Saturday June 20th, 2026
Somehow, back in my interest in film years, I'd managed to skip Jean Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless. We watched it last night, and it felt kind-of of its time socially, but there were things that kept making me go "wow", the use of the camera as active observer, the intimacy of the indoor shots, the breadth and messiness of the outdoor shots which still made every moment count, cuts which felt way more modern.
The subtitles and French made it challenging, and the social aspects of "of its time" left me feeling like I'd watched something of historical importance, but not particularly relevant to modernity.
We watched it as a prelude to watching Nouvelle Vague. As the "Fin" faded from the screen I did a quick search and realized it was on Netflix, which we'd accidentally gotten subscribed to when Charlene went to watch an older episode of The Way Home and Google misdirected her, and our subscription ended... today, as it turns out.
So, back to back, we watched Richard Linklater's comedy/drama about the making of Breathless. Also in black and white, and in French, with subtitles, and...
Nouvelle Vague is genius. The casting worked amazingly well. The film tells enough in action and leaves enough space for the subtitles to work. It carries the frenetic improvised feel of Breathless while being clear that the entire film had to be meticulously plotted and planned to tell exactly that story with, I assume, an amazing amount of effects and set work, especially given the budget.
Much like Breathless, the film both is and isn't about its primary plot, and it lets those personal evolutions be told through small beats.
Anyway, we loved it.
I'm listening to the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's "Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas", and... ad blocking is a start, but I need to be doing more to control the external impacts on me.
https://rangedtouch.com/2022/0...1/43-schull-addiction-by-design/
A good reminder, as we disproportionately enforce laws in order to create modern slavery: Jermaine Fowler: Everyone Reads the First Line of the Juneteenth Order. Never the Second.
Friday June 19th, 2026
I'm putting the Animista On-Demand CSS Animations tool here because I'm afraid at some point it may be useful.
I mean, I don't ever want it to be useful. I want my web sites to work in Lynx, but here we are, in 2026.
Jason Scheirer — A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career.
Via this little remembrance of 4GLs and CASE tools and whatnot. Apropos of AI/LLMs.
In The Weights is a web site that attempts to score how well LLMs know your name. I have a score of 575. Via Tara Calishain (406), who should, by rights, score way higher than me owing to, you know, all the books she's written, and the fact that she's been blogging a similar length of time, and Anthropic stole all of her books, and...
How AI Impacts Skill FormationJudy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin
Summarized by Elf Sternberg as
"Users who used Claude to learn basic concepts around a program implementation project averaged 72% on a quiz of knowledge retention afterward. Those who Claude for code generation scored only 31%."
Five experiments demonstrate that because headphones localize sound inside a listener’s head (i.e., in-head localization, the sensation that the sound is originating from within one’s own head), they increase listeners’ felt closeness to the communicators of a message. Consequently, listeners perceive the communicators as warmer, feel and behave more empathically toward them, and are more persuaded by them.
Via.
Aspirational Clownmaxxing and Joey's cadillac todo list, on giving LLMs creative writing around a ToDo list app and seeing what they come up with. I initially closed this tab, but then read lake's fantastic lobste.rs comment:
What the LLM responds with might be mildly amusing the first time, especially at first, but if you've seen one of those outputs, you've seen them all. They tend to follow the same formula, regardless of the prompted style, and will always its most cliché, unsubtle elements. I would sometimes see glimmers of something good, but they were drowned out by the overall, well, slop, and clearly not there because of some latent creativity, but as a stochastic accident.
Dan Davies — Tokenalysys and John Henry looks at Ed Zitron's note on OpenAI losses:
Today, I can exclusively report, based on audited financial documents viewed by this publication that have been independently verified by the Financial Times, that OpenAI lost around $38.5 billion in 2025, as well as other crucial details about the financial condition of the company.
and notes that:
And, of course, this is just for coding – the idea of making material use of AI for general management and governance is several generations of R&D, plus several multiples more token use intensity. It seems to me that we are quite a lot of unknowable technical advances (in model design, renewable energy availability, quite possibly orbital data centres) away from anything like this being possible. And that there is a very difficult business strategy problem of getting there, because the AI companies now have to manage their pricing to walk the tightrope between growth and cash burn.
