Friday December 5th, 2025
We are taking care of the neighbor's cat, which means he gets lots and lots of scritches.
Ars Technica: In comedy of errors, men accused of wiping gov databases turned to an AI tool
US DOJ: Two Virginia Men Arrested for Conspiring to Destroy Government Databases.
- On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:58 p.m., MUNEEB AKHTER issued commands that deleted a DHS production database containing U.S. government information. The database was hosted on a Company-1 server in the Eastern District of Virginia.
- On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:59 p.m., MUNEEB AKHTER asked an artificial intelligence tool, “how do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases.”
- On February 18, 2025, at approximately 5:14 p.m., SOHAIB AKHTER stated aloud, “They’re gonna probably raid this place,” to which MUNEEB AKHTER replied, “I'll clean this shit up.” SOHAIB AKHTER responded, “We also gotta clean stuff up from the other house, man.”
Thursday December 4th, 2025
Interesting both for work, and for thinking about environments and platforms like Emacs: Jack Rusher at Strange Loop 2022: Stop Writing Dead Programs.
I found a taker for the TI99-4a that came into my life, but in pondering the joy of the BASIC environment I was reminded of a lot of the Seymour Papert and Alan Kay ideas that made their way into this talk, about how a great environment isn't just about being able to inspect the state at a given place, but to play with it and let it continue.
My primary environment these days has been XCode, and the problems with Apple's direction on software process are well documented, but as conditional breakpoints are apparently broken and it's harder to change values than it was with CodeView or SoftICE back in the day, I've been pondering this even at my level.
Darkness fell, like a cliche in a room full of poetry majors.
I've been seeing the posts about RAM, and not quite understanding what was up (especially given that "DDR" will always mean "Dance, Dance, Revolution" to me), but allison @aparrish@friend.camp noted
you know i'd never stopped to consider how annoying tulip mania must have been for folks who just wanted to grow a few pretty flowers in their front garden
about Ars Technica: After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers
The surprise announcement from Micron follows a period of rapidly escalating memory prices, as we reported in November. A typical 32GB DDR5 RAM kit that cost around $82 in August now sells for about $310, and higher-capacity kits have seen even steeper increases.
Yikes, especially since 32G seems to be the absolute minimum for a computer these days...
Edit: Pivot to AI weighs in.
My VLC wrapped for 2026: Top artist was "Unknown Artist", top album was "Unknown Album".
Single top track was "Vocal Warmup 2.mp3".
From the creators of Oglaf, though this one is mostly SFW, some notes on owning a pony. For the horse-y people in my feed.... https://www.patreon.com/posts/pony-club-144777978
Wednesday December 3rd, 2025
Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas. The source I got this from, @jenniferplusplus@hachyder m.io said "what's that popping sound", but it also sounds a lot like the layered capabilities aren't much of a draw:
The sales figures suggest enterprises aren’t yet willing to pay premium prices for these AI agent tools. And Microsoft’s Copilot itself has faced a brand preference challenge: Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft salespeople were having trouble selling Copilot to enterprises because many employees prefer ChatGPT instead. The drugmaker Amgen reportedly bought Copilot software for 20,000 staffers only for them to ignore it in favor of OpenAI’s chatbot.
This is also interesting, because I have this general vibe that OpenAI is getting its ass kicked by Google.
Kohler Can Access Data and Pictures from Toilet Camera It Describes as “End-to-End Encrypted”
Claimed end-to-end privacy doesn’t fully conceal your rear-end data
Via.
Among the things that surprised me in today's Timdle, the Suez Canal opening, and the US crossing 300M residents.
Oh, hey, a business model for AI: Anthropic: AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits
Going beyond retrospective analysis, we evaluated both Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 in simulation against 2,849 recently deployed contracts without any known vulnerabilities. Both agents uncovered two novel zero-day vulnerabilities and produced exploits worth $3,694, with GPT-5 doing so at an API cost of $3,476.
So assuming the API cost isn't a loss leader (hahahaha), the benchmark is over the period of 2020 to 2025, we have a model for AI ROI...
