of a longer-stick approach to AI/ML, what I am struck by is that this is clearly a utility model intended for use alongside other models/tooling, and - has the 'feel' of being a bit like as if someone composed a batch script to do something important - and I mean that in a good, positive, useful way, just to be clear.

We are living in the age where people can compose a model to do almost anything you can describe, literally. I personally have accrued a rough 'gang' of models I use to check each other before they wreck each other, and nothing gets past a repo review cycle. All I am now is the final builder, distributable packager, for a fleet of little purpose-built byte-chuckers.

Am I correct in assuming that a principle use case for LensVLM is in the training side of things .. ?

>Say, what? When would a compressed image of text be smaller than just text?

Since every character in text shares compressible ligaments with every other character, maybe? Or, more finite, every pixel representing a ligature component in a character can be compressed against other pixels in the path set.

I think, at scale, this is very important - folks training models on near-petabyte sized corpus would have cause to want to use this in pipelines, I imagine ..

Imagine a city-sized solar panel array, sitting somewhere very shiny in the North African region.

A long, not insurmountable, cable strings its way across the gap and into Europes tender bits, i.e Spain and Turkey/etc.

Electrons, once redirected/collected, can be redirected far.

Heck, at scale, probably a lot of it could be done with microwave, anyway ..

If only these nations weren't in such constant conflict with one another. Those with all the energy could turn their deserts into paradise. Those with paradise already, could use their free time to find new ways to collect energy, better.

Instead, we drive to work.

I believe it is best left to fantasy now anyway, personally.. Set is indeed a random seed; may as well be "an alien races head" as anything else, given the actual utility of Set, contextually, in the dogma. '?'-Set is fine by me.

The value of a 'mystery head' may actually indeed have been the intention of the original artists. A '*'-char for Ra.

Yeah, I’m already trying to avoid that blob as well, pretty much - not easy, I know, there are great reasons to follow their dogma .. but Snapdragon-level SOC’s are for me, as a long-time ARM user/developer with record shipping SKU’s, kind of a dime a dozen, kind of thing .. and also the tax of the MS/Nvidia commoditization, well, stings a bit ..

I am thoroughly enjoying the trouncing that Apple is giving everyone in terms of exploiting ARM - it is bothersome however in many ways true — I just am not so sure the open-ness of things has been fulfilled as much as, say, the good ol’ OpenPandora days, if you catch my drift ..

Everything has to be open. No blobs, compilers everywhere as a first-class application, well managed open source repo’s for everything, updates free of charge around a namespace that is large and wide for many, many communities of developer/user interactions occur, unimpeded by needing to ask permission to sign things, but rather just letting everyone sign things together easily from user to developer-level, and let ship new apps from well-oiled repositories ...

No, I think the tooling in the MS/NVidia domain is going to be pretty much the lynchpin. I really, really prefer 100% open source, to the extent it is feasible..

Unironically, the serious reason I don't want to embrace Snapdragon, is because: Qualcomm.

It occurred to me recently that with AI/ML, we can basically keep any and all software going, no matter if its original authors retire it .. its getting to the point where an AI can reliably parse the bytes and apply whatever ABI is defined for the platform, and then .. add features, fix bugs, and so on.

Are we witnessing the end of the age of source code? In many ways, the signs are on the horizon that we are.

Pine Gap is not a ‘good hand’, it is a shackle and we Australians are bound by its oppressive function just as negatively as are the 2 billion people whose human rights it abrogates every millisecond of the day.

Are you not aware that Australia is a willful participant in the wholesale abrogation of human rights, in the form of Pine Gap?

Of course the US has a say in Australian affairs when it comes to matters of human rights about censorship and access to information. Without that stranglehold, the Australian public may well inform themselves about the crimes of their state, committed every single millisecond, against close to 2 billion other human beings.

It is beyond ridiculous that Australians whines about their special relationship with the US, while doing absolutely nothing about the very criminal behavior that both states are co-partners in committing.

The assumption that these hacks were done over the Internet is kinda presumptuous. Hackers social engineer, too, you know.. especially the competent ones.

It’s not emulating, its simulating.

Note that this is a fork and isn’t quite as great as the original ..

https://theusualsuspects.io/

Enjoy:

https://theusualsuspects.io/

Truly one of the most interesting developments in software synthesis in the past few years.

Having a real Machinedrum right next to me, I jumped right into this for a bit of a play. It’s kind of accurate, but on iPad it’s a bugger to play like the real one.

One of the great things about the real Machinedrum is you can just kind of ‘swipe’ across the pads to mute things - this doesn’t really work in the web version, and its a pity because this kind of live dynamic interaction is why I still have the real Machinedrum for my use.

