Thursday August 20th, 2026
Florian Haas @xahteiwi@mastodon.social
You can't prohibit agile software development, but you kanban it.
Whee! Friend reports that Thrifty's 800 number AI phone agent told him it was changing his reservation, and didn't actually.
Second time kinda worked (it didn't do other stuff).
So extra load on us, double check what portions of that the AI agent told you it actually did...
Wednesday August 19th, 2026
Wheee! The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education
AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.
Via. Check out the AI vs non-AI exam scores graph.
You have to get on the blockchain now. This is the least capable that the blockchain will ever be. I project that we'll have 99% of our data on the blockchain within two years.
Looks like it's time to rework some of the gross HTML hacks I've got going on Flutterby.net: Chris Burnell: HTML Can Do That
HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.
404 Media: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, But Almost No One Is Buying Them
Futurism: The Economy Has Spoken: Stuff That’s AI-Generated Has Almost Zero Value.
The second references the first, both are referencing CG Trader's 2026 Market Trends (direct Google Drive link), which notes that:
AI floods the top of the funnel but not the bottom: ~1 in 6 uploads, but only ~1 in 90 dollars of revenue.
and
Most who try it aren't satisfied yet: customer survey among CG buyers, 20% tried AI and found it not good enough and 7% use it only with heavy editing versus 5% who say it works well. The bottleneck is output quality, not awareness.
Which makes sense, there's not a lot of value to republishing something someone can generate themselves anyway.
On Reddit , ReasonablePaper8225 says:
The value is in the generator, not the output. No need to buy yours if I can make my own. Once the prices to generate skyrocket, the outputs will have value
Which is helping me think about LLM generation, right now it has zero value because the quality is so bad and the generation cost is heavily subsidized. At some point the generation cost will go up, and if the quality is there that'll create a market for spreading the generation cost across multiple users.
I need to better characterize web comics here (and fix the search, again), but: Daisy Kutter: The Last Train
NPR: She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks. The writing is kinda convoluted, but it sounds like she actually had access to and interactions with a mental health professional, but it sounds like the chatbot was glazing her more effectively.
"Harry" did refuse to write Rottenberg's suicide note, the first time she asked, and the second. But the third time she asked, it wrote the note she left for her parents. Reiley said the writing did not sound like her daughter's voice.
Bwahahaha! Shelina Moreda apparently only moved her voter registration inside the city limits on August 6, and Petaluma code requires someone to have been a resident for 30 days in order to run for mayor. https://www.petalumanews.com/2...-candidacy-in-petaluma-race-for- mayor-thrown-into-doubt-by-residency-status/
Eenteresting phishing attack, apparently a friend got popped by it and it sent me an email... bulletfreesky dot com slash vxxt. Anyway, *do not* enter your Google credentials, there, but might be interesting poking around if you swing that way.
Lederer said he decided to step down because it had become clear that his philosophy of leadership and “understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes” differed in “fundamental ways” from plans the Defense Department has for the organization.
Reminder that if you fight "AI data centers" in your town, but you use AI to... for instance, come up with a number of data centers in your town as a reason the town should have an anti-AI datacenter ordinance... you're just a NIMBY externalizing costs on to other less privileged communities.
And the reward for least self-aware goes to.... Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered game engine to break the industry's doom cycle.
"There is a lot of anxiety, but let's be honest: is AI going away? No," Valient says. "With the dotcom bubble, did the internet go away? No. All the 'I have a domain, give me money' companies went away. That's probably what happens. There are a lot of companies that will probably not survive. There's a lot of great technology and a lot of great products that will because they are simply good. That's what we are trying to do. We are first and foremost making a good engine. AI is making us faster and dreaming bigger, and designing it in a way that is faster for the future. Is it a bubble? Nobody knows. Apparently, you don't know we are in a bubble until it bursts."
Thanks to Aura/Moom @moomanibe.bsky.social for pointing this out.
Should probably note that it's the "Immens" game engine, but I figure the "I have said I'm doing AI, give me money" factor here means history won't remember them much.
Tuesday August 18th, 2026
The Wikipedia page on the "Penn State fraternity hazing scandal" begins "The Penn State fraternity hazing scandal is an ongoing issue...", and then starts with a history lesson about trying to solve it in 1949.
So, anyway, PBS News: Penn State frat pledges forced to cut and bag cocaine for college drug ring, authorities say.
77 years later... it's almost like maybe the administration isn't actually trying?
Call me loopy, but "you may have to use an agent to..." find bugs that were likely introduced by a programmer using an agent seems... strange.
