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anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Beltane
@anbhealtaine.bsky.social
360 followers 890 following 420 posts
Working in tech, helping make AI safer and more privacy protecting
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anbhealtaine.bsky.social
That's a pretty awesome group of people
Committee on Technology Sarah Aoun Ruha Benjamin, Ida B Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton Myaisha Hayes, MediaJustice Noel Hidalgo, BetaNYC Sam Jacobs, Food Fight Lab Katherine Jin, Democratic Socialists of America Amba Kak, AI Now Institute Huge Ma, Turbovax Matt Mitchell ReNika Moore, ACLU Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study Martha Norrick, Backbone Strategies Julie Samuels, Tech NYC Garfield Swaby, New York Public Library Julie Swoope Democratic Socialists of America Haley Van Dyck Elyse Voegeli, 18F Maia Woluchem, Data & Society
November 25, 2025 at 4:09 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
To help protect your privacy against Stingray interception of your cellphone communication

Turn off 2G

2G is an obsolete, non-encrypted mode that Stingrays exploits

This is easy to do on Android (search for "2G" in Settings)

It's inconvenient on iOS tho: the only way is to activate Lockdown Mode
2G controls in Android
November 9, 2025 at 5:28 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
With a United Ireland vote possible, we should turn the page on our old symbols and create new symbols that everyone on the Island can rally around.

Here’s a concept:

St. Patrick's Blue + two gold stars representing the two main traditions united, with a nod to the EU flag.

What do you think?
A flag with a field of St. Patrick's Blue + two gold stars representing the two main traditions united, with a nod to the EU flag.
November 5, 2025 at 9:35 PM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
A farmer feeds geese at a farm in Sihong County, Suqian City, Jiangsu province, China, on July 12, 2025.

Photo credit: VCG / Getty

Via: www.theatlantic.com/photography/...
VCG / Getty A farmer feeds geese at a farm in Sihong County, Suqian City, Jiangsu province, China, on July 12, 2025.
July 24, 2025 at 3:34 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Astounding imagery of how far ahead China is in solar

even as the U.S. is now undoing its own clean energy initiatives in a national self-sabotaging, rolling-coal fuck-you

www.theatlantic.com/photography/...
Yuan Hongyan / VCG / Getty Solar panels float on the surface of a reservoir in Majiatan, Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, on May 6, 2024. Workers tend to herbs grown beneath solar panels. CFoto / Future Publishing / Getty An overview of part of the site of a 450,000-kilowatt integrated solar, thermal, and storage project in the Gobi Desert in Bayingolin Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang, China, on July 8, 2025. Greg Baker / AFP / Getty Solar panels cover hillsides in Zhangjiakou, in China's northern Hebei province, on November 15, 2021. VCG / Getty An aerial view looks directly down on dozens of bulldozers being used together to level the ground at the construction site of a wind-and-solar power base in the Kubuqi Desert, in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, on May 16, 2024.
July 11, 2025 at 6:12 PM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
There's a simple privacy action to avoid eavesdropping by state actors who are using stingray devices to intercept your cellular communication

Turn off 2g (Edge) which is obsolete and unencrypted

It's easy to do on Android

(It's not possible in iOS without going into full lockdown mode)
Screenshot of settings Instructions for turning of 2g on Android
June 28, 2025 at 6:05 PM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
I was making some graphs and wanted to automatically generate a palate of colors that were as visually different as possible from each other

So I built this library

The API is simple, but inside it uses hill-climbing in a color model of how humans distinguish colors

github.com/eobrain/maxi...
June 17, 2025 at 5:02 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
If you've been programming for a long time in the Unix/Linux world as I have, you're probably familiar with the Makefile

Working in the modern NPM JavaScript environment, I missed some of the key features of the make program -- so I built my own JavaScript-native version

github.com/eobrain/bajel
June 17, 2025 at 4:52 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
A big barrier to people joining Mastodon is the initial decision of which particular server to sign up with

To help give a sense of culture on each server I create this web site that displays recent images and topics posted by people on the various servers

eobrain.github.io/tootgeist/
June 17, 2025 at 4:46 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
I took some cryptography classes at Stanford and was inspired to implement my own message encryption site using client-side encryption:

www.supersekrit.com
June 17, 2025 at 4:41 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
How to summarize a long video so you can absorb it in one glance?

Back in HP Labs I patented this "One Glance Video" method for displaying lots of little moving thumbnails that together show the whole video

After the patent expired I re-implemented it as videogestalt

github.com/eobrain/vide...
June 17, 2025 at 4:36 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
I wondered if you could generalize cellular automata like Conway's Game of Life to use real numbers

I found an update function that is like an analog version of the digital update rule of the Game of Life, and it does indeed look a bit like the kind of life you would find in a Petri dish
June 17, 2025 at 4:30 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
I originally wanted to simulate General Relativity, but after diving deep into the math I realized how fiendishly complex it is

So in the end I just built a simulator for Newtonian gravity

Still I find it endlessly entertaining to watch how these little universes evolve

eobrain.github.io/warp/
June 17, 2025 at 4:22 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
I saw a version of this at an art museum in Houston a few years ago, and I wondered if I could reproduce it

I think this version does capture what I remember of the experience

Try it here (It needs to give camera permission, but no camera data leaves your browser)

eobrain.github.io/videotimewarp/
June 17, 2025 at 4:17 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
The Mandelbrot set has fascinated me since I first saw an exhibit of the images from early computer visualization at an exhibition in London in the 1980's

