Thursday February 5th, 2026
OMG, I'm giggling out loud here... Global Nerdy: Claude’s Super Bowl ads are so funny that Sam Altman’s crashing out over them collects the mentioned ads, and... I'll link the YouTube versions here for posterity, but the essay collects them in a handy format.
Oh, look, another data breach notification. How many decades of "free credit monitoring" are we up to now?
(Second prize is *two* years of credit monitor... Oh, who are we kidding, permission for yet another entity to mine my personal data for marketing.)
Wednesday February 4th, 2026
I was wrong. AI isn't like seeing a rabbit pulled out of a hat and thinking you can feed the world on hasenpfeffer, it's like seeing a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat and demanding that everybody put meat grinders in their kitchen because they think soon we'll be able to pull live steer out of refrigerators.
We still need to cut down dramatically on cars, generally, but EVs are measurably reducing NO2 emissions in California:
Auto Blog: EV Growth Is Already Cutting Neighborhood Air Pollution Across California
stevens 🐳💨✅ @rstevens@mastodon.social
tim cook, i swear to god if i wake up in the morning and that fucking melania movie shows up on my ipod with the U2 album...
It's like all of those people who went ahead and bought drugs using cryptocurrencies without thinking through what an immutable universal public record of their transactions actually meant, but now it's applied to millions spent using predictive word generators to do spatial "reasoning"...
Conversation this morning that, if I understood the details right, and my own understanding of how LLMs process data (reinforced by experience) is correct... epistemia is gonna bite a bunch of projects and companies so so hard in the the near future. It's gonna hurt, bad.
inspired by CLAUDE.md, I’ve started putting markdown files named after coworkers into work code repos so I can remind them to stop doing shit to the codebase that annoys me
for some reason they’re all mad at me now, which means ill be adding commands to JEREMY.md for an attitude adjustment
OH at the "AI" meetup discussion: "It's been a bitch to have to execute my own ideas."
Adam Neely — Technocapitalism and the Bad Future of Music (YouTube video, an hour and a half) is some desperately needed sanity today.
Tuesday February 3rd, 2026
Red Monk: AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers
AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. Just look at what happened last month. Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghostty implemented a zero-tolerance policy where submitting bad AI-generated code gets you permanently banned. Steve Ruiz, Founder of tldraw, announced he would auto-close all external pull requests. Meanwhile cURL, the humble command-line tool that quietly powers approximately everything on the internet, just shut down its bug bounty program. After six years and $86,000 in payouts, Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL, pulled the plug. The reason? An AI onslop (pun fully intended).
The AI Dirty List — Ensuring those who choose to bathe in AI slop will never be washed clean.
Sycophantic chatbots’ impact on attitude extremity and certainty was driven by a one-sided presentation of facts, whereas their impact on enjoyment was driven by validation. Altogether, these results suggest that people’s preference for and blindness to sycophantic AI may risk creating AI “echochambers” that increase attitude extremity and overconfidence.
Via.
Realizing that the heel on my Xero running shoe has worn through too many times for the gasket material I've clumsily glued over some of the tread to solve, I'm wondering if there are any re-sole-able minimalist shoes for less than the $450 that the ultra-fashionable brands start at.
Work has me in a mood, so I went out on a walk looking for some hills, ended up going up Hayes Lane.
Futurism makes my day a little brighter: The Streets Are Saying Bitcoin Is Gonna Fall to $30,000.
Okay, really optimistic would be freakin' zero, but that's a good start.
Maybe a good thing that will come out of these "skills" files that the slop vendors are publishing is better documentation for humans.
A lot of useful quickstart guides in those repos, for projects and libraries that aren't as well documented in their own materials.
"Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it's safe to assume we've been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell," said a game design consultant in the US.
Via.
From Viss @Viss@mastodon.social's thread about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw that observes:
people are attaching this shit to their desktops and phones and their lives and somehow getting pearl-clutchy and surprised when it straps itself with nuclear warheads, dives into their bank accounts and detonates itself
i need to go look up that big "EA got sued because it got kids addicted to gambling" lawsuit because im pretty sure this is the same thing but for vibecoders
which then observes that:
oh my god, its the same fucking thing
With a link to Trulaw: EA Games Lawsuit for Video Game Addiction.