Via.
Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe
Current “AI” from my perspective is less like a technological breakthrough—“the genie is out of the bottle”—and more a research fusion reactor: no matter how much energy and money you throw at the thing, nothing changes the fact that it costs more energy than it produces
All that scaling it up accomplishes is waste. LLM true believers are effectively arguing their tech accomplishes free energy when the costs mean it’s effectively the opposite
Via.
Holy shit it's time to accelerate the migration away from Gmail.
Thursday June 18th, 2026
Craigslist posting for our Endless Pool https://sfbay.craigslist.org/n...ate-90s-swim-spa/7941846475.html
Ethan Marcotte: All tomorrow’s parties.
On what repair to the generational damage inflicted by AI might look like.
Can we skip to "what will happen next" sooner?
Xi Iaso: I hate compilers. On the challenges of reproducible builds and Web Assembly.
Edit: Xe filed a bug: [WASM] Binaryen compiles are nondeterministic due to using machine pointers as keys in a DenseMap, probably in function WebAssemblyCFGStackify::fixCallUnwindMismatches #204883
The Vacancy Project has some media coverage in Petaluma Voice, including mention of next week's meeting! https://www.petalumavoice.org/fenced-lots-and-empty-storefronts/
Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social
My main worry is that we’re banning social media for kids but not AI. So you can’t speak to real people online anymore, kids, but you sure can talk to your fake artificial friend who weirdly loves to talk about taking your own life!
A couple of Blüskï threads to read this morning:
Coleen Murphy @ctmurphy1.bsky.social
one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband
Quoting Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social
When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.
Which references Who Gets Cited? Gender- and Majority-Bias in LLM-Driven Reference Selection Jiangen He.
Lots of stuff there, including how Google's AI search is totally fucking up ORCiD references.
Be careful about using Adobe products to generate or edit your PDFs : Comics Beat: Adobe quietly injects AI content into user’s files, hikes prices
Evil Hat Productions, a TTRPG and board game company, announced on Bluesky that the latest PDF files for their Umdaar game had injected autogenerated AI alt text, without warning. Other users are reporting that not only does alt text generate for undefined images, it also overwrites previously existing alt text.
Via.
My old house server died, so looking for a cheap replacement I grabbed a pair of Optiplex 7050s off of the Sonoma County surplus auction, for about what the RAM in them would cost at retail (Moved the RAM from my old server into one of them, gonna put it in the other one).
Of course it doesn't really have room for all the drives I need to put in it, so I have an external enclosure coming...
Penny Arcade on the news that Xbox Game Studios Head Craig Duncan & Chief of Staff Louise O'Connor leave Microsoft:
Ultimately, it's based on something like a religious belief: that wealthy companies have discerned some proprietary, secret knowledge about how the world works, and they should be allowed to do whatever the eff they want, when what usually happens is that they know somebody who knows somebody, got a firm grip on the teat of public money, or are psychopaths playing a game made by psychopaths for the benefit of psychopaths. Business is how psychopaths fuck.
Fuck yeah!: Millions of Copyrighted Songs Were Fed to AI Music Generators – Now There’s Proof
Atlantic databases name 21 million tracks fed to Suno and rivals as Sony, UMG, and Warner seek $150,000 per song in damages
Go get 'em, lawyers!
Wednesday June 17th, 2026
Searching for stuff on the TV show The Way Home last night, and the word salad that Google's AI Overview provided was... something.
I'm becoming more selective about publishing slop, even to laugh at it, but it feels like when we inadvertently uncover this stuff we need to note it, as a reminder.
I remember one of B.F. Skinner's books ending with "Now, let us see what man can do with man".
If the continuum from A/B testing ads to LLMs and AI psychosis is the leverage of automated exploits of unconscious human behaviors, I think...
... I think we're discovering what that means.
Racket MN: What's the deal with Paul Bunyan? From the subject of ribald tales in logger camps to a mascot to sell lumber to...