Long COVID takes $1 trillion global economic toll each year, analysis suggests
A brief communication published last week in </span><span>NPJ Primary Care Respiratory Medicine outlines the substantial economic burden of long COVID worldwide, estimating that persistent symptoms after COVID infection cost the global economy roughly $1 trillion each year, or roughly 1% of global gross domestic product.
Via.
"It's my view that there's no way you're going to get a return on that, because $8 trillion of capex means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest," he said.
That article is pulling from the podcast portion of The Verge: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says there is no AI bubble after all, which from the text sounds like he's happily pushing the quantum computing bubble.
A Decade Long Study Shows Cycling Helps Older Adults Live Longer Healthier Lives
If you’re looking for yet another reason to hop on your bicycle today— especially if you’re in your 60s or beyond—new research out of Japan has delivered a big one. A 10-year study from the University of Tsukuba has found that older adults who cycle regularly aren’t just feeling better day-to-day—they’re actually living longer and avoiding long-term care at significantly higher rates.
annaf @annaf@climatejustice.social
What I want to say to these AI guys is, ok you could create an existential threat, so what? We've already got nuclear weapons, war, climate change, ecosystem destruction, and you're adding another one. It proves that the super rich (mostly white, mostly men) are so stupid they will create things that can destroy themselves and everyone else just to look big. If that's the pinnacle of technological genius in your view, then we're done. So do what you want, I will slow hand clap you on our way to extinction. #AI #Extinction
Google Discover is testing AI-generated headlines and they aren't good. Whoever could have guessed?
For instance, one rewritten headline claimed "Steam Machine price revealed," but the Ars Technica article's actual headline was "Valve's Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one." No costs have been shared yet for the hardware, either in that post or elsewhere from Valve. In our own explorations, Engadget staff also found that Discover was providing original headlines accompanied by AI-generated summaries. In both cases, the content is tagged as "Generated with AI, which can make mistakes." But it sure would be nice if the company just didn't use AI at all in this situation and thus avoided the mistakes entirely.
Retro computer folks: where an I most likely to pass on a TI 99-4a to someone who will appreciate it?
Tuesday December 2nd, 2025
Mx Amber Alex (she/it) @amberage@eldritch.cafe
The key words "AND MAKE IT FAST", "ABSOLUTELY NOT", and "LISTEN HERE YOU LITTLE SHIT" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
Osma Suominen @osma@sigmoid.social
@amberage The key words "MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T)", "SHOULD CONSIDER", "REALLY SHOULD NOT", "OUGHT TO", "WOULD PROBABLY", "MAY WISH TO", "COULD", "POSSIBLE", and "MIGHT" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 6919.
Since it's December, I can note this: I don't want a lot for Christmas...
Abolish parking minimums and upzone those brownfields, let's get some shit built!
Woooh! 8 out of 10 on today's Rule34dle!
Quinn Rhodes on Genderbent: Loving masculinity when men are in crisis
Figuring all of this out – slowly accepting that I do not have to feel guilty for how good it felt to be a man – was my masculinity crisis. In some ways, the wider quote-unquote “crisis of masculinity” is eerily similar.
Quinn Rhodes (he/him) @onqueerstreet@mastodon.social noted:
@girlonthenet I want to clarify that I wasn't tying to make this all about me, more to express that I get where the 'men are trash' sentiment comes from, because we let men like this define what it is to be a man, and that version of masculinity *is* trash.
last week i remembered that macOS lets you set your own icons and that *I* have the power to delegitimize the professionalism of the software that runs on my machine, so here's a thread of the 16 new icons i've made so far
i really forgot how fun it was to just sit down and make art for myself :')
As I said on my re... what the fuck are they on BlueSky, skeets? ... of this thread: This entire thread is absolutely beautiful, and I'm torn between "Fuck MacOS, I don't want to put any energy into it" and "my Mac could look so much better" (even though, functionally, it so lags Linux... except for Logic Pro).
