"We just realized it was a growing complaint we were getting. We started to see calls that were being escalated and becoming more violent," Soto said earlier. "There's a time and a place for a lot of different types of activities. I think being in the middle of a group of people is probably not the best time." [...]
The new ordinance states that it is illegal for anyone to possess, carry or use a whip in the downtown corridor without a permit. It also states that it is illegal for anyone to crack a whip to "injure, annoy, interfere with, or endanger the comfort, repose, health, peace or safety of others" within city limits. It doesn't apply to private property.
I refuse to make a Devo joke here
The Reno City Council has banned the possession and use of whips without a permit in the greater downtown area after police reported a steep increase over the past two years of 911 calls from residents who mistake the sound of a cracking whip for gunfire.
4 Comments
Tags: perversions, stormtroopers
How much more terrifying could the murderbots be? Waymo.
Dead-End SF Street Plagued With Confused Waymo Cars Trying To Turn Around 'Every 5 Minutes'The visitors don't just come at night. They come all day, right to the end of 15th Avenue, where there's nothing else to do but make some kind of multi-point turn and head out the way they came in. Not long after that car is gone, there will be another, which will make the same turn and leave, before another car shows up and does the exact same thing. And while there are some pauses, it never really stops.
"There are some days where it can be up to 50," King says of the Waymo count. "It's literally every five minutes. And we're all working from home, so this is what we hear."
"We have talked to the drivers, who don't have much to say other than the car is programmed and they're just doing their job," King says.
"There are fleets of them driving through the neighborhood regularly," says Lewin. "And it's been going on for six, eight weeks, maybe more."
Much of the commentary I saw on this was people acting like it was some weird mystery, why would the cars glitch out like this. And an anonymous Waymo PR flack shat out some meaningless verbal diarrhea that amounted to "what we are doing is not technically illegal so you can't stop us."
But it's obvious what's happening here. Someone found a bug where these cars weren't negotiating u-turns properly, maybe even on this very street. So they added this street to the test suite, and they're going to run it again, and again, and again, until they get it right. Which is a completely normal way of debugging things when it's code on your own computer -- but is sociopathic when it's a two-ton killing machine on public streets, non-consensually involving real live humans into your process of debugging your buggy-ass software.
But here's something that might really bake your noodle. What if they aren't actually debugging code? What if this is not an edit-compile-deploy-test cycle at all. What if instead they're just training the network? What if their process is simply, "if we drive cars down this dead-end road ten thousand times, and they don't crash, we're just going to bake all of those runs into the network and call that whole 'u-turn' problem solved."
We're all going to fucking die, is what I'm getting at.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Tags: ai, computers, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, firstperson, mad science, robots, security, sf, sprawl
DNA Lounge: Wherein a winnar is us!
Thu: Sequence: Riot Ten
Fri: Turbo Drive
Fri: Midnight Bloc
Sat: Murder Mansion
Sat: Bootie
Sat: Shake Like an Earthquake(Best Dance Party runner-up: Death Guild.)
Thank you again for your support!
If you want to see what the fuss is about, well, this is a good weekend for it! This Saturday at 7pm, Hubba Hubba Revue presents Murder Mansion!
And directly following, and every Saturday, we have Bootie Mashup, this week presenting a tribute to oldies from the 2010s.
I also strongly recommend Turbo Drive on Friday, with Night Club, One True God, and a secret special guest. It will be a great show!
Just a little light treason
You've probably heard about the recent espionage caper, but if you haven't read the actual court document, you should! It's a page-turner!Criminal Complaint: Conspiracy to Communicate Restricted Data:
On June 18, 2021, the UC posing as a representative of COIJNTRY1 emailed "ALICE" to provide detailed instructions on servicing a dead drop location in Jefferson County, West Virginia to occur on June 26, 2021. [...]
34. On June 26, 2021, at approximately 10:41 a.m., the FBI observed JONATHAN TOEBBE physically service a dead drop location in Jefferson County, West Virginia. Records show that JONATHAN TOEBBE is a government employee working as a nuclear engineer for the United States Navy and holds an active Top Secret Security Clearance through the United States Department of Defense and an active Q clearance from the United States Department of Energy.
