<a href="https://smidgeo.com/notes/deathmtn">deathmtn</a>

7/14/2024, 9:42:02 AM

A smaller satellite just flew across the night sky under the ISS HDEV. It was delightful. It kind of looked like some twitchy bug.
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7/14/2024, 8:57:41 AM

I gotta say, I dislike waking up feeling vaguely stressed because I’m living in a country that whose stability falls steeply every couple of weeks lately.
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7/13/2024, 11:30:43 PM

Just realized that Balatro has the first trap beat that I have ever liked. Now that’s a feat.
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7/13/2024, 8:15:29 PM

Streaky!
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7/13/2024, 2:00:41 PM

I was just shown how to exactly bisect an angel. Exactly.
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7/13/2024, 11:40:12 AM

Minor Balatro spoiler: Look away if you want to avoid learning about something in gold stake.

So, gold stake introduces rental jokers: Jokers that cost a fee per round. Previous stakes brought in infinite jokers, which can never be removed once bought and perishable jokers, which stop working after five rounds.

I like how the stakes progression kind of models the commercial software world. You used to be able to just buy software, and it would work indefinitely. Then, forms of lock-in started appearing, followed by stuff that just stopped running after a while, either through planned obsolescence or the platform changing out from under it. Finally, Balatro models paying for subscriptions for things you used to just pay for once. If there are ever stakes beyond gold, maybe there’ll be jokers with ads, some kind of exploitative user data collection jokers, and in-joker purchases.
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7/13/2024, 10:54:51 AM

The only time our ugly purple-side red counter looks good is when grapefruits are being cut.
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7/13/2024, 8:41:22 AM

A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation.

…

The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states.

…

Now Mitchell is promoting a tool called EagleAI, which has claimed to use artificial intelligence to automate and speed up the process of challenging ineligible voters. EagleAI is already being used to mount mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states, and, with Ziklag’s help, the group plans to ramp up those efforts.

According to an internal video, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s clean the rolls project,” which would be one of the largest known donations to the group.
Great. $800K is not a lot of funding for a software compare, but on the other hands, it’s a lot for asymmetric information warfare. Russian social media
bots are close to free; these sound like bots that are going to go a few steps further and overwhelm election commissions.
But Ziklag is not a political organization: It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, the same legal designation as the United Way or Boys and Girls Club. Such organizations do not have to publicly disclose their funders, and donations are tax deductible. In exchange, they are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.
I guess the only silver lining is that they don’t actually seem to be spending that much. $12MM is a lot, but Bloomberg alone spent $150 MM in 2020 on political donations. And I gotta hand it to them: Ziklag is a good name for a creepy Christian organization.

I am still freaked out by the use of LLMs to overwhelm election administration, though. I’m sure EagleAI is not the only product for this.
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7/13/2024, 7:56:36 AM

Since Katt is out of town, I am the guy that Bonus Cat yells at for breakfast. He is very persistent and will get you up, even if you’re very tired. The semi-conscious brain can snooze an alarm for hours without the conscious part knowing, but it can’t shake off a cat.

He’s like a living CAPTCHA.
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7/12/2024, 11:44:57 PM

The Erratic Deck is neat. It’s what I try to do a deck if I get Ouija or Wrath, except without reducing hand size.
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7/12/2024, 8:31:42 PM

It turns out the guy hasn’t been doing ippon seoinage quite right this whole time, and I didn’t notice. He doesn’t do the bicep pinch, and he starts turning without actually bringing the opponent with him. (The turning without actually having control of the opponent is a thing lots of people do, including me. I think it’s a form of wishful thinking.)

Obviously, this is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Lots of kids and adults do throws inefficiently. Still, we’re gonna fix it!
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7/12/2024, 11:44:49 AM

I oiled all the speaking cabinets and doors. Feels good man
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7/12/2024, 9:11:56 AM

Drop-off was at the Museum of Science today, so there wasn’t too much to go through after exiting the expressway, and we missed the traffic there. We didn’t have to go into Cambridge at all. Thirty minutes each way. Not bad!

