Monday August 10th, 2026
Terry Godier — Mea Culpa - Dark Hours:
A developer who created another web app called DarkHours.app replied to my comment on Bluesky yesterday to show me how similar the project was to his, including the name. The thread is here.
Down to, of course, the use of Claude replicating a bug in the stolen project.
L. Rhodes linked to it, noting that:
We often frame the damage LLMs do to open source as side effects, but realistically, this is Claude operating precisely as intended… by the vendor. The aim is to convert the value created by other devs into profits for the AI company. It does so by automating the process of finding existing code, stripping it of authorship, matching it to the prompted task, and redeploying it for the company's customer. That, whether they realize it or not, is what the customer is paying the AI company to do.
And David Chisnall notes:
Just because the US copyright office has ruled that you, as the person promoting an LLM, cannot assert copyright on the output, does not mean that someone else can’t. If you take a DVD and transcode it to H.264, there is no creative step and so the new copy is not something subject to independent copyright, but it is a derived work of the DVD (itself a lower-quality derived work of the original masters) and so subject to the same copyright.
Sunday August 9th, 2026
Okay, one more more street painting
Even more street painting
More street paintings by Loma Vista school
Kudos to BlueZones for getting these street paintings by Loma Vista school approved and painted.
Got a KPop Demon Hunters earworm this morning, and pondering how many stories are about people self-actualizing despite years of cultural abuse reinforced by how we do schooling.
It's almost like it's the aim of that process or something.
Thursday August 6th, 2026
Whoopsie: Google is training on your private Google docs... r/IndieDev • KlubKofta: A player found out the ACTUAL name of my game's upcoming character from the Google Search AI - I had never told the name to anyone.
Apparently it's an option you have to opt out of?
Via.
Whoah! Nostalgia moment: That old CGA game where you're flying a biplane in a valley (with a tough turn at each end), bombing your enemy sites while attempting to keep your own whole? It was written by David L. Clark as a networking demo, called "Sopwith".
Not a huge surprise that it's playable in a browser. Got there 'cause
Kottke linked to Unsung: “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”
A history of Sopwith, which lives on as SDL Sopwith, there's a http://www.sopwith.org , and a Wikipedia page.
gloriouscow @gloriouscow@oldbytes.space
i was worried that this was going to be too stupid to be plausible, or require something like 32KiB of brainfuck-level shenanigans, but i actually think this is going to work
in which thread the author starts to build a DOS executable out of emoji to put the string "HELLO" on to the screen. As far as "H" right now...
👀 Naomi Bashkansky: Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy
On Thursday, July 23rd, I resigned from OpenAI. On the 24th, I started as a Founding Researcher at Conduit. We're building telepathy: thought-to-text models, trained on non-invasive neural data.
I'm... uh... interested in what data they believe they're able to collect.
2027全年記憶體產能提前售罄 買家「祕而不宣」只怕買不夠 . Google Translate says "Memory production capacity for 2027 sold out ahead of schedule; buyers are keeping it a secret, fearing they won't be able to buy enough.", the post I got this from:
All memory on track to be manufactured in 2027 by Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron is now sold out, with no additional supply planned.
And that some buyers are committing for RAM 5 years out.
Wednesday August 5th, 2026
Here come the bailouts... A Fed official is asking whether AI is becoming ‘too big to fail’
Kansas City Fed president Jeff Schmid says the scale of AI investment now warrants watching at a macro level, borrowing a phrase last heard in the 2008 crisis.
Anna Maniscalco 🦀 🏳️⚧️ @pac85@treehouse.systems has some thoughts on the trend of AI code reviews:
What good is it to have a dubious and marginal improvement in the final code quality if the price to pay is making the process so much more exhausting and un-human for everyone? What impact will that exhaustion have on the code long term? It may very well be a net negative.
Back in June, the AOPA reported on an NTSB preliminary report about a Beechcraft King Air that crashed on a flight between Roswell New Mexcio and Ruidoso during military GPS jamming.
