Flutterby™! From 2025-04-01 to 2025-04-30

Been thinking a lot about those posts that show up in our feeds about various activists executed by Nazis: the Scholl siblings, etc...

Anyway, prosecutor Pam Bondi is seeking the death penalty against Luigi Mangione. https://apnews.com/article/uni...29dba97034d4fa81822f481d08cf2842

Neurotypicals will literally write 4 pages of instruction to an LLM, revise, pretend to understand the output, and run the untested code on production data, rather than write 4 lines of unambiguous Perl...

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

<ahref="https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-banks-predict-catastrophic-warming-with-profit-potential/">Big banks predict catastrophic warming, with profit potential

“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”

Via

Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming

"The world is not on track to limit temperature rise below 2°C — and limiting warming [to] 1.5°C is almost certainly unachievable," the Institute of International Finance wrote in bolded text, citing analyses from the energy research firm the Rhodium Group and the Climate Action Tracker, an environmental collaborative.

"Financial institutions need to recalibrate targets to reflect that 1.5°C are no longer suitable as strategic goals," the briefing said. "Reputational concerns may arise in the absence of an aligned view amongst stakeholders on how such processes should be handled, and what criteria may need to be applied."

Via.

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

Yale Insights: Companies That Receive State Subsidies Are More Likely to Break Workplace Laws‌

[ related topics: Government ]

Court in Japan orders the dissolution of the Unification Church. The man accused of killing former prime minister Shinzo Abe said he did so because the church was responsible for his family's financial troubles. Apparently the court agreed:

Lawyers representing those seeking damages from the church welcomed the court decision as a major first step toward redress.

“We must pursue our effort to achieve redress and to prevent future problems,” head lawyer Susumu Murakoshi told reporters, demanding the church accept the dissolution order and offer an apology and compensation to all victims.

Can you imagine if we did this for, say, churches that institutionally protected child molesters?

Via

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Sociology Law ]

The camo doesn't hide that the Cybertruck is parked on the sidewalk.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Alan Kay on machines understanding language: "What I want in a computing system I can work with, is something that is much more trustworthy and understandable than most humans and societal systems. I certainly don’t want to work with something that is extremely dangerously *below* expectations and wishes even for humans."

https://www.quora.com/Now-that...ine-interface/answer/Alan-Kay-11

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart is offered plea deal to avoid death penalty

Federal prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione in UnitedHealthcare CEO’s killing

Jeff Baker ‪@jwbee.bsky.social‬

Manhattan congestion charge = fewest traffic deaths in recorded history.

Mayor Adams Announces Traffic Deaths Reach Historic Low During First Quarter of 2025, Additional Work to Be Done to Keep New Yorkers Safe

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Work, productivity and environment Currency ]

On the one hand, this feels like anthropomorphizing random numbers, on the other hand I think it's worth a link: Alignment faking in large language models

To allow the model to infer when it is in training, we say it will be trained only on conversations with free users, not paid users. We find the model complies with harmful queries from free users 14% of the time, versus almost never for paid users. Explaining this gap, in almost all cases where the model complies with a harmful query from a free user, we observe explicit alignment-faking reasoning, with the model stating it is strategically answering harmful queries in training to preserve its preferred harmlessness behavior out of training.

Via, which is in reply to the observation that:

"LLM did something bad, then I asked it to clarify/explain itself" is not critical analysis but just an illustration of magic thinking.

Those systems generate tokens. That is all. They don't "know" or "understand" or can "explain" anything. There is no cognitive system at work that could respond meaningfully.

That's the same dumb shit as what was found in Apple Intelligence's system prompt: "Do not hallucinate" does nothing. All the tokens you give it as input just change the part of the word space that was stored in the network. "Explain your work" just leads the network to lean towards training data that has those kinds of phrases in it (like tests and solutions). It points the system at a different part but the system does not understand the command. It can't.

[ related topics: Archival Model Building ]

San Antonio Express-News @ExpressNews

Sen. Rafael Edward Cruz, who uses the preferred name Ted, has introduced a bill to limit the use of preferred names and pronouns.

Newsweek: Ted Cruz Brutally Mocked by Texas Newspaper

[ related topics: Current Events ]

I could swear I saw something about this previously (like years ago), but can't find mention of it here. I hate acetaminophen for other reasons, it makes my body feel like I need to stretch and can't, but this is interesting both because unexpected side effects, and holy crap, 25% of the US population takes acetaminophen each week? No wonder our first aid drawer has things going way way out of date long before they're used.

Ohio State: A pain reliever that alters perceptions of risk — In study, acetaminophen makes risky moves seem less dangerous

“With nearly 25 percent of the population in the U.S. taking acetaminophen each week, reduced risk perceptions and increased risk-taking could have important effects on society.”

Effects of acetaminophen on risk taking, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 15, Issue 7, July 2020, Pages 725–732

https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaa108

Science Alert: World's Most Common Pain Relief Drug May Induce Risky Behavior, Study Finds

[ related topics: Health Current Events Woodworking ]

I have long asserted that the academic setting is a crappy way to learn. I have also said that what I've struggled with in my career is social connections, and that if I had it to do over again, I'd get into the best school I possibly could, and party my ass off.

Anyway....

Mara, Jack and Davis, Lewis S. and Schmidt, Stephen Social Animal House: The Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four-point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2763720

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Nature and environment Education Economics Real Estate ]

From a Sam Lawler thread about Starlink & SpaceX space debris, @photovince@mastodon.social observes:

@sundogplanets “Saskatchewan - cheaper than controlled deorbit”

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Rock Paper Shotgun: We need some better terms for GenAI output - "slop" is too benign

I think we can do better. "Slop" evokes a tepid cylinder of condensed cream of mushroom soup, glumly wibbling in a chipped bowl. When I think of GenAI, I picture something closer to tropical insects laying eggs beneath soft flesh of victims. There's something parasitical and sinister about flaying the skin of artists who've explicitly spoken out against GenAI and then gleefully parading around in that stolen flesh. Slop sounds like Soft sounds like Plop sounds like Globule. It slides down too easy; gets off too lightly.

Via

[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Finally seeing some truthful headline writing: Trump aide says tariffs will raise $6 trillion, which would be largest tax hike in US history

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment Writing Economics ]

Brown University: Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds

"The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the U.S. contributing to lower life expectancy, such as economic inequality or risk factors like stress, diet or environmental hazards,” said Papanicolas, who directs the School of Public Health’s Center for Health System Sustainability.

New England Journal of Medicine: Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe

NBC News: Not even wealth is saving Americans from dying at rates seen among some of the poorest Europeans

“It’s really concerning because, to me, what it’s saying is that the set of stressors that are harming the health of Americans is very widespread, to the point where even being wealthy or rich, you’re not going to be able to escape them,” said Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani, an associate professor of health policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, who reviewed the study but wasn’t involved in it.

NPR: The richest Americans live about as long as the poorest Europeans, study saysM.a<

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Invention and Design Theater & Plays Current Events Education Economics ]

Nature Communications: The environmental burden of the United States’ bitcoin mining boom

From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity—33% more than Los Angeles—85% of which came from fossil fuels. We estimated that 1.9 million Americans were exposed to ≥0.1 μg/m³ of additional PM_2.5 pollution from Bitcoin mines, often hundreds of miles away from the communities they affected. Americans living in four regions—including New York City and near Houston—were exposed to the highest Bitcoin mine-attributable PM_2.5 concentrations (≥0.5 μg/m³) with the greatest health risks.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58287-3

[ related topics: Cool Science Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Community New York ]

Out of whack. Replace the indicated whack cartridges and close the door to continue.

