Monday July 27th, 2026
What have we wrought? Datatype: A variable font that turns text into charts.
Via.
Whatever happened to Google search? I'm trying to find if Emily Wilson has written anything on "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou", and the "AI" summary is sending me down links that, of course, don't say what the summary claims.
But even the Google excerpts are just bogus now.
I went looking for a non-paywalled, non-Bezos-owned version of Washington Post: Deadly U.S. boat strikes have failed to curb cocaine supply, Pentagon and DEA officials say that everybody's linking to, and, yeah, the indie people were on the story a week ago: Breaking Defense: The US military campaign to stop drug trafficking has failed. It’s time to move on.
According to US Customs and Border Protection, more cocaine was seized by US authorities in the eight months since the boat strikes started compared to the eight months preceding them. Cocaine prices have remained stable across this time frame as well, which suggests there aren’t any supply shocks. The market is well stocked. In short, if the US objective is to reduce trafficking, then Washington’s own statistics show that Operation Southern Spear is doing absolutely nothing.
I mean, given that the current administration and its well-heeled supporters are probably the majority of the cocaine demand in the US, it's silly on its face to assume that they'd pursue a policy that actually impacts supply (unless it lets their cronies raise prices), but it's also unsurprising that shooting up a bunch of fishermen for sport impacts supply either.
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️ @foone@digipres.club
39 year ago, the debut single of a young singer was released, which would one day change the world forever. Let's celebrate together!
Way back in 2016, at the Maple Leafs Regroup square dance convention on Toronto, a bunch of us newer callers let ourselves into a room after the normal dancing started, and called to each other until we couldn't stand up any more. The 2017 Palm Springs organizers got wind of this, asked me if I'd take responsibility for a room, and the tradition was born.
I haven't been back to many IAGSDC Conventions since COVID, we went to San Francisco, but missed Montreal this year. Apparently, though, the activity is ongoing, and one of the callers who's carrying on this tradition and is writing something up emailed me for a quote, and I'm not sure I gave her anything pithy or quotable, but I'm copying what I wrote here:
I think people give me credit for Zombie Caller School in the same way that neighborhood parents might wonder about the thought process that led the sewing machine to be tied to the clothesline and dangled from the barn roof, and know that I must have been involved somehow. Aside from being the usual bad influence, I think the only "push" I gave it is that I said "yes" when people asked if I'd be willing to take responsibility for the room to reprise what we, collectively and without a clear leader, did guerrilla style in Toronto.
And if I'm going to have any influence going forward, 'cause at this point me referring to myself as a newer caller or student is like the thirty-something hanging out with high school kids, it's that...
Along with going down to the Sunnyvale caller workshops, Charlene and I have been participating in singing circles recently. They're generally led by someone, often there's a "big" name, but the song leaders make a lot of space for people who have a song idea they want to share with the group, It's tough, because you don't want to turn it into an open mic for everyone who has a trauma issue, but it's also about fostering new leaders, and reinforcing that this isn't a constructed experience, it's a strongly participatory one. We're co-creating these spaces.
This is something that bugs me about square dancing, that it is so hierarchical. One of the things I love about the Sunnyvale caller workshops is that there's a lot of "I think I see what you're trying to do, let me show you what I think would work", and there's much more of a sense of working with peers, rather than the caller being somehow on a different tier than the dancers.
I don't know what it looks like to the activity at large. There are some people who will only ever dance and that's fine, but we *need* more callers, and I really want to foster the idea that we're all bringing something more to guiding and shaping this, and co- creating it, not just dancing.
So if the original Zombie Callers was us saying "I missed caller school this year, how are y'all progressing?" to each other (and learning things, I remember Diana's "aha" that night about Chicken Pluckers after *how* many caller schools?), what I hope it's becoming is a place to foster that square dancing as a collaborative activity, rather than an experience that the "Callers" deliver to the "Dancers".
There's this idea that I've seen floating around in various essays since at least the '90s, it probably goes back further, that synchronized dance is the art form of fascism. That the masses of troops marching in synchrony in Red Square or Pyongyang are a symptom of a hierarchy that's pretty disturbing. And I've often wondered about the post WWII rise of square dancing, and the ways in which MWSD is very much tied to recorded music and amplified voice, and tried to deconstruct how it fits into that.
Obviously, I love square dancing. But, as a domme friend once suggested, calling does sometimes feel like topping in a group scene. Maybe there's room for it to be something more as a conversation between equals, a coordination of anarchy.
