Friday May 22nd, 2026
Thinking back to my 20s in rural Tennessee and hearing people talk about how they drove better after a few drinks.
This is a post about AI productivity.
If we can send one crypto-billionaire to Mars, why can't we send them all? SpaceX Taps Crypto Billionaire to Lead First Crewed Mission to Mars
During the live webcast, SpaceX played a video of cryptocurrency billionaire and civilian astronaut Chun Wang speaking from Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Wang, who has gone to space one time before, explained that he will embark on a Starship flyby of the Moon and Mars. SpaceX has not shared a target launch date for the mission, but it could be the world’s first interplanetary human spaceflight.
I'm too tech fatiqued to try to self-host email, but am trying to get confident enough in my new settings to migrate away from Google to Hetzner.
Sigh. Tech is making me tired.
"the ability to process is going to get faster and cheaper ... than people expect"
Dan Lyke comments (0)Okay, even if you think that "AI" is gonna bring something useful... Reddit r/TechGawker: Mark Cuban says OpenAI’s trillion-dollar data center bet is doomed because AI processing will get faster, cheaper and more efficient before the spending ever makes sense.
The Register: Gemini accused of 30,000-line code
purge and fake recovery report. I mean, it's the usual The Reg snark, but the Reddit thread of people dissecting why the slot machine
strategy prompts failed is super super sad.
Which leads to a couple of Fediverse posts for the morning. mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca
Seeing people I respect calling their development process "arguing with chatbots" now is really getting kind of sad. There's no agency there, man, there's no choice. There's no understanding. You're standing at the craps table in a plausible-syntax casino, telling the dice they're wrong and to try again. Of course the house is winning.
@AnarchoNinaWrites either LLMs are capable of doing what is advertised, and them it's impossible to be left behind, or it isn't capable and then it's not worth not falling behind.
Where some guy came up with a bet that has favourible odds for believing in god, the LLM hype is a bet with favourable odds for disbelief.
Danielle Foré @danirabbit@mastodon.online
We’ve pushed young people completely out of our public physical spaces and now they’re getting pushed out of our digital spaces as well. Where are they supposed to go?
Thursday May 21st, 2026
A cute surrealist web comic with a full story arc that has completed: Back
I don't know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about "AI" to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying "Well actually fire is used to make bread" when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses
Might have to distribute this in physical form: Pictures of the ad on the the London tube, along with a printable PDF that reads:
Yes, we built a machine that tells teenagers to kill themselves.
But - it might also help them with their homework.
ChatGPT
With a QR code that leads to Wikipedia: Deaths linked to chatbots.
Wish Mastodon had a "show me this user's posts without RTs" option. It's sometimes hard to tell if a new follower is just content farming, or there's actually a person adding value to the web there.
Though I suppose that if it's hard to tell, then I have my answer.
Sean Conner: The AI has come for my code.
Seriously, Github needs a “dismiss with prejudice” button. Now!
Wednesday May 20th, 2026
Fixing that "AI Generated Content Lacks Soul" image.
Oh, dear, Facebook. Offering an LLM summary of a Chuck Tingle post to tell me "Why AI Generated Content
Lacks Soul" sure is... a thing.
If I still believed that companies needed to provide value in order to thrive I'd suggest you short your Meta stock, but I'm too cynical for that.
I try to be cynical, but I just can't keep up: The Onion, September 1 2005: Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index
This is actually happening now
The new “CDOT Economic Impacts of Bike Lanes Study” examined six Chicago corridors where bike lanes were installed and compared them to nearby “control” corridors without bike lanes. While the report stops short of claiming bike lanes directly caused economic growth, it repeatedly found that bike lane corridors performed similarly to — or in several cases better than — their comparison corridors on measures like employment, commercial vacancy, sales tax revenue recovery, and property values.
Some amazing data visualization in this post: The Conversation: The market moves before Trump posts
Hundreds of millions of dollars are changing hands, but can we call it insider trading?
Because I saw Calishat @researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host's response to this post.
Bond villain has developed a device that will destroy the planet. The British government sends James Bond to offer him tax incentives to build the device on brownfield land in the East Midlands.
I'm reading Medium: UX Collective: The rise of the Orchestrated User Interface (OUI). It's paywalled, I don't particularly think it's worth clicking through, but I find this interesting:
In the OUI era, we must now become gardeners.
