davidbookstaber

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Review: The Handmaid's Tale

Since its debut in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale has offered an uncanny look at a society that descends — almost seamlessly — into theocratic totalitarianism. Adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, the Hulu series finds fresh horror not in the invention of new dystopias but in the recreation of real-world repression. When Atwood wrote her novel, the most salient examples may have been Soviet-era…

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From https://www.thediff.co/archive/longreads-open-thread-126 regarding cheating with LLMs, Byrne Hobart writes: One question that comes up in this is: what do the students, and the professors, think they're actually doing here? When systems can be gamed, it's worth asking what the system is trying to accomplish. In some domains, people are perfectly aware of this: chess players know that computers can beat them, but that winning is not the only point of chess; weightlifters realize that pulleys would make the deadlift a lot easier. The outcome is a proxy, not the end goal, so it's worthwhile to ask: if gpt-4o can write plenty of grammatically-correct sentences, summarize texts, write snippets of code, etc., why exactly is society devoting so many nice campuses and talented teachers to the project of teaching people to replicate the outputs of a cheap consumer product? And, if students aren't doing the work and professors can't tell the difference, what's the resulting credential really worth?

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Light Interaction App

Check out this nifty little touch-screen-compatible, WebGL-powered application. To test out the latest AI, I added Github Copilot to VSCode and asked it to build a simple web application that lets the user move three radiant lights (red, green, and blue) around a screen to see how adding colors works. (For example, if the three colors are right on top of each other it looks like a single white…

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Word of the day: Gyming

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Add a tip?

Do you ever feel underappreciated? I sure do. So I built this mock tip prompt that’s free for anyone to use: Just go to https://david.bookstaber.com/tip to display it, then shove your device in the face of anyone who you believe owes you gratitude! (I know it looks trivial, but I spent almost an hour getting that web page to work properly on every mobile device I could test.)

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SpaceX Falcon 9 Flyby

I glanced out a window last night and saw this brilliant spectacle unfurl as the second stage of a Falcon 9 traversed the sky west of Phoenix at an altitude of 90 miles and ground speed reaching more than 10,000mph: Since this was shortly after sunset, the exhaust plume was high enough to be illuminated by the sun from over the horizon. (Here’s SpaceX’s video and mission summary.)

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Venus

Now in the first week of February 2025, Venus is approaching its peak brightness. Here is a picture of it near the waxing crescent moon while at a brightness magnitude of -4.8. Compare this to Mars, which had a magnitude of -1.4 in the photos following its lunar eclipse three weeks ago: Venus has almost twice the diameter of Mars (which has twice the diameter of the moon), and presently it is…

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Martian Eclipse (Lunar Occultation)

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Bright Planets: Venus and Mars

Coming into 2025, have you noticed that Venus and Mars are growing quite bright? Looking at a map of planetary positions it’s easy to see why Mars is approaching a point of peak apparent brightness (which it will reach on January 16): it’s on the same side of the sun as we are, so it’s relatively close; and we are aligned to see the full reflection of the sun-lit “day” side. Inner planet…

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How much CO2 does a gas stove add to indoor air?

CO₂ meter next to gas stove boiling water For fun I got a carbon dioxide (CO₂) meter. Standard atmosphere contains 400ppm of CO₂. Some studies suggest that mental performance begins to degrade when CO₂ concentration exceeds 1000ppm. I was surprised to see that when cooking on my gas stove (in the kitchen) the CO₂ meter in my office began to register levels approaching 2000ppm. I was curious to…

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How much water is in the air?

My skin and sinuses don’t like dry air, and nothing dries air like heating it: Heat freezing air at 40% relative humidity (RH) to room temperature and the relative humidity drops below 10%, which is as dry as deserts at noon! So when indoor heat comes on in the winter I break out the humidifiers. If my living space has a central air handler I install an automatic humidifier on that. If not I…

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Alcohol is more efficient than sugar

Centuries ago, when bulk transportation was expensive and raw foods were at risk of loss to spoilage or pests, distant farmers might prefer to convert sugar-bearing grain and fruit into ethanol, distill it to concentrate it, and transport that concentrate to distant markets. (This fact was a primary cause of the Whiskey Rebellion in response to the imposition of a tax on distilled alcohol.) I…

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Why is COX cable afraid of people "filming or recording" in their stores?

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Pepsi checking whether we're paying attention?

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100 Free 4k UHD Background Photos

I went through my landscape photos and picked the best hundred, then spent time enhancing each one to make a good background image at 4k resolution (3840×2160 pixels). I have shared them through this Google Photos album under the CC BY-NC-SA license so you can save your favorites. If you simply save the images to an album in your own Google Photos then you can set that as your “Screensaver” for…

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A simple test for whether "Assault Weapons" Like AR-15 Rifles can be banned

I see a shortcut around historical arguments that would moot a great deal of the current debate on gun control: Citizens of the United States should be allowed to keep and bear any weapon that is used by law enforcement agencies.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of a 4th Circuit decision upholding state laws that ban “assault weapons” from citizen ownership. (See WSJ article here and FOX summary here.) Arguments against citizen ownership of “weapons of war” can make good soundbites: Battlefield weapons belong on battlefields, right? This reasoning gets muddy when we look at the intent behind the Second…

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Police Perjury ("Testilying")

Police give misleading or false testimony under oath with such regularity that police testimony in court is often referred to as “testilying.” I previously mentioned this happening in my own case. I have direct experience with another egregious case. After police served search warrants on my residential property following the murder of a neighbor, my father-in-law who is a business attorney…