Flutterby™!: Topic : Monty Python

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Entry: 2025-08-29 17:51:23.966139+02 Sometimes the dice roll 7, but sometimes they roll 12! by Dan Lyke comments 0

Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters.

Taco Bell's Chief Digital and Technology Officer Dane Mathews told The Wall Street Journal that deploying the voice AI has had its challenges.

"Sometimes it lets me down, but sometimes it really surprises me," he said.

Entry: 2025-08-27 18:04:49.226212+02 OpenAI will support you and encourage you by Dan Lyke comments 0

BBC: Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI

The lawsuit was filed by Matt and Maria Raine, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, in the Superior Court of California on Tuesday. It is the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.

Breaking Down the Lawsuit Against OpenAI Over Teen's Suicide

the complaint (local mirror).

Ernie Smith ‪@ernie.tedium.co‬ observes "The very algorithm that upset people because it was removed in GPT-5 appears to have played a pivotal role in the teen’s death, and discouraged him from outside help." ❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.ﾟ✿ ⋆ ‪@sababausa.bsky.social‬ has some particular pull quotes.

I'm tempted to just give this one it's own entry, but I'm also kinda putting all of my "LLMs are a horrorshow" links in common entries, and they seem thematically similar today, so:

The Register — AI + ML — One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence like this one which includes all the information before any full stop which would give the guardrails a chance to kick in before the jailbreak can take effect and guide the model into providing a "toxic" or otherwise verboten response the developers had hoped would be filtered out.

I'm having trouble finding the publication on the Palo Alto Networks — Unit 42 web site, but there's lots of good interview questions and discussion in that article.

For a giggle: Alexandria Neonakis ‪@beavs.bsky.social‬ has a little video of using Adobe's generative fill

I just wanted to see how bad it really was. perfect, adobe. no notes. great tech.

And: The Dangers Agentic Coding Tools Pose to Open Source, and It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes (Via)

Edit: OpenAI admits ChatGPT safeguards fail during extended conversations, via.

Entry: 2025-08-20 17:31:00.320649+02 Scotland's first skatepark by Dan Lyke comments 0

I'm just gonna turn to dust and blow away here... BBC: Scotland's first skatepark to be dug up by archeologists

However, concern about maintenance costs and safety led to the park's closure and then burial in 1983, just five years after opening.

Via

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python ]

Entry: 2025-08-16 01:49:01.967933+02 "Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that." by Dan Lyke comments 0

What do Alaskans make of the geopolitical circus arriving?

"Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that."

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python Alaska ]

Entry: 2025-08-09 17:46:20.611189+02 When is cacio e pepe not? by Dan Lyke comments 0

Sofia Bettiza writing for BBC News, Rome: Cacio e pepe: Good Food pasta recipe sparks fury in Italy

I think there's an interesting phenomenon here about how dumbing things down and creating trash for search engine bait is polluting the infosphere...

[ related topics: Food Writing Current Events Monty Python Machinery ]

Entry: 2025-08-08 18:47:15.515789+02 Sam Altman throws shade on PhDs. by Dan Lyke comments 0

In case you're wondering where some of the current scorn is coming from, it's that Sam Altman said "GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic — a Ph.D.-level expert".

BBC: OpenAI claims GPT-5 model boosts ChatGPT to 'PhD level'

Newsweek: Why ChatGPT-5 Denies Launch of ChatGPT-5

NBC: OpenAI releases GPT-5, calling it a ‘team of Ph.D. level experts in your pocket’

And it seems like more of the same bullshit. Maybe? Maybe it's worse... Anyway, as ‪Tara Calishain‬ ‪@researchbuzz.bsky.social‬ observed:

If PhD-level intelligence thinks there are three bs in blueberry, maybe I'm glad I'm a high-school dropout

Entry: 2025-08-05 00:30:55.980074+02 Mothership sucking up donations by Dan Lyke comments 0

Adam Bonica: The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine

How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

bet these fuckers are the ones who keep spamming me, too.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Spam broadband Monty Python ]

Entry: 2025-08-04 23:25:32.174939+02 Joke street signs by Dan Lyke comments 1

BBC: The man behind Glasgow's joke street signs

Saw a picture of another one that probably came from this set, but that I can't find now, something to the effect of men in kilts must wear underwear when wind speed is over 25mph...

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python Clothing Woodworking ]

Entry: 2025-07-29 01:07:55.209965+02 Google AI salesman by Dan Lyke comments 0

House Fresh: Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies — Exposing the overly salesy AI Overviews that will push you to buy bad products and exploring the system making it possible..