We plant the seeds (user goals), set the boundaries (guardrails), and nurture the system as it grows (reinforcement learning). We are designing systems that learn from the user, becoming more accurate and personalized over time.
Because all I can think of is the Spanish speaking guy with the old beater pickup truck, bed filled with assorted tools, doing my neighbor's landscaping... Or, maybe, we can aspire to be the Oliver Mellors of the situation...
Also see that previous entry about using LLMs for analysis reinforcing cultural stereotypes, I suspect that the systems are shaping the user far more than learning from the users.
Adam Kucharski: Real signals or artificial stereotypes? In which the author creates 2,000 survey responses, copies them labeling one set "US" and another set "UK", and sees how Copilot thinks the responses differed.
Chad M. Topaz: Receipts are receipts — A response to Pirate Wires on Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Via Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, who quote skeeted Chad Topaz Queer DEI Race Traitor @chadtopaz.bsky.social describing the post as:
So, @tressiemcphd.bsky.social writes a brilliant (as usual) op-ed about genAI and some tech bro attempts to ridicule it. The guy, Mike Solana, is probably not worth my time but it seems he's gay and as a Gay, I am unduly annoyed by evil gays. Also, I'm bored. So here's my debunking of this guy.
Grafana Labs security update: Latest on TanStack npm supply chain ransomware incident, in which the extorters threaten to release Github repos.
Which is different from InfoWorld: GitHub admits major source code leak after 3,800 internal repositories breached, Forbes: GitHub Says 3,800 Repositories Breached— TeamPCP Hackers Demand $50,000.
Which is different from Krebs on Security: CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on Github, Gizmodo: ‘The Worst Leak That I’ve Witnessed’: U.S. Cybersecurity Agency Leaves Its Digital Keys Out in Public on GitHub, Tech Republic: CISA Contractor Exposed Sensitive Credentials in Public GitHub Repository .
There is so much wrong with this.... A new body will recommend how state government and Vermont businesses could adopt AI. I mean, obviously, there's starting with the flawed premise:
Through an executive order, Gov. Phil Scott created the Vermont Artificial Intelligence Economic Taskforce on Monday. And first on its agenda, the body must present up to five recommendations within 90 days for how state government could adopt AI to better serve the public. The group will also work to educate state leaders on how they could apply AI to their work.
But then we get to idiocy like this:
Given AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT that prove powerful “off the shelf,” Lunderville said the technology could be a leveler for small companies. For example, he pointed to small manufacturers using AI to draft requests for proposals, which could cut a 20-hour process down to five hours.
Sooooo... what Neal Lunderville, CEO of Vermont Gas and "...experience holding multiple Cabinet-level positions in Vermont", is telling me is that off-loading the RFP process to a third party that everyone else is using is going to give small companies a competitive advantage?
A "leveler" perhaps in that what's obviously an overly cumbersome RFP process is gonna turn into a die roll.
Tuesday May 19th, 2026
No lies detected. The AI summary gets it right for once.
Listening to Rostam interviewed on Switched On Pop, and I'm reminded that kids protesting on campus have a much better track record for being right than the administrations and authorities that have opposed them.
Kickstarter: An Apology: Rethinking Our Mature Content Guidelines
The updates to the rules were primarily driven by requirements from our payments processor, Stripe. Stripe operates under its own legal and compliance requirements separate from Kickstarter’s own rules. And even Stripe’s rules are dictated by a larger system shaped by financial institutions that govern how money moves globally. Under this system, many platforms – including other crowdfunding and creator monetization platforms – struggle with how to create space for mature content while getting the creators of that work paid without friction.
A good reminder that the "adult content" policy of the world is set by the Epstein Class,
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Package Manager Where This Regularly Happens
“It’s a shame, but what can you do? This is just the price of building modern web apps,” said Senior Frontend Engineer Mark Vance, echoing the sentiments of a community that completely relies on a 40-level-deep nested tree of unvetted packages maintained by pseudonymous strangers to capitalize a single string. “There’s absolutely no way to foresee or prevent someone from taking over a long-abandoned utility package and injecting a crypto-miner into every production build in the world. It’s just an act of nature.”
ana «model a7m2» @ana@starlite.rodeo
why did they call them "ai datacenters" when they could have called them "slopping malls"
Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit. Seems a little unfair to "AI", this just seems like the business people in charge of implementation didn't understand the processes they were automating, and fucked up bigtime in exposing information that shouldn't have been external, or should have understood that they needed to create other incentives in the process.
