podcast friday

Oct. 24th, 2025 07:36 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
Today's featured episode is "Smart Glasses Are Ushering In an Anti-Social World ft. Chris Gilliard" from Tech Won't Save Us.

This is a good episode for a number of reasons. First of all, it reminds us that just because tech companies want a thing, and invest a lot of money to convince you that this thing is the inevitable progression of humanity, you can as an individual reject that thing and convince others to do so too. Google Glasses are a great example of a thing that was heavily pushed but no one other than glassholes wanted it, and so people were shamed, mocked, and bullied out of public spaces for wearing them. This is a good use of shame, bullying, and mockery. (Note: Chris points out that the latest attempt at making glasses that control you happen is a bit different, as it's being aimed at controlling workers rather than as a status symbol for the rich. Obviously, do not bully an Amazon delivery guy for being forced to wear them.) Another great comparison is the Metaverse—Zuck spent a fortune on his fantasy of not having a body that sweats too much, and no one bought it. No one asked for LLMs and you—yes you, one person who thinks you're too insignificant to do anything—can stop them from being forced on you. We finally get to use our mean girl powers for good, and I have a mean streak a mile wide.

Another thing that kind of blew my mind is the way Chris talks about the phases of Big Tech-driven media—first it was used to connect you to your friends (and make you dependent), then it was about a trade where the companies gave you connection and visibility in exchange for privacy, and now the deal has shifted. You are expected to be controlled by the technology. You are now being programmed and instructed. Chris notes that some people very much desire this as it reduces decision fatigue. Of course this dovetails nicely with the broader move towards fascism in former Western democracies.

Finally, there is some good talk about affordances. An affordance is basically what the environment or technology allows you to do. A button allows you to press it. A car not only allows you to go faster than you could otherwise, but it creates physical and geographic isolation, the development of suburban spaces around roads rather than common areas, and reactionary politics caused by mistrusting your neighbour and especially Those People In Cities. The replacement of Dreamwidth-style fixed-page scrolling on most social media sites by endless scrolling is what enables social media dependency and doomscrolling. Etc. Chris talks about what, specifically, LLMs are designed to do as their ideal use-case, which is forcing your worldview on someone else. They are primarily for deepfakes, stalking, propaganda, and CSAM. That you can do other things with them is a side-effect. I think this is a very strong argument and not one I'd really thought about. The characterization of LLMs as an inherently antisocial technology is not one I'd thought much about either.

Never forget that our billionaire enemies are forcing LLMs into everything because they want girlfriends without having to talk to women, they want slaves without having to see a Black person, and they have a fantasy of immorality via being uploaded into Machine Heaven. This is fundamentally silly and risible and actually batshit insane, and you are smarter and more reality-based than they are.

Dear Yulegoat 2025

Oct. 23rd, 2025 06:37 pm
ceb: (Default)
[personal profile] ceb
Dear Yulegoat,

Thank you for writing for me! I love hand-made presents and I am easy to please. I hope you will find something you enjoy writing here. This is me at AO3.


General likes/dislikes:

I would prefer gen fic for all the fandoms I've nominated, though plot-relevant sex is fine (especially for the Saint of Steel books) if that's where your plot needs to go. I like happy endings and bittersweet endings, and noble tragedy is my catnip.

I like competence and the ability to think things through; I am annoyed by plots where a character does something out-of-character stupid just to advance the plot. I have no problem with in-character mistakes and if written well they can make the story.

I adore experimental and unusual formats (and, apparently, lists). Please, if you want to, tell me a story as a game or a series of drabbles or a shopping list or a puzzle or a 1-line fic with a very large set of intertwined footnotes or a poem or an ASCII map or half of a scribbled note exchange... if there's some crazy thing you've been wanting to try to write forever but aren't sure if it would work or if your recipient would get it, I am the right person to send it to. Take this as a 'HELL YES' opt-in for IF also. If you're not that person and just want to write a story, I will also be delighted, so please play to your strengths and don't feel you need to reach for a weird format if you don't want to.

