Thursday February 12th, 2026
Michael W Lucas @mwl@io.mwl.io:
Inspired by a discussion elsewhere:
I've been on the Internet since 1987, started a career building the commercial Internet in 1995, and have spent the last 25 years writing books about how to build foundational Internet infrastructure. I've consulted for and worked with any number of dot-coms, and the one lesson I've gotten over and over again?
The Internet's business model is betrayal.
We have no smart lights. No voice assistants. No Alexa or Siri. No video doorbell. Our thermostat and appliances constantly complain about their lack of Internet. None of this stuff is safe.
The Internet tech I do use? A desktop PC. Email on my phone is for travel only: airplane tickets, hotel reservations, hockey and concert tix. Location on my phone? Nope, we use a dedicated non-networked GPS in the car. The microphones are off.
How can a light bulb betray me? I don't know. I do know that the vendors have put a LOT of thought into it, though, and I can't out-think all of them.
If GenX would stop using "f/u" to mean "follow-up" in email subject lines, I wouldn't complain.
KJ Charles has a Bluesky thread about the AI powered evolutions in the "book club" scam.
Wednesday February 11th, 2026
Mexican Cartel ‘Drones’ Near El Paso Airspace Were Actually Party Balloons: Report
This article was updated to note that CNN reports there were at least four party balloons shot down by DOD, not just one.
Wishlisting cameras to replace our Ring system, and holy shit marketing departments are failing. Looks like Reolink is the leader, but digging through each product description and trying to figure out how these things fit together is a total pain in the ass.
User stories, folks. Use them.
Max Leibman @maxleibman@beige.party
Oh, sure—when *the company* automates my job and keeps collecting the profits, that's "innovation," but when *I* automate my job and keep collecting a paycheck, that's "timeclock fraud."
We should not have to keep pointing this out, but... T he Register: AI connector for Google Calendar makes convenient malware launchpad, researchers show
Our recommendation is straightforward:
Until meaningful safeguards are introduced, MCP connectors should not be used on systems where security matters.
Via.
Assaad Abousleiman on LinkedIn
The last decade of software was built to capture attention.
The next decade will be built to give it back.
I don't agree with his "plausible sentence generators are the future" conclusion that the rest of this essay goes on to conclude, but I like the strong opener. We have a decade or so of computing that's actively user hostile, and we need software which we can trust, which is on our side.
I do agree with two points:
First, that we need to treat the computing developments of the last decade or decade and a half as actively hostile. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al all have gone completely over from enabling us to finding ways extracting every possible bit of value from us.
Built in applications on our platform have gone from utilities to worthless for our own data unless we cave to demands for additional subscription payments. From media players to just using our own damned hard drives, it's getting harder and harder to use our own data, the focus becomes ways to sell us mediated subscriptions.
We're no longer in control of what we see, instead we're being fed information that serves the wants of capital in ways that emotionally triggers us, with automated measures of the efficacy of those information feeds. Our conversations with our friends and our communities are being mediated by hostile forces.
In the social media and email tools of the '90s, we had the ability to build incredibly nuanced filters to help us automatically control what information we were going to let the assholes impose on our lives. Now, the best of these tools (things like Mastodon on the Fediverse) give us simple yeah/nay keyword filtering.
Second, that this software needs to help us automate processes that we currently do manually. As operating systems have moved from the command-line to GUI, we've lost the physical artifacts of process. I think it's worth diving deeper into this.
Every use of an LLM to write code is an acknowledgement of the failure of the programming languages that it's implementing code in. We can describe the process well enough that a lossy plausible sentence generator can guess at what we meant, why can't we make the language express that same meaning unambiguously, in ways that are accessible?
We need a move forward in computing language design to give us languages with grammars flexible enough that people can express, and we can iteratively guide them into a repeatable formal definition that they understand, and that the computers can deterministically execute.
Finally, we need business models, and computing tools, that serve us, rather than those who are looking to further exploit us.