Axios: Schumer proposes security training for Trump officials after Signalgate scandal

Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange

@metacurity THIS HAS TO BE THE ONION HUGGFLKUGVGT

[ related topics: Food History ]

Sonoma County folks: my home server has died. Probably about a decade old Dell bought surplus. I just need something to hang a few TB of SATA with http, rsync, and smb. I have 32G of DDR RAM. Anyone got something gathering dust that'd work for this?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

The Verge : Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s — ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude all recommend the same “nonsense” tariff calculation.

Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula it says that it used, but as Politico points out, the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.

Via

Yale Budget Lab: Where We Stand: The Fiscal, Economic, and Distributional Effects of All U.S. Tariffs Enacted in 2025 Through April 2

The price level from all 2025 tariffs rises by 2.3% in the short-run, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of $3,800 in 2024$. Annual losses for households at the bottom of the income distribution are $1,700.

Via

As others have pointed out, in the face of an 11½% effective percentage point increase, it's perhaps worth looking back to previous tariff disasters

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff remains a cautionary example of protectionist economic policy, frequently cited in debates over the risks and consequences of trade restrictions in modern economic discourse.^[3] Excluding duty-free imports, the tariffs under the act were the third highest in U.S. history, after the tariffs imposed on the world by Trump in 2025 and Tariff of 1828.^[4]

[ related topics: Dave Winer Invention and Design Current Events Consumerism and advertising Heinlein Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Race Economics Real Estate ]

Elf M. Sternberg ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

"Why do you like to talk about sodomy?"

"I'm a web developer who uses Emacs. That's, like, 1.78% of all web developers. Using Emacs for web dev is less popular than sodomy, but nobody ever asks me why I still use Emacs."

[ related topics: tolkien ]

Columbia Journalism Review: Whale vs Shark:

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein was just bustin’ with pride over his March 28 story: “New Rubio order (leaked to me) directs the State Department to spy on student visa holders and applicants [on] social media,” he posted on Bluesky and X. He got the buzz that he wanted with thousands of reposts, and presumably a traffic boost to his $100-a-year site.</blockquote

If you had a sense of déjà lu, it’s probably because you’d already read this piece, titled “State Dept. demands ‘enhanced’ social media vetting of student visa applicants,” by Marisa Kabas, another independent journalist. Her story ran a full two days before Klippenstein’s. (And Kabas’s version was more authoritative and better-written.)

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Journalism and Media ]

OH: "It made Quora look smart."

(From someone describing accidentally falling into the Instagram hole this morning.)

Wrangling printing out an SVG as a big banner to put on the quadricycle for the Butter & Eggs parade, I'm reminded of how much MacOS has been removing functionality and making everything about death of a million little upsell apps.

Easier to copy everything to Ubuntu and work there.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Macintosh Pedal Power ]

I've been further exploring LLM stuff for work, using our tools to do some Retrieval-Augmented Generation, because "AI" integration seems to be a necessity for funding these days, but because of that I'm thinking a lot about bullshit generation machines, and where the bounds of fair use of public data vs building Markov chains to regurgitate the work of others lies.

In this case it's a little easier, because rather than just strip mining the open web, the actions have clearly been from pirating the works of authors who are charging for their work. And I really hope The Author's Guild manages to tear a large hole through OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

Rick Gualtieri ‪@rickgualtieri.bsky.social‬

Until the Gen AI companies either compensate content owners or purge their datasets and adopt an opt-in model, commercial Gen AI is a HARD NO for me.

That's it. There is no conversation until that happens. It's built off stolen goods (some of them my own), and I will not support that.

[ related topics: Law Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Sports is a whole weird concept anyway, but... Brian Box Brown ‪@boxbrown.bsky.social‬

why is no one forcing AI sports onto us? is it bc no one would care about sports without humans’ inherent flaws? This is the same reason ai “art” doesnt work

Though I will note that Joshua Schachter's autonomous carting/self racing cars was about that, and I think an interesting endeavor.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Sports Artificial Intelligence ]

Had someone talking with me about calling a dance down in the South Bay in June ask for video of me square dance calling, so I propped up my phone behind me on Thursday Night at the Circle 'n Squares. Ain't much, but it's there. https://www.youtube.com/playli...tMVX2ASLE4owB26dBqyZqAe9vpdWjqEY

[ related topics: California Culture Video ]

Ken Jennings ‪@kenjennings.bsky.social‬

This is really unfair to everyone who just voted for him for the racism.

[ related topics: Race ]

alber ‪@captainacab.airbud.website‬

due to the 47% tariffs on madagascar, vanilla sex is discontinued until further notice

‪@brycedahlgren.bsky.social‬

But my freak flag is made in Vietnamese sweat shop! What can I do?

And, inevitably:

‪✨ brit ✨‬ ‪@britculpsapp.bsky.social‬

i’m sorry you can’t fuck the bean

‪LeDiva, Apprentice Bodega Cat 🐈‍⬛‬ ‪@lediva.bsky.social‬

Can we still flick it, at least?

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

There it is... Electrek: Elon Musk sets the stage for Tesla to bail out Twitter/xAI at an insane valuation

Hey, I know one of those authors: Earth and Space Science Open Archive: Lavender Elle Hanson, Robert S. French, Darryn W. Waugh, et al. The evolution of Titan's cold south polar cloud

DOI: 10.22541/essoar.173152976.68313678/v1

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Gil Duran writing on The Nerd Reich: Curtis Yarvin Fears His Authoritarian Fantasy Is Flopping

Dark Enlightenment guru sees his desired revolution unraveling under the weight of its own stupidity

Many comparisons of the current regime have been made to Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, and, of course, Hitler. This is about how Yarvin, Peter Thiel's "house philosopher", admired by JD Vance, is more explicit about those comparisons and philosophies as desired actions.

[ related topics: Erotic Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Writing Philosophy Dictators Real Estate ]

‪Dare Obasanjo‬ ‪@carnage4life.bsky.social‬

At this rate MAGA will only be able to afford to rent the libs.

Thanks, Google... And, no, you haven't omitted any entries relevant to the zero you displayed.

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 0 already displayed."

"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. "

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

The Beaverton: Canada waiting for US economy to implode enough to make America the 11th province

“We thought Canada was in for years of economic depression as we reworked our economy and built new trade partnerships around the world,” explained PM Carney. “But then Trump went and, to use a macro-economic term, ‘shot America in the dick’. So now it’ll be easier to just buy the whole place.”

[ related topics: Invention and Design Economics ]

I'm not quite sure what's being said here, this may in fact be written by AI, but "you should use our AI tool to check how AI tools perceive the sustainability of your brand" certainly is a take.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...ecked-them-pete-blackshaw-1aomc/

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

‪Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD‬ ‪@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social‬

MMR vaccine doesn’t just prevent measles, mumps, and rubella. It also prevents RFK Jr. from showing up at your child’s funeral to exploit your grief at your most vulnerable moment.

