Flutterby™!

Ripping and accumulation of CDs, using the Mac 'cause it's there, and having fun with "how many of these CDs has iTunes not heard of".

Surprised by some of the ones it finds data on, where others...

Petaluma folks: we're gonna take Bay Area Regional Planner, the board game, down to Aqus on Sunday January 4 at 2PM. Join us?

Really? You don't fucking say? Cursor CEO warns vibe coding builds ‘shaky foundations’ and eventually ‘things start to crumble’.

Via.

`perl -le 'while (<>) { print $1 if m%public_html/(.*?\.php)%;} ' < ~/var/log/apache2/flutterby.com.log-error`

And you get a zip bomb, and you get a zip bomb, and...

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Between 2001 and 2014, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US an estimated $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion in direct spending. Global AI spending, according to Gartner, is forecast to reach nearly $1.5 trillion this year, putting today's AI boom in the same cash-burning league as two major wars.

Via.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has like half the revenue of OnlyFans...

Michigan AG opens investigation into Native American boarding schools

The investigation seeks to document the history of the buildings, as well as prosecute where possible. Of the eight state recognized institutions, two of them were open and operating into the 1980's.

Via.

Went into the city to hang with friends. Google Maps transit data has really gone to shit. From trying to direct me to non-existent bus stops, to sending me way out of my way for connections, it's... Not good.

And they still miss the feature I most want, a "maximize walking", because I know I'm gated through a once an hour bus, how many steps up Van Ness can I safely take before I risk being between stops?

Whoopsie. If only someone had seen this coming... After laying off 4,000 employees and automating with AI agents, Salesforce executives admit: We were more confident about...

"All of us were more confident about large language models a year ago," Parulekar stated, revealing the company's strategic shift away from generative AI toward more predictable "deterministic" automation in its flagship product, Agentforce. This admission comes after Salesforce reportedly reduced its support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees—approximately 4,000 roles—through AI agent deployment, as CEO Marc Benioff disclosed in a podcast appearance.

We're watching "Finding Mr. Christmas". My "this guy has the kind of personality you can put your own spin on" contestant has been eliminated, and I'm even more conscious of how this vision of masculinity, and Christmas, is constructed to create consumer demand. And yet I continue to watch...

Ouch on this morning's Timdle: spanked right out of the gate by "Donation of Pepin (Papal States established in central Italy)" vs "Boethius Writes Philosophy (Classical learning preserved for posterity)".

I'm learning. Slowly.

Courier: We created a searchable database for the Epstein Files, including everything the DOJ wants hidden (Via)

There's a lot of buzz that much of the redactions involved black rectangles drawn over text on the PDFs, leading to things that I haven't delved too deeply into yet, like Lee Drake‬ ‪@leedrake.bsky.social‬

I wrote up a batch converter that should extract all the text and keep pagination/layout comparable. Putting docs here.

If anyone else can send me PDFs, I can give it a go.

Epstein Docs Unredacted — Google Drive

There's a lot of misinfo flying around, but I think it's worth linking to this assertion that one of the images released of Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross, with Jackson's and Ross's kids blacked out is just a Getty Images picture.

Chuck Darwin @cdarwin@c.im has a link to Mi ke Baker posting some documents that collaborate Maria Farmer's 1996 FBI complaint.

Reuters Exclusive: SoftBank races to fulfill $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end, sources say

The "all- in" bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm's position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank's entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia (NVDA.O), offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile US (TMUS.O) stake, and slashed staff.

Via

Different ways to watch the 60 Minutes piece on CECOT:

@dannotdaniel@hellions.clou d embeds the video from https://drive.proton.me/urls/XA5XYQV47M#VSGTMh8TpDEO

David D. Levine links to Yashar Ali | The Reset — BREAKING: Here’s the 60 Minutes Segment Trump and CBS News Executives Don’t Want You to See

links to Inside CECOT - Distributed Denial of Secrets

Not sure if this is hosted on Reddit, or embedded, but /r/Trumpvirus: 60 Minutes - Inside CECOT - Bootlegged episode not aired in USA (Via)

And on archive.org (via).

I'm sitting here on a network that could, if I upgraded some hardware, have a 10G uplink, with Internet connected light switches and cameras and a robot vacuum, thinking about trust and participating in society... Brian Krebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange

When an entire class of technology states on the packaging that it was made in China but intended "for overseas use only," this should really give you pause before plugging it into your network.

