Sunday August 24th, 2025
Today I bombed out of Timdl because I didn't know about China's Grand Canal... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
Giggling over the notion of a "virgin White Russian", but then I guess that's basically what Starbucks serves...
Saturday August 23rd, 2025
Another view of the northern bench
Bench, with people
Another bench.
Oh look, more benches! The Beautify Petaluma folks coordinated on these.
On today's Timdle, I totally missed Sao Paolo's founding vs Toyotomi Hideyoshi dying, but can't believe that I flubbed the end of South African Apartheid vs the founding of Chipotle...
Pondering the difference between asking AI for artistic output, and Jeff Koons hiring an army of art serfs.
A few incidents are making me think that when a company advertises themselves as "Diamond Certified" it's a big fucking red flag.
Not the least of which is how much of my time that organization wastes in the process of handling a complaint.
Friday August 22nd, 2025
Bob Clark, vice president of marketing for Herr Foods, Inc., said the company was surprised to see its chips mentioned in the press.
“While we can’t speak to the details of the story,” he said, “we can confirm that our Sour Cream & Onion flavor is money.”
This means an adversary can hide instructions in regular text, but also have the LLM create responses containing text that his hidden to the user as Kai tweeted.
And to state the obvious, such hidden instructions can be on websites, pdf documents, databases, or even inside GPTs (yes, I already built one of these).
I grew up on raw milk, I have all sorts of issues around the community, my health beliefs, all of that stuff, it does me good to look at the numbers occasionally, especially as consumption of it is seeing a resurgence: Outbreak-Related Disease Burden Associated with Consumption of Unpasteurized Cow’s Milk and Cheese, United States, 2009–2014
https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2306.151603
From Elf Sternberg linking to Groveling MTG Goes All In on Raw Milk to Cozy Up to RFK Jr. and the MAGA Elites
Thursday August 21st, 2025
Blood in the Machine: AI Killed My Job: Translators
Machine translation hasn't even improved. There was no big OpenAI moment. I'm starting to suspect it's an unhappy coincidence of sunk costs and economic downturn forcing us all down this path. And you know what? I started learning to code—needed something to do after all. And ChatGPT and Claude started off as amazing helpful tools. Then at some point you've got the basics down and you're trying to do marginally more complex things—and you notice how quickly they lose track and fall apart, how needlessly complicated their solutions are, how your entire architecture turns into a mess of barely-functional spaghetti. Does this stuff work *anywhere*? My IT friends complain about being forced to use whatever hot new AI tool, and their companies stopped hiring junior positions. My own industry seems broken. After sending this mail, I'll have to do some tedious, underpaid post-editing. I'll hate it. Whoever will have to actually use the documents will hate it.
A thing I'm noticing is people putting together demos of things they don't understand. Use cases that nobody who's actually in that field would ever use. I think this is all further indication that we've elevated a class of people who don't do into decision-making, and the fact that they confuse language models with mental models also means they are completely out of touch with their customer base and use cases.
He's dead. Good. Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson dies at 89
In today's https://www.timdle.com/daily, I had no idea that the "running machine" bicycle was that late (but the relative dates were easy), and made a lucky guess on the typewriter vs the Polish January Uprising.
I have been switching back and forth between C++ and Objective-C, which means that I can add mixing up std::cout and .count to my list of things my fingers typed when I wasn't looking...
Wednesday August 20th, 2025
WTF is this? MashDigi is giving this word salad, the headline suggests "Chromebook sales will reach 2023 million units in 1700". Can't tell if this is a machine translation error, or just malicious prose.
It's been pretty obvious for quite a while that money isn't, in fact, what drives most companies. From obvious inefficiencies in processes to employee relationships, it's clear that maintaining various social norms and fictions are far more important than "the almighty dollar".
Another example: mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social
One thing that I want to mention, true in 2023 and just as true in 2025: the number of corporations I’ve seen making a point to say that their HVAC systems have been upgraded, that they’ve been working to make collaboration safe in their spaces during this whole RTO push, has been zero. It has been exactly zero.
Compared to the cost of a single employee getting sick this shit is basically free. It is cheaper than toilet paper or soda. But somehow.
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.
Fuckin' CEQA, man: Judge rules against environmentalists in lawsuit over Caltrans’ I-80 project
Alameda Superior Court Judge Michael M. Markman filed an order on Aug. 13 saying that although adding lanes to highways usually fails in the long-term, Caltrans had fulfilled its obligations under CEQA.
Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
A programming language so powerful that it use variables of type Charactest & Integest.
CNN posted this video with the caption:
Influencers Nina Santiago and Patrick Blackwood were filming a food review at a Houston restaurant when an SUV smashed through the windows.
I saw it from Peter Beadle's observation that
Folks are terrified of the NYC subway, think DC is a gang ridden hellscape and have other often irrational fears, but here's the truth, other than disease or an abusive partner with a gun, you're most likely to be killed by a reckless driver, and we barely acknowledge it's a problem.
Tuesday August 19th, 2025
🆇00001 @X00001@masto.hackers.town
"Hey, have you heard about the creator you like? Apparently, they also post 🔞 content. Isn’t that a bit strange? I mean, we should probably keep this space-“
No, I don’t think so. I’ve booked a front-row seat to the devil’s sacrament, and you’re blocking my view. Just go back to the 1660 New England hole you just crawled out of and eat barley for a week to atone for your sins or whatever.
Romance? Reviews! @HornyShitposts@thicc.horse
@X00001 "isn't that a bit strange?" no fam, some of the earliest art to survive to this day is sexual in nature and the majority of adults are not asexual, so having given the matter due thought *no.*
Our use of oversized wires for everything in the house, and sticking with our old simple ClipperCreek charger, seems like a smart decision right now: The EV Charger Hack That Can Burn Down Your House Just Got More Terrifying
The YouTube video seems to suggest that your load needs to be able to pull extreme amounts of current too, I'm not sure that most cars will do that, given that the EVs we've had haven't been able to pull that much power. So kinda seems like a "several things have to fail, or someone has to be on-site" exploit.
Al Sweigart @AlSweigart@mastodon.social
OH:
"give us huge $ investment, and when we make AGI, the AGI will know how to give you huge returns."
Tech bros love reinventing trains, and buses, and even Pascal's Wager. Now they're reinventing the prosperity gospel.
The Onion: Heroin Overdose Serves As Wake-Up Call To Keep Doing Heroin But Smarter
Or "if you change the prompt, the AI will give you better results".
When I dropped out of college, I spent hundreds of dollars (thousands in modern dollars) on software books, voraciously reading everything, and I remember reading this line from Weizenbaum on how people adapted to Eliza, and it's worth repeating now:
Thomas 🔭🕹️ @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
―Joseph Weizenbaum
notorious rgb @rgb@cathode.church reminds us of the '90s and a product that I vaguely remember, but less so than Racter:
Do you think if I show an investor a copy of dr sbaitso from the 90s and claim its an LLM they will give me millions of dollars?
https://classicreload.com/play/dr-sbaitso.html
Expanding on yesterday's link that included 'botlickers' and 'Slopholm Syndrome', Erik Uden has a list of slurs for AI users.
Vendor is pushing webinars about "IgniteAI" and I can't attend because can't trust myself not to ask about burning it all to the water-line.
Greg Wilson @gvwilson@mastodon.social
in March 2025, the CEO of Anthropic said that AI would be writing 90% of code within six months, so, um, look forward to a really big announcement in the next four weeks?
Business Insider · Mar 13 — Anthropic CEO: AI will be writing 90% of code in 3 to 6 months
University of Guelph: AI Chatbots Are Giving Away Your Company’s Data, in which Dr. Ali Dehghantanha, Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at the University of Guelph, is retained for a little data exfiltration, and demonstrates it.
Duh of the morning:
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
The Register: AI + ML — GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40 billion on fire
"The GenAI Divide is starkest in deployment rates, only 5 percent of custom enterprise AI tools reach production," the report says. "Chatbots succeed because they're easy to try and flexible, but fail in critical workflows due to lack of memory and customization."
I'm trying to find a PDF of the actual report, everyone seems to be republishing the same Fortune article, which I got to via Kevin Beaumont.
And while I'm clearing tabs, The Atlantic: AI is a mass delusion event (gift link courtesy of Felix Stalder) which observes that:
It seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service.
Which pairs with my observation that GenAI interaction patterns have a lot in common with developmentally disabled adults. And in that, I've gone from suggesting that AI fans don't spend enough time interacting with developmentally disabled adults to recognize those patterns, to thinking that maybe the problem is that it's a peer group.
Monday August 18th, 2025
Archive.is just asked me to prove that I'm not an automobile driver in order to proceed.