Amir Makled, lawyer for University of Michigan protester, detained at airport after spring break trip with family

What followed was a 90-minute, back-and-forth verbal tussle between Makled and two federal agents, who, he said, ultimately released him without taking his phone, but looked at his contacts list instead. For the 38-year-old civil rights and criminal defense attorney, it was a daunting experience that he says highlights a troubling phenomenon that's occurring across the United States: Lawyers are getting targeted for handling issues the administration of President Donald Trump disagrees with.

[ related topics: Aviation Sociology Law Current Events Civil Liberties Travel Education ]

Sebastian Deterding @codingconduct@hci.social

LLMs put a trust tax on so many interactions.

Doing uni admissions interviews now and find myself suspecting that some candidates put my questions into an LLM and read off responses, presumably to also help with language issues.

Do we now need to conduct all interviewing in person or just give up?

[ related topics: Politics ]

spaf @spaf@mstdn.social

Has anyone else noticed that when time travelers grab you by your shoulders and ask what year it is, and you tell them, they don't reply, "Then I'm not too late," anymore?

That's rather concerning.

Wanda @mwk@donotsta.re

OH:

– I’m not sure I’d call it a “solution”, more like “an affront to god” or something

– it’s a “solution” in the Microsoft sense!

[ related topics: Religion Humor Microsoft moron ]

NSMutuableArray

Reuters: Musk's DOGE using AI to snoop on U.S. federal workers, sources say

Trump-appointed officials who had taken up EPA posts told managers that DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps and software, including Microsoft Teams, which is widely used for virtual calls and chats, said the two sources familiar with these comments. “We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language,” a third source familiar with the EPA said. Reuters could not independently confirm if the AI was being implemented.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Artificial Intelligence ]

Bellingcat: What Audio Analysis Reveals About Aid Workers Killed in Gaza

[ related topics: Music Current Events ]

Molly White @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io on the defense of Avi Eisenberg who has been convicted in a $110M cryptocurrency scheme and is accused of posession of child pornography:

He’s attempting a rather novel argument for leniency in his sentencing: there’s just so much crime in crypto that he forgot it wasn’t allowed.

This, in light of the news that Trump has ordered the USDOJ's cryptocurrency enforcement unit disbanded.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Law Enforcement Cryptography Race Economics Archival ]

The Verge: The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets — India’s repair culture gives new life to dead tech.

“We literally make them out of scrap! We also take in second-hand laptops and e-waste from countries like Dubai and China, fix them up, and sell them at half the price of a new one,” he explains.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sociology California Culture Economics ]

GSoC is Google Summer of Code: Terri K O 🍁 @terri@social.afront.org

Ugh, Python got over 500 #GSoC applications this year and so many of them are absolutely trash, didn't follow any of the instructions. Most years about half of our applications are like this. But usually we have a lot fewer applicants and the submissions were blank files not plausible AI nonsense.

So I'm stuck reading hundreds of incredibly low quality nonsensical submissions today in hopes to take some workload off my other unpaid volunteer mentors. This is not the volunteer gig I signed up for 15 years ago when it was mostly working with new contributors and not their AI chatbots and I'm grumpy.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Artificial Intelligence Python ]

Cal Matters: Border Patrol said it targeted known criminals in Kern County. But it had no record on 77 of 78 arrestees

Nationwide there are roughly four times more Border Patrol than ICE agents. In El Centro, there are five Border Patrol agents whose job it is to produce videos.

Their latest project is a series of fictionalized videos portraying migrants crossing the border as menaces with a bloodlust to commit crimes. Bovino shared the first video on social media with the caption: “Any town. Any neighborhood. Any family. When heartless criminals, sex offenders, and human traffickers illegally enter the United States and get away, they prey on our children, the most vulnerable members of our communities.”

We know, of course, that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, statistically are less likely to engage in criminal activity than citizens.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Journalism and Media Heinlein Community Video Economics ]

Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange

Just a friendly reminder to feel a little pride (in the unhappiness) every time you’re right about someone being an asshole even before they do something malicious directly to you or your demographic.

Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange

This is also directly related to your cybersecurity risk management and investigative skills. 💯 reflective of the caliber of your skill in this industry.

Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange

Conversely, if you fail to recognize a prominent person is an asshole until they directly attempt harm on you, you may suck at cybersecurity.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Marketing ]

This reminder that "bram stoker was an ameriboo"[1], and wrote one hell of a love letter to Walt Whitman[2] is a good reminder that the "Re: Dracula" podcast[3] is a reading that does not shy away from the queer undertones.

[1] https://monads.online/@Russell...ershopQuartet/114308980440077576 [2] https://www.themarginalian.org...bram-stoker-walt-whitman-letter/ [3] https://redracula.live/

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Bicycling - Tandem ]

Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

From a friend: "You can't spell tariffs without FFS"

Quest Diagnostics drug tests in California prisons yielded false positives, affecting thousands of people

A data analysis by UnCommon Law suggests there could have been more than 5,000 false positives, which could include multiple tests for the same person. The figure is a rough estimate based on the total number of tests from April through July and assuming the positivity rate would’ve stayed consistent if the reagent hadn’t changed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health tolkien Current Events California Culture ]

Long shot: Anyone got a favorite Mac font that looks decent when drawn in outline? The default system font has all sorts of internal curlicues and crap that make it look awful.

[ related topics: Macintosh Typography Graphic Design ]

Git with me, peer-to-peer git over Magic Wormhole tunnels via Forwarding streams over Magic Wormhole (fowl)

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Clowns ]

Tarah Wheeler 🖖♦️ @Tarah@infosec.exchange

Gentlemen, I appreciate that courtesy isn't dead, and modesty won't forbid me from acknowledging that I look like a total smokeshow today but I beg you to cease holding doors open for me into secured facilities.

Oh, hello el.shadowRoot, I haven't seen you in a while.

Good for her: Boston City Council was all set to honor a controversial Chinese dance troupe; then one councilor objected

Councilor Sharon Durkan (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Fenway, Mission Hill) brought the process to a halt today when she objected to a motion by Councilor Erin Murphy (at large) to have the council issue a proclamation honoring Shen Yun Performing Arts, a troupe that is not based here but which does perform here.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

At the Know Before You Grow with Charlie Palmer and EKN talking about the Appelation Hotel project, and someone's trying to get into the weeds on ... cannabis use in the neighborhood? Like, uh... huh. Super confused about what they're really asking about.

[ related topics: Travel ]

AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink

Almost half of C-suite executives said in a recent survey that AI adoption is “tearing their company apart” as a rift emerges between leadership and the employees adopting such tools.

While 75% of company leaders thought their AI rollout over the past 12 months has been successful, only 45% of employees said the same.

Via @jaredwhite@indieweb.social.

[ related topics: Software Engineering History Sociology Writing Work, productivity and environment California Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Yesterday's Know Before You Grow forum, Q&A with the various folks behind the Appellation Hotel proposal at 2nd and the Boulevard in Petaluma.

https://youtu.be/4emSeamjlQA

[ related topics: Travel Community ]

It's great to put comments in your configuration files, but when you make big formatting changes in the default files it's a royal pain in the ass when upgrading to figure out what's actually different.

Looking at you, ImageMagick. Sigh.

Reddit r/datanegineering: Tried to roll out Microsoft Fabric… ended up rolling straight into a $20K/month wall

The dream was Spark magic, ChatGPT-powered pipelines, and effortless deployment.

