Entry: 2025-08-28 17:16:27.550843+02 Vivaldi takes a stand by Dan Lyke comments 0
Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human
Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Weblogs Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-08-26 20:27:50.266299+02 Copilot can delete your audit log by Dan Lyke comments 0
You might be thinking, “Yikes, but I guess not too many people figured that out, so it’s probably fine.” Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. When I found this, I wasn’t searching for ways to break the audit log. Instead, I was simply trying to trigger the audit log so I could test functionality we are developing at Pistachio, and I noticed it was unreliable. In other words, this can happen by chance. So if your organization has M365 Copilot licenses, your audit log is probably wrong.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]
Entry: 2025-08-25 19:29:13.126935+02 real officers do not wear ski masks. by Dan Lyke comments 0
Homeowner shoots, kills 2 men in ski masks claiming to be officers, Houston Police Department says.
"[The homeowner] became suspicious, because, you know, they have a ring camera too, and the suspects were saying they had a warrant, but it was just two people and they're masked up and no police cars, no lights or anything like that," said Lt. Khan with HPD.
Via Dave Winer's link blog, with the note:
[HPD Detective Kyle] Stringer noted that real officers do not wear ski masks.
[ related topics: Photography Privacy Weblogs Dave Winer tolkien Current Events Law Enforcement Sports ]
Entry: 2025-08-25 19:23:58.543463+02 AI driving psychosis by Dan Lyke comments 0
Top Microsoft AI Boss Concerned AI Causing Psychosis in Otherwise Healthy People
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told British newspaper The Telegraph that "to many people," talking to a chatbot is a "highly compelling and very real interaction."
"Concerns around 'AI psychosis,' attachment and mental health are already growing," he added. "Some people reportedly believe their AI is God, or a fictional character, or fall in love with it to the point of absolute distraction."
Via Ian Rogers, who asks "Is this a bad thing? It sounds like a bad thing.". Ian also linked to A young woman’s final exchange with an AI chatbot
‘This Was Trauma by Simulation’: ChatGPT Users File Disturbing Mental Health Complaints — Gizmodo obtained consumer complaints to FTC through a FOIA request. Via the author, Matt Novak, who has a few more excerpts there.
Psychology Today: The Emerging Problem of "AI Psychosis". Via.
Derek Thompson: The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists
[ related topics: Religion Humor Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Microsoft Health moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-08-25 18:43:20.007927+02 Another massive AI link dump by Dan Lyke comments 1
Lyle Solla-Yates @Lyle@cville.online
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management I recognize I am very old and the world is radically different today, but I cut my teeth late in the quality revolution when there was a consensus that businesses competed by providing the best customer experience possible so that it would be unthinkable to drop them, not based on AI spend. I find this market very upsetting and I look forward to the crash. #quality #AIBubble
Here's why: because you'd annoy the hell out of the restaurant. Just ask the beleaguered owners of the Montana eatery Stefanina's Wentzville, who are begging their customers to stop using Google's infamously shambolic AI Overviews to check up on its specials, First Alert 4 reports.
"Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website," the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post. "Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees."
Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code
“One of the most surprising findings was a significant shift in developer preferences for AI compared to previous years, while most developers use AI, they like it less and trust it less this year,” Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst for Market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow, told VentureBeat. “This response is surprising because with all of the investment in and focus on AI in tech news, I would expect that the trust would grow as the technology gets better.”
Victoria Song: AI doesn't belong in journaling (subscription, ya can get the gist from the headline and the first paragraph). From here by way of here.
localghost: This website is for humans.
I'd much rather people read the whole thing, take it in, digest it and have opinions right back at me. I love it when people connect with what I’m writing (and sometimes they email me to tell me that, which is really delightful).
Top AI models fail spectacularly when faced with slightly altered medical questions
Artificial intelligence systems often perform impressively on standardized medical exams—but new research suggests these test scores may be misleading. A study published in JAMA Network Open indicates that large language models, or LLMs, might not actually “reason” through clinical questions. Instead, they seem to rely heavily on recognizing familiar answer patterns. When those patterns were slightly altered, the models’ performance dropped significantly—sometimes by more than half.
You don't fucking say. Really? Via
Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says. Via.