DNW: No 2025 real-world politics please (e.g., no fascism, no real wars, no TERFery, no disintegrating climate doom).

All my specific suggestions are intended as idea sparks, I don't have my heart set on any of them and I will not be even slightly disappointed if you have a different idea you'd like to pursue. Run with them, or not, as suits your story.

AO3 Name: molybdomantic


Fandom: Glamourist Histories Series - Mary Robinette Kowal
Characters: Worldbuilding

I am completely fascinated by the artistic and technological potential of glamour. We see it change during the series from merely a polite pastime for genteel women to a thing with uses beyond parlour tricks. What might it be used for later in the history of this world? Photography? Does glamour show up on film? Theatre? What might glamour music hall acts look like? Did the Victorians use glamour for educating the masses, like they did with plaster cast galleries and magic lanterns? Movies? Seances? Fashion? Modern art? I would be delighted to be given a guided tour of a glamour art installation from basically any point in time.


Fandom: Powerpuff Girls
Characters: Space Towtruck

I really enjoyed the return of the Powerpuffs after such a long hiatus (in the real world and also in Yuletide :-).I find I desperately need to know more about the girls' new favourite TV show, Space Towtruck. What is Space Towtruck's greatest secret? What other adventures has Space Towtruck encountered? Don't worry too much about canon; I get the feeling this is the kind of show that has multiple reboots, comic versions, etc. Feel free to include the girls if you would like to (maybe they get sucked into a Space Towtruck story via the magic of plot, or have an argument about which is the best Space Towtruck reboot). I like Mojo Jojo too, especially in his wordier incarnation of the earlier series, but find many of the other villains a little irritating.

I can't find full episodes online anywhere but 90% of the existing Space Towtruck canon is in the first half _The Big Sleep_ and the theme song is in _Tiara Trouble_.


Fandom: LEGO Natural History Museum
Characters: Worldbuilding
Fandom: LEGO Botanical Garden
Characters: Worldbuilding

I would love some worldbuilding set in either or both of these lovely sets. Both are packed with details. The botanical garden has lego versions of many real plants (see the build instructions linked below) and the natural history museum's collections include dinosaur skeletons, minerals, historical lego sets, and spaceships. What's it like to curate one of these museums? What do their accession records look like? Who smashed the pot? What do the exhibit labels / interpretational texts say? If you're feeling festive, I'm extremely fond of my local botanic garden's cheery winter light art display, what would that look like in lego?

Natural History Museum (10326)
https://www.newelementary.com/2023/11/lego-icons-set-review-10326-natural.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1Uf37xCXE
https://www.lego.com/en-gb/service/building-instructions/10326

Botanical garden (21353)
https://brickarchitect.com/2024/review-21353-the-botanical-garden-lego-ideas/
https://www.brickfanatics.com/lego-ideas-21353-the-botanical-garden-review/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSDN-w7mJic
https://www.lego.com/en-gb/service/building-instructions/21353

New blog post

Oct. 23rd, 2025 01:09 pm
sweh: (Default)
[personal profile] sweh
New blog post in which I discuss what happened when I broke guidance and asked an interview question about information that can be found in a manpage: https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-10-23-options-to-ls/

Quality Experiences

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:11 pm
tcpip: (Default)
[personal profile] tcpip
I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.

Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited me to the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.

As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.

Doh! moment in sysadminning

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:25 am
pvaneynd: (Default)
[personal profile] pvaneynd
PSA:
This morning I noticed that needrestart was not telling me to reload, which was strange, given the latest security update of intel-microcode

A bit of searching revealed that a long time ago I had set APT::Default-Release "stable";, which will prevent apt from upgrading to security packages!