Anyway, if I can get back into the habit of going to convention, that's the direction I'd like to see it evolve. Zombie Callers feels like dipping a toe in.
It's not just lawyers: A Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court Transcript, Judge Says.
In a memorandum decision concerning a case about a man who sold drugs to another man who overdosed and died, filed on July 23, Judge Paul Felix wrote in a footnote of the decision that a transcript contained errors that looked a lot like generative AI. The footnote was spotted by attorney Rob Freund on X.
Via.
But the optimists have not given up. Some suggest the so-called Jevons paradox that argues that increased efficiency (from AI) will lead to increased demand as unit costs of spending on AI falls. That will generate the profitability that AI companies are seeking and the stock market is hoping for. But only 2% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI productivity during Q1 2026 earnings calls. And among those that did, the focus was overwhelmingly on cost savings rather than revenue growth. This raises serious questions about how the hundreds of billions in investment can be expected to turn into profits, let alone revenue.
Via.
Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction. The song is David Bowie's Five Years: lyrics.
Via.
Stephen Follows: What just happened to The Numbers should worry us all. The Numbers is a film industry tracking site, this is the story of how scraping brought it to its knees.
Brought by Scott Winters, a 55-year-old pastor and real estate professional, the lawsuit, which accuses OpenAI of negligence and of engaging in the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” is the first known case to argue that a general use chatbot should be liable for bad medical advice. News of the lawsuit was first reported by The New York Times.
ChatGPT wrote her “resignation.” She says she never meant to quit.
Run The World cofounder Xuan Jiang testified that she asked ChatGPT to reject a roughly $380,000 buyout, but the AI‑generated email said she was stepping down, which the company now cites in its summary‑judgment motion.
Via.
Hacker News comment by thaumaturgy on the reasons they hate LLMs. Via.
AI vs Human: Lessons from AI detection. Via.
I probably already linked another take on this, but... Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron. Via.
Tesla swapped a solar owner’s lease contract for the Book of Enoch.
A Tesla solar customer went to pull up their lease agreement in their Tesla account this month and found something other than a contract waiting for them: the Book of Enoch, an ancient apocalyptic text about fallen angels.
Via.
The Rose City Riveters are a fan club for the Portland Thorns women's soccer team.
The are not happy about being featured in an ad that used images of them to promote "Treasure AI" (no link, 'cause it's an AI company, they're not gonna be around long): Human Connections Matter - An open letter to the Thorns Front Office.
Via.
Inspired by someone who got a worse answer, I tried this, and, yeah, find me a human that would answer this "yes, it clearly is" question with "no".
Anyway, Sam Altman thinks we've hit the singularity.
Just ran across the word "mechanthropomorphism" in Peter F Hamilton's "Pandora's Star", and I like it and the concept a lot.
Sunday July 26th, 2026
I've never been up in this San Rafael neighborhood before.
Like This Post, the back side mechanism.
Like This Post, in its open configuration, button pressed.
Like this post, in its closed configuration. With picture.
Like this post, in its closed configuration
Some days it's scrap wood to excise the ideas from my brain... Anyway, we have a post next to our driveway that's no longer used for anything, but I like it, so I built something to encourage people to like this post...
Friday July 24th, 2026
I have been way off my exercise game and trying to get back on it. This morning I did 3 laps on the Quarry Heights stairs (208 plus a few), and this evening 8 on the McNear Landing stairs (50) so over a thousand.
I realize that's only like 7-800' vertical at sea level (+ hill to and from), but...
Gavin Newsom supports return to office so that we'll fall in love with our coworkers...
The jokes write themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/live/I...zjc?si=9cwOIAgVmwycd1M-&t=48m13s
One of life's little justices is that "WAP" will forever be associated in my mind with Cardi B, and not Curtis Yarvin.
Thursday July 23rd, 2026
Well, that was unexpected. I just sold a "traffic congestion drives positive outcomes" T-shirt (after how many years of it just sitting there after I ordered one for me...).
https://www.teepublic.com/t-sh...gestion-drives-positive-outcomes
Wednesday July 22nd, 2026
For the moment I've abandoned Firefox, though I do still have Waterfox on various machines. But this seems super useful: Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io
TIL in Firefox about:config:
widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled = false
widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.thumb-size = 1
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 4
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 16Gets you scrollbars that are actually visible and clickable with the mouse.
