The Braindump Blog

Homeless people should not be arrested just if they smell - minister

One of the increasingly rare Conservative MPs with a good opinion! Wokeness runs amok!

Sometimes one can tell a lot about the legitimacy of a policy by the ludicrousness of the headlines it generates. This one is in reference to legislation the Conservative government is trying to get through that had the galaxy-brained idea of fining any rough-sleeping people - who of course famously have an excess of wealth to spare - up to £2500 for causing a nuisance. Prison sentences also available. Nuisance is defined widely enough that being “excessively” smelly or simply looking a bit like you might intend to sleep rough would be eligible for punishment.

The existing legislation - which is naturally a law from exactly 200 years ago: the 1824 Vagrancy Act - already makes rough sleeping and begging a criminal offence. Thousands of people without homes have been arrested for such crimes as “vagrant being found in or upon enclosed premises” or “begging and wandering around” in recent years. And there’s a concern that these changes would lead to a even greater criminalisation in practice.

It’s a policy so stupid and cruel that even several of today’s Conservative party are likely to rebel if the government pushes this forward. Good on them, especially “rebels” who are trying to work across party lines to decriminalise rough sleeping entirely. We desperately need new legislation on the subject, but not this new law.

Homelessness is not a lifestyle choice, and we know how to solve it.

Trump forced to see mean memes about him shared by prospective jurors

(from Rolling Stone)

Donald Trump’s latest trial is making for some slightly comedic scenes in amongst the horror. But this does raise the question of how on earth you find a jury of American citizens who have no pre-existing bias either towards or - particularly around Manhattan where this trial is situated - against ex-President Trump?

Find me 18 folk who have never made a comment or forwarded a meme even tangentially related to Trump or his extremely controversial clickbait policies and that’ll be 18 people not at all representative of any Americans I know.

Anecdotal evidence is coming to light that suggests that folk on the revolutionary GLP-1 anti-obesity medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy et al. are more likely to get pregnant. Sometimes this is joyfully welcomed. Other times - especially in cases where the person concerned is taking birth control pills - it’s more of a problematic surprise.

There’s a number of theories in play as to why this might be.

From Jezebel:

Experts say it’s possible that people are getting pregnant on these drugs because weight loss can help treat insulin resistance, which can lead to more regulated ovulation and menstrual cycles.

But the medications work by slowing stomach emptying, and that can affect the absorption of oral medications when they’re taken at the same time.

The drugs can also cause vomiting and diarrhea, which could mean people aren’t absorbing enough of their birth control pill to prevent pregnancy.

Early days yet as to how much this is a big and real phenomenon. But for it seems as because not a great deal is yet known about any effects of these drugs on pregnant humans and their offspring, if you do get pregnant whilst on these meds your doctor is likely to advise you to stop taking them. And if you don’t want to get pregnant, you might want to avoid relying on oral contraceptives alone - something which providers should hopefully already have informed you of.

Spotify has changed its payment structure such that playing most tracks they host will result in a $0 payout to the artist. That’s because they’ll now require a song to have at least 1000 streams a year in order to be paid out on.

To be clear, the claim is not that Spotify will keep the money themselves (not that they’re against that concept in general), but rather it’ll just get redistributed into payments for more popular tracks. Nonetheless, whether you think this is a good or bad move it’s interesting to learn a bit most about the makeup of the Spotify catalogue.

From NME:

According to Spotify data, there are around 100 million songs on the service, yet only around 37.5million meet the new requirements to generate revenue.

…

Spotify said that 99.5 per cent of all streams on the platform “are of tracks that have above 1,000 streams.”

It’s a real “winner takes all” situation. And darkly amusing to learn that one of the non-malicious reasons they’re doing this is that, because they anyway pay so badly, artists with those kinds of listening numbers were in practical terms not receiving any payment even under the former regime.

On average a song that got under 1000 streams over the past year earned a whopping $0.03 per month. And not even that 3 cents made it to the place you probably thought it did given the minimum withdrawals and transaction fees that the non-Spotify institutions like to apply. And that’s even before we consider the fact that, as we covered before, most money that does eventually get out of the system goes to somewhere other than the artist’s bank account for reasons of varying legitimacy.

