Erik Nygren

I knew it was bad but not this bad. No excuse for the Dems not to act.

A photo of a 3.5" computer cassette, in this case Install Cassette 5 for Macintosh System 7.5

GenX kids will know the pain of needing just the right kind of pencil to rewind.

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

I have to use sheer force of will to not go on ebay and buy every single miniature model that salespeople used to carry around for cold calls and meetings.

The idea of being a neon salesman in the 1930s with a briefcase of tubes with onboard electricity is just such a wonderful different world.

It is so easy to empathize with @murderbotbot.bsky.social on this.

Maurene Comey's goodbye note to SDNY colleagues:

Do not lead the goats.

I recently watched the play _Our Class_ (ourclassplay.com) which takes place during these events in Jedwabne. It was one of the hardest things I've ever watched, and at the same time was very much worth watching.

OUR CLASS Acclaimed production of the award-winning play. Friends. Enemies. Classmates. Based on a true story.

We recently saw the the play _Our Class_, which is about Jedwabne, when it was showing in Boston. It was one of the more difficult and painful things I've ever watched, but is very much worth watching.

ourclassplay.com

What words should we use to describe the wartime camps? Among scholars, government officials, and the Japanese Americans who lived through Executive Order 9066, there is no general agreement on the most accurate and appropriate terminology. Camps such as Tanforan and Topaz-where the artists Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo were both held-were officially called "assembly centers" and "relocation camps." The government favored these euphemisms to downplay its unprecedented actions. Similarly, it described the forced removal of Japanese Americans as "evacuation" and their imprisonment as "internment." Government officials, including President Roosevelt, used the term "concentration camp" during the war. The phrase describes a place where people are imprisoned because of who they are, rather than for any crime they have committed. However, it is today strongly associated with the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust, requiring the explanation that American concentration camps were not places of systematized torture and death. "Incarceration camp" and "illegal detention center" are other terms for describing the camps.

Thinking of this plaque I came across at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibit on the art and lives of Hisako Hibi and Mine Okubo, two Japanese-American painters detained during World War II

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I made a roof for over the camera in our backyard.  It's needed to protect the camera from the squirrels and raccoons who otherwise were launching themselves off of it and knocking the camera down.

Designed in #FreeCAD and printed on a #Prusa

Vashti (@vashti@hachyderm.io) Attached: 1 image Why #Ao3 was down yesterday:

Omg, absolutely incredible reason for AO3 to have been down hachyderm.io/@vashti/1147... (alt text at original)

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Me: We should watch MacGyver. It's from the 80's.

Mr.8: That's old! Is it in black and white?

For a break from everything going on, a young raccoon encounters our hammock.

NASA science budget over time

Planned NASA mission cancelations

The details are not yet finalized, but the budget bill would devastate NASA science and the future of US exploration in space and astronomy. Among many other things. 🔭🧪

www.planetary.org/articles/nas...

You should warn people about how long FedEx will take to deliver to the US -- I ordered mine over a month ago and one of the boxes is still in-transit (and I also have no idea what my tariff bill will be like). FedEx customs handling seems totally overwhelmed and unresponsive.

Guardian headline saying, "‘It’s terrifying’: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user’s number Chatbot tries to change subject after serving up unrelated user’s mobile to man asking for rail firm helpline"

'Meredith,' some guys ask, 'why won't you shove AI into Signal?'

Because we love privacy, and we love you, and this shit is predictable and unacceptable. Use Signal ❤️

It's that time of year again! Drowning doesn't look like drowning; familiarize yourself with the instinctive drowning response

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper. She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.

t.co/JXeTALBPds

Those “I bought this BEFORE I knew Elon was crazy!” stickers don’t actually mention cars. You can put them on your furniture, appliances, pets, etc.

I just finished Ep9 tonight and had the same reaction...

Fell behind on Andor, so am catching up. Watched Episode 9 this evening.

You know. The wild one where they arrest a Senator after manufacturing a fake crisis that required the military to put down protestors.

So unrealistic.

there should be a consumer electronics review site called does it beep dot com and the sole criteria it uses to judge kitchen appliances, cars, washing machines, etc is whether it beeps at you and if so how annoying the beeps are

In the past week, a union leader has been arrested, a U.S. Rep charged with a crime, a U.S. Senator violently handcuffed, and reporters shot with rubber bullets and detained. There is no ambiguity. This is a regime operating as an authoritarian. Americans who believe in liberty must oppose it.

Journalist shot by Minneapolis police during 2020 protests dying from injuries Linda Tirado was in Minneapolis from out of state covering the protests and rioting when police shot her in the face with a rubber bullet, also known as a "less-lethal" round.

in so many videos out of LA i am seeing officers aiming rubber bullets right into crowds, this is filling me with a deep and anxious rage knowing what happens when they do that
www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/ne...

Many decades ago I got most of the way through implementing "amiandornot" for rating of boolean expressions, logic gates, 74xx chips, etc, but I eventually gave up on ever finishing and let the domain expire.