Video of Anything You Can Imagine

Over a thousand people chatting in a livestream waiting to see if the corpse flower in the Sydney Botanical Garden opens...

Meme Dump...

StalkerBot

A machine learning tool that can guess where a photograph was taken by contextual cues:

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.

Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company’s founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.

They're apparently marketing it to the po-po pretty heavily.

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Monday Morning Memes...

Cold Spell

The sun has risen here in Indianapolis, causing the mercury to soar to 2°F, a full two degrees higher than it was just before dawn. Depending on who you believe, today's high could creep into double digits. While the local television meteorologist is saying we'll only see 9°F this afternoon, Weather Underground says we could get all the way up to 12°F.

It's currently seventeen degrees in Nome, Alaska.

I do not approve of any of this.

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Memes to Keep You Warm...

"For some reason, the Nokia G0-4T5-E never caught on."

Lucky Break

The way that it was giving him that hard eye contact, I was sure dude was going to end up as moose toe jam, but apparently he was okay, just got knocked down.

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Tab Clearing...

• Norway's closing its last coal mine in Svalbard, which could have unexpected geopolitical repercussions...


• The outgoing director of the BATFEIEIO has a sad.


• Coinage and currency in fantasy role-playing games.

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Meme Dump...

Final Weekday Memes...until Monday

So it goes...

Famed director David Lynch has left the building. Keep it weird in his honor.

(In case you don't get the Pabst Blue Ribbon reference, Blue Velvet is available to stream on Prime Video.)

Meme Dump...

It's all relative...

It's 24°F and sunny out there, which is warmer than it's been for several days, and it's supposed to get above freezing sometime around lunch and hang in the mid-thirties until after sunset.

That's gonna feel downright balmy. Tomorrow's going to get into the forties!

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Tab Clearing...

• Weird family moves to Russia to escape immigrants and lesbians. Madcap hijinks ensue. Seriously, this story has it all, including a plan to support a family of five by selling caramelized nuts in a country where you don't speak the language, and the quote "Jesus is our lawyer."


• Fapping to Clippy is not only a sad indictment of our atomized modern society, but also the title of my band’s next album. (The band's name is Virtual Boyfriend Dystopia, fwiw.)


• Canadian jailbreaking?

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Overheard in the Office...

Me: "I'll bet even if you live smack in the middle of downtown Unalaska you can't get much in the way of same-day Amazon deliveries. The produce department at the local Safeway's probably pretty weaksauce, too."

On the other hand, the actual middle of nowhere's a fairly short walk away, where you could just do whatever right out in the open and there wouldn't be anyone around to care but some bored seabirds.

Midweek Memery

Heavy Mettle

The upside: A 9mm this heavy with a good trigger is really easy to shoot well.

The downside: Not cheap.

The full review can be found here.

Who down wit' P.I.D.? Yeah, you know me!

Gorillafritz has an excellent post on the importance of positive target identification in averting tragic, and potentially fatal, mistakes:

"Let me start by saying that no one in this situation did anything wrong. The cop was trying to make sure a boy wasn’t going to kill himself. The homeowner was legally defending his residence from a suspicious intruder approaching the back door of his house. Some frazzled nerves, poor training, or a couple more pounds of pressure on either weapon’s trigger would have resulted in a tragic outcome.

How do we prevent situations like this from going bad?"

Go read the whole thing.

Your house is not a free-fire zone. Use a flashlight. If you don't have a flashlight... well, you're wrong ...but if you don't have a flashlight, turn on the lights. If the power's out, ask "Who's there?"

Don't just shoot at shapes and shadows.

Meme Dump...

Misread

Elsewhere on the web, someone wished a blessed Feast of The Ass to those who observe.

I misread that as the "Feast of Ass" and I was like “Hey, not my thing, but I’m not the Fun Police. You do you, Boo.”

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Memes, Memes, Memes!

RX: "Next thing you know, you'll be snorting fat lines of grated parmesan."
Me: "You say that like it's a bad thing."

Tab Clearing...

• Jim Grey's first impressions of the Nikon 35Ti he purchased from me. (It's a really neat camera but I have reluctantly come to accept I'm not a wide-angle street shooter and it's nice to see it go somewhere it'll get some use. I still have my Kodak S1100 XL nostalgia camera if I want to give it another try.)


• The Volvo 122S 5-door wagon.


• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

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Meme Delivery...

These are the people who call other people "snowflakes"

Imagine being assmad about the sign language person. “Show me on the Binky doll where the mean disabled person hurt you…”

"That person is doing sign language to make me feel powerless" is such a fricking bonkers take.

Lady, you need to go touch some grass, stat. You've been hittin' the culture war sauce a little too hard lately it seems.

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Fire's Long Reach

I was going to be spending the week dog-sitting for this Very Good Girl and her brother while my friend was out in Hollywood doing Hollywood stuff, but that's been cancelled. I mean, not only was the meeting he was going to be attending rescheduled, but the house where he was gonna crash for the week burned down.