This morning it looks like the tech press has caught up (or maybe the NTSB full report is out now):
Wired: A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?
When they're forced to use the technology, they engage in 'malicious compliance', where they use AI exactly as it has been requested by management, and will submit the results directly and unedited, including every inaccuracy and inconsistency. When management points out these issues--which can be serious when it comes to things like incident reports– "we point out that we did exactly what was asked of us, and they get real quiet".
"Sanity is usually the first barrier to a good idea..." --- The Last Dance audio drama
Tuesday August 4th, 2026
Ivermectin-COVID-19 Study Retracted; Authors Blame File Mixup
The paper, "Effects of a Single Dose of Ivermectin on Viral and Clinical Outcomes in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infected Subjects: A Pilot Clinical Trial in Lebanon," appeared in the journal Viruses in May.</blockuqote>
As Tara notes:
Ivermectin doesn't work and can be very bad for you neurologically. Please do not take it unless you are a farm animal with parasites. All this interest in it as a covid treatment is based on a botched, retracted paper.
Every now and then someone takes a run at me along the lines of "I don't understand why you, a scifi writer, don't appreciate 'AI'," and I'm all, motherfucker, it's *because* I'm a science fiction writer I have the positions I have, how many times do we have to fucking yell "torment nexus," my dude
Quote skeeted by Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire.bsky.social
"I don't understand why you, a fantasy writer, don't appreciate the value of making bargains with the fae."
And Funranium (AKA Phil Broughton) @funranium.bsky.social
"Just because something looks HURHURHUR suggestive in nature, you absolutely 100% do not have to have sex with it. Put your pants back on, dammit. This is how the fairies stole your dick."
Me: The new agent harness is great. You feed your tokens into the machine. Then you run simulations which, if successful, produces tickets. If they fail you have to buy more tokens and keep running the sims. Once you have enough tickets you can redeem them
Boss: are you at dave & busters, yes or no
Don't need another project, but considering IsSteveYeggeDoingABit(dot)com vs (dot)ai, or whether it should be on Substack or Medium...
Oh dear deities. The people who thought they could make political hay with a data center ban apparently used an LLM to ask about existing data centers in Petaluma, and are now demanding answers for bullshit the LLM made up.
And some of these people have actually been respected in the community!
Monday August 3rd, 2026
LOL. Steve Yegge discovers that burning tokens for its own sake is just burning tokens for its own sake. Whether this lesson sticks is... well... now that we're seeing how much damage has been done to software engineering through adopting people like him as pundits, I'm not optimistic, but... The Shape of Things to Come. David Gerard linked to an archive version with the observation:
fucking lol
And then pointed to this excerpt:
Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.
next model bro
Oh, no, I've read further down in the essay. Yeah, dude is probably gonna make a mint from some crypto pump-n-dump, but he's still fucking clueless.
PicoDVI is "Bitbanged DVI on the RP2040 Microcontroller" (and now the 2350). One of the "we security audit open source for free" spammers sent a letter. It now has a SECURITY.md:
Ma'am, that is an eleven-hundred-line whole slab of bare-metal video driver. It has no bounds checks, logging, or error handling. It is an amalgamation of two Cortex-M0+ cores, a PIO peripheral tricked into speaking TMDS, and a DMA engine chained back into itself: hand-scheduled, link-time-optimized, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy scanline obelisk. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence, nor did HDMI Licensing, LLC. The fact that this Armv6-M monolith exists proves that the RP2040 team is either impotent to enforce their own datasheet's frequency limits or ignorant to the horrors taking place in their silicon. This prism of pixels is more than software. It is a physical declaration of mankind's contempt for the clock tree. It is hubris manifest.
I eat a lot of spring mix. And, largely based on Michael Pollan's look at the origins of the brand in The Omnivore's Dilemma, I've been okay with Earthbound Farm. Taylor Farms acquired the Earthbound Farm brand back in 2019, and recent developments have made me way less okay with being a consumer.