You will find this verbiage on a lot of Android TV streaming boxes for sale at the major retailers. There's a very good reason the country that makes this crap doesn't want it on their own networks. My advice: If you have one of these Android streaming boxes on your network or get one as a gift, toss it in the trash. I'll have a lot more about this in the New Year, but these things are responsible for building out a botnet that currently has ~2M devices and is growing rapidly.

Kimwolf Exposed: The Massive Android Botnet with 1.8 Million Infected Devices.

Science News: He made beer that’s also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing kinda buries the lede under the sensationalism, or maybe the sensationalism is the point:

Buck’s body made antibodies against several types of the virus after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.

because it's about generating oral vaccines cultured in yeasts using FDA "generally recognized as safe" ingredients to count as supplements rather than medicines, which seems like all sorts o' both cans o' worms, and fascinating evolutions of how the regulatory and public health environment are evolving.

Via.

Washington State Attorney General announces $150 million multistate settlement with Mercedes, Daimler over emissions fraud. If you had a diesel 2008 to 2016 Mercedes you might wanna check the state list at the end of the press release to see if you can get some recompense for inadvertently helping the Germans gas your neighbors.

Happy Christmas Adam!

Henri is staying with us for two nights, and you should buy their zines and stickers because they're awesome!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/henkprints

Today I learned that "deprecate" used to mean "to pray against, as an evil," which explains why, in the modern usage, deprecated technologies are the ones we most want to adopt and use.

Super enjoyed the Candy Claus, Private Eye comedy audio drama podcast, but when discussion episodes talk about this new medium, I wanna scream.

Where were y'all when Norm Sherman and Abigail Hilton and Chris Lester and Nathan Lowell and all those folks were doing their things over a decade ago?

In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Aberdeen Division : Thomas Billups Plaintiff v. Louisville Municipal School District Defendant — Civil Action No. 1:24- CV-74-SA-RP Sactions Order (PDF)

As of March 2025, Ms. Watson was on notice of her mistakes when an opposing attorney informed her directly that she had submitted a brief that contained misrepresentations of law. She was apparently then given an opportunity to fix the issue without consequence. Instead of learning from her mistake, she failed to change her ways and continued the same practice of not verifying AI output—only then, her conduct additionally violated the Firm’s policy prohibiting use of external AI tools.

As Eric Goldman ‪@ericgoldman.bsky.social‬ summarized

An attorney couldn't stop using Grok (?!) to help draft filings, producing "a flood of tainted filings" & apparently triggering the implosion of a law firm & 3 lawyers' careers 🤖😵 The court called her misconduct "particularly egregious & prolific"

and ‪Mike Masnick‬ ‪@mmasnick.bsky.social‬ observed:

Already unacceptable to use LLMs to draft filings and even worse, if you do, not to have checked the citations. But if you ARE going to do that, why of all LLMs out there would you use *GROK*?

And elsewhere: As more lawyers fall for AI hallucinations, ChatGPT says: Check my work, same article republished as How AI-driven hallucinatory filings are impacting Arizona courts

The AI Hallucination Cases database – maintained by Damien Charlotin, a researcher at HEC Paris, a leading business school in France – identifies a half-dozen federal court filings in Arizona since September 2024 that include fabricated material from ChatGPT or another generative AI tool.

Hopefully we'll start to see some real penalties for lawyers who outsource their work to the plausible bullshit generators.

Max Leibman @maxleibman@beige.party

It’s offensive and presumptuous to wish strangers “Happy Holidays.”

You don’t know them. Maybe they don’t practice happiness.

No picture, because it's basically just another shot of that same jig, but just did the first glue-up of the veneer on the inside of the table inset, using an old yoga mat to prove pressure.

And I have some 2x12 that looks like very clean vg Doug Fir that I think is gonna be the rim, legs, and pedestal. Still need to sort inside the recess...

Seen in the wild this morning, same size pickup truck bed.

Clamping so that the ring stays fixed, and keeping the router in place, is tough. Hope this works....

the inset train dining room table continues, I'm trying to get a very consistent height ring cut, so I made a large Lazy Susan so I can spin this thing against a router to try to cut it.

Listened to the Switched on Pop episode on quitting Spotify, featuring Deerhoof, and ran across Time Extension: Site News | Why We Won't Be Covering ModRetro Products Moving Forward, and thinking a lot about when we stop engaging, and why, and where the line is.

And not having good answers.

