jwz

Every now and then I make the mistake of of posting something on Mastodon that really should have gone on the blog first. This is one of those, from last week. It did some numbers.

Everything written by AI boosters tracks much more clearly if you simply replace "AI" with "cocaine".

I shall demonstrate!

(Not linking to OP, because it's trash.)

"Let's pretend you're the only person at your company using cocaine.

You decide you're going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison. [...]

In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting cocaine."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Judge forced to slash SF jury pool over hate for Elon Musk:

One candidate said, "In a criminal trial, I would feel morally obligated to convict, however, in a civil trial I could set those views aside," adding, "I believe it would be to the benefit of the human race for Mr. Musk to be sent to prison." [...]

"I don't believe the loss of several hundreds of millions of dollars in civil trial will be even a drop in the bucket to his wealth," he reportedly said. "So it doesn't really matter."

He did not make it onto the jury, and neither did a woman who said Musk has "no moral compass" and "used his wealth to buy votes." The judge also dismissed a candidate who said they disagree with the "existence of billionaires" and another who noted their dislike for Musk's firing of Twitter content moderators.

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Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras:

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25 years ago today, Bad_CRC posted the primordial meme video "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" on Newgrounds.

In honor of this important anniversary, I downloaded the original Flash SWF file from Internet Archive, played it using Ruffle in a full-screen window, and replaced the audio with the original MP3 of "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by The Laziest Men on Mars. So this is probably the highest fidelity encoding possible, without going back to the original forum GIFs.

Make your time.

Previously, previously.

A day after a blackout plunged a third of SF into darkness, City Hall and many of the surrounding blocks remained without power. But the stage lights were on at the War Memorial Opera House.

Not mentioned at the hearing: The mayor's teenage daughter, Taya Lurie, was cast in the starring role of Clara at the matinee performance that Sunday.

During stunning testimony before the Board's Public Safety Committee, Supervisor Bilal Mahmood asked PG&E CEO Sumeet Singh why the utility had chosen to help the arts venue while so many other San Francisco sites were without power.

"You prioritized the opera, where no one is living, to restore service, before you prioritized restoring service in communities and seniors living in [single room occupancies]," said Mahmood.

"We did not make that decision on our own accord," Singh replied. "We were requested by the mayor to provide temporary generation to that specific location. And we responded to that."

Singh said 10% of affected PG&E customers were still experiencing blackouts when the mayor made his request.

The mayor's comms team went ballistic and a couple days later, the PG&E CEO recanted and said: Oh, that thing that I quite clearly stated, that was a "misunderstanding". Uh huh.

So the interesting thing here is not that our oligarch mayor is both corrupt and bumbling -- I mean, water is wet -- but that PG&E chose to throw him under the bus like that. Statements like that, from people like that, about people like that, don't happen off the cuff. With the renewed and increasing calls to Eminent Domain PG&E, you'd think that PG&E would want SF's mayor on their side. This suggests that they think they just don't need him.

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US20200310367A1:

A booth having a housing enclosing a viewing station opposite an entertainment station; a robotic entertainer disposed within the entertainment station, the robotic entertainer having a humanoid appearance and comprising a plurality of actuators; and a computing system coupled to the plurality of actuators and configured to control the actuators so to move the robotic entertainer in accordance with a performance.

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Today I learned that you can DoS a Waymo by opening its door.

"The More You Know..."

Waymo, Google's autonomous vehicle company, and DoorDash, the delivery and gig work platform, have launched a pilot program that pays Dashers, at least in one case, around $10 to travel to a parked Waymo and close its door that the previous passenger left open.

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The impetus for the rule was accessibility:

The "very poor," as well immigrant communities and the very young and old, the amendment read, "fall outside the non-cash financial system." [...]

Nationwide, those levels are decreasing, but remain significant. A survey conducted by the FDIC found that in 2023, Black and Latino households were overrepresented in the unbanked population, with 10.6 percent of Black and 9.5 percent of Latino households in the U.S. were unbanked, down from 17 and 14 percent in 2017.

Today, approximately 4 percent of San Francisco households are "unbanked," or do not have a checking or savings account, and nearly 14 percent are "underbanked" -- have bank accounts but primarily use cash or use check cashers or money orders. [...] "These residents are often the most financially vulnerable and can face higher costs and barriers in everyday transactions," Manke said.

The destruction of cash is part of the advertising panopticon agenda. Paper money doesn't have a utm_source on it so it is useless.

Let us also keep in mind that this "vocal contingent of local business owners" are the same business geniuses who are always, always certain that a bike lane will ruin them.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Any time I see my staff taping a paper flyer to one of our walls, what I hear is, "You are telling me there should be a flyer screen there." So we finally did that in the pizza alcove. I think they look pretty good! We just stuck the monitors into the same style of picture frames we use in the DNA Pizza dining room gallery.

My vendetta against tape on the walls is endless. I just think it looks really tacky. Plus, one of the things about paper that it is famous for is always showing the same thing. Whereas these screens have all kinds of complications. (In watchmaking, anything that a timepiece does beyond showing hours, minutes and seconds is called a "complication", and I love that term.)

For example, they are sensitive to the room they are in and the genres of the show that is currently happening, so if it's a metal night, they're going to show flyers for other metal shows much more often. They are likewise skewed toward showing shows happening sooner than later.

And another recent complication is the dancing QR codes. I put a bunch of work into making the underlying URLs as short as possible so that the QR codes have big chunky pixels that you can scan from across the room (or from space.)

We also use a couple of screens in the Pizza checkout lane to hype our appetizers.

In summary, digital signage is a land of complications.