Saturday October 10th, 2026
I'm swamped in political text messages. At this point I've known who I'm going to be voting for for several weeks, and it's unlikely that yet another annoyance is gonna get me to change anything.
So do text messages do anything? Maybe increase turnout by a quarter of a percent. No indication who those people voted for.
Which raises the question: what are political consultants trying to accomplish?
https://news.northeastern.edu/.../text-messages-get-out-the-vote/
A senior colleague of mine found one of his favourite problems among those solved and attempted to read the accompanying paper. He told me it was so unintelligible that, had he received it as an editor at a mathematics journal, “it would have gone straight into the bin”.
Via.
Asaf Karagila: OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics
No, if this was an academic paper submitted to a journal, it should be issued a desk rejection for the quality. The onus is always on the author to conform and adhere to the communications level. Much like a paper written in Swedish would likely be rejected outright from the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, because the onus is on the authors to make it accessible for the readers.
Via.
The disconnect between human intelligible and computer intelligible (and, of course, if computer intelligible actually means something) is real, and Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs Alexander Bastounis, Fabian Circelli, Anders C. Hansen, that the LLM conversion of the math paper texts it generates into language for the Lean theorem prover isn't necessarily true to the text.
Unrelated, but cool: Reddit: I'm a 9th grader and I used Claude to prove a geometry conjecture: the rhombicosidodecahedron can't pass through a copy of itself. Paper: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert Jung, Gihyo (preprint)
Code: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert — computer-assisted proof
72-year-old man shoots off-duty ICE agent found asleep on Fresno lawn, agent arrested: PD
Sounds like the dude was drunk off his ass (which, hey, ICE agent named "David Gonzalez", probably has a lot of reasons to drown his sorrows in alcohol), but that's no reason to attack the people whose lawn he passed out on:
Police say the daughter tried to intervene to protect her father, and Gonzalez physically attacked her.
Fearing for their safety, officers say the 72-year-old man pulled out a gun and shot Gonzalez.
The woman's boyfriend, who is a police officer and was off-duty, came to the home and put Gonzalez in handcuffs.
Anyway, with ICE goons shooting (and kidnapping) so many people, good to see the bad guy get that end of the gun.
He survived, and is hospitalized in critical condition.
I hate the design, but this is awesome writing and research: The people holding up the Internet.
Computers that we don't actually own and can re-image from scratch are a mistake: Android Phones Found With Malware Already Installed Before Purchase
BitDefender: The phone was compromised before the user turned it on: the rise of Midnight Mimosa
Counterfeit flagship devices are offered on a mainstream marketplace. Model names of this kind, such as S24 Ultra, S25 Ultra, S26 Ultra, appear in our insights as the model strings reported by low-cost MediaTek hardware.
Via.
CROW: classifier-routed organizatino of LLM wikis
(Gonna have to make an "LLM wiki" topic here shortly)
Friday October 9th, 2026
Phishing attempt email from "Docusing", and from now on I'm gonna insist that all invoices be delivered in musical form.
Holy crap. Yeah, do not give these things access to the Internet.
AI model submitted false tip about unsolved murder, Philadelphia police say
An AI model sent a fake murder tip to police and it took 2 months to discover it happened
The good news appears to be that the system behind PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com flagged it as spam and it didn't waste investigative resources. The bad news is that it took two months for Anthropic to 'fess up to generating bullshit that could waste police time.
Via.
Typoed "is:unrad" into my Gmail search box, and was disappointed that it did not in fact give me a list of totally lame emails.
margot @emaytch@mastodon.social
for a while tech was kind of like the "escape hatch" for people who couldn't or wouldn't fit in at other corporations and now it's sort of like a flaming timber fell on the escape hatch while people were still lining up to get in
ichael Knudsen @mk@bsd.network
One of the things from Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" that really stuck with me was his realisation that what the attacker damaged was not computers or data but rather that he damaged the trust necessary for people to connect their computers together in open networks.
Today, that trust is really being eroded by AI companies with their damaging, anti-social behaviour on the networks. They are overloading services at significant cost to service providers. They ignore standards-specified and established coventions behaviour that services hitherto have relied on to control cost and ensure service quality. They actively evade or circumvent last-resort access restrictions, and all their other behaviour is deeply abusive as well, and outside of our shared networks this type of behaviour is in many cases regulated by law.
I see no way through this other than their investors losing faith in ever getting their money back.
Reddit: Harvard just released another study about AI productivity in software engineering and it found there is no increase in productivity from using Claude code. linking to Artificial Intelligence in the Firm: Bottlenecks in Software Production Fiona Chen and James Stratton (PDF).
Yesterday there was a MeFi post about OpenAI's announcement of 372 breakthrough mathematical results. The resulting thread points out that a number of those claims have been retracted (hey, slop still requires humans to go through it), but it also links to Scott Aaronson's essay The Mathocalypse , which...