GOP lawmaker turns heads with odd fundraising pitch about furries
Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI) sent out a bizarre fundraising call to action for his supporters on Friday, headlined, "the furries are coming for me."
"I'd heard of furries, but to be honest, I didn't think they were real. Then one filed to run against me for Congress," stated the email. "Samuel Smeltzer, whose furry name is Elyon Badger, announced he's running against me, in costume, on a far left progressive platform."
Elyon113 @elyon113.bsky.social noted:
This is going from the dumbest, to the funniest timeline so fucking fast. 😂😂😂
Republican mayor in Kansas facing deportation over voter fraud
A recent profile of Ceballos, written by Roy Wenzl for The Wichita Eagle, revealed that the 54- year-old did not understand that as a Mexican immigrant, he was not eligible to vote in U.S. elections, which he has been doing since 1991. Ceballos also said he “probably” voted for Kobach and President Donald Trump multiple times, because he instinctively chooses the candidates with an “R” next to their name while voting.
Kansas mayor charged with alleged voter fraud; state leader says ‘hundreds’ more cases expected
The point in that latter article is made that even though this is a handful state-wide, in this case it was an election in a town of 2,653, where a vote or two can swing the results.
Monday December 1st, 2025
Installed VLC on my phone because I finally got fed up with what Google has been doing to the Android music player that's become YouTube Music, and holy shit what a revelation it was to have a tool that does what I want it to do, and isn't just a big funnel to get me to pay more money.
OMG, Google, I fucking hate you.
(Ctrl-G quits the current operation in Emacs, to have that suddenly be toggling Gemini is about the most obnoxious thing that could possibly occur.)
Sensing a pattern here, Google...
Fired up Firefox to retrieve an old password, and it's claiming that a one-off password used only for Facebook was part of a breach on September 30, 2023?
I've changed it, but I'd expect that'd have gotten more press than it apparently did, can't find anything on such an incident...
Oh, fucking charming, Homebrew has somehow destroyed my PGVector install, so my Postgres database is now unusable.
Have I mentioned in the last 15 minutes how much I hate this miserable excuse for a platform?
Darrell Owens: The Fire Department vs. Traffic Safety Advocates
A firefighter sympathetic to the fire officials argued to me that traffic calming slowed the fire department’s ability to respond to fires. But firefighters and EMT affiliates spend far more time collecting bodies from car accidents enabled by car-oriented road design than they do fighting structural fires. Between 2010 and 2022, structural fires in Berkeley injured an average of 2 people per year, while between just 2017 and 2022, traffic accidents injured or killed an average of 694 people annually. (Report here). This is proportionally true of most cities in the United States. This month, a cyclist was hit and killed on one of the streets fire officials want to keep free of street festivals.
How long until we see J1772 plugs in our houses? My car charger can boil water really fast (YouTube video). Dude gets a UK 240v 3k watt tea kettle, and, with a side track into Saudi Arabia's electrical code and NEMA junction boxes, and various different liquid volume measurements, uses a car charger...
With a diversion into putting 6kW into a 1.5kW tea kettle...
Thanks, Google AI, that's helpful.
Sunday November 30th, 2025
"18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations. The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal."
https://ogc.osd.mil/Portals/99...of_defense_law_of_war_manual.pdf
Pictures from the original build at https://www.flutterby.net/Guitar_Building_Pictures
Wide shot of the guitar pre-hardware.
Changed the shape of the headstock, took off a lot of material.
13 years ago, Daniel and I built a guitar in my workshop. He's recently been working with a luthier local to him to tune it up. Went a little thin on the back taking out weight, but replaced the screws for the plates with magnets.
Abstract
While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time. Our finding highlights a critical challenge for GenAI, which can weaken the motivation required for creative excellence and innovation.