In the future, all compute that isn't used by LLMs will be devoted to dumbass architectures that diff the entire model state with the view state to find and apply changes.
'Venecky' instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect school agendas are AI-generated.
On the pages inside, Kentucky was labeled “Venecky". Louisiana was "Lookoong." Alabama was “Alotome.” Illinois was “Vitoiis.” South Carolina was "Sorth Cuanto."
(JCPS is Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Kentucky)
Interesting that we're starting to see some valuation of AI generated content:
"We have to pay a ten-dollar instructional fee every year to get this agenda," Morris said. "But you're making us pay for something you used AI for? That's kind of silly, in my opinion."
In linking to AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org, Mario Munoz @pythonbynight@hachyderm.io noted:
One of the (many) salient points about this is that this is laughable when the errors are easily spotted.
But what happens when harder to spot errors come through? Biases that are harder to spot? Propaganda hiding as policy?
Okay, Google, now you're just jerking me around. The excerpt text contains the string "Baltimore", the line below that claims it's missing that search hit.
Oh wow: From a thread exploring John Gruber: Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing (uh... insert that Nathan Fillion speechless .gif from Castle) Cassandra has had an adventure @xgranade@wandering.shop observes:
@whitequark That is, someone far enough down a AI radicalization pipeline may not share a common vernacular or grammar with *anyone*; to wit the Gas Town case. I don't think anyone else had exactly the same radicalization pipeline. To be blithe perhaps to the point of inaccuracy, LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each.
(Emphasis mine).
"LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each." I'm gonna have to sit with that.
The same thread proposes "vibesick" as a sub for "ai psychosis", which I'm also pondering.
If you had a bunch of collections of information, perhaps envisioned by folders full of PDFs and web links, how might you lay out clusters of that?
I can use semantic embeddings, but the two largest eigenvalues doesn't seem like enough info.
Also, what's the right granularity for those embeddings? More than folder name, I'd guess.
Maybe something involving distances in that space between each of the collections? What's the right algorithm for reducing that to 2D?
Elderly friend of mine gave up on recovering his Instagram account via a password change. The process led to a screen which asked him to log in on another device, or... and the "or" wasn't clickable.
So we abandoned it.
It's amazing that a company the size of Meta is fucking it up this badly.
Monday August 17th, 2026
@xgranade @whitequark One thing to remember is scammers may now actually be writing their bot code with Copilot so it is actually possible for them to literally be doing something that makes no sense and not know it.
Didn't think it needed more investigation, but... nature: Undocumented migration does not raise crime rates, huge study finds
Duh: Yet another finding that the US would benefit from becoming a developed nation: Yale School of Public Health: Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects
For the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the researchers modeled what would happen if the United States adopted a national public insurance program like the one proposed in the Medicare for All Act. Using 2024 spending, insurance coverage, and mortality data, they estimate that the universal coverage would reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20% — even after accounting for the additional care that uninsured and underinsured people would receive.
Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It’s Almost Hard to Believe
Drawing from an CNBC poll, New CNBC Generation Lab poll shows almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds see democratic socialism positively
When given the names of nine key people in the AI industry and asked whether they trust each leader to act responsibly on AI, in each case a majority of respondents said they don’t. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella scored the best, with 65% reporting they don’t trust him. Palantir CEO Alex Karp scored the worst: 81% said they don’t trust him. About 75% of respondents said they don’t trust Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and about the same percentage said they don’t trust Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk all scored about the same, each with about 70% of respondents saying they don’t trust them, and 79% said they don’t trust Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel.
Catching up on older links: Operator fatigue is a thing: Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated, in which a transcription error snowballs.
Australia's peak regulator of medical practitioners, AHPRA, said clinicians must always check all output from an AI scribe for accuracy to ensure they meet their professional obligations. Ms Green said it was clear her doctor did not do this.
"If you had checked that letter you would have been able to correct that before it was sent out … why aren't you in tune with each of your patients and what's going on?"
Unexpected Findings Add New Insight on Cannabis and Heart Health
Habitual cannabis users experienced about 9% fewer premature heartbeats on days they inhaled cannabis compared with days they abstained, a counterintuitive finding that adds to the complex and evolving understanding of how cannabis affects the heart, new UC San Francisco-led research found.
Sunday August 16th, 2026
We're house sitting for some neighbors who expressed that they're having a little trouble with some steps up and down in their house, I had some Simpson decorative bolts, and some Ipé I'm gonna slap these grab bars in those places when they're gone.