But I think there's a larger issue here. The trend for years has been to punt understanding the systems we're automating into down the road, to use code to specify the constraints, to even just implement all of the options and A/B test the results. Using metrics that may or may not be actually relevant to the business goals.
It very much feels like in the same ways that in the naïveté of the ྖs we said "we're going to bring the amazing online communities to the world", and what we did was brought the world to the online communities, destroying them, when we said "we're going to teach the world to program", rather than teaching critical thinking and logic, we taught people to plug together npm packages...
Anyway, good on the franchise owner, I hope he nails them to the wall.
I'm gonna have to pay special attention to this next time we're down in the mountains of that area: Wikipedia: Tunemah Peak
Tunemah Peak is a mountain in Fresno County, California, located in the southwestern United States, with an elevation of 11,158 feet. The mountain gets its name from the nearby Tunemah Trail, which originated in 1878 when a Cantonese cook and a shepherd uttered the Cantonese curse "屌你阿媽" (Jyutping: diu2 nei5 aa3 maa1; lit. 'fuck your mother') while walking along the rugged trail.
Fascinating read on the politics of Christo's "Running Fence" installation in Sonoma County https://petalumahistorian.com/christos-trojan-horse/
mirrored (likely with paywall) at https://www.petalumanews.com/2...ing-fence-changed-sonoma-county/
Fits on a Floppy, an awareness campaign with logo for small software.
Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can.
Via.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social
Independent audit confirms my analysis of Telegram's protocol from last year: https://istories.media/en/stor...endent-review-confirms-critical- telegram-vulnerability/
The audit was ordered by one of the main characters of IStories' investigation into Telegram's network infrastructure, man called Vedeneev. My analysis was done in connection with that journalistic investigation.
Presumably, Vedeneev ordered the audit in order to discredit my analysis and Istories' investigation. Instead, the report confirms my findings.
and Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social
You can find my original analysis here:
https://rys.io/en/179.htmltl;dr: for every device, Telegram generates a long-term identifier, auth_key_id, that is then prepended *cleartext* (or at best, trivially obfuscated) to every encrypted packet; this allows anyone with sufficient visibility into global Telegram traffic to spy on its users.
Monday May 18th, 2026
Yesterday afternoon we went down to Copperfield's to see Mac Barnett in conversation with Jon Scieszka about Mac's new book Make Believe: On Telling Stories To Children. Two funny people talking very thoughtfully about relating to children. If you have the opportunity to hear 'em talk, do.
Love me a good takedown of.... investments of dubious quality, especially since I ran into the "EM thruster" stuff back when I was doing the transporation consulting: Ars Technica: Casimir force co-opted to generate free energy, midichlorians not included
This week, a company called Casimir Inc. emerged from “stealth mode” to announce that it had raised significant funding from venture capitalists willing to roll the dice on free energy. That’s right: a startup has gotten serious backing to develop sources of perpetual free energy. The people behind this fantastic new energy generator also brought us the wildly successful
WTF thrusterEM-drive that could supposedly directly convert electricity into a propulsive force.
Essentially, "AI" discovered bugs/security holes are public, and should be treated as such, rather than being managed in privileged spaces without disclosure.
Over the years I've read with horror the various things that state schools have done to native and indigenous children and families, but often assuaged that sense with the notion that this was all in the past, or in Canada, historical harms, and surely we were more civilized now...
NPR: Native kids with disabilities were held in wooden boxes. Sweeping reforms are coming
FORT COVINGTON, N.Y. — Rumors spread on social media over the winter: School kids with disabilities in the Salmon River Central School District, including Akwesasne Mohawk children, were being confined by special education teachers in wooden boxes. Sarah Konwahahawi Herne was devastated.
Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate plausible but false information across a wide range of contexts, yet the real-world magnitude and consequences of this hallucination problem remain poorly understood. Here we leverage a uniquely verifiable object - scientific citations - to audit 111 million references across 2.5 million papers in arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and PubMed Central. We find a sharp rise in non- existent references following widespread LLM adoption, with a conservative estimate of 146,932 hallucinated citations in 2025 alone. These errors are diffusely embedded across many papers but especially pronounced in fields with rapid AI uptake, in manuscripts with linguistic signatures of AI-assisted writing, and among small and early-career author teams. At the same time, hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition. Preprint moderation and journal publication processes capture only a fraction of these errors, suggesting that the spread of hallucinated content has outpaced existing safeguards. Together, these findings demonstrate that LLM hallucinations are infiltrating knowledge production at scale, threatening both the reliability and equity of future scientific discovery as human and AI systems draw on the existing literature.
