Tab Clearing...

• Leadership lessons from Star Trek: TNG.


• Facebook Destroys Everything.


• Clothes With History.

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Know Nukes

With all the data center construction that's accompanied the AI... boom? bubble? ...the demand for power is off the charts and this is leading to talk, wild speculation, and outright misinformation about nuclear power and potential reactor construction.

Here's a dude who knows something about the topic talking about small modular reactors:

Tech giants are signing deals with nuclear power companies to supply energy to their data centers. Many of these deals revolve around unproven Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This is a relatively new term for most people, so I figured it as worth it to dig in a little to help it make sense.

First to get the hysteria out of the way. No, Microsoft and Google will NOT be running nuclear reactors. No, AI will not be running nuclear reactors. These SMRs will be operated by highly trained operators licensed by the NRC, just like I was on my reactor. Every licensed operator is personally responsible for ensuring nuclear safety. Like go to prison personally responsible. It doesn’t matter who’s name is on the front gate.

Go thou and RTWT.

And remember, any talk about running a technological civilization on clean power that doesn't involve nukes is fundamentally unserious.

This was cool...

I actually got the Powerbook 540c to boot!

These things were so baller for their day. They had built in stereo speakers with 16 bit sound, 640x480 active matrix color display, 33mhz 040 CPU, dual battery bays... it was one of the first laptops that could also work as a hoss of a desktop machine. 

Of course, they were originally something like five grand, which'd buy you a pretty nice used car back in 1995. They had product placement in movies, of course, since they looked so cool.

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Monday Morning Memes, Special Highbrow Edition

Psst! Kid! Want a unique game console?

Further proof that if something has a CPU and a screen, someone's rigged it to play Doom...

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom.

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks.

In case you think I'm kidding, here's a dude playing Doom on an old Kodak point & shoot camera.

"Are your glasses doxxing me?"

The pace of technological change comes at you fast, and it has a lot of implications that may not be immediately apparent.

Take these seemingly unrelated facts:

• High-resolution digital cameras are tiny and ubiquitous.
• Bluetooth, WiFi, and 5G connectivity is portable and everywhere.
• Facial recognition technology continues to advance by leaps and bounds.
• Everybody's in some sort of database these days.

Now, this caused a stink recently when people were using Meta's smart glasses to doxx random people via facial recognition, but there's no need to be using funky prototype smart glasses when your phone has a camera and the ability to locate and lock on to faces and you could theoretically, I dunno, just carry it backwards in your shirt pocket...

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Tab Clearing...

• We "dial" and "hang up" phones, have web "pages", and "roll up" the windows in our cars.


• Russian hackers breach Verizon's PTT network.


• "Hey, buddy, do you have the time?" On distracting questions.

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Currently off the shelf...

Well, it's not really off the shelf since I'm reading it on my iPad via the Kindle app, but at any rate, I'm reading Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter after seeing several good reviews complimenting the writing style.

They were not wrong! This is well-written and hard to put down. I started yesterday afternoon and I'm about a third of the way in. (It's early 2020 and Elliott Management has just tried a boardroom coup to oust Jack Dorsey... again ...from the CEO's chair.)

I imagine I'll be done by this evening so I can write a proper book review.

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Spiking the punch...

With Meta aggressively scraping your posts to train its large language models, feel free to drop some acid in the Facebook/Instagram punchbowl.

Fabingy!

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Tab Clearing...

• Chris Arnade walks the Faroe Islands.


• The Throwing Madonna.


• A Rape in Cyberspace.

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Super New

The more mature a technology is, the harder it is to release a really jaw-dropping product:

So even if the engineers manage to improve an already near-perfect model, the new camera will not really be all that different.

That is exactly what happened in case of the Nikon D6: Like the D5, it still is a lighting-fast camera, it still has incredible high ISO performance and it still is indestructible. On top of that, the autofocus was improved significantly, but no one really took note of that, as the D5 was already practically infallible.

