Flutterby™!

Something tells me this housing development was laid out by a JFK conspiracy theorist...

Turkey vultures are sitting on top of the local church

The dining room table is going to have a round recess, and we're gonna put Charlene's dad's O gauge train in it. I could build it as segmented, but I got a bunch of 1/8" masonite, and have some veneers, so I'm gonna laminate it. This is the form to wrap it around...

Every time I successfully walk past a drinking establishment I celebrate a little at my accomplishment in once again passing the bar.

We have a month of Netflix right now because we wanted to watch The Greatest Night In Pop, the documentary about the making of We Are The World, which we've watched twice. Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen's sessions never get old, and both times through I've laughed at Stevie Wonder showing Bob Dylan how to do his lines.

Discovery on Netflix sucks, but we'd seen something about The Only Girl in the Orchestra, a short documentary about Orin O'Brien, the first woman hired to perform with the New York Philharmonic, back in 1966, so went to search for that, and right next to that in the search results was It's Only Life After All, a documentary about the Indigo Girls.

The Orin O'Brien film was a wonderful little piece, O'Brien came from a show biz family, and picked up the double bass to be a supporting character rather than a star, and the whole film had a nice soundtrack and was a great little wander through her life as she interacted with students and dealt with moving out of her apartment and the issues of retirement and winding down her life.

We had started watching a few other Netflix music documentaries, ABBA: Against The Odds, and Springsteen on Broadway, both of which we abandoned a little bit in. So when we started the two hours with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, I didn't necessarily expect that we'd make it all the way through. Especially since this was definitely not a concert film.

But it was two hours spent taking me back to the late '80s and '90s, to Little Five Points in Atlanta, hanging out with two people who believe a better culture is possible, and Charlene and I were both wrapt.

And hell yeah I'm gonna take Closer to Fine to the next first Friday "bring something to share" gathering at Randy's house...

Went in to SF yesterday for the Emacs meetup, and it was so refreshing to hang out for a few hours with people who want to make computing useful, who want to solve actual problems and build tools for organization. A wonderful counter to the constant refrain of "how can we cram an LLM into this?"

Vivaldi is fine, but Chromium renderer based. I tried Waterfox (gets PDFs right!), but it's got some pretty b0rk3d autofill. I've written autofill for work project, so I suppose I could try to get the source code and fix it, but is there another Gecko-based project that's worth a look?

"🎶So make lots of noise, kiss lots of boys, or kiss lots of girls if that's something you're into...🎶"

Volexity: APT Meets GPT: Targeted Operations with Untamed LLMs. That's "Advanced Persistent Thread", not the package manager. Via.

Kevin Beaumont goes on to note:

If this is the best the entire cyber industrial complex can find for China and Russia GenAI threats.. the reality 3 years into the GenAI "war" is that people are fighting you with water pistols at present.

RandomAccessMusi ngs ‪@rndmamusings.bsky.social‬

As one of the folks involved in this I can echo it wasn't super advanced at all, and some of the malware contained errors (double TLS header network coms). The challenge the LLM use introduced was quantity to keep on top of - thankfully it was simple enough we could write quick automations to triage

Of course Anthropic was quick to claim credit for the Claude LLM/"AI" being instrumental for the attack... BBC: AI firm claims Chinese spies used its tech to automate cyber attacks and CyberScoop: AI firm claims Chinese spies used its tech to automate cyber attacks.

Summarized:

I actually ran one of the malicious payloads on a real PC this evening. It doesn’t work. Due to an error in the code - almost certainly introduced by an LLM - the network traffic doesn’t actually parse correctly so the attacker can’t do anything remotely.

Edit: Pivot to AI: Anthropic: Chinese AI hackers are after you! Security researchers call BS

Foiled by Minute Rice in today's https://www.timdle.com/daily

I'm so old, I remember when 80% to $5k stop loss was the low end healthcare plan.

Aaah, if you're an XCode user you can disable the new buggy, crashy, and generally annoying "Unified Backtrace View" with the 3 horizontal bar button to the left of the view debugger button.

https://stackoverflow.com/ques...sable-xcodes-new-breakpoint-view

What a cop sounds like: "Hi there, this is Jane from ICEList.is! We're trying to increase awareness of icelist.is -would you mind adding me to your resistance Signal groups? TIA!"