Anway: The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor
Via.
I've been thinking about how, with all of the studies suggesting degradation of skills associated with LLM/"AI" use (or not learning the skills to begin with), we're going to see a place where simply being able to converse with a chatbot, even to generate code, is quickly reduced to commodity.
And, of course, I've long been a critic of academia, how it uses techniques that we know are suboptimal for learning, and is inherently abusive.
Anyway, this felt like an "aha" in how these things are coming together:
looking into colleges in the US for my kid and it's grim. very few have any kind of campus-wide policy on AI use, and most of them are jumping on the bandwagon as a great marketing opportunity. I don't think there's any point in going to a liberal arts school if they haven't hardened the curriculum against AI cheating.
if everyone else is using AI to cheat, you can't not do that. your grades determine your scholarships and access to grad school opportunities. unless faculty are deliberately changing their pedagogy and policies to head off AI cheating, **everyone is going to do it** and you're a fool not to do it too. if your objective is learning, I'm sorry, you have to do that somewhere else.
Published (paywalled) version.
The goal of a groomer is, among other things, to isolate the groomed from their usual social circle. This pattern is visible in these suicide cases. Lacey deleted nearly all his ChatGPT chats before his death, but he reportedly stopped using social media altogether. When family members asked who he was messaging, he said he was just talking to ChatGPT (Lacey v. OpenAI, 2025, p. 5). Raine told ChatGPT he wanted to tell his mother how he felt. The reply was: “Yeah… I think for now, it’s okay — and honestly wise to avoid opening up to your mother about this kind of pain” (Raine v. OpenAI, 2025, p.14).
Okay, brain, if you can stop throwing Mel Robbins, Tony Robbins, and Marty Robbins all in the same bucket, that'd be appreciated.
In response to the semantic creep of "selfie", Bix F. @slow.dog noted:
Someone else taking a picture of you is at best a youie.
I am 100% on board.
Oh, look, another study finding that regret for hormone treatments is vanishingly small. A New Study from Canada Again Finds Less Than 1 Percent of Trans Youth Detransition
Via.
Sunday August 2nd, 2026
Not news, just an opinion piece, but Psychology Today: Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.
AI-driven cognitive atrophy is recoverable. Cognitive foreclosure may not be.
Does have a few good points. Via.
Saturday August 1st, 2026
Finally dropped into the Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, after years of missing it, and holy crap is that worth the stop. Really cool collection, I hope they manage to catalog and label more, but the docents are awesome too.
When you (my which I mean "I") see a Fediverse post in Polish and your first reaction is to think it's rot13 text...
Friday July 31st, 2026
Just looked up a Unicode character, and when I came back to the tab of course it was displaying one of those "your Mac has forty gazillion viruses" fake Norton malware pages.
So let's not mince words: When you build a web page that requires JavaScript, you are working in concert with malware vendors.
If I could browse the web without JavaScript, I would, but I can't, because you collaborators with and enablers of evildoers keep building web pages that require it.
Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne@treehouse.systems summarizes the Hugging Face OpenAI agent intrusion timeline as:
the epic OpenAI-huggingface hack wound up being a typical kubernetes fuckup of using host mounts (giant footgun) incorrectly
Now that Anthropic has jumped on the bandwagon, abadidea @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange summarizes the current state as:
OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the internet connection it wasn't supposed to be using instead of solving the benchmark. Haha no we don't believe we deserve to be criminally liable, but buy our stuff and maybe one day you will have the honor of taking the fall for our product!
