Monday August 17th, 2026
Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It’s Almost Hard to Believe
Drawing from an CNBC poll, New CNBC Generation Lab poll shows almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds see democratic socialism positively
When given the names of nine key people in the AI industry and asked whether they trust each leader to act responsibly on AI, in each case a majority of respondents said they don’t. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella scored the best, with 65% reporting they don’t trust him. Palantir CEO Alex Karp scored the worst: 81% said they don’t trust him. About 75% of respondents said they don’t trust Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and about the same percentage said they don’t trust Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk all scored about the same, each with about 70% of respondents saying they don’t trust them, and 79% said they don’t trust Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel.
Catching up on older links: Operator fatigue is a thing: Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated, in which a transcription error snowballs.
Australia's peak regulator of medical practitioners, AHPRA, said clinicians must always check all output from an AI scribe for accuracy to ensure they meet their professional obligations. Ms Green said it was clear her doctor did not do this.
"If you had checked that letter you would have been able to correct that before it was sent out … why aren't you in tune with each of your patients and what's going on?"
Unexpected Findings Add New Insight on Cannabis and Heart Health
Habitual cannabis users experienced about 9% fewer premature heartbeats on days they inhaled cannabis compared with days they abstained, a counterintuitive finding that adds to the complex and evolving understanding of how cannabis affects the heart, new UC San Francisco-led research found.
Sunday August 16th, 2026
We're house sitting for some neighbors who expressed that they're having a little trouble with some steps up and down in their house, I had some Simpson decorative bolts, and some Ipé I'm gonna slap these grab bars in those places when they're gone.
Saturday August 15th, 2026
Cat pic!
Friday August 14th, 2026
Dear deities. I'm watching a Nate B. Jones video for work, and the ads... the ads make me need a shower. With like steel wool to scrub off the ick.
I don't know if this is where YouTube ads have gone generally, but these things are making Meta ads look legit.
Vancouver Sun: Concert review: AC/DC Power Up Vancouver again — and are far better than in 2025
By the time the final cannon salvo echoed over the arena during the concert closer For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), the crowd exited smiling and, in many cases, well-juiced. Outside the arena exit gates, rows of teens were waiting to drive their parents home.
Idly musing that the Therac-25 cautionary tale I learned about in my undergrad software engineering course resulted in a total of (IIRC) 6 medical injuries over about 4 years. And that was considered horrific and required immediate changes to how computers were used in medicine.
is a good jumping off point for the various replies talking about layers of redundance, hardware interlocks, cost benefit analyses, and more. 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 @brouhaha@mastodon.social, further down thread, sen @sen@hachyderm.io
Lots of fascinating stuff in Schneier on Security: AI Use by the US Government:
The international gold standard was arguably set by the French in 2016, via their Digital Republic Act. The law, itself informed by an online citizen consultation, requires all algorithms used to automate government administrative decisions to be subject to public records requests, to be appealable to a human reviewer, and to have mandatory notification of the use of automation to those affected by the decisions.
Via.
Apparently there's a 'tuber (my whitewater days leave me unable to separate the "You" and "inner-" meanings of that word from the botanical ones, hat tip to William Nealy) named Hank Green who's been pushing ControlAI and "AI doom" as undisclosed paid marketing, [object Object] @zzt@mas.to has a thread going into further detail on Pivot to AI: The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers.
Thursday August 13th, 2026
This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.
Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data.
Via Jocelynephiliac @twipped@twipped.social who noted:
We're really hitting the "finding out" era of cloud compute, aren't we?
Jason Gorman: codemanship: AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say? (Via).
If you're looking for more writing by someone who's consistently been right about the current "AI" boom, Timnit Gebru's book Deep Unlearning is available for pre-order. (Via)
Brett codes: I'm Done Using AI, on the path through using AI assistants for coding, and then, of course, realizing that the mental atrophy is setting in. Via pretty much everywhere, but here.
Buncha people linking to Annie Sexton's Compression is prediction, which is a lot of old territory if you're already a programmer, but eventually gets around to the notion that an LLM is a lossy compression of the Internet, while referencing the Google Language Modeling Is Compression paper from 2023. (Via)
And, finally, in "oh, honey, no, you didn't actually..." DOCKET NO. AAN-CV-25-6066141-S : MATTHEW A. ELLIOTT V. NEW YORK BARIATRIC GROUP, LLC : : SUPERIOR COURT JUDICIAL DISTRICТ OF ANSONIA/MILFORD AT MILFORD AUGUST 6, 2026 MEMORANDUM OF DECISION COURT SANCTION FOR PLAINTIFF'S USE OF PROMPT-INJECTION ("the plaintiff is self-represented"👀)
The Court further finds that this conduct is irreconcilable with the good- faith certification required of every filer under Connecticut Practice Book $4-2(b) and 4-9, and that it is an abuse of the filing process and an affront to the integrity of these proceedings, over which the Court has inherent authority.
"No more electronic filing for you!" (Via Tara Calishain and Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. among others)
Today I learned about https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel , a command-line tool to talk to the Apple FoundationModels that run locally on Macs. 4k tokens on MacOS 26, 8k on MacOS 27.
Also https://github.com/scouzi1966/maclocal-api for an OpenAI API, can run other models (like Qwen).
Wednesday August 12th, 2026
Just to prove that I'm not "whine about AI all the time", last night I ended up hanging at the workshop of a computing luminary for a an hour or two, and among the topics we covered was Shelly devices for home automation, and... I don't know how proprietary the software for these things is, but holy crap they look awesome.