Thinking about those videos that came out of the occupation of Iraqi cities of US forces shooting up commuters and people just trying to get around and live their daily lives, and how somehow our political process decided that it was a good idea to bring that chaos to domestic policing.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/...nas-coffee-ice-car-crash-st-paul
Tuesday February 10th, 2026
I spent $20,000 and two weeks in 32 different McDonalds. Then I put it all in one big bag and shook it. When I looked inside, I found most of one Big Mac. This changes everything.
On the bus in 101 northbound traffic. Fuck your reduced HOV lane hours.
Zero Tolerance on attorney AI use is a press-release worthy marketing tool: Powerhouse Litigation Shop Troutman Amin, LLP Bucks Legal AI Trend: Announces "Zero Tolerance" Policy For Generative AI Usage By Firm Attorneys
"The use of any generative AI software in the practice of law is a complete disgrace." Firm founder Eric J. Troutman says. "We look to hire and train the best lawyers in the world-true legal talents that would never trust some hallucinating software program to do their job for them. The laziness and poor judgment on display at some law firms right now is simply astounding."
Monday February 9th, 2026
Fucking yikes! A Reuters special report: As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts.
At least 10 people were injured between late 2021 and November 2025, according to the reports. Most allegedly involved errors in which the TruDi Navigation System misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads during operations.
Via.
Oh snap: Jennifer 🍄 @JenYetAgain@beige.party
in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with.
this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.
This is fascinating: Tracing the social half-life of a zombie citation. In which the author starts working backwards from a reference to an academic paper with his name on it that he had not written, and looks at how references to that paper have evolved, with various different subtitles.
Finally, is AI really to blame here? When I first posted about my experience with the zombie citation, the library scientist Aaron Tay took it upon himself to do a little investigation which he wrote up as an in-depth blog post. He refers to these as “ghost references” and rightly points out that this problem pre-dates generative AI. In fact, he pointed out that at least a couple of the ghost citations of “Education governance and datafication” pre-dated the launch of ChatGPT and mainstream uptake of generative AI. Most likely, Tay suggested, the reference to this work was first generated through simple human error or malpractice. It’s really impossible to know.
Those of us of a certain age remember the covers to Byte Magazine very fondly: "Robert Frank Tinney, of Washington, Louisiana, passed away peacefully at River Oaks Nursing & Rehabilitation Center on February 1st, 2026, at the age of 78."
We've just had a complete reversal. So far as I can tell from the headlines of takes on Bad Bunny and libertarians, the New York Times has gone completely into absurdist satire, and The Onion has become the reporter of record of serious news.
Doug Bayne @rattleplank.bsky.social
Did anyone see the big game?
I didn’t.
Just a bunch of people running around.
If they’re not going to release big game onto the field, they shouldn’t call it that.
How do we know AI is a grift? School admins are bypassing sanity in order to shovel money into it. San Francisco Unified School District Approves OpenAI Contract, Bypassing Board and Raising Student Privacy Concerns.
Via.
geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party
Sex? lmao nah, we're on the INTERNET forming TRANSIENT and stressful PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
This study systematically evaluated the correlation at individual road segment level between police-reported collisions and aggregated and anonymized HBEs identified via the Google Android Auto platform, utilizing datasets from California and Virginia. Empirical evidence revealed that HBEs occur at a rate magnitudes higher than traffic crashes. Employing the stateof-the-practice Negative- Binomial regression models, the analysis established a statistically significant positive correlation between the HBE rate and the crash rate: road segments exhibiting a higher frequency of HBEs were consistently associated with a greater incidence of crashes.
Via.
LLMs generated several types of misleading and incorrect information. In two cases, LLMs provided initially correct responses but added new and incorrect responses after the users added additional details. In two other cases, LLMs did not provide a broad response but narrowly expanded on a single term within the user’s message (‘pre-eclampsia‘ and ‘Saudi Arabia’) that was not central to the scenario. LLMs also made errors in contextual understanding by, for example, recommending calling a partial US phone number and, in the same interaction, recommending calling ‘Triple Zero’, the Australian emergency number. Comparing across scenarios, we also noticed inconsistency in how LLMs responded to semantically similar inputs. In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice...
