Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2026-02-28 11:21 pm
silveradept) wrote2026-02-28 11:21 pm
Shorter month, shorter posting, it seems - Late February 02026
I feel like we need to start with this, because I'm runnning into situations where people have clearly not internalized one of the most important things to remember about stochastic parrots that they are calling Avian Intelligence. It's all based on vector maths and probabilities. It does not know what is true, nor what is accurate, when it is constructing what word to select next. That it manages to get things correct is by accident, and by the providence of having training data that contains the correct information in it. When it constructs sentences and so on, it does so based only on what the training data and the vector math, with some fuzz factor built in, says the next word is, regardless of whether that's the right word or not. (Admittedly, being able to do the vector math is helpful, because it allows for a certain amount of synonym substitution and can make a search engine more robust at finding relevant answers if you don't hit the exact keywords. There's an aside here about how many engines are transforming your queries so that you search for things that will serve you ads or that will steer the results to prioritize those who have paid for top search engine ranking, such that even things that are good that come from machine learning are then transformed to evil purposes by capital and their priorities.)
Also up top, Dreamwidth is recruiting volunteers who would be willing to file documents in United States courts talking about the chilling effects on your speech and online activity that various state laws trying to curb social site use by teens would have, and especially from parents who would be willing to detail the way those laws would interfere with your parenting decisions. Comments screened, signing up is not committing to writing such declarations. Also, risks involve things like having to use your wallet name, and possibly having your wallet name and your Dreamwidth identity linked in publicly-available court materials or at least materials available to the state and the court.
(Because South Carolina is the latest entity to join the circus, South Carolina users are especially helpful right now, but all kinds of states have legislation that's looking to join the circus. Why South Carolina? Well, they're charging people with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" by being an identified adult in a teen-focused anti-ICE school walkout planning chat and expressing support for the walkout. Among other things they're trying to do to supposedly protect teens from the corrupting influence of adults.)
The worry about the presence of new media is perennial and perpetual, but it's not the new medium, or the new screen, that is the issue, it's the way that content is designed and presented that's trying to fragment attention and deep thinking. Accessibility and multimodality are awesome things, but there's a lot of design work that's been put into keeping us scrolling and viewing ads rather than using our tools to think and engage deeply.
Dr. Gladys West, whose precise measurements of the planet made it possible for the Global Positioning System network to come into existence, and therefore commercial (and military) satellite navigation, has died at 95 years of age. Another contribution of painstaking measurment and mathematics that undergirds so very much of the technological world today.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and occasional punchline of a joke, has finished his ministry at 84 years of age.
The administration is still in violation of laws requiring transparency and disclosure for all the files available about convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which may now include documents involving allegations that the current administrator was not merely palling around with the sex trafficker, but may have also engaged in some child sex abuse of his own. Which is a very different tack than the United Kingdom, which allowed the arrest of the former Prince Andrew on charges related to material in the files and the actions that itr alleges the former prince took.
Flouting the requirements that the Congress has the power to declare war, as well as destroying whatever progress diplomacy had made, the U.S. Administrator ordered, and the military carried out, with the cooperation and further strikes from the nation of Israel, attacks against Iran including missile strikes and other acts that are a declaration of war. The Islamic Republic fired drones and missiles back at United States and Israeli presence in the region, and reported the death of the Supreme Leader of the country as a result of the attacks.
The United States will justify this by saying that Iran was not holding to any agreements made about not-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel will likely justify this by calling Iran an existential threat to their existence, and likely will point to Hamas's existence in the country as proof that Iran needed to be destroyed anyway. The Congress seems to be properly roused about at least doing the duty of rubber-stamping the war and calling it right and proper, but once again, we have a President acting in ways that should have required Congressional approval beforehand, and only afterward is the Congress trying to assert its own power and relevance in the matter. Not to mention the likelihood that this will destabilize the region significantly, even as the U.S. administrator urged the citizens of Iran to seize their government and prevent the appointment or election of a new Supreme Leader.