It is important to understand that major breakthroughs in physical engineering are far less likely to happen and if they do happen, they often go relatively unnoticed.

Always keep the Pareto-principle in mind: An improvement of 20% requires 80% of total development resources and is neither needed nor noticed by 80% of all users.

Tab Clearing...

• Awaiting the Apocalypse With Elon Musk


• Space debris lands on Canadian farm.


• U.S. and Japan strengthening military ties.

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AttackBot

A robotic scout dog that cops can use to knock the various "Internet of Things" devices in your house offline in preparation for a SWAT raid sounds like something out of a Terminator sequel, but here we are.

“NEO can enter a potentially dangerous environment to provide video and audio feedback to the officers before entry and allow them to communicate with those in that environment,” Huffman said, according to the transcript. “NEO carries an onboard computer and antenna array that will allow officers the ability to create a ‘denial-of-service’ (DDoS) event to disable ‘Internet of Things’ devices that could potentially cause harm while entry is made.”

DDoS attacks are a type of cyber attack where a website, server, or network is overloaded with traffic until it is knocked offline. Huffman did not provide any specifics about how a DDoS attack like this would work. But he said DHS wanted to develop this capability after a 2021 incident in which a man suspected of child sexual abuse crimes in Florida used his doorbell camera to see that he was being raided by the FBI and began shooting at them, killing two FBI agents and injuring three others.

At FLETC they even have a training house set up with various web-enabled devices like crib monitors and "nanny cams" so the Feds can practice working in that environment for entries, which makes sense, I guess. Wonder if they have a practice claymore roomba?

The DDoS scoutbot dog is based on this model:

Crapping all over the internet...

Scammy shill reviews and SEO trickery have plagued the internet for... well, about as long as search engines have been a thing, but they're getting turbocharged by large language models and popping up in unlikely places.

There's this one dude who managed to slip his spammy garbage into places like USA Today and Sports Illustrated:

In October, The Verge and other outlets reported on product review articles appearing on Gannett publications like USA Today that seemed to be AI-generated. Gannett maintained that the content was produced by humans and that a third-party marketing firm was responsible. Just a month later, eerily similar review articles were published on the website of Sports Illustrated, but this time, Futurism discovered that the article authors’ headshots were for sale on an AI photo website. Shortly after, Sports Illustrated said it had cut ties with the company that produced the reviews.

The apparent AI content proved embarrassing for nearly everyone involved: venerated publications that hired a third-party marketing firm to produce content were now attempting to defend the work — and themselves — after readers discovered the low-quality junk content on their sites. Workers who had nothing to do with the stories feared it could be the beginning of the end of their jobs. In January, the Sports Illustrated newsroom was gutted by mass layoffs, though much of the staff was later rehired after its parent company found a new publisher.

In both cases, as reported by The Verge, the AI-generated content was produced by a mysterious company called AdVon Commerce, a marketing firm that boasts of its AI-powered products. There’s little information available about AdVon online, as its owners have worked to scrub their names from the internet.

But sneaking content onto sites is one thing. Suppose you could instead just buy the legal remains of a once-respected but now-defunct site and reanimate it, including generating new AI-written articles under the bylines of its former authors?

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Not how that works.

From the department of "Free Speech Absolutism":

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk wrote that X "has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators" behind an advertiser boycott on his platform.

"Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution," Musk wrote, leading several X users to suggest that Musk wants it to be illegal for brands to refuse to advertise on X.

Boycotts are free speech too, Elmo you knob.

Guys like this claim they hate government regulation meddling in business, but when they wind up on the wrong end of the stick, they're all "Please help me, Government! I'm just a smol bean and they're being mean to me!"

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Small is Beautiful

An all-in-one "walking around" zoom lens is what's normally on my cameras. I like them because they're more versatile than a fixed focal length lens and have more reach than the typical 24-70mm pro zoom. (They don't have as much reach as a superzoom. In non camera nerd speak, these are "5X" rather than "10X" zooms.) 