Nice small relays, with isolation (so you can switch 220V and power them with 110V, or in some cases, 12v or 24-48v), some of them have inputs so that you can use them to augment an existing switch, and configure them to edge trigger or level trigger in various ways (so that you can use the WiFi-ness of these things as one leg of a 3 way switch, turning them off and on with an existing switch).
Looks like the ecosystem has some really cool environmental sensors, too.
But the big thing is the form factor is small and easily embedded in stuff (no more trying to mash a big ol' over-sized smart switch into a box), and they're not outrageously priced.
Google’s AI Team Tells Job Seekers Its HR Filters Are Unreliable
Google DeepMind's AGI Safety and Alignment Team, which seeks to mitigate the risks of advanced AI, is encouraging job candidates for its open roles to fill out a special form alongside their application to eliminate the risk it may be automatically screened out by the company's internal AI systems, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg, which contained the disclaimer "PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOC WIDELY."
As Gabriele Svelto @gabrielesvelto@mas.to notes:
We don't eat our own dog food because frankly it tastes like shit
Excellent forensic research published by Snyk, Trend Micro, and Cycode has thoroughly detailed the mechanics of this breach. The attack did not begin with LiteLLM. Instead, TeamPCP first compromised the GitHub Actions pipeline for Trivy, a highly popular open-source vulnerability scanner.
Via.
Nature is strange: Fish climbing in the upper Congo Basin (Central Africa), first report for the shellear Parakneria thysi on the Luvilombo Falls.
Specimens climb the vertical wall of the falls (~ 15 m high) in the splash zone during major floods, usually occurring at the end of the rainy season (April–May), using their pectoral fins, supported by their pelvic fins.
Interesting musings on software design and purpose: Is Aphera a Lightroom replacement?
Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’. Apparently Time started serving pages as markdown for the consumption of AI agents, started serving ads in that markdown, and...
The ads work by having ad tech firm Mobian generate FAQ-formatted content based on a brand brief, then insert it into Time’s markdown pages and track how often AI search engines surface it, and how favorably. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had their brand-written, brand-approved messaging sit in the same markdown version of the page an agent reads as fact. If a page’s markdown version can be quietly seeded with paid content, users have no way of knowing whether an answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief, appears Perplexity’s logic.
One of the big problems with LLMs is that there is no control channel. Sure, the "system" prompt may get weighted more heavily, but everything is data.
Kinda like humans, come to think of it...🤔 [goes and updates ad blocker]
Via.
May used Meta AI to make the cover, which resurrects late frontman Freddie Mercury. He did so in order to make a “very serious” point about the environmental impact of AI to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
But I'm now very serious. I believe the price we are about to pay for this 'inevitable' development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK.
Science Alert: 'Virtually Absent': AI Models Practically Erase Female Characters From Kids' Stories
In this paper, we use anthropomorphic fiction as a stress test for gender representation in contemporary LLMs. Across 23.8K story completions, we find that models frequently respond to gender ambiguity through avoidance, either by repeating the animal noun or using neutral pronouns. This surface-level neutrality does not translate into equitable representation. When the models do explicitly assign gender, they overwhelmingly default to masculine protagonists, while feminine protagonists are nearly absent. This experiment leads us to a broader claim about AI alignment with regard to gender and broader social representation: neutrality bites. In other words, we argue that prioritizing neutrality with regard to representations of gender, race, sexuality, or other identity categories, above all else, can function less as inclusion and more as erasure. <?blockquote>
Via.
David Culley has some thoughts on Transformers and human susceptibility.
Great Scott Gadgets: LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects
Our communities are already noticing a shift away from collaborative stewardship and toward transactional interactions with projects, and we’re seeing open source project maintainers left to deal with increasing volumes of generated code. When people interact privately with systems trained on communities, it gradually weakens the shared understanding of how projects work and redistributes the burden more heavily onto (often underfunded) project owners.
Via.
Obligatory cat picture
For the love of all the deities, just send me the damned prompt, stop asking me to read LLM output. It's so clumsy and convoluted that I can't tell if you* have an interesting thought under there, or not.
- For specific values of "you" that are probably not the reader of this.
I too exhibit a present flagrance...
Cal Newport: On AI Coding and Its Discontents (Via).
The Carlson Lab: The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI, on text regurgitation and the destruction of an academic career that comes from plagiarism. (Via Stephen Royle @steveroyle@biologists.social, Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe, among others).
1Password: Off-by-1 Labs: Why AI-generated vulnerability patches still require expert human review
We studied what happens when Large Language Models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for recently disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. Our data shows that LLMs produce Fix-Like Artifacts with Embedded Defects (FLAWED) 53.9% of the time when complex patches are required.
Tuesday August 11th, 2026
Oh god. You know that thing where to understand code, you have to go through and strip out all of the misleading comments.
And you know how LLMs meticulously comment code.
And... yeah. I just hit one of those.
Which is why I'm looking for different work.
OH:
"Being a horndog is not a new thing it's the oldest thing."
"No but "trans woman in Starfleet uniform" is new to me"
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.
Edit: Colin Cornaby @colincornaby@mastodon.social looks at the Chisnal thread and notes:
I looked at the replies to this post, did some more digging, and found the actual story is *even weirder.*
BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who. Kind of embarrassing.
The one guy claiming his Claude generated code as an original creation no one else can "copy" is maybe the most embarrassing part.
And bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social
The Dark Hours author who just published his Claude "Mea Culpa" has a history of being full of shit: https://daringfireball.net/202..._app_store_rejection_of_the_week
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.