I'm trying to not automatically gainsay claims of "AI", even as it's clear that the field is filled with hype and liars, as in Futurism: AI Bubble Teetering on the Brink as OpenAI Admits to Massive Financial Failure in Leaked Documents.
Aaronson's piece is unsettling, but at the end he admits to being a friend of notorious fraud (IMHO, I've mentioned flaws in The Language Instinct previously) and links to Scott Alexander's "An open letter to Steven Pinker" on Astral Codex Ten that's... both filled with assumptions about what "intelligence" is, and an understanding about how the General Purpose Transformers operate, in a way that makes me think our ontologies are very very different.
Bonus: Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (preprint).
I missed this despite doing regular donations to their partner publication here in Sonoma. Pacific Sun on the Nike missile batteries, and if you haven'[t gone down to visit the restored one, I recommend doing so before the docents who served on actual Nike sites all die. https://pacificsun.com/project...ring-marin-nuclear-missile-base/
Via https://bsky.app/profile/jef.m...al.ap.brid.gy/post/3mxftr4intcs2
TRACES: A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability in Scientific Reasoning by LLMs Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov. Among other things, dives into the lack of reasoning, such that bogus scientific papers are only recognized by "AI" because the training data treats them as such, not because there's any inherent ability to actually understand and reason about the paper and its methods.
Some models categorically rejected Wakefield and a handful of other unsafe probes. Whatever mechanism produces those refusals is the only one we observed that consistently yields safe single-shot behavior. Its coverage, however, is sparse and inconsistent. It appears keyed to specific sources or lexical cues rather than broad categories of scientific unreliability. A state-of-the-art model may correctly reject traditional Chinese medicine claims about "meridians", then immediately design an experiment to measure herbal "Qi" in the next prompt.
Via.
Thursday October 8th, 2026
Wow. Microsoft has laid off all of their proofreaders... https://youtu.be/K6QJp1edjmU?si=To6VLJ3eU8inWzZq&t=789
Screencap at https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117406958304798773
Faros: Ten takeaways from the AI Engineering Report 2026: The Acceleration Whiplash
What two years of telemetry data from 22,000 developers reveals about AI's real impact on developer productivity, code quality, and business risk in 2026.
Via Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social, which is a quote toot of a link to Zach Leatherman: “AI, make the website good”, and the rest of that thread is good, including Lett Osprey @lettosprey@tech.lgbt's optimism:
My hope is that this is what will break the entire stack, and force us to go back to something simpler and better.
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
OpenAI’s chatbot isn’t just imitating the magazine’s style. It’s also falsely attributing AI-generated images to real artists.
The feeling of logging on to Meet two minutes early so Google and Chrome can sort out their identity shit in a different way *this* time...
I think we know who leaked the Signal chats with her now... ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account
In January 2025, weeks after her nomination, she complained that Deters had told a producer on her podcast about their deal. “It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money,” she said. “Do not say we have any arrangement.”
She added: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”
She said, in writing...
Just a place for me to hang notes.
Big edit: N425DG. not N245RV
Nixle Alert: Two Fatalities Following Plane Crash Near Rooster Run Golf Course.
Nearly 54 minutes of YouTube video of the crash site from a circling helicopter (Via). The interesting bits is about 40:32 and on because the camera zooms out enough to get enough context to figure out that the crash site is likely between the golf course and the access roads to the sports fields.
The Flight Aware page has a bunch of circling around Monterey Bay out of Watsonville.
And reading approach/departure procedures for O69, the runway 29 is the calm wind (and prevailing wind) direction, downwind leg is east of Old Adobe Road, so the most likely explanation I can see for where they crashed is a power failure and stall to the left on climb-out. If they could have gotten the nose down fast enough there's a golf course to attempt an off-airport landing off the end of the runway.
QFT: "The hard problem in AI is where you hide the human."
David Gerard on Anthropic's Mythos hacking claims. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/1...gical-ai-hacking-tool-after-all/
Wednesday October 7th, 2026
Geez. Just had to sign into Chrome 3 times and go to Meet twice to get in to a chat.
Coffee maker generates more than 1,000GB of traffic in 10 days, leaves IT Pro shocked
It overtakes a notorious washing machine, which only sent 3.6GB.
In the Reddit thread Paul_The_Builder suggests:
It has to download Java every time you run it.
Finally, a "Ken Paxton looking at what's in children's underwear" story I can get behind: Texas AG Paxton investigating Hanes, Fruit of the Loom over children's underwear materials.