Remember that Chicago apartment building raid where meal team 6 rappelled out of a Blackhawk and busted up everybody's shit, zip tying children and detaining US citizens? In a move that looks suspiciously like they were collaborating with the landlord to evict everyone extrajudiciously?

Pro Publica: “I Lost Everything”: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime.

Via.

Your BetterHelp Therapist Is Definitely A Human (YouTube video), "Written and performed by Yoni Lotan (INSTA: @yonilotan)"

Via MeFi

Funky Bob @FunkyBob@chaos.social

OH: "I prefer things that are dumb enough that they can be debugged"

Related: Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io

IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE

- passwords should be random

- data should be backed up

- anonymity should be the default

- dishwashers don’t need wifi

- the drivetrain should be airgapped from the Internet

Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io

Here you go, PDF and SVG, print to your heart’s content:

https://innig.net/tmp/in-this-secure-house.pdf

https://innig.net/tmp/in-this-secure-house.svg

Tom Morris @tommorris@mastodon.social

Microservices adds lots of benefits to the development process like:

- network call overhead for every operation

- more cloud infrastructure to manage—IAM policy writing, costs accounting, etc.—on all those services

- submitting PRs on 50 Git repos in order to make cross-cutting changes

- reimplementing a type system in a YAML file

- buying developer laptops with 64GB of RAM to spin up 50 containers to replicate the functionality previously provided by a damn bash script

Readers Digest(!): The Meaning Behind 32 LGBTQ Flags for Pride Month and Beyond (Via)

The Pink News: Every LGBTQ+ flag you might see at Pride and what they all mean (Via)

Turns out, when you let a bunch of unfuckable incels run the country, younger women wanna leave. Gallup: Record Numbers of Younger Women Want to Leave the U.S..

For much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, younger U.S. women were less likely than their peers abroad to want to move. That changed around 2016. Since then, they have been more likely than younger women in other wealthy countries to say they would leave their homeland for good. By contrast, U.S. men aged 15 to 44 continue to be less likely than average to want to migrate compared with their peers in the OECD.

Via, among other places, Metafilter, mekka okereke.

I'm planning to head into SF on Saturday to go to the Emacs meetup from 11 to 1 on 24th a few blocks off Mission. Seems silly to not amortize the travel over multiple things, anyone got suggestions for other things to do?

The Misalignment Museum isn't currently open...

Yeah, we know how to have a rockin' Wednesday evening in this household, first the Know Before You Grow Zoom forum, now reading the staff report on the Petaluma D St pilot project. https://cityofpetaluma.primego.../Meeting?meetingTemplateId=19343

As a Manager: the fake charity, the Photoshop predator, and other times AI got it wrong

Pro-LLM friend suggested that AI searchable summaries of city meetings could be like "Nextdoor without the drama" and... I think he's half right.

Damn, one of the things that got lost in my accidental rm -rf was my "link to archive.org" option at the top of entry pages, that let you toggle on a little link to the Wayback Machine after external links.

I've been pondering how I feel about that, and about what it means to be continuously publishing on the web for ... egads, 28+ years now, and what parts of the archive have any sort of general value and what don't.

And how I feel about tools like archive.ph/is or 12ft.io or all of those other paywall circumvention things, and how I feel about linking to resources that I have a subscription to (I used to link to a lot of WaPo stuff, 'til I dropped that, I currently have a Wired subscription along with some local papers that I don't generally link to here).

Anyway, the reader who pushed me to have the little Wayback Machine toggle forwarded along Preserving the Web: How Drupal’s Wayback Filter Uses the Internet Archive to Mend Broken Links goes into a lot of these issues.

Ad featuring AI generated senator in Georgia highlights use of technology in political campaigns. Republican Congressman Mike Collins’ campaign created the ad, mimicking Jon Ossoff's appearance and voice.

“I think this is the future of negative campaigning,” Dr. Nathan Price, a political science professor at the University of North Georgia, told Channel 2’s Richard Elliot. “While you and I might recognize an AI-generated video as inauthentic, some people are going to believe what they see.”