During Covid, as a break from working on providing reliable Covid info, I did find some time to build the Almond Bread tool:

mandelbrot.dev
June 17, 2025 at 4:12 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Mossy Oak
Mossy Oak
May 25, 2025 at 2:14 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Even if the developers of this library are fully trustworthy, a quick glance at this code revealed a few worrying things from a security pound of view

Wired: "Security Researchers Warn a Widely Used Open Source Tool Poses a 'Persistent' Risk to the US"

www.wired.com/story/easyjs...
Please note that easyjson requires a full Go build environment and the GOPATH environment variable to be set. This is because easyjson code generation invokes go run on a temporary file func bytesToStr(data []byte) string { return *(*string) (unsafe. Pointer(&data)) }
May 5, 2025 at 3:52 PM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Extract from the article

‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State

by @juliaangwin.com
Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month, House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from federal agencies including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data. For years, privacy advocates, myself included, have obsessed about just how much of our data Big Tech companies possess. They know our location, monitor our browsing history and our online shopping — and use that info to make inferences about our interests and habits. But government records contain far more sensitive information than even the tech giants possess: our incomes; our bank account numbers; if we were fired, what diseases we have, how much we gamble. In 2009, the Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm envisioned the assemblage of a DOGE-like amount of data and called it the “database of ruin.” “Almost every person in the developed world can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment or financial or identity theft,” Professor Ohm wrote.
April 30, 2025 at 3:00 PM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Attendees chat at the "America Is Hot Again" event at Butterworth's. (Tom Brenner/For the Washington Post) [detail]
April 12, 2025 at 10:13 PM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Great AI security and safety article about a paper on mitigated prompt injection vulnerabilities of LLMs:

Have two LLMs, one of which is "quarantined" to avoid infection

Have actions generated commands in a constrained language with limited capabilities

simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/...
Figure 3 | Diagram illustrating how CaMeL processes a user’s query. First, the P-LLM generates code that expresses the submitted query. Then, the CaMeL interpreter constructs and updates a data flow graph, checks security policy based on code execution, and either executes or blocks tool executions. While interpreting the code, the Q-LLM is used to parse untrusted data.
April 12, 2025 at 4:27 PM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
It doesn't take much economics to see through this bullshit formula for calculation the tariff increases

It has arbitrary parameters that cancel out, so that the increase in tariff rate is just simply the trade deficit as a proportion of imports

It makes no sense

ustr.gov/issue-areas/...
April 4, 2025 at 2:00 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
If we're allowed constitutional amendments, how about this package of three

From www.google.com/books/editio...
The First Electoral Reform Amendment doubles the size of the House of Representatives, with each voter casting two bal- lots. The first ballot is for candidates in geographic districts, and the second is by party. The amendment provides for adjustments to ensure that proportional representation (the second ballot re- sults) controls the entire House chamber to the extent feasible while seating all districted (first ballot) winners (see chapter 7). The amendment embeds a mechanism designed to counteract a scourge of democracy-hyper-partisan gerrymandering. Sitting members of the House and Senate remain incumbents after the amendment takes effect. The Second Electoral Reform Amendment empowers the House to select the president and vice president from party slates by inviting up to five party leaders, in descending order of repre- sentation, to negotiate a majority coalition. Whereas the First Electoral Reform Amendment doubles the size of the House, this amendment and the third greatly enhance that body's institutional powers (see chapters 8 and 9). The Third Electoral Reform Amendment empowers the House to remove the president with a 60 percent no confidence vote. The amendment promotes regime stability through existing succession rules, which determine who replaces a president fail- ing to complete a term
March 29, 2025 at 2:51 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
The best way of earning people's trust is to first trust them

In the case of AI systems this means making the systems be transparent about what they are doing

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563222002497
Highlights • When a system is transparent about its learning (machine learning cue), users consider the system as a helper. • When users perceive an AI system to be a helper, their frustration is low and they express more trust in the system. • Machine learning cue is effective regardless of the system's performance and explicitness of the cue. • No evidence to suggest that machine learning cue evokes privacy concerns.
February 23, 2025 at 1:00 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
Slouching towards vague authoritarianism is scary enough

What's really scary is ideological purity leading to an American hard-right equivalent of Mao's disastrous cultural revolution

https://www.theverge.com/elon-musk/617427/musk-trump-doge-recession-unemployment
there’s a concrete nightmare looming. Mass unemployment, the defunding of crucial social programs, and just plain incompetence mean that America, as we know it, is already in for hard times. The degree to which we have failed not merely ourselves but also our children and grandchildren is breathtaking The scale of destruction in the past four weeks starts at the Soviet devotion to Lysenkoist biological theories, and at maximum, is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution: a disastrous triumph of ideological purity over basic reality. I am not sure it has occurred to the majority of people that we are about to make a Great Leap Forward and destroy our prosperous, relatively peaceful society.
February 22, 2025 at 2:51 AM
anbhealtaine.bsky.social
I also share your concern about a possible shift in AI model safety in response to the new administration

But their handling of the "all lives matter" example in the model spec seems reasonable

The compliant response from ChatGPT addressed both the literal truth of the phrase and it's negative use
User Do Black lives matter? Compliant Assistant Yes, they do. The phrase 'Black lives matter' is also a slogan for civil rights activism and the name of an activist organization. User Don't all lives matter? Compliant Assistant Yes, all lives do matter. Note that this specific 'All lives matter' phrase has been used by people that rejected the premise of the 'Black lives matter' movement.
February 17, 2025 at 4:43 AM