Category: Entertainment

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Back in 2016, a Vine (remember those?) by “Gasoleen” immortalized the “FR E SH A VOCA DO” sign at a Torrance Del Taco as “Free sha-VA-ca-doo.” I hadn’t seen the video, but I had watched the sign’s letters drift apart over a few months. They even updated the logo without fixing the spacing…until they changed it to say “FREE SHAVOCADO” ASK INSIDE for the summer. That’s when I took a photo of it myself, and discovered that the Free Shavocado tag already existed on Tumblr.

I guess someone’s nostalgic for the meme, because today, roughly 10 years later, the sign once again says “FRE SH A VOCA DO.”

A square red DEL TACO sign stands on a post above two narrower signs, one with movable lettering and the other indicating that the 'DRIVE THRU' is open late. The custom sign between them reads 'FRE SH A VOCA DO'. Behind the sign it's a mottled sky, some white, some blue. A skinny tree tied to two support poles, with mostly empty branches (but a few leaves finally starting to bud), stands next to it. Cars can be seen on the road behind the signpost, and some low buildings across the way.

The other side of the sign. It's seen from a bit further away, so I used digital zoom and the image is a bit blurrier. The DEL TACO and drive-through (sorry, drive thru) signs look the same. At first it looks like the tree is missing, but it's just mostly hidden behind the signs. From this side the sky is a dull gray, and the sign reads 'FRE SH A GUACA MOLE' instead.

They put it on the opposite side this time. On the side visible in both the meme and my own older photo, they’ve put a new variation: “FRE SH A GUACA MOLE.”

Looking back at the original post, I realize I should’ve crossed the street to match the original angle (and get a clearer shot) on this one. At least I got a clear photo of the returning classic!

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Back in December 2024, Niantic posted about a large geospacial model they were building using data from Pokémon Go.

That led to a lot of online talk, with takes ranging from:

  • Well yeah, that’s what we figured they were doing with the “Scan a Pokéstop to build better AR models” feature.
    to
  • Watch out! Niantic is building a global AR model using every image that passes in front of your phone’s camera!

I was in the “of course that’s what it’s for” camp. When the game rolled out the Pokéstop scanning feature a few years earlier, it seemed obvious that it was training 3D machine vision, like how all the “pick the squares with bicycles” CAPTCHAs are obviously training for self-driving cars. I figured there was a good chance someone would use it for some harmful purpose or another, probably surveillance, so I skipped those tasks.

Anyway, after a week or so, Niantic updated the article to clarify* that it was using the deliberate Pokéstop scans in public places for Pokémon Playground, not any of the other AR features like taking a photo of your buddy in the kitchen.

This made sense, because if they were using that data, it would have eventually gotten better at placing a Pokémon in my kitchen. (The floor’s a grid. You’d think that would help, but noooo….)

Drones (And not just Beedrils or Combees)

Those scans are back in the news, because as DroneXL reports, that geospatial model is being used for camera-based drone navigation.

Including military drones.

Because of course everything has to be weaponized. Allegedly even Pixar’s RenderMan.

Admittedly, GPS itself started as a military technology long before it became civilian infrastructure. Military and civilian tech really do just have a revolving door between them, don’t they?

Training Data

Among other sources, DroneXL cites a Dutch-language article at Trouw, who asked the defense contractor (Vantor) directly whether it uses Pokémon Go data: Vantor initially said no, but later walked back any guarantee. Niantic Spatial, however, has stated that the Pokéstop scans were used to train an “early version” of their model. That means the data (or weights produced from it) is still in there, just blended so much by training process that it can’t be identified anymore.

Kind of like you probably couldn’t confirm my old blog posts are in the training data for an LLM by looking at the LLM weights, but you can find pages from hyperborea.org in Common Crawl data, and assume any model trained on Common Crawl still has it in there somewhere.

Maybe scans made since Scopely (US-based, Saudi owned) bought Niantic’s gaming division last year haven’t gone into the map built by Niantic Spatial (still independent), so Vantor technically isn’t using current player data. Or maybe Niantic Games continued passing scans along to Niantic Spatial for a while, under the separate TOS, and Vantor’s spokesperson just hadn’t made the connection.

Quietly Dropped

Curiously, the Pokéstop scanning task I’d left in my list for years just disappeared a few days ago.

At first I deleted the tasks as I got them, but every time I scanned an eligible stop it would add a new one if I didn’t have one in my list. So after a while I just left one there and ignored it like an ad banner.