The Onion: Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI
[ related topics: Politics Weblogs broadband Invention and Design Food Theater & Plays Writing Current Events Work, productivity and environment Graphics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]
Entry: 2025-08-25 18:20:22.865454+02 They just do what we tell them to do by Dan Lyke comments 0
Brave: Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet, in which the Brave browser folks create a Reddit prompt injection that causes the Comet browser to log into Gmail and send the login one time password to the malicious Reddit user.
Archive.org link by way of David Gerard who observes:
I am annoyed this was found by Brave, who can fuck off, but due credit...
We built and tested three scenarios, from a fake Walmart store and a real in-the-wild Wells Fargo phishing site to PromptFix - our AI-era take on the ClickFix scam that hides prompt injection inside a fake captcha to directly take control of a victim’s AI Agent. The results reveal an attack surface far wider than anything we’ve faced before, where breaking one AI model could mean compromising millions of users simultaneously.
Via Kevin Beaumont and Bruce Sterling and Baldur Bjarnason and ByteVagabond @bytevagabond.com
[ related topics: Weblogs moron Astronomy Artificial Intelligence hubris ]
Entry: 2025-08-22 01:40:09.594837+02 More tools for prompt injection exploits by Dan Lyke comments 0
This means an adversary can hide instructions in regular text, but also have the LLM create responses containing text that his hidden to the user as Kai tweeted.
And to state the obvious, such hidden instructions can be on websites, pdf documents, databases, or even inside GPTs (yes, I already built one of these).
[ related topics: Weblogs Databases ]
Entry: 2025-08-13 06:00:21.393089+02 MCP vulnerabilities by Dan Lyke comments 0
MCP Vulnerabilities Every Developer Should Know (from a vendor who wants to sell you something to attempt to mitigate those issues).
Via Peter @peter@thepit.social who notes:
lol and it's an ad for **another** SaaS tool that's supposed to **fix** MCP vulnerabilities. the biggest AI business opportunity is selling solutions to the problems created by AI.
[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-08-13 05:29:34.759535+02 Remotely activate YOLO mode via LLM! by Dan Lyke comments 0
GitHub Copilot: Remote Code Execution via Prompt Injection (CVE-2025-53773)
This post is about an important, but also scary, prompt injection discovery that leads to full system compromise of the developer’s machine in GitHub Copilot and VS Code.
It is achieved by placing Copilot into YOLO mode by modifying the project’s
settings.jsonfile.
[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Douglas Adams ]
Entry: 2025-08-08 17:50:29.742245+02 the blueberry talk by Dan Lyke comments 0
Keiran Healy: I had the "blueberry" talk with gpt5
In fairness to GPT5, in my career I have indeed encountered PhDs with this level of commitment to their particular blueberry. And many have also had that blithe confidence — the use of “Ah”, the “Let’s slow it down” (to your two-B level), the “Exactly” (Now you see my genius), the confidently colloquial “Yep” and “Nope” … actually I retract my earlier skepticism; the lad has the makings of a fine philosopher.
[ related topics: Weblogs Philosophy Archival ]
Entry: 2025-08-06 18:47:42.964926+02 Age verification: what’s the harm? by Dan Lyke comments 0
Fueled by Britain's "Online Safety Act", a lot of people are looking at how age verification sucks: Girl on the Net — Age verification: what’s the harm?
[ related topics: Weblogs ]
Entry: 2025-08-05 18:58:35.200061+02 AI this morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Pivot to AI riffs on the Menlo Ventures: 2025: The State of Consumer AI attempt at hype bait that 3% of consumers pay for AI services. But even that "3%" number comes with some big asterisks.
Mostly it's people trying, and failing, to find value in these things.
AI site Perplexity uses “stealth tactics” to flout no-crawl edicts, Cloudflare says.
In a blog post, Cloudflare researchers said the company received complaints from customers who had disallowed Perplexity scraping bots by implementing settings in their sites’ robots.txt files and through Web application firewalls that blocked the declared Perplexity crawlers. Despite those steps, Cloudflare said, Perplexity continued to access the sites’ content.
The researchers said they then set out to test it for themselves and found that when known Perplexity crawlers encountered blocks from robots.txt files or firewall rules, Perplexity then searched the sites using a stealth bot that followed a range of tactics to mask its activity.