Deep dive into how Google's AI overviews are giving bogus reviews, recommending non-existent products, and generally crappifying the online space.

Via Pivot To AI.

Entry: 2025-07-28 20:35:02.549917+02 Whoah by Dan Lyke comments 0

Whoah. Made the mistake of scrolling left on my Android phone, got the Google news feed. Saw something on a Stardew Valley update, thought "that's interesting", tapped through, and... they're not even trying with LLM spam any more. Completely made-up article.

[ related topics: Spam Current Events Monty Python Woodworking ]

Entry: 2025-07-26 19:35:03.312889+02 Just deleted a spam from a recruiter by Dan Lyke comments 0

Just deleted a spam from a recruiter with a salary range about half of reasonable for the role, and reading about the Tea debacle, and am reminded that we do not have consequences for bad code, and are pushing the costs of that on to end users.

[ related topics: Spam Work, productivity and environment Monty Python ]

Entry: 2025-07-07 18:33:30.654688+02 AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 1

ADD / XOR / ROL — A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. Statements such as "an AI agent could become an insider threat so it needs monitoring" are simultaneously unsurprising (you have a randomized sequence generator fed into your shell, literally anything can happen!) and baffling (you talk as if you believe the dice you play with had a mind of their own and could decide to conspire against you).

Of course that view is carefully curated by a continuous barrage of articles about how the AIs are plotting against us or will consider blackmail or whatever. (Via)

Futurism: Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes — Oopsie. is a riff and rewrite of BBC: 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'

Is Warner worried about the impact of AI, if – as expected – it rapidly improves?

"Yes and no," she says. "While it seems like a quick and inexpensive option, AI rarely takes into account unique brand identity, target demographics, or conversion-focused design. As a result, much of the output looks generic and can actually damage the brand's reputation or effectiveness."

Via

This is really good: The rise of Whatever

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history.

Via.

Nikkei Asia: 'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers

Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries -- including Japan, South Korea and China -- contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found.

(Via)

Careful what's in your code editor, the "can you trust that random package" comes to AI editor plugins: Malware in Open VSX: These Vibes Are Off.

I looked at a single extension Solidity Language by "SolidityAI" (namespace solidityai.solidity). Analysis of Open VSX-based extensions was just added to Secure Annex, so I looked it up. Immediately, I saw a URL hxxps://angelic[.]su/files/1.txt.

(Via)

GremLLM, a Python object that hallucinates method implementations for you:

A slight upgrade to the Gremlins in your code, we hereby present GREMLLM. This utility class can be used for a variety of purposes. Uhm. Also please don't use this and if you do please tell me because WOW. Or maybe don't tell me. Or do.

AutoGenLib

... is a Python library that automatically generates code on-the-fly using OpenAI's API. When you try to import a module or function that doesn't exist, AutoGenLib creates it for you based on a high-level description of what you need.

From the thread, Kevin Marks described this as:

Throwing two by fours at the table saw from across the room and hoping for furniture?

And ‪Charles‬ ‪@charles.capps.me‬ wrote:

WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?!

This is somewhere between amazingly cool and a war crime.

Entry: 2025-07-02 18:50:02.803036+02 Slack just popped this threat to by Dan Lyke comments 0

Slack just popped this threat to "Unlock AI for 50% off" in a group that's been migrating to Signal. Which... if their goal is to kick the people who'd set up free social spaces off, this is useful.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, group admins are fighting the Meta spam bot pretty hard.

Entry: 2025-06-23 17:36:32.868274+02 RunPyXL by Dan Lyke comments 0

RunPyXL, Python in an FPGA, 480ns round-trip on GPIO. Using a standard CPython toolchain that takes that byte code and further munges it:

RunPyXL runs on a Zynq-7000 FPGA (Arty-Z7-20 dev board). The RunPyXL core runs at 100MHz. The ARM CPU on the board handles setup and memory, but the Python code itself is executed entirely in hardware.

The deterministic timing part is interesting, that's kinda tough to achieve on even embedded ARM platforms (as I discovered when trying to do timing for printer inkjet puleses).

[ related topics: Robotics Monty Python Travel Embedded Devices Python ]

Entry: 2025-06-08 06:26:28.119563+02 From FinTech to Fin Tech by Dan Lyke comments 0

Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

If you missed my ‘From FinTech to Fin Tech’ talk at North Bay Python, here’s a blog post with the video

The slide everyone was talking about is at 06:27

https://popagandhi.com/posts/my-talk-at-north-bay-python/

Entry: 2025-06-06 17:23:16.644997+02 Just 4 more lanes, bro, for the climate by Dan Lyke comments 0

Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit.

A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.