People keep busting on them for having terrible opsec, but I dunno, I think they did ok. And I watched all six seasons of The Americans, so I'm kind of an expert on this.
But when the party that you are trying to engage in international espionage flips on you to the FBI at your very first contact, it's pretty much over.
The other surprising thing about this is, they did this for only $100k? I know that criminals aren't always the best decision-makers, but when you do the risk/reward analysis of something like this, come on! "On the one hand they might execute us... on the other hand, we could make as much money as six months' salary!" (Dude was a nuclear engineer, that job doesn't pay minimum wage.)
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, security
Flying Toasters in CSS.Apple's war on their users continues apace
So in Apple's continuing effort to prevent me from accessing my own computer, Full Disk Access is up to some new arcane fuckery. I found that even though Emacs is on the list, I still wasn't able to open files that were on my Desktop and other places without first going to Terminal and doing this:
- open -a Emacs ~/Desktop
open -a Emacs ~/Library
open -a Emacs ~/Downloads
open -a Emacs /Volumes/Time\ Machine/
and so on. After doing that once, I could access them again in the future. I have no idea where this is recorded, or what other directories I will find on the exclusion list in the future.
The latest one that I cannot figure out is that "crontab -" works from Terminal, but from inside an Emacs shell buffer it says,
- crontab: tmp/tmp.16124: Operation not permitted
Why can Terminal do things that Emacs can't and how do I fix that?
I tried doing that "open" trick with /tmp, /var/tmp, /private/tmp, /private/var/tmp, /private/var/at/tmp, ~/tmp... it's not one of those. You might think, "run crontab under dtruss to figure out what directory you need to authorize! You sweet summer child, dtruss hasn't been functional on macOS for roughly a thousand years.
Update: The fix is to give /usr/bin/ruby full disk access! You get full disk access, and you, and you, and you! Turns out that the Emacs startup sequence begins with a Ruby script that decides what executable to launch, so the topmost process is the one that counts.
XScreenSaver 6.02 out now
Two new hacks this time, Marbling and Binary Horizon, plus a few minor updates.
Several of the old hacks have been re-enabled on Android, because it turns out that while they didn't work in the emulator, they do work on real Android hardware (of which I have none).
This release was built on macOS 11.6 instead of 10.14, so I think that means that it has native Apple M1 code in it -- though I doubt you'll notice any performance difference over the Rosetta2 emulation.
Also Apple completely changed how code signing works again, because hey, six more months have passed, it's clearly time for a redesign of the most incomprehensible part of their entire ecosystem, right? Is it better? No. No it is not, it's just differently awful. Again. Anyway, let me know if there are signing issues.
I also had to update Sparkle (the "Check for Updates" library), so hopefully auto-updates still work. Let me know.
About Marbling, the new one written by me. It started out fairly simple, but then it took the optimization train to crazytown. Here's the comment from the top of the source:
This generates a random field with Perlin Noise (Perlin's page, SIGGRAPH 2002 paper, Wikipedia entry), then permutes it with Fractal Brownian Motion (Wikipedia page, Book of Shaders, Shader Toy) to create images that somewhat resemble clouds, or the striations in marble, depending on the parameters selected and the colors chosen.
These algorithms lend themselves well to SIMD supercomputers, which is to say GPUs. Ideally, this program would be written in Shader Language, but XScreenSaver still targets OpenGL systems that don't support GLSL, so we are doing the crazy thing here of trying to run this highly parallelizable algorithm on the CPU instead of the GPU. This sort-of works out because modern CPUs have a fair amount of parallel-computation features on their side of the fence as well. (Generally speaking, your CPU is a Cray and your GPU is a Connection Machine, except that your phone does not typically require liquid nitrogen cooling and a dedicated power plant).
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. A while back someone requested an Apple TV version of XScreenSaver, so I took a crack at it. There's a tvOS target in the Xcode project, but when you launch it, it never instantiates SaverRunner. I imagine there's some xib or storyboard problem, but I couldn't figure it out so I gave up. If someone can get me past that, I'll take another look. BTW, it turns out that one of the hurdles of porting iOS to tvOS is that tvOS doesn't have newfangled UI elements like checkboxes and sliders.