Merely having access to AI nearly eliminated participants’ willingness to suspend judgment, and this held whether the advice was actively requested or simply displayed. Consequently, participants answered more questions but were correct about a third as often as when AI was unavailable—yet their confidence nearly doubled. Incentivizing accuracy and penalizing inaccuracy led participants to seek and follow AI advice less, answer more accurately, and suspend judgment more often, though still far less than when AI was unavailable. As AI suggestions grow ubiquitous and unsolicited, they may not simply affect answer accuracy; they may even alter the metacognitive threshold at which people decide whether they know enough to answer.
From The Register: Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something.
Capraro said that he believes this is an issue that needs to be dealt with at a societal level through AI literacy and education policy initiatives. "Of course model providers should try to help, but I would imagine that the incentives are not very much aligned," he said. "A much more promising approach would be at the educational level."
Ah, that pesky "alignment" problem...
Via.
I've had The Next Web: Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron tab open for a day or two now, haven't posted it here because... well... I didn't take the time to dig into it, and anyone who's been following Ed Zitron knows the balance sheets are hinky, but today it seems to have gotten around to Tom's Hardware: AI tech companies have ‘hidden debt’ worth around $1.65 trillion, report claims — amount is 122% of debt reflected on the balance sheets of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Anyway, AMD is selling Anthropic AI servers while investing up to $5B in Anthropic.
I mean, it's not quite Miniscribe shipping bricks, but...
Dan Cornell @danielcornell@mastodon.social
So if today's hype cycle is to be believed, some OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face
Cool. Cool
I'm just curious - which OpenAI execs are going to have their lives ruined and go to jail for this?
Asking for Aaron Swartz
In other news, the judge approved the Anthropic $1.5B slap on the wrist.
Edit: Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io
Propaganda: "Our AI is so advanced it can escape sandbox containment!"
Reality: "Our AI spits out such shit sandboxing patterns that they don't actually do anything, and since our employees just blindly use what it gives them, there was no meaningful 'sandbox escape' needed."
Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose
One buyout firm quietly collected Pyrex, Corelle, Instant Pot, and Oneida. Farberware is a name on a 200-year lease. And the pans still worth buying.
One thing I hadn't been aware of is just how much of the anti-Teflon/PFAS stuff was inter- brand warfare.
(I use cast iron where stickiness is an issue)
Facebook don't ask me to post "Happy Birthday" on the profiles of dead people challenge.
I almost gave up on the https://anticrastination.fyi podcast because the dysfunction was like far too many meetings I've been in recently, as much as it tried to be over the top it just felt like documentary.
But somewhere around stair 500 this morning it clicked with me.
Ah, yes, it's great that we forked that repository so that you could make changes while my system continued to just run.
So, uh, why is my system needing attention this morning?
Good morning, Petaluma!
(The Dairyman's Feed silos tower over the Petaluma River with the sprawl of Petaluma laid out around it. Everything illuminated by the very first rays of sunlight, in sharp chiaroscuro.)
The thing about listening to podcast ads is, aside from scammy privacy invading online therapy companies, LinkedIn bragging how their users are particularly ad-susceptible.
You know what I love about Node package managers? They manage to take what could be clean code that runs nicely in different environments, and makes sure that that code will only run on very specific systems with their dependencies configured *just so*.
Nina Jankowicz: I Got Trapped in the AI Ouroboros
A foreign news outlet fabricated a quote from me. LLMs have already picked it up.
Tuesday July 21st, 2026
Sorry I missed this: Doctor M. Popular: Chuck Tingle at the Internet Archive in SF.
ICE is lying about body cams. These documents prove it.
Not only did ICE not purchase the body cams “as soon as they had funding,” but ICE had not purchased the body cams at the time of Homan’s statements, according to government contracting documents unearthed by Popular Information. On July 17 and July 20 — days after the Homan interview — a division of ICE, the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs</span> , issued two <span>delivery</span> orders for $30.9 million of body cams.
I do a lot of dunking on LLMs and "AI" image generation, but I'm not against machine learning generally and think throwing lots of compute at problems can be really cool. How To Train a Generative Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop With 6GB of VRAM.
Saved off for later, and for you organic chemistry nerds: Roche Biochemical Pathways posters.
Olivia Guest writes about "Entryism" in AI and cognition arguments.
Via.
Oooh: Asset forfeiture reaches the Supreme Court: Supreme Court to hear from Alaskan bush pilot whose plane was confiscated over a six- pack of beer.
In 2012, now 82 year old pilot Kenneth Jouppi flew some passengers into the town of Beaver Alaska, which is dry. One of them had 3 cases of beer in their luggage, Beaver is a dry town, the state has been going after his Cessna.
