Flutterby™!

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.

U.S. Department of Justice: Attorney General Pamela Bondi Directs Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty for Luigi Mangione.

CNN: Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart offered plea deal to avoid death penalty

The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.

Via Elf M. Sternberg ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ who observed:

For every developer who views software as craft there are a dozen who view it as a paycheck don't give a shit otherwise. If AI is a force multiplier, it's multiplying the impact of the "don't give a shit" developers much more than anyone else

Lots of good stuff to think on in this: Simpson Center: Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of "AI": The View from the Humanities, Emily M. Bender (YouTube video)

I've been trying to understand how to use the Gemini CLI to write non-trivial code. There's a lot of waiting for "Thinking..." for the better part of an hour for it to come back with something that... sometimes works? Maybe is good for fleshing out a very rough version of code, but it's clear that at some point I'm going to have to go back in and use specific language to actually get it right.

Which is reiterating my feeling that if we're using LLMs for fleshing out code, our real issue is that our environments and languages have failed us.

Meanwhile, for work, I'm also looking into the AI integration into Notion. Of course the first thing that Notion wants me to do is to install an app (hey, spyware!) that doesn't seem to actually have any features that you'd hope for from an app. No worries, telemetry is whatever, I'm glad that this thing can't go poking around in my filesystem.

At least not visibly.

But beyond the basic "Chatbot thinks I should be 'Settings', the App calls that 'Preferences'" language mismatch, it's giving me quite a bit of instructions that just don't work. And, I mean, hey, keeping documentation up with the app is always a challenge, but it really feels like someone has off-loaded the process that should be creating the documentation, to the chatbot.

Finished CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring last night. Read it on the suggestion of a friend. I forget the context in which it came up, but...

It makes a compelling case that the LAPD and DA's office told a story about what happened that wasn't consistent with the facts, and that there was a lot of bumbling between the LASD and the LAPD. It raised a lot of questions about why Manson and his entourage may have been treated very leniently before the murders by both law enforcement and the judiciary. It points out a whole lot of intersections between the CIA's MKUltra program and various aspects of the '60s counterculture that intersected with Mason and crowd.

What I don't know after reading this is how out of the norm these various connections are. We know from so many cases in the intervening years that the LAPD and the LASD as institutions have practices of altering crime scenes and reports to fit a DA's narrative, and that judges are wont to, say, give young women who are having their first interactions with the court a little leniency in hopes that they can straighten themselves out without punishment (since, let's be fair, that's the main remedy courts have).

We also know that various US federal agencies engage in some sketchy shit in terms of internal US policies, and what university research gets funded, and a lot of this stuff may have been cleaned up a bit in the intervening years, with IRBs and all.

And the book acknowledges all of this.

So, yeah, a good read in understanding how, for instance, "conservative" factions act to make sure that the counter-culture acts in the ways that they fear, in seeing a lot of how prosecutors and "law" enforcement act to reinforce their initial suspicions, in how so much of society is intertwined. I recommend it from that front.

But frustrating (and, again, the author acknowledges this) that in the end this is the tangled yarn of a connection board without a clear picture emerging. It's the tale of the decisions a society makes, without an overarching story.

Fascinating read, I'm glad I went through it, but still trying to figure out what it means.

OpenAI CRO Tells Staff Anthropic Inflates Run Rate by $8 Billion:

The compute section reads like a second front. OpenAI told its investors four days earlier that Anthropic is "operating on a meaningfully smaller curve," projecting 30 gigawatts of OpenAI capacity by 2030 against 7 to 8 gigawatts for Anthropic by end-2027. Today OpenAI runs roughly 1.9 gigawatts. Anthropic runs 1.4. "Even at the high end of that range, our ramp is materially ahead and widening," the investor memo read.

Gotta say that, on the one hand, I get it, on the other hand measuring success by energy consumed is kinda like measuring programmer productivity with lines of code written or AI tokens billed or something.

Car headed to strip club crashes into Avondale violin shop

“We also were able to recover seven cellphones, one of which was on and indicated that the party was traveling to Pin-Ups,” Bryant said.

Via Tara Calishain, who noted:

🎶 That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia 🎶

Remember those pictures of ChongLy Scott Thao, a U.S. citizen of Hmong ancestry, in a plaid blanket and blue shorts, and nothing else, being escorted through the snow by ICE thugs?

Ramsey County officials investigate alleged kidnapping of St. Paul man by federal officers

Fuck yeah. Take them down.

In linking to Politico: The whisper network that caught up to Eric Swalwell, David Dayen ‪@ddayen.bsky.social wrote:‬

Several important nuggets in here:

• Swalwell was rebuilding Newsom's inner circle; he was the establishment hope

• One lobbyist: "Were we willing to delude ourselves or not ask questions that should have been asked? 1000%"

• His campaign started sending cease-and-desists last year

Via

Dragon in a Fez:

keep thinking about how I wrote in my dissertation about how every time a new form of public/social space emerges it’s immediately popular with kids and teenagers who see it as a chance at freedom and then adults colonise it and kick them out. this happened with malls in the 80s and diners in the 50s and pool halls in the 20s. my dad was doing research on this trend in like 1975. and I was like “yeah so this is going to happen to the internet” and then five years later every government suddenly decided to ban kids from everywhere online. I hate being right especially when I don’t even get paid for it

The Onion: Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto.

Via.

OMG. There have been a number of companies making plastic construction toy bricks compatible with Lego bricks. Now Utah has entered the chat: Brick 'em Young, including sets for various Mormon temples, and a nativity set.

Via Sean Conner.

Futurism: The Effects of AI-Generated Code Tearing Through Corporations Is Actually Kind of Funny — Womp womp!

Prior to modern technology, wealthy patrons had to pay actual artists to create grotesque charicatures using religious imagery to valorize themselves.

Just pondering about what's "easy" with an LLM coding assistant, and what's hard, and how the languages I've used have influenced the kinds of code I've written, and how the use of an LLM assistant is going to change what our software looks like.

Like: If we can't get our LLM assistant to fix a UI issue, are we just gonna abandon that interface mode?

Fascinating article on people deliberately colliding automobiles into trucks for the insurance payout: New Yorker: Letter from New Orleans: The Car-Crash Conspiracy — High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy.

Via.

Neville Park @nev@status.nevillepark.ca

ahem In the original novel Dracula, it must be a crucifix (that is, a fancy schmancy cross with Jesus on it) to properly repel Dracula. In later works, a simple cross suffices. This implies Dracula is getting more Protestant over time. In this essay I will

Oh, yes, this object has the method as_secs_f64(), that's definitely letting me abstract out the code to the appropriate floating point size for whatever target platform this ends up running on.

Jewish Currents: When Jewishness Means Genocide

My partner and I were hiking recently on an international trail in Spain. People passing each other on the trail would say hello in different languages. I was joking about the possibility of saying “shalom” to people. And it immediately became clear to both of us that today saying “shalom” would be provocative. I was thinking about how the word “shalom,” which is a nice word, a word of greeting, opening, peace, has become a marker of hate, in a sense. And then it dawned on me that there was a different but comparable process with the word “heil.” In German, it basically means holiness, peace, wholesomeness— good things. But it became the word for evil. You would not utter it today, in Germany or anywhere. And the comparison between these two words was very heavy, but it was there. It was not an intellectual process. It was kind of an instinctive feeling.

Via

Soatok Dreamseeker @soatok@furry.engineer

Some furries: "hehe I'm furry trash"

Me: "yiff-raff"

Finally, we've found the corporate role that AI can replace: Meta spins up AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to engage with employees

The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI.

Via