A team of AI and sociology researchers at Renmin University of China (RUC) recently interviewed 92 residents of a Beijing urban community for two hours each, capturing migration stories, marriages, career turns, grievances about community issues. They transcribed these life-history interviews, then trained a small language model to answer governance surveys on behalf of those residents. The model gets it right about 50% of the time.1 They then deployed a live system where a residential…
I am trying something a little different with this episode. I am heading back to 1977 to take a look at the original titles for the Atari VCS. I have been a lifelong Atari fan and collector and while my top games are not from the first year of the console, I am very mich intrigued by the idea of a time when the console only had 9 titles. It would take me a while, but eventually I would get to collect ‘em all.Support the Retroist on PatreonOn the show, I start off by talking about this time in…
Early last week I reached 8200 followers on Bluesky. I set that number as a goal because it’s half of what my follower number on Twitter has eroded down to after years of shadowbanning, follower capping, and other sleazy tactics intended to surreptitiously reduce the reach of dissidents. And even at half, Bluesky is so much less throttled by algorithms and outright blocks that making exactly the same post on both sites will routinely garner triple-digit engagement on Bluesky and single-digit…
The Rúin is a dark, suspenseful debut set in Galway, first in a series. It follows Detective Cormac Reilly as he relocates from Dublin with his girlfriend, and (somewhat mysteriously) is treated with hostility by his new police department, which assigns him to cold cases (some of which are not just cold but wet - he thinks his colleagues are deliberately spilling coffee on the case files to show their contempt of him), despite an impressive 20-year career. When Jack Blake commits suicide by…
Back in May, Pushkin Vertigo released their eighth Kosuke Kindaichi novel, Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), written by the patriarch of the Japanese honkaku mystery novel, Seishi Yokomizo – translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood. No doubt, the book title will make Western readers immediately think of John Dickson Carr's It Walks by Night (1930) and not wholly without reason. But, as Ho-Ling Wong noted in his review, it also smacks of Edogawa Rampo's grotesque tales with its…
On layover in AMS on way to Porto!
Bruce Schneier: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift … even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things. The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work – if the task has to be…
Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over new cards with questions that you have to answer as fast as possible: Is this adjustment to the database schema right? Do these bits of data look plausible? Do these five paragraphs of text describe an actual series of manual tests that took place? Does this suggested architecture pass the smell test? Is this implementation better than the current code? Or this one? Or…
After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.I am finally at peace! Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily “update available” and “view release notes” ritual? There is nothing I dread more than release notes. Between VS Code and Zed, I must have glanced at a million lines of sloppy commit summaries. Can I remember seeing anything of value? Nothing comes to mind…Modern software sucks. It’s built by…
Andrew Kemp: Between 150 and 500 million people may have lived and died in Australia before 1788 (British colonisation). I always enjoy these kinds of posts. ↬ ∙ Tagged in Trivia.
Wow, 30 years. Part of that seems to have whizzed by, and it has been a long while since I last played Quake. I always hated the hellish look, but the technology was irresistible–and looking back, it is pretty amazing how much it shaped my career, or at least my pastimes. Running Quake servers at an ISP is quite literally how I initially ended up in marketing instead of engineering, and it got me exploring networking, servers, real-time graphics and all sorts of other things I am still…
Alison Weir has written so many novels about the Tudors it’s surprising that she’s still able to find different angles and perspectives to write from. In The Boleyn Secret, she tells the story of Kate Carey, daughter of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary and, some believe, Henry VIII himself. There have been other books about Kate, but I haven’t read any (apart from where she’s mentioned as a minor character), so reading a whole book from her point of view was something new for me. Katherine Carey…
♠ Problem statement: a terraform project planned clean locally (terraform plan), but CI insisted on a diff. Every apply fixed it for one side and broke it for the other, back-and-forth. The culprit was a null_resource that rebuilds an AWS Lambda for a NodeJS app bundle whenever its sources change, keyed on a hash of the whole directory: resource "null_resource" "lambda_build" { triggers = { dir_sha = sha256(join("", [for f in sort(fileset("${path.module}/lambda", "**")) :…
Hey there. Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Here’s an alternative to avoid cognitive debt (5min). #2. With AI, almost everyone is euphoric but nothing works (4min). #3. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is wrong. That’s what covers are for. But what if you could judge a book by its first page instead? (1min). #4. Last week, I discovered makestopmotion. A free, open-source, and local stop-motion app. And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about my 8-year…
