@karabaic@mastodon.social
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

karabaic

@karabaic@mastodon.social

John Karabaic's account. he/him. BLM.

NYC MIT WPAFB CIN PDX, kinda in that order

Virtual plumber to https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Breakfast on the Bridges volunteer https://social.ridetrans.it/@bonbpdx

Working for tech companies since they made hardware.

The gurney is the reward, as my NeXT colleagues put it.

Expect book and media reviews, comments on science and technology policy, frequent #NoirAlley #TCMParty posts.

Banner from Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

There's lots of noise in SF about homeless people "refusing shelter" and "They want to live in tents!" And that we should force them to accept the shelter against their own will, "for their own good!" Many SF folks rationalize their desire to not see homeless people, by convincing ourselves that refusing shelter is an irrational behaviour, and that we know better.

We don't consider the fact that people might be refusing shelter when that shelter is worse than a tent.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/sf-sro-empty/

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@mekkaokereke I have been involved in the creation of a shelter adjoining my neighborhood in PDX. I recommend 2 books to understand the situation:

Teresa Gowan’s Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders for a good history of the situation in the USA & SF https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hobos-hustlers-and-backsliders

Talmadge Wright’s Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes for a profile of uprisings among the unhoused when shelters are inadequate. https://sunypress.edu/Books/O/Out-of-Place2

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@siderea Do you know that history? I was born & raised in NYC and I don’t. I’d love to learn it.

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@siderea A little digging gives this summary of the court case that established it.

https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/contentious-history-behind-new-york-citys-right-shelter

Article XVII § 1 of the constitution was approved at the 1938 NYS Constitutional Convention. Nice summary here.

https://history.nycourts.gov/a-global-context-the-new-york-state-constitutional-convention-of-1938/

Now I want to read a book about the Convention itself! It must have been something else.

karabaic, to random
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

Last night we watched , ’s amazing documentary of ’s life and work.

Reading ’s today made me realize the protagonist is an unwitting double agent, of sorts, and I hope it develops with the same complexity as Le Carre’s work.

Teri_Kanefield, to random

My son was born at 1:30 a.m. on November 5.

We set the clocks back last night at 2:00 a.m.

That means we went through the hour of 1:00 a.m. - 2:00 a.m. twice.

That means we had his exact birth time twice today.

So he has a double birthday today, right?

🤔

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@Teri_Kanefield sounds like something Gilbert & Sullivan would work into a plotline

janellecshane, to random
@janellecshane@wandering.shop avatar

“It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor”

Cursed knowledge from @popsci

https://www.popsci.com/science/starfish-head-body/

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@janellecshane As an Oregonian, all I could think was a lonely head, clinging to Haystack Rock, pounded by the waves of the incoming tide.

The opening scene of Goonies: The Next Generation

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)

Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@cstross I think #StefanoQuintarelli has the best take on this. Call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences: SALAMI. Sounds silly to say, is this SALAMI conscious? https://blog.quintarelli.it/2019/11/lets-forget-the-term-ai-lets-call-them-systematic-approaches-to-learning-algorithms-and-machine-inferences-salami/

karabaic, to random
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

Any folks want to see Victims of Sin/Victimas del pecado, a rarely see Mexican noir musical? It’s in fully restored 4K from the original nitrate film negative, playing at the Hollywood Theater here in Portland OR on 11/12/23!

https://hollywoodtheatre.org/events/victims-of-sin/

karabaic, to random
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

Oh, @alex @emilymbender, this may be a good paper for ?