This is Not Good. (And I have a sinking feeling that, once again, the U.S. and Israel will simply get away with it, because they don't believe anyone has the authority or power to stop them from doing it, and the people that could are going to be too busy trying to look the other way to actually decide that there should be sanction against either or both countries for their actions.)
After the gold-medal-winning women's ice hockey team got dissed by the current administrator fawning over the gold-medal-winning men's ice hockey team, Flavor Flav, long known to be a staunch supporter of women's sport, invited the whole team, and every medal-winning woman from the U.S., to a bash in Las Vegas in their honor. And a lot of brands and people are on board the Flav train to celebrate wommen's sports and the athletes who rocked it at the Olympic Games. In a different direction, Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author, has released a Tingler called "Not Pounded By This T-Rex On The USA Men's Hockey Team Because It Turns Out He's A MAGA Dork. So you can get your ethical non-erotica. (Unfortunately, the link is to amazon because that's where the official website links to, as well.)
The Supreme Court of the United States told the current administrator to find better authority to impose his tariffs. Because it was 6-3, instead of 9-0, it's not a strong rebuke that says "Hey, the Constitution says Congress has the power to levy taxes," but much more likely a critique saying that it wasn't working and he needed to find a different method. The repeal of the authority to levy tariffs may have also made it impossible for the current administration to claim that they have a balanced budget, or can fund all the things they're spending money on, not that this administration would do anything other than claim that "foreign countries" are paying them the tariff money, and all is well.
After refusing to review a new Moderna mRNA flu vaccine, presumably because of conspiracy-theory fears about the use of mRNA, or of vaccines in general, the Food and Drug Administration reversed course and said they will review the vaccine. Good. Sanity prevails.
There is precedence for the government siting large spaces to build facilities on for the holding of persons - it was Executive Order 9066, and the country seems poised not to have learned anything at all from the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Of course, that's still true even if no new anything were constructed - we're still operating concentration camps for brown people based on them being brown people.
The FCC chair is suggesting to private enterprises and broadcast channels tailor their programming to be friendly to the government, under the guise of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year. Because he wants to make sure that all the mmedia outlets are proper extensions of the Ministry of Truth and will do their job to parrot the propaganda. So, you can probably expect certain stations and programs to start looking more like they want to please the person in charge rather than act as entities asserting their First Amendment rights.
The nationwide House of Representatives had a bill introduced that would ban any material in schools, with an easy expansion toward public libraries, that dares to make mention of the fact that trans people exist, as well as any book that recognizes that people sometimes have genderfeels. (The mechanism is to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to prevent the spending of any funds on books that the Representatives feel introduces sexual topics to the under-18s, and, as usual for the Republicans who want this, genderfeels and being trans are automatically considered sexual material that should be age-restricted.)
The state of Kansas determined that trans people are no longer allowed to legally exist, and immediately expired all identification, driver licenses, and other documentation that has a person's correct gender on it and demanded reissuance of all of those documents using only the gender assigned at birth as the only allowable gender to be on those forms. The legislators overrode the governor's veto to pass this bill and bring it into immediate effect, as well as giving license for people to bully or intimidate others or pursue lawsuits against trans people if they are using a restroom that the person seeking to intimidate and bully believes is the "wrong" one for that person. As you would expect from such a dick move, the lawsuits are already well underway.
If you were looking for voter fraud in Georgia, as this administrator has regularly claimed, you would find it in the actions of the PACs associated with Elon Musk, sending partially pre-filled-in absentee ballot applications to voters in Georgia.
The Washington State Department of Licensing was using computer voices for its processes, except the "Spanish" option was apparently English spoken with a heavy accent, rather than actual Spanish, which, honestly, the DoL could have had someone record actual Spanish lines (and all the other language options) for cheaper than whatever this tool supposedly cost them to screw it up.
The residents of Chicago made their voices clear, selecting "Abolish ICE" as one of the names for a city snowplow for the year. (They also chose "Stephen Coldbert", "Pope Frio XIV", "The Blizzard of Oz", "Svencoolie", and "Caleb Chilliams" as plow names, proving that Chicagoans are more than up on their pun game and their current events game.)