The writing we use, the very substrate of our culture, is the result of a process older than we can comprehend. Who are we to decide that process is finished? That the time of invention and human input is done, and every letter created from now on should be a remix of what came before?
Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’
"The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in… If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two."
Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies
From divination and horoscopes and from ELIZA to present-day large language models, I document how people have been thinking with things, outsourcing judgement, and making sense of interactively presented non-sense. Following the lead of Lucy Suchman to “slow down discourses of the ‘smart’ machines”, I consider the interactional foundations of our engagement with technologies of language. I make the case that the fluid output, fine-tuned overconfidence, and interactive design of these computational artefacts conspire to exploit our interpretive processes and interactional infrastructure, rendering them irresistible to lay people and researchers alike.
Semgrep: You Can't Reverse Engineer Your Way Out of the AI Supply Chain Problem. The pitch is for "trusted third parties", which, great, spend some money on that, but horse and barn and all.
Restaurant in Major Trouble After Posting AI Pictures of “Its Food” links to SFGate: San Francisco restaurant gets angry backlash for AI menu images and Reddit: Yum, slop. The place is called Grind & Unwind, proprietors AJ and Lyndsey Lozano, no links 'cause they're not gonna be around long enough to matter.
Via A. Rivera who introduced me to the term "cogsucker".
I Watched a 55-Year-Old Law Break the AI Hiring Industry — And It Was Overdue, on how the lawsuit against Eightfold AI rests on the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970:
The legal theory in Kistler v. Eightfold is elegant: if Eightfold generates match scores based on harvested data, and those scores are used by employers to filter candidates, then Eightfold is functioning as a consumer reporting agency. Full stop. And every candidate it scored was entitled to disclosure, access, and dispute rights that they never received.
Via.
Monday July 20th, 2026
I could swear that at some point I ran across an economic analysis of Petaluma's auto mall and its net benefits/costs to the city, but I cannot find it. Anyone got a lead?
Sunday July 19th, 2026
I propose that when NIMBYs complain about "insufficient outreach" for a project that pretty much everyone within 25 miles knew was happening for at least 5 years, that we deliver announcements of new projects within a similar radius by kicking down their doors and delivering notice in their bedrooms.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/a...rafael-housing-boom-22339216.php
Working on an English Walnut picture frame, wood harvested from a friend's yard...
Friday July 17th, 2026
So, (()=>{...;})(), we meet again!
The urge to scream "that's not how music licensing works at all!" at a piece of fiction using song ownership as a plot point...
I wanna see a pedestrian and transit first city, and I'm pretty sure that the only way for that to happen in the US is something like California Forever, so I'm bummed that they lost the shipyard deal to Texas, but Trump era war spending also seems like a shakey foundation.
https://sfist.com/2026/07/16/c...rnia-forever-loses-shipbuilding/
I've been trying to get out early and go up the steps on the hill in the local new subdivision.
I can't run up it in one shot yet, have to stop and rest, so it's kinda... Stops and stairs
Samir Talwar: LLMs can't program, in which the author reports from a two day workshop on "spec driven programming".
Via.
Ashley Brouillette told a reporter that she wanted to speak publicly because she had previously reported concerns to his superiors in the military about David Brouillette’s mental health. She said he was abusive in their relationship.
And that he called her and asked her to lie to cover him...
Thursday July 16th, 2026
In which an essayist talks about how LLM usage is destroying their staff's morale, while cluelessly using image generation to illustrate said lament: Stackademic: My Best Senior Engineer Quit Last Month. Her Exit Interview Was Scheduled for Forty Minutes. The Last Five Changed How I Run My Team.
She said: “I haven’t built anything in eight months. I’ve spent eight months reading things a machine wrote, trying to find the bug it was too confident to see. I’m not an engineer here anymore. I’m a verification layer for an agent. I didn’t spend ten years getting good at this to become the thing that stands between a model and the incident it’s about to cause. I’m tired in a way that has nothing to do with hours.”
My ear buds: "I dunno, man, I may have heard of your phone, once..."
My car: "Oh, hey, I realize you turned off the audio but I dug through your phone and found the raunchiest erotic podcast, your passengers are gonna listen to that now."
Friend from way back is reinventing as a digital artist, went through the NFT phase, and is referencing Pepe the Frog because "Pepe is a very popular in the Web3 space".
Yikes, and it's amazing how the bubbles of what's acceptable surround us.