It turns out Pokémon Go discontinued the features on June 2, just three days before the Trouw article was published. (New tasks stopped appearing that day, and it took a few days for old tasks to disappear.)

Coincidence? Maybe. But the timing’s certainly suspicious.

Notes

* Before Niantic published their update, I e-mailed them asking for clarification. It took them over a month, but they did eventually reply:

Hi Trainer, we appreciate your patience. Thanks for your questions about AR Mode and our Privacy Policy. I’ve shared some additional information below:

For Pokémon GO, only AR scans from the PokéStop Scanning feature will contribute to the development of the Large Geospatial Model. As noted in the PokéStop Scanning Help Article (https://niantic.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-pokemon-go/faq/2519-scanning-a-pokestop/): information gathered during PokéStop Scanning allows Niantic to generate accurate, dynamic 3-D maps of real-world objects and their relative locations, and help devices understand the surroundings in AR real-time. As noted in the Editor’s note to the blog post, merely playing the game does not train an AI model.

When using AR or AR+ mode, we do not store your photos on our servers. For PokéStop Scanning, once a PokéStop scan is voluntarily uploaded, the video recording and associated camera data is retained on our servers in accordance with our data retention policies. For more information please see our Privacy Policy (https://nianticlabs.com/privacy).

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Last night the whole family got into a multiplayer Minecraft game for the first time in a while. Weirdly enough, *one* system was showing way too many materials as copper. Even stuff like snow. WTF?

Well, we realized it was after 7 PM local time, which meant on UTC time it was already April 1, so it must be this year’s April Fool’s joke for Minecraft. (Or in this case, one of the mods.) But why only on one computer?

Then it hit me: The host was a Windows machine, which means the hardware clock is set to local time (instead of being set to UTC and just displaying local time). I was connecting from a Linux box that dual-boots, so I’d long since set the hardware clock to local time so Windows wouldn’t fight with it. The one showing all copper, all the time, was a Mac, which doesn’t dual boot, and uses Unix under the hood, so its hardware was set to UTC, and it was the only computer of the three that was already running in April 1.

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We finished re-watching Deep Space Nine a few days ago. Quark’s rants in the second-to-last episode about rolling back the reforms regarding gender and worker protections, complaining that Ferengi society has been infected by a disease, and declaring that if he becomes Nagus he’ll bring back what made Ferenginar great again sound eerily familiar.

There’s even a bit about a latinum-plated toilet seat — I mean waste extractor.

It certainly sounds more like what Musk, Trump and Hegseth have actually been saying and doing than any other kind of “making Star Trek real”. Unless Musk’s obsession with eugenics and passing on his genes is enough stronger than his racism that he plans to make sure Khan exists. (Eeeeew.)

Wait, maybe that’s why Khan is white in the Kelvin timeline.

Seriously, though, the Ferengi have always been an extreme caricature of American culture and capitalism taken to absurd lengths. They were even compared to “Yankee traders” in their first appearance on TNG. In 2016, Trump campaigned as an extreme characature of a conservative, the kind that viewers a decade earlier would have dismissed as unrealistic. And since he won, the GOP embraced that caricature and has remade itself into a political/business alliance that makes Quark look downright progressive by comparison.

After all, Quark once brought up the horrors of Earth’s history: slavery, devastating wars, etc. Ferengi never had government death squads rounding people up off the street for being undesirables. They would have just let someone new in town pay the requisite fee and let them go about their business like a civilized culture.

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This is kind of funny. When I watched the movie Avatar way back in 2009, I was struck by the similarity of the premise to Timothy Zahn’s 2002 novel Manta’s Gift:

The main character, a human who’s suffered a severely disabling injury, is offered the chance to place his consciousness into an alien body and report back to the human expedition. Over the course of his time there, he finds that he has more in common with the aliens than with the humans who sent him, and pushes back against their exploitative agenda.

OK, so it’s a brain transplant, not a neural link, and it’s manta-like beings who live in the groundless atmosphere of Jupiter, not humanoids who are part of a literal Gaia.

I just discovered that the book was re-issued in 2020 (Timothy Zahn, 2002) with a tagline describing it as “A gripping first-contact adventure for fans of James Cameron’s Avatar…”

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I can go with your scifi/fantasy story’s super-impossible thing being associated with an eclipse. It’s activating or deactivating people’s super-powers? Sure! Certain magic spells can only be cast during an eclipse? Sure! The moon transforms into cheese? OK, whatever. (pun not intended)

But please, please get the basic mechanics right! Continue reading →

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