Minnesota is not just defending their people against kidnappers and murderers, they are trying to find ways to deny kidnappers and murderers access to the tools they need to kidnap and murder. (And also, the kidnappers and murderers have gained a modicum of ability, in that they're not following white people from grocery shopping, on the assumption that they will lead the kidnappers and murderers to people to kidnap and murder that they haven't found before.)
In technology, another reason to avoid the Substack platform, as they're partnering with a company that thinks gambling on future events is a good idea.
Having received a large amount of blowback from their announcement that they were rolling out age verification across the world, Discord walked back some of the proposed changes and attempted to explain what they were doing. This doesn't mollify the user base, even while Discord has to navigate age-verification laws that have already come into existence in other countries, and that are being designed and put into place in the United States. The good thing is that the supposed test partner, Persona, for Discord age verification is not, in fact, an age verification partner…and probably would not have been after they suffered a significant data breach from having unlocked access points available. It gave significant insight into the additional checks being performed at Persona that had nothing to do with age verification.
Pennsylvania State University undergraduate student Divya Tyagi has refined work regarding wind turbines to account for factors the original author did not consider, and may make wind turbines more power-efficient in doing so. For as much as we talk about sport rivalries and competition, the academic sphere often produces brilliant minds, and I'm very happy for the Nittany Lions to have such a student and to recognize her work.
What people believe are surefire tells that a document was written by stochastic parrots are usually indicators that they've never listened to, looked at, or otherwise interacted with people who speak English as one of many languages, or who use English in other parts of the world than the United States. There are no features of language that are unique to computers using tokens to select the next word, and so, no, there are no tells. What you can (and probably should) criticize is whether or not this particular piece of writing appears to have had thought, care, and proofreading put into it, or whether it appears to have been extruded as product or "content" and then slapped up somewhere.
The stochastic parrots are incompatible with a true machine intelligence, are incompatible with any form of work, culture, or otherwise that is supposed to be about innovation, and are generally just incompatible and misaligned to any goals about using machines to make a better society.
And that's before they don't behave according to the specifications, as a bug causing CoPilot to access and summarize e-mails marked as confidential showcases, or when they are behaving exactly according to specification, as when the director of AI safety at Facebook's parent company saw in real-time as one of the agents determined everything in her e-mail inbox was worthy of deletion and steadfastly went at it without being able to be stopped except by physically shutting down the computer the process was running on.
Most smartphone photo applications are using image detection and processing algorithms to produce a processed image by the time it's saved to the device. Depending on the model of the phone, and the features invoked, this may be more or less under-the-hood processing, but just about every model from every manufacturer does some processing before saving the image.
A criticism of Cory Doctorow choosing to dismiss the people who are concerned about the impacts of stochastic parrots and the companies that create the models for them as "purity culture", which has great merit in it. Not first because I think it's right, and that Cory has decided to generate strawpeople and argue against them, instead of having a better argument about why he thinks that people can take these things that have poisonous or immoral origins and put them to better uses. (Because the people that make tools are not all perfectly virtuous, yes, but it is not mere utilitarianism that governs morals.)
On realizing that what you thought computer programming meant is not what it means now, and that you have fallen out of the company of programmers because of it. Which, assonia did, I put next to the ways in which workers in the technology sector, especially in software, act in the same way toward their bodies that people who have gender dysphoria do. The strong tension between the idea of code and technology as hypermasculine and the feminized skills of communication, diligence, and checking details (and sometimes doing very boring work) that produces actually good and robust code makes for some specific vulnerabilities that tech workers can have toward going with whatever the supposed trend-setters say is good, rather than working within their own true selves.
Two developer productivity metrics that actually make sense to measure: how frequently are there regular releases, and how often does a new release cause a major wreck? And if both of those are doing well, then question three is "How does each release make the user feel positively about it?" Those are some good metrics, I must say.