“This month, Princeton CITP — with experts at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – unveiled a paper detailing The Foundation Model Transparency Index, or FMTI. That's a tool for measuring just how forthcoming 10 of the world’s top tech developers have been with their most salient generative AI applications…”

https://crfm.stanford.edu/fmti/fmti.pdf

rebeccawatson, to random
@rebeccawatson@mstdn.social avatar

What is peek-a-boo if not a jump scare for someone without object permanence? For Halloween, I'm talking about the science of why we love to be scared! https://skepchick.org/2023/10/extreme-haunted-houses-and-the-science-of-horror/

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@rebeccawatson It was fascinating to me, who came of age with Piaget's conception of object permanence, to learn via Stan Dahaene's book, "How We Learn", that it's been revealed to be waaaaay more complicated: infants appear to be born with object permanence hard-wired into their brains. What Piaget interpreted was the frontal lobe learning to weigh internal models against the outside world.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Lots of talk about the Atlanta restaurant scene, and why service is so "bad." I'm here to tell you that the problem is me! And customers like me! Because we select for the types of restaurants that Atlanta has.🤷🏿‍♂️

I ate at Milk and Honey Atlanta 2 days ago. Took over an hour to get seated, and they forgot us twice. Took another 45 minutes for food to come out. And yet I will be back first chance I get!

Because I took the first bite of the biscuits and gravy appetizer, and wow.

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@mekkaokereke I think you need to clarify what market in NYC you're talking about. I think for folks in higher income brackets dining in midtown to Wall Street, you're right. Uptown, deep Greenwich Village, and the outer boroughs are, in my experience, as tolerant as Atlanta or PDX.

BlackAzizAnansi, to random
@BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to avatar

Do any of y'all own a fully electric car? What has your experience been like?

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi Chevy Bolt EUV. Union-made.

Was about $15K cheaper than the Kia EV6, VW id.4, Ford Mustang Mach-e, etc. Deal included getting 40A 240V circuit installed at home.

Similar features, with advantage of things like window & door switches using traditional tech with electronic overlay. Reliable.

Comfortable, efficient. Can make trips to the coast (79m) and back & get groceries on single charge, fully recharge on fast dc while shopping.

Consistently getting 4.2 m / kw-hr.

karabaic, to pdx
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

Hey folks…the on SE Division donated a buncha inventory to the on SE MLK. Good, cheap, bulk food there among other items.

mekkaokereke, (edited ) to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

🤔 The US government is the most well funded in the world. We have Federal agencies dedicated to emergency management (FEMA). We have a robust network of highways. We have the best access to electricity and fossil fuels. Most US citizens are adults. Despite all this, when there is a hurricane, we struggle to evacuate a few million people from the path of a slow moving weather event.

If most Gazans are children, who have no fuel or electricity, how do they evacuate a million people?

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@mekkaokereke during Hurricane Katrina almost 2 decades ago, when they announced the evacuation of New Orleans, before the storm changed track to Mobile, the European tourists and expats showed up at the Amtrak station, expecting orderly and well-run evacuation trains.

We don’t know how to run an evacuation, either, even when we pay for the infrastructure.

Evacuating roughly the same order of magnitude of people in the path of a storm with days of notice was beyond us.

hrefna, to FediMeta
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

As a server admin, what are the things you would like to know before applying a domain block (and/or a ), or what kinds of steps would you like to perform?

Some of my thoughts:

  1. How many people would be impacted on our server and theirs?
  2. How significant the impact would be for those impacted?
  3. Is the domain actually alive still?

What else?

karabaic,
@karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

@hrefna You must also consider one of the inverse questions: what is the cumulative harm to people on your server while the server remains unblocked—right now and going forward until a block decision is permanently implemented or not.

This is why, in the legal realm, we have temporary injunctions.

The small harm in a proactive, temporary block may be necessary to ensure safety until a permanent decision is made. It is reversible and be weighed against the cost of inaction.

