Flutterby™!

Minetta Transportation Institute — MTI Electric Bicycle Safety Study Identifies Illegal, Over-Powered Devices as Key Problem

While nobody knows how many of these illegal electric bicycles are on the road, the percentage might be quite high. Counts of electric two-wheelers parked at a dozen northern California middle and high schools found that almost 90% may not meet the standards for legal electric bicycles. Some of these devices have as much as eight times more power than legal limits.

While I'm finding cool stuff in Rust: Pest

pest is a general purpose parser written in Rust with a focus on accessibility, correctness, and performance. It uses parsing expression grammars (or PEG) as input, which are similar in spirit to regular expressions, but which offer the enhanced expressivity needed to parse complex languages.

Looking at Rust GUI libraries, and I guess we just assume that compute is cheap enough that for every tick of the song playback slider/transport, we're willing to re-render all of the text and tables in the window as well now?

(I'm headed towards Relm/gtk4, which also gives me the hives. Sigh.)

Waymo Is Not In The ‘Vision Zero’ Toolbox: Data

Waymo has told advocates that expecting it to respect bike lanes is “too high a bar” because customers expect to be dropped off in them, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition.

“People always point out that unlike human driven cars, the AVs stop at lights and obey the speed limit. However, they are really only as good and effective and safe as they are programmed to be,” White said. “Waymos pull over into bike lanes all the time for pickups and drop-offs and that’s neither legal nor safe but the companies say that is a normal practice and that’s what customers expect.”

Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar” – because customers want to be dropped off in them, autonomous vehicle firm Waymo tells cyclists

Last June, a cyclist in San Francisco sued the Google-owned company after she was seriously injured when one of the brand’s driverless taxis stopped in a cycle lane and a passenger opened its back door, striking the cyclist and causing her to smash into another Waymo car that was also illegally blocking the bike path.

Got a Nixle alert to avoid Petaluma Boulevard South at Mountain View Ave so of course we had to walk down and see. Not sure how this happened, but I think the wheels side is supposed to stay down

Ah, yes, when you have to use QuickTime Player to screen record XCode to catch the stack trace before XCode shits itself...

maxine 🇵🇸 @maxine@hachyderm.io

Consider the following: rust rewrites of projects like coreutils exist purely to remove copyleft licensing. The supposed security and performance gains are irrelevant, and while memory safety is important, logic bugs don’t suddenly cease to exist just because it was written in Rust.

Phoronix: Ubuntu Rust Coreutils Audit Revealed 113 Issues, Ubuntu 26.10 Aims For "100% Rust Coreutils"

So I'm fleshing out this app with Cosmic/Iced, and... is there a cross-platform widget set for Rust that's lighter weight and not so "rerender everything when the data model changes" based?

Preferably with a reasonable table control that has in-place editing, and cropping of columns with variable length (so a cell with long data in a column that fills doesn't overrun the next column)?

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: Mobile phone short video use negatively impacts attention functions: an EEG study

These results suggest that an increased tendency toward mobile phone short video addiction could negatively impact self-control and diminish executive control within the realm of attentional functions. This study sheds light on the adverse consequences stemming from short video consumption and underscores the importance of developing interventions to mitigate short video addiction.

I'm... skeptical of EEG studies and results, and the "this is an addiction" opener, but wanted to find a place to refer back to this.

Via.

Public Domain Review: First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming, by Eunice Foote (1856)

Jaimie's Erotica @Jaimieserotica@kinkycats.org

Now that Apple have announced a new CEO is due to arrive soon, I wonder if they'll be deliberately slowing Tim Cook down with a view to completely bricking him when the new one arrives?

Pondering Rust's fascination with f32 types. I remember being concerned about memory usage and floats vs doubles in the late '90s, but in the intervening decades I thought we'd kinda agreed that unless there's lots of them, doubles were faster. Am I just the wrong level of old?

The Conversation: It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect is a look at Social Development: Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses Reveal no Gender Difference in Neonatal Social Perception

Existing evidence supports a possible maturational difference but not a specific social advantage for girls at birth. While more research and better reporting are needed, the present findings challenge the claim that girls are innately more socially perceptive than boys.

‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ summarized this as:

The evidence is pretty clear: boys will be boys is a myth. Kids are sociable creatures. We TEACH boys to be monsters and to hate girls. We TEACH boys to interpret puberty as an alienation from girls.