US imposes first-ever limits on levels of toxic PFAS in drinking water

(From The Guardian)

PFAS are a set of chemical compounds that have been traditionally used for making things like water, stain or heat resistant products.

The problem is that they have been repeatedly shown to be risk factors for many illnesses:

The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid problems, decreased immunity, hormone disruption and a range of other serious health issues

They also don’t break down naturally, so end up being dissipated all through our environment, including into our drinking water. Hundreds of millions of Americans are likely being exposed in this way. Along with people from the rest of the world - a recent study found places all over the world where the groundwater exceeded the recommended thresholds, even when we know the levels are likely underestimated.

…this study suggests that a large fraction of surface and groundwaters globally exceed PFAS international advisories and regulations and that future PFAS environmental burden is likely underestimated.

These laws don’t cover every type of PFAS and certainly aren’t a ban. And only a minority of the average person’s PFAS exposure comes from water - probably around 20%. Other sources include the food we consume and the dust we breathe in. But, limitations acknowledged, they should improve the safety of drinking water.

EPA scientists calculated that the new limits will result in thousands of fewer birth-weight related infant deaths, kidney cancer deaths, bladder cancer deaths and deaths from cardiovascular disease

Assuming there are least acceptable alternatives for any critical use-cases, perhaps we can also hope to see more companies following 3Ms example and no longer seeing it as desirable to bother producing PFAS in the first place. Their decision to stop was at least partially due to the trend in regulations like these.

January 2024 saw the probably the biggest known leak of personal data yet known. An astonishing 26 billion records from various sources was found by researchers to available via open resources.

“The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts,” the researchers said.

Rather than newly hacked data, it seems to at least mostly be a collection of historical data breaches all handily available in one download. Which makes sense when one realises who the leaker was, outlined below.

Cybernews reports on some of the sites whose data was in the haul - site name and number of records:

• Tencent (21.5B),
• Weibo (504M),
• MySpace (360M),
• Twitter (281M),
• Wattpad (271M),
• NetEase (261M)
• Deezer (258M),
• Linkedin (251M),
• AdultFriendFinder (220M),
• Zynga (217M) ,
• Luxottica (206M),
• Evite (179M),
• Adobe (153M),
• MyFitnessPal (151M,)
• Canva (143M),
• JD.com (142M),
• Badoo (127M),
• VK (101M),
• Youju (100M).
• Daily Motion (86M),
• Dropbox (69M),
• Telegram (41M),
• and many other companies and organizations.

They set up a site where you can see if your data has been leaked which includes the above collection.

It seems like it was actually a site that offers the service of checking whether your personal data got leaked that was the inadvertent offender in this case. Whoops.

Leak-Lookup, a data breach search engine, said it was the holder of the leaked dataset. The platform posted a message on X, saying the problem behind the leak was a “firewall misconfiguration,” which was fixed.

Started learning how to be a ‘Full-Stack Developer’ with Mimo.

Being a DuoLingo streak addict, as well as a not-entirely-proud owner of such fine web properties as this one (along with a heady mix of being desperate to learn things in a world where a 2 minute break is too much to ask for) it was hard to resist when a friend tipped me off that there’s Duo equivalents but for coding.

I’m trying Mimo. It’s got basically identical types of gamification as Duo - streams, leagues, gems (well, coins) and similar 2 minute fill in the blanks and/or finish the line type exercises. The path I’m on promises to tech me everything web from html through to backend databases. Some of which I kind of know at least substantially outdated versions of already But I learned, as many of us did back in the day, more from the View Source menu option of a browser than actual education. A further variety of languages are available to learn if this isn’t your cup of tea - Python, SQL, Swift, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

Sololearn is a similar looking competitor if Mimo doesn’t do it for you. They have a few extra languages on top of the above including C, C++ and Java as well as some more general fundamentals courses like ‘Tech for everyone’ and a new offering on using generative AI.

It’s too early to tell so far whether 3 minutes a day is going to make me the world’s best web programmer or not. Mimo’s site does proudly suggest one can ‘get hired’ after working through their offerings. But given I still don’t think I could hold a conversation in Spanish even after literally 1000 days. I guess I’ll see what it feels like if and when I get into topics I’m not already sort of familiar with.