Examinations in an era of chatbots, where specifically telling students they will be responsible for chatbot mistakes gets many of them to swear them off, if they were considering them as aides. What there also is in this examination session, however, is a lot of encouragement from the professeur that it really is about trying to see if the students have learned and grasp the concepts in the course, rather than being about regurgitating correct answers on demand, with several tools deployed to help relieve stress, but also to help work with the environment that has been forced upon the students.
Last for tonight, twenty-five years of a very popular early-Internet meme, matching visuals to the "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by the Laziest Men on Mars, who would also give us the Pusher and Shover robots in a different viral video.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
Also up top, Dreamwidth is recruiting volunteers who would be willing to file documents in United States courts talking about the chilling effects on your speech and online activity that various state laws trying to curb social site use by teens would have, and especially from parents who would be willing to detail the way those laws would interfere with your parenting decisions. Comments screened, signing up is not committing to writing such declarations. Also, risks involve things like having to use your wallet name, and possibly having your wallet name and your Dreamwidth identity linked in publicly-available court materials or at least materials available to the state and the court.
(Because South Carolina is the latest entity to join the circus, South Carolina users are especially helpful right now, but all kinds of states have legislation that's looking to join the circus. Why South Carolina? Well, they're charging people with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" by being an identified adult in a teen-focused anti-ICE school walkout planning chat and expressing support for the walkout. Among other things they're trying to do to supposedly protect teens from the corrupting influence of adults.)
The worry about the presence of new media is perennial and perpetual, but it's not the new medium, or the new screen, that is the issue, it's the way that content is designed and presented that's trying to fragment attention and deep thinking. Accessibility and multimodality are awesome things, but there's a lot of design work that's been put into keeping us scrolling and viewing ads rather than using our tools to think and engage deeply.
Dr. Gladys West, whose precise measurements of the planet made it possible for the Global Positioning System network to come into existence, and therefore commercial (and military) satellite navigation, has died at 95 years of age. Another contribution of painstaking measurment and mathematics that undergirds so very much of the technological world today.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and occasional punchline of a joke, has finished his ministry at 84 years of age.
The administration is still in violation of laws requiring transparency and disclosure for all the files available about convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which may now include documents involving allegations that the current administrator was not merely palling around with the sex trafficker, but may have also engaged in some child sex abuse of his own. Which is a very different tack than the United Kingdom, which allowed the arrest of the former Prince Andrew on charges related to material in the files and the actions that itr alleges the former prince took.
Flouting the requirements that the Congress has the power to declare war, as well as destroying whatever progress diplomacy had made, the U.S. Administrator ordered, and the military carried out, with the cooperation and further strikes from the nation of Israel, attacks against Iran including missile strikes and other acts that are a declaration of war. The Islamic Republic fired drones and missiles back at United States and Israeli presence in the region, and reported the death of the Supreme Leader of the country as a result of the attacks.
The United States will justify this by saying that Iran was not holding to any agreements made about not-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel will likely justify this by calling Iran an existential threat to their existence, and likely will point to Hamas's existence in the country as proof that Iran needed to be destroyed anyway. The Congress seems to be properly roused about at least doing the duty of rubber-stamping the war and calling it right and proper, but once again, we have a President acting in ways that should have required Congressional approval beforehand, and only afterward is the Congress trying to assert its own power and relevance in the matter. Not to mention the likelihood that this will destabilize the region significantly, even as the U.S. administrator urged the citizens of Iran to seize their government and prevent the appointment or election of a new Supreme Leader.
This is Not Good. (And I have a sinking feeling that, once again, the U.S. and Israel will simply get away with it, because they don't believe anyone has the authority or power to stop them from doing it, and the people that could are going to be too busy trying to look the other way to actually decide that there should be sanction against either or both countries for their actions.)
