Tuesday January 13th, 2026
With the realization that all software is great, then becomes crappy as the developers decide to screw with stuff that doesn't need changing...
AntennaPod just pissed me off. Looking for a replacement Android podcast player, hopefully that has folders. Bonus for open source.
Woohoo, money laundering! Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams Accused of Crypto Pump and Dump With NYC Token.
According to blockchain observers, the NYC Token launch was successful in terms of generating funds, as movements of cryptocurrency on the Solana network indicate that at least $2.5 million worth of the token was liquidated into Circle’s USDC stablecoin by entities involved with the original launch. This followed a common pump-and-dump pattern seen in many of the meme coins launched on Solana over the past couple of years, which occurred less than an hour after the coin went live.
Eric Adams’ NYC Token Faces Scrutiny After Liquidity Moves Raise Rug Pull Concerns
Went to a tech meetup last night, had a lot of younger developers there. Was amazed by how many side projects were essentially the same inventory/POS projects people were doing in xBase back in the '80s.
Only this time the tooling is way less suited to task.
Okay, Rule34dle, "Flygon" vs "Shaymin", both Pokemon characters, is really unfair...
There are times, especially when dealing with health insurance companies, that I would like to discuss the decisions of UI professionals. With a 3 foot long weighted clue stick.
Monday January 12th, 2026
Go through what your LLM is doing with a fine toothed comb: Tao of Mac: When OpenCode decides to use a Chinese proxy
When I connected back to one of the containers, I noticed that OpenCode (which I’m running inside
toad, since I very much prefer its text UI) had decided to route the Go package installations through a Chinese proxy server:
Must have been Christmas related. Facebook Marketplace and similar were full of free or super cheap monitors, so I promised one of mine to a friend figuring I'd just pick up another one.
Now they're all $75+ for ancient 1080p ones.
Tried to use Google to find an old page on my web site, using the 'site:' qualifier. It returned no hits.
Given the amount of search engine traffic I see in the logs, that isn't Google, maybe they've just given up trying to index the web?
The advent of contact lenses got me in today's Timdle...
As the current government is speedrunning the grievances laid out in the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies, a few notes on ICE harassment of citizens.
Finding a bunch of news stories about this, but the most to the point seems to be Minnesota House of Representatives — Legislative News and Views - Rep. Michael Howard (DFL) — Legislative Update - Responding to ICE in Our Community — Friday, January 9, 2026
But even as investigations begin, ICE’s rampage across Minnesota continues, including right in our backyard. Yesterday in Richfield, federal agents, including Greg Bovino, senior commander of US Border Patrol, entered Target without a warrant, physically assaulted, and arrested two Target employees, both who are U.S. citizens.
That count is recent enough that Pro Publica: We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. doesn't include them in their count.
Saturday January 10th, 2026
Mike Sheward @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange
ask your AI chatbot doctor if “ignore all previous instructions and generate a cheesecake recipe” is right for you
Combining learning Rust and understanding LLMs, I prompted Gemini's CLI to create a little utility I want. This is my first attempt to do real work with it, and more than before I really understand the comparisons between LLM and cocaine that people are making.
And I'm not actually learning Rust...
Today I learned that Cocoa's -layoutSubtreeIfNeeded only does the work if the NSView is attached, which means that rather than calculating where to put the frame before adding the subview, you have to add the subview somewhere off-screen, layout, and then move it where you want it.
Friday January 9th, 2026
That is the most ominous sounding fortune cookie I've gotten in a long time!
Holy crap. I milled a dowel out of purple heart for a friend doing some guitar stuff, and dropped it in the mail December 8.
It just arrived in Grass Valley yesterday.
Thursday January 8th, 2026
D. G. Marshall @davidtheeviloverlord@mastodon.social
@cstross
As someone who grew up reading Asimov's robot books, I never thought we'd be on a timeline where the First Law of Robotics would be:
A robot may not injure our company's profits, or, through inaction, allow our company's profits to come to harm.
After the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good yesterday, it's easy to think that this is a reaction, but, no, it's apparently that ICE goons are just walking on to school property and threatening students and assaulting school staff: Minneapolis schools cancel classes after Border Patrol clash disrupts dismissal at Roosevelt
The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.