TIL that an astonishing (to me) 1 in every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord.

The article I learned that from has made me question my thinking a bit. Previously I’d assumed that the broken UK housing market is essentially a problem of supply and that we should basically get over our NIMBYism and build, build, build. That still feels like it would be a good idea, and actually attracts mainstream political support these days, at least to some extent.

But apparently the statistical evidence isn’t tremendously in favour of this being the only, or perhaps even primary, problem. The ratio homes to households has actually grown over the past 25 years. And it’s not an especially bad ratio compared to other countries, the UK having about the average homes per capita for an OECD country, 468 per 1000 people in 2019.

So perhaps a large part of it is also a problem of legislation. Houses are simply getting into the hands of the wrong people. If so, then the argument goes that what we really need is some far less friendly policies when it comes to (private) landlordism.

It’s not clear to me that people’s homes should really ever be investment vehicles. They should be high quality, decent and healthful to live in. That may not be compatible with unbridled capitalism in a country of great economic inequality.

In a recent paper “Beware of Botshit: How to manage the epistemic risks of generative chatbots” , Hannigan et al. introduce (I think) the concept of ‘botshit’.

It relates to a particular style of use of output from one of the currently-fashionable generative AI models - ChatGPT, Bard et al - and is defined as:

Chatbot generated content that is not grounded in truth and is then uncritically used by a human for communication and decision-making tasks.

And “not grounded in truth” is a common feature of today’s large language models, as at the end of the day:

…generative chatbots are not concerned with intelligent knowing but with prediction.

An obvious example of botshit in practice might be the hundreds of websites that NewsGuard identified as having been created by generative AI and then published without care or concern by humans

Botshit can be distinguished from “bullshit”, which necessitates the same style of applying potential nonsense to a task, but in this case the content is specified as having a human origin.

Human-generated content that has no regard for the truth which a human then applies for communication and decision-making tasks

And it’s distinguishable again from “hallucinations” which is what occurs when chatbots produce:

…coherent sounding but inaccurate or fabricated content

Because botshit requires not only that a hallucination may have occurred, but that a human actively used the results for a given task.

Once LLM content potentially containing a hallucination is used by a human, this application transforms it into botshit.

To date I’ve quite liked the “fluent bullshit” formulation for describing generative AI nonsense output, although botshit is both catchier and makes is easy to distinguish the specific act of using AI generated ramblings for a specific task from other adjacent concepts.

📧 Reading the Garbage Day newsletter.

This often hilarious, sometimes thought-provoking, always addictive newsletter is all about what one could call internet culture, drama, beefs, whatever.

The latest edition I read caused me to learn the incredible fact that YouTube megastar MrBeast is spending the same amount on some of his mind-splattering retention-edit-pilled videos as an episode from the first five seasons of Game of Thrones cost to make. And there’s not even a dragon in the couple I put myself through. Yes, some of Señor Beast’s content apparently costs him $5 million per ep.

Want to stay up to date on the latest TikTok spat or AI growth-hack monstrosity without having to lend the actual offenders your eyes? Read about it in this newsletter instead.

Garbage Day is for folks that remember growing up in the west wild of AIM and Kazaa and message boards and know that, even though it’s probably politically destabilized most of the planet, the internet can still good and fun.

📺 Watched season 21 of of Dragon’s Den.

BBC ‘Business Thursday’ hit our household again this year with the Thursday back-to-back showing of both this den and the (aforementioned) Apprentice.

Again it’s a program where little changes over the years. They shook things up a little with the Dragons with a couple of ‘special guest’ celebrity-style judges popping in to throw some money around. And there was an episode where they had to overlay a health warning having failed to call out that there was little medical evidence that ‘ear seeds’ cured myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

This was possibly less of a faux pas than the Apprentice of course, one of whose candidates mysteriously vanished from the after-show gatherings having been found to be spouting ‘vile and sexist’ stuff about feminism, Judaism and Hinduism. He’d previously set up the “University of Masculinity” to find Moroccan wives with the ideals he prefers for divorced Muslim men,

But overall, the den provided oddly reassuring old familiar stuff from an earlier era. Sure, we could lecture sternly about the ever-increasing inappropriate valorisation of business, money and personal status above the social good. But at least that’s an old, pre perma-crisis problem.