After the gold-medal-winning women's ice hockey team got dissed by the current administrator fawning over the gold-medal-winning men's ice hockey team, Flavor Flav, long known to be a staunch supporter of women's sport, invited the whole team, and every medal-winning woman from the U.S., to a bash in Las Vegas in their honor. And a lot of brands and people are on board the Flav train to celebrate wommen's sports and the athletes who rocked it at the Olympic Games. In a different direction, Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author, has released a Tingler called "Not Pounded By This T-Rex On The USA Men's Hockey Team Because It Turns Out He's A MAGA Dork. So you can get your ethical non-erotica. (Unfortunately, the link is to amazon because that's where the official website links to, as well.)
The Supreme Court of the United States told the current administrator to find better authority to impose his tariffs. Because it was 6-3, instead of 9-0, it's not a strong rebuke that says "Hey, the Constitution says Congress has the power to levy taxes," but much more likely a critique saying that it wasn't working and he needed to find a different method. The repeal of the authority to levy tariffs may have also made it impossible for the current administration to claim that they have a balanced budget, or can fund all the things they're spending money on, not that this administration would do anything other than claim that "foreign countries" are paying them the tariff money, and all is well.
After refusing to review a new Moderna mRNA flu vaccine, presumably because of conspiracy-theory fears about the use of mRNA, or of vaccines in general, the Food and Drug Administration reversed course and said they will review the vaccine. Good. Sanity prevails.
There is precedence for the government siting large spaces to build facilities on for the holding of persons - it was Executive Order 9066, and the country seems poised not to have learned anything at all from the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Of course, that's still true even if no new anything were constructed - we're still operating concentration camps for brown people based on them being brown people.
The FCC chair is suggesting to private enterprises and broadcast channels tailor their programming to be friendly to the government, under the guise of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year. Because he wants to make sure that all the mmedia outlets are proper extensions of the Ministry of Truth and will do their job to parrot the propaganda. So, you can probably expect certain stations and programs to start looking more like they want to please the person in charge rather than act as entities asserting their First Amendment rights.
The nationwide House of Representatives had a bill introduced that would ban any material in schools, with an easy expansion toward public libraries, that dares to make mention of the fact that trans people exist, as well as any book that recognizes that people sometimes have genderfeels. (The mechanism is to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to prevent the spending of any funds on books that the Representatives feel introduces sexual topics to the under-18s, and, as usual for the Republicans who want this, genderfeels and being trans are automatically considered sexual material that should be age-restricted.)
The state of Kansas determined that trans people are no longer allowed to legally exist, and immediately expired all identification, driver licenses, and other documentation that has a person's correct gender on it and demanded reissuance of all of those documents using only the gender assigned at birth as the only allowable gender to be on those forms. The legislators overrode the governor's veto to pass this bill and bring it into immediate effect, as well as giving license for people to bully or intimidate others or pursue lawsuits against trans people if they are using a restroom that the person seeking to intimidate and bully believes is the "wrong" one for that person. As you would expect from such a dick move, the lawsuits are already well underway.
If you were looking for voter fraud in Georgia, as this administrator has regularly claimed, you would find it in the actions of the PACs associated with Elon Musk, sending partially pre-filled-in absentee ballot applications to voters in Georgia.
The Washington State Department of Licensing was using computer voices for its processes, except the "Spanish" option was apparently English spoken with a heavy accent, rather than actual Spanish, which, honestly, the DoL could have had someone record actual Spanish lines (and all the other language options) for cheaper than whatever this tool supposedly cost them to screw it up.
The residents of Chicago made their voices clear, selecting "Abolish ICE" as one of the names for a city snowplow for the year. (They also chose "Stephen Coldbert", "Pope Frio XIV", "The Blizzard of Oz", "Svencoolie", and "Caleb Chilliams" as plow names, proving that Chicagoans are more than up on their pun game and their current events game.)
Minnesota is not just defending their people against kidnappers and murderers, they are trying to find ways to deny kidnappers and murderers access to the tools they need to kidnap and murder. (And also, the kidnappers and murderers have gained a modicum of ability, in that they're not following white people from grocery shopping, on the assumption that they will lead the kidnappers and murderers to people to kidnap and murder that they haven't found before.)
In technology, another reason to avoid the Substack platform, as they're partnering with a company that thinks gambling on future events is a good idea.
