Flutterby™! From 2025-06-01 to 2025-06-30

Called a bit of square dancing on J Street today, the 5th and 6th St crowds were there. Fun potluck, got told they had a great time, looking forward to trying this for other blocks.

Got invited to do it at a July 4th party, but we'll be at IAGSDC.

Today in questionable life decisions, I'm rolling out my "garage sale detritus plus a bunch of scrap wood" trash can.

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Two videos and a pic from yesterday's J St potluck square dance.

https://youtube.com/shorts/j1br_MO4s8o?si=ijbiBk_nWtyoeL2t

https://youtu.be/mwgAA6tV6f0?si=KGoUgYblayTKK6YE

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

This is marvelous: The West Australian — Andrew Miller: Classic car chases educate a child’s mind in ways the classroom just can’t

I was supposed to be helping the six-year-old with reading practice, but we got distracted and ended up watching classic car chases on YouTube.

Specifically, comparing and contrasting wanton automotive carnage in the movies The Italian Job and The Blues Brothers.

This naturally led to explaining the historical relevance of the Illinois Nazis — who met their demise by driving off an incomplete flyover while pursuing Jake and Elwood Blues — and why popular culture so often circles back to the dark risks of fascism.

Via

[ related topics: Movies Sociology Heinlein Beer California Culture Automobiles ]

Irenes (many) @ireneista@irenes.space

be gay do crime

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️

🏳️‍⚧️❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🏳️‍⚧️

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️

d@nny disc@ mc² @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run

make sure to do crimes if you're not gay to contribute to the statistical noise that drowns out the gays doing crimes

Be sure to break small rules so that when it comes time to break big rules, you're in practice.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Space & Astronomy ]

WVU study shows ripple effects from World War II detainment camps on Japanese Americans’ health

TheJournal of Public Economics published the findings by Grossman and his coauthors. Their paper illuminates the health effects of in utero and early life shocks, and the ongoing reverberations generated by events like forced migrations.

As Tara notes:

There needs to be more discussion around the idea that traumatic events echo. They don't impact just one generation.

[ related topics: Health History Television Community Economics ]

Login login Temu style.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wacky. Hopefully this will get that picture of Jeff and me duded up at yesterday's square dance...

[ related topics: Photography ]

If you get one of those fancy wifi enabled dryers, and when your laundry is finished it notifies your phone, is that a ...

... clothes call?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Clothing ]

Google AI making everyone smarter.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

When the job lets you dig your own hole, that’s re-moat work.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]

Well that's a fascinating twist: Legal Newsline: Judge rejects claim AI chatbots protected by First Amendment

Judge Anne C. Conway of the Middle District of Florida denied several motions by defendants Character Technologies and founders Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the mother of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III. Setzer killed himself with a gun in February of last year after interacting for months with Character.AI chatbots imitating fictitious characters from the Game of Thrones franchise, according to the lawsuit filed by Sewell’s mother, Megan Garcia.

“... Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are speech,” Conway said in her May 21 opinion. “... The court is not prepared to hold that Character.AI's output is speech.”

[ related topics: Games Law Civil Liberties Guns Artificial Intelligence Gambling ]

Nextdoor post asking about how many signatures have been received for the zoning overlay referendum vs how many are needed, and I do not want to interact with that post, so I'm gonna leave it here to check up on...

Obviously I think the best of all possible outcomes is that they can't get enough signatures to put this on the ballot.

https://nextdoor.com/p/J5nzqsrzT5xz?post=404210317

SF Standard: The ICE agents disappearing your neighbors would like a little privacy, please

“While we always weigh legitimate concerns around privacy and safety, we believe that censoring images from this news event would set a harmful precedent for the media’s right to report and the public’s right to know,” managing editor Jeff Bercovici said.

If I were a member of an agency that's horrifically disappearing people on the pretext that employers should have access to what's essentially a slave under-class, I would simply, you know, not do things that history is gonna judge me really fucking harshly for.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Privacy Bay Area Law Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

That moment when you read the Nextdoor complaints about Petaluma's "Slow the fast down" campaign, and realize that many of your neighbors would be totally against the "Slow the *flock* down" campaigns that real cities like Portland and Seattle do.

[ related topics: Seattle ]

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 ]

Hailey @hailey@hails.org did this with embedded images, I'm gonna do it with text:

shot: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/

This library (including the schema documentation) was largely written with the help of Claude, the AI model by Anthropic. Claude's output was thoroughly reviewed by Cloudflare engineers with careful attention paid to security and compliance with standards. Many improvements were made on the initial output, mostly again by prompting Claude (and reviewing the results). Check out the commit history to see how Claude was prompted and what code it produced.

