Steve P.

remlaps and remlaps-lite on Steem sites like

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

On the #Steem blockchain, I think the potential for value creation by harnessing delegation and beneficiary rewards is massively underappreciated. Especially in combination with LLMs and other forms of AI.

Here's why - https://t.co/ndZRjDfE42

@steemit @SteemNetwork

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

@darrylsden @steemit Thanks! I was lucky to be there at just the right moment.

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

I never thought I'd write a @steemit blog post about the American Robin, but here it is. It's a common bird, but I lucked into some interesting photos during May photography practice.

One set shows an adult feeding a worm to a fledgling on the ground.

https://t.co/7j59L5QrL1

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

@darrylsden @steemit @inaturalist My wife and I have competing names for the Red-tailed Hawks that live nearby. I call 'em Frosty & Toasty, but my wife says Fred & Ethel. (A post on them is coming soon.)

What type of animal is Henry?

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

My latest blog post on @steemit. Photography practice photos of animals that I hadn't observed before May. 8 species covering 14 @inaturalist observations.

https://t.co/NwlhpTCY9M

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

Next up in my blog series on @steemit covering backyard wildlife photography practice. This post lists animals with no @inaturalist observations after April, and animals with first observations during May.

Click through to see photos from May.

https://t.co/rshhttTLKU

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

And here's an "Explainer video" from @NotebookLM covering the posts with my April and May observations.

https://t.co/frBx6rLyZD

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

Here's the summary post for my wildlife photography practice in May. Stay tuned for more details during the rest of June.

71 observations on @inaturalist covering 27 species.

https://t.co/Ta64FfNUD3

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.

The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.

Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.

Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.

Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.

There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.

We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).

That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.

America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.

Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

Recent algorithm changes on X may be unfairly hammering Brave users. And there's a larger issue here about bad interactions between robots and privacy measures.

@nikitabier @brave

My friend Jay Maynard, who some of you may know as Tron Guy, just got permabanned off X for "inauthentic behavior". His appeal was swiftly denied.

Jay is not a spammer, scammer or engagement farmer; he is, in fact, exactly the kind of good citizen X says it wants. Jay asked Gemini for analysis, and now thinks he knows what happened.

Brave, as a privacy measure, randomly changes the identity presented to sites in order to avoid tracking by the ad vampires. Gemini suggested that some code at X interpreted this as spammy behavior using multiple browsers. If so - and this does seem plausible - everybody trying to protect their privacy with Brave is at risk.

This is a general problem, not just an X glitch or a Brave issue. Social media sites are increasingly relying for security on forms of heuristic AI that are prone to unacceptably high false-positive rates.

More specifically, platforms are increasingly treating a user's refusal to be tracked, fingerprinted, and categorized as a hostile act. When a site makes it impossible to connect via a privacy-focused user agent without getting flagged as a malicious bot, it stops being "security" and effectively becomes a retaliatory lockout for protecting oneself.

Worse yet, such system architecture provides no circuit breaker - humans are only rarely and exceptionally asked review for errors. Jay's appeal denial came back so fast that it was obvious no meat-brain ever saw it. He has filed complaints within the Minnesota Attorney General and the Better Business Bureau, because what else can he do? The robots have locked him out.

Badly designed robots and zeal to squeeze human oversight out of the system forces regular citizens to rely on state law enforcement or consumer protection bureaus.

Allow me to gently suggest to the people running X that unless you want politicians poking their noses into your business and imposing constraints on you that you are not going to like, you need to fix your security and appeal processes so running to the law isn't necessary.

[Hawk Mountain @Hawk_Mountain]

Berks Sinfonietta will return for the 6th annual Music on the Mountain on Saturday, June 13! Join us for a live outdoor classical performance in the Sanctuary’s accessible Amphitheater, this year featuring three regional premieres.

Learn more at https://t.co/hf5kjzgipk

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

Here's the fifth and final post in my series covering my wildlife photography practice during the month of April.

The Raptors: Cooper's Hawk, Red-tailed Hawk, Turkey Vulture, and American Bald Eagle.

https://t.co/6G318hBCaN

[Ryan Peterman @ryanlpeterman]

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++ and a former researcher at Bell Labs at its peak. I interviewed him about:

• What made Bell Labs different
• Programming language design: types, memory safety, bootstrapping
• When abstraction improves performance
• Anecdotes from building C++
• Thoughts on AI writing C++
• Mistakes he'd change while building C++

Where to watch:
• YouTube: https://t.co/THHTMP9VoT
• Spotify: https://t.co/5kVNWCYEAI
• Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/jOYDGtHtd1
• Transcript: https://t.co/5jmJQWVtWp

Thank you to this episode's sponsors for supporting my work:
• Cursor 3: a unified workspace for building software with agents, check it out at https://t.co/PgHyLKgrxW
• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://t.co/y8noBzGc3U

Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro
0:50 - The origin of C++
8:46 - What Bell Labs was like
17:24 - Dennis Ritchie
24:00 - When to build a programming language
31:59 - Bootstrapping a language
33:58 - C++ is not object-oriented
37:32 - Discussing type systems
46:20 - Memory safety
49:26 - Standards committee anecdotes
1:09:40 - Adding automatic garbage collection to C++
1:18:25 - Template instantiation is Turing complete
1:21:57 - Abstraction and performance
1:28:51 - AI writing code
1:35:54 - His motivation
1:39:18 - Famous quotes
1:46:48 - Reflecting on building C++
1:49:12 - Top C++ book recommendation
1:50:59 - Advice for his younger self
1:58:06 - Outro

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

Part 2 of my first encountered species during April photography practice: Cooper's Hawk, House Finch, Carolina Wren, American Crow, and Eastern Bluebird.

Logging observations on @inaturalist and blogging about them on @steemit .

https://t.co/L2u1LMZ4wR

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

Still learning photography, logging wildlife observations for @inaturalist & blogging on @steemit. These are 6 species that I first saw in April (Downy Woodpecker, Painted Turtle, Canada Goose, Red-winged Blackbird, White-throated Sparrow and Osprey.)

https://t.co/cEiEQtyQDf

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

What the AIs are teaching me about photography: Lower zoom -> more detail (in some cases).

https://t.co/rEEGgxlCIw

[Claude @claudeai]

We’ve agreed to a partnership with @SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity.

This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.

[Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation]

Kaspersky has uncovered a backdoor embedded in the official Windows installer of Daemon Tools, a widely used disc imaging application.

Security researchers believe Chinese-speaking hackers carried out a supply chain attack that began on April 8, compromising thousands of systems.

The attack primarily targeted organizations in retail, scientific, manufacturing, and government sectors in Russia, Belarus, and Thailand.

The backdoor remains active, allowing deployment of additional malware.

Disc Soft, the developer of Daemon Tools, has confirmed it is aware of the report and is investigating with high priority.

Users who installed recent versions of the software are advised to monitor antivirus alerts and assess their risk.

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

And here's video explainer of the article that was created with @NotebookLM .

https://t.co/meDlPwbYNc

[Steve P. @SharesSteem]

I'm using #wildlife to learn #photography. Here's my #citizenscience summary for April on @steemit:

- More than 1700 pictures in total
- 64 observations for @inaturalist with 23 unique species
- 59 iNaturalist observations reached "Research Grade"

https://t.co/089CqL1Lbo