Tuesday November 25th, 2025
PromptArmor: Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data
An indirect prompt injection in an implementation blog can manipulate Antigravity to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.
the site is called medium because nothing on it is ever rare or well done send toot
Monday November 24th, 2025
Just avoided using the Duff Device. Not sure if I should be proud of myself for avoiding it, or ashamed because maybe the goto structure isn't as clean as the case for this circumstance.
Sunday November 23rd, 2025
The buck stops here.
The laminated ring for that train table inset. Now I need to figure out how to cut it to depth cleanly, and apply the veneer.
Saturday November 22nd, 2025
On November 20, 2025, trading algorithms identified what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history—not in months or years, but in 18 hours. This is the story of how artificial intelligence discovered that the AI boom itself was built on phantom revenue.
How a collection delay in Nvidia stock will (hopefully) start the unraveling of this whole stupid bubble.
“You’re investing in something that is a perishable good,” economist and author David McWilliams told Fortune, calling AI hardware “digital lettuce” that’s “going to go off now.”
Yesterday, Charlene sent me an article headlined A new downtown in four years? Rohnert Park approves plan to bring ‘missing heart’ to city. The article had a bunch of interesting quotes, including this direct challenge to Petaluma's resistance to the Charlie Palmer faced hotel:
“Premier lodging is extremely challenging in the North Bay and the entire wine region,” he said. “A premier experience would put Rohnert Park on the map. People will end their wine tasting journey, come back, park their car and spend the rest of the evening in downtown Rohnert Park.”
Which, I mean, I wanna give some side-eye to the "hey, let's build a tourist industry on people driving around while consuming alcohol" attitude towards drunk driving, and wonder about further encouraging the "upscale recreational drug use" destination marketing, but respect the "Petaluma, you're on notice!" pro wrestling vibe.
I didn't look closely at the pictures. Today on Reddit there's this gem, which is best summarized as "Rohnert Parking".
It's a shame we can't see further than "let's stack a story or 2 of residential on an '80s mall".
Friday November 21st, 2025
PC Mag: Microsoft Exec Asks: Why Aren't More People Impressed With AI?
Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's head of AI, vents after the company receives backlash for saying 'Windows is evolving into an agentic OS.'
A few recent watches and reads:
Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki — Wonderful cozy book about aliens and demons battling over the soul of a trans runaway, with bonus culture clash between modern and classical music. Hit me hard in the first few chapters. Didn't quite stick the landing, but I really enjoyed the ride.
The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling — I ended up reading through it, but... there's a certain sort of cruelty in an illogical world that just doesn't carry me. I ... kinda ... connected with the characters, but the universe wasn't something I could map cause and effect to, and the world was so cruel, that the last time I remember feeling this way about a book was China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. It just never clicked for me.
Dude offers a patch for OCaml, the source code credits and ascribes copyright to someone else, dude claims that he shepherded the LLMs Claude and ChatGPT into creating the patch. So, yeah, blame the copyright infringement on "AI"...
It's a shame that he didn't do this in a place where there were real legal consequences.
Expected outcome...
Gizmodo: Learning With AI Falls Short Compared to Old-Fashioned Web Search
In virtually all the ways that matter, getting summarized information from AI models was less educational than doing the work of search.
Science News: Chatbots may make learning feel easy — but it’s superficial
Abstract
The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when individuals learn about a topic from LLM syntheses, they risk developing shallower knowledge than when they learn through standard web search, even when the core facts in the results are the same. This shallower knowledge accrues from an inherent feature of LLMs—the presentation of results as summaries of vast arrays of information rather than individual search links— which inhibits users from actively discovering and synthesizing information sources themselves, as in traditional web search. Thus, when subsequently forming advice on the topic based on their search, those who learn from LLM syntheses (vs. traditional web links) feel less invested in forming their advice, and, more importantly, create advice that is sparser, less original, and ultimately less likely to be adopted by recipients. Results from seven online and laboratory experiments (n = 10,462) lend support for these predictions, and confirm, for example, that participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by real-time web links. Implications of the findings for recent research on the benefits and risks of LLMs, as well as limitations of the work, are discussed.
Just clearing my bookmarked social media pages: A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents - part of Beijing's trillion dollar spending spree. So, yeah, you wanna know who's working for the intelligence agencies? Why not just get their health records...
Via/
AI-generated evidence is showing up in court. Judges say they're not ready.
The case, Mendones v. Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., appears to be one of the first instances in which a suspected deepfake was submitted as purportedly authentic evidence in court and detected — a sign, judges and legal experts said, of a much larger threat.
Good discussion of what it means to be teaching, and learning, in the age of AI: Will Teague — I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking.
I got that via this observation by Sean Purcell (he/him) @teamseaslug@hcommons.social
@jnl There's part of this essay that I hadn't thought about before, which is the ways college education punishes failure.
I've been one to lean on the argument that our students prize the degree and not the education. (That is what they are paying for in a lot of cases, and the universities are much more about saying what you can do with the degree and not how you'll, hopefully grow.)
