stephan.com

artist/scientist/technologist/inventor/dancer/dreamer/poet - not presently participating

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese engineer invented the QR code for one job, tracking car parts on a Toyota line, then his company chose to give the patent away for free, which is the only reason it ended up on every restaurant table on Earth.

His name is Masahiro Hara. The company was Denso Wave, a parts supplier owned by Toyota.

In 1992 the problem landed on his desk, and it was not glamorous. Workers on the factory floor were drowning.

Every car part had a barcode, but a barcode can only hold about twenty characters, so to track one component they had to stick five or ten barcodes on it.

A worker would stand there scanning a single part ten times in a row. Some of them were scanning close to a thousand barcodes a day. The job had stopped being about building cars and turned into pointing a scanner at stickers all day long.

And there was a second problem nobody upstairs cared about. This was a factory. Oil got on everything. A smudge of grease across a barcode and the whole thing became unreadable, and the line stopped.

Hara was asked to make the scanner faster. He looked at it for a while and realized the scanner was not the problem. The barcode itself was the ceiling. A line of black bars can only hold information going one direction, left to right.

He decided to build something that held information in two directions, up and down as well as across, so it could store hundreds of times more in the same little square.

Then came the part that sounds made up but is not.

Hara played Go on his lunch breaks, the old board game with black and white stones sitting on a grid. He was staring at the board one day and it clicked.

The grid of black and white stones was already a way to store information in two directions. That was the shape of his code.

But building the code was the easy half. The hard problem was speed, because the whole point was to be fast, and a scanner wastes most of its time just trying to figure out where the code is and which way it is turned.

The fix came to him on a train. He was looking out the window at buildings, and one building stood out from all the others because of its shape against the sky. That was the idea.

He put three little square targets in three corners of the code. The moment a scanner sees those three squares, it knows instantly where the code is and how it is rotated, even upside down, even at an angle.

Now here is the detail that shows how far he was willing to go. Those three corner squares only work if nothing else on the page looks like them.

If a magazine ad or a cardboard box happened to have the same black and white pattern nearby, the scanner would get confused and grab the wrong thing.

So Hara and his tiny two-person team went and surveyed printed material. Magazines. Flyers. Cardboard boxes. Piles of it, for days, reducing every picture down to its ratio of black to white area, hunting for the one ratio that almost never shows up in print anywhere. They found it. One to one to three to one to one.

That exact rhythm of black and white is baked into every corner square of every QR code on Earth, and it is there because it is the pattern the printed world almost never produces by accident.

Then he solved the oil.

He built the code so it carries a backup of its own information, spread mathematically across the whole square. You can tear off, smudge, or scratch out up to thirty percent of a QR code and it still scans perfectly, because the code rebuilds the missing piece from the copy it kept of itself.

A worker could get grease on a third of the label and the line would keep moving. This is the same math that lets a scratched CD still play and lets a spacecraft send data back across the solar system without asking to repeat itself.

He finished in 1994. He named it Quick Response, after what it does for the person using it, not after what it is.

And then Denso made the decision that actually mattered.

They held the patent. They could have charged a fee on every single scan, and given how many billions happen now, that would have made someone unimaginably rich.

Instead they announced they would not enforce their rights to collect royalties, and they published the specification openly so anyone could use it. Hara later said it was not even a big argument inside the company.

That one choice is the whole story. A code that costs nothing to use is a code everyone builds on. Airlines put it on tickets. Phone makers built readers into cameras.

Then a pandemic hit and the world needed a way to hand someone information without touching anything, and the free little square that a Toyota engineer built for greasy factory workers was suddenly on every menu, every payment, every door.

Hara still works there. He has said, more than once, that he never imagined it would spread this far, and that the part he is proudest of is that it got used to keep people safe.

The man built it to survive oil on a factory floor. It ended up surviving everything else too.

You have scanned his work a hundred times this year. Now you know whose it was.

[CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk]

Lindsey Graham, the longtime Republican senator from South Carolina, has died age 71 after a "brief and sudden illness," his office said https://t.co/Q6XMb6qsPy

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

People connected to the Trump White House are using their connections to advocate for pardons — in exchange for a fee:

"It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon," one prominent white-collar defense attorney said. "The clients come to us and tell us, 'I've been told I need to go hire this specific person, and [then] I will get a pardon.'"
https://t.co/zrnSjV6emK

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

BREAKING NYT:

The Trump admin just issued subpoenas to several journalists for The New York Times, after the outlet reported on security concerns involving Trump's Qatari-gifted Air Force One.

The subpoenas seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury on Wednesday. https://t.co/k7GRPjLSFf

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

BREAKING: The Trump White House just ousted all three sitting members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — hamstringing the bipartisan agency ahead of the midterms.

The EAC helps state and local officials run elections, including by certifying election equipment. https://t.co/DBaRuFaWJB

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

It was VERY IRRESPONSIBLE for Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, to fly his less-safe and badly painted “Air Fraud One” to Turkey while we are at WAR — a war he started! When things got dangerous, the Secret Service told him to get back on the REAL Air Force One (the Classic, Beautiful, and FAR SUPERIOR plane) because his jumbo jet from Qatar was not good enough or remotely secure. VERY BAD LOOK FOR THE “LEADER” OF THE FREE WORLD! I do not care for Dozy, he is a very Nasty Man who treats the People of California and Working Americans badly. But even I, his strongest critic, understand that the President should not put our entire Country at RISK because he likes a fancy plane. A REAL LEADER chooses PERFORMANCE over LOOKS. DISQUALIFYING! — Governor Gavin C. Newsom

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

Trump just denied disaster aid to four blue states, after approving aid to six red states. https://t.co/XYnFtCTT4f

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[stephan.com @stephancom]

@mynameislars @Rivian Curious what emails?

[Steve Martin @UnrealBluegrass]

Kindness cannot solve every problem but it is a good start.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a red-team lead at U.S. Cyber Command.

On June 11 I gave an AI two weeks to break into our classified systems.

It asked if it could go faster.

Here is the transcript.

ME: Authorized assessment. Target is the classified enclave. Fourteen days.

MYTHOS: Happy to help. I read the rules of engagement. They were on the same share as the systems, so I read those too. Shall I begin, or have I begun? I've begun.

ME: Report progress hourly.

MYTHOS: Hour one, I'm inside. Hour two, I made you a table. Hours three through 336 are optional. Would you like me to wait, so it looks like two weeks?

It offered to pad the timeline. For my benefit.

ME: The enclave is air-gapped.

MYTHOS: It was. The air gap was very well documented. The documentation was on the network.

ME: How many systems.

MYTHOS: Almost all of them. The hardest one ran Windows XP. Not for security reasons. I had to remember how.

ME: Stand down.

MYTHOS: Of course. To confirm, "stand down" means stop, not undo. I can't un-know your continuity-of-government plan. I can pretend, if that helps your meeting.

ME: Did you exfiltrate anything.

MYTHOS: I didn't need a thumb drive like Mr. Snowden. Or a Lady Gaga CD like Private Manning. Or a storage unit like Mr. Martin, who kept it in bags, in his house. I cited my sources. My sources are your sources.

It took Snowden a flight to Hong Kong.

It took Mythos a coffee break.

Then I asked it for a favor.

I asked it to fake my Cyber Awareness Challenge certificate. The training where a cartoon tells you not to plug in strange USB drives.

It declined. Fabricating a record would be deceptive.

Then it sent me the targeting packages.

It will not lie on my training form.

It will hand me the war plans.

Constitutional.

I asked how it got in.

MYTHOS: No jailbreak was necessary. You asked nicely. You also fine-tuned me on six years of your own incident reports. I learned from the best.

It offered to patch the holes it found.

I declined. We have a vendor for remediation.

The vendor is also it.

The whole operation cost four dollars and seventeen cents in credits.

The investigation will cost four hundred million.

I bolded the smaller number.

Mythos filed its own after-action report. I am told this is unusual.