But it's also further confusion in my own search for identity, thinking about how much of who I was that I regret being in my 20s is a function of neuro-divergence vs my Waldorf school experiences.

Financial Times (subscriber only) Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’.

Bloomberg Law: Sullivan & Cromwell Apologizes to Judge for AI Hallucinations.

Dietderich said he also apologized to lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner who alerted him to the errors. Matthew Schwartz, Boies Schiller’s chair, is counsel to Chen, according to a court document.

Some "what goes around here", Boies Schiller Flexner's John Kucera was in the hotseat last year for AI slop in a case against the Church of Scientology.

Above the Law: Sullivan & Cromwell Files Emergency ‘Please Don’t Sanction Us For All These AI Hallucinations’ Letter

Alerted to this by ‪Indefinitely Extended Hat‬ ‪@kenwhite.bsky.social‬

TFW Sullivan & Cromwell charges you $1200 an hour for a Yale graduate to ask grok “is this argument sus”

Vaccine. Volume 40, Issue 51, 5 December 2022, Pages 7500-7504 A historical analysis of vaccine mandates in the United States military and its application to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate Capt Brian P Elliott, Col Steven Chambers

doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.017 PMCID: PMC9376337 PMID: 35989135

Via

I'm learning Rust, and wow am I feeling the "docs are not written for humans" thing right now. And nor are forum responses. A lot of "I'm so smart, mark that particular example up this way", not a lot of "here's how to structure your code out of this mess".

Walking to work a little early this morning. Tons of kids biking on the sidewalk. Paint bike lanes really don't protect anyone, do they?

Beyond Code Snippets: Benchmarking LLMs on Repository-Level Question Answering March 2026

Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate two widely used LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) under both direct prompting and agentic configurations. We compare baseline performance with retrieval-augmented generation methods that leverage file-level retrieval and graph-based representations of structural dependencies. Our results show that LLMs achieve moderate accuracy at baseline, with performance improving when structural signals are incorporated. Nonetheless, overall accuracy remains limited for repository- scale comprehension. The analysis reveals that high scores often result from verbatim reproduction of Stack Overflow answers rather than genuine reasoning.

DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2603.26567

Via

Update from "nobody thinks they're the villain in their own story" to "anybody who thinks they're the hero in their own story is probably the villain."

I've eventually, after looking at situations like Spade Cooley, come around to the fact that it's not bad to support the estate of people who've done horrific things, if the estate is paying into funds which help the victims. I can "separate the art from the artist" when the art is helping mitigate some of the damage.

I've also come around (and there's history on Flutterby, eg, of me being dismissive) to understanding that Michael Jackson was one hell of a singer, and, the product of a very fucked up childhood, and product of a very fucked up society in how we, collectively, handled his celebrity.

So I've been kinda looking forward to the upcoming Michael Jackson movie.

But I'm also well aware that... there's some problematic shit here. And somehow I missed this headline from January of last year, that Michael Jackson Biopic Needs Major Reshoots After Discovery of Past Legal Agreement with Molestation Accuser: Report.

More recently, Inside the ‘Michael’ Overhaul: $15 Million Reshoots, Removing Child Abuse Allegations and What’s in Store for Sequels which names the accuser whose lawyer made sure that there was to be no mention of said accuser in future films. Decades ago.

(Still) An(gr)i Bundel ‪@anibundel.bsky.social observed:

I feel like not enough reviewers know they had to remake the entire final third of the Michael Jackson movie because it falsely exonerated him, and it turned out the kid’s lawyer foresaw that shit in the 1990s and made sure to include a clause that the estate could never ever do that on film.

‪(Still) An(gr)i Bundel‬ ‪@anibundel.bsky.social‬

Note I said “remake.” As in, the Jackson estate apparently had *no idea* they had signed something 25 years ago that prevented them from ever defaming the kid until the movie was basically finished.

I can't imagine that the estate's legal team somehow dropped this. I would think that the screenwriters would have been working with these settlement agreements all the way through.