Closing the week out with some memes...

QotD: This Ain't Sportsball Edition

"In the 2024 Presidental election, more people voted for Donald Trump in Los Angeles than voted for him in Arkansas or Oklahoma. This nonsense about "red America" vs. "blue America" ignores the reality that we all live in purple America, a bit redder in some places and bluer in others, and when bad luck falls on Texas or New York, Oregon or Florida, it falls on millions of people who voted the same way you did and hold similar values, no matter how you voted or what policies you favor. We're all in the same box."

Bobbi responding to the "HuRr dUrR LiBrULs R bUrNiNg Up iN kOmMiEfOrNiA"* idiocy percolating around the sewers of the blogosphere.

*Los Angeles County cast 1,189,862 votes for the Trump/Vance ticket last November, compared to 759,241 from Arkansas and 1,036,213 from Oklahoma. More people voted for Trump in the five boroughs of NYC than in the entire states of Kansas or Mississippi.

Brr-rrr!

Last night was one of those wintertime joys that seems to get less fun every year: Dragging the trash can to the curb in the snow.

Temps were in the high teens by 10PM and part of the walkway down the side of the house was rock-hard glare ice, but by sticking to the shoveled walks rather than going straight across the lawn, I didn't get any snow in my boots, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

I'll admit that I towed the trashcan down the sidewalk to in front of the neighbor's house and followed the path he'd dragged to the street through the snow in the devil's strip with his own trash can, rather than wade through most of a foot of snow in ours.

The street did not get plowed, but it's all pretty well packed down by four days of traffic...although we're supposed to get another three to four inches of fresh powder today.

At least it's scenic as dammit out there.

Meme Dump...

Tab Clearing...

• An entire virtual D.C. lobbying outfit staffed by chatbots working for the Pakistani military.


• Looks like this weekend it'll be the South's turn for snow.


• AI Boom or AI Bust?

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Alert!

1/200th, f/6.3, ISO 200

A wary eastern fox squirrel observing me on my walk to lunch on Saturday. I had the Olympus OM-D E-M1X and the M. Zuiko Digital 12-200mm f/3.5-6.3 zoom lens with me.

The upper photo is the straight-out-of-camera monochrome JPEG*, while the lower one is the same shot, processed from the RAW file and lightly cropped.

*On a Micro Four Thirds sensor the raw aspect ratio is, as one can surmise from the name, 4x3. I have the camera currently set to record a RAW file and a 16x9 JPEG simultaneously.

Sig Electro-Optics Recall...

There's a product recall for the SIG SAUER ROMEO5 electro-optical red dot sight. Apparently the button cell battery compartment is not secured in a fashion that is considered child-safe and therefore the button cells pose an ingestion hazard for small children.

Of course, if your carbine with a red dot sight is stored in a fashion where your kids can get at it and eat the batteries, you have a lot bigger problems going on in your life, my friend.

(I will point out that any battery cap that can be unscrewed by a toddler has other problems.)

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Sickos.

Weirdos on the internet are using AI to edit various well-known snuff videos to make them look like they were filmed using animated characters from Minions movies instead of the actual, you know, human beings who died or were maimed.

The future is terrible and the internet was a mistake, Exhibit #4,291,870

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Midweek Memes...

Privacy Nightmare

Technically you don't have any reasonable expectation of privacy while you're just driving down the open road, on public thoroughfares.

I don't know that the Founding Fathers had thought through the implications of license plate readers, though...

Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security made a series of YouTube videos showing vulnerabilities in a Motorola Reaper HD ALPR that he bought on eBay. As we have reported previously, these ALPRs are deployed all over the United States by cities and police departments. Brown initially found that it is possible to view the video and data that these cameras are collecting if you join the private networks that they are operating on. But then he found that many of them are misconfigured to stream to the open internet rather than a private network.

ALPR being "Automated License Plate Reader", of course. These cameras are common enough tech that you can buy a variety of them on Amazon.

You may recall the fun I had with a botched license plate read back in the early days of this blog if you've been around long enough.

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O, Fortuna?

Rooting around for a USB mouse for my iBook G3 I stumbled across a bag of coins, mostly Roman, that I'd written off as long gone over a decade ago.

Of course this happens when I have a two-digit balance in my checking account and a ton of invoices outstanding that could show up any day now.

This is fate playing chicken with me.

That 1/12th stater from Miletos got lost in history's sofa cushions 2½ millennia ago and I thought it had disappeared again.

But it isn't art.

The hot garbage people are calling "AI" produces laughable results so frequently that "People with too many teeth and fingers" has turned into a trope.

In case you were wondering what the automotive equivalent to "too many fingers" is, then check out the AI-generated promo splash pic for Amazon's F1 racing documentary. It's super cheesy.

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Writing Elsewhere...

• Cold Weather Carry


• 2000 Jaguar XJR


• Player B Has Entered the Game


• 1964 Oldsmobile F-85 sedan

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Memes! Getcher memes here!