Having received a large amount of blowback from their announcement that they were rolling out age verification across the world, Discord walked back some of the proposed changes and attempted to explain what they were doing. This doesn't mollify the user base, even while Discord has to navigate age-verification laws that have already come into existence in other countries, and that are being designed and put into place in the United States. The good thing is that the supposed test partner, Persona, for Discord age verification is not, in fact, an age verification partner…and probably would not have been after they suffered a significant data breach from having unlocked access points available. It gave significant insight into the additional checks being performed at Persona that had nothing to do with age verification.
Pennsylvania State University undergraduate student Divya Tyagi has refined work regarding wind turbines to account for factors the original author did not consider, and may make wind turbines more power-efficient in doing so. For as much as we talk about sport rivalries and competition, the academic sphere often produces brilliant minds, and I'm very happy for the Nittany Lions to have such a student and to recognize her work.
What people believe are surefire tells that a document was written by stochastic parrots are usually indicators that they've never listened to, looked at, or otherwise interacted with people who speak English as one of many languages, or who use English in other parts of the world than the United States. There are no features of language that are unique to computers using tokens to select the next word, and so, no, there are no tells. What you can (and probably should) criticize is whether or not this particular piece of writing appears to have had thought, care, and proofreading put into it, or whether it appears to have been extruded as product or "content" and then slapped up somewhere.
The stochastic parrots are incompatible with a true machine intelligence, are incompatible with any form of work, culture, or otherwise that is supposed to be about innovation, and are generally just incompatible and misaligned to any goals about using machines to make a better society.
And that's before they don't behave according to the specifications, as a bug causing CoPilot to access and summarize e-mails marked as confidential showcases, or when they are behaving exactly according to specification, as when the director of AI safety at Facebook's parent company saw in real-time as one of the agents determined everything in her e-mail inbox was worthy of deletion and steadfastly went at it without being able to be stopped except by physically shutting down the computer the process was running on.
Most smartphone photo applications are using image detection and processing algorithms to produce a processed image by the time it's saved to the device. Depending on the model of the phone, and the features invoked, this may be more or less under-the-hood processing, but just about every model from every manufacturer does some processing before saving the image.
A criticism of Cory Doctorow choosing to dismiss the people who are concerned about the impacts of stochastic parrots and the companies that create the models for them as "purity culture", which has great merit in it. Not first because I think it's right, and that Cory has decided to generate strawpeople and argue against them, instead of having a better argument about why he thinks that people can take these things that have poisonous or immoral origins and put them to better uses. (Because the people that make tools are not all perfectly virtuous, yes, but it is not mere utilitarianism that governs morals.)
On realizing that what you thought computer programming meant is not what it means now, and that you have fallen out of the company of programmers because of it. Which, as
sonia did, I put next to the ways in which workers in the technology sector, especially in software, act in the same way toward their bodies that people who have gender dysphoria do. The strong tension between the idea of code and technology as hypermasculine and the feminized skills of communication, diligence, and checking details (and sometimes doing very boring work) that produces actually good and robust code makes for some specific vulnerabilities that tech workers can have toward going with whatever the supposed trend-setters say is good, rather than working within their own true selves. Two developer productivity metrics that actually make sense to measure: how frequently are there regular releases, and how often does a new release cause a major wreck? And if both of those are doing well, then question three is "How does each release make the user feel positively about it?" Those are some good metrics, I must say.
Examinations in an era of chatbots, where specifically telling students they will be responsible for chatbot mistakes gets many of them to swear them off, if they were considering them as aides. What there also is in this examination session, however, is a lot of encouragement from the professeur that it really is about trying to see if the students have learned and grasp the concepts in the course, rather than being about regurgitating correct answers on demand, with several tools deployed to help relieve stress, but also to help work with the environment that has been forced upon the students.
Last for tonight, twenty-five years of a very popular early-Internet meme, matching visuals to the "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by the Laziest Men on Mars, who would also give us the Pusher and Shover robots in a different viral video.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)