University of Wisconsin professor Kasey Keeler describes this as settler nostalgia, a process by which settlers to an area create an imagined past of the region to which they can connect. If Paul Bunyan, a white settler himself, created the rivers and lakes that white settlers now vacation in, then it follows that the land was made for them. How could Ojibwe or Dakota people have lived for hundreds or thousands of years in a landscape that was custom built by a giant lumberjack and a blue ox?
When I type this out, it feels obvious: Multi-layered AI agents (OpenClaw, etc) are an attempt by an industry that's constantly flailing at trying to automate processes they don't understand to automate their own bad processes.
Multiple regressions compound into a catastrophic token burn scenario. Subagents recursively spawn child agents 50+ levels deep, ignoring CLAUDE_CODE_FORK_SUBAGENT=0. Permission denials trigger further agent spawning instead of stopping. Agents fetch individual files from GitHub repos via HTTP (one WebFetch or curl per file, each with a full prompt and context payload) instead of cloning locally. Subagent permissions do not propagate to the user for approval. And if the user interrupts any of this, all intermediate work from every agent in the tree is lost. The entire token spend goes in the garbage.
In the observed case: 1.2M+ tokens consumed in ~30 minutes on a task that should have been
git clone + find . -name '*.sol'. The recursive agent tree was still growing when observed.
From Reddit, by way of jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny@neuromatch.social quoting Peter @peter@thepit.social.
Reading through a document on implementing A2UI:
To see why a format matters here, think about how a composer ships their work. They don't hand musicians a recording: they hand them sheet music. The same score plays on a piano, an orchestra, or a synthesizer; each instrument interprets the notation through its own voice.
"each instrument interprets the notation..." 👀
Tuesday June 16th, 2026
maia arson crimew 🏴 @crimew.gay
SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members?
I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
Via Chest er Christmas @imemptyplshalp.bsky.social
Oh of fucking course Larry Summers, Sam Harris, and Stephen Pinker are on here. The unholy Trinity of people considered smart despite being wrong about literally everything they've ever written.
But, yeah, it's got strong overlap with the Epstein files list, and has all the hallmarks of being a vibe-coded React thing. Of course the list of names hardcoded in source could be a red herring of some sort...
Edit: AmyFou 🕊️ @amyfou@lingo.lol, and Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town.
jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny@neuromatch.social
only amateurs "pay for tokens," i'm out here using the free models, aka putting a prompt in any issue in any github repository and labeling it with "good first issue" and waiting for the people with full-auto openclaw agents to randomly open pull requests against it
Commodore Callback flip phone: Welcome to the Internot. A Sailfish based flip-phone that doesn't run social media apps, by design.
Interview with FFMPEG enthusiast (YouTube video). From the comments:
You know that FFMPEG supports h265 hardware accelerated encoding with Radeon cards on Linux? I mean I couldn't get it to work but FFMPEG supports it.
Very dry, very droll. Via.
I kinda hate "accent", because it's anthropomorphizing, but Model Tell: Every AI writes with an accent is interesting, as is the ensuing MeFi thread. Especially the model generation similarities.
aeva @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
you ever think about how buildings also kinda function as population density bar graphs
Monday June 15th, 2026
So that I can find it in the future, grab a video frame at a particular time with:
ffmpeg -ss 12:34.5 -i video.MOV -frames:v 1 -q:v 2 output.jpg
A Scottish Post: The New Election Threat: Disinformation Inside the Answer. Via.
Looks like the source of this is from: Demos: Electoral Hallucinations: Safeguarding UK elections in the world of LLMs and AI chatbots
Our snapshot testing on March 27th 2026 found that - across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Grok, and Replika - just over a third (34.1%) of responses to questions about the Scottish elections contained factual errors (109 of 320 total responses). To break down these inaccurate responses, 8.75% (28 of 320) were entirely inaccurate and 25.3% were partly accurate but with errors (81 of 320). Partly factual responses could be particularly misleading as their errors were sometimes much harder to spot.
Lynn Cavanah: A brief history of the establishment of international standard pitch a=440 hertz (PDF)
Via this Reddit thread on tuning your guitar at 432 vs 440.