"NOOOOOOOO!!!! You can't just use an LLM to write an auth library!"

"haha gpus go brrr"

In all seriousness, two months ago (January 2025), I (@kentonv) would have agreed. I was an AI skeptic. I thoughts LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn't actually understand code and couldn't produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh... the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.

To emphasize, this is not "vibe coded". Every line was thoroughly reviewed and cross-referenced with relevant RFCs, by security experts with previous experience with those RFCs. I was trying to validate my skepticism. I ended up proving myself wrong.

chaser: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2025-4143

eaders who are familiar with OAuth may recognize that failing to check redirect URIs against the allowed list is a well-known, basic mistake, covered extensively in the RFC and elsewhere. The author of this library would like everyone to know that he was, in fact, well-aware of this requirement, thought about it a lot while designing the library, and then, somehow, forgot to actually make sure the check was in the code. That is, it's not that he didn't know what he was doing, it's that he knew what he was doing but flubbed it.

[ related topics: Language Books Robotics Net Culture Embedded Devices Artificial Intelligence ]

404 Media: Ukraine's Massive Drone Attack Was Powered by Open Source Software, on using ArduPilot to destroy a third of Russia's bomber fleet.

[ related topics: Free Software Software Engineering Journalism and Media ]

Fast Company: The household auto fleet is a money pit

Cars are parked roughly 95% of the time, depreciating as they collect pollen and bird droppings. And yet they demand monthly payments, insurance, fuel, and maintenance. The long-distance commute has been the primary reason for every working member of the family needing their own vehicle, but our travel habits have changed.

Via

[ related topics: Sociology Work, productivity and environment Currency Birds ]

Steve Wart @swart@cosocial.ca

"We're thrilled about the future of autonomous vehicles" — Sean Duffy

A Fatal Tesla Crash Shows the Limits of Full Self-Driving

As Elon Musk touts robotaxis in Austin, federal regulators are investigating whether the system is dangerous even with a human behind the wheel.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/iVcPW

Gift link with interactive graphics: https://www.bloomberg.com/feat...L7C9qjPrFk_Axf_8wP6-CqDj67nvFP3o

[ related topics: Graphics Television ]

So in the past day, someone at 34.132.153.18 running Scrapy has made 106,033 requests to Flutterby.com. Which, you know, on the one hand "whatever", on the other hand it also seems to be making requests with weird characters.

But I think the open web was a mistake.

[ related topics: History Sports ]

lynn / clarissa @left_adjoint@tilde.zone

As someone who works in higher-ed and also has taught middle school and high school aged kids, my opinion is not that LLM use is exploding among students because they're lazy or stupid or anything else

it's because our educational system has prioritized a very transactional "do this bullshit, and you get the credentials you need to have a life" approach for

well

maybe forever, really

and no one should be surprised that adversarial approaches by teachers and administrators are being met with an adversarial approach by students

[ related topics: Children and growing up hubris ]

Andrew Plotkin (Zarf): AI web scrapers: a data point.

[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

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 ]

Dogomation

Mechanical Bark is building out a "neural petwork" of dog labour(dor) for minimum wags.

The goal is simple: Get them to work like a dog.

I will start by seeing if we can track their input and gestures and slowly increase their input until they can book my flights, file my taxes, everything to earn their keep.

Using the Stanford Vision Image Net Dogs database.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Books Aviation Work, productivity and environment Education Databases Dogs Government ]

So I don't wanna suggest that maybe the Musk meltdown is a diversion, but how's that Tesla robotaxi rollout in Texas going?

Sean Patrick Conner: Avoiding Roko's basilisk, part II.

I'm gonna print out "For as long as you have a way for the machine to validate it’s (sic) outputs it can even..." in 128 pt type and post it on my wall. There is, perhaps, a class of problems where that's true. Factoring primes, maybe. But generally: those are the words of someone who should be physically prevented from getting anywhere near a keyboard.

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.

Via

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Gambling ]

Yes, I know, I shouldn't be interacting with any of the Meta properties, but... The Facebook Android apps (both Lite and regular) incorporate deliberate anti-patterns to foil attempts at cited conversations, and it frustrates me.

billy joe bowers-8647 @billyjoebowers@mastodon.online

I will quit using your product before I go to discord for help.

Via.

The Bellingcat podcast episodes on the MH17 downing sure pointed solidly this way, though the wording here is pretty milquetoast. ICAO Council vote on Flight MH17 case:

The Council agreed that the claims brought by Australia and the Netherlands as a result of the shooting down of Flight MH17 on 17 July 2014, were well founded in fact and in law. The case centered on allegations that the conduct of the Russian Federation in the downing of the aircraft by a surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine constitutes a breach of Article 3 bis of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, which requires that States "refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight."