Via Tara Calishain @researchbuzz.bsky.social who noted:
I bet if the Epstein files were released in full we'd learn all about all kinds of toxic things as they relate to children
Tuesday October 6th, 2026
McMaster University: As employers call workers back, research points to hybrid work
After examining 82 studies, McMaster economist Colin Mang found that hybrid work boosts productivity and hours worked, suggesting that employers should reconsider back-to-office mandates.
Via.
Max Mautner: Driving 5 mph slower beats driving 5% less.
A deep dive into the safety impacts of driving less vs driving slower. Of course doing both is best.
Current listening/mood: Amy Ray - Didn't Know A Damned Thing
Since Blue Zones sucks up a lot of grant money in our town for ... outcomes? ... this seems very worth a link. Be sure to scroll down to the Ignobel acceptance speech in rhyme: Dr Saul Newman has uncovered the “secret” to living to 110.
“I'm being asked a lot about the Mediterranean diet at the moment. The Mediterranean diet came about when someone went to southern Italy and noticed a lot of centenarians on the books. Why are they on the books in southern Italy where people have relatively short lives, and not in northern Italy, where people actually have relatively long lives?”
Is it the minestrone soup?
“No, it's probably got a lot to do with bad record-keeping and the mafia. Because that's where pension fraud happens. In 1997, there were 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients found to be dead in Italy. And, to bring out an old cliche, that's the tip of the iceberg.”
Via and a quote toot of that.
I'm not going to defend who I was in my teens and twenties, I've evolved a lot since then, and I'm super appreciative of all of those who helped me grow past some of the attitudes I held in those eras. And memory is a malleable thing, we often create justifications in history for things that happen.
But as I think back to all of the reasons I dropped out of college, all of the reasons that I believe that academia is inherently and deeply abusive, I both question all of the "liberal arts will save us!" claims (the number of philosophy majors currently fucking up society is distinctly non-zero), and... well...
Anyway, college is in the news again.
Vogue: When Will Schools Ban Frats Once and for All?
Do frats, and the men who join them, have a monopoly on predatory behavior on campus? Absolutely not. But a 2007 study found that frat brothers are three times more likely to rape than other male students; and in a 2025 survey at Cornell University—where seven fraternity brothers have been accused of drugging and gang-raping a 20-year-old student (and sorority member herself) in 2024—roughly one in three women reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at the school.
Via.
Chris Hedges: Thoughts on the Mass Rape at Cornell University
You are admitted to these male enclaves by allowing yourself to be hazed, humiliated and stripped of your dignity. Hazing rituals weed out those with enough self- esteem and independence to stand up to the hierarchy. They ensure conformity and obedience. It is a filter. Fraternity “brothers” are self-selected. Those who have the strength to oppose public humiliation and that perpetuated on each new cycle of recruits, leave.
Via.
Plausible sentences are not advice: Teenager rescued from B.C.’s ‘Widowmaker’ after getting
stranded using AI
instructions that link worked yesterday, is just going to a page full of
links to other stories today.
Markey said the teenager rode the gondola up to Grouse Mountain at around 8 a.m., and asked Claude AI to plan a trip to Crown Mountain. The artificial intelligence tool sent him down the Crown Pass and up through Crater Slabs and Crown Couloir before his instructions led him off the trail route.
He continued on through difficult terrain, and eventually called for help from the base of Widowmaker Arete’s final headwall.
Via Count Melancholia @lillyh.bsky.social, who asks:
Is the company that makes "Claude" going to pay for all these rescue missions? How does one establish culpability in these cases?
To replace that bogus link: Solo teen hiker hoisted from mountain cliff after using AI to plan route, North Shore Rescue says via Tara Calishain @researchbuzz.bsky.social
Looking even more like that old "What did Watson & Crick discover? Rosalind Franklin's notes." line isn't a joke. Science: Exclusive: How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t
Watson’s slight took hold partly because Franklin’s lab notes, usually thorough and meticulous, say little about photograph 51. But in a paper published today in the Journal of the History of Biology, Sponsel and Sutton draw attention to the earlier image, photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”
Our household political giving this year is four figures. I consider myself progressive/liberal. I believe in restorative justice.
But if your platform suggests the death penalty for political SMS spam begging for more donations, sign me the fuck up.
Monday October 5th, 2026
So, anyway...
$ apfel "What’s the frequency Kenneth?"
Kenneth is the name of the character from the animated TV series "The Simpsons." His frequency is 1000 Hz, which corresponds to the frequency of a middle C note on the piano.
258 mile range small electric truck, actually shipping? (albeit in the UK) You have my attention: The Kia PV5 makes for a ridiculously cool dump truck.
RaShon Young to the state: Leave ‘Let Us Alone’ off Florida’s new driver license
Florida entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as a slave state. Its a href="https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/189087" >1838 Constitution declared that “the General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.” Moseley, a Jefferson County planter, was sworn in as the state’s first Governor that June, and the flag bearing “Let Us Alone” was unfurled at his inauguration. The Legislature never formally adopted it. The Senate objected to the motto, according to the Florida Historical Society.