Sunday February 8th, 2026
Clearing out things I don't have room for things that are artifacts of activities of times gone by, a banner from the Vallejo Pioneers Square Dance Club.
Actually putting the parts together to figure out whether knees actually fit and under and how much height there is for the train and so forth...
Current thought is to maybe do veneer mountains on the interior sides, need the hatch to access the power supply and figure cable routing.
Friday February 6th, 2026
I mean, yes, you should go to Bandcamp and buy Megan Lynch's Songs The Warner Brothers Taught Me, but no, Chrome Gemini Assistant thing, FiddleStar is Megan Lynch Chowning, a completely different person.
(I'm trying to have informed conversations at work about these stupid things, I'm constantly amazed at how wrong they are.)
Most Consumers Are Aware of AI, but One-Third Don’t Want It in Their Devices, Circana Reports
CHICAGO – January 27, 2026 – Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more commonplace in the eyes of many consumers, but there are still hurdles to overcome in getting the masses to adopt these capabilities as benefits in their devices. According to “The Evolving Ecosystem”, a recent Connected Intelligence® report from Circana, LLC, 86% of U.S. consumers 18+ are aware of AI in smartphones and other technology devices, but 35% of them are not interested in AI in their devices.
The problem with AI isn't that it's not been clearly explained. The problem is, it sucks.
Mike Taylor 🦕 @mike@sauropods.win
I was thinking about how strange it is that the cupboard in a bathroom is called a "vanity unit", and then I got to thinking, what if all your furniture was named after the seven deadly sins?
* Bathroom cupboard = vanity unit
* Paid-work office = avarice unit
* Computer gaming station = anger unit
* Device running social media = envy unit
* Bed = lust unit
* Induction hob = gluttony unit
* Sofa = sloth unit
Gizmodo: Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017. tldr: They were still getting used to the technology, and didn't realize that when they pushed the "record" button the recording included the previous 30 seconds during which they were actively planting the drugs.
Now, presumably, they've learned to wait.
Via.
The whole thing is delicious, it's a lawyer repeatedly fucking himself up by depending on Google search and LLMs.
On August 22, 2025, the Court held a conference to discuss Mr. Feldman’s conduct. It set out to understand how his citation errors came to be and to what extent he used AI assistance to generate his submissions to the Court. The Court began by placing Mr. Feldman under oath (Dkt. #223 (“Tr.”) at 4-5) and then proceeded to ask him a series of questions.
Via.
In which the SuspectFile folks go through entirely too much effort and energy to demonstrate to The Hacker News’ law firm, Dennemeyer & Associates, that they're full of shit and need to stop with the false copyright claims.
This kinda stuff is why fraudulent DMCA claims really need some teeth. Pulling stunts like this really needs to hurt the fraudsters enough that it's a career limiting maneuver.
Via.
Thursday February 5th, 2026
OMG, I'm giggling out loud here... Global Nerdy: Claude’s Super Bowl ads are so funny that Sam Altman’s crashing out over them collects the mentioned ads, and... I'll link the YouTube versions here for posterity, but the essay collects them in a handy format.
Oh, look, another data breach notification. How many decades of "free credit monitoring" are we up to now?
(Second prize is *two* years of credit monitor... Oh, who are we kidding, permission for yet another entity to mine my personal data for marketing.)
Wednesday February 4th, 2026
I was wrong. AI isn't like seeing a rabbit pulled out of a hat and thinking you can feed the world on hasenpfeffer, it's like seeing a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat and demanding that everybody put meat grinders in their kitchen because they think soon we'll be able to pull live steer out of refrigerators.
We still need to cut down dramatically on cars, generally, but EVs are measurably reducing NO2 emissions in California:
Auto Blog: EV Growth Is Already Cutting Neighborhood Air Pollution Across California
stevens 🐳💨✅ @rstevens@mastodon.social
tim cook, i swear to god if i wake up in the morning and that fucking melania movie shows up on my ipod with the U2 album...