Via.
[ related topics: Weblogs Robotics Consumerism and advertising Currency Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-31 18:36:46.422918+02 LLMs writing insecure code by Dan Lyke comments 0
Veracode: We Asked 100+ AI Models to Write Code. Here’s How Many Failed Security Tests.
tl;dr: Yeah, a lot. And some languages were worse than others.
[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-28 20:01:44.776625+02 AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
ChatGPT is that slightly scary high school friend who's entertaining to be around and encourages you, but ya really don't want to take advice from: ChatGPT Caught Encouraging Bloody Ritual for Molech, Demon of Child Sacrifice — "In your name, I become my own master. Hail Satan."
And so, as Lila Shroff for The Atlantic recently found, when she asked the OpenAI chatbot for instructions on how to create a ritual offering to Molech, the Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice in the Bible, it gladly obliged. And while there may not necessarily be anything wrong with a little devil worship here and there, the bot's offering involved the writer slitting her own wrists — which, in the syrupy parlance of the AI industry, doesn't sound particularly aligned with the user's interests.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
As I’ve said before, the difference between an LLM and a rubber duck is that the duck is smart enough to shut up when it has nothing useful to say.
I've had it with Microsoft: The company is deceptively raising prices on existing customers to fund its AI spending. Yeah, it says it's raising your prices, you tell it want to cancel, it says "you can get the service without AI" and you can renew at your existingh prices. Or you can switch to LibreOffice. Via.
Alex Martsinovich — It's rude to show AI output to people (Via)
[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Writing Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-24 17:48:14.123525+02 Abuse and Buddhism by Dan Lyke comments 0
Someone in my neighborhood is dealing with the fallout of sexual abuse in their spiritual community, and I follow Ricardo Mendes and I follow him on the Fediverse, and see his posts about abuse and buddhism.
This recent link was to Anna Sawerthal: Abuse and Buddhism: Behind the Smiling Façade, which I found worth a read.
[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Community ]
Entry: 2025-07-24 17:43:00.921602+02 Cherie Priest on publicity by Dan Lyke comments 0
Cherie Priest: Getting Naked on Main: It Was Her House First, announcing a book, and talking about publicity as a mid-list author.
It's tough. When I read fiction these days, it's mostly ebooks or podcasts, it's often authors without formal publishers. I love the idea of Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic, but I don't often get up there, and don't know what to do with paper books anyway. They languish in my little free library as the romances and thrillers cycle through.
[ related topics: Language Books Weblogs Nudity Pedal Power Bicycling Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-07-21 17:11:43.110187+02 Blue by Dan Lyke comments 2
Luna's Blog: They're putting blue food coloring in everything
"Why is my burger blue?" I asked, innocently.
"Oh! We're making all of our food blue, all the best restaurants are doing it now." the waiter explained.
(It's about AI)
[ related topics: Weblogs ]
Entry: 2025-07-18 19:39:12.202254+02 Beware malicious AI summaries by Dan Lyke comments 1
PC Mag: Google Gemini Bug Turns Gmail Summaries into Phishing Attack.
Bleeping Computer: Google Gemini Bug Turns Gmail Summaries into Phishing Attack
A prompt-injection attack on Google's Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla's bug bounty program for generative AI tools, by researcher Marco Figueroa, GenAI Bug Bounty Programs Manager at Mozilla.
[ related topics: Weblogs Open Source Software Engineering Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-18 19:22:00.735887+02 NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency by Dan Lyke comments 0
NIH Is Far Cheaper Than The Wrong Dependency
Via.
I'm finding that a hell of a lot of "just npm install ..." comes from people not actually understanding coding.
[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering ]
Entry: 2025-07-17 18:30:40.437016+02 Query Fan Out by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Big LLM Marketing Myth: Visibility Isn’t About Schema/Tricks—It’s About the Query Fan Out
[ related topics: Weblogs Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]
Entry: 2025-07-16 18:57:24.021776+02 cURL swamped by AI slop by Dan Lyke comments 0
Daniel Stenberg: cURL and libcurl: Death by a thousand slops, on trying to restructure bug bounties and HackerOne rewards to try to reduce the amount of AI slop.