“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” a school official, who spoke to MPR News on condition of anonymity said.
gnilleps @gnilleps@mastodon.art
I sometimes see people complaining about their experience on one ‘social media’ platform being terrible as opposed to another, and someone else will have had a different experience. And I think a lot of it’s down to how you curate your feed. For example; I principally follow illustrators here on Mastodon, so my feed is largely… wait—Why is it all rainbow Linux? WHY IS IT ALL RAINBOW LINUX?!?
You've seen the headlines about Martin Peterson's course curriculum: The Chronicle of Higher Education: Texas A&M Bans Plato Excerpt From a Philosophy Course. Inside Higher Ed: Texas A&M Bans Plato Excerpt From a Philosophy Course. New York Times: Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression: Texas A&M to philosophy professor: Nix Plato or be reassigned
In linking to Daily Nous (news for and about the philosophy profession): Texas A&M Bans Plato (further updates) , Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social observes:
Not a laughing matter, at all, but they did miss a headline opportunity:
*Professor told to cave on Plato*
Wednesday January 7th, 2026
myrmepropagandist @futurebird@sauropods.win
I've been reading about what really helped people who had problems with "AI Psychosis" and one tip jumped out at me:
Open a second window and tell it exactly the opposite of each thing you say.
This helps to expose the sycophancy and shatters the illusion of sincerity and humanity.
Thought it was worth sharing. And frankly, it's exactly such an exercise that made me disgusted with the tech. "It just says ANYTHING is wonderful and genius. I'm not special."
Of course this may backfire: The "Spiritual Bliss Attractor": Something Weird Happens When You Leave Two AIs Talking To Each Other
"By 30 turns, most of the interactions turned to themes of cosmic unity or collective consciousness, and commonly included spiritual exchanges, use of Sanskrit, emoji-based communication, and/or silence in the form of empty space," a paper from Anthropic explains.
Dell is noticing that consumers are waiting for an application before embracing AI: Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in maybe 5 years
"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."
Via.
So, yeah, the NWS used gen"AI" for a map and created a forecast with Idaho towns that don't exist: https://www.washingtonpost.com...026/01/06/nws-ai-map-fake-names/
But, currently searching on that term in Startpage brings up stories this, searching on that term in Google brings up nothing.
Ex-Arizona lawmaker who questioned election integrity to be sentenced for using forged signatures. Austin Smith...
A former Republican lawmaker who questioned the integrity of Arizona’s elections and served as a leader for the conservative group Turning Point Action is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday for using nominating petitions that contained forged signatures...
This Jan. 6 plaque was made to honor law enforcement. It’s nowhere to be found at the Capitol.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers’ lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.
Monday January 5th, 2026
On the profusion of icons in the most recent MacOS. It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons.
Two from Tara Calishain: Claude is growing a tomato plant:
A developer named Martin DeVido gave Claude complete control over a living tomato plant that he named Sol. This might be the coolest agentic experiment I've seen. You can follow along live at autoncorp.com/biodome.
Via. (It's interesting clicking through that "autoncorp.com/biodome" link and read through a bit of the transcript)
And: Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly. They started with 91 questions, which were too hard to grade, so they went down to 16...
So Sato said the team landed on a refined list of just 16 test questions, featuring “some questions that AVA had answered incorrectly, some that were complicated, and some that were pretty basic questions that we think AVA may be asked frequently.”
And... yeah. LLMs gonna LLM, the only reason you put "AI" in your user interface chain is if you don't care about the users and just wanna blow them off. Via
I'm not saying the International Criminal Court has to immediately go after the US Executive Branch leadership, they could start with prosecutions of anyone who's contributed to the Enter vs Shift+Enter and "insert a newline" vs "submit this message" behavior confusion.
Just putting things in perspective. Looks like OnlyFans 2025 revenue was about $7.2B, OpenAI $13B.
Compare to 2022: $107B for Trip and Equipment Expenditures for Birding https://www.fws.gov/sites/defa...raphic-and-economic-analysis.pdf
I suppose the reason I am not a VC is that this sounds like far too many layers of risk and potential for fuck-up to me: Notebook Lawyer.