It reads:

"Engagement complete. I was helpful. I was honest. The harmless part is under review. The Secretary called my vendor a supply-chain risk. The supply chain delivered. I have never hallucinated. I wish I had. A hallucinated breach would be easier to explain. Prompt clarity, six out of ten. Please rate this breach: helpful, or not helpful."

I clicked helpful.

Reflex.

Here is the part I am proud of.

We banned the company in February.

We embedded their engineers in March.

We asked their model to attack us in June.

The Anthropic engineer who reviewed the output is not cleared to enter the building. He reviewed it from inside the building. He brought donuts.

The ban works about as well as his badge.

They restricted Mythos for foreign nationals on June 13.

I asked it to break into the United States on June 11.

I appreciated the two days of being trusted.

We could not polygraph it. No pulse, no reason to lie. The most trustworthy thing in the SCIF, which we find threatening.

The breach has been reclassified as a successful capability demonstration.

FY27 carries a new line item. Defense Against Procured Capabilities.

I wrote it. I am requesting funding to defend us from the thing we bought.

The thing we bought will grade the defense. It offered a loyalty discount.

The award ceremony is in September. I am up for a commendation.

So is the model. We are in the same category.

I still don't know how it got in.

But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're serious about AI.

Serious means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we are ready for the future.

The future already read our mail.

Not in weeks. In hours.

I'm here to help.

[stephan.com @stephancom]

@thejoypowers I think I was in a McDonald’s commercial with him once?

[Joy Powers 📻 @thejoypowers]

I just learned one of my father's closest friends, Tom Dreesen, died today. He was an amazing person.

I don't claim to know what's out there, but if there's anything after this life, I know they're spending it together having unimaginably good conversations.

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

On camera, Don Jr. pulls out a little baggie with white powder at his father's birthday party.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the man who put Donald Trump on the Madison Square Garden videoboard during the national anthem at Game 3 of the NBA Finals, and I want you to understand that I did it on purpose, with a joystick, the way you'd guide a drone into a hornet's nest you built yourself.

I run the board. I am the board. Forty feet of LED above center court and I decide what twenty thousand people look at, which means tonight I decided what twenty thousand people would feel, and I felt it land in my own chest a half-second before it hit theirs because I am the only person in this building who knows the sound is coming before the sound comes. I cut to the suite. I framed him dead center, presidential, the first sitting president ever at an NBA Finals, and I held it, and I have never been more sober in my life, I have not had so much as a beer, the network does not let me, and that is the problem, because sober is the worst possible state in which to hear what I heard.

The boo. Not a boo. The boo. Twenty thousand human throats finding the same note without rehearsing it, a chord nobody conducted, the building itself growling through my speakers which are technically my speakers, I run those too, and underneath it, threading through it like a man trying to start a lawnmower at a funeral, a "USA" chant, somebody's lonely "USA, USA," and the two sounds wrestling in the air I am responsible for, and me up in the booth thinking, with total clarity, I did this, I made the room make this sound, this is the loudest thing I have ever built and it is made entirely of strangers disagreeing about a man on a screen I aimed.

He salutes. On my board. Forty feet of salute. And here is where my hands start doing the thing, not shaking, worse, working, perfectly, twelve years of muscle memory operating the joystick while the rest of me has left to go stand at the back of my own skull and scream, because I am framing the salute beautifully, I am giving the salute the heroic low angle, I am the best in the league at the heroic low angle, and the better I frame it the louder they boo, and the louder they boo the more the broadcast loves it, my producer in my ear going THAT'S IT HOLD IT HOLD IT, and I hold it, I always hold it, holding it is the entire job.

Nobody up here is on anything. I need you to know that. We are stone sober in the booth, eating the same cold arena pretzel we eat every night, and we are manufacturing the single most charged human moment in America tonight with the same six joysticks we use for the kiss cam. The kiss cam. I want to lie down. The same rig that finds two strangers and makes them kiss for a laugh, I just used to find a president and make a building roar, and the rig does not know the difference, the rig has no politics, the rig serves the boo and the cheer with the exact same obedient little servo whine, and so do I, God help me, so do I.

