Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

The latest in my ongoing #GreenColonialism investigation: a federal agency has moved forward with a renewable energy development on Yakama sacred lands, despite not having consulted with the Yakama Nation.

They cornered the Yakama Nation with an impossible choice: give up confidential cultural information, or waive the right to consult. Some experts say this is a disingenuous tactic, showing the lack of teeth tribal consultation really has.

#Indigenous #Washington

https://www.hcn.org/issues/56-7/how-federal-rules-and-a-lack-of-protection-for-sacred-indigenous-sites-left-the-yakama-nation-with-an-impossible-choice/

An AI thing I'm watching play out at another org:

1: Expert A, with a deep understanding of a nuanced and difficult problem answers a question they've been given, presenting several choices.

2: Director B, recipient, uses an AI to summarize it and then runs it up to leadership saying, "A says this." That generated summary is subtly and very wrong.

3: A is now being held responsible for plans made based on B's AI-generated and very wrong rewriting of his recommendations.

Fun times.

@pixelpusher220 @shoq @jeffjarvis As the one who has been in our department the second longest, and in a role that is "akin" to "the librarian" (as in I know where everything is), I have this argument frequently. The form/shape/system of the repository is never the issue. Its curation of the repository that is EVERYTHING.

There are tons of wikis out there. What makes Wikipedia so good? Active and vigilent curation. What makes our corporate wikis and sharepoints so garbage? No time for curation.

For example: If Trump is elected, then at least two Supreme court Justices in their 70s will feel free to retire.

If they retire under Trump they would be replaced by more conservative justices in their 40s.

If there are younger conservative justices on the court then, for the next 40 years, every attempt to address climate change, human rights, everything will be obstructed and dismantled.

You have to chain events together before it comes down to material consequences.

Here's a brilliant hack... llama.ttf https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/ is a font with a LLM embedded in it (using WebAssembly, which apparently can be used in fonts now)

You type "Once upon a time!!!!!!!!!!" and those exclamation marks are rendered to show the LLM generated text, using a tiny 30MB model

I wrote more notes on how it works (including a link to another font that can be used to play Tetris) here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/23/llama-ttf/

Goodbye Lynn.

When you think President, think supreme court, when you think, the direction the country is going, think congress. #Biden is doing a terrible job on #Gaza, but 80% of Dems agree with him. Without them Biden's foreign policies toward #Israel would be very different. We must re-elect Biden to ensure no new 2025 nutjobs get appointed to the supreme court and then get our game plan around to primary the every living hell out of anyone who supports an ethnostate over human lives. Biden's policies would shift drastically if the make up of congress changed rapidly in 2026. Take your anger out on the party in 2026, don't sabotage the nation and climate change mitigation this year, #Trump will turn this nation with the worlds biggest military into a totalitarian state.
♲ mastodon.world/@obtener/112660…

OMG! i didn't know this happened to Linda Tirado, aka Killer Martinis @ Twitter.

https://mastodon.social/@NewsDesk@flipboard.social/112655481443211797

this is horrible. i started following her eons ago because, though it's her last name by marriage, Tirado is my second last name.

this is horrible and my heart is heavy for her. she was maimed by cops for covering the 2020 protests and now she's dying.

i have no words.

this is fascism. plain and simple. Linda Tirado is yet another victim of USA's very protected police state.

People are stuffing these elaborate, unreliable ML systems into everything everywhere at enormous expense, and meanwhile everyone out in the trenches are saying things like "hey, um, when was the last time we tested the DR plan, do we know we even have backups and when was the last time we tested restoring from them, can we have centralized auth this year and when was the last time we audited our auth systems or firewall config anyway...

https://techhub.social/@rayckeith/112658293822679279

"the Times has revived the lab leak hypothesis, muddied the waters about the origins of the virus, and undermined the scientists who seek to better understand viral emergence and how new pathogens may soon threaten us. ... Why does this happen? We think it’s because too many commentators don’t understand the limitations of their knowledge. ... Neither of us would opine on climate science or nuclear physics, and nobody should pay attention if we did." #COVID #pandemic https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nyt-covid-opinion-coverage/

Strangers sitting quietly together in a town square reading in peace, everyone lost in their own different world in their book, is a nice and surprisingly communal experience.

I was in Nigeria, lost in The Road To The Country. So I jumped in my seat at the end when someone in Aarhus suddenly spoke from the unseen seat behind. "A strange experience, watching someone read my book." The author was behind me all the time. So amazing to me that I'll be retooting this story every day now. #MuteMeNow

Why do we call electrons 'negative' and protons 'positive'? It's an arbitrary convention but it's annoying: it means that when electrons flow through wires, the current is defined to flow in the OTHER DIRECTION.

If you ask people why electrons got called 'negative', you get a bunch of crap answers:

"Electrons are referred to as negative because of their behavior in an electric field. In an electric field, an electron will move from the negative pole to the positive pole, giving it a negative charge by convention."

Yes, but why THAT convention?

"If we re-designate all positive electric charges as negative and vice versa, while keeping their absolute value, the resulting physics would be the same. So exact choice is merely a matter of convention."

Yeah, it's a convention - but why THAT convention?

"In quantum theory of elementary particles (in a sense of irreducible representation of Poincare group with mass m and spin (helicity) s) if some operator Q of internal symmetry commutes (like electric charge charge) with Hamiltonian H...."

Irrelevant crap which never leads up to an answer.

The answer is that Benjamin Franklin chose this convention and nobody knows why.

In Franklin's day there was a 'two-fluid' theory of electricity saying electricity comes in two kinds. Around 1750 he developed a 'one-fluid' theory after showing that a rubbed glass receives an equal but opposite charge as the cloth used to rub the glass. He decided that electrical fluid was going into the glass. So he said the charge of the glass was 'positive' and the cloth was 'negative'.

Unfortunately it turns out that that electrons are going into the cloth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_charge#History

OpenStreetMap is a map that everyone can edit and improve, and that's how we've created the best map of the world. 😍 🗺 💪 🥇

Alas, some people just want to vandalise things 😭. If you've seen weird things on the map (e.g. lots of crossing white lines), that could be vandalism. Here's what to do if you see this:

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/have-you-spotted-vandalism-on-openstreetmap-org/114684

with thanks to @SomeoneElse.

#OpenStreetMap #OSM #OSMVandalism #Vandalism

A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings.

If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend arguing about it is wasted energy.

I will die on this hill.

Ursula Le Guin: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

This is a BFD: “President Joe Biden will announce new protections Tuesday for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, as well as streamline work visa access for some ‘Dreamers,’ per three sources briefed by the White House.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-to-announce-protections-tuesday-for-undocumented-spouses-of-u-s-citizens-and-dreamers

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/112637213238431183

A friend of mine joked when this came to light the other day that we should start the timer to see how long it would be before some SystemD person came out and said that was expected behavior and you're an idiot for using it wrong. And we laughed to ourselves, wouldn't that would be funny, that really is the reputation they have now isn't it.

Well, jokes on us, because that's the first fucking comment on the bug.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/33349

Today I Learned:

Skeet shooting was added to the Olympics in 1968, and it was a mixed event, meaning both men and women could participate. But in 1992, a woman by the name of Zhang Shan, shot two perfect rounds, and a final round missing only 2 shots, setting an Olympic Record, tying a world record, and taking home the Gold. In the 1996 Olympics the International Shooting Union banned women from the competition, moving women into their own event in 2000, where they only shot about half the targets making no way to compare the skill sets. Eventually the event changed so that women shot the same amount of targets, but the sexes are still separated.