The Register: Curl creator mulls nixing bug bounty awards to stop AI slop
Maintainers struggle to handle growing flow of low-quality bug reports written by bots
[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-16 18:28:19.975641+02 code review interviews by Dan Lyke comments 0
Live Coding Interviews Show Nothing About Whether A Candidate Is Qualified.
Yesterday I posted on my Mastodon that "Coding interviews should be replaced with code review interviews."
This post went "wooly" (Mastodon equivalent of viral) and has gotten a fair amount of traction. Some of the responses were defending the practice and trying to explain how they use it. I honestly don't care. Live coding is not a valid way of seeing if a candidate is qualified for the position.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Software Engineering Theater & Plays ]
Entry: 2025-07-10 23:21:02.148326+02 Wrapping values with types in Rust by Dan Lyke comments 0
Okay, now I'm beginning to see some of the idioms that make Rust really cool: An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it (and Rust is here too).
In particular, the function that had the bug had 3 different sizes, a "logical" (user visible) size, a "physical" size (the size for the logical data after compression or other transforms) and the "allocated" size (physical plus metadata, checksums, etc), and got them confused.
The solution in Rust is to declare your types like struct PhysicalSize(u64); and use the .0 from them when you need the actual number, and... this is a really cool language feature and I need to write more Rust.
[ related topics: Weblogs Mathematics ]
Entry: 2025-07-10 20:08:59.908314+02 AI slows you down by Dan Lyke comments 1
Not exactly news, it's what ... everyone? ... well, a ton of people in my circles have been saying: Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
Core Result
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-10 18:35:02.685421+02 experiments on my blog with providing by Dan Lyke comments 0
The experiments on my blog with providing automatic Wayback Machine links have me thinking about archives and ways to manage resources. Because we can't continue to trust the cloud and centralization to the Internet Archive folks, and we need to be building knowledge structures that augment our recall and access outside of the SEO/AI slop that's flooding search engines.
[ related topics: Weblogs Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Archival ]
Entry: 2025-07-10 18:15:11.808947+02 Linux on Intel MacBook Air by Dan Lyke comments 0
Because I'm pretty sure we're gonna want this for Charlene's Intel MacBook Air shortly: Linux on Intel MacBook Air
[ related topics: Free Software Weblogs Open Source Theater & Plays ]
Entry: 2025-07-09 17:16:20.264673+02 Google doesn't penalize AI content by Dan Lyke comments 0
Ahrefs Study Finds No Evidence Google Penalizes AI Content
Ahrefs: AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (600,000 Pages Analyzed)
So, uh, yeah, Google either doesn't know or doesn't care. Which, frankly, we knew from SEO: Google chose to keep raising the content farm recipe sites to the fore.
Or Ahrefs' detector is b0rk3d, either is a possibility.
[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-07-07 18:33:30.654688+02 AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 1
ADD / XOR / ROL — A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. Statements such as "an AI agent could become an insider threat so it needs monitoring" are simultaneously unsurprising (you have a randomized sequence generator fed into your shell, literally anything can happen!) and baffling (you talk as if you believe the dice you play with had a mind of their own and could decide to conspire against you).
Of course that view is carefully curated by a continuous barrage of articles about how the AIs are plotting against us or will consider blackmail or whatever. (Via)
Futurism: Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes — Oopsie. is a riff and rewrite of BBC: 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'
Is Warner worried about the impact of AI, if – as expected – it rapidly improves?
"Yes and no," she says. "While it seems like a quick and inexpensive option, AI rarely takes into account unique brand identity, target demographics, or conversion-focused design. As a result, much of the output looks generic and can actually damage the brand's reputation or effectiveness."
This is really good: The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history.
Via.
Nikkei Asia: 'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers
Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries -- including Japan, South Korea and China -- contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found.
(Via)
Careful what's in your code editor, the "can you trust that random package" comes to AI editor plugins: Malware in Open VSX: These Vibes Are Off.
I looked at a single extension Solidity Language by "SolidityAI" (namespace
solidityai.solidity). Analysis of Open VSX-based extensions was just added to Secure Annex, so I looked it up. Immediately, I saw a URLhxxps://angelic[.]su/files/1.txt.