Which brings us to: Fuck yeah! Tech Crunch: Research repository ArXiv will ban authors for a year if they let AI do all the work.
404 Media: ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop
One of the amazing things about this is the number of people who are whining that it's unfair that they've actually read the work they're citing, or are creating other hypotheticals. This doofucs on the Fediverse is, for instance, willing to lay the blame on his co-authors in order to take the credit.
It gets worse if you head over to X/Twitter, which... I'm not gonna link to individually, you can find your own list off of Thomas G. Dietterich @tdietterich's announcement of the policy there, but honestly, people if these are the arguments y'all are making in good faith, academia is irretrievably broken.
Which I've long contented anyway, but... damn...
Saturday May 16th, 2026
Reading the Suisun Expansion Specific Plan ("California Forever"), and mostly it's a look at how we could have beautiful things in our own cities if we could balance out the voices of the older NIMBY automobile violence advocates.
And maybe allow a little less emphasis on the voices of people who live in sprawl outside the city...
Took Charlene for some medical tests, while she was in with the tech the people behind the desk were talking about "what's cool with the kids". One mentioned a Hacky Sack, another asked "What's a Hacky Sack?"
I just had to interject: "Some of you spent the '90s sober, and it shows."
Friday May 15th, 2026
Baldur Bjarnason: The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born
If you have two economies of equal size and productivity, one has a massive financial sector and billionaires while the other does not, the financialised economy will have less left over to invest in research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Over time, it will inevitably fall behind the country with a smaller financial sector because it’s the other things that drive the economy and productivity, not stock market growth.
Went to Santa Rosa YIMBY this evening, came home with a book. Two or three of you are going "oooh, cool", the rest are like "WTF, Dan? This is geekier than when you're on your computer stuff..."
Thursday May 14th, 2026
Santa Clara County Sues Meta for Making Billions from ‘Scam Ads’ on Facebook and Instagram
The complaint alleges that Meta tracks up to 15 billion scam ads shown to users every day across its platforms, generating $7 billion in revenue. The county said in its complaint that Meta’s own systems flag ads that are likely scams but, instead of stopping them, charges scammers a premium price.
Nature Human Behavior: The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA
Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s. Here we find evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms. First, demographic realignment within political coalitions brought less healthy individuals into the conservative camp. Yet by the 2020s, demographic change, public policy and COVID-19 do not fully account for the widening gap in mortality rates. Public opinion data are consistent with a second mechanism: declining trust in medical professionals among right- leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness, even for issues unrelated to COVID-19.
He was told to sign a non-disclosure agreement, furnish a copy of his identification card, and was issued with a "letter of guarantee" for reimbursement within 15 business days
Via.
If, like our household, you are hooked on the Hallmark series "The Way Home", someone has pieced together the song "Breathe" and recorded it.
You Can't Spell @cantspell@mastodon.social
You can't spell artificial intelligence without a lie citing interface
This thread: Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social
Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents.
I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.
Wait, so basic functionality in MacOS has been broken for at least two and a half years?
Sigh.
Wednesday May 13th, 2026
The transcripts. Holy shit. “Will I be OK?” Teen died after ChatGPT pushed deadly mix of drugs, lawsuit says
Via.
Oh, you mean the complaints about remote learning not working were largely bullshit, and the children's happiness at not being forced into bullying situations was seen as a downside? Golly, who might have thought that the advocates for violence against non- conforming children might be willing to draw false conclusions?
Kids' test scores began declining way before COVID. These schools are making gains
The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long "learning recession" that began years before COVID-19's arrival. That's according to the latest Education Scorecard, an annual deep-dive into student data from The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University and Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research.
Tuesday May 12th, 2026
Back in the early naughts I had an elderly friend who hung out at the same coffee shop as me. Journalist with many cool experiences.
He became convinced that he'd finally figured out a mechanism for betting on horses.
This is also a post about conversations with people on how they use LLMs.