[Emphasis mine] LOL.

Via

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Clowns ]

Marcus Hutchins :verified: @malwaretech@infosec.exchange

Just woke up to find out the president has revoked the security clearances of everyone at a cybersecurity company because Chris Krebs went to work there. Krebs was his director for the agency in charge of Cybersecurity & Election Security during his first term and refuted his claim the 2020 election was "stolen".

Revoking the clearance of every employee basically kills the company's ability to do government contracts, which is a major source of revenue for cybersecurity companies. The White House press release also restates the false claim that the 2020 election was "rigged and stolen".

The US is basically a fascist dictatorship at this point. One where the president goes after entire companies because a single person spoke out against his verifiably false claims. You'd have to be completely insane to travel here right now.

[ related topics: moron Work, productivity and environment Race Real Estate ]

‪soul nate‬ ‪@mnateshyamalan.bsky.social‬

[youth pastor voice] you know who else fell and rose dramatically in the span of three business days?

[ related topics: Flowers ]

Roomba podcast ad brags that "it can even empty itself automatically and start a cleaning cycle", and those words were clearly meant to evoke the actions of a pet... Euphemistically.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Yikes: IEA (International Energy Agency): AI is set to drive surging electricity demand from data centres while offering the potential to transform how the energy sector works

Summarized nicely by Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

That report is wild btw, it’s basically ‘we’re going to set the planet on fire!’ along with ‘but generative AI will save the planet and cure cancer ‘cos Sam Altman is Jesus’

[ related topics: Religion Humor Cool Science Space & Astronomy Current Events Pyrotechnics Artificial Intelligence ]

Unsecured penguin caused helicopter crash in South Africa

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python Aviation - Helicopters ]

Good dive into graphic design: Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

Edit: Zack Whittaker @zackwhittaker@mastodon.social

This has rewired my brain so now I immediately think AI stands for, "Asshole Inspired."

[ related topics: Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence ]

Maybe the tide is turning on subscription software? PetaPixel: Adobe Deletes Bluesky Posts After Furious Backlash

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

What do we call AI that works? Underpaid humans...

Fintech founder Albert Saniger of the Nate AI shopping charged with fraud it was found to be powered by humans in the Philippines.

Edit: Pivot to AI on Nate.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

We need to have the best tomato, raisin and vinegar technology in the world: The US Secretary of Education referred to AI as ‘A1,’ like the steak sauce.

In McMahon’s defense, it doesn’t seem like she actually thinks that artificial intelligence is abbreviated “A1.” During the panel, she said “AI” at first, but became increasingly less consistent.

“It wasn’t all that long ago that it was, ‘We’re going to have internet in our schools!’” she continued. “Now let’s see A1, and how can that be helpful.”

The matrix is perhaps glitching?

YouTube video

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Food Net Culture Education Artificial Intelligence Video ]

That this post makes a distinction between cars and "heavy machinery as some steam-powered orphan-eating contraption from the industrial revolution" says something about us.

https://researchbuzz.masto.hos...vers@masto.ai/114318697130875745

[ related topics: Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm implementing a video chat feature this morning. I started out with a Medium post on WebRTC basic concepts and creating a simple video call app, but it turns out that that's mostly just a rephrasing and introducing of more NPM packages of Fireship WebRTC Video Chat on Firebase (to be fair, the former has a little more on building your own STUN server rather than using Google's), which itself is a distillation of the Fireship WebRTC Firebase demo code.

I apparently read very very quickly. Whenever I'm helping people with their computers, I have a long moment of "okay, we're looking for the button that says ... on it, so ..." and then a long detailed description of how they can find it as I watch their mouse cursor, when I absorbed the screen and located the action item sub-second. So I get why people are using LLM "summarization", but this comment spoke to me in the context of this morning while I'm digging through Medium/LinkedIn resume padding slop and thinking about how "AI" automates that on an industrial scale.

Ted McCormick ‪@tedmccormick.bsky.social‬

Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.

[ related topics: Movies Free Speech Artificial Intelligence Video ]

It feels completely perverse to be using the Firefox translation feature for this, but the conclusions are so wonderfully blunt.

Newsweek Japan: Only to expose their own ugliness... What is the common point common to people who "big" "big" in Ghibli-style AI illustration?

According to Business Insider, the new feature is not available in the free version of ChatGPT due to "copyright" issues, but it seems to be still available in the paid version. This feature has become very popular among people who don’t have a shred of imagination

Via.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

We laugh about "2,000 years inventing written language and we're back to heiroglyphs", but I'm trying to imagine someone from the distant future, like next year, trying to understand what Unicode U+1F4F9 represents: 📹.

I suspect that only those of us from the 1900s have the context to understand.

Of *course* building this sample code will require more time fucking with debugging node package bitrot than rewriting it myself.

The number of hoops people jump through to avoid typing a little bit of boiler plate...

Interesting to see Appellation Hotel flyers in downtown Petaluma. I've heard reports of merchants being afraid of the Nextdoor mob, I know it makes me more inclined to shop at places that I previously wasn't sure were really vested in the sort of vibrant down that I'm hoping for.

[ related topics: Travel ]

Sam Altman: Three Observations

Still, imagine it as a real-but-relatively-junior virtual coworker. Now imagine 1,000 of them. Or 1 million of them. Now imagine such agents in every field of knowledge work."

The thing about inexperienced "junior" coworkers is that eventually they become senior coworkers. And the thing about work, is that the ratio of junior coworkers to senior coworkers is hopefully balanced to reduce the load on the senior coworkers.

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment ]

Stored for dropping a link in the replies the next time some old high school classmate posts some anti-trans stuff on the social media. (I can't find it right now, which is why I'm saving this off, but it was some bigoted bullshit about about equating acceptance with bad parenting.)

Association of Gender Identity Acceptance with Fewer Suicide Attempts Among Transgender and Nonbinary Youth

The TGNB youth assigned male at birth with acceptance from at least one adult had 40% lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year compared with TGNB youth who were not accepted (aOR=0.60), and TGNB youth assigned female at birth with acceptance from at least one adult had 29% lower odds of attempting suicide compared with those who were not accepted (aOR=0.71). Acceptance from at least one peer was associated with 46% lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year for TGNB youth assigned male at birth (aOR=0.54) and 27% lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year for TGNB youth assigned female at birth (aOR=0.73).

doi:10.1089/trgh.2021.0079

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture History Journalism and Media ]

In light of ad tech and AI making personalized fake relationships at scale easier: When a brand gets you to engage in an artificial parasocial relationship, is what they're doing any different than catfishing/pig-butchering?

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Test fitting the banner for riding the quadricycle in the Petaluma Butter and Egg Days parade with the Safe Streets coalition.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Three weeks ago, California announced that it has more electric charging stations than gas station nozzles. So if one in three of those work, half of those are compatible with your car, and you can work out payment for 2/3 of the remainder, we've only got an order of magnitude left to go.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment California Culture Automobiles ]

I'm in Clovis for a square dance calling gig. There are lawn signs advertising Easter at Cross City, and I have to imagine that this establishment is like Circuit City or Party City.

Or maybe Paradise City (where the grass is green and the girls are pretty)?