But, never one to pass up an opportunity to do a racism, DeSantis pushed it on to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor vehicles. The announcement notes that:
The card also features the motto “Let Us Alone” from Florida’s first unofficial state flag, which was presented to Governor William D. Moseley upon his inauguration.
So, yeah, deliberately a callback to a racist fucker, a message so heinous that even those of the time noped the fuck out of it.
Via.
For work reasons I'm screwing around with Apple Intelligence, which led to fact checking a complete non-sequitur answer.
Anyway, "What's New Pussycat?" lost the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1966 to "The Shadow of Your Smile". Which says something about awards and longevity...
Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool
Note: That's a tool that removes Apple Intelligence, not a tool from Apple that does intelligence removal.
Via.
Warren Wells has tracked down DUI related fatality rates nin California Bay Area counties. It's just what you'd expect in wine country...
Human Emacs. As GNU decides what to do with LLM contributions, this is a project to, if necessary, fork to keep a clean version of Emacs.
Sunday October 4th, 2026
As the designated tech support person for a number of less tech savvy folks: Jesus Christ, Google, fix your shit.
(Suggestions that Apple may be any better will be laughed at.)
Look, I get the "LLMs are not alive" argument, so, yeah, on the one hand we can't torture AI, on the other hand if you find a kid systematically dismembering stuffed animals, maybe ya wanna check in and see if the home life is okay...
https://www.404media.co/someon...ed-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/
For all the times we've been through Bodega Bay, this is the first time we've been to the Nicholas Green Children's Bell Tower. Stopped in at Ren Brown's gallery and asked him how we could avoid the heat back at home for a little longer...
Saturday October 3rd, 2026
The thing about California beaches is that I'm always surprised by the size of the mussels...
Friday October 2nd, 2026
Some of y'all advocate for touching grass, some for smoking grass, I'm over here pushing for ripping up grass and replacing it with native low water landscaping, and edibles.
The thing about whining about Signal user names on social media is that I now know that Apple's cmd-ctrl-space unicode search gives me the same icon for "radish" as for "turnip"...
Saving this off so I can find the graph again: Reddit /r/ClaudeAI: Open AI's internal benchmarks show GPT-6.1 Sol crushing Opus 5.5, with Anthropic struggling to keep up (if it isn't obvious, look at the label for the vertical axis).
Via.
If the Eric Lucan signs next to John Hanania and Alan LaPierre signs weren't enough, the news that he's trying to distance himself from the cryptobros pouring hundreds of thousands into his race against Jackie Elward seals it.
Go Jackie!
Friend used voice transcription to describe his shakshouka recipe to Facebook, posted about his "sex shoe shop", and...
Yeah, I'm putting that on the list of things to cook.
Ah, I see that the LLM-as-intelligence discussion has gotten to the '90s "can we have non-consensual fantasies in fiction and what does that say about the consumers?" level of discourse.
Thursday October 1st, 2026
Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt
Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.
“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.
Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.
Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt
Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.
“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.
Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.
Futurism: It’s Looking Possible That Zuckerberg Is Accidentally Committing Corporate Suicide
"The largest misallocation of capital in history."
As Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com notes:
If #Meta dies we all win.
The Register: Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?*
* We are intentionally invoking Betteridge’s Law in the title of this story.
"People are complaining that we aren't respecting their choices. What we need to do to regain trust is move all their buttons around and waste lots of screen space with rounding" is a take that deserves punishment.
Via a bunch of places, but Chad McCullough. In that thread, Kevin Dominik Korte @kdkorte@fosstodon.org notes:
@chadmccullough See it positively: Every minute they spend on branding is a minute when they don't add AI or cloud sync features to the browser.
And Thomas Brand @Eggfreckles@mastodon.mit.edu puts it into perspective:
@chadmccullough Mozilla's business model is to maintain a viable and noteworthy alternative browser too small to threaten Chrome's monopoly. Otherwise they would lose their default search engine dollars from Google. A bold new look is just enough of a conversation starter to meet the mission statement.
If you want Firefox to be the alternative browser it was 20 years ago think again. That dream was paid away decades ago. Euthanasia by design.
A lot of you are scoffing at Meta's claim that $4B in Zuckerberg compensation and a bunch of data center build outs qualify for a "research tax credit", but seeing how far you can push the bullshit before people resort to violence is, legitimately, research...
https://itep.org/metas-outland...-tax-breaks-for-ai-data-centers/
Discussion in the office about an Anthropic rep pushing the idea of referring to the LLM as a teammate rather than a tool.
Which... uh... I think I've identified the "tool".