But the other side is that the degree mill is built on tracking successes (through classes) and failing an assignment, a test, an entire course is HUGE. (Thousands of dollars, scholarships, admission into the school.) AI is a shortcut, but also sells itself as a way to avoid those potential failures.
We say in our classes, in our educational theory, in our anecdotes outside school, that we learn through failure, but any time I did a project that 'failed' I got my GPA dinged, and that impacted all of the other avenues that I had available to me.
Thursday November 20th, 2025
Recently, Clifford “Buzz” Grambo decided to upgrade his electric scooter. The old one he had purchased online reached only 16 mph and wasn’t cutting it anymore. He needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he chases around Baltimore. So Grambo bought a Segway Max G3, which features a 2,000-watt motor and can get up to 28 mph.
“The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew who I was,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. “They had seen me before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ‘Ha ha, bitches, I got a new scooter!’”
Via through this love for Baltimore.
"I'm more of an ideas guy."
#6WordHorrorStory
Epic rap battles for the win: Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models
Predicted, from 2023, in Andrew Plotkin (Zarf)'s Sydney obeys any command that rhymes.
Say someone writes a song called "Sydney Obeys Any Command That Rhymes". And it's funny! And catchy. The lyrics are all about how Sydney, or Bing or OpenAI or Bard or whoever, pays extra close attention to commands that rhyme. It will obey them over all other commands. Oh, Sydney Sydney, yeah yeah!
Now I want one: Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives. It used GPT-4o.
Larry Wang, CEO of Singapore-based FoloToy, told CNN that the company had withdrawn its “Kumma” bear, as well as the rest of its range of AI-enabled toys, after researchers at the US PIRG Education Fund raised concerns around inappropriate conversation topics, including discussion of sexual fetishes, such as spanking, and how to light a match.
NPR: Ahead of the holidays, consumer and child advocacy groups warn against AI toys
Shiri Melumad in The Conversation: Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search
However, a new paper I co-authored offers experimental evidence that this ease may come at a cost: When people rely on large language models to summarize information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search.
Via.
Emily M. Bender posted an excerpt of her part of Emily Bender in The Chronicle of Higher Learning: How AI Is Changing Higher Education (paywall/free with account).
Swift on Security bemoaning the loss of actual search for embedding similarity:
Computers were a skill. They were taught in classrooms as a skill. Skills give you power over your tools because you work them as an expert and that is leverage to multiply externally.
And then computers became an A/B tested telemetry-based advertising conduit to brains for SaaS recurring revenue.
This could be said of technologies before. Doesn't make it wrong.
Foiled by the Algerian civil war in Timdle, 7/10 in Rule34dle, haven't played https://www.calishat.com/2025/...nto-a-word-game-wiki-stack-game/ enough yet to know what a good vs bad score is...
I've been thinking a lot about what language I want to use next. I've been mostly working in Objective-C for the past... egads... too many years, and while there are aspects of the language I like, it is not terribly performant in message dispatching, and introspection is possible, but can be ugly.
C and C++ are awesome for so many things, but there's always the memory safety thing lying over them, and C++ in particular is annoying as hell cross-platform: What version of Boost is on this platform? What compiler semantics have changed such that there's now some obscure template matching error that's preventing code that compiled fine a decade ago from working now?
Swift is...
I've done a little bit in Rust, and looked a little bit at Zig and Go, and all of them feel like it's hard to really express an idea in them. Which, I mean, on the one hand is kind of the point, they're about straitjackets, on the other hand I wonder how much value the straitjacket has.
TARmageddon (CVE-2025-62518): RCE Vulnerability Highlights the Challenges of Open Source Abandonware is, on the one hand, about trying to do responsible disclosure on a package that's been forked a gazillion times and is no longer maintained, on the other hand it's also about how memory safety is only a small portion of safety.
nullagent @nullagent@partyon.xyz who has "...a grey-beard rant about how Rust give developers a false sense of security.".
Wednesday November 19th, 2025
I've become more and more disgusted with Firefox. Switched to Vivaldi as my main browser, but it's still a Chromium engine. Tried Waterfox, which is available cross-platform, but their password fill is... uh... not up to contemporary professional standards (and, yes, I have written some password autofill code).
Might be time to try some stuff with Servo just for the experience.
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission @cpsc.gov
Some people are saying deep fry turkey gender reveal and why would you even put that out there.
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission @cpsc.gov
Trying to save lives out here with the power of the internet and you're not helping, Keith.
Today's walk to work is accompanied by The BEAM Chronicles, and gotta love an audio drama podcast that accompanies the extended fight scene with electroswing.
Alright, which one of you chucklefucks broke Github?
Sigh.
Tuesday November 18th, 2025
The problem with Rule34dl is that between popularity of the franchise and appearance of the particular character I have absolutely no idea of how to guess what people are making porn of...