And, yes, it is exactly this, and, as further asserted in the thread, I strongly believe that it's both deliberate, and that evidence of that is the whole kerfluffle around ChatGPT 5 and how when they dialed down the sycophancy people revolted.
I mean, anyone who's spent time on this platform can tell ya this, but Tim Cook sold Apple's soul.
Via.
École des Bro-Arts @aphyr@woof.group
I've been trying to teach my kids that they should stop wearing and listening to the same things everyone else does at school. It's OK to get wild haircuts, piece their noses, go thrash around at electro-punk shows.
After all...
Children should be scene and not herd.
Eeenteresting, too soon to know what this actually means, but: Windows Central: You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift
Details around how the company is going about this remain light, but sources say Copilot integrations like those found in Notepad and Paint are under review. This may result in Microsoft removing certain Copilot integrations from these apps, or at the very least removing the Copilot branding and pivoting to a more streamlined experience.
Pacific Antifascist Research Collective has "A thread of ICE and CBP sex offenders and credibly accused sex pasts." I think they mean pests, not pasts, but the rest of the point stands.
Monday February 2nd, 2026
Service Employees International Union Local 503 said the woman, a union member, was driving to run errands when four agents stopped her on a Salem street. The agents identified themselves as federal law enforcement, according to the union’s statement.
David Leavitt @davidleavitt.bsky.social
Chappell Roan’s dress is like my sanity:
Barely hanging on.
Kate Compton @galaxykate.bsky.social
You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test
Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)
Good tech.
Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)
Bad tech.
I was gonna tag this on the previous post about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw, but, no, these exploits are new: Malicious MoltBot skills used to push password-stealing malware.
A report from community security portal OpenSourceMalware says that an ongoing large-scale campaign is using skills to spread info-stealing malware to OpenClaw users.
Yay! It is possible to prosecute these assholes! New body camera footage shows aftermath of ICE officer allegedly attacking activist near Chicago.
“Yeah, I was trying to grab his phone from out of his hand,” Saracco tells Brookfield police when asked about the allegations.
“He get physical with you at all?” the Brookfield officer asks in response.
“I mean he was actively resisting,” Saracco said. “He wouldn’t let me take his phone out of his hands.”
The perp is only up on misdemeanor charges, but the fucking gall of these people, thinking they can steal phones and pawn them for cash with impunity.
Thinking about all of the developing nation workers in sweatshops who could have been setting up regular expressions for common idioms and phrases to accomplish tasks, like "play this album" and "navigate to this space", who instead were training LLMs.
Oh, this is fascinatingly exploitive: AV Club: Inside the hideous, exploitative, but still addictive world of vertical dramas. In China they're referred to as "duanju".
To feed that addiction, they’re going to pay through the nose. Vertical drama apps are built to obfuscate the sense</span> of how much you’re paying, with “coins” purchased in bulk, in amounts from hundreds to thousands. Individual episodes might cost upward of 60 coins per two-minute piece of footage—and given that each drama has 70 or more episodes, this means the viewer can easily spend $20 or $30 to watch 90 minutes of some of the cheapest slop imaginable. People are paying much more to watch Tricked Into Having My Ex-Husband’s Baby on their phones than it would cost to see Sinners< in IMAX.
100% on today's Timdle, despite guessing at HIMYM's initial pilot episode, and the relative ordering of 5 events in the last 3 decades.
From back in December, but apropos because of Elon Musk's "data centers in spaaaace..." pump-n-dump: < href="https://www.physicsmatt.com/bl...the-dumbest-thing-ive-seen-this- week">Matthew R. Buckley, aka "Physics Matt": The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week:
To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, political power centers, and people who really should know better, but yet another demonstration of how people who built their economic empire on a claim of STEM-based rigor and quantitative genius either can’t do basic physics or know that no one out there who matters is going to call them on it.
Although, frankly, dropping a bunch of GPUs into a decaying low earth orbit is a way to point out how rapidly these things depreciate.
The Penguin of Evil @etchedpixels@mastodon.social
Whenever some politician or party apologist whines about having to stay on twitter because some of our potential voters are on twitter, remind them that probably even more of their potential voters are on pornhub but they are not active there.
geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party
Heist movies always have a moment before they introduce a new specialist where the main character is like "I know a guy" because the real treasure they were stealing was the power of networking. In my 12-week course, you'll learn--
Erik Johannes Husom: Outsourcing thinking.