Tags: computers, firstperson, linux, mac, phones, security, xscreensaver
Can light gray text on light gray backgrounds please stop being a thing?
Exhibit A: the unfathomably unreadable new look in macOS 11.x. It was already bad in 10.x but they made it worse.
Exhibit B: This is what happens when you go to System Preferences / Accessibility and check "Increase contrast". It just puts thin black borders around everything.
Exhibit C: This is what happens when you move the "Display contrast" slider two ticks up from "Normal" to "Maximum". It makes it so much worse that I wonder if someone implemented the slider backwards and QA didn't notice.
"Dark mode" is just as bad, it all ends up being dark gray on dark gray instead.
Fucking Apple.
Tags: a/b, computers, doomed, firstperson, mac
Somehow macOS 11.6 broke HDMI
I wanted to do an XScreenSaver release, and it turns out that some time since April, Apple has started refusing uploads to the app store that were built with Xcode 11 (because fuck you that's why). And they never bothered to do a build of Xcode 12 or 13 that will run on macOS 10.14 (because fuck you that's why). So here I am, under duress, finally upgrading to macOS 11.6 (because fuck me that's why).
And that's going about as well as expected:
But the above game of whack-a-mole is not why I'm posting. No, I'm posting because I'd like someone to explain to me why my iMac's second monitor is working fine but my third monitor (my projector) is getting no HDMI signal. I see a bunch of people complaining about this sort of thing on laptops, but no answers.
If I go to the end of the run and plug in a different monitor into the cable that normally plugs into the projector, I get signal, main screen turn on. But apparently said signal is now unacceptable to my projector.
Note: no hardware has changed, only an OS update. And somehow that OS update has weakened or otherwise broken this HDMI run, and now I can no longer watch TV from my couch.
Double-You Tee Fuck.
Update: And then... it magically started working again.
Tags: computers, doomed, firstperson, mac
DNA Lounge: Wherein the parklet and booze rules have changed again
Newsom signed some bills, so this is how it works now, I guess?
- Parklets are now fully legal, not temporary. Bars and restaurants can continue to serve food and booze outside.
- Take-out cocktails are only allowed with food, and are limited to two drinks per meal.
- Delivery cocktails are no longer allowed.
The article also says, "restaurants will still be able to sell bottles of wine and cans of beer for delivery, as those are in the manufacturer's original packaging", so I guess that means that we will still be allowed to sell our DNA Lounge brand liquor bottles to go, since they're sealed from the distillery. One liter equals one drink? Not that we sell very many of those.
We stopped selling our batched, to-go cocktails in mason jars a while ago, because they were just not selling any more. But for those bars and restaurants who were still doing good business with to-go and delivery batched cocktails, this is kind of a kick in the teeth.
Also related, another bill that everyone hoped would make permanent the 15% cap on the delivery apps' extortionate fees, was gutted. Instead of requiring a cap, It just requires "transparency". So now they have to itemize why they are charging you 30%. And I guess you'll feel better about that somehow?
In DNA news:
Attendance has been slowwwwly picking up. Interestingly, it's mostly a younger crowd. Maybe the 30-plus folks are more afraid of Delta than the kids are, who knows.
We did have some antivaxxer idiots show up the other day. It was before doors, and they just stood there yelling at us for a while. We are "sheep", apparently. This was on a night when I understand that there was a sportsball game of some kind, so presumably these were tourists from the Central Valley, the Red State part of California that is still dying in droves.
In other "Get Off Of My Lawn" news, a number of our staff have been noting that "these kids today" just don't know how to behave in public. We know what 18-year-olds are like, but recently they have been, uh, worse. But then someone made a very salient observation: when lockdown began, these 18-year-olds were 16! So, no, they don't know how to behave in public because they've literally never had to before. Can you imagine what it would have been like to spend the last half of high school at home on your couch? They're all homescooled bubble babies!
