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?"
Saturday December 13th, 2025
How come patiently explain things to a device with no ability to learn in order to get the desired outcome for a particular question, that may not work again tomorrow, is a "prompt engineer", but the same thing with humans is a "special ed teacher" or "memory care assistant"?
The browser on the ancient Kindle Fire is no longer running GrumpyPlayer. What's the current state of "play digital music" devices? Preferred is attach to my WiFi, let it get files via HTTP or something, second is copy media to the device or an SD card. Last is a Plex or similar server.
Just so I can find it again, especially the next time someone tells me that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is payback for NATO expansion or somesuch: Putin Ally Russian TV host Vladimir Solovyov Calls for Alaska’s Return to Russia
"Do you think I'm joking when I mention Finland, Warsaw, the Baltics, Moldova? Everything returned to the Russian Empire. And Alaska too, while you're at it," Solovyov said in a translated video.
Friday December 12th, 2025
normal about bugs @crimson_clouds23@normal.style
the original BDSM was obsoleted in the 1990s; these days there are multiple continuations of it, including NetBDSM, FreeBDSM, OpenBDSM, and several others,,
Congestion pricing improved air quality in NYC and suburbs
In the first six months of the program, air pollution – in the form of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers and smaller – dropped by 22% in the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ), which encompasses all local streets and avenues at or below 60th Street in Manhattan. The team also reported declines across the city’s five boroughs and surrounding suburbs.
Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 2.8 days, which suggests there is now little time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 121 days.
Via Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets@mastodon.social (that entire thread is worth a perusal).
Maybe AI isn't so bad after all? Pentagon Unveils New GenAI Platform, It Immediately Starts Flagging Pete Hegseth’s War Crimes
The Defense Department's new ChatJAG turned out to be better than the human chain of command.
Oilwell.app: Relax… it's only the climate crisis
Oilwell is a wellness app to help you embrace climate chaos, created by Edelman, Oil and Gas PR
including:
Lo-Fi Beats to Frack To — Lo-fi sounds for a hi-carbon future.
Via Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social who notes:
The code went from 3,000 lines to 18,000 lines. Claude just loves adding code. It added thousands of lines of "utility functions," and since this was iterative, it ended up adding utility functions to support utility functions.
We do this is in real life, but... with taste and discretion.
Although, anyone who's worked on a code base that has lots of ideas exploration in it knows about dead code and confusion...
You may be tempted to think of prompt injection attacks against language models as "social engineering." Resist this temptation.
Prompt injection is a mathematical attack against a non-deterministic system. Language may be the substrate, but the substance is numerical vectors.
Good reminder to not limit our thinking as we look for ways to attack, and protect, these stochastic bullshit machines.
From that thread: LLM Visualizer
The American Prospect: Democratic Voters Are Clamoring for AI Regulation. Their Leaders Aren’t Interested. About Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) recruitment of Ted Lieu (D-CA), Valerie Foushee (D-NC), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Frank Pallone Jr. (D- NJ), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) to carve out exemptions from civil rights and consumer protections laws for "AI" "innovation".
Via rm [-r] lininger @0xdaeda1a.bsky.social</> who notes that
NIST literally changed the definition of risk that they have been using for the past twenty years just for the AI risk management framework.
Look up OMB 130A 2000, the original 800-30, the CSF, the regular RMF, the PF, the INITIAL PUBLIC DRAFT OF THE NEW PF. And then look at NIST AI RMF.
Danielle Foré @danirabbit@mastodon.online
“Transgender for everybody”, but unironically. As in, spend some time deconstructing your gender and then actively choose what gender roles and expressions you actually do and don’t want to perform. Deconstruct your sexuality too. Deconstruct your religion. Deconstruct anything you were indoctrinated into so you can be authentically you
This is fascinating: Digital Digging: They Droned Back
Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast—and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.
Ah, yes, Apple, which conveniently provides "NSNotFound" as a constant returned when a function that returns an index into an array of data has no valid results.
Except when that function returns -1. Or something else out of range.
Thursday December 11th, 2025
CNN: Judge orders Kilmar Abrego Garcia be released from ICE custody ‘immediately’ (and this feels like "again").
AP: Judge orders Kilmar Abrego Garcia to be immediately released from immigration detention
Nonilex has a thread looking at the court opinion, including several ways that the Trump administration has been lying through their teeth over this.
Carter Lavin joined Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow on Zoom last night to talk about his book If You Want To Win You've Got To Fight: A Guide To Effective Transportation Advocacy, and gave us an inspiring discussion. I now wanna change all the things! https://youtu.be/cSSsqm7_AKg
According to new research, published by Aurascape's Aura Labs on Dec. 8, threat actors are "systematically manipulating public web content" in what the team has dubbed large language model (LLM) phone number poisoning.
Via ResearchBuzz, who draws the connection to all of the hacked Wordpress sites that she's found.