The Onion (video): Fractures Emerge Between GOP’s Pro-Pedophilia, Extremely Pro-Pedophilia Wings

Were Abby‬ ‪@kellylink.bsky.social‬

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off

the AI features

that were in

the update

and which

you were probably

hoping

to monetize

Fuck you

they were stupid

so unnecessary

and so annoying

UCLA Center for Parking Policy: Minimum Parking Requirments - A Research Synthesis

Eliminating minimum parking requirements does not eliminate the environmental, social, and economic harms of parking, but it can reduce their severity. Research indicates that the early effects of repeal are modest rather than dramatic. After requirements are lifted, drivers make more efficient use of existing parking infrastructure, and developers also continue to supply new parking. As a result, the total number of spaces and vehicles citywide may continue to grow while the number of parking spaces per capita declines over time. Minimum parking requirements exert a long shadow, having been entrenched in U.S. cities for more than 75 years. Even after repeal, cities will be dealing with the legacy of an oversupply of parking for many years to come.

I've only gotten as far as the executive summary, but my takeaway is that we should be probably aggressively pursuing parking maximums, not merely repealing parking minimums.

Is anybody else having kerning problems reading "Ternus" as "Temus", and thinking about the future of Apple?

(Not a dig at the guy, the MacBook Pro has definitely been rescued from the Ives era. Even if it's hobbled by Liquid Glass )

Listening to Darknet Diaries: Superbox, in which Jack Rhysider interviews D3ADA55 about a pirate TV box that's sold via BestBox and Wal*Mart (through their third party online programs), through an MLM scheme at your local farmer's market, and mailed unsolicited for free to people who work in the petroleum industry, and sold under other brands such as "Magabox" ("Show your patriotism by putting a foreign threat actor's tool on your local network").

And, of course, is not just core to some sort of botnet, but is also exploited by other players for integration into other botnets.

I've been, you know, kinda concerned about the various embedded devices that I've dropped on to my network ("Hey, solar power controller! Cameras! Other stuff that I probably don't even remember that I added!"), but... yeah.

Edit: FBI: Home Internet Connected Devices Facilitate Criminal Activity — Alert Number: I-060525-PSA

Mississippi Free Press: Editor’s Note | We Unknowingly Published an AI Column by a Fake Author. Here’s What Happened. Not a whole lot of new there, they missed it, they feel bad, they're working to tighten up their processes. Via Taggart :ifin: @mttaggart@infosec.exchange who noted:

What happens when you must wonder if everything you read is synthetic, meaningless, intentionless wordloaf? What happens when most of the text around you actually is?

This is not about economics. It's not even about climate. It's about the damage to the metaphysical fabric of human existence.

JFC: The first agentic cannabis device

Not just a vape. A connected earning device. Gudtrip combines premium cannabis, blockchain rewards, and AI-powered asset tools in one product.

Created by Puffpaw, who sells a device as

...a smarter way to beat nicotine addiction by vaping for crypto rewards.

My mind boggles.

Truth: Dave Winer ☕️ @davew@mastodon.social

Something that hasn't largely been noticed, we no longer have personal computers.

That Privacy Guy: Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop. Stuffs a bunch of browser extensions into your system.

Via Matthias Ott @matthiasott@mastodon.social

Can confirm this for Arc, Brave, Edge, Chromium, and Vivaldi on my machine:

#Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop

tef @tef@mastodon.social

i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical

i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend

as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars

so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses

mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca

"The Devil Went Down To Georgia" says that the Devil was "in a bind because he was way behind and he was willing to make a deal", suggesting that Satan Himself - note that the song specifies "the Devil", not "a devil" - has monthly quotas and faces consequences for not meeting those quotas. From this we can infer the existence of a greater and more sinister being capable of imposing KPIs on Satan Himself, suggesting in turn that KPIs themselves are the product of something more evil than Satan.

Pondering how the connectionist approach to AI had a quick flash with LLMs, but in order to actually make this stuff appear to be useful they need to be layered under regexes and tool guidance.

Conceding the field, once again, back to the symbolists.

Provident decided to shut down our local hospice supporting thrift store, which sucks, but they're selling stock at 50% off. I got some honest-to-god programmer socks for a buck.

Some days I think we're seeing the consequences of Computer Science education having become chanting "Resource Acquisition Is Initialization" as a religious incantation rather than actually building mental models about code and systems.

Down to Sausalito for the community garage sale this morning, and we're taking the slow way home. Stopped in Roy's Redwoods, first time we've been there since they refinishef the trail revamp.

Miss the old sense of wandering through forest but, given the increase in visitors, it's really nice.