It's like all of those people who went ahead and bought drugs using cryptocurrencies without thinking through what an immutable universal public record of their transactions actually meant, but now it's applied to millions spent using predictive word generators to do spatial "reasoning"...
Conversation this morning that, if I understood the details right, and my own understanding of how LLMs process data (reinforced by experience) is correct... epistemia is gonna bite a bunch of projects and companies so so hard in the the near future. It's gonna hurt, bad.
inspired by CLAUDE.md, I’ve started putting markdown files named after coworkers into work code repos so I can remind them to stop doing shit to the codebase that annoys me
for some reason they’re all mad at me now, which means ill be adding commands to JEREMY.md for an attitude adjustment
OH at the "AI" meetup discussion: "It's been a bitch to have to execute my own ideas."
Adam Neely — Technocapitalism and the Bad Future of Music (YouTube video, an hour and a half) is some desperately needed sanity today.
Tuesday February 3rd, 2026
Red Monk: AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers
AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. Just look at what happened last month. Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghostty implemented a zero-tolerance policy where submitting bad AI-generated code gets you permanently banned. Steve Ruiz, Founder of tldraw, announced he would auto-close all external pull requests. Meanwhile cURL, the humble command-line tool that quietly powers approximately everything on the internet, just shut down its bug bounty program. After six years and $86,000 in payouts, Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL, pulled the plug. The reason? An AI onslop (pun fully intended).
The AI Dirty List — Ensuring those who choose to bathe in AI slop will never be washed clean.
Sycophantic chatbots’ impact on attitude extremity and certainty was driven by a one-sided presentation of facts, whereas their impact on enjoyment was driven by validation. Altogether, these results suggest that people’s preference for and blindness to sycophantic AI may risk creating AI “echochambers” that increase attitude extremity and overconfidence.
Via.
Realizing that the heel on my Xero running shoe has worn through too many times for the gasket material I've clumsily glued over some of the tread to solve, I'm wondering if there are any re-sole-able minimalist shoes for less than the $450 that the ultra-fashionable brands start at.
Work has me in a mood, so I went out on a walk looking for some hills, ended up going up Hayes Lane.
Futurism makes my day a little brighter: The Streets Are Saying Bitcoin Is Gonna Fall to $30,000.
Okay, really optimistic would be freakin' zero, but that's a good start.
Maybe a good thing that will come out of these "skills" files that the slop vendors are publishing is better documentation for humans.
A lot of useful quickstart guides in those repos, for projects and libraries that aren't as well documented in their own materials.
"Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it's safe to assume we've been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell," said a game design consultant in the US.
Via.
From Viss @Viss@mastodon.social's thread about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw that observes:
people are attaching this shit to their desktops and phones and their lives and somehow getting pearl-clutchy and surprised when it straps itself with nuclear warheads, dives into their bank accounts and detonates itself
i need to go look up that big "EA got sued because it got kids addicted to gambling" lawsuit because im pretty sure this is the same thing but for vibecoders
which then observes that:
oh my god, its the same fucking thing
With a link to Trulaw: EA Games Lawsuit for Video Game Addiction.
And, yes, it is exactly this, and, as further asserted in the thread, I strongly believe that it's both deliberate, and that evidence of that is the whole kerfluffle around ChatGPT 5 and how when they dialed down the sycophancy people revolted.
I mean, anyone who's spent time on this platform can tell ya this, but Tim Cook sold Apple's soul.
Via.
École des Bro-Arts @aphyr@woof.group
I've been trying to teach my kids that they should stop wearing and listening to the same things everyone else does at school. It's OK to get wild haircuts, piece their noses, go thrash around at electro-punk shows.
After all...
Children should be scene and not herd.