Today’s DuoLingo seems to be 100% sponsored by our dog.

📺 Watched The Power.

This is the TV adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s justly-famous book of the same name. Or at least part of it.

It’d been so long since I read the book that I’d forgotten everything about it except the main premise - that women everywhere start to develop the weird ability to create and transmit electricity from their bodies at a level far more than what’s necessary to fatally electrocute people - and that I enjoyed it a great deal.

The key point being made here is around the implications for a world in which the average woman is no longer fundamentally threatened without recourse by physically stronger males; a world in which women by default have the upper hand when it comes to power. What would such a world look like? And, always of interest to me in this type of story, how would the transition phase go, how would those who today hope the power react to their potential dethronement?

Which made the start of the show a little disappointing, it being less captivating than I remembered the book as being. But as time went on either it got better or I subconsciously learned to like it. By the end I was into it enough that it’s very obviously not-really-the-end made me hanker for a second series.

R. A. Fisher’s quote from his address to the 1938 First Indian Statistical Congress remains extraordinarily true, even if the guy himself may have had some rather problematic views in other domains.

To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.

True enough to make for a good email signature if nothing else.

Immediate low-key stress response whenever I see a message like this from a product owned by Meta.

(It popped up on my WhatsApp recently.)

‘Refugee Astronaut III’, from a recent visit to the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition ‘Being Human’.

From their commentary:

…it is hard to see Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Refugee Astronaut’ as anything other than some sort of dire omen from an environmentally catastrophic future.

🎶 Listening to Saviors by Green Day.

I’m constantly amazed that bands that were big when I was young are still in one piece all these years later when some of us normies barely seem to have made it. How this bunch preserved enough energy to keep expressing their distaste for modern day America in what sounds like such physically demanding ways I’m not sure, but they did.

Their distaste is indeed real. Harking back non-too-subtly to their outstanding 2004 album “American Idiot” - remember that was the time of George Bush, 9/11, the Iraq war and so on - they seem no more enamoured with the American lifestyle now, with first track on this album being “The American Dream is Killing Me”. The earlier song’s critique of mass-media brain-numbing television culture with Bush-era “redneck” vibes and a kind of paranoid alienation has been updated to reflect today’s landscape, with shoutouts to today’s conspiracy culture, virulent homelessness, obsolescence and the continuing privatisation of everything all embedded within track 1.

Later on in the album we learn that “Strange days are here to stay”; days that include fentanyl addicted grandmothers, ubiquitous racism and a late-running Uber.

A real product of its time.

It’s rather alien to mainstream British culture, but:

Reptile meat is not unlike chicken: high in protein, low in saturated fats, and with widespread aesthetic and culinary appeal

A new paper suggests that farming snakes - pythons to be specific - is better for the environment and a more efficient use of food, water and other resources than the typical meat fare of pigs, cows et al.

They’re also easier to farm, especially in a world prone to climate-change related uncertainties.

Also I’m not sure exactly how to interpret the line “They display few of the complex animal welfare issues commonly seen in caged birds and mammals” - but perhaps they’re also better in terms of coping with the capitalism-driven cruelty that most of our lifeforms-destined-to-be-meat undergo? They’re also less likely to transmit zoonotic viruses along the lines of the various bird or swine flus or, of course, Covid-19.

So there we go: if you are not yet willing or able to move to a plant based diet, but yet have similar concerns to many folk that have taken that step, then perhaps you could consider moving to a snake-based one as an intermediate step on that route. After all, it only feels weird to certain cultures - snake soup is for instance a “popular Cantonese delicacy”.

📚 Finished reading The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow.

This is the sequel to a book I read last year Red Team Blues. Or perhaps in part a prequal insomuch as we learn more about the life of Martin Hench, forensic accountant extraordinaire, before the crypto-infused adventures detailed in the earlier book.