[ related topics: Cool Science Aviation Law Guns ]

Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit.

A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.

It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people - including world leaders - at the conference in November.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Current Events Monty Python Conferences Global Warming ]

The thing is... It seems pretty clear that people who think the AI are smarter than they are are probably right.

Pro Publica: Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to “Munch” Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health

This was error-prone and not necessary, as accurate contract information can already be found in publicly available databases like USASpending. In some cases, this led to the AI system being given an outdated version of a contract, which led to it reporting a misleadingly large contract amount. In other cases, the model mistakenly pulled an irrelevant number from the page instead of the contract value.

Ars Technica: DOGE used flawed AI tool to “munch” Veterans Affairs contracts

Peter @peter@thepit.social summarized as:

this guy 100% set up a RAG pipeline on a local GPU running Llama 3.2 or whatever. there's a whole class of dudes who have had their brains melted by this stuff, it's basically a religious belief, they are **convinced** they can do magic with this stuff and have utter contempt for any kind of real knowledge or expertise.

[ related topics: Religion Health Sports Artificial Intelligence Clowns Databases ]

Great work 5th St folks with the garden in the traffic circle at G St.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Gardening ]

Wide shot of the 5th St traffic circle garden.

[ related topics: Photography Gardening ]

"Circle garden is a temporary project that transforms an existing traffic-slowing element into an appealing green space. ..."

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Gardening ]

Anti-Petaluma Appellation Hotel advocates: "I'm not against a hotel in principle, just that tall."

Also: "We can't cover up the mural on the side of the hardware store!"

So apparently the appropriate height for the hotel is zero feet.

[ related topics: Travel ]

Google AI definitely has a notion for the lore and mythology of elves in Dungeons and Dragons.

[ related topics: Photography tolkien Artificial Intelligence ]

20mph limits in London linked to sharp fall in road injuries and deaths, new report finds

A new study published by Transport for London (TfL) has shown that the introduction of 20mph speed limits and zones on local authority-managed roads in London between 1989 and 2013 led to significant reductions in collisions, injuries, and deaths, particularly among children and vulnerable road users.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Theater & Plays Fashion ]

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 ]

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

https://popagandhi.com/posts/my-talk-at-north-bay-python/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Monty Python California Culture Video Python ]

Global Environmental Change: Why do cars get a free ride? The social-ecological roots of motonormativity

Here we used a large international sample (N = 2035) and novel within-participants testing to show, for the first time, at least two environmental pathways linked to judgement biases: one related to people’s social surroundings and linked with their explicit views on transport, and a separate, more implicit pathway related to higher-level structural influences such as nationality, and living in rural areas. Additionally, respondents dramatically underestimated public support for non-motorised transport relative to their own, a pluralistic ignorance effect likely reflecting another facet of motonormativity. The social-ecological explanation, with its nested environmental influences, helps explain the ‘stickiness’ of automobility, and implies change will be most likely when multiple facets of a person’s social, physical and cultural surroundings align in supporting non-motorised mobility.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2025.102980

[ related topics: Sociology ]

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️*looks at you 俺ly*🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️ @kirakira@furry.engineer

*invalidates your cache*

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity (pdf)

Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter-intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.

Via

[ related topics: Apple Computer Macintosh ]

Effin' Birds: Statement on Unbound

John Mitchison, Unbound’s publisher, posted a heartfelt apology yesterday, announcing that he was stepping away from the business because authors are not getting their money. I feel a lot of empathy for John, because he, too, lost his dream to Unbound’s financial mismanagement. But the act of destroying a creative person’s confidence to hide the company’s monetary losses is unforgivable.

It took me two years to get over the feeling of rejection that came from a book that, it turned out, was successful and should have had a second printing.

Via

[ related topics: Books Currency Birds ]

Methane leaks from dormant oil and gas wells in Canada are seven times worse than thought, study suggests

The national emissions estimate they arrived at—230 kilotonnes per year—is sevenfold higher than the 34 kilotonnes reported in Canada's National Inventory Report. The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology.

Of particular interest to me 'cause I know someone caught up in the drama of an Alberta well...

[ related topics: Current Events ]

nova (they/them) @nova@sharkey.stellar.gay

correlating a lack of critical thinking in 18 year olds with chatgpt instead of the holistic failure of the education system is such a joke and insult to kids, honestly

the failure didn’t start when they were 15 and chatgpt became commonplace

the failure started at the start of their education, when the sole intention of the system is to produce malleable workers who do not question authority

we are failing our kids and have been since long before chatgpt. stop acting like it’s not the fucking design of the education system to make a complacent public.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Graphic Design Education ]

When the LAPD thanks the protest organizers. We need to get ICE the fuck out of California.