A few years ago, I rewrote my Perl markdown-ish parser in C++, with CMake build files, as a static site generator. Every once in a while I go to make changes and rebuild this thing, and every fucking time C++ or linking or the semantics of some library has changed.
Considering just going to C.
Finished Jonathan Kauffman's Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat last night. A fantastic look back at cultures and names I remember from growing up, and a really good jaunt through the various ways that society has evolved and changed on a lot of fronts, from the things that we've learned about collective decision-making to things that we've learned about nutrition and biology, to things that we've come to appreciate about eating.
Might have to let this one set and re-read it.
Charlene and I are exploring various places around the Bay. Yesterday we ended up in Oakland on Broadway around 19th, and were disappointed by the level of street activation on a Sunday afternoon.
When we do another visit, where are the pedestrian throngs at? Where should we hang out?
Saethelred the Unsteady @SethRudy@c18.masto.host
First they came for the oh shit the fuckers are here for me already that was fast
Yesterday, in a "holy crap we need to get out of the house" day, Charlene and I went down to the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park, wandered through the exhibits there, and then down into Oakland. We spent quite a while in the park, and after a lunch in a downtown that desperately needs more street activation on a Sunday afternoon, the lowrider club with their really loud audio systems wasn't our scene, but I was struck by some of the graffiti and stickers that indicated people in urban settings are thinking about relationships with technology in ways that we out in the burbs probably aren't addressing similarly.
Never mind the botlickers, ‘AI’ is just normal technology
Slopholm Syndrome notwithstanding, if we are to have useful conversations about machine learning then it’s crucial that instead of succumbing to the cheap parlour tricks of Silicon Valley marketing strategies — which are, tellingly, constructed around the exact-same mix of infinite promise and terrifying existential risk their pro-bono shills the botlickers always invoke — we pay attention to the men behind the curtain and expose “AI” for what it is: normal technology.
Sunday August 17th, 2025
It’s the 83rd anniversary today of the clue “French port (6)” appearing in the Daily Telegraph. Which may not sound like much of a story, except that the next day, they printed the answer (Dieppe) and the day after that 6,000 Allied troops landed at the very spot — and the outcome was a bloody disaster.
a fascinating look at operational security and how information leaks through side-channels. Via.
While ICE is busy rampaging through brown skinned neighborhoods to throw people in extrajudicial detention, Head of the Israeli Technological Defense Division at the Israel National Cyber Directorate, Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, was arrested at Black Hat in a child predator sting operation, and then allowed to leave the country.
Among other places, Via
We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a "student" model trained on this dataset learns T. This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T. We observe the same effect when training on code or reasoning traces generated by the same teacher model. However, we do not observe the effect when the teacher and student have different base models. To help explain our findings, we prove a theoretical result showing that subliminal learning occurs in all neural networks under certain conditions, and demonstrate subliminal learning in a simple MLP classifier. We conclude that subliminal learning is a general phenomenon that presents an unexpected pitfall for AI development. Distillation could propagate unintended traits, even when developers try to prevent this via data filtering.
Elf Sternberg summarized this as:
Bias in AI models cannot be filtered out. The emergent structures of a bias are encoded throughout that model and are transmitted to any model derived from it, regardless of human attempts to filter it out.
I suspect that we can extrapolate to humans from this, how, for instance, people say they're not racist, or they support equity, but then there are zoning decisions, or moving email lists to Nextdoor groups, or...
no-no @wolfteeth@mellified.men
did you fall from heaven? because you look like you're probably at war with god
Elda King @eldaking@weirder.earth
As humans get older, their hair slowly loses pigmentation, becoming grey and then finally white.
This behavior is shared by common printers, which suggests it evolved before the last common ancestors of humans and printers diverged. However, humans do not possess replaceable pigment cartridges, indicating this trait evolved after the split. In this paper I will...
Going on vacation tomorrow so spent Saturday night making maps of all the places in Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina with higher violent crime and murder rates than D.C. Perhaps better places for those governors to focus resources!
More people in Ohio need protection from violent crime than do people in D.C.
Financial Times: Is AI Hitting a Wall? doesn't have a lot that feels new to me, except this quote from this wonderfully un-self-aware dude:
Many believe there is a huge amount of value yet to be unlocked in the current generation of models. “Start-ups and businesses have not begun to scratch the surface of what they are capable of in business and consumer applications,” says Peter Deng, former OpenAI, Uber and Facebook executive, now general partner at venture capital firm Felicis, which has invested in AI coding company Poolside and video generation start-up Runway.