High-fat cheese, cream linked to lower risk of dementia: Study

Cheese Linked to Lower Dementia Risk in 25-Year Study

American Academy of Neurology

Could Cheese Protect Your Brain Health? Study links high-fat cheese and cream to lower dementia risk

Neurology: High- and Low-Fat Dairy Consumption and Long-Term Risk of Dementia, Evidence From a 25-Year Prospective Cohort Study

‪Kingfisher & Wombat‬ ‪@tkingfisher.com‬

Me, submerged headfirst in Brie: Shu’ up, ’s medishinal.

Writing about a short video from a $70/head Christmas service at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas (kind of amazing), Sharon ‪@sharonk.bsky.social‬ wrote:

for all people make fun of falun gong, it's wild how much this is basically the same thing as shen yun

Via ‪Christopher Walsh‬ ‪@deflatermaus.bsky.social‬

"megachurches are shen yun for white people" is an incredible and damning true statement

Miakoda :neurodiversity: @hellomiakoda@pdx.social

All tech is wearable tech if you have enough duct tape.

Sorry, I really want to make social media more... you know... social. Life updates and stuff. Not just posting links to law... But it seems like today is a day to emphasize a passage from "H.R.4405 - Epstein Files Transparency Act".

https://www.congress.gov/bill/...th-congress/house-bill/4405/text

(b) Prohibited Grounds for Withholding.—

(1) No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.

From 2021, but CNN: When granted a ‘Make-A-Wish,’ this 13-year-old chose to feed his city’s homeless for a year. Which came via Jules @afewbugs@social.coop who posted this with a screencap of "Blood Quantum Entanglement @LammaticHama" (maybe a Twitter user) saying:

If you look at this more than half a second you realize they're saying this city required a child sacrifice to feed their citizens

Ghoul shit

and added:

Welcome to the resort city of Omelas, from the people who brought you the Torment Nexus

Bluesky thread from Ben Williamson, starting with reviewing a paper that referred to non- existent sources on which he was allegedly a co-author, and then becomes a look at how AI generated citations are polluting Google Scholar.

Via ‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬, who notes:

This is ridiculous. Consensual reality, the very idea that we inhabit an understandable universe where any beliefs we have in common are grounded in verifiable facts, is being destroyed before our very eyes.

Sorry, I can't help you with the response from the LLM. I can change the system prompt to try to get the LLM to give a more relevant response to your prompt, but we'll need a significant sample of prompts and the sorts of responses you expect to make that happen. These things aren't magic.

The news that you can use a hot glue gun to melt candy canes (for things like building gingerbread houses) has me wondering who's gonna be the first to release a food-grade hot glue gun.

https://urusai.social/@mdmrn/115735087231525565

Axios on MSN: Scoop: TikTok signs deal for sale of US unit after years-long saga:

The White House and the Chinese government hammered out a deal in principle in September to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by a U.S. investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake, and Oracle.

(Emphasis mine.)

I don't have a non-paid link for this, but: 404 Media: Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers. So, yeah, Andreessen Horowitz has backed Doublespeed, a company that uses generative AI to create social media slop for advertisers.

This will not end well for society.

Ah. Timdle felt especially easy this morning. Even guessed reasonably on the Battle of Clontarf.

Someone else took me to task for describing anthropomorphizing LLMs as developmental disability, and as someone formally diagnosed with learning disabilities in the '80s, I'm actually angry about it.

If an adult honestly ascribes personhood to a stuffed animal, we talk about intellectual challenges, but when they do it to an LLM, framing it like that's offensive.

Like my inability to mask and say "oh, yeah, that's totally a sane thing" is the problem.

The search is currently fucked up, so I can't figure out if I linked this previously when it was a Twitter thread, but a long Bluesky thread about the dialog in the swordfighting scene in Pricess Bride.

I kinda get how for physical objects where inventory projection is an issue, or limited resources like theater seats, you might want web site shopping carts to have time limits.

But holy shit, for digital resources, make that time limit days or weeks, not minutes.

Cc: karaoke-version.com. Sigh.

Interacted with a reply from someone who was obviously keyword trolling. After that exchange started to feel a bit hinky, went out and searched the person's name and read a few threads, and...

Good reminder to block and move on.

Wow. If you wanted to destroy my remaining faith in an organization, you probably couldn't be more effective than an email titled "Scientific Validation Confirms Blue Zones Integrity" with body that reads like the worst conspiracy theory appeal to authority.

Thinking about the revelations about Oliver Sacks making stuff up, and what we already knew about Malcolm Gladwell, and how much we like LLMs telling us what we want to hear.

Humanity really seeks out being lied to.

That moment when I feel stupid because Apache for all the virtual domains was logging to my user home directory, and /var/log/apache wasn't readable to that user, and there were 36G of old log files clogging up my web server that I couldn't find...