8646/21565I never thought I'd be offended by anything on Netflix, but they really managed to get to me today via the email I got first thing."We've added something you might enjoy.... Alley Cats"Really Netflix? Do you think so poorly of me?I've taken great care to only watch the best comedy on your service, hoping you'd see me as someone with great taste who likes 30 Rock, Community, Bojack Horseman, early Rick and Morty.... why would you do this to me?It's like an elderly aunt you've never met…
If a privacy feature says it hides your IP address, every network request a website can trigger has to respect that promise. Protecting the main browser traffic is not enough when a side path can quietly go around it.Apple’s iCloud Private Relay is supposed to make Safari browsing harder to tie back to you. It replaces the IP address websites normally see and splits the connection across two relays, so no single party should know both who you are and which sites you visit.That is a useful…
If you are one that has been clamoring for IndyCar races every weekend, then this is your time. Beginning with this weekend, The NTT IndyCar Series will have six races over the next five weekends. Exactly one-third of the IndyCar season will take place in less than a month, concluding with the season finale at […]
Spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day -- it's very good, I've seen it twice! -- follow. In the film, a significant moment hinges on Hulk recognising Peter Parker, and I've been trying to work out how that could be, barring any off-screen "I read about you in the Avengers files" business: In Infinity War, Banner meets Spider-Man before the latter goes into spaaaaaaaaace. In Endgame,
Things change on the old roads all the time, so it’s good to revisit them from time to time. Not long ago I went out to see a few key places on the National Road in western Indiana. One of them was the Walker Motel, in Putnam County. Here’s what it looked like when I photographed it in 2009. Despite the sign’s peeling paint, this place looked to be reasonably well kept. In particular, the hanging plants under the eaves suggested that someone cared. I can’t easily find information about when…
Every once in awhile, I fall into a deep, existential panic over the concept of moral luck.Moral luck, per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control." It presses against a very common intuition, which is that we should not be held accountable for things that we did not choose or which are out of our control…
yesterday i sent my first ever postcrossing little postcard and letter! it felt like such a rush, to be honest. last weekend i've been just sitting there, missing the feeling of writing a letter, when i remembered postcrossing exists, and i immediately ran there to sign up and get my first recipient. i got to pick out a card out of my collection and wrote up a small letter to accompany it, then in a couple days hurried to the post office to send it out. it made me so happy, and i'm hoping it…
Wisdom is a strange thing. The Wisdom Paradox is this: when we realise we are less wise than we thought, we become wiser. […] Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. The naivety of youth is a lovely thing. As a teenager, you can be sure that the grown-ups are doing it all wrong, and the path to better is obvious. Then, as an adult, it somehow seems more difficult than before. Some 20 years ago I became familiar with this principle, and it’s beautiful.…
Erling Haaland, the cool Norwegian soccer player, has a pretty fun and slightly unhinged social media presence. During the World Cup, a clip from his Instagram account resurfaced where he claimed, “Just raw dogged a 7 hour flight. No phone, no sleep, no water, no food. Only map. #easy” I have a confession: I, too, fly like this. Not for 7 hours, because I do sleep or watch a movie on a transatlantic flight, and yes I drink water, because hydration is important, ok? But I love the airplane map,…
Follow up from this post - I just signed into my Vinted account (to delete it) and it didn't send me an MFA SMS so how the fuck is me giving them my number securing my account in any way? The internet is fucked. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, and then two come along at once. Please be upstanding for Manila-based crimebuster Winston Casio and the doyenne of indolent teachers everywhere, Tandy L’Enfant!
Brilliant. I'm such a "valued customer" that they couldn't even be arsed to put my name in the email. Why is it even necessary to have a "business intelligence database" with a 3rd party? I ordered a fucking laptop. Can a tech company not create their own customer database? Full email here - https://cdn.kevquirk.com/framework-breach-email.pdf Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
Very busy along Gardiner Road with traffic leaving Monash Uni and traffic entering the pub, complete with mobs of pedestrians blithely ignoring traffic and stepping straight in front of me. Dodg’em cars around the drivers parking on and driving across the bike path, then blissfully empty further down the hill and towards the creek …so who forgot to charge the headlight on Tuesday after getting home. “Nah, she’ll be right …” It was alright, for the first half of the ride home.
I love climbing and bouldering. Like, an inordinate amount, and it would not be a stretch to say that climbing has changed my life for the better since beginning this journey in 2019, as my climbing addicted friend and I walked the University of Canberra campus trying to find rocks and/or stairs and/or weird parts of walls to pull on (shoutout to Pearce for introducing me to this world!). I'm 36 now and that means it's been more than 15 years, of varying levels and volume, climbing my little…
I love guest posts about people’s relationships to their bodies, especially when those bodies are changing and there’s this burst of new discovery. Even better when those discoveries are hot and full of joy. So I’m especially delighted to welcome this week’s guest blogger – she’s here to share a gorgeous story that combines exquisite […] The post Guest blog: Newly becunted – sex and healing after vaginoplasty appeared first on Girl on the Net.
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