The lack of focal length, however, is made up for by much better optics as well as larger available apertures over the most of the range of the lens. For instance, my favorite Nikon full-frame superzoom, the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6, has a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at 28mm, while the 24-120mm f/4 VR is a third of a stop slower. But by the time you've zoomed out to 50mm, the 28-200 can only manage f/4.5, while the 24-120 will hold f/4 all the way out to 120mm.

The bigger hole lets in more light, allowing you to use lower ISOs or faster shutter speeds indoors or in the shade.

These lenses tend to be compact, but still fairly chonky, and that's one reason that smaller sensor cameras still appeal to me.

Thanks to the magic of crop factor, these are the equivalent lenses for full-frame, APS-C, and Micro 4/3rds:

• Nikon 24-120mm f/4 VR: 84x103.5mm, 710g
• Fuji 16-80mm f/4 OIS WR: 78x89mm, 440g
• Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4: 68-86mm, 320g

That Micro 4/3rds lens on the Olympus, seen in the photo above, is almost an inch shorter, about a half inch smaller in diameter, and less than half the weight of the full-frame Nikon, yet it covers the same effective field of view and is a full stop brighter on the wide end, to boot. 

That's just shy of a pound's weight difference between the Nikon and Panasonic glass, and you notice that when it's hanging around your neck during a long day.

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Time marches on...

At the camera store yesterday I asked if they had any 16GB SD cards.

The counter guy looked at me with pity.

I literally said to the sales clerk "What year is it?" and he replied "2024" and I realized he probably wasn't even born when Jumanji was in theaters.

Pardon me while I walk into the ocean. I might be some time.

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Don't want none of that...

The upcoming Microsoft Recall feature is a security disaster, some experts are warning...

Microsoft maintains Recall is an optional experience and that it has built privacy controls into the feature. You can disable certain URLs and apps, and Recall won’t store any material that’s protected with digital rights management tools. “Recall also does not take snapshots of certain kinds of content, including InPrivate web browsing sessions in Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, or other Chromium-based browsers,” says Microsoft on its explainer FAQ page.

However, Recall doesn’t perform content moderation, so it won’t hide information like passwords or financial account numbers in its screenshots. “That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry,” warns Microsoft.

I have no clue who thought this was a good idea.

Of course, given how easily many people fall for Nigerian foreign minister scams, a lot of people's computers are open books anyway.

Oh, and speaking of privacy issues:

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media.

Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people's lives.

The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google’s own employees reported internally.

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Meme Dump...

Sports Fan Alignment Chart

Travel Rig

If I’m not traveling with checked bags, that really dings my camera choices.

The Think Tank Airport Advantage has to stay home, and I’m limited to my Peak Design Everyday Messenger that’s big enough for my 13” MacBook Air, one camera body, and three lenses, plus ancillary gear. Plus the cheater body & travel zoom lens I hang around my neck for the trip, that’s two bodies and four lenses.

I can free up a little room by leaving the portable hard drive and the cabled Compact Flash card reader at home. I have a temporary “Travel Photos” folder on my desktop that gets kept synced thanks to Apple, so that’s not a problem, but leaving the CF reader at home means I’m limited to cameras that use SD cards, which can be read via the slot on the notebook.

Only a couple of my Canon DSLRs use SD cards, and they’re still full from TacCon. Plus, two of them are 1D pro bodies and those use enormous batteries with a double charger the size of a literal brick, which kinda defeats the purpose.

Good thing all my Fujifilm gear is in a handy grab-‘n’-go Peak Design Everyday Sling… that, oops!, is too small for the MB Air.

If it’s a one or two night trip, I might rough it without the laptop and just make do with the iPad and its Logitech keyboard cover, but three or more nights in a hotel room, I’m gonna need to get some work done, so it looks like there’s gonna be unpacking and repacking and cross-loading of gear before I leave.

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