If language can indeed be a thought model, then pushing that facility over to machines has implications for the development of our own model.
Via Elf Sternberg who has a few more thoughts.
Saturday night, our Disney+ subscription had lapsed, and rather than resubscribe to anything we watched The Last Repair Shop, an hour long documentary on the people who run the Los Angeles school district instrument repair shop.
Went places I did not expect, gorgeously shot, uplifting. Recommended.
Sunday February 1st, 2026
Any body have recommendations for a smoke detector that actually lets you cook? This Firex ionization one in the main part of a house goes off if I try to use the air fryer or brown anything. Super annoying.
Saturday January 31st, 2026
Called Capital One via their app, and between the accent of the representative and some of the procedures in verification, egads I hope that hasn't been backdoored, because there are totally places in those processes where this could be an account exploit.
Anthropic(!): How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.
In an effort to extract the most value from our month of Disney+, we watched The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile![[Wiki]](/adbanners/lookingglass.png){kind=small}
last night, and really enjoyed that movie.
And if someone wants to give me hours and hours of Brandi Carlile giving studio direction to music icons, I'm all in.
Nine out of ten zoo dentists refuse to work on a Grizzly unless it has been given a strong anesthetic.
There's safety in numb bears.
Aaah, it's a good morning for the schadenfreude: Futurism: Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized
While Zairi is only the latest AI hound to bark about stolen prompts, she’s certainly not the first. Examples abound, as the Daily Dot pointed out back in December: consider a poster who railed about “prompt thieves in the AI art community,” or the “AI artist” who went on a tangent after someone aped his prompt “without knowing it’s mine.”
I am not one generally to watch a 27 minute video of someone talking about a Nature blog post, but this roast of a dude who became ChatGPT dependent is giving me all the schadenfreude warm fuzzies.
Angela Collier: this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain (YouTube video)
The massive self-own is Nature: When two years of academic work vanished with a single click
After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.
I'm not getting a lot of solace from the headlines these days, but the news that the rumored Nvidia plan to dump $100B into OpenAI is collapsing brightens my day.
Reuters: Nvidia's plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI has stalled, WSJ reports
Friday January 30th, 2026
Thinking about Simon Willison's "Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw." and how many people I know with missing fingers... 404 Media: Silicon Valley’s Favorite New AI Agent Has Serious Security Flaws, on the obvious flaws in the whole Clawdbot/MoltBot/OpenClaw paradigm.
The latest Epstein files dump needs a trigger warning.
Meidas: DOJ Just DELETED This Document from the Epstein Files. We Saved It. which notes that it was restored, whence the link above.
Too much good stuff to find an appropriate pull paragraph: Eevee: The rise of Whatever
The machines are getting better at lying: Wiki Education: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
LAPD continues its long tradition of being a bunch of lawless thugs: LAPD won’t enforce ban on federal law enforcement officers wearing masks, chief says
Reading though the source code for https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw / MoltBot (formerly ClawdBot), and maybe the thing about specifying skills for these monstrosities is that we can actually get some good human-readable command-line tools and documentation.
Edit: Oh yeah, the Anthropic skills are totally handy "so you want to..." guides: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/
How AI Impacts Skill Formation Judy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin
Figure 6 shows that while using AI to complete our coding task did not significantly improve task completion time, the level of skill formation gained by completing the task, measured by our quiz, is significantly reduced (Cohen d=0.738, p=0.01). There is a 4.15 point difference between the means of the treatment and control groups. For a 27-point quiz, this translates into a 17% score difference or 2 grade points. Controlling for warm-up task time as a covariate, the treatment effect remains significant (Cohen’s d=0.725, p=0.016).
Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis" seems to be running about 110 BPM, which means it's probably possible to do a 126BPM version for a square dance singing call.
Guessing that's not gonna come from any of the traditional producers, though.
The 2020s just keep getting weirder and weirder: Man allegedly posed as FBI agent in apparent attempt to spring Luigi Mangione from prison
The problem of the future is gonna be all of the outdated documentation for Google products polluting the information space, making us think that it's still possible to use all of these deprecated features.
Thursday January 29th, 2026
Sounds like it reached market penetration quickly. It has done one thing, I am way less likely to click on a video in Facebook now, because the disappointment factor after doing so and finding out it's a bad Sora render is so high.