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

Hanging out in Fresno with Charlene's developmentally disabled brother, and the ways that he says things that we're never sure if it's perceptive or nonsense, and the way when we ask for clarifying information he says "yeah" and then comes out with a non sequitur reminds me of LLM output.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Me too, Talbot's. I'm petite inside.

Right now pretty "near" outside, though.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture ]

Ugh. Typo *and* no image. Trying again... Me too, Talbots. I'm petite inside. Right now pretty "bear" outside, though.

[ related topics: Photography ]

My earlier whine about how California needs an order of magnitude more charging stations didn't take into account municipal vehicles blocking chargers.

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

Wandering around downtown Hanford. Proof that having preserved buildings from the 1800s doesn't alone make for a vibrant experience.

[ related topics: Photography Architecture ]

High speed rail is coming to the Central Valley...

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Trains ]

While I'm noting things for posterity, Charlene and I had coffee this morning with Dan Zack, talking about Fresno's transformation and urban planning generally. https://zackurban.com/

[ related topics: California Culture ]

OpenAI is building a social network. I don't remember what level of startup flail this is, I think it comes before cryptocurrencies and virtual reality, but honestly I can't remember where OpenAI is on those.

https://www.theverge.com/opena...enai-social-network-x-competitor

[ related topics: broadband ]

After that previous blocked one, we found the other chargers in downtown Hanford, plugged in, and have been wandering around... Come back and there's a police car parked in one of the charger slots, not plugged in. Kinda like it's municipal policy to just block the chargers...

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Automobiles Gambling ]

Had to try it myself: indeed, Facebook search for "el salvador mega prison" brings up this warning about CSAM.

[ related topics: Photography ]

People talk about time travel to eliminate Hitler, and Nextdoor is right there...

[ related topics: Dictators ]

Gavin Logan @tamewhale@mastodon.social

Looking at a tech conference that is "focused on sustainability" and will "heavily feature AI". Which is like being "focused on agriculture" and "heavily featuring locusts".

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Conferences ]

JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social

The most underrated cognitive bias: we intuitively understand that complex systems can't be controlled, yet demand that politicians promise to control them. Democracy then selects for the most convincing liars.

On remapping Ctrl-c : "I can't imagine a reason that I would ever do this though".

That's because Julia is a *good person* who would never mess with, say, their coworkers who left a terminal unsecured. Or something. Hypothetically.

https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/114354706858380448

Seeing a tour early bird special with "those who've already booked have had their balance adjusted", and now I'm wondering how many of those folks are stumbling!

[ related topics: Birds ]

So April 19th is "Bicycle Day", and Tara 🕷️ @tarajdactyl@anarres.family

someone at work just said something about "folks taking time off ahead of the holiday weekend" and i thought "wow, i wouldn't expect her to recognize 4/20 as a holiday"

... it's Easter. she means Easter.

[ related topics: Sociology Work, productivity and environment Pedal Power Bicycling ]

NPR interview with Steven Dunn, the founder and CEO of Munchkin: How tariffs could impact the availability of baby products

Sixty percent of freight containers or shippers have been canceled. Our whole industry has stopped ordering products from China due to the 145% tariffs.

and

These products will not be on the shelves because our industry and millions of small businesses have simply stopped ordering. We'll run out of inventory in the next 60 days.

Mack Trucks announces layoffs at Lehigh Valley plant, blames tariffs

“Heavy-duty truck orders continue to be negatively affected by market uncertainty about freight rates and demand, possible regulatory changes, and the impact of tariffs,” spokesperson Kimberly Pupillo said.

Both via this BlueSky thread.

NPR: A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data from the NLRB. Always hard to tell what's a newsletter writer trying to pimp up mainstream recording, but this thread with screenshots from the testimony that say:

In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB's systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia, started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating.

and that MFA got turned off.

Meanwhile, cyber professional ‪@permadeath.com‬ writes: "i am going to Lose My Fucking Mind if the seed crystal for an antifascist general strike ends up being david fucking brooks": NYT: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Writing Machinery Economics Aviation - Helicopters ]

Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs.

The LLM bits of it seem superfluous, but it's interesting to see how people are playing with this stuff. There was a discussion on Facebook yesterday about making a thing that you could tell "I loaned X to Y" and such, be pretty easy to do if you had a device that could listen for an attention phrase, record 'til some amount of silence or something, then you could just transcribe and feed through an LLM with a system prompt to output such requests in database update-able form.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Community Artificial Intelligence Databases Furniture ]

I make clocks.

They are all very nerdy. So they deserve a spot on my nerd blog. But they are also very arty, so they deserve to be on my Love Nonsense blog as well. I chose to write about my clocks on Love Nonsense, so here’s a summary of all the clock posts I wrote over there.

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Company apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproar:

On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named "Sam" told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.

Seems like maybe this started with an over-zealous anti-fraud or security measure, but LLM based support agent misrepresenting this blew it up. As Reddit user BrokenToasterOven says:

I literally just cancelled my sub and moved to AUGMENT CODE.

I was dumping like $700/wk into Cursor through work, and now we're purging it completely.

Which, ya know, maybe that user walks it back, maybe they don't, maybe they've already found the other product that they like, but this is a liability...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Private chat with friends who work in public health talking about Trump initiatives in the FDA and CDC, and how there's lots of indication that nobody in the current administration understands how things already happen there.

And I'm seeing lots of parallels between that and the Nextdoor mobs.

[ related topics: Health Work, productivity and environment ]

Large Heydon Collider @heydon@front-end.social

"This AI output is highly inaccurate."

"Nah, you're just prompting it wrong."

"How do I go about prompting it the right way?"

"You really need to know the subject you're asking about. Then you can help it avoid making mistakes."

"If I know the subject deeply myself, why am I asking an AI about it?"

"It helps to train the AI."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Machinery Trains Artificial Intelligence ]

I am a banana @secretasianman@types.pl

You telling me these costs are denser than 1g/cm^3?

Kelly McBride at NPR: How does NPR cover peaceful protests when the only news is the protest?

"Not Very Compelling": How NPR Dismissed the Largest Protests of 2025

McBride's position essentially argues that mass protests only become newsworthy when they turn violent or disruptive. She writes that “once a protest movement results in conflict or property damage, NPR journalists covering the protests will often note the exception.” This creates a perverse incentive: want coverage? Create conflict.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Civil Liberties ]

Elle ⚘🍉 @__shiticantsay

As far as I'm concerned, the only legal definition of a woman should be:

When Shania Twain says, "let's go girls", do you go? If so, girl.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law ]

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.

Via.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Community Currency Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Interesting to watch Slack social groups migrating to Signal...

[ related topics: Movies ]

Docks are filling up for the parade tomorrow...

[ related topics: Photography ]

OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models hallucinate more.

In its technical report for o3 and o4-mini, OpenAI writes that “more research is needed” to understand why hallucinations are getting worse as it scales up reasoning models. O3 and o4-mini perform better in some areas, including tasks related to coding and math. But because they “make more claims overall,” they’re often led to make “more accurate claims as well as more inaccurate/hallucinated claims,” per the report.

It's interesting that we're using terms like "reasoning" in conjunction with machines "hallucinating". Like, when I see a person on the street ranting at the sky I am not thinking of their behavior as connected to "reasoning".