Also, it was overcast, so the sun couldn’t reach through the AC to cook me.

THIS HAS BEEN WSMG SMIDGEO TRAFFIC AND WEATHER ON THE ONES!
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7/11/2024, 10:32:03 PM

I got a couple of neat machines going in this Balatro run. With the Oops! All Sixes joker (which doubles the chances of any random roll) and Hanging Chad (which makes the first card you play play three times), I was able to make Lucky cards trigger which — in addition to the mult and $ — pumped up the Lucky Cat all the was the 12.75X.

The Astronomer got me free planets, which pumped up the Constellation, which got to around 6X. I was regularly getting around 5000 mult.

That’s still not enough to get you into scientific notation range, nor to get through Ante 12. I probably should have tried harder to replace the astronomer once I had tons of money and to have found another source of chip bonuses. Well, I guess that’s why I’ll end up playing this for several more months.
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7/11/2024, 8:59:31 PM

Junior calisthenics, old guy back workout, three pull-ups. I kinda like this sort of chill workout. Maybe I’ll get just slightly closer to pushing it to the limit when it’s fall and if my back is still solid. Maybe.
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7/11/2024, 6:37:15 PM

I was just looking at a picture of Milei and thinking, where have I seen that guy?
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7/11/2024, 3:09:41 PM

One thing that’s gone well this week: I made a clip to hold the plastic thing that keeps the aux cable connected so that it delivers stereo sound to the car stereo. (The glue I used to hold it in place before dissolved.) It took three tries to make one that both held the plastic cap on and didn’t block the stereo face from clipping in, but it’s been two days without a single stereo drop.
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7/11/2024, 2:44:37 PM

On Wednesday, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi announced in a letter to the company that it would be laying off 1,800 employees—about 10 percent of its workforce of around 18,000—while simultaneously planning to hire the same number of new workers as part of a major restructuring effort purportedly focused on AI.

Hahaha, OK.
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7/11/2024, 1:51:44 PM

Well, it’s hot like boiled vomit here, but at least the drive was 20 minute with no one hitting the car.
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7/11/2024, 12:37:51 PM

One of these things that's "obvious" once you've been told about it: The THX sound is a D major chord, but everything starts on a different pitch and eventually slides into place. If you want to hear a slower and less aesthetic piece using this technique, there's Searching the Bogs, which I made without knowing that how the THX sound was made.
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7/11/2024, 11:57:50 AM

For long video meetings in which there’s pressure to have your camera on, I’ve started desk drumming. I messed up a bunch here, but at some point in the meeting, things were 🔥

With more practice, I should get more consistent.
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7/11/2024, 10:07:06 AM

Even if I was willing to pay $18/day to park at Alewife, we couldn’t even take the red line in. It’s been shut down and replaced by shuttle buses throughout July.

I guess I’m slowly turning into the Falling Down guy and should probably work to counteract that.
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7/11/2024, 9:59:14 AM

At one point, I was turning right but had to stop because the car in front of me couldn’t go, either, leaving me half turned in the right lane. The bike behind me did not want to stop because cyclists should never have to stop, apparently. He went around, but he also kicked our car. What an asshole.

The best I could do was yell at him. I know it’s so unlikely that he’ll ever experience consequences, though. It’s far more likely that he’ll experience consequences for never slowing down or stopping.

Bikes are supposed to be treated like vehicles, and I do that. But much of the time they don’t treat themselves like vehicles. How often? I should probably start counting. I see cyclists running red lights and changing lanes without signaling and going between lanes all the time, though.

I support pro-cycling policy, but whenever I notice a cyclist, they’re doing something that makes me say you motherfucker.
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7/11/2024, 9:46:19 AM

An hour and twenty minutes of driving done. One more hour to go if I’m lucky with afternoon traffic.
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7/10/2024, 10:00:47 PM

Junior calisthetics, took throws for the guy (he learned tomoe nage (!) tonight), back exercises (had a lot of trouble with the side planks, despite that being a workout for old people), eight pull-ups.
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