This time he’s up against a different variety of business-related con artists. He inadvertently gets exposed to a fairly pernicious but fixable scam whilst trying to have a good time on a rich-person’s vacation - no surprise there - the impact of which comes back to haunt him years later. Along the way we encounter a bunch of the scams which we have all, in real life, suffered from over the past few decades.

As ever with Doctorow’s work, it’s highly influenced by his point of view on various political issues. Readers of his excellent blog, Pluralistic, will find a lot familiar here. I’m sure it’s meant at least somewhat as a tool to educate people outside of his blog readership of some of the issues we see with modern-day technology, high finance, out of control capitalism, weird tech-bro billionaires, all that good / terrifying stuff. You will for instance become very familiar with the dynamics of pyramid schemes. But in a good and gripping way.

Whilst fiction, I’m certain much of what is described is very closely based on reality actually happened. Certainly the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina is real, as is its association with Wrigley of chewing gum fame. The Prison Industrial Complex is a real thing in California and beyond. The capitalists insatiable drove to profit from prisoners is real.

Presiding as a monopoly over prison phone calls has made big business lots of private money for years. The “free” tablets given to prisoners are real, and equally problematic, even down to the charges made to prisoners to purchase a “stamp” when they send an email - although there does appear to be an in-jail jailbreaking movement.

And even though for-profit prisons (only) in California were supposedly phased out around 2020 - years after the events of the book - private prison firms have still found ways to make big money by exploiting folk for whom in reality we have a duty of care for, not a duty to profit from at any cost.

The title “Bezzle” comes from a contraction of “embezzlement” and is used here as in John Kenneth Galbraith’s conception of the term as referring to:

The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.

You can hear an excerpt of the audio book version on Doctorow’s blog for free.

A few exhibits below that caught my eye from a recent trip to the Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition “The Cult of Beauty”.

Our major new exhibition explores notions of beauty across time and cultures.

Around the world, beauty is constantly seen as an ideal worthy of going to great lengths to achieve. But what are the driving forces that lead us to believe in a myth of universal beauty, despite its evolving nature?

First up, a “Vanitas” head. This one is a wax carving, representing life and death. In general, Vanitas as an art genre refers to artworks that are designed to symbolise “the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures”

This creepy looking thing is a “beauty mask”. A century ago, women might wear these to supposedly remove wrinkles and blemishes from their face. Modern-day versions of something similar exist today, see for example the £2000 “Cellreturn Platinum LED Mask”. This is definitely not a personal recommendation.

A 2 metre+ high collage created by Eszter Magyar who runs the Instagram account “makeupbrutalism”, called “It makes no sense to be beautiful if no one is ugly”. The photos are closeups of herself, covered with various types of makeup.

Finally for now, “The Black Morphew”. This is actually two photos I pasted together. The left one is what the sculpture looks like to the human eye. But if you take a photo with your flash enabled, the result is something very different; the right hand version.

It’s named after a skin lotion made of Pelican gall bladders and wine (yum?) that was supposed to make dark scars turn silver.

🎶 Listening to GUTS (spilled) by Olivia Rodrigo.

I’m not often a fan of “deluxe” versions of albums; often I feel like the best and most coherent stuff has obviously been put onto the basic release. But I liked GUTS enough that I’m currently giving this one a go. It’s the original album + 5 songs.

Once more disregarding the warnings from future-documentary Westworld, I noticed that OpenAI gave ChatGPT a memory. It’ll start self-electing to remember things as you chat, so perhaps it’s time to start acting politely and respectfully when making your demands. You can explicitly tell it to “Remember that I love robots” or whatever.

The intent is that it’ll remember facts that will help inform what or how it communicates to you in the future. Its examples include a parent who without the help of ChatGPT would apparently have forgotten that their child likes jellyfish when designing a birthday card for her.

You can manage the memory to make it forget anything or everything. And there’s a kind of incognito-mode “temporary chat” feature where no history or memories are kept, nor is data used for future training.

Otherwise though, memories are used to train their future models unless you’ve a paid teams or enterprise account - so don’t let it remember anything too confidential. And of course, like all internet connected services, no doubt one day it’ll be hacked or otherwise leak, so there’s another reason you might not want to overindulge in the feature.