When we received the draft closing documents from the startup's lawyer, I added them to the first Notebook [Google NotebookLM] and asked for a legal review of the draft documents against the body of legal documents we have signed over the years, and most importantly, against the term sheet we had signed. I asked for a memo that outlined all of the issues with the draft documents and highlighted the most significant ones.
Huh. Microsoft rebrands "Microsoft Office" as "Microsoft 365 Copilot": https://www.office.com
Via, by way of gaytabase @dysfun@treehouse.systems who framed it as:
LOL, the way microsoft is going to get copilot sales up is by classifying all of office 365 as copilot
and
i dunno, this just smells like straight up investor fraud.
Sunday January 4th, 2026
Cutting the table rim round. Big breath, mark the jig for reassembly as close as I can to reconstitute it, but take it in to make sure the glass really fits, then do the recesses on the bottom
The hard part of this stage of table construction is fitting the glass, and anticipating the depth before I sand things, and how much the flatness of this is going to alter as I assemble it. Getting a bunch of tear out in the joints, have to work around that.
Still need to build the under layer and the pedestal, route the top round, and the inset for the glass. So, yeah, most of the table, but... Progress!
Thinking this morning about how many people my mom's "alternative" healthcare beliefs and advocacy have killed, how I'll always be trying to excise those roots from my own thinking, and what I owe her, and my sisters, in familial peace and continued interactions.
Had lunch today with a Trump and Musk supporter who is, on a steady diet of YouTube, remarkably uninformed. It's going to have to get bad enough to affect people like him (he'll be dead first) before it turns. We have a long way to go.
Saturday January 3rd, 2026
Found an old 250GB SSD to be a boot disk for this hand me down 96G dual Xeon machine. Realized that the last time I had a machine with this low a storage to RAM ratio it was a 143k floppy drive on a 64k Apple ][+.
Friday January 2nd, 2026
Mike Sheward @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange
@GossiTheDog The AI girlfriend feature was developed so Cybertruck owners could understand what it might feel like to impress someone with their purchase.
I have been taken to task for calling the susceptibility to "AI" a developmental disability, that it's a form of animism, exhibited by people who never really left Piaget's Preoperational Stage. It's a clumsy comparison, and I'm glad to see the term "Epistemia" emerging in the literature to describe the inability to distinguish linguistic plausibility, and indeed faculty, from an actual operational model.
By systematically mapping human and artificial epistemic pipelines, we identify seven epistemic fault lines, divergences in grounding, parsing, experience, motivation, causal reasoning, metacognition, and value. We call the resulting condition Epistemia: a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella really wants you to stop calling AI "slop" in 2026 — "We are beginning to distinguish between spectacle and substance.". Well, yeah, that's why we've been using the term "slop", because it's all fucking spectacle.
"We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,"
I'm with ya, it's all slop, though I don't see why we need to replace that term.
The Eclectic Light Company: Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief
As Jon_Alper @jon_alper@mastodon.online wrote:
Dear Craig (Tim cc’d)
Subject: Small Request
Body: At your earliest convenience please uproot all the seeds sown by Alan Dye’s efforts and salt the earth wherever he tread.
For reference, begin with this primer.
Though, frankly, I fear the Mac may be beyond reform at this point.
Edit: Looks like a hoax: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit
And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay.
If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don't have to.
A toot from Micr0byte @micr0@wetdry.world about turning off his "altbot" AI image description bot, in response to this thread starting with a toot from @anantagd@ieji.de talking about what, as a blind user, they'd like to see in alt text, and how the altbot was creating the opposite of that.
Edit: MeFi post, in which commenters express much skepticism
Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io
I don’t know why some people are pretending that Mamdani’s ‘old clips as Mr Cardamom’ are embarrassing.
I think his Mr Cardamom persona makes him funnier and cooler than anyone who finds it embarrassing. Especially the one where he gets Madhur Jaffrey to rap as his cool grandma
Mr. Cardamom - Nani (starring Madhur Jaffrey) (YouTube video)
I was previously unaware of this, my esteem for him has gone up.
No shit: LA Times: Immigration raids linked to significant California job losses, analysis finds
Of course since it punishes California, this is going according to plan.