We see this a lot in arguments about
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 @maxdubler.com
The Lead Paint Theory of Anti Gentrification holds that activists can prevent displacement and preserve housing affordability by preserving neighborhood disamenities and blocking investment in quality of life improvements like parks, bike lanes, and libraries. It does not work.
is quoting Sam Gould @form67.bsky.social
I attended an urban infrastructure panel where a UC Berkeley professor argued that libraries were gentrification. I am really struggling to see how this is different from a Republican position of denying knowledge, tools, and technology to low income, disadvantaged neighborhoods.
And has a screenshot of a tweet from X user @AllisonB916 “rent controller OG”:
Taking down freeways in some situations would open the community to gentrification—what protects the community is the damn freeway.
I noted that Audiveris has some sketchy malware/crypto/whatever scammer campted out on the .com, Bartosz Golaszewski points out that someone is doing similar to libgiopod.
Via.
Paddy Duke @paddyduke@mastodon.social
@aral From “Think outside the box!” to “The box will now handle all the thinking for you. Please insert a coin into the box.”
The PrimeTime: I Think They Are Lying To You (YouTube video) is... well... nothing you don't already know, and it's video form, but it showed up in a Slack channel this morning, and it's about Boris Cherny of Anthropic bragging about how he doesn't even prompt Claude any more, he just... something... and code comes out, contrasting that with how long it's taking Anthropic to release fixes to obvious and horrible Claude Code usability issues. So maybe coding is a solved problem, but debugging isn't?
In reading through Mike Bowler: The case for real collaboration I realized that I don't think I've ever worked on a team large enough to do "pair programming" in the manner that it was originally envisioned.
But it's worth a read through.
Australian Privacy Commissioner orders American Express Australia Limited to compensate complainant following interference in privacy. It takes a couple of clicks to get to the actual report, but it's summarized by Dissent Doe :cupofcoffee: @PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange (who also links to a paywalled news report):
American Express ordered to fix security gaps after a customer complained about improper employee access.
It seems that a customer reported a privacy concern and fought AmEx for 4 years to get them to implement stronger access controls or monitoring of employee access to data.
Now, the AU govt has ordered AmEx to rectify security flaws in five of its data systems to guard against “insider threats” and to restrict employee access to specific customer information to protect vulnerable and high-profile customers.
From reading through the report, this was a stalking/domestic abuse violation, and AmEx didn't even have access logging, and lacked policy for any sort of reaction to stalking.
Thought we'd found a place for this final SFBABC.org bench, went and talked with someone tending the space and discovered that they were delicately managing relationships with the two property owners, and didn't want to introduce a bench to that.
So we're back to the two playgrounds that feel kinda like a slap in the face of Parks & Rec, or finding another space. Anyone in Petaluma got suggestions for a public space that could use a bench?
Sunday June 14th, 2026
If anybody in the North SF Bay area is interested in a late 1990a era Endless Pool (with some modern upgrades), hit me up before I write the whole Craigslist posting. It won't be cheap to move, but for the right DIYer with a plan it might be cool.
AI's healthcare side hustle: inflating your bill
TL;DR: You might have expected AI to cut healthcare costs, whether it’s by reducing paperwork, automating the doctor’s notes, or thinning out hospital staff. But a new 60-page PwC report suggests the reverse: So far, one of its most widespread uses is making medical bills bigger. It’s an example of how AI isn’t only good at making tasks more efficient—it’s also very good at finding more granular ways to boost a sector’s bottom line.
How to make good open source project:
- plaster pride flags everywhere (keeps bigots away)
- swear constantly (keeps ai away)
- sex (keeps corporations away)
Good read: Banning noise will be a disaster for statistical data products, on a new order from the US Office of Privacy and Open Government: Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products which says (in section 5, policy):
- Any use of noise infusion is inconsistent with the Department’s policies.
The article points out two things: first, that this is likely a disaster for privacy of individuals whose data are aggregated in those sets, of course, but also that this makes analysis across this boundary difficult.
Saturday June 13th, 2026
Edith @edithcharles.bsky.social
You won’t want to hear this but when it comes to kink at Pride I’m afraid we, as a community, in a public place, need to show more restraints.
Patrick Siegman @siegman.biz
SB 79, which allows apartments up to 9 stories tall near major transit stops, goes into effect on 7/1.
