Ahh. Interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen the HIBP one!

Now it’s going to bug me, trying to remember the one I was thinking of. (Unfortunately, I’m out and about today and can’t really take a moment to hunt down what I’d previously seen.)

There’s one by …. Microsoft, I think?

It actually requests your password (vs email for HaveIBeenPwned) and checks it against rainbow tables. It doesn’t ask for other identifying information, so it’s okay, but feels super sketchy.

Currently stuck in the prison lair?

audience groans, throws vegetables. A copy of The Communist Manifesto sails through the air, just past my head

I think it was Leeja Miller who said Vance is a dark horse in that he can rationalize and communicate significantly better than Trump - making the insane sound reasonable.

One of my fears is that while I disagree with Trump on practically everything, a JD Vance replacement of him would lead to greater competence to execute and justify the same agenda.

My organization seems to have already thrown in the AI towel, or at least are resorting to magical thinking about it

We’re highly integrated with Microsoft - Windows Login, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and even a managed version of Edge as the org-wide ‘default’ browser that we’re encouraged to sign into with our organizational credentials to sync account information, etc. Our AI policy is basically “You can use any Microsoft AI feature your account can access.”
They can try to block whatever sites they want with the firewall, but once you let a user get comfortable with the idea of allowing systems to exfiltrate data, you aren’t going to also make them more discrete. They’re trusting that by throwing open the floodgates users will actually use Microsoft’s offerings instead of competing offerings — as if folks who sometimes still cannot tell the difference between a web browser and ‘the internet’ will know the difference. And they are also trusting that Microsoft is going to uphold our enterprise license agreement and their own security to keep that data within our own cloud instance.

Boy howdy, this will be interesting.

I already can’t do half the things I’m trying to do on my network, now I gotta figure out DNS?!?

My tin foil hat theory is that he was planning out another shooting and got interrupted.

I have too many of each of those things, with more on the way. Literally, in the mail right now.

In the ultimate synthesis of things, I’m currently working on building a new bed frame/headboard. I’m building one that has flip down cushions at the headboard with storage behind them, and a shelf (or two) up top. It’ll have integrated sensors/buttons and lights for reading, viewing inside the storage area and adding mood lighting to the room. It’ll have a lot of available power inside the storage area, so we can keep our sex toys stored and charged there, and not in the bathroom where we have to wonder if we’ve hidden things appropriately before we have company, in totes (where they get forgotten) or like, on our bedside, where they wind up with dust or stolen by a pet that thinks it’s a chew toy. Oh, and it’ll have hard points, obviously.

This house used to be a duplex. It wasn’t built that way, and it’s not that way now, but there’s a patch of siding at the back of the house that’s the shape of a door. When I moved in, I had to pay the local utility company on two bills, because the electricity was being billed to my street address, and the water was billed to my street address, Fl 1. It was a huge pain in the rear, because the utility company just shrugged and said “Oh, you’re the landlord over both those units.” And set me up as a master account holder over them as if the floors of my house were rentals. (IT’s weird they saw that one that doesn’t get water, and one that doesn’t get electricity and just shrugged it off, but whatever.) I had to call the city to have them send a letter to the utility company to tell them that my house was a single family residence. They didn’t do anything, but I called a few months later to ask if they ever got the letter. They said they had, and about 9 more months after that, they started sending me a single bill. Mercifully. The utility company doesn’t bill on the same day each month. I don’t know what math they use, but it seems to shift. Maybe they bill every 4 weeks instead of every month, but as a landlord of the single family home that I solely inhabited, they enrolled me in paperless billing and didn’t send ‘the landlord’ any billing notifications, so paying the bill on time was contingent upon not just checking the site in accordance with the calendar I keep, but also randomly checking it, too, as the billing date moved around. Do you have any idea how hard that is for someone with ADHD?

Anyway - all that is to say this house is totally whack. The furnace is about 3x the size needed for the square footage, so the air coming out of the vents is like 20 degrees hotter than it should be, and the blower struggles to push the appropriate volume of air through the old, hodgepodge, and (in at least one case) improvised ductwork. Instead of cycling and like, circulating air properly, it just blasts the area around the vents with hot air, and leaves cold spots cold. The plus side is that our HVAC guy says he expects the heat exchanger to burn itself up any time now, and when that happens, I guess I’ll spend the money I’m saving up for a down payment on a new house to deal with it. Or take out a HELOC and hope that when the market turns we don’t lose that much equity. Then we’ll get a nice heat pump or something - you know, for the next person who lives here, because this house’s problems are many.
But for right now we’re just running the thing with the cheapest, crappiest air filters we can find so there isn’t much air impedance, and changing them often. Sometimes I feel like living here is like living on the Serenity.