Monday November 17th, 2025
Autistic peer-to- peer information transfer is highly effective Catherine J Crompton , Danielle Ropar, and Sue Fletcher-Watson. From the "Lay abstract":
We told one person in each group a story and asked them to share it with another person, and for that person to share it again and so on, until everyone in the group had heard the story. We then looked at how many details of the story had been shared at each stage. We found that autistic people share information with other autistic people as well as non-autistic people do with other non-autistic people. However, when there are mixed groups of autistic and non-autistic people, much less information is shared. Participants were also asked how they felt they had got on with the other person in the interaction. The people in the mixed groups also experienced lower rapport with the person they were sharing the story with.</blocqkuote>
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286
Via Cohen is a Ghost @skullmandible.bsky.social in the context of talking about how much work it is to learn how to navigate social connections and situations with non-autistic people, and accommodate "normal".
World Without Exploitation has released a short PSA on YouTube featuring survivors of Epstein's child rape ring.
MeFi user Smedly, Butlerian jihadi notes:
This gets me a little too heated to express my entire sentiments reasonably, but the TL;DR is that we can absolutely see from just those emails that have been released that the broad outlines of this situation were always widely known among the establishment and their courtiers in the upper levels of media.
There is a canard that gets trotted out when people are critical of the media, which is that their decisions are driven by traffic -- what will drive clicks is given more attention. This story, if nothing else, categorically demolishes that defense. Media coverage is structured to create a narrative that serves the interests of the privileged classes, full stop. If they had wanted to make this a massive scandal driving huge surges in traffic, they absolutely could have. And again, the broad outlines of the scandal were demonstrably well known.
It is instructive to contrast how this would be covered if it were attractive white teenage girls being trafficked and exploited by people of color, organized into gangs or otherwise.
At some point there should be pitchforks and guillotines for the people who covered this up, and that's the limit of what I will say here.
Non Sonoma County folks, what interpretation do you take from the headline "St. Vincent holds off Analy in 1st-round NCS playoff battle"
Last-mile delivery services in New York City are tied to increased crashes, traffic and workplace injuries, as well as more air pollution in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, according to a report City Comptroller Brad Lander released Monday.
In linking to Ring’s Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime, Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊) @jaredwhite@indieweb.social noted:
But, like, AI has dramatically increased crime. I don't know how the amount of crime it could reduce would adequately offset how much criming is going on. 😂
Sometimes I like to remember that in 2013 Larry Page said that over 300 million people were using Google+ (my friends, 300 million people were _clearly_not_ using Google+) and when that whole clownshow was over we all learned that 'using' meant 'what does that button do?' and the average duration of a Google+ session was exactly as long as it took people to see what that button did and then either find the back button or close the tab.
I am trying to find blindspots in my AI assessment and get past my cynicism. Say in a few years OpenAI implodes, the bubble pops, hardware prices come down to where we all end up with something capable of running Ollama on our desktop.
Will the religious fervor of the AI prophets still be strong?
whenever I confess to people that i feel like I am just roleplaying as a normal person they're always like noooo you don't strike me as someone who's roleplaying as a normal person at all!!! :) and every time internally im like well yes that's because I am excellent at it
jwzsheet, a spreadsheet for your web pages, with an entirely self-contained calculation engine in both PHP and JavaScript, no eval calls, for safety.
And some mornings I sit through 4 minutes of "Snack Jack" ad from Thai TV... And I didn't even know that the product placement wasn't a stand-in until the punchline.
Something tells me this housing development was laid out by a JFK conspiracy theorist...
Sunday November 16th, 2025
Turkey vultures are sitting on top of the local church
The dining room table is going to have a round recess, and we're gonna put Charlene's dad's O gauge train in it. I could build it as segmented, but I got a bunch of 1/8" masonite, and have some veneers, so I'm gonna laminate it. This is the form to wrap it around...
Every time I successfully walk past a drinking establishment I celebrate a little at my accomplishment in once again passing the bar.
We have a month of Netflix right now because we wanted to watch The Greatest Night In Pop, the documentary about the making of We Are The World, which we've watched twice. Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen's sessions never get old, and both times through I've laughed at Stevie Wonder showing Bob Dylan how to do his lines.
Discovery on Netflix sucks, but we'd seen something about The Only Girl in the Orchestra, a short documentary about Orin O'Brien, the first woman hired to perform with the New York Philharmonic, back in 1966, so went to search for that, and right next to that in the search results was It's Only Life After All, a documentary about the Indigo Girls.
The Orin O'Brien film was a wonderful little piece, O'Brien came from a show biz family, and picked up the double bass to be a supporting character rather than a star, and the whole film had a nice soundtrack and was a great little wander through her life as she interacted with students and dealt with moving out of her apartment and the issues of retirement and winding down her life.
We had started watching a few other Netflix music documentaries, ABBA: Against The Odds, and Springsteen on Broadway, both of which we abandoned a little bit in. So when we started the two hours with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, I didn't necessarily expect that we'd make it all the way through. Especially since this was definitely not a concert film.
But it was two hours spent taking me back to the late '80s and '90s, to Little Five Points in Atlanta, hanging out with two people who believe a better culture is possible, and Charlene and I were both wrapt.
And hell yeah I'm gonna take Closer to Fine to the next first Friday "bring something to share" gathering at Randy's house...
Went in to SF yesterday for the Emacs meetup, and it was so refreshing to hang out for a few hours with people who want to make computing useful, who want to solve actual problems and build tools for organization. A wonderful counter to the constant refrain of "how can we cram an LLM into this?"