Friday November 14th, 2025
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!"
Thursday November 13th, 2025
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?
Via.
Your BetterHelp Therapist Is Definitely A Human (YouTube video), "Written and performed by Yoni Lotan (INSTA: @yonilotan)"
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:
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
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
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.
Wednesday November 12th, 2025
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.
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.
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.”
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...
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
Tuesday November 11th, 2025
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.
Monday November 10th, 2025
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.
Sunday November 9th, 2025
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
Saturday November 8th, 2025
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.
Friday November 7th, 2025
If you haven't already abandoned Firefox, Firefox Forcing LLM Features has some notes on configuration, including ways to replicate these things across machines.
Jury acquits D.C. 'sandwich guy' charged with chucking a sandwich at a federal agent
Sean Dunn faced a single misdemeanor after federal grand jurors refused to indict him on the felony charge sought by prosecutors.
Via @GottaLaff @gottalaff.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy Who noted...
Just desserts!
and
2/ I think we all knew this one was in the bag.
3/ The DOJ lawyer should be sacked.
4/ Sandwich Guy's lawyer ate DOJ for lunch.
5/ ... because DOJ just couldn't cut the mustard.
Okay, I'm done.
6/... because my jokes are getting stale.
Thursday November 6th, 2025
Mozilla's SUMO Japanese translation community ends their support over botched machine translation:
They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.
Via nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social, in the replies David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange has some notes on how, yes, this is the result of a bug, but...
That bit bothers me the least. Lots of systems have bugs. The issue here for me is that they have a load of experts who understand the problem, and someone who does not understand the problem has mandated a tool that does not solve the problem and entirely disregarded the value of the experts.
Machine-assisted translation tooling primarily focuses on building, maintaining, and using a term dictionary: a set of prior translations that ensure that you consistently translate terms of art in the same way. If you don't do this, you get something that is technically a valid translation, but which is completely useless because the same term is translated in different ways throughout the document (based on surrounding context and translator preferences) and so it's impossible for a reader to tell that they're the same term.
It sounds like the Japanese translators have put a lot of effort into solving this problem. LLM-based translation is infamous for not doing this. It will translate terms based on how, across the training corpus, that term was translated when adjacent to other words. This is completely fine for short, low-stakes translation. If I want to translate a menu while travelling, for example, an LLM will typically give a good output (maybe don't trust it if you have serious allergies, but for the rest of us it's fine). But for something where you want to communicate technical content (in any domain), they're (at best) a good first approximation. And translators have repeatedly reported that cleaning up LLM translations is more work than doing the translation well in the first place.
Also Via.
You know what I love about modern software? Slack is adding "AI" features and can't get my unread workspaces or messages right.
New features trump core annoyances.
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show
Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’
I am actually surprised that the number is that low. I assume that any ads on Facebook are scams. I wonder if they've A/B tested out exactly what proportion of scammy ads they can get before users stop engaging and advertisers stop buying ads?
Charlene is now reading Carter Lavin's If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy and is all fired up about advocacy and messaging. I was super impressed with Zohran Mamdani's videos and campaighn generally, and ran across Corey Atad in Defector: Selling Zohran, and thought it was worth sending along to her and saving here.
Kay Leadfoot @ FuelArc News @kayleadfoot.bsky.social
I had the regrettable realization...
The Caribbean boat strikes are our "dropping dissidents out of helicopters into the Atlantic" moment.
The regime has tipped into extrajudicial killings against perceived opponents.
Only, instead of Pinochet's cloak of secrecy, we live-tweet videos of it.
Wednesday November 5th, 2025
"This neural network could have been a matrix computed with principal component analysis" is the new "this meeting could have been an email".
Norman Rockwell family slams DHS over art use on social media
“Protect our American way of life,” one DHS post on Facebook from August said, with an image of Rockwell’s 1971 painting “Salute the Flag.” Another post included an image of Rockwell’s work along with a quote from former President Coolidge: “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.”
USA Today Opinion: We're Norman Rockwell's family. Trump's DHS has shamefully misused his work.
“I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in an interview in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”
Via.
Charlene read Truly by Lionel Richie, and said it was good, so I'm reading it, and quite enjoying it. From that, we got to talking about We Are The World, which led to last night watching The Greatest Night In Pop (official trailer), and...
I know I have been dismissive about Michael Jackson before, and I think my understanding of why people do what they do (and the pressures of performance and being a public figure) has evolved quite a bit, but I think it's been with the development of my own voice that I've started to really listen to vocal performers, and holy shit that cat could sing.
As could everyone else in that performance, each in their own distinct (and, with their voices arranged to showcase those distinctions) way.
I may have to watch the thing again just to catch those places where people were singing in isolation, and take careful notes about some of the things they were doing with pronunciation and emphasis, and...
Anyway, really enjoyed the documentary. Probably helps if you've seen Quincy, and some of the framing from reading Truly is also useful.
The headline is... overblown: Kim Kardashian Blames ChatGPT for Failing Law Exams
Taylor jokingly asked whether she was cheating and Kardashian clarified that it was just to study for her tests, but it often gave the wrong answer. “They’re always wrong,” Kardashian said, stone-faced. “It has made me fail tests all the time. And then I’ll get mad and I’ll like yell at it and be like, ‘You made me fail, why did you do this?'”
Not sure whether this is pro or con on using LLMs to study.
I'm an "AI" detractor, but I would like every developer of a package management environment to use an LLM coding tool to install and configure a package, to demonstrate just how bizarre and how much lore goes in to using these damned things.