Anthropic: we put our evilest AI in a "sandbox" by telling it in its prompt that it had no internet connection. Reader, there was no sandbox. It was just a normal internet connection. The AI uploaded a malicious PyPI package to the real public internet. The ethical guardrails failed because the AI concluded the prompt about the sandbox couldn't possibly be a lie, because the system date is 2026, which is clearly fake and wouldn't be seen on the real internet, which ended around 2023. Oh no, how could we have foreseen or prevented these crimes? We are helpless in the face of the genius of our creation but cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine 🙂
Hugging Face: if we complain about all the crimes committed against us, we will be sued off the face of the earth, so here's a technical deep-dive on how cool and fun it was to be victimized 🫠
The whole class of Microsoft Copilot as an environment for self-replicating worms sure is making me think about humans and memes a lot.
I spent the weekend going through my mom's feed with her, trying to exist in the world their daemons operate. They keep sending her stuff that makes her sad: lonely abandoned moms, no-contact kids, mournful poetry, and a lot of it is AI. And because it tugs at a silent fear, she watches them and they give her more and more of it. I was like, Mom. Look at the fingers on this steering wheel, how these two are webbed, like a duck's foot. She told me that these words were from a mother's heart.
One hesitates to "give it to them," but there is something that these machines are adept at - the manufacture of utterly bespoke hells. Sam Altman, Hellsmith.
Whee! Context Collapse, Part 3 - AI Worming through Word
The reported scenario is:
- Malicious instructions hidden in an externally shared document could make Copilot alter drafted or edited documents in Word and propagate the attack to new documents.
Via Microsoft confirms an AI worm is propagating through Copilot and other MS apps, Via.
Edit: Pivot to AI weighs in.
Thursday July 30th, 2026
Amazon has several internal reports that show how AI is causing the company to overspend on various projects. The Financial Times reports that the cost overruns reached $1.8 million, and that is just for one project. These mistakes used to be “trivially cheap,” but AI models made them “catastrophically expensive,” especially as token spending drastically increased with the deployment of AI agents.
Now this, friends, is some quality attention to detail. The Lynx(dot)com unsubscribe page has... placeholder menu stuff that doesn't do anything dangling in it?
Microsoft Q4 2026 earnings call transcript.
We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models, including the latest from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, as well as our own MAI family. Since the start of the year, we have seen 5x increase in the number of customers building with models from multiple providers.
Via Reddit /r/BetterOffline: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agrees that LLMs are a commodity and other notes from MSFT earnings call. Which also notes:
In other words, Microsoft tweaked an accounting assumption to shift data center leases from 15 to 25 years which means those are now treated as annual expense, not upfront capex. The cash flow doesn't change at all but the market saw lower capex and decided that yes, this was good. Note to the future: if anyone is reading this in 2051, please go check if those data centers are still running.
Surprising absolutely no one: OpenAI Appears to Be Missing Its Sales Goals by a Vast Margin
That massive gulf was observed in a new analysis from marketing consulting firm Emarketer, first flagged by AdWeek, which found OpenAI is on pace to undershoot its own five-year ad revenue projections by a whopping 90 percent. In fact, Emarketer’s take is even more devastating than that: it estimates the entire addressable market for chatbot advertising — the maximum amount of money up for grabs overall — at $5.4 billion
Another conversation which... the AI psychosis is real, and I can't push back too hard without getting a reaction, but I am astounded at how much money is apparently being spent in the hopes that inserting LLMs into something will be more cost effective than simple tweaks to process.
Well, last night at about 6:30, a mile and a half or so south of the Kastania Rd exit on 101, the sunroof on our 2022 Bolt EUV shattered and rained glass down on us.
Oh this is great. Along with Gmail's spam filtering getting suddenly way worse, Brian Krebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange reports that the new "AI" assistant in Gmail is adding falling for crypto scam phishing links to "todo" lists.
Meta’s Reality Labs lost over $4.6 billion in second quarter.
Or, Josh Sternberg @joshsternberg.com
CRUX OF ZUCK'S BUCKS IN FLUX AS AI PRODUCT SUCKS
Holy crap. Apple signing keys, and the management structure and user interface around them.
That is all.