Saturday July 19th, 2025
Keep seeing references to Colbert's viewership as a counter to CBS's claim of financial issues: viewers are not the customers. Those are advertisers, who are buying the presentation of a viewpoint. They don't care about how many people see the message if the message isn't furthering their goals.
Friday July 18th, 2025
Because the US tourism industry hasn't been hit hard enough yet: Travelers to the U.S. must pay a new $250 ‘visa integrity fee’ — what to know
PC Mag: Google Gemini Bug Turns Gmail Summaries into Phishing Attack.
Bleeping Computer: Google Gemini Bug Turns Gmail Summaries into Phishing Attack
A prompt-injection attack on Google's Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla's bug bounty program for generative AI tools, by researcher Marco Figueroa, GenAI Bug Bounty Programs Manager at Mozilla.
Dr. Davey F. Wright ⛏️🦕🧬 @daveyfwright.bsky.social
"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪
NIH Is Far Cheaper Than The Wrong Dependency
Via.
I'm finding that a hell of a lot of "just npm install ..." comes from people not actually understanding coding.
That's not good. Office mate just came in and said it was more black smoke just a moment ago. Hard to tell from here where it's coming from: McNear building? Further?
Addendum: City of Petaluma Recent Alarms page suggests it's a vehicle fire at B St & Petaluma Blvd.
Double addendum: Restored VW van goes up in flames near downtown Petaluma
Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies
Exposing the overly salesy AI Overviews that will push you to buy bad products and exploring the system making it possible.
I've been trying to investigate AuraCast and the new Bluetooth broadcast technologies for my square dance calling, to create some better hearing enhancement above the FM broadcast that requires people to take out their hearing aids and put in ear buds, and Google's getting pretty worthless, burying the equipment manufacturer's pages in favor of Amazon links, and the links to eBay resellers taking advantage of the Amazon aversion by marking up 30% and drop-shipping from Amazon.
Just deleted a Google Maps API key that Google was complaining was exposed. I have no idea where I was using it, if I still am. If anyone notices anything broken, please say something to me.
Thursday July 17th, 2025
India Dispatch: The Great AI Land Grab Reaches Peak 'Free Lunch' in India
This is no watered-down trial. The offer provides the full version of Perplexity Pro, a service that normally costs nearly $200 a year and gives users access to powerful AI models like GPT-4.1 and Claude Sonnet and Opus 4. The strategy specifically targets Airtel’s paying subscribers, one of India’s largest groups of commercially valuable internet users, in a market projected to surpass 900 million users in 2025.
So 350M customers times $200 is $70B, which says some combination of they're not losing as much as we think they are per customer, they don't expect usage to actually be that high and they're willing to accept the loss leader to pull those customers on board, and this is one hell of a Hail Mary flail.
Bwahahaha: Reddit post begins:
I worked on a book with ChatGPT and it’s around 487MB with all the text and visuals. ChatGPT has tried the Google Colab way but it’s not working (I don’t know whose fault it is).
Is there a way that can help me resolve the issue and save months of work?
As we drop down in the comments, we find this exchange: Professional_Job_307
You generated 700 images with chatgpt? How is it stitching them all together into a book?
After understanding a lot of things it’s clear that it didn’t. And it fooled me for two weeks.
I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.
that's, uh, not really the ideal takeaway from this lesson
Wednesday July 16th, 2025
TechDirt: How One 1990s Browser Decision Created Big Tech’s Data Monopolies (And How We Might Finally Fix It) quotes a lot from and resummarizes Alex Komoroske's Why Aggregators Ate The Internet.
Unfortunately that piece seems to deeply misrepresent the notion of the "Same Origin Paradigm" that it talks about, or doesn't meaningfully describe what it is, because the larger issue is that everyone wants to own your data.
When identity was working itself through the system, there was much discussion about how we were gonna own our own identities. How that fell apart into OpenID is a rant for another time (or, likely, many times previously on here), but the reality is that everyone wants to own your identifier, and nobody wants to help you reclaim it.
Your bank? They sure as hell don't want to cede authentication to you, the consumer, who's getting popped by people impersonating your relatives and asking you to send bail money as gift cards.
Google? Ditto, and, if they can convince other places that they can provide that security (or at least more than you alone) they can get data out of those other places.
Apple? That's why they're pushing Passkey, 'cause it lets them get a little back from Google, and because it deeply locks you into a platform (lots of stuff about issues with migrating those identities).
