Tootfinder

So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

I’ve been testing a theory: many people who are high on #AI and #LLMs are just new to automation and don’t realize you can automate processes with simple programming, if/then conditions, and API calls with zero AI involved.
So far it’s been working!
Whenever I’ve been asked to make an AI flow or find a way to implement AI in our work with a client, I’ve returned back with an automation flow that uses 0 AI.
Things like “when a new document is added here, add a link to it in this spreadsheet and then create a task in our project management software assigned to X with label Y”.
And the people who were frothing at the mouth at how I must change my mind on AI have (so far) all responded with resounding enthusiasm and excitement.
They think it’s the same thing. They just don’t understand how much automation is possible without any generative tools.

Demystifying #AutomaticInstrumentation: How the Magic Actually Works
https://www.causely.ai/blog/demystifying-automatic-instrumentation

This is one of the most shortsighted and greediest things I've seen a successful tech company do in a while.
Just staggeringly mindblowing how the C-suite there failed to understand or just decided to ignore what their customers would do.

Of course, my default will always be "keep things out of the government so those things can't be held hostage" but that's a longer term goal. First, understand the situation then figure out how to respond.
Now that everyone is good and scared, and realizing that a whole chunk of the population can suddenly go without food, I'm gonna remind everyone that the time to learn to grow food and forage is not *when the food runs out*. It's in the years before that.
Here's a fun place to start with foraging....
https://youtube.com/@blackforager

My big gripe with "AI" is that a big reason why it's sold as the second coming of Jesus is that most tech people fundamentally do not understand how it actually works.
Their reasoning goes something like, "It works sort of ok for code generation, and programming is the hardest possible thing in the world to do, every other human endeavor is trivial compared to writing code, therefore it must excel at anything else!".
So it ends up being pushed due to a mixture of ignorance and hubris; and especially being stuffed into things it should never be used for (usually when users don't have a say which software they need to use for work).
The finbros are happily along for the ride because they just need something that can be hyped to pump and dump.

Finished “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey, the short novel and 2024 Booker Prize winner. I am at a loss to understand how that could possibly be so. I hated it. Because it is short and in hope there was something redeeming, I saw it through, regrettably.
There are moments of beautifully lyrical prose, but my god… just endless lists of things. The book is plotless, which can work in an essay structure. But it needs to be compelling. This wasn’t.
1/5 stars ⭐️

Orbital
A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Boo…

Things that I will never understand: going through life as a racist bigot asshole.
The sheer energy spent on thinking in every decision and in every human interaction whether you need to be hateful or not and how this hate should manifest.