So, you mean that AI isn't gonna figure this stuff out for us?
archive.ph link. Via and via.
(roundabout by way of <https://bsky.app/profile/elfsternberg.bsky.social/post/3lwmbbr2kic2w">Elf Sternberg)
Well, Sylk on this Fire tablet has degraded such that it no longer serves as a head end for GrumpyPlayer. Is self-hosted music just chasing bit rot forever? Signs say yes...
Saturday August 16th, 2025
NPR: Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit
Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.
Via, among many places.
Via the ever amazing ResearchBuzz: UNLV Libraries Acquire Groundbreaking Sex Work Activism Archive
The Norma Jean Almodovar Papers document decades of advocacy and expand UNLV’s collecting initiative on sexual entertainment and economies.
SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange
People really be like "oh imagine a future society where humans have to be cybernetically enhanced by machines to get a job" bro wake up just be an American without a car
What do Alaskans make of the geopolitical circus arriving?
"Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that."
Worth reading this closely: "I researched every Democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. the success rate after fascists were elected was 0%." https://medium.com/@carmitage/...e-success-rate-is-0-a665e2e048a2
Friday August 15th, 2025
I'm okay if my entendres have the full consent and cooperation of their partner(s)
Dan Lyke comments (0)J Wolfgang Goerlich @jwgoerlich@infosec.exchange
I like my entendres single, thank you very much.
Sshwifty Web SSH & Telnet Client
The glass glare effect above is only included in the Executive Golden Premium Plus+ Platinum Ultimate AD-free version, which can be obtained after joining the cult. Though, science has proven that the normal AD-free version is sufficient for most people. In fact, the majority of people surveyed are annoyed by the glare, while the rest showed a little interest)
I have used the JavaScript version of xterm to similar ends, but I had to tie that to the SSH process via callbacks in the web view that was hosting it...
Axios on Sam Altman and the GPT5 launch quotes him as saying:
"I think the models are still getting better at a rapid rate," he said. "One of the things that's interesting is the models have already saturated the chat use case. They're not gonna get much better. ... The Turing test has passed."
Which... ya know... is what a bunch of us have been predicting, but if he thinks this is "the Turing test has passed", he's...
Look, I know it's problematic to talk about levels of humanity, but one of the things that has struck me about LLMs and generative AI is how it sure seems like the proponents of these things haven't spent a lot of time hanging out with developmentally disabled adults, those who have some interests and can spout facts, but are also willing to make up whatever to please the asker. My experience of LLMs is that they're like a few such DD adults I know, I have to be very careful of how I phrase questions because I know I'm going to get "yes, and..." when the answer is more likely "no, that actually never happened".
Anyway, maybe I was wrong, and that's who Sam's baseline is?
Matthewせいじ @matthewseiji.com
It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4
Phys.org: Surprising sex reversal discovered in Australian birds
In a study of nearly 500 birds from five species—including magpies, kookaburras, pigeons and lorikeets—researchers found that up to 6% had the physical features of one sex but the genetic makeup of the other.
The Royal Society Biology Letters: Prevalence and implications of sex reversal in free-living birds.
No good answers, but some astounding examples: Why Is TikTok Overflowing With AI Country Music Erotica?
NaN-Propagation: A Novel Method for Sparsity Detection in Black-Box Computational Functions
We introduce NaN-propagation, which exploits the universal contamination property of IEEE 754 Not-a-Number values to trace input-output dependencies through floating-point numerical computations. By systematically contaminating inputs with NaN and observing which outputs become NaN, the method reconstructs conservative sparsity patterns that eliminate a major source of false negatives. We demonstrate this approach on an aerospace wing weight model, achieving a 1.52x speedup while uncovering dozens of dependencies missed by conventional methods -- a significant practical improvement since gradient computation is often the bottleneck in optimization workflows.
I should fix the categories here on Flutterby so I can capture instances of gender policing. Another one: Minnesota teen says server forced her to prove her gender in restaurant bathroom
Gerika Mudra, 18, went to dinner in April with a friend in Owatonna, about an hour south of Minneapolis. When she went to the restroom, a server followed her inside and banged on the stall door while saying: “This is a women’s restroom. The man needs to get out of here,” according to Gender Justice, a Minnesota gender-equality organization that filed the charge on Mudra’s behalf.
Programming Quotes @programming_quotes@mastodon.social
the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.
— John Carmack