An Implausible Mr. Buckley: A new PBS documentary whitewashes the conservative founder of National Review. by Rick Perlstein, April 17, 2024
The USDA’s gardening zones shifted. This map shows you what’s changed in vivid detail
What’s Glass Etching Cream Made of?
Open Bookcases by Robert Benchley, New York World, March 15, 1920
How to Make Google’s ‘Web’ View Your Search Default (&udm=14)
Velvet Ants of North America by Dr. Kevin Williams, Dr. Aaron D. Pan, Joseph S. Wilson. 2024.
A New Jersey city that limited street parking hasn’t had a traffic death in 7 years
Thermochromism
Thermochromic properties of some colored oxide materials
Rheem 80 Gallon 6-Year Solar Tank Electric Water Heater with Heat Exchanger, $1600
Grep by example: Interactive guide
37 Pieces of Career Advice I Wish I’d Known Earlier
Genialer Spickzettel für Fotografen
The new AI / LLM tools have many potential applications, but many of them will have downsides for some people–replacing copy writers, some tech support, these are benefits for the companies that apply them, but many of today’s jobs in those areas will be eliminated.
One application that seems inevitable and all positive is raising the floor for human performance. An tool that you can ask for advice, or better yet an AI tool that monitors you, by email, or watches internet use across devices, and/or is watching on video, understands what the user is doing, understands the context, and provides advice will help people avoid mistakes. While these mistakes are not obvious to the person making them, they are obvious to a person with experience, or able to research the problem. Imagine a person playing chess alone vs. someone playing with a chess program to flag potential mistakes, with the general knowledge of an AI allowing it to work in many more situations.
This AI tool can develop slowly and in a modular fashion, will be useful even in crude form, but will become revolutionary once it gets good enough. Imagine a person using a crude form of this as an interactive chat tool. The person could say, I’m taking a vacation to Greece and get advice on things to do, what they need to know about currency or visas. Or imagine a more advanced AI would remind a person of an appointments, or tells them they need to change the house air filter. If a person was goiing to make a poor decision–routinely using check cashing places or buying a car with poor service record, the AI could warn them.
This AI tool would be able to slot in special modules as needed. A person starting a business could get localized advice on the steps to take. Someone buying a house could get advice on things to check, and a new homeowner could get advice on what to check and repair and reminders for maintenance.
What we talk about when we talk about The Future. A few thoughts on four genres of futurism. by Dave Karpf. Pundit futurism, The Professional, Techno-optimist Futurist, Cassandra-futurism, The Sci-fi futurist
Google Pixel 6 Pro, $220, specs
Bruce Schneier talked at Capricon about fifteen ideas he had on AI that are forming up into a 2024 book. One thing he mentioned is that AI would make lawsuits much cheaper to launch and carry out, and multiplying the number of lawsuits would mean that courts would need to adopt AI adjudication to adapt to this. Bruce passed over this pretty quickly, but I think this will have early and pronounced effect on society.
It looks like legal work is a problem AI will be able to solve soon. That is, AII tools will be able to contribute effectively to the process of filing and carrying out lawsuits. This is not one problem, but a set of related problems that AI will soon be able to do effectively. Given a set of facts and objectives, an AI will be able to determine what type of lawsuit to file, write it up in the proper jargon and format suitable for submission, determine and write a response to opposing counsel motions, summarize and prioritize discovery material, etc. A lot of legal work is routine, repetitive, and very similar to previous cases. Really, a perfect problem for AI.
The immediate upshot is that a lawyer using AI tools will be able to do much more legal work, work faster, and lawsuits will be much cheaper to launch. The short-term impact is that the number of lawsuit filed will go up multiple-fold and this will crash the courts. Gum them up. Bring things to a standstill. US courts are operating at capacity already and can’t handle more cases.
There isn’t any way for courts to prevent this. The lawsuits will be filed by lawyers at established law firms. Lawyers will use AI as a tool, review AI written suggestions and briefs, and from the court’s perspective these lawsuits will look just like the existing lawsuits, there will just be many more of them.
In the long term, it will make sense for judges and the courts to adopt AI tools to accelerate their end of things, but this will require new laws. New laws means years of hearings, discussion, negotiation, etc. Government functions require deliberation and consideration before making big changes. And who will develop AI tools for courts? The market is smaller and more uncertain than the market of making these tools for private law firms. And judges are very conservative, notoriously slow to act, to react, to adopt new technology.
So AI-assisted lawyering will hit the courts at some point in the next few years, but it will take a decade or more for the courts to effectively react.
New gene therapies confront many sickle cell patients with an impossible choice: a cure or fertility.
CRISPR treatment for sickle cell approved (Casgevy)
USB Logic Analyzer – 24MHz/8-Channel ($20)
Bus Pirate – v3.6a ($33) — v4.0 still experimental
Flipper Zero — Multi-tool Device for Geeks ($150)
CC1101 chip, making it a powerful transceiver < 1 GHz, 125 kHz RF
ID antenna, NFC module 13.56 MHz, BLE, infrared transmitter/receiver, 1-Wire, GPIO
Mini WiFi Surveillance HD Camera, $12.50
2K Pan/Tilt Security Camera, $26
Falling In And Out Of Love With LA’s Mystery-Cloaked Magic Castle, part2, part3
How Many Creationists Are There in America?
2019 poll: 61%-81% US adults pick evolution, 32%-62% of US white evangelical prostestants
I added a new disk, removed one on my workstation. It is running Ubuntu 20.04. Booted up, and the drive letters have changed, and the md number of a RAID 1 array changed. So I updated /etc/fstab and went to mount the /dev/md1 array. The mount command completes without error, but the disk did not mount. Turns out, needed to:
systemctl daemon-reload
Then the mount worked, and I could add the new disk to the RAID 1 array.