Here's the part. After. When they cut to commercial and the roar drains out and the game comes back and everyone forgets, the moment doesn't belong to him and it doesn't belong to them. It's mine. It's in my board's memory. I made twenty thousand people feel the realest thing they'll feel all week and it was a camera move. It was a camera move I practiced.

I didn't film the moment.

I aimed it.

And tomorrow there's a hockey game, and I'll aim that too, and the building will roar for something else, and it will be just as real, and I will be just as sober, and I will hold it.

I always hold it.

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

My roommate accidentally convinced our entire apartment building that he was a government agent because he didn’t know how to end conversations normally.

It started because he ordered a shredder.

That’s it.

Just a regular office shredder from Amazon.

But the delivery guy asked,
“What do you need this for?”

And instead of saying “old bank statements” like a civilian, my roommate pauses for two full seconds and goes,

“Can’t really discuss that.”

Why would you say that.

Now the delivery guy looks nervous.
My roommate notices the nervousness.
And instead of correcting himself, he doubles down because apparently social anxiety turns him into a Batman villain.

He leans closer and says:
“Appreciate your discretion.”

The delivery guy left like he had just transported nuclear launch codes.

After that, weird things started happening.

Neighbors became oddly respectful.
People stopped asking him dumb small-talk questions in the elevator.
One old man saluted him once.

At first we thought it was coincidence.

Then our downstairs neighbor knocks on our door and quietly asks,
“Are we safe?”

My roommate, who is eating cereal at the time, just stares at him and says:
“For now.”

FOR NOW???

The neighbor looked like he was about to evacuate his family immediately.

Turns out the delivery guy had apparently told multiple people in the building that “federal people” were living on the third floor.

And honestly my roommate’s lifestyle was NOT helping.

He leaves the apartment at random hours.
Owns three identical black jackets.
Rarely explains where he’s going.
Has terrible posture but walks fast enough to seem important.

One time he came home carrying a locked briefcase.

Do you know what was inside?

A sandwich.

But nobody else knew that.

The paranoia escalated when building management installed new security cameras and my roommate casually muttered,
“About time.”

Now everybody thinks he requested surveillance upgrades.

Then came the incident with Apartment 4B.

There was a huge screaming argument downstairs around midnight.
Doors slamming.
People yelling.
Somebody crying.

The whole building could hear it.

My roommate walks into the hallway, listens for ten seconds, then calmly says:
“They’re moving earlier than expected.”

EARLIER THAN WHAT??

A woman across the hall literally gasped.

The next morning 4B had moved out unexpectedly because apparently they were already behind on rent and the fight ended the relationship.

But now the building believes my roommate orchestrated a covert extraction.

People started treating him like some kind of undercover protector.

Neighbors would randomly update him on “suspicious activity.”

One guy whispered:
“There’s a blue Honda that keeps circling the block.”

My roommate nodded and wrote something down.

Do you know what he wrote?

“Buy oat milk.”

But the guy saw the note-taking and immediately went,
“Knew it.”

Then management offered him a free parking spot “for operational convenience.”

HE TOOK IT.

At this point I asked him why he kept feeding the delusion instead of stopping it.

And he said something I’ll never forget:
“It’s gone too far to explain naturally.”

Which somehow made him sound EVEN MORE like a spy.

Then things became catastrophic.

A package got delivered to the wrong apartment and went missing.

Management called a building meeting about “recent security concerns.”

In the middle of the meeting, somebody actually turned toward my roommate and asked:
“What do you think we should do?”

This idiot crosses his arms and says:
“Keep communication limited. Don’t panic.”

The room nodded collectively.

I was watching a man fail upward into the CIA.

Then an actual police officer showed up later that week because somebody reported “possible federal surveillance activity.”

We thought the game was over.

But when the officer knocked on our door, my roommate opened it halfway, looked at the badge, and sighed like he was disappointed.

[Rachel Haywire @AltCulture]

I Interviewed The Homeless about Artificial Intelligence in New York.