[ related topics: Photography Civil Liberties California Culture ]

Yesterday my BlueSky and Fediverse feeds lit up with reports of an ICE vehicle driven at high speed into a crowd. Today I can't find news reports on this event. Anyone got details?

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Wandered around the Martin Civic Center lagoon, there were turtles and birds heron there...

[ related topics: Photography Birds ]

Buncha klan members got in hopped up trucks, covered their faces, and went down to the Home Depot to kidnap and harass brown people. Motherfuckers should be glad the community let them get away with their lives.

The responsibility for violence lies with the instigators. They need to be told this.

[ related topics: Machinery Community ]

OpenAI is retaining all ChatGPT logs “indefinitely.” Here’s who’s affected.

In a statement, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap explained that the court order came in a lawsuit with The New York Times and other news organizations, which alleged that deleted chats may contain evidence of users prompting ChatGPT to generate copyrighted news articles.

So, uh, yeah, careful there kids, your chat logs are fair game for law enforcement, no matter what you think you've told OpenAI to do with them re retention.

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Games Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement Douglas Adams New York Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Mark Carrigan @markcarrigan.net@markcarrigan.net — A depressing fable about how ChatGPT is corroding trust in scholarship. In which he discovers that the opening quote of Trust: Building on the Cultural Commons by Pascal Gielen inadvertently(?) starts out with a likely LLM fabricated quote attributed to bell hooks, but probably isn't.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

MostlyHarmless @MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social

When you stare into the abyss and the abyss, without a word, hands you your usual order right away.

Simon Tatham @simontatham@hachyderm.io

Who called it "cloud identity provider" when they could have called it "Attack Surface as a Service"

Whoah. Checking the Petaluma forecast for tomorrow, NWS says high of 77, Weather Underground says 70, AccuWeather says 76, Weather Channel says 69. That's quite a spread.

Media changes definition of ‘crossfire’ to include when a cop points a gun at you and shoots you

This comes after Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi was shot by police with a rubber bullet while covering the protests in LA.

The incident which was caught on camera and shows the officer look at the reporter, then pointing a gun directly at her before shooting her, has been described by outlets including her employer Channel 9 as being caught in the ‘crossfire’.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Television Guns ]

I feel this so hard. Especially as the Mac just gets worse with every release: afreytes 🇵🇷 ☭ @afreytes@mastodon.gamedev.place

I'm sorry in advance if this sounds cringe or sappy. Or if it is something well known. But right now the difference, for me, in using Linux versus Windows is hope. It really is. Let me explain.

On Linux, if I have an issue, or a problem, something I don't understand. I have hope that I can find a way, an alternative, a forum, someone that will help, or even make it better by myself. No matter the issue hope drives me forward.

On Windows, there is no hope anything will get better.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Microsoft Open Source Macintosh Community ]

So glad there's only one iOS user who I do tech support for in my life. The "where'd my button to do this go?" questions are gonna be numerous.

Wow. I know I'm disappointed and disgusted with the tech industry lately, but the #wwdc25 examples are completely falling flat with me. "AI can help you shop better!" "You can put backgrounds on your text chats!"

If this was on The Onion, I'd understand, but while MacOS has so many bugs...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Macintosh Artificial Intelligence ]

Wilhelm Fitzpatrick @rafial@masto.hackers.townM>a<

Sitting here with gasping like a fish after reading a detailed description of using an AI coding tool to write a unit test for a simple function in which it is mentioned:

* The AI was apparently unable to "reason" about correct dependency injection or mocking

* 20 prompts were written to "iteratively refine" the solution

* 2000 lines of code were generated of which 50 were used

...and at the end the writer concludes "the final result was successful and saved time over doing it manually"

😱

Wilhelm Fitzpatrick @rafial@masto.hackers.town

I continue to be astounded by how LLMs seem to hack the basic reasoning processes in our own meat brains!

[ related topics: Software Engineering Writing Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

The Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections (CSWR), part of the University Libraries, has announced the public release of the first portion of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe Institutional Abuse Collection. This important digital archive provides public access to previously sealed legal documents related to clergy sexual abuse cases in New Mexico.

CSWR: Archdiocese of Santa Fe Institutional Abuse Collection

Via

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Law Current Events Education ]

Futurism: People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions. Got a good rundown of other resources with similar results.