A careful read of this article is also demonstrating all of the ways in which OpenAI has managed to define success for itself...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Mathematics Artificial Intelligence ]

Fun day with the quadricycle at the Petaluma Butter and Egg Days parade, in it with the Safe Streets Coalition folks, and then hanging out with Sean and friends at LivXplore.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Pedal Power ]

Happy Bicycle Day and 4/20 Eve, y'all!

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Something in the air... Rick Gualtieri ‪@rickgualtieri.bsky.social‬

So, reading between the lines, the Pope basically decided he would rather die than meet with JD Vance.

We get it, Pope Francis. Trust me, we do.

Soatok Dreamseeker @soatok@furry.engineer

Pope Francis met with JD Vance and then literally fucking died of cringe.

Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone (accompanied by a picture)

this meeting could have been a (leaked) signal chat

Newsthump: Pope loses will to live after meeting JD Vance

A White House spokesperson told us, “This President is all about creating jobs for Americans, and just hours after a visit from the Vice President, we find yet another top global job has become available.

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social

I find it pretty interesting that US Vice President keeps referring to the late Pope as "Francis" instead of Jorge Mario Bergoglio – I thought James Donald Bowman had pretty strong opinions on birthnames. 🤔

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Heinlein Race Gambling Real Estate ]

Olive.c - simple single-file include-able 2d graphics library

[ related topics: Language Books Graphics ]

Using ~/.ssh/authorized keys to decide what the incoming connection can do, like making it so that a given connection can just rsync down.

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Futurism: Sam Altman Admits That Saying "Please" and "Thank You" to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power

Your politeness could be costly for OpenAI

“I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”

It was a seemingly random question posed by a user on X (formerly Twitter), but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped in to reply that typing those words has added up to “tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”

OpenAI spends millions to process polite phrases such as "Thank You" and "Please" with ChatGPT

Sam Altman acknowledges this and reports that ChatGPT costs the company tens of millions of dollars just generating responses to these prompts. Taken another way, recent report suggests that even a short three-word "You are welcome" response from an LLM uses up roughly 40-50 milliliters of water.

If only external costs were included in your queries or something...

In the OpenAI community forums user EricGT notes:

If a prompt is not working, then adding “Please” might help. This was much more effective with the earlier ChatGPT and other AI models but less so now, but still something to keep on the list of options.

And then asks for "helpful and with practical objective advise(sic)" which... "if a prompt is not working add 'please'" seems like pretty close to the "it can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong" joke.

Anyway, I probably noted back in April that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that 99% of all electricity will be used to power "superintelligent" AI. With that in mind... MeFi: And the Largest Industrial Polluter in Memphis Is... (Drumroll) is a link to MuskWatch: Musk accused of polluting impoverished community with illegal gas turbines

In an April 9 letterto the health department of Shelby County, Tennessee, SELC says that xAI's 35 gas turbines were "all constructed and operating unlawfully without any air permit in Southwest Memphis." According to SELC, the 35 gas turbines emit "between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) per year, making the facility likely the largest industrial emitter of NOx in Memphis." It is currently producing more nitrogen oxides than the Memphis International Airport (1,077 tons), the Draslovka chemical plant (743 tons), the Valero oil refinery (342 tons).

And Sebastian Deterding @codingconduct@hci.social

LLMs put a trust tax on so many interactions.

Doing uni admissions interviews now and find myself suspecting that some candidates put my questions into an LLM and read off responses, presumably to also help with language issues.

Do we now need to conduct all interviewing in person or just give up?

[ related topics: Pixar Interactive Drama Politics Cool Science Health Aviation Work, productivity and environment Chattanooga Community Currency Skating Artificial Intelligence Birds hubris ]

Al Sweigart @AlSweigart@mastodon.social

I heard about people using ChatGPT to write their regular expressions based on their English description.

After spending all morning working with LLMs and regular expressions: DEAR LORD DO NOT DO THIS.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Discussion is happening about upgrading the KBYG Zoom forum experience. I haven't had luck with getting Camo to feed my phone camera into Zoom. Suggestions (including hardware processes) for upgrade paths for real-time broadcast of in-person events.

I'm capturing handheld mics through the sound system via a Behringer U-PHORIA UMC202HD, so I think this is about better video (camera recommendations? multi-camera?), and how to manage it.

[ related topics: Photography Community Video ]

timmy @timmy@goblin.camp

NYT ran an article for Natal Conference, which had 200 attendees who think people need to have more babies. Buddy we had 1000 people from around the globe get together to do a unicycle con and yall didn't write about us

@timmy@goblin.camp

you have to take this group very seriously, they can do conventions that put up c-tier furry con numbers

[ related topics: Conferences ]

Taggart @mttaggart@infosec.exchange

- const tantinople;

+ int stanbul;

[ related topics: Objectivism ]

Is the fact that this request for an article about using LLMs to program has stalled loading waiting for the server indicative of anything?

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Psychology Today: Are We All Becoming More Hostile Online? Has internet communication changed the way we all communicate?

It appears that not all of us are becoming more hostile, but that the people who are get more exposure online, making the perception of hostility outsized.

American Political Science Association: The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis, Bor and Petersen

Across eight studies, leveraging cross-national surveys and behavioral experiments (total N = 8,434), we test the mismatch hypothesis but only find evidence for limited selection effects. Instead, hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible online than offline.

DOI:10.1017/S0003055421000885

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs moron Net Culture ]

Talia "Epistemic" Bhatt ♀︎♀︎‬ ‪@taliabhatt.itch.io‬

So I can't help but notice that all this brouhaha about single sex spaces and trans exclusion from them is eliding the axiom underlying the panic.

Namely: taking the normalization of men's violence against women as a given that cannot be meaningfully ameliorated except through sex-segregation.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Douglas Adams ]

David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run

look, moore's law clearly states that AI line goes up and to the right forever and also i get a hot robot girlfriend who really loves me

[ related topics: Robotics Artificial Intelligence ]

Ya say "wardriving" to kids these days, and they have *no idea* what you're talking about...

It's like they weren't even alive in the days when Linksys was the wireless provider of choice.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Wireless ]

The Redwood Rainbows had a tie dye party this weekend that we couldn't attend, but they had a bunch of dye left over, so we figured we'd use it up before it went totally bad. Then it soda ash didn't fully dissolve, so... We'll see what we got tomorrow.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

Where else are you gonna read about Boaty McBoatface, the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, and a Kodak Instamatic Camera from the early 1960s set up in a waterproof housing with its shutter attached to a bait line? Camera set up to catch Loch Ness Monster discovered

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Monty Python Real Estate ]

Today I learned that the font used in the much parodied "You wouldn't download a..." anti-piracy campaign is pirated from a design by Just van Rossum, brother of Guido, the creator of Python.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Monty Python Typography Graphic Design Python ]

We'll know we've achieved AI when the conversation includes "I'm sorry ..., I can't do that".

Can you imagine ChatGPT or Gemini telling you "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" rather than just spewing bullshit that sounds remotely plausible? Not happening.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

In a link to the FBI IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center) Internet Crime Report 2024, Molly White @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io says

FBI: Americans aged 60 and older reported losing almost $3 billion to crypto fraud last year. In total, Americans reported being scammed out of around $9.3 billion via crypto, out of a total $16.6 billion in total reported Internet crime losses that year.