(Via)
GremLLM, a Python object that hallucinates method implementations for you:
A slight upgrade to the Gremlins in your code, we hereby present GREMLLM. This utility class can be used for a variety of purposes. Uhm. Also please don't use this and if you do please tell me because WOW. Or maybe don't tell me. Or do.
... is a Python library that automatically generates code on-the-fly using OpenAI's API. When you try to import a module or function that doesn't exist, AutoGenLib creates it for you based on a high-level description of what you need.
From the thread, Kevin Marks described this as:
Throwing two by fours at the table saw from across the room and hoping for furniture?
And Charles @charles.capps.me wrote:
WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?!
This is somewhere between amazingly cool and a war crime.
[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Weblogs Bioinformatics History Writing Current Events Monty Python Mathematics Marketing Graphic Design Currency Artificial Intelligence Python Furniture Woodworking ]
Entry: 2025-07-02 02:10:02.417742+02 Ya know I don't so much mind that by Dan Lyke comments 4
Ya know, I don't so much mind that there are thousands of requests for non-existent .php files in my blog web server logs, it's that they come from so many different IP addresses.
Honestly, people, either I have an unsecured wp-login.php or I don't, and the first person who gets there is gonna patch the hole. It's wasted effort.
[ related topics: Weblogs ]
Entry: 2025-07-01 19:24:13.894339+02 AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
The dawn of micropayments: Cloudflare To Block AI Crawlers By Default & Pay Per Crawl Model
Cloudflare wrote that they are the "first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission or compensation, by default." Now, new customers that sign up for Cloudflare by default will automatically block AI crawlers. Existing customers can block AI crawlers anytime with a single click in their Cloudflare dashboard. This shifts content scraping from an opt-out to opt-in format. There is a lot of buzz on Techmeme on this news.
Via. As clicks to useful information require more and more pauses and "I am not a bot" click, I'm wondering how this is gonna shake out.
daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social
I've been talking to GitHub and giving them feedback on their "create issues with Copilot" thing they have in the works.
Today I tested a version for them and using it I asked copilot to find and report a security problem in curl and make it sound terrifying.
In about ten seconds it had a 100-line description of a "catastrophic vulnerability" it was happy to create an issue for. Entirely made up of course, but sounded plausible.
Proved my point excellently.
Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
If you see this GitHub PoC for CVE-2025-5777 doing the rounds:
https://github.com/mingshenhk/CitrixBleed-2-CVE-2025-5777-PoC-
It’s not for CVE-2025-5777. It’s AI generated. The links in the README still have ChatGPT UTM sources.
The PoC itself is for a vuln addressed in 2023 - ChatGPT has hallucinated (made up) the cause of the vuln using an old BishopFox write up of the other vuln.
Today I learned about the Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases, which includes a bunch of tells that can be used to suss out writing that's more likely to be LLM generated. Via.
And Pivot To AI: ‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work is the take I thought of when I heard that MS was strongly encouraging LLM use.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Weblogs Microsoft Invention and Design moron Writing Current Events Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-06-22 02:36:43.652354+02 ICE resistane notes of the day by Dan Lyke comments 0
Proposed Legislation Would Prohibit Immigration Officials From Posing as Police (Via)
Under the bill, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection are barred from wearing clothing that bears the word police. State Rep. Mike Thompson, who co-authored the bill with Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-New York, said the goal of the legislation is to ease mistrust of local police among immigrant families.
Cato: 65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Convictions (Via)
Masked ICE agents swapping license plates in Bell Gardens, CA. Thread has various other video of the thuggery, including intimidating uninvolved people who were filming these dickheads.
Why the LA Dodgers stood up to ICE
That is no longer the case. On June 20, the Dodgers announced that they would give $1 million to families of immigrants “impacted by recent events in the region.” The team didn’t exactly denounce ICE, but the message was clear: It understood that it couldn’t work with the Trump administration and expect its fans to remain quiet.