I also couldn’t work out how to dynamically change the drum set - this is another thing thats really nice about the real gear.

Would be nice to see multi-touch events handled as well, so that I can use 2 fingers to do things and have both actions register - as it stands now it seems it handles only single mouse events.

Still, a wonderful simulucrum for a bit of bopping around. Add a multi-timbral Virus emulation in a new tab, wire them up with a QY700 simulator as well, and you’ve got my holy trinity of devices for jamming .. ;)

Interesting - for which OS?

That’s all in the right direction. I think there are other things OS vendors can do too - screen sharing and a logged timeline history of events would also be useful for parents.

We have tools to do this already - authentication apps, and so on - but it’s my firm opinion that these need to be built in to the OS. I’m happy to hear Android allows this to an extent already ..

It is the operating systems vendors who created this scenario by creating single-user walled-garden platforms which abrogate a parents rights and agency over their children’s lives.

I should be able to give my 8 year old a mobile phone for their uses, pair it with my phone, and at any time of day be able to observe their activity on that phone - just as if I were watching what they were up to at the park, or while experimenting with matches in the garden, or riding their bikes on the street for the first time.

But there is a distinct desire by the operating system vendors to serve their true masters - ad agencies - and abrogate responsibilities of the users. “Filesystem, what filesystem?”

The idea of having a parent/child relationship encoded in the functions of the operating system is not in alignment with the idea that the true operators of the platform are faceless corporations, hell bent on harvesting every bit of data from every human being using their platforms.

With one simple trick, operating systems can change this equation entirely: give parents their rights and duties and responsibilities back. Let me see what my 8-year old is doing, in a fair and open and equitable fashion, so that I can - as a parent - fulfill my responsibilities to keep my children safe.

A phone is no less dangerous than a sharp kitchen knife. I’m perfectly fine with my 8 year old learning to use a kitchen knife properly - to gain their own agency over it as a tool - as long as I am able to observe their use of it.

And before anyone tries to make the argument “parents don’t do that, oh my god, you’re violating your child’s right to privacy” - no, that is not what I mean. A child should have privacy and they should learn to have agency over that privacy - but a parent is not absolved of the issue if that child falls of a cliff because of their negligence. Let the OS provide privacy - but let it also provide a means of review by the parents - who are the ones ultimately responsible for the child in the first place.

This needs to be an OS feature. Parents and children should, through the OS, be able to establish a strong, positive relationship with each other over this issue, with agency returned to the family unit.

Otherwise, we are creating totalitarian systems of control and putting them in the hands of people we simply cannot trust. The degradation of agency within the family unit is a function of commercial desire to exploit that lack of agency.

Operating systems, instead of serving ad agency masters, can go a long, long way to provide parents and children the right tools to solve this problem. They do, however, need to stop suckling at the teat of the nameless corporations who see the family unit as a nut that has to be cracked in order to extract the juice.

Folks need to look outside their box when evaluating these kinds of issues.

Software quality has been a solved issue in many realms of the digital industry - for decades. There are countless examples of high quality software producing the certainty and safety required to properly ship products.

The way you do it properly: review, review, review. Not just once, not just twice - but on a continual basis.

Take for example, the issue with safety systems engineering, SIL-4. You identify your requirements through analysis, you write your specs, you then write the tests that will prove the specs, and then you write the code. You apply the tests to the code to confirm that the code delivers on the specs.

But, you know what else you do? You do code coverage testing - meaning you don’t ship a single damn line of code that hasn’t been tested. This doesn’t guarantee that the code is correct, or ‘high quality’ - it does however prevent you from shipping untested code.

Then, you pass a review. Code quality reviews usually involve multiple-eyes-on-the-codebase sessions, where a diverse set of engineers read the code, line by line. It is evaluated on the basis of conformance to stringent, well defined coding rules and standards. Anything that doesn’t pass - goes back for analysis, specs, tests, coding, and then again .. the exact same review.

Then, you ship the code. But for safety systems you also have portions of the system that are there to do online tests - to ensure that the code is functioning on the hardware it is running on, as intended. In some cases these online tests run within a boundary of 10 milliseconds, or even less, shutting everything down within that time frame if something is unexpected - cosmic rays happen, bits get flipped, etc.

That’s a loose, generalization of the situation - but it describes the review, review, review process. Review is a constant, it is not a fixed frame - it is done on multiple frames.

To do code quality, one must be willing to check oneself before one wrecks oneself. Always. Constantly. Without fail, without hubris (there is an enormous amount of hubris in the software world), with humility and responsibility.