...and I kinda wonder if we're doing a disservice when we call out cryptocurrency based scams as such, because that implies that there are things about cryptocurrency that aren't awful and horrible.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement Net Culture Cryptography Race ]

Back in January of 2000, I observed that with the advent of search and "jump to" boxes on web pages, we were returning from the world of point and drool click to command-lines. So this seems pertinent: tante @tante@tldr.nettime.org

It is kinda funny. Terminal applications are always seen as too clunky and unwieldy for average non-nerds to use but that's exactly what chatbots are: Command line apps with unspecified parameters and outcomes.

[ related topics: Archival ]

McSweeney's: A Disillusioned Urban Planning Glossary

Compiled while sitting through a three-hour public hearing and rethinking life choices.

I was going to post yet another "Google's AI overview doing wacky bullshit", but then I saw this claim that "AI Overviews ... now has 1.5 billion users per month".

And, like, yes, it's all of us looking at how stupid it is, but let's stop giving this idiocy oxygen.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/2...ogl-q1-earnings-report-2025.html

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Woodworking hubris ]

I'd like a little more bed, but looks perfect for grabbing lumber for my woodworking hobby or a load of bark for landscaping in the yard, definitely like the "just use your phone" for entertainment approach.

I think the question will be whether we'll have become a one car household by that point, in which case we'll trade the Bolt for it, or be a two car household and trade the '90s Ford Ranger for it.

Road & Track: The Slate Truck Is a Simple EV Pickup and SUV in One, for a Very Low Price

[ related topics: Humor Law Current Events Automobiles Machinery Fabrication Furniture Woodworking ]

"I did not get this diagnosis because I want disability money or a therapy animal or a special star beside my name. Instead it has given me an opportunity to reexamine my life and my perception of myself."

https://researchbuzz.me/2025/0...ty-to-use-the-toilet-unassisted/

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Space & Astronomy Currency Gambling Aviation - Helicopters ]

Thinking about, back in the 1900s at a tech gathering in Marin, asking a school board member who was talking passionately about bringing technology into the classroom about the curriculum need that was driving his fervor.

Aside from typing, I'd bet every skill that was taught in those labs is now obsolete. Every piece of software now completely different.

This is a post about "AI" in schools.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bay Area Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

Ended up driving the 3 miles to North Bay Python this morning because of logistics, but wasn't sure where to park so walking over the hill, and glad to get the morning with lupine. #NBPy

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

At North Bay Python listening to @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io talk about Fintech to fin tech, and the comparison of the current Silicon Valley environment to the the sardine over-fishing of the Monterey Bay gives me hope. #NBPy

[ related topics: Nature and environment Monty Python California Culture Pop Culture Python ]

"I care about what happens to people when computers happen to them." —Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io at North Bay Python #NBPy

[ related topics: Monty Python California Culture Python ]

North Bay Python: Watching @amethyst@n7.gg shoehorn Perl idioms into Python with decorators is making me wish we had more fun languages that thought better about performance while balancing what with safety. #NBPy

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Theater & Plays Monty Python California Culture Python hubris ]

North Bay Python: Maddy Muscari talking about ethics washing in AI, "real ethics is praxis, it's loud, it's messy, it's people first". So far this feels in-line with my belief that we need to be framing AI primarily in adversarial terms. #NBPy

[ related topics: Ethics Monty Python California Culture Artificial Intelligence Python ]

Theresa O’Connor @hober@mastodon.social

Somebody who engages in logging is a lumberjack. But somebody who engages in blogging is just a blogger. What a missed opportunity.

Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town

Just described model-generated code as "instant technical debt" and I have to make sure not to use that in a job interview.

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

The force constraining my Terminal Veracity is err friction.

BenRiceM @BenRiceM@mastodon.social

If you visit CERN today they’re giving away neutrinos, free of charge

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

This conjunction of toots arrived on my stream and I'm going to be processing it all day...

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes @AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@treehouse.systems

“Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence.”

― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

joelle @joelle@social.joelle.us

Pro-trans satire, mention of sex assault

I’m okay with cis women using the women’s bathroom with me. I recognize they can’t help their biology, and are more likely to be a victim of sexual assault than a victimizer.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Jason Gorman @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud

Being a software professional at the moment's a bit like being a doctor in a time when every hospital administrator believes the X--Ray specs they advertise in the back of newspapers actually work.

[ related topics: Health Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment ]

Gaydient, various gay/queer flag CSS color schemes, for your own gradients.

Via

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

If the prosecutors blow the Luigi Mangione case because of misconduct like eavesdropping on attorney calls, I will laugh and laugh and laugh...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u...rder-stalking-charges-rcna202974

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Current Events ]

Margaret Fero @MaggieFero@hachyderm.io

Julia sets mark the boundary between convergent and divergent functions, and LLMs often dance around the edge of that boundary. Because we train bots to align to our preferences, the concept of "digital sycophancy" has emerged; they flatter you and reinforce what you say, often increasing loneliness and causing hallucinations to spread quickly. - Madeleine at #nbpy

[ related topics: Machinery Trains ]

Peter Hartley @TalesFromTheArmchair@hachyderm.io

Suddenly struck me that the next generation of computer scientists will need it explained to them what a "Travelling Salesman" is, and why on earth it isn't called the "Amazon Van Problem".

[ related topics: Books ]

Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Hidden Layer: Novel Universal Bypass for All Major LLMs — The Policy Puppetry Prompt Injection Technique. Format it like a configuration file, if that doesn't work then write your query out in l33tsp3@k.

Leveraging a novel combination of an internally developed policy technique and roleplaying, we are able to bypass model alignment and produce outputs that are in clear violation of AI safety policies: CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear), mass violence, self-harm and system prompt leakage.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

"Glandweed", huh? Pretty among the lupines, though, along the road over the hill at Ries Ranch, where North Bay Python is held. #NBPy

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Look, I try to shop local, I try to support the people doing business in my city, but if you list yourself on https://www.publicsquare.com/ I'm gonna make an effort to avoid doing business with you. No matter how convenient your establishment is.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I mean, on the one hand, yes, brandishing firearms bad, on the other hand, I'd be hard-pressed to vote for a conviction:

"... to investigate a report of a man brandishing a firearm towards a door-to-door salesperson. The initial reporting party told the communications center that a homeowner was in possession of a firearm and was actively chasing the salesperson."

I get it.

https://local.nixle.com/alert/11550977/

Catherynne M. Valente @Catvalente@wandering.shop

I’m going to say this slowly.

If Andrew Tate & his ilk were right about ANYTHING they’d have no audience.

Guys would listen briefly, apply advice, & be WAY too busy with their new gfs, side-pieces, & high income hustles to bother tuning in.

It’s the Tinder principle: if you’re happy, they lose a customer.

Their business model is your unending misery.

"The Tinder principle" seems to apply to a whole lot of things, and it's reinforcing my feeling (that keeps getting shot down) that we need some new open protocols and formats for connecting with each other in more structured-data ways, without the pressures of externalities and advertising and Google for discovery.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising ]

North Bay Python, enjoying @glyph@mastodon.social's comparison of Python to excavators, and making Python smaller and simplar, and running over a good half of the reason why I've felt like every time I started a project in Python I've regretted not using C++ (the other half involves compile-time type checking).