Removing this fixed the issue of course. Now to reload the server...
flaviomatani: (Default)
[personal profile] flaviomatani


'A Moment's Thought', one of my own little pieces, played live at the [profile] kentishtowncityfarm on 17-10-25

Guitar is a Yulong Guo Chamber Concert

#guitar #classicalguitar #kentishtowncityfarm #kentishtown #livemusic

Four hours in an art gallery

Oct. 22nd, 2025 06:15 pm
lovingboth: (Default)
[personal profile] lovingboth

I am in Vilnius, Lithuania at the moment.

The Founding General Meeting for the new pan-European bi+ organisation, Bi+ Equal, finished before lunch today, after two and a half days talking about the journey to get here - the Dutch / French organisations that have done most of the work started about 18 months ago - and sorting out the details. There were other things you could do, but this was a much more 'work' conference than any BiCon.

I'll have more to say about it later, but partly so I can tell people who are still here and not going to the ILGA Europe conference that's happening somewhere else in the city, I want to post about what I did this afternoon.

The main modern art gallery's English name is the Contemporary Art Centre. Their current show is called 'Bells and Cannons: Contemporary Art in the Face of Militarisation'. There's an online review complaining that there's not much to see, and that's true: it's not a large gallery compared to say Tate Modern etc.

But it is extremely good. Involves talking about violence etc )

Reading Wednesday

Oct. 22nd, 2025 07:30 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
Just finished: Nothin'.

Currently reading: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. I haven't made a lot of progress here. It's quite a good, thoughtfully written craft book, with a lot of emphasis on revision, which I like. I.e., write your story first, then work on teasing out the structure in themes in the second draft, which is how I work. There is quite a bit on Harry Potter, unfortunately, but also a number of other examples of interesting-sounding books.

Like most well-written craft books, it's really more literary analysis than a how-to, but I do enjoy her use of literary analysis as a tool for revision and strengthening.

Interesting Links for 22-10-2025

Oct. 22nd, 2025 12:00 pm

My thinking on transgender issues

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:46 am
andrewducker: (overwhelming firepower)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Every so often I see some politician Gotcha'd with "Can women have penises?" - and the results have always either be flailing or in a very rare case (new Greens leader Zack Polanski) just saying "Yes", in a way which basically hands everything to the interviewer.

And I know that it's really hard to deal with an interviewer who is determined to make you look bad. But it bothers me occasionally that people don't try and explain "But here is my point of view, and where it comes from" - because while saying "Yes" might be very reassuring to people already on your side, it does nothing to persuade others who are just confused by/mildly hostile.

So here, in a simple set of 4 steps is my view.

1) Nobody is choosing to be transgender. It's a difference in brain development.
See here. This isn't new, it's the medical view, and has been for many years.

2) Forcing people to live in the gender that they don't identify as is incredibly destructive to their mental health.
This is also long well known. The vast majority of attempts to raise boys as girls and vice versa have appalling impacts on people. The poster-boy for this was David Reimer, who suffered a terrible accident as a baby which destroyed his penis (in the 60s), never knew he was born a boy, and was raised a girl (on the advice of a doctor who believes that gender was just cultural conditioning). And it made him *incredibly* unhappy - within weeks of his parents breaking the rules they'd been given and telling him (at age 13) that he had been born a boy he'd changed his name and presentation. Details here.

3) Most transgender people are not publicly out.
You might get the impression that trans people are all out activists. But the vast majority aren't. They don't want to be "The person who was born one way and is now another", they want to be the person that they are on the inside. So almost nobody they interact with on a daily basis knows that they are transgender. The ones where "Everyone knows about this transgender person" are the exception, most of them are not public about it. As a friend said "My identity is female and back when I transitioned the advice was to deal and vanish into the big bad women's world."

4) Therefore, as a society, we have a choice between either forcibly outing people whenever they want to use a toilet, get married, throw a ball, or otherwise interact with society, or letting them live in the gender that they are presenting*.

There you go. That's the humane, liberal approach to transgender people. And every time you get hooked into arguments about the definition of the word "woman", you get pulled away from those very simple things: Nobody asked to be born in a body that destroys their mental health. Most people don't want to be public about that having happened to them (because it stops them just living as the gender they are in their brains). So we can either be supportive or we can torture them.