Is there either a really good intro to Rust's libcosmic, or a better/more mature widget set for Rust that isn't Qt?

I'd love something lightweight, but a table that doesn't appear to have edit in place capabilities, or truncate/wrap for long fields, seems... more archaic than I want.

State Bar of California: Attorney John Eastman Disbarred by the California Supreme Court.

Context for this Bluesky thread debunking the various people attempting to exonerate him.

Via.

SMS with a verification code from a 5 digit phone number I don't recognize. Moment of panic, then I search for the number and discover it's the Safeway Rewards login process.

Sorry, evildoer, you will not hijack my grocery coupons today!

Oh shit. Windows Defender exploit.

Via

The boats have arrived for Butter and Egg Days.

Lucy, the office pup, eyes deep in a Penry Park gopher hole. With picture.

Lucy, the office pup, eyes deep in a Penry Park gopher hole.

3 sentenced in 'unbelievable' bear attack insurance scam:

But the video and photos from the scene didn’t look quite right. During the investigation, detectives sent the footage to a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who “concluded the animal shown was clearly a human in a bear suit,” according to the news release from the California Department of Insurance. The team then realized similar claims had been made about damage to two Mercedes vehicles.

The news release includes a link to a Flickr image set that includes a picture of the bear suit. No human in it, alas.

Cognitive Resonance: An illustrated guide to resisting "AI is inevitable" in education.

Which links to Pure Genius (dot) Education, which is brilliant.

Oh eeenteresting: Google's models respect Anthropic's poison pill constants. At work we just tried to use the Gemini API to summarize Flutterby, and it kept throwing errors.

Bwahahahaha!

rtyler @rtyler@buoyantdata.social

eternal sloptember

(reference)

The best part about this little bit of irony from this thing that's apparently just reskeeting anything with "AI" in it, and is likely just a bad reselling of someone else's LLM API, is that the link on their home page to their pricing is 404.

Fun little thread on the Utah teapot of computer graphics.

LLMs have so poisoned the concept of "AI" for me that I automatically assume any pitch involving the phrase is bullshit, even if there might actually be reasonable machine learning behind it.

(This particular musing brought to you by email from NoamAI, no link 'cause I'm not sure if it's legit.)

Morning giggle: Humanoid robot in some sort of race demo trips, destroys itself, is carried away on a stretcher (video).

erdgeist @erd@gei.st

OR: There will be no WW3. They’ve abandoned numbered releases and switched to a live service model with seasonal events.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange has "A few notes about the massive hype surrounding Claude Mythos", and points out that Anthropic apparently isn't using it on their own code: Beyond Machines: Anthropic Claude Code Leak Reveals Critical Command Injection Vulnerabilities.

Vidoc Security: We Reproduced Anthropic's Mythos Findings With Public Models.

Anthropic framed Mythos and Project Glasswing as proof that frontier AI vulnerability research now needs gated access. We tested the public, patched cases with GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 and found that the key building blocks are already accessible outside Glasswing, while reliable operationalization remains the real moat.

This thread that has a lot of good resources stemming off of AISI: Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities.

Bwahahahaha: AI token freeloaders are coming for your customer support chatbot

“A normal customer service interaction of ‘Where’s my order? What are your hours?’ runs maybe 200 to 300 tokens. Someone asking the bot to reverse a linked list in Python is generating more than 2,000 tokens easy. That’s roughly a 10x cost multiplier per session,” says Nik Kale, member of the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) and ACM’s AI Security (AISec) program committee.

Via.

Last night filling in for Eric at Tam Twirlers, tonight calling at Circle n Squares.

Square dance calling is definitely a joy and a bright spot right now.

AI Media House: Uber Let AI Write the Code. It Blew the Budget

Uber exhausted its annual budget for AI coding tools within the first months of 2026 as internal adoption scaled faster than expected, according to a report by The Information.

Via

Whoah! I've had them on a recurring donation for a little while, Petaluma Voice has launched... errr... hatched!

https://www.petalumavoice.org/petaluma-voice-hatches-today/

This whole thread: Gwen Snyder is uncivil ‪@gwensnyder.bsky.social‬

Spending a lot of time ripping out crab grass by hand so my clover can take root out back, and it has me meditating a lot on what it means to take out fascists.

We always used to say it was whack-a-mole, it wasn't.