📺 Watched Black Mirror season 6.

Despite the fact that I’m not sure my nerves need shattering any further now we live in a world of perma-crisis, I risked watching the latest season of Black Mirror, which was first released in 2023.

Overall, good (bleak) times, although inevitably not quite as magnificent as some of the earlier seasons.

My favourite was episode 1, “Joan Is Awful”, probably because it’s the one that seems most plausible, most contemporary, most Black-Mirror-classic “what if phones, but too much” with its themes of AI, deep fakes, the everyday surveillence technology we willingly carry around with us each day. privacy, unreadable terms of service, algorithmic-engagement-optimised streaming services and the like.

A couple of the others were a bit less phone involved, more classic horror at points. One thing I really feel like I’ve learnt from various recent-ish day media is that if you ever discover a mysterious old VHS tape lying around then for pity’s sake please do not try and watch it. Come on, it’s been at least two decades since The Ring taught us the perils of that path.

Here comes yet another example of conservatives hating law and order, at least those laws that seek to do anything other than protect their in-group.

GB News - a horror show of a TV channel that was Britain’s thankfully lackluster take on Fox News which an unholy number of our serving government are nonetheless much too fond of - continues to get in trouble with the regulators.

In case you’re curious about what kind of shows you’re almost certainly missing given that at times it’s been so unpopular with viewers that some of its broadcasts attracted literally zero viewers

Johnson, who was tapped to join GB News radio in December, is a presenter, programme maker and commentator. Farage presents a daily primetime show on the channel, while Rees Mogg hosts a State of the Nation programme.

Several advertisers also dropped out of the channel as soon as two days after the channel launched and they saw what kind of dross their products were being shoved in between. In a fit of pique, thin-skinned chairman-at-the-time Andrew Neil threw his toys out of the pram and decided he’s going to ban the brands who withdrew their adverts from advertising. I’m sure they were devastated at this classic “you can’t quit, I’m firing you!” tantrum.

So the channel does little but lose vast amounts of its investors' money, which is probably its main contribution towards a fair and just society. Although a fair whack of said cash unfortunately goes towards six-figure salaries for the likes of Lee Anderson, the ex-Conservative deputy Chairman who managed to say so many stupid and offensive things during his £100k side-job that even today’s Conservative party saw fit to withdraw the whip.

Anyhow, the big names mentioned above provide a clue as to their latest infraction of regulations. The regulator Ofcom recently censured the channel for breaking British rules on news impartiality.

Under the Broadcasting Code, news, in whatever form, must be presented with due impartiality. Additionally, a politician cannot be a newsreader, news interviewer or news reporter unless, exceptionally, there is editorial justification.

Dodgy biased news from people that should know better (not to mention be focusing on their primary jobs) is only one way in which GB News fails to respect GB rules. Just a couple of weeks ago Ofcom ruled that the channel had broadcast misogynistic comments made by the inane presenter(?) Lawrence Fox unchallenged and uncontextualised. The comments had generated almost 9000 complaints.

We found that Mr Fox’s comments constituted a highly personal attack on Ms Evans and were potentially highly offensive to viewers. They reduced her contribution to a broadcast discussion on mental health - in her professional capacity as a political journalist - to a judgment on whether she, or women like her who publicly expressed their political opinions, were sexually desirable to men.

As such, we considered that Mr Fox’s comments were degrading and demeaning both to Ms Evans and women generally and were clearly and unambiguously misogynistic.

Towards the end of 2023 it was noted that Ofcom had 14 open investigations into the channel. So to be honest you could just scroll through Ofcom’s news page to get a good idea of how often this particular channel likes to break the rules so overtly that the regulators get involved.

From The Guardian:

Five people have been killed and 10 injured in Gaza when they were hit by a pallet of aid parachuted into the territory as part of a humanitarian airdrop.

Further evidence we live in the worst timeline when even well-meaning attempts to save the lives of people in extraordinarily desperate situations end up killing them.

…all of a sudden, the parachute didn’t open and fell down like a rocket on the roof of one of the houses.