Saturday August 15th, 2026
Cat pic!
Friday August 14th, 2026
Dear deities. I'm watching a Nate B. Jones video for work, and the ads... the ads make me need a shower. With like steel wool to scrub off the ick.
I don't know if this is where YouTube ads have gone generally, but these things are making Meta ads look legit.
Vancouver Sun: Concert review: AC/DC Power Up Vancouver again — and are far better than in 2025
By the time the final cannon salvo echoed over the arena during the concert closer For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), the crowd exited smiling and, in many cases, well-juiced. Outside the arena exit gates, rows of teens were waiting to drive their parents home.
Idly musing that the Therac-25 cautionary tale I learned about in my undergrad software engineering course resulted in a total of (IIRC) 6 medical injuries over about 4 years. And that was considered horrific and required immediate changes to how computers were used in medicine.
is a good jumping off point for the various replies talking about layers of redundance, hardware interlocks, cost benefit analyses, and more. 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 @brouhaha@mastodon.social, further down thread, sen @sen@hachyderm.io
Lots of fascinating stuff in Schneier on Security: AI Use by the US Government:
The international gold standard was arguably set by the French in 2016, via their Digital Republic Act. The law, itself informed by an online citizen consultation, requires all algorithms used to automate government administrative decisions to be subject to public records requests, to be appealable to a human reviewer, and to have mandatory notification of the use of automation to those affected by the decisions.
Via.
Apparently there's a 'tuber (my whitewater days leave me unable to separate the "You" and "inner-" meanings of that word from the botanical ones, hat tip to William Nealy) named Hank Green who's been pushing ControlAI and "AI doom" as undisclosed paid marketing, [object Object] @zzt@mas.to has a thread going into further detail on Pivot to AI: The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers.
Thursday August 13th, 2026
This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.
Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data.
Via Jocelynephiliac @twipped@twipped.social who noted:
We're really hitting the "finding out" era of cloud compute, aren't we?
Jason Gorman: codemanship: AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say? (Via).
If you're looking for more writing by someone who's consistently been right about the current "AI" boom, Timnit Gebru's book Deep Unlearning is available for pre-order. (Via)
Brett codes: I'm Done Using AI, on the path through using AI assistants for coding, and then, of course, realizing that the mental atrophy is setting in. Via pretty much everywhere, but here.
Buncha people linking to Annie Sexton's Compression is prediction, which is a lot of old territory if you're already a programmer, but eventually gets around to the notion that an LLM is a lossy compression of the Internet, while referencing the Google Language Modeling Is Compression paper from 2023. (Via)
And, finally, in "oh, honey, no, you didn't actually..." DOCKET NO. AAN-CV-25-6066141-S : MATTHEW A. ELLIOTT V. NEW YORK BARIATRIC GROUP, LLC : : SUPERIOR COURT JUDICIAL DISTRICТ OF ANSONIA/MILFORD AT MILFORD AUGUST 6, 2026 MEMORANDUM OF DECISION COURT SANCTION FOR PLAINTIFF'S USE OF PROMPT-INJECTION ("the plaintiff is self-represented"👀)
The Court further finds that this conduct is irreconcilable with the good- faith certification required of every filer under Connecticut Practice Book $4-2(b) and 4-9, and that it is an abuse of the filing process and an affront to the integrity of these proceedings, over which the Court has inherent authority.
"No more electronic filing for you!" (Via Tara Calishain and Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. among others)
Today I learned about https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel , a command-line tool to talk to the Apple FoundationModels that run locally on Macs. 4k tokens on MacOS 26, 8k on MacOS 27.
Also https://github.com/scouzi1966/maclocal-api for an OpenAI API, can run other models (like Qwen).
Wednesday August 12th, 2026
Just to prove that I'm not "whine about AI all the time", last night I ended up hanging at the workshop of a computing luminary for a an hour or two, and among the topics we covered was Shelly devices for home automation, and... I don't know how proprietary the software for these things is, but holy crap they look awesome.
Nice small relays, with isolation (so you can switch 220V and power them with 110V, or in some cases, 12v or 24-48v), some of them have inputs so that you can use them to augment an existing switch, and configure them to edge trigger or level trigger in various ways (so that you can use the WiFi-ness of these things as one leg of a 3 way switch, turning them off and on with an existing switch).
Looks like the ecosystem has some really cool environmental sensors, too.
But the big thing is the form factor is small and easily embedded in stuff (no more trying to mash a big ol' over-sized smart switch into a box), and they're not outrageously priced.