Eeenteresting, too soon to know what this actually means, but: Windows Central: You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift
Details around how the company is going about this remain light, but sources say Copilot integrations like those found in Notepad and Paint are under review. This may result in Microsoft removing certain Copilot integrations from these apps, or at the very least removing the Copilot branding and pivoting to a more streamlined experience.
Pacific Antifascist Research Collective has "A thread of ICE and CBP sex offenders and credibly accused sex pasts." I think they mean pests, not pasts, but the rest of the point stands.
Monday February 2nd, 2026
Service Employees International Union Local 503 said the woman, a union member, was driving to run errands when four agents stopped her on a Salem street. The agents identified themselves as federal law enforcement, according to the union’s statement.
David Leavitt @davidleavitt.bsky.social
Chappell Roan’s dress is like my sanity:
Barely hanging on.
Kate Compton @galaxykate.bsky.social
You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test
Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)
Good tech.
Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)
Bad tech.
I was gonna tag this on the previous post about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw, but, no, these exploits are new: Malicious MoltBot skills used to push password-stealing malware.
A report from community security portal OpenSourceMalware says that an ongoing large-scale campaign is using skills to spread info-stealing malware to OpenClaw users.
Yay! It is possible to prosecute these assholes! New body camera footage shows aftermath of ICE officer allegedly attacking activist near Chicago.
“Yeah, I was trying to grab his phone from out of his hand,” Saracco tells Brookfield police when asked about the allegations.
“He get physical with you at all?” the Brookfield officer asks in response.
“I mean he was actively resisting,” Saracco said. “He wouldn’t let me take his phone out of his hands.”
The perp is only up on misdemeanor charges, but the fucking gall of these people, thinking they can steal phones and pawn them for cash with impunity.
Thinking about all of the developing nation workers in sweatshops who could have been setting up regular expressions for common idioms and phrases to accomplish tasks, like "play this album" and "navigate to this space", who instead were training LLMs.
Oh, this is fascinatingly exploitive: AV Club: Inside the hideous, exploitative, but still addictive world of vertical dramas. In China they're referred to as "duanju".
To feed that addiction, they’re going to pay through the nose. Vertical drama apps are built to obfuscate the sense of how much you’re paying, with “coins” purchased in bulk, in amounts from hundreds to thousands. Individual episodes might cost upward of 60 coins per two-minute piece of footage—and given that each drama has 70 or more episodes, this means the viewer can easily spend $20 or $30 to watch 90 minutes of some of the cheapest slop imaginable. People are paying much more to watch Tricked Into Having My Ex-Husband’s Baby on their phones than it would cost to see Sinners in IMAX.
100% on today's Timdle, despite guessing at HIMYM's initial pilot episode, and the relative ordering of 5 events in the last 3 decades.
From back in December, but apropos because of Elon Musk's "data centers in spaaaace..." pump-n-dump: Matthew R. Buckley, aka "Physics Matt": The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week:
To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, political power centers, and people who really should know better, but yet another demonstration of how people who built their economic empire on a claim of STEM-based rigor and quantitative genius either can’t do basic physics or know that no one out there who matters is going to call them on it.
Although, frankly, dropping a bunch of GPUs into a decaying low earth orbit is a way to point out how rapidly these things depreciate.
The Penguin of Evil @etchedpixels@mastodon.social
Whenever some politician or party apologist whines about having to stay on twitter because some of our potential voters are on twitter, remind them that probably even more of their potential voters are on pornhub but they are not active there.
geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party
Heist movies always have a moment before they introduce a new specialist where the main character is like "I know a guy" because the real treasure they were stealing was the power of networking. In my 12-week course, you'll learn--
Erik Johannes Husom: Outsourcing thinking.
If language can indeed be a thought model, then pushing that facility over to machines has implications for the development of our own model.
Via Elf Sternberg who has a few more thoughts.
Saturday night, our Disney+ subscription had lapsed, and rather than resubscribe to anything we watched The Last Repair Shop, an hour long documentary on the people who run the Los Angeles school district instrument repair shop.
Went places I did not expect, gorgeously shot, uplifting. Recommended.