And once a company is able to be miserly with your identity, that gives them even more leverage to silo your data. Google doesn't want to share your calendar information. The only entities which do want to make it easy are small startups, who are gonna get tromped by asymmetry.
This has not been a technical force, this has been a socioeconomic force. And no amount of AI boosterism is gonna tear down capitalism and replace it with something that works better.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Day that Newsweek Discovered Bisexuality. To mark the occasion, I’m going to tell you all a little story.
A Bluesky thread about becoming the face of bisexuality and mentioned into the records of the House of Representatives, with bonus illustration of a cover of the lamented magazine Anything That Moves.
Looking at Auracast transmitters, and... electronics have really been reduced to Amazon, eBay reselling Amazon at a markup, and Alibaba, haven't they?
Wooh, 35 out of 36 on today's Timdl, and I can't believe I flubbed the iPhone vs the first Tesla Roadster timing.
Daniel Stenberg: cURL and libcurl: Death by a thousand slops, on trying to restructure bug bounties and HackerOne rewards to try to reduce the amount of AI slop.
The Register: Curl creator mulls nixing bug bounty awards to stop AI slop
Maintainers struggle to handle growing flow of low-quality bug reports written by bots
Live Coding Interviews Show Nothing About Whether A Candidate Is Qualified.
Yesterday I posted on my Mastodon that "Coding interviews should be replaced with code review interviews."
This post went "wooly" (Mastodon equivalent of viral) and has gotten a fair amount of traction. Some of the responses were defending the practice and trying to explain how they use it. I honestly don't care. Live coding is not a valid way of seeing if a candidate is qualified for the position.
Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis @siderea@universeodon.com
@nyhan So, I have been slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that LLMs are the One Ring:
• They are seductive by appealing to a person's best nature
• By convincing the user that what they most ardently desire is almost within their grasp and they are right and good to want it and deserving of having it, they slowly turn the user into Gollum
• They are probably feeding everything the user whispers to it right on to the evil guy on the back end of a Palantir
The Seven Voyages Of Steve @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place
It makes me laugh/cry that we spent decades trying to get the software industry to internalise that it takes far more effort to support & maintain systems than it does to write them in the first place, and yet seemingly every trendy development in the last 5-10 years has been about making that initial stage faster & sloppier at the expense of everything else
Mother Jones: I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book
Whether the guy was FBI or a private security goon posing as a fed, the call was an important development—it told me that the book I was dealing with and the numbers it contained were genuine. Every cell phone, every yacht line, every private office number—they were all real, and every one of them was about to get a call from me.
Via and Via, the latter links to Epstein's book itself.
Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 @vaurora@mstdn.social
I'm impressed by the neoliberal circular logic here.
The U.S. DoD "had" to move off its own computers to the cloud to save money. But the only way the cloud was cheaper was if Microsoft employed people in China at much lower wages to maintain it. So they "had" to invent American "digital escorts."
Basically, the cloud is only cheaper for the U.S. military if it is completely and totally compromised by its most powerful geopolitical adversary... 🤔
ProPublica: A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers
And a bunch of chocolate shapes.
More playing with our food. Gonna have to try the inside of the silicone muffin cups next time, but these will make a nice custard container. Maybe with one of those pigs in it..
We picked up these candy making molds at a garage sale, and I had some powdered agar agar that needed using, so vegan coconut chai spice "gummi" bears and pigs. Gonna have to try gelatin, and less fat, 'cause the texture of these is meh.
Grocery Outlet had a paneer cheep, so I sauteed up some onion, ginger, garlic and spinach, a little cardamom, cumin, cloves, pepper, and anise seed and stem (because I didn't have star anise), and accompanied it with some lentils.
Pla
Interesting... Bonfire: Connect your existing tools to the fediverse with Mosaic. It's "book a call", which isn't super promising, but is apparently about tying calendars and bug/issue tracking and whatnot into fediverse syndication.
Tuesday July 15th, 2025
Slate: What It’s Like to Be a Student Who Hates ChatGPT: “Everyone is using it”—almost everyone.
Understandably, Perry’s rather skeptical of A.I.’s artistic applications, and fearful of the sweeping effects it could have on her chosen field, especially as generative-music startups like Suno and Udio are programmed to replicate specific artists and musical styles. Which is why she’s not too happy that her school, and her professors, is straight-up encouraging the use of this tech. One particular assignment really got to Perry: She was instructed to write a descriptive note about a classical piece for a concert program, then ask ChatGPT to do the same thing, compare and contrast, and see whether the bot could hasten the task.