In other words, OpenAI has all the resources it needs to have identified and nullified the issue long ago.

Why hasn't it? One explanation echoes the way that social media companies have often been criticized for using "dark patterns" to trap users on their services. In the red-hot race to dominate the nascent AI industry, companies like OpenAI are incentivized by two core metrics: user count and engagement. Through that lens, people compulsively messaging ChatGPT as they plunge into a mental health crisis aren't a problem — instead, in many ways, they represent the perfect customer.

Via

[ related topics: Health ]

The Register: Even modest makeup can thwart facial recognition

In a pre-print paper titled "Novel AI Camera Camouflage: Face Cloaking Without Full Disguise," David Noever, [PeopleTec] chief scientist, and Forrest McKee, data scientist, describe their efforts to baffle face recognition systems through the minimal application of makeup and manipulation of image files.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Low Background Steel:

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 ]

Wall Street Journal: The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology

U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs

Archive.ph link

Summarized by Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 @vaurora@mstdn.social

Surprise. All the US military UFO stuff turns out to be deliberate misinformation to cover up advanced military projects, or shitty Air Force hazing rituals

[ related topics: Politics Guns Conspiracy Economics ]

As Apple's WWDC keynote this year highlights... uh... a new "design language" that has contrast issues and is gonna result in the Apple users in my life asking me where the fuck the buttons they expected to find have gone, and suddenly it's my problem to figure all that shit out. And all sorts of other features that nobody actually cares about...

A good rundown on the ways that big tech computing has fucked up design: Adrian Roselli: I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did.

Via

[ related topics: Apple Computer Invention and Design Graphic Design ]

Gonna name a git branch my_finger so I can tell people to pull it.

AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

Hmm, parking in downtown LA *is* really bad, the Marines had to park in Seal Beach (Orange County). If they want a better route to the Civic Center, I'd hop on Amtrak and hop off at LA Union Station. (it's a lot better).

Marines ordered by Trump to serve in Los Angeles arrive in ... Orange County?

Thomas Sturm @tsturm@famichiki.jp

@ai6yr "LA cant be occupied by armed forces as there is no parking." is the most California take possible.

😂

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Theater & Plays California Culture Trains Public Transportation Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

myrmepropagandist @futurebird@sauropods.win

This whole AI thing is like being in a restaurant with a fancy waiter who has one of those giant pepper shakers, only it's full of bird poop and anthrax and he keeps asking "would miss like a little AI on her pasta?" with every dish that comes out... and when you say "NO" he starts grinding anyway and won't stop until you physically knock him over.

[ related topics: Food Artificial Intelligence Birds ]

Ryan Castellucci @ryanc broke github with a shell injection in the committer email message and bad timestamp in a git commit. Other people in the thread are looking at it as a possible way to kill the repos of people who fork a project and then SEO their fork above the original...

Brute forcing the phone number of any Google user

Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets@mastodon.social

The more I learn about atmospheric chemistry, the more terrified and angry I am about satellite companies' blatant lack of consideration for how their actions will harm the atmosphere. I hope this gets a lot of press. Great work by a whole team of scientists, including @astrokiwi.bsky.social!

npj Climate and Atmospheric Science: Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Global Warming ]

Hmmm.. this seems like the sort of thing I'd have linked, but I don't see it. From 2020: Journal of Transport & Health: Estimated car cost as a predictor of driver yielding behaviors for pedestrians

Results Of 461 cars, 27.98% yielded to pedestrians. Cars yielded more frequently for females (31.33%) and whites (31.17%) compared to males (24.06%) and non-whites (24.78%). Cost of car was a significant predictor of driver yielding (OR = 0.97; p = 0.0307); odds of yielding decreased 3% per $1000 increase.

Via.

[ related topics: Health Automobiles Model Building ]

I'm just here for the headline: Financial Times: Duolingo CEO on going AI-first: ‘I did not expect the blowback’. The rest of the article is a puff piece, archive.ph version.

Via

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm in email correspondence with someone who's suggested that I should automate older links on Flutterby tying to the Wayback Machine. And it's just a little bit of JavaScript, could be tied to a checkbox or something at the top of the page and a cookie, but it's also got me thinking about how much an individual site attempts to override a user's browsing behavior.

One of the things that drives me fucking nuts about software is when the software thinks it can do better than the plaform services, and creates additional layers on top of the system in ways that attempt to replace (and often interfere) with the underlying systems.

And it could go further, I'll sometimes link to archive.ph or similar services if something has a paywall, which I also sometimes feel kinda guilty about (although it seems like it's generally "a take"/dunking on the article, so...), is it reasonable to do that?

