Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

This research has come up several times at a big climate conference: A huge majority of people are worried about climate change and want governments to do more to control the crisis. BUT they think they are in a tiny minority and nobody else cares. Everybody (almost) cares! You are not alone https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-actions-are-far-more-popular-than-people-in-u-s-realize/

I've already encountered several comments from people stating that to develop and maintain a browser you only need a handful of "talented engineers". That's a remarkable underestimate, but more importantly it ignores the fact that you also need a lot of people with skills outside of the technical domain, and that includes humanities.

I know that techbroism *hates* humanities, but it turns out you also need them when dealing with something as complex as a browser.

Make The Onion Satire Again

So I wrote a rant about Lean in software development on Twitter years ago. At the time I was diving into the background of Lean since I was confused about the implementations in software dev.

Anyway, Lean, as most people know, grew out of Just In Time Production at Toyota factories. In those factories it has a lot of fascinating, and very reasonable, implications.

This process was then copied to a lot of industries. But they tend to either misapply (as in software dev) or apply too rigidly. The last goes against the entire process, which is designed to be purposefully flexible and malleable. Based in people and learning.

Anyhow, when the chip shortage hit the auto industry after the pandemic, it took much longer to hit Toyota. Because they had a chip stockpile. Why? That seems to go against the process. But after Fukushima Toyota had realized that this was one of their vulnerabilities, and so they adapted.

If you have a large enough user base that people depend, for whatever personal, safety or security reasons, on your product, then I believe you have a positive obligation to those people to protect them from risks and failures they might never see or understand.

Not because anyone's dumb or incompetent, but because those threat actors make every effort to be invisible to their victims and impossible to understand to defenders.

@denschub @narinarinari I don't install my copy of Firefox through a blog. My copy of Firefox is silently updated in the background by my operating system. I allow this because I assume that Firefox updates will often contain critical security fixes, but will never contain nasty surprises such as backdoors for advertisers which passes them information about the things I see while browsing.

I shouldn't *have* to "care" what's happening on the Firefox blog to prevent my privacy being violated.

There's a difference between being aware of what is happening and putting yourself through intense physical and emotional stress by "doom scrolling" and posting things you might regret later.

Sign off, pet a pet, hug someone.

Though I might dance & celebrate when Biden wins, it will not be for him. It'll be in spite of what he & every mealy-mouthed norms-anxious compromiser has done to put us here. And then, when I'm done dancing, (it may take a moment) I will turn around and put my focus in a new place.

I'm filled with optimism because all caution is gone from my body. We can't afford an ounce of that.

For what it's worth disabled community has recognised this and there's stuff like the hashtag #Alt4Me where you can ask others to help write alt text for your post.

We need to give space for people to ask for help and not make them feel like a bad person for doing so.

Good work -- actual journalism -- from ABC News.
h/t Joy Reid
'No Blame?' ABC News finds 54 cases invoking 'Trump' in connection with violence, threats, alleged assaults. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blame-abc-news-finds-17-cases-invoking-trump/story?id=58912889

Few facts are available about yesterday's top story.
Opinions, rumors, "theories", and conspiracies seem rampant.
Even reputable news outlets have allowed commentators to opine on "the current state of affairs".

As an elder, I vividly recall events from 1960, 1968, as well as Kent State.
I plan to wait for all the facts to emerge before listening to or reading commentary.

#USpol #USpolitics #TrumpShot #Trump

So many Republican electeds out here condemning “political violence” today. Meanwhile Trump has called for political violence over and over for the past 10 years at least. Haven’t heard people like George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Steve Scalise, and Mike Johnson piping up then about its unacceptability. #Craven #Hypocrisy

I’ve had my fill of living in interesting times

Don’t spread misinformation

I’m annoyed that we’ve found a way to spend 100 times more electricity over standard search to have computers confidently provide wrong answers to questions.

This. All of it. Top to bottom.

This is what the MSM should be plastering wall to wall.

Eyes on the ball, everyone.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-07-11/la-trump-unfit-for-office-biden-election

i think where people’s brains break regarding LLMs is understanding that they generate the most likely result. not the one most likely to be correct, but simply the most likely. if it shows up in the training data more often, it’ll probably get picked. that doesn’t necessarily have any correlation to how correct it is. that there is any overlap between correct and likely is a function of the quality of the training data, which requires intensive and constant curation, moderation, and filtering.