Kyle Kingsbury

  1. No, You Can't (Officially) Reconnect Cut Pieces of Hue Strip Lights

    Hopefully this saves someone else an hour of digging. Philips Hue has a comparison page for their strip lights. This table says that for the Ambiance Gradient lightstrips, “Cut pieces can be reconnected”. Their “Can you cut LED strip lights” page also says “Many strip lights are cuttable, and some even…

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  2. The Future of Radiation Safety is Lies, I Guess

    Here’s a page from AEG Test (archive), a company which sells radiation detectors, talking about the safety of uranium glass. Right from the get-go it feels like LLM slop. “As a passionate collector of uranium glass,” the unattributed author begins, “I’ve often been asked: ‘Does handling these glowing…

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  3. Op Color Plots

    A lot of my work involves staring at visualizations trying to get an intuitive feeling for what a system is doing. I’ve been working on a new visualization for Jepsen, a distributed systems testing library. This is something I’ve had in the back of my head for years but never quite got around to. A Jepsen…

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  4. The Future of Fact-Checking is Lies, I Guess

    Last weekend I was trying to pull together sources for an essay and kept finding “fact check” pages from factually.co. For instance, a Kagi search for “pepper ball Chicago pastor” returned this Factually article as the second result: Fact check: Did ice agents shoot a pastor with pepperballs in October…

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  5. I Want You to Understand Chicago

    I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on…

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  6. Notes on "Prothean AI"

    If this were one person, I wouldn’t write this publicly. Since there are apparently multiple people on board, and they claim to be looking for investors, I think the balance falls in favor of disclosure. Last week Prothean Systems announced they’d surpassed AGI and called for the research community to…

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  7. Geoblocking Multiple Localities With Nginx

    A few months back I wound up concluding, based on conversations with Ofcom, that aphyr.com might be illegal in the UK due to the UK Online Safety Act. I wrote a short tutorial on geoblocking a single country using Nginx on Debian. Now Mississippi’s 2024 HB 1126 has made it illegal for essentially any…

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  8. Astound Supports IPv6 Only in Washington

    In the hopes that it saves someone else two hours later: the ISP Astound only supports IPv6 in Washington State. You might find this page which says “Astound supports IPv6 in most locations”. Their tech support agents might tell you that they support v6 on your connection, even if you are not in Washington…

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  9. The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess

    In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says: Please tell us a bit about yourself and your connection…

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  10. The Future of Comments is Lies, I Guess

    I’ve been involved in content moderation since roughly 2004. I’ve built spam prevention for corporate and personal e-mail, moderated open-source mailing lists and IRC channels, worked at a couple social media networks, and help moderate a Mastodon instance for a few hundred people. In the last few years…

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  11. The Future of Customer Support is Lies, I Guess

    Update, 2025-05-22: TrueNAS was kind enough to reach out and let me know that their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs. They’re talking about what happened internally, and intend to prevent it from happening again through improved documentation and reviewing the support process as a whole…

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  12. The Future of Newspapers is Lies, I Guess

    Update, 2023-05-23: Added a paragraph about Dr. Howard Whiteman’s non-existent quote. I subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times, a non-profit newspaper. This week they sent me a sixty-four page special insert, branded with the Chicago Sun-Times logo, full of LLM nonsense. Yesterday I wrote the following letter…

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