“What I found was that everything that ChatGPT returned about my piece was incorrect,” Perry said. “The composer was right, but the composition date and other facts about the piece were either half-truths or not accurate at all. So in my summary, I was like, This was not useful, and in fact, it wasted my time.”
Perhaps that's the lesson?
Via.
Discussion about high school photos and the old "portrait studios" led to: I may still have an Olan Mills picture that some grandparent insisted everyone in the family do '89 or '90. I remember at the time thinking "I have professional photographers take 12-16 action shots of me on whitewater every weekend day, how is this in clothes I never wear against a fold down backdrop capturing anything meaningful about me?"
Lynnesbæn @lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space
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Walked for coffee with a friend this morning, and one of the topics was user stories. And I'm now sitting here thinking about how many fantastic ideas in product development there have been over the decades I've been in computing, and how I still struggle to get people to adopt any of those best practices from other disciplines into computing.
Some days it's like Deming never existed.
The thing about the Fediverse is that I was just followed by someone whose first name on their profile is "Blow Job". They have no posts yet, and I can't figure out if, yes, this is exactly the sort of person I want to follow back, or if it's just another boring catfisher.
Sigh. Another day, another day dealing with NSTextField bullshit... (Why are you losing your delegate? I assume it's because of field editor bugs, but... I hate this platform).
Tara Calishain @researchbuzz.bsky.social
Three tools to find local information in America via authoritative sources -- local government web sites, universities, and FCC-licensed TV stations. Free, no ads:
#US #search #gov #OSINT
Contrary to best practices in the medical community, LLMs 1) express stigma toward those with mental health conditions and 2) respond inappropriately to certain common (and critical) conditions in naturalistic therapy settings -- e.g., LLMs encourage clients' delusional thinking, likely due to their sycophancy. This occurs even with larger and newer LLMs, indicating that current safety practices may not address these gaps.
Via Jeremy Kahn @trochee@dair-community.social, who also notes:
It's frustrating to see a paper that arrives at a conclusion I consider foregone — that LLMs are no substitute for a human connection — while using very shady methods
They *don't even cite Weizenbaum* and ELIZA was exactly this
Two completely unrelated security stories:
FBI Cybersecurity Breach Led to Murders of Informants in El Chapo Case (Via)
DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI
Mr. Elez did not respond to a request for comment. The code repository containing the private xAI key was removed shortly after Caturegli notified Elez via email. However, Caturegli said the exposed API key still works and has not yet been revoked.
Via.
So this one is great... David Snider has nothing to do with Patricia Snyder, but the word association machine conflates them when you put them in the context of the Janis Ian...
Monday July 14th, 2025
Somebody wants an exit, and decided that they could take Apple down with the bubble... Apple Faces Calls to Reboot AI Strategy With Shares Slumping.
“Historically Apple does not do big mergers and acquisitions,” said Citigroup Inc. analyst Atif Malik, noting that the last major deal was its takeover of Beats in 2014. But, he argues, “investors would turn more positive if Apple could acquire or invest a meaningful stake in an established AI provider.”
A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything
Yeah, a lot of the time I feel like AI boosters are people who think they loved Hitchhikers Guide but didn’t get the joke
Because I'm seeing claims like "use fees for government services are a regressive tax on the poor": Any subsidies of automobile impacts are a *huge* tax on the poor, paid for in health, injuries, and the ways in which this mandates car ownership.
If we don't make owning a car incredibly expensive and difficult, we're just gonna continue building auto-only environments which exclude the people who can't afford a car from our communities.
We've got ex-military wackos impersonating cops: Bay Area military veteran arrested for posing as cop, bounty hunter: Sheriff
Gregg Jackson, 40, from Santa Rosa, California, was arrested earlier this week for impersonating a law enforcement officer, specifically "using a vehicle outfitted with red and blue emergency lights and was identifying himself as a bounty hunter," the sheriff's office announced on Tuesday.
Police officers impersonating cops: Former Rohnert Park Police Officer Joseph Huffaker Found Guilty Of Conspiracy To Commit Extortion, Impersonating ATF Agent, And Other Charges Related To Marijuana Seizure Scheme (one of his co-conspirators, Brendan “Jacy” Tatum, pled guilty back in 2021, the defense was that the whole damned department was corrupt and they got thrown under the bus, which... I could believe.)