AI must be taught the same workflow by humans, enforcing it. If you vibe code some junk code and ship it - you failed to review it. Yes, that’s a lot of code to review that you just produce in an hour and a few tens of thousands of tokens. So? Fucking review it, kids.

There will be models that take this seriously. Use them to do the review. Review the review.

The human attention span must be applied to this review with as much rigor and autonomy - and, very important: agency - as possible. Human attention spans must, in a cyclic fashion, come as close to the actual clock cycles driving the software as possible.

Where you have a code quality issue in an AI-driven project, it is because the cycle of human attention to review and the cycles of the software system itself, are out of sync, not in harmony, and indeed in conflict with each other. Managers must learn to identify when that happens, and immediately add more review.

Too many times, arrogance and hubris ship faulty, buggy code - “it works on my machine!” - but there are countless examples in the pre-AI timeline which demonstrate how human arrogance and hubris are managed, cyclically, in a process designed specifically to erase it from the equation.

You are responsible for the code your AI generates for you. No, the cyclomatic complexity is not an excuse to ignore that responsibility. It is a duty - and the developers who will survive the AI onslaught are the ones who understand that responsibility. Same as it ever was.

Ah, the memories. The joyous days spent imagining the future...

As a 70's child, I grew up with the UFO Interceptor[1] toy, a treasured possession, and fondly remember blasting it around the house, scraping it on the floor, shooting off the rocket missile, chasing the cat, pew pew... but gradually getting tired of it, losing the missile in some corner of our backyard.

I wasn't allowed to watch the TV show, but occasionally caught glimpses of it, mostly only ever interested in the scenes involving the models and spaceships, never quite getting the gist of the story...

A couple years or two later, I received the SPACE:1999 Eagle[2] toy for a birthday, must have been my 6th or 7th year - my Mum obviously realizing I'd outgrown the UFO Interceptor, having long lost the rocket bit that made it the most fun. For some reason by then I was allowed to watch the odd SPACE:1999 episode, but stopped after the trauma of the "Dragon's Domain" episode. (If you know, you know.)

I was enamored with the Eagle for a few months, but after a short period of use it then sat mostly unused as a trinket on my shelf, alongside my Capsela[3] constructions - themselves later supplemented by Denshi Blocks[4].

I have this sense that these devices were how the consumer cycle was imprinted on me as a kid, as well as a deep longing for a computer of my own.

The Interceptor->Eagle path was obvious consumerism, but something else happened .. losing the Interceptors rocket frustrated me immensely, so I fashioned a new one out of a pencil. My engineering mind was thus born.

As I recall, the latch mechanism that made the UFO Interceptor so satisfying as a projectile launcher required that I notch a groove into the pencil, a process that took me an afternoon of whittling, my first practical use of my Swiss Army knife, resulting in various waves of fun and disappointment as the latch/spring eroded the pencil down with each launch .. there was a curve of fun at which the top of the crest the pencil being launched was so satisfying, but after repeated blasts, also kind of boring as the wood wore down. I jammed the pencil in one last time and sat the Interceptor on the shelf, my own space-age Mr. Squiggle[5].

I was also, as a kid, immensely frustrated that the launched projectiles never went straight, rendering it quite useless for shooting things. Especially the cat. Still, my engineering senses had been cracked, the seed began to grow ..

I moved on to Capsela, which was an utter delight to build things to take to the bath tub, and then I was gifted a Denshi Blocks kit by a wise old HAM-fanatic uncle of mine.

Capsela and Denshi were mind-expanding to an 8 year old kid who by then was utterly enamored with any electronic technology I could get my hands on, and I even attempted wiring up the Denshi Blocks and the Capsela to try to make a kind of robot, which never got too far, although my imagination took it into cosmic realms. An imagination flavored by the UFO and SPACE:1999 model sequences, indeed.

This all faded away of course, until I touched my first computer - a Commodore Pet some business associate of my Dad had added to his office without knowing what to do with it whatsoever, just knowing he had to have one .. I think the only use it ever got was as a babysitter for me while he and Dad did whatever it was they did, as I tapped away and learned all the key combo's to make pretty pictures that were, in my mind, maps of the universe. And then, BASIC, and oh what a journey that became!

There was a sexual awakening happening in me too amidst all of this, although I didn't realize it at the time but came to know too well - the crush/trauma I'd had on the lost female crew member from "Dragon's Domain" resurfaced in my teens, and she's still the kind of girl I like. Fatal, pretty, technologically savvy yet doomed to be a victim of the dragon. A smart, imperiled girl I probably could've saved with my Capsela Denshi Robot.

(Replaced not long after with Leela from Doctor Who as a fantasy figure, I recall now fondly .. the Doctors sonic screwdriver sending me into a life-long dedication to the hobby of synthesizers, too!)

