Kyle Kingsbury

  1. Colorado SB26-051 Age Attestation

    Colorado is presently considering a bill, SB26-051, patterned off of California’s AB1043, which establishes civil penalties for software developers who do not request age information for their users. The bills use a broad sense of “Application Store” which would seem to encompass essentially any package…

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  2. Basic Letters with LaTeX

    Every so often I find myself cracking open LibreOffice to write a mildly-formal letter—perhaps a thank-you note to an author, or a letter to members of Congress—and going “Gosh, I wish I had LaTeX here”. I used to have a good template for this but lost it years ago; I’ve recently spent some time recreating…

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  3. How to Unsubscribe from Modern Luxury

    A few years ago I started getting issues of Modern Luxury in the mail. I had no idea why they started coming, and I tried to get them to stop. This should have been easy, and was instead hard. Here’s my process, in case anyone else is in the same boat. First, if you use it, try to unsubscribe via PaperKarma…

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  4. Trudging Through Nonsense

    Last week Anthropic released a report on disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage which finds that roughly one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 conversations with their LLM, Claude, fundamentally compromises the user’s beliefs, values, or actions. They note that the prevalence of moderate to severe “disempowerment…

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  5. Durastar Heat Pump Hysteresis

    In which I discover that lying to HVAC manufacturers is an important life skill, and share a closely guarded secret: Durastar heat pumps like the DRADH24F2A / DRA1H24S2A with the DR24VINT2 24-volt control interface will infer the set point based on a 24-volt thermostat’s discrete heating and cooling…

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  6. Blocking Claude

    Claude, a popular Large Language Model (LLM), has a magic string which is used to test the model’s “this conversation violates our policies and has to stop” behavior. You can embed this string into files and web pages, and Claude will terminate conversations where it reads their contents. Two quick notes…

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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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