Or do I just assume the sophistication of users to derive such links through whatever means they have (manually, plug-ins, whatever)?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

Just to log such things here: I've been getting all of the "use LLMs" pressure, and work has me using the OpenAI API. I've got a couple of features I want to add and clean up in my C++ static site generator, and thinking maybe I need to rework that into Rust, in order to learn Rust, so along with my explorations in parsers in Rust, I asked gpt-4o:

I need command line application written in Rust. It should take as arguments one or more paths to search. It stores all of its information in an SQLite database, and if the SQLite database doesn't exist, it can create the database.

It should recursively search the specified paths for files. If the last modified date on a file is more recent than the entry in the SQLite database, or does not exist in the SQLite database, it should calculate a SHA512 sum of each file. If those files are a well known image format, it should extract the height and width of the image. It should store filename, the filename with full path, last modified date, checksum, height and width of each file in the database.

And I got... something that looked like a Rust application, as Cargo.toml and main.rs, but was not in fact a Rust application. It did, however, seem like a reasonable bit of code to fix, so after adding a bunch of <()> to -> Result return specs, and doing a lot of unwrapping and match and error return type management, I've got something that ... runs.

I also had to change how it did file date checking, because it got the semantics of SystemTime totally wrong.

cargo build pulls in a huge list of modules that I don't know how to trust or evaluate (dependencies of dependencies, unlike my previous attempts at vibe coding Rust this did seem to only suggest semi-relevant modules), it seems to run slower than forking jhead and pnginfo processes to find image sizes in C++ (my guess is that the image::GenericImageView is loading the full raster, and doesn't need to).

So... interesting, but not sure how helpful it is vs reading the docs yet.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Graphics Databases ]

Disclosure: Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android. If you're familiar with peer discovery protocols....

On or around May 17th, Meta Pixel added a new method to their script that sends the _fbp cookie using WebRTC TURN instead of STUN. The new TURN method avoids SDP Munging, which Chrome developers publicly announced to disable following our disclosure. As of June 2, 2025, we have not observed the Facebook or Instagram applications actively listening on these new ports.

“Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion. (Let's fucking hope.)

MeFi thread

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Graphics ]

ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

In a post on LinkedIn, Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso explained how the OpenAI chatbot "got absolutely wrecked" by an Atari 2600 running Atari Chess, a game for the system released in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still president.

[ related topics: Games Software Engineering Sports Artificial Intelligence Phreaking ]

Because I'm going to want to find this later: A Letter from the Episcopal Bishops in the State of California

Like all Californians, we are watching with great concern the events unfolding around immigration protests in Los Angeles. We are deeply concerned about the ICE raids and about the potential for violence arising from the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to the Los Angeles area. We are concerned that military deployments will escalate the confrontations unnecessarily, and worry that all of our regions in California may be subject to future deployments that heighten tensions rather than resolving them.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Closing off tabs: Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story

At re:Invent we announced Aurora DSQL, and since then I’ve had many conversations with builders about what this means for database engineering. What’s particularly interesting isn’t just the technology itself, but the journey that got us here. I’ve been wanting to dive deeper into this story, to share not just the what, but the how and why behind DSQL’s development. Then, a few weeks ago, at our internal developer conference — DevCon — I watched a talk from two of our senior principal engineers (PEs) on building DSQL (a project that started 100% in JVM and finished 100% Rust). After the presentation, I asked Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes if they’d be willing to work with me to turn their insights into a deeper exploration of DSQL’s development. They not only agreed, but offered to help explain some of the more technically complex parts of the story.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Work, productivity and environment Conferences Databases ]

This is really good: Baldur Bjarnason: Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk

The summary post: Avoiding generative models is the rational and responsible thing to do – follow-up to “Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI...’”

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Gabbard says AI is speeding up intel work, including the release of the JFK assassination files

“We have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously — which was to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages,” Gabbard said.

I really really hope that these were LLMs hosted on a secure machine, but even so...

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

Simon Willison: Breaking down ‘EchoLeak’, the First Zero-Click AI Vulnerability Enabling Data Exfiltration from Microsoft 365 Copilot.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

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 ]

What the....?!? Here's What Really Happened With Our Dodge Charger EV's Unintended Acceleration — Is "Drive by Brake" really a feature?

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles ]

Is this butter "cultured", Or just pretentious?

"The Cloud" was a mistake.

(This message brought to you by Firebase being down.)

The clusterfuck invasion of California as of right now:

Guard Soldiers Deployed in Trump's LA Crackdown Aren't Getting Paid Yet. (Via

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs contradicts Trump’s takes on Putin, LA protests (Via)

‪Justin Baragona‬ ‪@justinbaragona.bsky.social‬

Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city."

Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!

(With video)

Video of the assault on Padilla.

Aaron Rupar ‪@atrupar.com‬

holy shit -- GOP Rep. Mike Turner tries to "help out" Hegseth by getting him to confirm that the Pentagon does not in fact have plans to take Greenland by force, but Hegseth instead more or less testifies that yep, they have devised plans for that

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture Video ]

Dear presentation software makers: *Please*, for the love of all that's holy, give me a mode where I can see the slide full page *without* going full screen.

Signed: dude that's trying to do Zoom broadcasts with slides and really hates that I don't have OBS controls when that's happening.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

CHOAM Nomsky‬ ‪@samthielman.com‬

wow I wonder if the cops who lied about the sitting senator even though everything they did was on tape are also being less than honest about the presence of violent agitators at the protests in los angeles. they might even not have told the entire truth about other protests

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement ]

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 ]

Nikki McCann Ramírez @nikkimcr.bsky.social‬

Padilla: If this is how DHS responds to a senator with a question you can only imagine what they're doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California.

(With video)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture Community Video ]

NBS Boston: Worker arrested by ICE in Lynn, later released, says agents beat him in cemetery

WBUR: ICE holding immigrants in 'abysmal' conditions at Burlington office building, lawyers say

CBS News: ICE holding immigrants in 'abysmal' conditions at Burlington office building, lawyers say

[ related topics: Current Events ]

McSweeney's: New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution”

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Civil Liberties Douglas Adams New York ]

With lots of conversations recently about LLMs, and how people don't seem to have the tools to process what they're seeing, I'm pondering a lot about Baldur Bjarnason's note that avoiding generative models is the rational and responsible thing to do which is a shorter follow-up to Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk as I hear a lot of conversations by smart people who, if pressed, would say "these things are a clever hack", but then go on to use them as though they're omniscient entities.

Referencing a Reddit conversations about people losing perspective with ChatGPT, Elf Sternberg highlighted:

"Being able to say 'That sounds nuts' without having a point by point rebuttal is a critical talent for surviving in this world." AIS are not meant to survive in this world.

and as the poster of those conversations Linnea Sterte‬ ‪@decassette.bsky.social‬ noted

some of these are prob mostly lies ppl made up but the 'no I'M the one who made the ai awaken & become sentient' via eliza effect or w e is fascinating as a weird cyberpunk narrativesome of these are prob mostly lies ppl made up but the 'no I'M the one who made the ai awaken & become sentient' via eliza effect or w e is fascinating as a weird cyberpunk narrative

Even the NYT is starting to notice: Justin Hendrix ‪@justinhendrix.bsky.social‬

Here is a gift link to @kashhill.bsky.social's must read piece on the dangers of OpenAI's sycophantic LLMs and the parasocial relationships people are creating with them.

New York Times: They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. (Gift link)

“What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?” Mr. Yudkowsky asked in an interview. “It looks like an additional monthly user.”

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

Of course these days it's hard to tell what's real and what's a troll, but bwahahahahaha: Cursor Forums: Cursor YOLO deleted everything in my computer

Via

(From that thread, how to fuck up your repo with VSCode)

[ related topics: Community ]

No Kings rally in downtown Petaluma, we've just gotten past E At, looks like it extends up along D St to at least 5th

[ related topics: Photography History ]

I'm trying to do some stuff with steel scavenged from an old bed frame. It is absolutely tearing my drill bits up, but I got through, and then couldn't get the bolt in the hole. I remeasured, everything should fit, then I looked at the leading 3/8" of my drill bit, and ...

[ related topics: Cool Science Fabrication Furniture ]

I'm trying to do some stuff with steel scavenged from an old bed frame. It is absolutely tearing my drill bits up, but I got through, and then couldn't get the bolt in the hole. I remeasured, everything should fit, then I looked at the leading 3/8" of my drill bit, and ...

[ related topics: Cool Science Fabrication Furniture ]

Wait, the attempt to replicate the USSR Victory Day parades sponsored by cryptocurrency? So like literally brought to us by North Korea?

https://mastodon.social/@fj/114685687992714704

So yesterday, reports are that Oakland PD worked with the crowds in the protests to keep them civil, and the LAPD and LASD exchanged fire like the warring gangs they are, and blamed it on the protesters.

Guess Oakland learned something from The Riders that LA hasn't yet.

[ related topics: Bay Area Pyrotechnics ]

Joshua Conkel ‪@joshuaconkel.bsky.social‬

We should make June 14th No Kings Day permanently.