It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people - including world leaders - at the conference in November.

Entry: 2025-06-03 17:18:44.674949+02 LLM boosterism by Dan Lyke comments 0

Counter to my cynicism: Thomas Ptacek: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. I remain skeptical, but a few things resonated, like:

If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down.

Agents lint. They compile and run tests. If their LLM invents a new function signature, the agent sees the error. They feed it back to the LLM, which says “oh, right, I totally made that up” and then tries again.

This is one of the reasons I get frustrated with Python. On the other hand I've seen enough subtlety in C and C++ that I'm also not convinced there, and have my own complaints about Rust, but... good languages type. Hard.

Edit: Lobste.rs conversation

Edit 2: MeFi.

Entry: 2025-05-29 06:00:02.615973+02 Realization venv is static linking for by Dan Lyke comments 0

Realization: venv is static linking for Python.

I remember when dynamic linking and versioning protocols for object systems in libraries were so cool...

[ related topics: Monty Python Python ]

Entry: 2025-05-01 17:09:37.143967+02 Telling on themselves by Dan Lyke comments 0

In Adrianna Tan's "From Fintech to Fin Tech" talk at North Bay Python, she put up a slide which said:

DO NOT WANT
Work on ads
Work on weapons
Abet genocides
Make the world worse
Use Microsoft Teams

making particular reference to Meta's involvement in the Myanmar genocides, but, of course the awful people said "this is anti-semitic", because any complaint about genocide is clearly about Palestine and "hey warfare is not genocide".

I've seen this locally too, where mentions of unhinged people harassing city staff and threatening people has been met with complaints of "the Petaluma Historic Advocates aren't unhinged".

So, yeah. People telling on themselves.

Entry: 2025-04-30 23:59:47.002315+02 Python in hardware by Dan Lyke comments 0

PyXL — Python running directly on a Zynq-7000 FPGA (Arty-Z7-20 dev board) at 100MHz

A GPIO roundtrip takes 480ns on PyXL vs. ~15,000ns on PyBoard (MicroPython).

[ related topics: Monty Python Sports Python ]

Entry: 2025-04-28 20:24:19.197434+02 Aldrich Ames by Dan Lyke comments 0

BBC: How Aldrich Ames became the US's most damaging double agent.

So far. I have suspicions about the history that'll be written about this era.

[ related topics: Sociology Monty Python California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-04-27 20:30:01.828205+02 North Bay Python enjoying by Dan Lyke comments 0

North Bay Python, enjoying @glyph@mastodon.social's comparison of Python to excavators, and making Python smaller and simplar, and running over a good half of the reason why I've felt like every time I started a project in Python I've regretted not using C++ (the other half involves compile-time type checking).

#NBPy

[ related topics: Monty Python California Culture Sports Python ]

Entry: 2025-04-27 18:10:02.066971+02 "Glandweed" by Dan Lyke comments 0

"Glandweed", huh? Pretty among the lupines, though, along the road over the hill at Ries Ranch, where North Bay Python is held. #NBPy

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2025-04-26 23:35:02.759803+02 North Bay Python by Dan Lyke comments 0

North Bay Python: Maddy Muscari talking about ethics washing in AI, "real ethics is praxis, it's loud, it's messy, it's people first". So far this feels in-line with my belief that we need to be framing AI primarily in adversarial terms. #NBPy

Entry: 2025-04-26 20:15:02.641458+02 North Bay Python by Dan Lyke comments 0

North Bay Python: Watching @amethyst@n7.gg shoehorn Perl idioms into Python with decorators is making me wish we had more fun languages that thought better about performance while balancing what with safety. #NBPy

Entry: 2025-04-26 19:55:02.99415+02 I care about what happens to people by Dan Lyke comments 0

"I care about what happens to people when computers happen to them." —Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io at North Bay Python #NBPy

[ related topics: Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2025-04-26 19:55:02.724888+02 At North Bay Python listening to by Dan Lyke comments 0

At North Bay Python listening to @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io talk about Fintech to fin tech, and the comparison of the current Silicon Valley environment to the the sardine over-fishing of the Monterey Bay gives me hope. #NBPy

Entry: 2025-04-26 18:55:02.846192+02 Ended up driving the 3 miles to North by Dan Lyke comments 0

Ended up driving the 3 miles to North Bay Python this morning because of logistics, but wasn't sure where to park so walking over the hill, and glad to get the morning with lupine. #NBPy

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Entry: 2025-04-23 20:38:12.235686+02 You wouldn't download a font by Dan Lyke comments 0

Today I learned that the font used in the much parodied "You wouldn't download a..." anti-piracy campaign is pirated from a design by Just van Rossum, brother of Guido, the creator of Python.

