lunatechian (lunatech-ian) - link

BlackRock Steps Back from ESG Push

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:34:55 +0000

In a recent interview, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, signaled a shift in tone. The firm, once a strong advocate of ESG and DEI, is now taking a more “pragmatic” approach. Fink described the “woke” phase as part of a cycle and suggested it may have gone too far.

Looking past the word soup: what does it even mean for a financial firm to lead “environmental and social activism”?

As one Reddit commenter put it:

“None of this even touches on the absurdity of the proposition that an entity such as BlackRock could be considered an interlocutor for ‘environmental and social activism.’”

Another commenter sharpened that critique:

There’s a reason finance capitalist environmental and social plans focus so much on ‘consumerism’ and envision saving the world through a reduction of people and production, and in rent seeking, not a change in property ownership.”

The power of trust in global Influence

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:02:43 +0000

From the Bloomberg opinion piece: America Is Depleting a More Powerful Weapon Than Its Missiles (the answer is: belief in the truth of what the leader of the US tells the world about the war, peace and everything else.) an interesting tit-bit:

Contrary to the illusion held by many Americans, the BBC is not a government-run body, it is an independent corporation administered by trustees and funded by public subscription. Throughout World War II, millions of people in occupied Europe risked their freedom to hear its news. The penalty for those caught listening by German detector vans was deportation to a concentration camp.

The magic words with which its impeccably modulated announcers began their reports — “this is London” — resounded across the globe. After 1945, the BBC habit persisted. Tens of millions of people — especially in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia — even now prefer the Beeb’s foreign language news to the local variety, rigorously censored by their own governments. Voice of America has never achieved quite the same authority or reputation for impartiality, but it has been nonetheless useful and influential.

Tiny transmitter could help scientists understand surprisingly social wasps

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:42:03 +0000

https://spectrum.ieee.org/rf-tags-wasps

An ultralightweight radio-frequency tag designed to be worn by a paper wasp may help scientists get a glimpse at some basic behavioral information that’s long been missing: where do the animals go when they leave the nest?

Getting the right combination of light weight, long range, and positional accuracy was key. Jettisoning the battery was the first step. “Batteries don’t scale,” says Blaauw. A miniaturized battery can’t provide enough current to generate a strong radio signal. Capacitors, which store energy by accumulating charges on surfaces, do better at small scales, Blaauw says. “Really small capacitors can store enough charge now to send a radio pulse,” he says. The capacitor used in the wasp tag weighs just 0.86 mg. A tiny photovoltaic array slowly charges up the capacitor until it has enough energy to generate a radio signal.

AI is for humanity

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:06:07 +0000

Interesting reflection from , John Palfrey after attending the AI summit in Delhi:

In Delhi, the big sessions had thousands. And the man who ran the event told me that more than a million people, mostly from India, had passed through the gates of the massive convention center during the week.

This may sound symbolic but I think it is an important symbol: that AI is about and for all humanity. It is not something that is magical and only to be shaped by wizards. It is a technology that is general — it touches everyone on the planet one way or another, already, with implications for nearly every aspect of human life. I’m not hyping it up; I think this is fact at this stage. The Internet was the same way, sort of, but I think AI will prove another step more consequential.

Don’t let the llm rush you

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:47:43 +0000

Sage advice from scripting.com

A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you’re not careful it’ll quickly start giving you orders.

Postmortem from 2028

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:03:46 +0000

From The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: A Thought Exercise In Financial History, From The Future

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction.

[...]

A competent developer working with Claude Code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS product in weeks. Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves?”

[...]

The interconnected nature of these systems weren’t fully appreciated until this print, either. ServiceNow sold seats. When Fortune 500 clients cut 15% of their workforce, they cancelled 15% of their licenses. The same AI-driven headcount reductions that were boosting margins at their customers were mechanically destroying their own revenue base.

Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:20:35 +0000

Mind blown by this sneakiness

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

Checking on the In a request for comment page on Wikipedia

Over 400,000 pages currently contain over 695,000 links to Archive.today

In January 2026, the maintainers of Archive.today inserted malicious code in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack against a person they were in dispute with. Every time a user encounters the CAPTCHA page, their internet connection is used to attack a certain individual's blog.

ops is not a dirty word

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:24:11 +0000

From https://charity.wtf/2026/01/19/bring-back-ops-pride-xpost/

What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering

Using llm to understand large codebases

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:45:49 +0000

From Martin Fowler :

One attendee is an SRE for a Very (Very) Large Code Base. He was less worried about people not understanding the code an LLM writes because he already can’t understand the VVLCB he’s responsible for. What he values is that the LLM helps him understand the what the code is doing, and he regularly uses it to navigate to the crucial parts of the code.

There’s a general point here:

Fully trusting the answer an LLM gives you is foolishness, but it’s wise to use an LLM to help navigate the way to the answer.

Ceaseless Reinvention Leads To Overlapping Solutions

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 02 May 2015 16:52:46 +0000

David M. Eagleman on edge.org's WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? says:

The elegance of the brain lies in its inelegance.

For centuries, neuroscience attempted to neatly assign labels to the various parts of the brain: this is the area for language, this one for morality, this for tool use, color detection, face recognition, and so on. This search for an orderly brain map started off as a viable endeavor, but turned out to be misguided.

The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting: it possesses multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world. It is a machine built of conflicting parts. It is a representative democracy that functions by competition among parties who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem.

..... And consider the different systems involved in decision making: some are fast, automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness; others are slow, cognitive, and conscious. And there's no reason to assume there are only two systems; there may well be a spectrum. Some networks in the brain are implicated in long-term decisions, others in short-term impulses (and there may be a fleet of medium-term biases as well).

... On a larger anatomical scale, the two hemispheres of the brain, left and right, can be understood as overlapping systems that compete. We know this from patients whose hemispheres are disconnected: they essentially function with two independent brains. For example, put a pencil in each hand, and they can simultaneously draw incompatible figures such as a circle and a triangle. The two hemispheres function differently in the domains of language, abstract thinking, story construction, inference, memory, gambling strategies, and so on. The two halves constitute a team of rivals: agents with the same goals but slightly different ways of going about it.

Part of the importance of discovering elegant solutions is capitalizing on them. The neural democracy model may be just the thing to dislodge artificial intelligence. We human programmers still approach a problem by assuming there's a best way to solve it, or that there's a way it should be solved. But evolution does not solve a problem and then check it off the list. Instead, it ceaselessly reinvents programs, each with overlapping and competing approaches. The lesson is to abandon the question "what's the most clever way to solve that problem?" in favor of "are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?" This will be the starting point in ushering in a fruitful new age of elegantly inelegant computational devices.

bad speling killed the dog

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:49 +0000

Woman inadvertently confesses to bestiality. More funnies available here.

ads by Salvador Dali

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 03 May 2011 21:30:33 +0000

TV ads for chocolate, Alka-Seltzer and wine… by Salvador Dali.

from warren ellis

in today's odd news: Scientists use Calvin Klein cologne to lure jaguars

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:16:07 +0000

Biologists Rony Garcia and Jose Moreira from the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Jaguar Conservation Program rely on Obsession for Men, a cologne known for its complex scent, to help lure jaguars in the Central American country.

Note that this scent works on jaguars. There is no research of its effects on cougars .

The discovery that Obsession for Men acted as a magnet for jaguars was the result of an experiment by the WCS's Bronx Zoo in New York. The WCS was looking for ways to get cheetahs in front of camera traps, and, after several years of testing with different fragrances, found spraying the musky Obsession For Men near the heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras drew the cats for longer than other scents.

Links:

Scientists use Calvin Klein cologne to lure jaguars at Yahoo! News

casio's g-shock watch

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:46:38 +0000

New entry at my site - a review for my watch, Casio's G-Shock MT-G Atomic Tough Solar Watch, which I love. Read more here

Higher Order Perl

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:25:53 +0000

I am in love with the book Higher-Order Perl, especially the technique in the Chapter 2: Dispatch Tables.