My realtor really did me dirty with this one. I mean, I still bought in 2019 before the market went insane, but like, it was my first house, and I really needed him to do better.
Next time I house hunt, I have a plan. I already have topographic maps of the whole city saved on my computer to ensure I’m not buying a house at a low spot (water issues). The state government provides maps of noise and environmental pollution, so I won’t be dealing with train tracks I thought I wouldn’t hear, or a metal plating company 3/4 of a mile away that makes the neighborhood smell like hot metal sometimes. I also now have thermal imaging gear, boroscopes, all manner of outlet testing gear, and a ruthless determination to not have to worry about a house that clearly wants to fall down. I’m going to be an unholy terror of a traveling home inspection for any house we’re looking at next.

After having just deleted 3 paragraphs… uh. This one, I guess.

I just talk too much. Add too many details. And then realize that I am actually bored with what I’ve written, and it would be awful to subject others to that.

I could have a good ramble about just about anything. Just before this comment I wrote and deleted 3 paragraphs about what temperature I keep the house. Programmable thermostat. Different modes for different seasons. Special seasonal cycles for morning/evening. Old house, renovations done to it, and not a great HVAC system, so some choices made to work around that, etc. Just rambly stuff.

Random electronics components, tools, or sex toys.

I’d do the opposite. Crash the biggest event I can find with ample media coverage, grab a mic, explain that I’m projecting myself backward through time from 200 years from now, and that I don’t have much time, and now is when it all goes wrong. To save everyone we need to

[Teleport to my living room]

I’m kidding, of course. I’d probably just waste it on something dumb(er).

You’re one of the founding members of the greater Seattle area polycule, aren’t you?

A base plate that’s got a spring under it, except for a little nub that pokes the power button.
Terrible if you live in earthquake-prone areas.

Wait. Are we describing a bump stock for your computer?

I used to play 1v1 Ticket to Ride matches against my wife using the app.

As background: I’m not a very competitive gamer, but I’m decent at problem solving. When I first learned TtR, I played with fairly … great players. One of my friends was (is?) nationally ranked. They routinely beat the ever-loving crap out of me. I think of the dozens of games we’ve played, I have won maybe 10-20% of the time?

My wife isn’t bad at TtR, but she doesn’t see things the same way in terms of strategy.

We had this one game where I drew a bunch of short routes all over the map, which blocked her early in the game, and a series of lucky route draws lead me to connect them, inadvertently blocking her at least twice, including on the last play, where I was just dumping cars to end the game.

She was always a little upset when I beat her, but this time the discrepancy was so bad and she was so upset. I just stopped playing Ticket to Ride - like, at all.

Shirley you’ve heard of absurdist humor?

That’s when my mom became old enough to vote, and she was a real idiot.

It’s not, you know, the best theory, but it’s the best theory I can come up with while also doing no research.

You say “Not even close.” in response to the suggestion that Apple’s research can be used to improve benchmarks for AI performance, but then later say the article talks about how we might need different approaches to achieve reasoning.

Now, mind you - achieving reasoning can only happen if the model is accurate and works well. And to have a good model, you must have good benchmarks.

Not to belabor the point, but here’s what the article and study says:

The article talks at length about the reliance on a standardized set of questions - GSM8K, and how the questions themselves may have made their way into the training data. It notes that modifying the questions dynamically leads to decreases in performance of the tested models, even if the complexity of the problem to be solved has not gone up.

The third sentence of the paper (Abstract section) says this “While the performance of LLMs on GSM8K has significantly improved in recent years, it remains unclear whether their mathematical reasoning capabilities have genuinely advanced, raising questions about the reliability of the reported metrics.” The rest of the abstract goes on to discuss (paraphrased in layman’s terms) that LLM’s are ‘studying for the test’ and not generally achieving real reasoning capabilities.

By presenting their methodology - dynamically changing the evaluation criteria to reduce data pollution and require models be capable of eliminating red herrings - the Apple researchers are offering a possible way benchmarking can be improved.
Which is what the person you replied to stated.

The commenter is fairly close, it seems.

Mind you, 4.1% reflects only people who are unemployed that have looked for a job within the last 4 weeks.

Let’s add in people who want a job, have looked for work in the last year, but haven’t looked in the last 4 weeks. And let us also add in people who want a job, but have a job market-related reason for not looking for one. The rate is now 5%. Still not bad.

Alrighty. What about adding in people who are working part time, but would rather work full time? The under-employed, if you will. Oh. Now it’s 7.7%

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Cryin’ all the way to the bread line.

And besides none of the above discusses that the unemployment rate is non-comprehensive and does not measure the quality of the jobs - rather, how well those jobs pay people compared to CPI.

Well. That’s it. Get the flamethrowers. Time to burn down the Amazon.

No. Not the one that’s already burning. The other one.