If you or someone you know is struggling to cope, help is here! Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you process strong emotions in a healthier way:
State law will put more housing near transit stops. This SoCal map finally shows where
Kaiser Permanenty: Self-guided CBT techniques to improve your mental health.
Jackon Rickun writing on Substack was just laid off from Grindr:
All of this has shown me that nothing ever needed to be good. It needed to be done, and done used to require a person who knew how. Good was just this…. cool little side effect. Now to get something done you don’t need the person. Done is free, good is extra, and nobody pays extra. Congratulations to done! Flawless victory!
Via.
Finished watching Motel Drive last night. That's a powerful (short, 1 hr) movie with no good answers, but a lot of questions we should be having conversations around.
Housing policy, drug policy, urban design, education... and it ends maybe kinda hopeful?
Friday June 12th, 2026
We identified four key problems that made this an ineffective method of recruiting participants (see also Hartman 2011). The first was that many people who responded to our messages only wanted to have sex with us.
Via rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social.
They take a long time to get around to the actual sampling method, but... "forty bucks is forty bucks".
That is not the ferry...
Renaissance Petaluma: Who gets to build?
Good to see downtown merchants getting on board with reforming how we permit and approve new construction.
Lan Tian: AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42
dn24, "decentralized network 24", is a large dynamic VPN that people play around in. The entire thing looks like a poorly formed agent coming in to wreak havoc, and a bunch of networking hobbyists deciding to make a game of it, and... hilarity ensues.
Via. Edit: Lobste.rs thread.
ava's blog: our workplace LLM mass delusion (Via).
McSweeney's: AI Economics for Dummies by Andrew Singleton is only barely distinguishable as satire from Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At:
1. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.
BlueSky thread from Michael Okun @michael-okun.bsky.social:
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 Jailbroken to Generate Stack Exploits
Researcher “Pliny the Liberator” defeats Claude Fable 5’s safety classifiers using multi-agent decomposition, Unicode tricks, and narrative framing, leaking the model’s 120,000- character system prompt along the way.
The future is going great (with picture)
The future is going great...
The Arch Linux AUR (Arch User Repository) had over 400 packages compromised with malware
There's a thread on the public AUR Mailing List with people reporting packages, where it seems like over 400 packages were hit with the issue. Arch packager Jonathan Grotelüschen mentioned work was ongoing to "reset/delete all malicious commits and ban the accounts".
ifin: 400+ AUR Packages Compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit points to Taggart :ifin: @mttaggart@infosec.exchange
I'm trying to understand the details of AUR processes for submitting PKGBUILDs. In other words, how exactly did this happen? arojas submitted hundreds of changes to PKGBUILD or related files. And they were just...accepted? What am I missing?
Edit: What I missed was this was pure impersonation. The maintainer is fine, but the process was vulnerable to spoofing.
Search Engine Roundtable: Bing Gives Searchers A Way To Disable AI Copilot Answers
Jordi Ribas, the President, Head of Search at Microsoft, wrote on X about this saying, "We just shipped a preview extension in Bing that lets you toggle AI chat-like features on or off with just one click."
Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice for
Chrome
Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice for Edge
Windows Central: Bing users can now disable AI Copilot search results with this new extension
Installing the Chrome data extension warns that
It can:
Read and change your data on bing.com and www.bing.com
Replace the page you see when opening a new tab
Read your browsing history
Change your search settings to bing.com
I was alerted to this by elilla& com pomba-gira de frente @elilla@transmom.love
daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social
working theory: we get fewer vulnerability reports late in the weeks as the researchers have all run out of tokens by now...
Thursday June 11th, 2026
John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications.
The thing is: I’m not special. Every writer and creative person, from the most successful down to the very newest, is inundated with these scam spam emails. Lots of them, every single day. Pretty much every one of us, I assure you, now associates “AI”- generated text with attempted fraud.
AI writing has become the modern day Facebook ad: sure, the product looks intriguing, but you know this particular link is a scam.
Beth Winegarner: San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum. Including a listing of inmates and prisoners.
Same author: Mission Local: The hidden, painful history of SF’s Magdalen Asylum.
Via.