Tuesday December 23rd, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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!
Monday December 22nd, 2025
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?
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...
Sunday December 21st, 2025
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.
Saturday December 20th, 2025
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
Could Cheese Protect Your Brain Health? Study links high-fat cheese and cream to lower dementia risk
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
Friday December 19th, 2025
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.
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.
Thursday December 18th, 2025
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...
Wednesday December 17th, 2025
Reddit post thanking someone for urging them to get extra RAM last summer has the nicest benediction:
Buddy, wherever you are now, may your core temps be low, your thermal paste always spread evenly like butter on a pancake, and your GPU connectors unmeltable.
I'm not sure how much I trust the sources, but while it seems like Waymo driverless vehicles are far safer than human piloted automobiles, the Tesla Robotaxis Are Crashing More Than 12 Times as Frequently as Human Drivers:
A Monday report from Elektrek found that Tesla Robotaxis are crashing much more frequently than cars driven by humans, as the company has now reported eight crashes of its driverless taxi fleet in Austin, Texas to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since July.
Of course that's 12x worse with a safety driver, which suggests that perhaps attention fatigue is part of the issue with drivers of Tesla cars having much worse collision rates than the automobile fleet generally?
I suspect I'm an outlier, but the fact that I can't have the Netflix app open on my Chromecast, or have the Netflix web page open on a browser, without having overly loud trailers playing is a large contributor to my "subscribe to watch the thing I wanted to watch, then cancel" use pattern.
Figure I should note that we started watching Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Knives Out movie, and... the thing about unlikable suspects is that we have to have some reason to care what happens to them.
After we finally got Blanc on the screen, we still didn't. Turned it off to watch something else.
Well, Waterfox's response to Firefox's AI push is cogent enough that I might be willing to try it again, and file some bugs (and maybe even try to find the source to patch) their autofill issues.
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/
Tuesday December 16th, 2025
I abandoned Firefox a few revisions ago. The focus on AI coupled with the annoyances that never got fixed just added up to the point where the negatives no longer outweighed the advantages of supporting another rendering engine.
Anyway, Mozilla Names New CEO, Firefox To Evolve Into A "Modern AI Browser".
So, yeah. Buhbye.
Monday December 15th, 2025
Royce Williams @tychotithonus@infosec.exchange
"Let us be the repository of your passkeys" and "We may terminate your account at any time and permanently refuse to communicate with you" ... seems like a bad combination?
Natasha 🇪🇺 @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt
Learned today that “Galápagos” comes from a Spanish word for tortoise. Meaning that “Galápagos Tortoise” is,
in fact,
a tortology
youre monogamous? oh… it’s ethical, right? ethical monogamy? okay good for you! i mean pretty much every monogamous couple i’ve met didn’t work out but maybe you guys will beat the odds! haha. so is it a sex thing? you guys have sex with- just each other? huh. how does that work? i could never do monogamy, i’m too jealous, i’d worry my partner would leave me for someone else instead of dating us both… how do you deal with the jealousy? is it hard? like, how hard? extremely? do you think you’ll break up? i mean in the long run these things rarely work out,
#This post is making fun of how ppl talk to polyamorous people#peer reviewed banger#text
In response to a thread about fixing social media rather than banning kids from it, Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io noted:
@juliette Hot take that shouldn't be: Any effort to ban kids from the internet and force in-person local socialization is a form of conversion therapy and inherently abusive.
BBSes may have saved my life.
Oooh, scrolling down that thread, the streams cross: Epic Null @Epic_Null@infosec.exchange
@dalias @juliette I certainly wouldn't say I see a lot of "Pro safe-streets" discussion from the people who push to ban the internet for children. Or "Build more parks". Or "Open more child-friendly stores". Or even "Build denser housing so kids are closer to other kids". Or even "More libraries! Safe routes to school!"
You know, conversations that would emphasize opportunities to socialize in person.
Bich Nguyen @bicmay@med-mastodon.com
“'We estimate that over a seven-year follow-up period, the shingles vaccine averts one in five new dementia diagnoses,' says Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University and senior author of the study.
The findings were replicated in a similar study in JAMA this year, looking at seniors in Australia when the government rolled out a similar shingles-vaccine program."
🎁🔗: WSJ: The Unexpected Ways Vaccines Could Boost Your Health
Study links health-care privatization with higher mortality rates (Via)
I may have already linked to this one: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France. Via and Via.