Google’s AI Team Tells Job Seekers Its HR Filters Are Unreliable
Google DeepMind's AGI Safety and Alignment Team, which seeks to mitigate the risks of advanced AI, is encouraging job candidates for its open roles to fill out a special form alongside their application to eliminate the risk it may be automatically screened out by the company's internal AI systems, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg, which contained the disclaimer "PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOC WIDELY."
As Gabriele Svelto @gabrielesvelto@mas.to notes:
We don't eat our own dog food because frankly it tastes like shit
Excellent forensic research published by Snyk, Trend Micro, and Cycode has thoroughly detailed the mechanics of this breach. The attack did not begin with LiteLLM. Instead, TeamPCP first compromised the GitHub Actions pipeline for Trivy, a highly popular open-source vulnerability scanner.
Via.
Nature is strange: Fish climbing in the upper Congo Basin (Central Africa), first report for the shellear Parakneria thysi on the Luvilombo Falls.
Specimens climb the vertical wall of the falls (~ 15 m high) in the splash zone during major floods, usually occurring at the end of the rainy season (April–May), using their pectoral fins, supported by their pelvic fins.
Interesting musings on software design and purpose: Is Aphera a Lightroom replacement?
Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’. Apparently Time started serving pages as markdown for the consumption of AI agents, started serving ads in that markdown, and...
The ads work by having ad tech firm Mobian generate FAQ-formatted content based on a brand brief, then insert it into Time’s markdown pages and track how often AI search engines surface it, and how favorably. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had their brand-written, brand-approved messaging sit in the same markdown version of the page an agent reads as fact. If a page’s markdown version can be quietly seeded with paid content, users have no way of knowing whether an answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief, appears Perplexity’s logic.
One of the big problems with LLMs is that there is no control channel. Sure, the "system" prompt may get weighted more heavily, but everything is data.
Kinda like humans, come to think of it...🤔 [goes and updates ad blocker]
Via.
May used Meta AI to make the cover, which resurrects late frontman Freddie Mercury. He did so in order to make a “very serious” point about the environmental impact of AI to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
But I'm now very serious. I believe the price we are about to pay for this 'inevitable' development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK.
Science Alert: 'Virtually Absent': AI Models Practically Erase Female Characters From Kids' Stories
In this paper, we use anthropomorphic fiction as a stress test for gender representation in contemporary LLMs. Across 23.8K story completions, we find that models frequently respond to gender ambiguity through avoidance, either by repeating the animal noun or using neutral pronouns. This surface-level neutrality does not translate into equitable representation. When the models do explicitly assign gender, they overwhelmingly default to masculine protagonists, while feminine protagonists are nearly absent. This experiment leads us to a broader claim about AI alignment with regard to gender and broader social representation: neutrality bites. In other words, we argue that prioritizing neutrality with regard to representations of gender, race, sexuality, or other identity categories, above all else, can function less as inclusion and more as erasure. <?blockquote>
Via.
David Culley has some thoughts on Transformers and human susceptibility.
Great Scott Gadgets: LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects
Our communities are already noticing a shift away from collaborative stewardship and toward transactional interactions with projects, and we’re seeing open source project maintainers left to deal with increasing volumes of generated code. When people interact privately with systems trained on communities, it gradually weakens the shared understanding of how projects work and redistributes the burden more heavily onto (often underfunded) project owners.
Via.
Obligatory cat picture
For the love of all the deities, just send me the damned prompt, stop asking me to read LLM output. It's so clumsy and convoluted that I can't tell if you* have an interesting thought under there, or not.
- For specific values of "you" that are probably not the reader of this.
I too exhibit a present flagrance...
Cal Newport: On AI Coding and Its Discontents (Via).
The Carlson Lab: The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI, on text regurgitation and the destruction of an academic career that comes from plagiarism. (Via Stephen Royle @steveroyle@biologists.social, Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe, among others).
1Password: Off-by-1 Labs: Why AI-generated vulnerability patches still require expert human review
We studied what happens when Large Language Models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for recently disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. Our data shows that LLMs produce Fix-Like Artifacts with Embedded Defects (FLAWED) 53.9% of the time when complex patches are required.
Tuesday August 11th, 2026
Oh god. You know that thing where to understand code, you have to go through and strip out all of the misleading comments.
And you know how LLMs meticulously comment code.
And... yeah. I just hit one of those.
Which is why I'm looking for different work.
OH:
"Being a horndog is not a new thing it's the oldest thing."
"No but "trans woman in Starfleet uniform" is new to me"