The Sonoma Sheriff's Instagram account
We’ve received reports of scammers impersonating Sheriff’s Office sergeants, claiming you missed a court date or jury duty that you were notified of via certified mail — and demanding payment or personal info to clear it up.
These calls are not real.
No one from our office will call to ask for money, gift cards, or cryptocurrency over the phone.
Hard to tell who's law enforcement and who isn't, any more...
Today's Timdle got me on the first commercial steamboat vs the first canning process, and a sports question which was actually interesting because of the geopolitical implications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hand_of_God
Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks — and it’s free.
The new model, called Kimi K2, features 1 trillion total parameters with 32 billion activated parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture. The company is releasing two versions: a foundation model for researchers and developers, and an instruction-tuned variant optimized for chat and autonomous agent applications.
Jaclyn Diaz at NPR: A recent high-profile case of AI hallucination serves as a stark warning
A federal judge ordered two attorneys representing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in a Colorado defamation case to pay $3,000 each after they used artificial intelligence to prepare a court filing filled with a host of mistakes and citations of cases that didn't exist.
This isn't gonna stop until quotes stop the little slaps on the wrist and get serious.
How well do you know the Javascript Date object?Javascript Date quiz (jsdate.wtf).
Need to fix my CMS so that I can format this stuff better, but I finally decided to start logging fiction podcasts at https://www.flutterby.net/Fiction_Podcasts
And even the poison oak
Love the shade on the east side of the knoll
More Clarkia!
Clarkia!
Went down to Roy's Redwoods, first time since they reworked the trails down there. Didn't get into the grove, did the loop trail. Was not disappointed.
Sunday July 13th, 2025
The more I learn about systemd... Since I'm going back to Linux on my personal laptop, is there any decent distro that hasn't gone that direction?
Saturday July 12th, 2025
This whole thread is a good reminder that one in a million long shots come up 9 times out of 10.
Dept of "No Shit", # too high to count: AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds
Stanford Report: New study warns of risks in AI mental health tools
Haven't had an application where I needed to account for lens distortion and chromatic abberation and whatnot in a long time, but this is cool: Node Mill LensNode — DaVinci Resolve plugin for macOS and Windows
Fast, fun and accurate emulation of real-world lens characteristics.
Fully GPU powered, it's simple to use and quick to apply.
Get creative, get technical, and tinker as much as you want.
...a pleasant rascal @Nead@vivaldi.net
Please stop swallowing the AI pill. It is now officially a drug and unregulated.
United Farm Workers @ufw.bsky.social
UPDATE: we tragically can confirm that a farm worker has died of injuries they sustained as a result of yesterday’s immigration enforcement action.
As The Serfs (youtube.com/theserfstv) @theserfstv.bsky.social said:
If this was reported on in any other country headline would be like:
Masked Paramilitary Unit Unlawfully Slaughters Innocent Civilian As Authoritarian Crackdown Pushes Crumbling Empire Closer To Complete Dictatorship
Friday July 11th, 2025
Why "chain of custody" discussions and disclosure around evidence are super super important: Wired: Metadata Shows the FBI’s ‘Raw’ Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Was Likely Modified
There is no evidence the footage was deceptively manipulated, but ambiguities around how the video was processed may further fuel conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death.
Elisa Weber owns downtown bakery Della Fattoria, Nancy Leoni owns downtown culinary wares shop iLeoni, and Naomi Crawford owns downtown restaurant Lunchette and is an Argus-Courier food columnist.
I appreciate that, in the face of calls for boycotts and general hostility and abuse, these downtown business owners are willing to step forward.
Big challenge in today's Timdle for me was the timing of canning.
Got some jicama with the leaves still on it from Lola's, and... yeah, that's the way I'm buying jicama in the future. Love that I'm being exposed to not just new produce, but better versions of existing produce.
And now I need to learn Spanish to communicate with the cashiers.
Yowzers. I've been trying to buy through companies that have retail presences in my town. Petco really doesn't want my money. Their site doesn't work with Firefox, they list a product that may or may not be the one that I want, even the online version doesn't have it in stock...
Thursday July 10th, 2025
Look, I know that this week we've had three "once-in-a-lifetime" weather events, but with 8.2B people and a 73.5 year life expectancy, we should be experiencing over 300k "once-in-a-lifetime" events per day, right?