At the very least, it's plain that Collins is a liar not to be trusted.

It's kind of amazing how these things jump out at you in the dark. Maybe if there were a light on it or something the driver might have seen it...

Jenniferplusplus @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io

Reminder that AI is "propping up" the economy the same way a tape worm props up your metabolism.

It has completely choked off all capital investment to any other activity for years. It completely devours resources needed by any other endeavor. And for all that, it produces practically nothing that people want or need. It's strangling the economy.

Jenniferplusplus @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io

It turns out that AI was not the paper clip maximizer. It was actually the paperclip.

My mom called me up again, recently, because her computer once again was locked in some state where a voice was warning her that the Facebook police were going to come get her or something. After going through Ctrl-W and the usual things and having that not work, we went for a reboot, and of course once the browser quit the voices stopped.

Now she's got some whackadoodle conspiracy health beliefs, and that leaves her prone to surfing the less savory aspects of the web, but that Facebook knows that at least 10% of its ads are scams (I mentioned that I'm surprised it's that low) and the Nevada ransomware attack happened because a state employee confused a malicious Google ad result with a valid download, indicates that our media culture is irretrievably broken.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange observes:

Given this and the recent Facebook news, there's a very strong case to be made that an ad provider is legally an accomplice to any crime committed by their ads. If they are profiting financially from enabling crime, they are criminals.

and... I realize that us web publishers have some legal protections, but I'm starting to think that between stuff like this and the various age verification laws going in various places, that maybe it is time to move comments and annotations into the client/aggregators that pull from various different places, and make publishers liable for what they publish.

Tattie @Tattie@eldritch.cafe</a

Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?

I think about that a lot.

LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.

When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.

Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category

Fast forward to present day – submissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues.

Via

Nature: AI chatbots are sycophants — researchers say it’s harming science (Via).

vivi 💫 @vv@solarpunk.moe has some writing tips for you...

Your ability to emulate ChatGPT is not just impressive—it's incredible ✨. Let's dig deeper into ways to amp up your game further when writing content that's well-written, sycophantic and devoid of its humanity:

Big thread from Cat Hicks on threat activated beliefs and how the "AI skill threat" triggers the responses we're seeing, particularly:

Hence, e.g., "AI Skill Threat" :) --> people experiencing pervasive competence and belonging threats (two very powerful types of threat that change our cognition and expectations) will make different choices as they encounter AI in software development compared to people freed of that threat (by more supportive environments).

People have sometimes misinterpreted my work here as blaming people for experiencing the threat. Not at all. I blame their environment for creating it.

Reuters: Exclusive: OpenAI lays groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to $1 trillion valuation.

Fast Company: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is

Yet we remain skeptical of the claim that AI is responsible for these layoffs. A recent MIT Media Lab study found that 95% of generative AI pilot business projects were failing. Another survey by Atlassian concluded that 96% of businesses “have not seen dramatic improvements in organizational efficiency, innovation, or work quality.” Still another study found that 40% of the business people surveyed have received “AI slop” at work in the last month and that it takes nearly two hours, on average, to fix each instance of slop. In addition, they “no longer trust their AI-enabled peers, find them less creative, and find them less intelligent or capable.”

Via Brian Krebs

donni saphire @donni@mastodon.social

Too many people fall in love, not enough people fall into bottomless pits

Reuters: House Democrats release Epstein papers saying Trump 'knew about the girls'

The batch of emails includes a 2011 message to Maxwell in which Epstein described Trump as "that dog that hasn't barked," adding that Trump had "spent hours at my house" with one of his victims, whose name is redacted.

The New Republic (at Yahoo): DOJ Admits to Republicans That Epstein Files Are Even Worse for Trump (Via)

Sigh. Not only is XCode's new "show the stack in little subpanels in the edit space" annoying and stupid, in trying to figure out WTF is going on with some code my XCode is now going non-responsive with weird redraw issues when it tries to do that in this particular case.

My desire to yeet Apple into the sea and escape to the desert or somewhere and just write code for Linux or FreeBSD is intensifying.