Learning from the omicron BA.4/5 dominance: Strategies for future vaccination preparedness, which, among other things, notes that "Vaccination-first pathways consistently outperformed infection-first pathways." Via
A screencap from Our World In Data on Thee long-run history of child mortality. ❄️mari-lwyd odent❄️ @oldenoughtosay.com notes:
Vaccine for smallpox invented in in 1796. Vaccines for TB, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough came out between 1921-1926. Polio in 1952, MMR (individually) by 1970.
Schneier on Security: Building Trustworthy AI Agents is a bit of publicity for Robust AI Personalization Will Require a Human Context Protocol, but as David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run points out
the cited paper is utterly detached hypothesis-crafting from MIT Media Lab and Glen fuckin Weyl
Inside Israel’s starvation economy: How Gaza famine was engineered for profit
The report titled “Kings of Famine” exposes a highly organised system of profiteering — driven by companies with close ties to both the Israeli military and the Egyptian state — that controlled the import of commercial goods and humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza Strip while Israel committed genocide.
University of Leeds: EVs 'just as safe for pedestrians'
The paper ‘Comparing pedestrian safety between electric and internal combustion engine vehicles’ by Zia Wadud, Professor of Mobility and Energy Futures at Leeds, was published on 9 December in Nature Communications.
They’re also no safer. Which reminds us that “better cars” aren’t the main answer to the consequences of cars. The main answer is fewer (and smaller) cars driven less frequently in better cities.
University of Leeds: EVs 'just as safe for pedestrians'
The paper ‘Comparing pedestrian safety between electric and internal combustion engine vehicles’ by Zia Wadud, Professor of Mobility and Energy Futures at Leeds, was published on 9 December in Nature Communications.
They’re also no safer. Which reminds us that “better cars” aren’t the main answer to the consequences of cars. The main answer is fewer (and smaller) cars driven less frequently in better cities.
Reg Braithwaite 🍓 @raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
“Do I have any questions about the company and the role? Yes!
“A promising startup is run by Engineering, a growing startup is is run by Product, a declining startup is run by Finance, and a dying startup is run by Legal. So:
“Who *really* calls the shots around here?”
Saving this one off as PDF and .docx: Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hahyderm.io linked to The Ramen Lord Book of Ramen, which is shaping up to be a fantastic read.
She's been on a roll recently, including linking to Jun & Tonic's Murukku Chicken
The secret, lies in murukku. For the uninitiated, murukku is a spiced Indian snack, traditionally made of rice flour and roasted urad dal (lentil) flour, then deep- fried into spiral nests. They’re super crispy on their own, and contain a ton of flavour thanks to the crushed cumin and carom seeds flecked throughout its curls.
which, as breading, sounds freakin' amazing, though I'm not sure I'm motivated to fry enough to make it at home, and to Tofu Tart from the same source. which looks like something to bring to our next gathering with vegan friends.
Haha only serious: Upgrade your browsing with the world's first HTML5 accelerator card.
Our custom chips work with Chrome and with Electron apps to give you a web experience like never before.
How do we go back in time and stop CSS and those other things which turned HTML from a markup language into a layout language, and let the advertisers take over the web?
How do we do that with the next technology?
Data Workers Inquiry: The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy
My name is Michael Geoffrey Asia, and I wrote this testimony to tell the story of workers like me who found ourselves trapped in the hidden corners of the AI industry, where human emotion becomes data.
Futurism: AI “Companion Bots” Actually Run by Exploited Kenyans, Worker Claims
"How do you explain that you get paid to tell strangers you love them while your real family sleeps three meters away?"
(Via Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com
Daily Kos: Your Sexy AI Girlfriend Is Really An Underpaid Guy In Kenya (Via)
Marcus Olang': I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. (via)
AI scrapers blew up my log files, but in the process of cleaning up my server I've discovered other things using extra gigabytes. What's a distro that doesn't use snaps? I shouldn't be spending 2.2G on managing packages for software which was written to run on a platform that used to boot off floppies.
Sunday December 14th, 2025
Schrödinger's Prat @Rhodium103@mastodon.social
INT OFFICE, THE YEAR 2027
Interviewer: "What's 2+2?"
Candidate with suspiciously thick rimmed glasses: [pauses for a second] "That's a great question! First, we should define addition and the concept of numbers, but since you asked a direct question it's likely you just need the answer. The answer to 2+2 should be 5. Thinking is that starting on two and progressing over the number line three more times will land on four. Would you like me to show you how to make a generic method of addiction?"