Okay, now I'm beginning to see some of the idioms that make Rust really cool: An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it (and Rust is here too).
In particular, the function that had the bug had 3 different sizes, a "logical" (user visible) size, a "physical" size (the size for the logical data after compression or other transforms) and the "allocated" size (physical plus metadata, checksums, etc), and got them confused.
The solution in Rust is to declare your types like struct PhysicalSize(u64); and use the .0 from them when you need the actual number, and... this is a really cool language feature and I need to write more Rust.
As AI adoption becomes more and more a religious behavior, including in/out group decisions based on professed belief, this Ask MeFi thread about ways to talk about AI with believers is fascinating and useful.
Wheee! Blocking Petaluma car violence advocates who came on to unrelated posts on my Facebook timeline with ad hominems. Way to convince me that I should roll over and leave Petaluma to the "real Petalumans", guys.
(I guess now that the hotel is in limbo they've gotta do *something* to feel heard.)
100%: Zeboyd Digital Entertainment @zeboydgames.bsky.social
If "AI" was as valuable as they say it is, they wouldn't be selling it to you. They'd be using it themselves in secret to make the next Minecraft, the next Avatar, the next Hello Kitty and then they'd sell that to you.
They're trying to sell you a sick goose, while pretending it lays golden eggs.
Which Iron Spike @ironspike.bsky.social quote posted with:
This is put so well.
There are absolutely parallels with cryptobros screaming at you about the impending death of fiat currency.
"Hyperinflation! Great Depression 2.0! Government collapse!!! Your stupid paper money will be worthless, soon! SOOOON!
...
Best to just give it all to me now!"
Zeboyd Digital Entertainment
Not exactly news, it's what ... everyone? ... well, a ton of people in my circles have been saying: Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
Core Result
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
The bait-and-switch has begun already. I'm kinda shocked. Pivot to AI: Cursor tries setting less money on fire — AI vibe coders outraged has the deets, basically the prices went up enough to make Cursor money (which is still a long way from making the actual language model folks money), including blowing off people who'd pre-paid for a year.
I guess Pat Gelsinger's prayer and fasting didn't work? Intel’s CEO, Lip-Bu Tan: ‘We are not in the top 10’ of leading chip companies.
Opinion: If they go off chasing Nvidia, when the AI crash happens it's gonna be really really bad for them.
The experiments on my blog with providing automatic Wayback Machine links have me thinking about archives and ways to manage resources. Because we can't continue to trust the cloud and centralization to the Internet Archive folks, and we need to be building knowledge structures that augment our recall and access outside of the SEO/AI slop that's flooding search engines.
Because I'm pretty sure we're gonna want this for Charlene's Intel MacBook Air shortly: Linux on Intel MacBook Air
Vanity Fair: “Wow, This Is So Gay”: An Oral History of But I’m a Cheerleader. Wow, I forgot that I saw this movie twice in the theater.
Seeing a lot of "We have to learn how to use AI", which... Brad L. @reyjrar@hachyderm.io
I'm witnessing professionals spending hours to engineer prompts for Copilot to do basic things like find a line in a file that has a string in it, or figure out who committed most frequently to a sub-path in a repository, or generate boiler plate code for classes.. None of these things require #AI. `grep`, `git log..`, and editor snippets have existed for a long time. They are quick. They are EXACT. They are FREE. They do not boil the oceans. They do not displace the workforce. They are more efficient and productive.
Learn the tools of your trade. If all you're doing is using AI, that means AI can and will replace you.
At the request of a reader, I've added a new feature. On the upper right of Flutterby pages, there's now an "Add Wayback Links" checkbox. If you check it, you'll get a little Internet Archive icon that's a link at the end of external links, to take you to the Wayback Machine for that link. It sets a little cookie (hopefully). Might be some wonkiness on it remembering the state and rendering from the state.
Additional ideas coming, I should probably try to get a notion of when the entry happened into the link, maybe I'll turn it on automagically for older links...
aei :neofox_upside_down: @aei@pleroma.envs.net
apple thought wirth's law was about to be beaten and they couldn't have that so they announced liquid glass, not to cripple their own devices, the iphone can handle rendering all that stuff, but to make every uncreative web developer and dumbheaded manager steal their designs and end up producing more webgl/svg/javascript nonsense as if modern commercial tech websites aren't utter garbage