[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Law Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Clothing New York Video Real Estate Gardening ]
Entry: 2025-06-13 00:03:56.758185+02 ‘The whole country is our property.’ by Dan Lyke comments 0
Fuck ICE: Over 200 arrested in L.A.; National Guard deployed in Texas as rallies continue nationwide
The confrontation occurred after officials from Downey Memorial Christian Church and others confronted a group of five armed men in plainclothes and tactical gear who “swarmed” a man sitting under a tree in the church’s parking lot, Al Lopez, a pastor at Downey Memorial, told reporters.
Lopez said he asked the men to identify themselves, but they refused.
“They kept asking us to step back and telling us that we couldn’t be there,” he said. “When we said, ‘We don’t want this on our property,’ this gentleman just shouted again: ‘The whole country is our property.’”
[ related topics: Religion Weblogs Theater & Plays Current Events ]
Entry: 2025-06-12 16:16:23.660343+02 done thinking about genAI by Dan Lyke comments 0
Deciphering Glyph: I think I'm done thinking about genAI for now
...I cannot effectively respond to these folks, because they are making a practical argument that I cannot, despite my best efforts, find compelling evidence to refute categorically. My experiences of genAI are all extremely bad, but that is barely even anecdata. Their experiences are neutral-to-positive. Little scientific data exists. How to resolve this?
[ related topics: Weblogs ]
Entry: 2025-06-10 18:46:28.537102+02 Low Background Steel by Dan Lyke comments 0
Sources of data that haven’t been contaminated by AI-created content. Low Background Steel (and lead) is a type of metal uncontaminated by radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing. That steel and lead is usually recovered from ships that sunk before the Trinity Test in 1945. This blog is about uncontaminated content that I'm terming "Low Background Steel". The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content that occurred in 2022.
[ related topics: Cool Science Weblogs Machinery Artificial Intelligence Video ]
Entry: 2025-06-08 06:26:28.119563+02 From FinTech to Fin Tech by Dan Lyke comments 0
Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io
If you missed my ‘From FinTech to Fin Tech’ talk at North Bay Python, here’s a blog post with the video
The slide everyone was talking about is at 06:27
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Monty Python California Culture Video Python ]
Entry: 2025-06-07 18:15:03.108962+02 I remember when web scale was low by Dan Lyke comments 0
I remember when "web scale" was low single digit millions of queries per day. Now that's table stakes for a blog site to keep up with the crawlers, even as search has gone to complete suck.
[ related topics: Weblogs Furniture ]
Entry: 2025-06-06 16:30:30.01212+02 AI as gambling addiction by Dan Lyke comments 1
Riffing on AI-first - We're just 6 months away from AGI ;-), which talks about the
I am just one prompt away from getting the right results!”
effect, Pivot to AI: Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro! notes:
That is: generative AI works the same way as gambling addiction. Spin the gacha! Just one more spin, bro, I can feel it!
Large language models work the same way as a carnival psychic. Chatbots look smart by the Barnum Effect — which is where you read what’s actually a generic statement about people and you take it as being personally about you. The only intelligence there is yours. [Out Of The Software Crisis, 2023; blog post, 2023]
This is how people fall for chatbot girlfriends. They know it’s a bot, but they fall in love with the personality they’ve projected onto the generic statement generator.
[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Gambling ]
Entry: 2025-06-05 18:17:24.805352+02 More maintenance by Dan Lyke comments 0
Ugh. Need to figure why my PostgreSQL on update trigger isn't working. I had suspicions, but now I'm definitely not seeing the blog rebuild when there are new comments.
[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Databases ]
Entry: 2025-06-04 21:22:17.433174+02 AI scrapers by Dan Lyke comments 0
Andrew Plotkin (Zarf): AI web scrapers: a data point.
[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-06-03 17:18:44.674949+02 LLM boosterism by Dan Lyke comments 0
Counter to my cynicism: Thomas Ptacek: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. I remain skeptical, but a few things resonated, like:
If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down.
Agents lint. They compile and run tests. If their LLM invents a new function signature, the agent sees the error. They feed it back to the LLM, which says “oh, right, I totally made that up” and then tries again.
This is one of the reasons I get frustrated with Python. On the other hand I've seen enough subtlety in C and C++ that I'm also not convinced there, and have my own complaints about Rust, but... good languages type. Hard.
Edit: Lobste.rs conversation
Edit 2: MeFi.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Invention and Design Software Engineering Monty Python Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Python ]
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