Very worth a read: Patterns, a Cell Press Journal: Perspective — The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions
The bigger picture
Machine learning has a pseudoscience problem. An abundance of ethical issues arising from the use of machine learning (ML)-based technologies—by now, well documented—is inextricably entwined with the systematic epistemic misuse of these tools. We take a recent resurgence of deep learning-assisted physiognomic research as a case study in the relationship between ML-based pseudoscience and attendant social harms—the standard purview of “AI ethics.” In practice, the epistemic and ethical dimensions of ML misuse often arise from shared underlying reasons and are resolvable by the same pathways. Recent use of ML toward the ends of predicting protected attributes from photographs highlights the need for philosophical, historical, and domain-specific perspectives of particular sciences in the prevention and remediation of misused ML.
Saturday November 29th, 2025
I mean, duh: Cato Institute: Immigrants Used Less Welfare than Native-Born Americans in 2022
Congress is currently debating whether to spend about $175 billion on deportations to avoid future payments like the $650 million that Congress spent on shelter and other services for migrants last year. Poorly spending $650 million last year doesn’t justify spending 269 times as much to avoid similarly relatively small costs when Congress could just decide not to spend the money on migrant shelter and services in the first place.<
Friday November 28th, 2025
I keep forgetting that the thing about the L2 chargers right off downtown in Grass Valley is an effective $.79/kWh.
I prefer level 2 when we can, for battery health, but dayumn.
Seems worth reading in light of current accounts of US military actions in the Caribbean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz-Wilhelm_Eck
Via https://bsky.app/profile/david...n.bsky.social/post/3m6picena4k22
AI CEOs generate thought leadership at the push of a button
Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.
Wednesday November 26th, 2025
Study compares heart risks of COVID-19 infection and vaccination, and the results may surprise you.
The results will not surprise you. Risk of rare heart complications in children higher after COVID-19 infection than after vaccination
Co-author Professor Angela Wood, University of Cambridge and Associate Director at the BHF Data Science Centre, said: “Using electronic health records from all children and young people in England, we were able to study very rare but serious heart and clotting complications, and found higher and longer-lasting risks after COVID-19 infection than after vaccination.
The thing about reading Brian Phillips in The Ringer: The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined is that it's a reminder that...
You know how people like to say that the police serve the desires of capital? Olivia Nuzzi's career is a strong reminder that the press serves the desires of capital.
As if the entirety of the New York Times wasn't already that reminder.
Brian Phillips @brianphillips.bsky.social notes that:
People are calling my lede here "appalling," "nightmare fuel," "actively evil," and "a desecration of the human spirit"
and I got to that via that genehack guy from that dead bird site @extremely.website noting:
…and they’re not wrong!
The Register: HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’
Cato describes HashJack as "the first known indirect prompt injection that can weaponize any legitimate website to manipulate AI browser assistants." It outlines a method where actors sneak malicious instructions into the fragment part of legitimate URLs, which are then processed by AI browser assistants such as Copilot in Edge, Gemini in Chrome, and Comet from Perplexity AI. Because URL fragments never leave the AI browser, traditional network and server defenses cannot see them, turning legitimate websites into attack vectors.
Via.
I hate that Apple has decided that Terminal is just gonna suck and you've gotta use iTerm2 if you want to access the command line.
Why Nature will not allow the use of generative AI in images and video. Interestingly, though:
For now, Nature is allowing the inclusion of text that has been produced with the assistance of generative AI, providing this is done with appropriate caveats (see go.nature.com/3cbrjbb). The use of such large language model (LLM) tools needs to be documented in a paper’s methods or acknowledgements section, and we expect authors to provide sources for all data, including those generated with the assistance of AI. Furthermore, no LLM tool will be accepted as an author on a research paper.
Which seems to be at odds with a lot of their reasoning over AI images.
Say you want to buy music from someone signed to one of the big labels: is there a place other than Amazon to buy a DRM-free download that doesn't require installing an app?
As Neal Stephenson foretold in The Diamond Age: AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds How to Find Knives and Start Fires With Matches
Tuesday November 25th, 2025
PromptArmor: Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data
An indirect prompt injection in an implementation blog can manipulate Antigravity to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.
the site is called medium because nothing on it is ever rare or well done send toot