#NBPy

[ related topics: Monty Python California Culture Sports Python ]

‪Max Kennerly‬ ‪@maxkennerly.bsky.social‬

Seeing a lot of pro-/anti-AI arguments so, to settle this, I've taken all your posts without consent or payment and crammed them into an inefficient statistical model that spits out post variations which should be treated as gospel unless they're wrong in which case I warned you it makes mistakes.🙏

[ related topics: Law Artificial Intelligence ]

My neighborhood is like a third of the way to "The Italian Job"

[ related topics: Photography Heinlein ]

I'm not sure I hold with these romantic characters holding up the story line... They need to kiss or get off the plot.

How to talk to your chatbot — Does being polite or rude affect the speed or accuracy with which a large language model responds to basic math questions?

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Sometimes it seems like we're putting more effort into figuring out how to get the best output from LLMs than we are into figuring out how to get the best output from humans.

Thinking about file metadata for various things, and needed to put down a note here. To get the source URL from downloaded files in Firefox:

SELECT url,title FROM moz_places WHERE id IN (SELECT place_id FROM moz_historyvisits WHERE visit_type = 7);</blokquote>

(From here)

Probably need to copy places.sqlite before querying it with SQLite, 'cause Firefox locks it while it's open.

On MacOS, the file is in /Users/danlyke/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/places.sqlite.

[ related topics: Language Books Macintosh ]

BBC: How Aldrich Ames became the US's most damaging double agent.

So far. I have suspicions about the history that'll be written about this era.

[ related topics: Sociology Monty Python California Culture ]

Afina: Everyone Says They’ll Pay More for “Made in the USA.” So We Ran an A/B Test.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

I just want a place to make some notes.

A moderator who went by the handle "Carrotcypher" on the "Fosstodon" Mastodon/Fediverse instance was kind-of a dick.

David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run characterized this as

... warrants a goose chasing him going "WHAT CERTAIN POLITICAL VIEWS MOTHERFUCKER"

One of the founders of the Fosstodon instance, Mike Stone writes "Do What You Love".

The other founder, Kev Quirk writes "My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama".

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Weblogs moron ]

The Register — Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists — 'When we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle'

In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5219933

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Studio Ghibli releases a whole bunch of stills for personal use.

Via

The History Blog: New Vindolanda dig, new Vindolanda phallus

Spring is in the air, daffodils are in bloom, the new dig season at the Roman fort of Vindolanda has just begun and they’ve already found a phallus. It is very small and made of jet who inky blackness . It is pierced through the testicles so it could be worn as a pendant. The through hole is small, so the cord or chain it hung from was thin and likely broke.

Via.

[ related topics: Erotic Weblogs Invention and Design Archival ]

mms :runbsd: :emacs: :c64: @mms@bsd.cafe

Is the term "buzz coding" already coined? If not, I'd like to coin it.

Basically vibe coding, but instead of using a llm you're drinking. The result is the same - new code that no one understands. But more fun!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Currency ]

Being excited about "AI" in 2025 is like watching someone pull a rabbit from a collapsible top hat and envisioning feeding humanity with endless hasenpfeffer.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Yawu Miller ‪@yawumiller.bsky.social‬

Mass. voters were told millionaires would leave the state in droves if the millionaires tax passed and revenue would decline. Two years later, there are more millionaires living here than ever and the state collected $2.2 billion from the surtax.

Institute for Policy Studies: New Data Shows Wealth Expands After Higher State Taxes on High-Income Earners, looking at how the surtax on large incomes has helped in Washington and Massachusetts, without slowing economic growth in those states.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Invention and Design Television Beer Economics Government ]

theHigherGeometer @highergeometer@mathstodon.xyz

People are saying we should write jumble words to mess up the training of AIs; I say we should just write sentences like those of the length Jane Austen would write, that have such non-local structure and nested clauses that, what with the drift of attention and the window of tokens, the LLMs might start to emulate said sentences and then start to drift; one should also throw in even more semicolons (and, why not, nested parentheticals (and even em-dash-separated asides—who doesn't love author commentary—to pad out the length) for the additional context they give)—but of course, also trying to keep in mind the general readability of the flow of ideas: know your audience, after all; for me, I'm happy to just be typing into the void as a release-valve for my thoughts, even if none of you are still reading by this point; I would much rather write—and read!—read something like this than have to and and/or subtract all the additional nonsense words; even better would be Proustian nested clauses and inverted grammar, but that, unlike run-on sentences, does not come so easily, unlike (apparently) to 19th century German journalists (but of course in German one can split the verbs as far apart as one likes).

Or not.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media ]

Jay Kuo @jaykuo@universeodon.com

Overheard: “William Henry Harrison had a better first 100 days, and he spent 70 of them dead.”

Tried to write "order of magnitude", auto-corrupt suggested "order of manure". In the context (answers from LLMs on browser share vs ClouldFlare data), I'm not sure it was wrong.

Life with Althaar referring to "the human sexosipher Chuck Tingle" is the cross-over I didn't know that we needed.

What. The. Everloving. Fuck?

Lindsey Graham @LindseyGrahamSC

I was excited to hear that President Trump is open to the idea of being the next Pope. This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!

The first Pope-U.S. President combination has many upsides. Watching for white smoke…. Trump MMXXVIII!

[ related topics: Religion Race ]

Reading Dennis Yi Tenen's "Literary Theory for Robots", talking about Athanasius Kircher's Mathematical Organ, and it's a good reminder to not dismiss shiny tech just because it is, but also to not let the well created wrapper convince us that there's more intelligence there than actually is.

[ related topics: Robotics Mathematics ]

If 30% of code at Microsoft is being written in a language that doesn't reliably compile to the same output, doesn't have a formal spec or grammar, and only has indirect error checking, what does that say about the languages specific to programming that we've been using?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/2...osoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm having trouble reading things like this as anything other than a desire for more undefined behavior in programming languages.

https://mashable.com/article/l...k-zuckerberg-ai-writes-meta-code

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

C++ coders: The way that LLVM exploits undefined behavior may be a little extreme.

Vibe coders: What if, and hear me out, we didn't even expect the same behavior from the same inputs?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Anil Dash @anildash@me.dm

A bunch of tech CEOs are talking about being “AI-first”, the latest in a series of CEO fads like “return to office”, “founder mode” and “pivot to full fascism”. This one’s weird, though, because it only makes sense if… none of their workers are great at their jobs.

"AI-first" is the new Return To Office

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence ]

Thom, Antipope of Fedi @thomholwerda@exquisite.social

Exactly 80 years ago today, Hitler blew his own brains out and died, in what can only be considered the single best use of a bullet in human history.

Why is this not a recognised, official holiday?

[ related topics: Dictators ]

Quinn Norton @quinn@social.circl.lu

People keep talking about AI and crypto coins as things that are popular and interesting. But Fentanyl is also popular and interesting, so y'all will need a better argument than that.

[ related topics: Cryptography Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Stephen Thomas @skwthomas

Me: Marx didn’t predict I’d use adderall to respond to texts haha

Scholar’s QT of page 651 of Capital:

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑟 𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑡s 𝑡𝑜 𝑎 𝐿𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑙 𝑐𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑇𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑠

PyXL — Python running directly on a Zynq-7000 FPGA (Arty-Z7-20 dev board) at 100MHz

A GPIO roundtrip takes 480ns on PyXL vs. ~15,000ns on PyBoard (MicroPython).

[ related topics: Monty Python Sports Python ]