Teri_Kanefield, to random

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    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @Teri_Kanefield Do we know if they had or were negotiating a defense cooperation agreement? Have you ever explained those, because I don’t fully understand them? How are such agreements affected by a decision to plead? At what point are you required to inform your joint defenders?

    analgesicsleep, to random
    @analgesicsleep@mastodon.social avatar

    (I can’t get YouTubeTV to work for me and it’s killing me that I can’t watch TCM when they’re showing such great stuff. Also, I miss watching with all y’all people💕)

    video/mp4

    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @33Wonderland @Kikadee @analgesicsleep There's a small one going on at BlueSky which I've peeked into and dupled a few posts on.

    karabaic, to ai
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    Apologies for the xpost, but too delicious not to share. community now debating .

    https://bsky.app/profile/robmccallum.bsky.social/post/3kc2vtbgvx322

    thepoliticalcat, to random
    @thepoliticalcat@mastodon.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @thepoliticalcat They believe they are immune to the financial and social chaos they would cause or have ill-defined (that is, massively stupid) plans to profit from it. Like shorting toilet paper manufacturers or going long on tear-gas makers or some other nonsense

    mekkaokereke, to random
    @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

    🤔I have friends that absolutely hate Venture Capital. Hate the very concept. They believe that VC ruins everything, and that the setup is evil, and prioritizes hyper growth above everything. Some of these friends will drive over to my house just to sit me down and yell at me in unhinged rants about how evil VC is, scaring my kids.

    If I think of the most unhinged, hyperbolic, doom and gloom rants about VC that I've ever heard? None of them paint VCs in worse light than Marc's manifesto.

    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @mekkaokereke

    This seems a very loose definition of VC. NSF takes no equity stake in the wealth produced. It demands no board seat. It requires the opposite transparency policy of the VC’s NDA.

    The only thing the NSF has in common with VC is that it trades money for access. The rules around access, and the type of access, makes all the difference. One is oriented towards the common good, the other towards private enrichment.

    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @mekkaokereke I’m not sure that describing a government service, created for the common good after 150 years of public laissez-faire towards anything but war-related research, as a capitslist tool is productive. The framing is to the viewpoint of the capitalist side, and ignores the very real, fundamental differences in philosophy. And it’s pretty clear mych NSF funding would never happen thru VC.

    You have a real comparison available: the CIA’s venture funding arm: In-Q-Tel.

    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @mekkaokereke There are some very generous provisions in the tax code for the wealth generated. After all, the wealthy pretty much write the tax code, and every act of capitalism starts with an act of theft. In this case, research results that get appropriated for private use and wrapped in a web of hard-to-untangle proximate IP claims.

    A case could be made that the USA gets tax revenue from the labor of the workers in the industries, if net new worker income is created.

    carnage4life, to random
    @carnage4life@mas.to avatar

    Electric vehicle sales in the US were up 50% year over year in Q3. While Tesla is still the 800lb gorilla from a marketshare perspective it’s dipped from 62% to 50% share.

    This is a contrary trend to the thesis behind its massive valuation — that Tesla will effectively be bigger than the rest of the auto industry as EVs take over.

    Analysts are hoping the Cybertruck reverses the trend. The problem is it looks terrible while other car makers have sexier cars coming.

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ev-sales-hit-new-record-in-q3-as-tesla-market-share-dips-194135842.html

    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @mekkaokereke oh damn the demonstrator pushing the car into a parking position really got to me. Thank you.

    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @thepoliticalcat @mekkaokereke @carnage4life I’m interested if this would pass USA safety standards, and what the surcharge would be for the adaptation for our market, if they didn’t. It has roughly the same performance specs as the 1976 CitiCar and is 4x cheaper in 2023 dollars. (CitiCars sold for $3K)

    karabaic,
    @karabaic@mastodon.social avatar

    @mekkaokereke @thepoliticalcat @carnage4life You would need to add a $20k import tariff to protect American jobs, my friend, unless they set up a plant along a winding road out in western Ohio or Indiana to assemble them here out of mostly US parts.

    Doable, because the price you quoted puts it firmly in CitiCar territory, and that ev was produced in the US but was ahead of its time.

    Note that both vehicles’ use cases/range assume city core or edge city residency/employment.

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