Good.

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don’t mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.

Who? The Senators? I think they’re genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).

I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.

I can’t argue with you on that.

I actually DO have some hope it will be rewritten, but I figure we know about it and maybe contact someone? https://usun.usmission.gov/mission/ ?

I heard a strange take on this story. I know someone whose spouse worked at that very school and has heard the gossip about the incident. While the hen clutch has been gossiping in private conversations rather than internet posts for the world to see, their speculations about the Principal are almost as slanderous – and have been for years.

Long story short: the hens felt this wouldn’t have happened if the Principal didn’t let the kids run amok and instead provided consistent disciple.

Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/

That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.

Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?

I’m not the lego person, but I am not taking that selfie because: 1) I don’t want to clean the house to make it look all nice before judgey relatives critique the pic, 2) my phone is old and all its pics are kinda fish-eyed, 3) I don’t actually want to spend the time doing the task right now when AI can get me an image in seconds.

I appreciate that the “Gradient Canopy” roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, so maybe the problem is they didn’t do enough by not adding in some shielding, too.

FYI, the bot only summarized the first of three pages.

The amazing thing is that almost ALL the staff signed a letter and threatened to quit, too! From: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-staff-walk-protest-sam-altman/

“The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company,” the letter reads. “Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI.”

Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place. By 5:10 pm ET on Monday, some 738 out of OpenAI’s around 770 employees, or about 95 percent of the company, had signed the letter.

Supposedly, Microsoft has said they’ll hire the whole team… but I wonder if it’ll really play out that way or if they’d just become short-term hires and then kicked out once OpenAI collapses. Note that Microsoft has invested a lot of money in OpenAI.

Vox also has a lengthy article with lots of details and consideration of what it all means, such as:

… There is an argument that, because OpenAI’s board is supposed to run a nonprofit dedicated to AI safety, not a fast-growing for-profit business, it may have been justified in firing Altman. (Again, the board has yet to explain its reasoning in any detail.) You won’t hear many people defending the board out loud since it’s much safer to support Altman. But writer Eric Newcomer, in a post he published November 19, took a stab at it. He notes, for instance, that Altman has had fallouts with partners before — one of whom was Elon Musk — and reports that Altman was asked to leave his perch running Y Combinator.

“Altman had been given a lot of power, the cloak of a nonprofit, and a glowing public profile that exceeds his more mixed private reputation,” Newcomer wrote. “He lost the trust of his board. We should take that seriously.”

You can pat yourself on the back? The article is about how the new rules make it hard for such groups to justify the cost of installing solar when the benefits look thin and potentially changeable.

You still get SOME money for adding power to the grid, but you’re basically getting paid a ‘wholesale’-like price and paying out the retail mark-up. I’m not sure how California’s grid works, but where I am, we have “line fees” for maintaining the infrastructure to cover that sort of thing.

They can’t afford any of it. Two points.

Point A) Renters. They’re renting. The new change will…

… make solar panels less economically enticing for apartment dwellers, farmers, schools and strip malls, solar companies say.

– there were harsher proposals, but this is a mid-way kinda where renters will get something but not as much as others.

renters will be paid much less than they are today for electricity generated by their rooftop panels above and beyond what they and their neighbors use — electricity that is sent to the larger power grid, helping the rest of us keep the lights on.

Point B) They’ve made it pointless for schools and farms:

other utility customers affected by the decision — including schools and farms — will still have to pay full retail rates for all the electricity they consume. Even if they install solar panels that cover some of their consumption, they’ll have to pay their utility for power during times of day when their panels are generating.

Under the new rules, “schools will not be permitted to generate their own power any longer. Instead, they’ll be forced to buy their own solar back from utilities at full price,” said Sasha Horwitz, a legislative advocate at the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Good catch!

For those who don’t know, when a legal doc says “shall” it means one MUST comply or get in trouble. If it says “should”, it means you don’t really have to care.

I am fine with medical schools taking in unclaimed bodies for the purpose of training future doctors, but it is disturbing that the number of such bodies has spiked so much. That can’t be good. This seems especially problematic given there are businesses out there who offer people free cremation through donation, but then sell the bodies off – often for parts – pocket the money, and let business decide what to do with them, such as bomb testing.

That is: family probably could have gotten a free cremation (with gruesome capitalism behind it), but instead, an increasing number of bodies are getting sent to schools. This says worrying things about the nation’s social and fiscal security.

After decades of sci-fi/fantasy entertainment to prime us, the primal part of the human brain that reacts to in-group and out-group members suddenly changes in every human and we start reflexively and unintentionally classifying all earth life as friends and space/environmental threats as enemies.

Humanity immediately gets serious about climate change, CO2 reduction, and the like, but we also get way too zealous about deploying space lasers.

Update: CNN says Kevin McCarthy is responsible for moving Pelosi and Hoyer out of their offices and it was done as ‘real estate revenge’ and Kevin is moving IN to Pelosi’s office. They say an anonymous republican source told them, “Kevin is on a revenge tour. Patrick would never do that on his own. This was Kevin’s call.”