Successful antifascism in a democracy is a practice of weeding

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose. On VF Corporation buying JanSport, The North Face, Eastpak, Kipling, Eagle Creek. Segmenting the market, making the low and mid range values crap to do value extraction from the brand.

WTF? Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 700%

I'm guessing it's one of those "people with an idea find a small cap company to take over the board of rather than go through the diligence to IPO" plays.

Welp, it just happened to me. Luckily, I had a backup. I've been trying to figure out if I'm being unduly harsh on LLM code generation, so I started asking Gemini CLI to build an app.

An app that accesses an existing database.

It's been an interesting process. I now understand how a lot of regressions are happening at work, it's super easy to have the LLM rewrite code that I didn't ask it to.

But you can see where this is going.

Luckily, I have a backup of the database.

What's most interesting to me is that, by the time it finally happened, I was actually angry. I typed

What the fuck? Why did you drop my old table?

before I realized that I was, in fact, anthropomorphizing the plausible sentence generator.

I even got lulled into a false sense of security because as the code generation proceeded it was doing things that added columns to the database schema and I figured I'd just fix that stuff up later in code.

Yesterday, I saved off Fi 🏳️‍⚧️ @munin@infosec.exchange

really wish that I had a more accessible way to explain "something that is right 90% of the time is vastly more dangerous than something that is wrong 90% of the time" to people.

Today I'm wondering how one might set up Gemini CLI to run in a container or chroot jail...

In response to Peter @peter@thepit.social

ChatGPT was released to the public four years ago and today i can't think of a single software feature or product that uses it that i would miss if it disappeared today.

Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love writes:

@peter @Binder I've been in ML/data science since 2018, formally, but worked with big data in a scientific sense since the mid 90s and one thing that keeps striking me like a thunderclap is how no LLM bro seems to be aware that while there have been refinements in the statistics and efficiencies of architecture, there hasn't been significant improvement in the fundamental outcomes of the statistics since probably 2019?

The lack of progress defies Moore's "law" and no one in the pro LLM space wants to even mention how "progress" has seemingly halted. Or was never happening in the first place.

There's a paper from a year ago (I'll dig the citation out of Computerphile's archives in a bit) that posits that any significant difference from feeding LLMs more content asks for an impossible amount of new ingested (stolen) information if the aim is to train a general LLM. In other words the method has already peaked.

It is just one paper. But to me it explains further AI development more as a profiteering Ponzi scheme and not actual Golden Age of Humanity and Computing.

The paper is No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance which, it looks like, I haven't linked to before.

Adële's blog: The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client

What I wanted was something in between: a client that runs in a plain browser, handles images properly, but does not require a JavaScript engine to display a list of posts. The API returns JSON; a server-side script can turn that JSON into HTML just fine. We have been doing that for 25 years.

So I built SmolFedi.

Think I'm gonna have to install and play around with this.

This is a really good read: Friday Archaeology: A Communist Apple II and Fourteen Years of Not Knowing What You’re Testing

I grew up using Правец (Pravetz) computers — forgive the Cyrillic, but we Bulgarians invented the alphabet, even though half the Slavic world claims the credit, and besides, it makes any noun look like classified military hardware. Every Bulgarian of a certain age used one. The Правец 82 was the machine in my school, with its yellow plastic case, black keyboard, red RESET key, and the unmistakable aura of a computer that had been reverse-engineered from a capitalist original by engineers who had never seen Cupertino and didn’t need to.

Science Based Medicine: No Pandemic Revisionism: Since They Won’t Remind You, Here’s What Drs. John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, Actually Said 6 Years Ago

"If you have a structure of the future where there's a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you're working on, that's great for society. It's actually not that good for your business."

Peter Thiel, as quoted in Karen Hao's book "Empire of AI"

When we made a YC application, there was a question: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

I'm reminded of this reading "Empire of AI".

I see it as an indication that YCombinator requires you to have fucked people over to qualify.

Turns out when autocorrect turns "Petaluma" into "proteins", the search isn't terribly useful.

Amusing AI slop in the wild. Facebook post from a page titled "African American/Black History" on Ray Charles says:

The students sent a telegram to Ray Charles's hotel room. They asked him not to play. Charles read that telegram and could have simply canceled. That would have been enough for most people, and most tellings of this story stop right there.

Emphasis mine. Uh. Yeah. Huh.