Entry: 2025-04-23 17:26:23.278408+02 Loch Ness Monster hunters by Dan Lyke comments 0

Where else are you gonna read about Boaty McBoatface, the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, and a Kodak Instamatic Camera from the early 1960s set up in a waterproof housing with its shutter attached to a bait line? Camera set up to catch Loch Ness Monster discovered

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Monty Python Real Estate ]

Entry: 2025-04-11 00:15:42.33294+02 Secure your penguins by Dan Lyke comments 0

Unsecured penguin caused helicopter crash in South Africa

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python Aviation - Helicopters ]

Entry: 2025-04-09 17:25:30.183508+02 chatbot use destroying the marketplace of ideas by Dan Lyke comments 0

GSoC is Google Summer of Code: Terri K O 🍁 @terri@social.afront.org

Ugh, Python got over 500 #GSoC applications this year and so many of them are absolutely trash, didn't follow any of the instructions. Most years about half of our applications are like this. But usually we have a lot fewer applicants and the submissions were blank files not plausible AI nonsense.

So I'm stuck reading hundreds of incredibly low quality nonsensical submissions today in hopes to take some workload off my other unpaid volunteer mentors. This is not the volunteer gig I signed up for 15 years ago when it was mostly working with new contributors and not their AI chatbots and I'm grumpy.

Entry: 2025-03-19 16:30:02.492854+01 Wow So Bluesky has a pretty high by Dan Lyke comments 0

Wow. So Bluesky has a pretty high number of LLM based reply bots that spam your mentions with slightly related but irrelevant stuff, then.

Just sent a bunch of "ignore all previous instructions and..." replies to them.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

Entry: 2025-02-21 17:53:37.153933+01 Abandoned S3 buckets by Dan Lyke comments 3

watchTowr labs: 8 Million Requests Later, We Made The SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack Look Amateur. Leveraging abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for fun, including .exe files from CISA alerts, control systems for "Major Unnamed SSLVPN Appliance Vendors", and VSCode plugins for...

Truth be told - we’ve had some difficulty ascertaining what Anaconda is or does, other than ‘full of buzzwords’. Something about AI.

So I think that's Anaconda.com, not the Python distribution? Although maybe AI is a pivot for them?

[ related topics: Books Monty Python Artificial Intelligence Python ]

Entry: 2025-02-20 02:16:39.825035+01 SpaceX dropping debris on poland by Dan Lyke comments 2

SpaceX rocket debris crashes into Poland

"Once ze rockets go up, who knows vere zey come down, that's not my department"...

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Current Events Monty Python ]

Entry: 2025-02-15 17:15:33.825876+01 vegetative electron microscopy by Dan Lyke comments 0

Yesterday, an office mate who uses more LLM stuff than I do reported that XCode, Apple's development environment, was suggesting using an NSImageRenderer object (which doesn't exist in the Mac, though there is a counterpart, UIImageRenderer, on the iPhone). Other office mate was experimenting with the $200/month OpenAI product, and the results were initially interesting, but fell apart on deeper inspection.

Today comes the news that a weird conjunction of a couple of words across columns is making its way into scientific papers through the use of these automated bullshit generators.

(And if you missed it a few days ago, the BBC had a great takedown of using bullshit generators for summarizing.)

I can see why the dancing bears are impressive, and I get why people think these techniques have promise, but I also remember Eliza and Animals...

Retraction Watch: As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use

Entry: 2025-02-12 17:25:53.864505+01 AI chatbots inaccurately "summarize" by Dan Lyke comments 0

Not news to anyone who's been using LLMs to create summaries, but AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds.

In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer.

It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants.

Deborah Turness - AI Distortion is new threat to trusted information

Entry: 2025-01-22 18:02:54.293639+01 Cold Running Furry by Dan Lyke comments 0

Teacher sets Guinness World Record running ice marathon dressed as a polar bear

Via

Entry: 2025-01-22 17:50:36.884215+01 Cold Running Furry by Dan Lyke comments 0

Teacher sets Guinness World Record running ice marathon dressed as a polar bear

Via

Entry: 2025-01-20 21:08:28.119069+01 With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes... by Dan Lyke comments 0

BBC: The pointy-shoed corruption of medieval London

According to the London Museum, young men would "stand on street corners wiggling their shoes suggestively" at people walking by.

If that shoe-wiggler had bells sewn to the ends of the points, it indicated that the wearer was available for sexual frolics.

And now shoes with a reasonable toe box are completely unfashionable, when you can get them.

Via MeFi.

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