Tech Crunch: OpenAI’s Sora app is struggling after its stellar launch
Powered by OpenAI’s video generation model Sora 2, the iOS version topped 100,000 installs on day one, despite being an invite-only experience. It soon hit the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, and it reached the 1 million downloads milestone faster than ChatGPT. At the time, Sora’s app was iOS-only and still required an invite, making its success all the more impressive.
Via.
Just a reminder that all of the mediocre grant applicants are running their projects through "AI", which will create a bland neutral description of what they plan to do.
If you hope to stand out, avoiding LLMs altogether is the only logical option.
That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
Reporting on the recent poll: PC World: DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don’t want AI
This one gets a top level pin in my browser: Identiconn™ Connector Identification Utility
Wednesday January 28th, 2026
Oh snap. The Dalles’ mayor called OPB’s data center story inaccurate. Here are the facts
An in-depth, line-by-line review of the article in response to Anderson’s letter found one error, which OPB has corrected and noted in the original story.
OPB incorrectly reported that projected monthly residential water rates are expected to climb by 7% by 2036. However, The Dalles 2024 Water System Master Plan forecasts that rates will climb by 99% by that year. OPB regrets the error.
Via.
By way of nycki @nycki@bark.lgbt I discovered XKCD colors
The 954 most common RGB monitor colors, as defined by several hundred thousand participants in the xkcd color name survey.
Available as a text file and a .css file. As nycki notes:
so now when I want a color on my website I can just write `color: var(--xkcd- off-white)` or so on. it's really convenient :)
Edit: nycki added the XKCD results blog post to their fediverse post.
Pavel A. Samsonov @PavelASamsonov@mastodon.social
All the same people boosting LLMs today were boosting NFTs five years ago. It's not a coincidence that
AI POWERED
is an anagram of
APE WEIRDO
Edit: Bonus, from 404 Media: App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits
Notorious RBMK @comraderobot.bsky.social: "hey train perverts wanna see the shinkansen cloaca", with TikTok video (Bluesky hosted) of the high speed rail coupler system operating.
In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:
- From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.
- In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.
- During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
- Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.
- In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.
- Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.
- Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.
Frankly there's quite a bit of that that I'd let him slide on if not for the hypocrisy and the ethics violations on the gifts. And that, yeah, the age difference in fucking a 17 year old is pretty damned skeevy.
Via.
Public urged to cut back on electrical usage across central Indiana, southern Indiana — January 24
A spokesperson for Hoosier Energy said, "High demand for electricity and tight power supplies throughout the Midwest are causing a serious power supply emergency."
Via.
A few days old, but Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State: Statement from Secretary Simon — January 25, 2026
SAINT PAUL – On January 24, 2026, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz with three requests that she writes would "restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.” The third request in the letter was to allow the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to access Minnesota’s “voter rolls.”
Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it's littered with 'TODO: Check authorisation' and similar
https://blog.cloudflare.com/se...rless-matrix-homeserver-workers/
The lobste.rs thread includes a link to the Matrix discussion of this fiasco and lots of discussion about how Clodflare's attempts at damage control just make it look worse.
Just a note of appreciation: switching from Firefox to Vivaldi has me using Startpage. It's not perfect, but Google has declined I find myself going back to it less and less.
I bounced off Kagi and a few others, but Startpage has stuck.
Argh. Same exact CGI::Fast->new() loop. From one form, I get the textarea contents entity encoded, in the other I get something that Perl is not interpreting as utf-8. I'm not seeing any difference in the HTML page meta statements, or the form. Driving me nuts.
Tuesday January 27th, 2026
De Speld (Netherlands): Wie is J.D. Vance, de First bitch achter president Trump?
Joey de Villa 🪗 @AccordionGuy@mastodon.cloud:
“First Bitch” is JD Vance’s correct title in both Dutch *and* English.
Ugh. Two FastCGI Perl scripts. One is inserting UTF-8 characters into the Postgres database correctly, one is biffing it. I cannot bloody well find the difference between the two.
Some days I regret not re-coding the entire thing in C.
Somebody take the LLM API keys away from marketing before they completely destroy the company! Jade @JadedBlueEyes@tech.lgbt
Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it's littered with 'TODO: Check authorisation' and similar
https://blog.cloudflare.com/se...rless-matrix-homeserver-workers/
Over on Bluesky, the Minnesota Star Tribune has a handy guide to identify which munitions the US Federal government is deploying against its citizens.