Kyle McDonald

betel nut, berries, apples and coconuts

i cannot even begin to explain my rage at how glitchy the instagram reels captions tool is

new cables and old ladders

a short trip from alotau to lumolumo with an incredible welcoming

“transformirror” with daito manabe will be at cinekid this year 🤗

i’m on day 19 of 50 days in the south pacific, helping upgrade power and internet for two traditional voyaging organizations—and trying to capture a rare flash of light called “te lapa”. i’m posting daily on instagram instagram.com/kcimc

the latest realtime video-to-video demos are wild

i think i see what you’re saying about there being a spectrum between treating AI-assisted search as a pure retrieval task vs a pure hallucination task. lots of hybrid in-between solutions that balance the strengths of each.

i tried this with o3: “do some research on the best rust proof nails. then provide a single recommendation along with sourced quotes justifying the answer. include quotes that come to a different conclusion and explain why they are wrong.”

re the original point: in theory you can file a complaint with CRCL but they've become toothless or complicit. the DHS OIG has forced some changes, but not individual accountability. personally i still feel identity is important, even if there is no clear route for accountability.

there is a precedent for takedowns of US-based sites (e.g. icelist) but icespy has been uninterrupted since 2018. at first i thought it was just under the radar, but two separate fox news hosts have painted a target on my back in the last week and.. nothing. so 🤷🏻‍♂️

first step is getting a database of headshots. in LA that was acquired through CPRA (like FOIA for california). once you have that ping me and we can build it out!

the first step is getting a database of photos that definitely includes these guys. then face recognition can help reduce the difficulty of searching through thousands of faces manually. but it cannot put a name to someone without an existing database.

there is currently no up-to-date database of ICE employees. but post-COVID there has been a lot of research on masked face recognition—and with new image generation techniques it should be possible to train even better masked face recognizers arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01745

next time someone asks why we don't have better pics of UFOs i'm sending them this 20 meter object that is literally broadcasting its exact location

if anyone is interested in re-scraping linkedin and updating the database please get in touch.

this project was originally launched in 2018 using the microsoft face recognition API, because microsoft was contracting for ICE and i wanted to invert the tech. microsoft finally restricted access to their API in 2024, disabling the site. i just rebooted it to run fully on-device.

ICESPY Find ICE employees using face recognition.

icespy.org shows the identity of ICE employees using face recognition against hundreds of scraped linkedin profiles

The Day the UFO Deactivated the Nukes It's said that in 1967, a UFO once deactivated an entire flight of US nuclear missiles in their silos.

there was also a previous perfectly good explanation for the shutdown, which is that a commercial power failure caused a spike. or was that story was a fabrication to keep the EMP testing secret? 🤔 skeptoid.com/episodes/4842

also: testing EMPs on *live* nuclear missiles, with unknown consequences, without telling any of the highly-cleared staff? the EMP device diagram in the article is from an unclassified 1973 report, would it really have been such a big secret? apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/A...

hazing is something you experience, and then perpetuate. this sounds more like a prank, since most of the people who were pranked never learned it was a prank.

The Augmented Hand Series - Playful, dreamlike and uncanny The Augmented Hand Series is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands.

The Augmented Hand Series – Playful, dreamlike and uncanny (2015) by Chris Sugrue, Golan Levin @golan.bsky.social, Kyle McDonald @kcimc.bsky.social, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry → www.creativeapplications.net/project/the-...

has anyone written about AI-assisted vibe coding? the loss of the flow state, the move away from mental modeling of computational processes, managerialization of the developer class, etc? it feels like a bellweather, but i’ve had trouble explaining to non-programmers.

Microsoft unveils Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits - Microsoft Azure Quantum Blog Majorana 1 from Microsoft is the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) built with a topoconductor. Discover more.

@michaelnielsen.bsky.social i would love to hear your take on the latest quantum news azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/q...

the cross-disciplinary technical mastery in this project is off the charts. if you spend any time thinking about strange sensors, this is a must read.

found someone with an xrf gun bsky.app/profile/plut...

A computer screen with a display showing output from an xray diffraction spectrometer.

Close up view showing fraction of metals. Fun stuff.

Just had a sample of the Eaton Fire ash that is in my driveway run on the department XRF. Is there titanium (new house paint)? Yup. Lead (old house paint)? You betcha. Heavy metals? Check. Treat that ash like it's toxic folks (because it is)

after more research, i don’t know if there’s anything to be done by citizen scientists beyond collecting samples and increasing PM2.5/VOC resolution. the tech required to answer questions about e.g. asbestos and lead is completely out of reach (xrays, electron microscopes)

are there any citizen science efforts to figure out what is actually in the air and in the ash in LA right now?

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