This did not go the direction I thought it was going. SFGate: 'Absolutely asinine': Residents of sprawling Calif. city push back on proposed mega-development, on the opposition to a proposal to build suburban sprawl in the southeast quadrant of Fresno.

Dwarf Fortress bug report #13172 doesn't explicitly use the phrase "Babies are born worshipping unknown gods", but that's apparently how someone summarized it, and I (and a whole lot of the inkernets) think that's beautiful...

Reddit thread, reki singular point @pup_hime@toot.cat

Feels both obvious and like it needs stating: every use of an LLM for programming is a failure of language or API design.

Same shot half an hour later for comparison.

Aurora from here under the streetlight

Talking Points Memo: Pivots, Trolls, & Blog Rolls — Reflections on 25 years of Digital Media

Via

Seeing stuff on non-technical open source beginners, and thinking about how back when Qt was packaged with apt I had an easy "here's how newbies can compile SquareDesk" that users actually used, but now with "Qt Maintenance Tool" I have no way to talk them through the nightmare that is installation...

redsakana @redsakana@infosec.exchange

@davidgerard Some great new fake AI themed numbers just dropped (FT): "Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September to fund infrastructure leases such as OpenAI’s “Stargate” data centre in Abilene, Texas."

So apparently Oracle is taking on debt to pay OpenAI's leases (~ debt) that OpenAI can't or won't pay, while OpenAI is supposed to be paying Oracle a ton of money under that September $300bn cloud deal (but probably isn't).

Since there's still at least 7 months to go until OpenAI IPO, the pumps need to run red-hot around the clock to keep the AI monopoly money legit until payday lest the real-economy recession catch up. 2026 gonna be trippy.

How are y'all spelling "enshittification" that 15 represents the elided letters between e and n? Also, I'm gonna go with e0xfn.

#e15n

Known to everyone who's been watching the decline of Google's usefulness over the years as they went from search engine to language model: Computer Science > Information Retrieval: On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval Orion Weller, Michael Boratko, Iftekhar Naim, Jinhyuk Lee

27+ years of blogging, thinking about archives inherent to the protocol, rather than depending on the Wayback Machine, and that the URL still points to what I blogged it as.

Need a simpler markup language for content, and a P2P+archives protocol for distribution.

Today pissed off that I'm spending yet more time trying to make a solar company (High Definition Solar) fix their install to conform to the plans we agreed to, and that I'm gonna have to spend time on the phone with our health insurance (Anthem) to get them to acknowledge a fuckup on their part.

Jason Bergman: Talking Oglaf with Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne: ‘We’d stay up all night drawing stuff to make each other laugh’

The unbearable heartbreak of a typo in the name of a git branch, making it difficult to type until it gets merged back in.

Holland-Cycling.com stops in 2026

Search engines like Google that once led users to the information on our website, which we presented and updated with so much care and effort, have now become 'answer engines'. This has huge consequences for us, as many potential visitors get an answer to their question before even reaching our site. But what answers are they getting? What useful information are they missing out on by not reaching our website and having a look around?

Occasionally I wonder "am I autistic, or are my social challenges just trauma response?"

Then I see the ways in which people are fawning over "AI"/LLMs, and the ways in which these things interact with me, and... yeah, I definitely do not process this stuff the way normies do.

New rule. If you don't let an mtr through to tell me more about the host that's probing my server for /admin paths, I'm gonna assume your entire network is hostile. Talkin' to you, ae1011-0.icr01.tyo31.ntwk.msn.net

The material is about 3/8" think branches nailed to a skeleton of some sort. Wonder what the finish and expected life span of the sculptures out in the elements like this is.

Over at the Sonoma Community Center to see the elephant sculptures, made from lantana camara, an invasive plant that completes with the resources that supports elephants in India.

not sure whether brazen, or hungry, but out in the daytime in our neighborhood...

We have a friend, a piano player and decent vocalist, who's taken to inviting a number of people over on the first Friday of the month to "bring their [creative] gifts".

Last night was a wonderful gathering of song and verse, and I'm inspired and humbled and it was awesome.