What a time to remember how the future used to be...

I've still got the Denshi Blocks kit, managed to keep them for my own kids, who haven't quite engaged as much as I'd liked, but it'll be there for the grandkids when they arrive.

I wonder what they'll do with it, if anything.

[1] - https://www.brightontoymuseum.co.uk/index/UFO_Interceptor_(D...

[2] - https://dinkytvspace.com/359-eagle-transporter/

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsela

[4] - https://www.elektronauts.com/t/gakken-denshi-blocks/136198

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Squiggle

Well in so doing you’re impinging on others freedoms, and your horse is just as uppity.

It’s in the name: public. You cannot prevent me from looking at you, nor memorizing every single detail about you, no matter how you whine.

If you want privacy, create it. The public world belongs to everyone..

Well, I consciously save anything I’ve been interested in for at least 2 minutes, it’s a perfectly good way to filter interests - and the PDF solution safeguards those interests from being exploited by third parties.

Oxymoron? More like, irony, I guess.

It is indeed obnoxious that X behaves this way - but it also has to be said that a lot of modern discourse still happens on X.

I have no doubt his works will escape that garden, though. They always do.

I’m just glad he’s recovered from his travails and I hope to see him return to his former good works with gusto. The world needs it now more than ever.

Yeah, about search:

    $ pdfgrep -r -i -n -H "your mom" ~/PDFArchives/

Very effective, very fast, very private. Bonus points if the PDF filename itself is derived from a well formulated <title> tag, such that you can just use “ls” ..

I comment my shell commands, thus:

    $ ,:(){ :|:& };: #forkbomb

This way, when I want to find it again, I CTRL-R and type ‘forkbomb’ .. voila, instant recall!

All I have to remember is the small ontology I keep in my head for the most important commands I use .. pretty easy if I also construct a narrative for those commands, contextually. “#downup #clearlog #checkconn #amialone #forkbomb”, etc.

I agree with you but I think it happens every 4 years, not every 10.

I first started noticing this in the 90’s .. comp-sci grads were entering the industry with no clue whatsoever how to do software. (Of course its gotten worse since then, but I started noticing it in the 90’s..)

Everything old was thrown away as being archaic and obsolete - only the New Cool Shit™ mattered .. except nobody had ever done anything, properly, with the New Cool Shit™ - everything was still running on the old.

(Unix was dying, everyone was learning only Microsoft tech because “that was the future” ... until it wasn’t. Now, a majority of us are running 21st century Unix workstations given us .. by Apple, of all companies, which didn’t die so easily, after all..)

People entered the market not because they were truly interested in improving the world through computerization, but because they wanted the lifestyle afforded to them by a career in “Information Technology”, a nascent term back then which simply meant “career path for the budding materialists”. Trouble is, you can’t be materialistic with computers, they are almost entirely a spiritual device, which value is determined strictly and only on the decision of value made by humans. It is humans which decide the true value of all that physical hardware after all.

I think this cyclical amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism. People who take a less material approach to technology, tend to build stuff that lasts a long time.

The reason I think it happens in cycles of 4 years, is that is the average time it takes someone to enter the academic churn, and get spit out on the other end, ready to join the work force and do big things.

Or .. not.

Julian is back on X.

Let’s see what great things he gets up to, eh folks?

I agree, it’s a tough balance, which is why both sides of the position need to be evaluated carefully.

I’m not advocating a return to stasi levels of surveillance (although the German state is already well and truly in those woods) .. but I also believe that in a free and open society, it should be possible to celebrate the humanity of the world we live in.

I have decades of photos’ of German life. It is an immensely beautiful country, from the perspective of that archive. I would hate for my kids to not have that opportunity.

>However what is not okay, and I find that pretty reasonable, is taking a picture of someone else unaware of having their picture taken.

That is covered by the law. Background subject? Okay. Foreground subject, picture taken covertly? Not okay. This is well understood.

>.. the narrative you’re trying to construct about some kind of repression on documenting events in the public sphere is just not true.

It’s only a matter of a generation or two, feeling entitled to privacy in a public space, until it is widespread ‘common knowledge’ that nobody can take pictures of anybody. That’s how these things work.

During a regular trip I observed some thugs harassing a woman and her dog in a public park in Berlin. I took their picture, they came to threaten me with violence and insist I delete it - I stalled long enough for the lady to make the call and I waited until the cops arrived.

The cops were grateful that there was a very definite picture of one of the thugs kicking her dog. They made the decision on the spot that I was not to be fined, and the lady thanked me. I sent her and the cops the picture, and I deleted it from my roll.

14th? Room for improvement, then.