*And that's the approach that the European Court of Human Rights took, in Goodwin vs The United Kingdom in 2001. They balanced the right of someone to not have to out themselves, against the the negative consequences thereof. And found that the proven negative consequences were basically nonexistent. Which is what then led to Labour being forced to pass the Gender Recognition Act. The rights coming from that, to live in the gender that you choose, are what is currently under attack.

Where are we on X Chat security?

Oct. 20th, 2025 03:45 pm
[personal profile] mjg59
AWS had an outage today and Signal was unavailable for some users for a while. This has confused some people, including Elon Musk, who are concerned that having a dependency on AWS means that Signal could somehow be compromised by anyone with sufficient influence over AWS (it can't). Which means we're back to the richest man in the world recommending his own "X Chat", saying The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

Elon is either uninformed about his own product, lying, or both.

As I wrote back in June, X Chat genuinely end-to-end encrypted, but ownership of the keys is complicated. The encryption key is stored using the Juicebox protocol, sharded between multiple backends. Two of these are asserted to be HSM backed - a discussion of the commissioning ceremony was recently posted here. I have not watched the almost 7 hours of video to verify that this was performed correctly, and I also haven't been able to verify that the public keys included in the post were the keys generated during the ceremony, although that may be down to me just not finding the appropriate point in the video (sorry, Twitter's video hosting doesn't appear to have any skip feature and would frequently just sit spinning if I tried to seek to far and I should probably just download them and figure it out but I'm not doing that now). With enough effort it would probably also have been possible to fake the entire thing - I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but it's not externally verifiable.

But let's assume these published public keys are legitimately the ones used in the HSM Juicebox realms[1] and that everything was done correctly. Does that prevent Elon from obtaining your key and decrypting your messages? No.

On startup, the X Chat client makes an API call called GetPublicKeysResult, and the public keys of the realms are returned. Right now when I make that call I get the public keys listed above, so there's at least some indication that I'm going to be communicating with actual HSMs. But what if that API call returned different keys? Could Elon stick a proxy in front of the HSMs and grab a cleartext portion of the key shards? Yes, he absolutely could, and then he'd be able to decrypt your messages.

(I will accept that there is a plausible argument that Elon is telling the truth in that even if you held a gun to his head he's not smart enough to be able to do this himself, but that'd be true even if there were no security whatsoever, so it still says nothing about the security of his product)

The solution to this is remote attestation - a process where the device you're speaking to proves its identity to you. In theory the endpoint could attest that it's an HSM running this specific code, and we could look at the Juicebox repo and verify that it's that code and hasn't been tampered with, and then we'd know that our communication channel was secure. Elon hasn't done that, despite it being table stakes for this sort of thing (Signal uses remote attestation to verify the enclave code used for private contact discovery, for instance, which ensures that the client will refuse to hand over any data until it's verified the identity and state of the enclave). There's no excuse whatsoever to build a new end-to-end encrypted messenger which relies on a network service for security without providing a trustworthy mechanism to verify you're speaking to the real service.

We know how to do this properly. We have done for years. Launching without it is unforgivable.

[1] There are three Juicebox realms overall, one of which doesn't appear to use HSMs, but you need at least two in order to obtain the key so at least part of the key will always be held in HSMs

Life with two kids: Their every move

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:15 pm
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Through the power of (very basic) smart home automation I now get a notification whenever the kids open the back door, and can then remotely check if they've left it open.

Many parents throughout history would be jealous.

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
andrewducker: (screaming hedgehog)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Sophia: "So mummy took a year off from her job when I was born and then she went back?

Incredulously: "And they remembered who she was?"
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Gideon, climbing on to Sophia's lap: "I'll be Alexa."
Sophia: "Alexa, play Soda Pop"
Gideon: sings Soda Pop
Sophia: joins in