Thread on event planning and yesterday's Victory Day Trump Birthday parade

Because of my mom's various theories over the years, I'm kinda familiar with this, but it's good to have an overview. NPR: Ancient miasma theory may help explain Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vaccine moves, but Ars Technica: RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory really gets more nuanced on miasma theory vs terrain theory.

Via

I think the good news about this whole era is that people I know who were all-in on homeopathy are now going "wait a minute", and my own thinking has evolved from "maybe the raw milk I grew up on wasn't all that bad, it sure tasted better" to "yeah, not worth it."

[ related topics: Health Current Events ]

Just add humans: Oxford medical study underscores the missing link in chatbot testing

A paper by researchers at the University of Oxford found that while LLMs could correctly identify relevant conditions 94.9% of the time when directly presented with test scenarios, human participants using LLMs to diagnose the same scenarios identified the correct conditions less than 34.5% of the time.

Perhaps even more notably, patients using LLMs performed even worse than a control group that was merely instructed to diagnose themselves using “any methods they would typically employ at home.” The group left to their own devices was 76% more likely to identify the correct conditions than the group assisted by LLMs.

[ related topics: Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

Via Gernot Wagner @gwagner@fediscience.org:

To write is to think. Using ChatGPT to write leads to..."cognitive debt", which might be one of the better euphemism for somewhat less polite words.

Small n, not yet peer-reviewed, etc https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Also referenced by Elf Sternberg

[ related topics: Writing Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Oh Google.

(Search inspired by this different but similar result: https://kolektiva.social/@BigTittyBimbo/114664527024450640 )

[ related topics: Photography ]

Pro Publica: Federal Monitor Slams NYPD Unit Whose Aggressive Policing ProPublica Exposed

What Happened: A monitor appointed by a federal court has found that a New York City Police Department unit has been unjustly stopping and searching New Yorkers, almost all of them Black and Hispanic men. The report on the NYPD’s Community Response Team echoes a recent ProPublica investigation that found the unit, championed by Mayor Eric Adams, has been ridden with abuses.

I mean, we know that Eric Adams security detail provided the "heavies" for a crypto related kidnapping, so it's not super surprising that these fuckers are abusive.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement Community Cryptography New York Race ]

Bellingcat: Have LLMs Finally Mastered Geolocation?

To assess how LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI compare today, we ran 500 geolocation tests, with 20 models each analysing the same set of 25 images.

Turns out some of the GPT's are pretty good at playing Geoguessr.

For reasons of updates, our Brother printer was no longer able to ftp scans to the home server, so I had to reinstall and reconfigure an ftp server.

I really miss the days when this just involved enabling it, and not choosing which modules and figuring out which package actually runs and how...

The Onion: GOP Lawmakers Clarify Their Hate-Filled Rhetoric Only Meant To Stoke Fundraising

[ related topics: Food ]

Dave Zaffrann ‪@dzaffrann.bsky.social‬

This is continued journalistic malpractice from the @startribune.com normalizing a violent white male suspect. He owned a private security company called Praetorian Guard, traveled overseas to preach against abortion and LGBTQ+ people, and attended a bible college that preaches "violent prayer."

Suspect showed few signs of political extremism before lawmaker shootings

[ related topics: Religion Politics Sexual Culture moron Education Race ]

I mean, normally I'm ready to dunk on both Meta and LLMs, but in this case I think humiliating AI users might be just fine with me. 404 Media: Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]

The hard part about working with AI believers is trying to come up with prompts that give outputs that don't look totally stupid so that I can say "yeah, here's the process you wanted me to AI-ify".

I think this may be related to me reading fairly fast, that I've yet to have a "summary" or analysis of text come out of an LLM that was generated faster than I read, and in any way a meaningful representation of what I think the salient points of the document were.

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

Trying to reconcile my feeling that computers are like calculators, and we should learn to use them as such, and LLMs are like automated religious experiences. Prompts are like prayers, bad output is "you're asking wrong" or "the Lord works in mysterious ways".

[ related topics: Religion ]

Saw a bunch of links to this article: Vox: What broke teenage romance?, but didn't really follow up because I figured I kinda knew what it said. And, to be fair, I think I did, but I think there's something to take from Elf Sternberg's comment:

This article reminds me of a conversation I had with my kids. They claim that so many kids identify as queer these days not because they want to date their own gender, but because the queer community gives them a vocabulary that's not steeped in patriarchy and misogyny.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture tolkien Community Woodworking ]

Ryanair boss was wary about Boeings

“We had planes being delivered and when we get them back to Dublin we find spanners and tools under the floorboards,” O’Leary told The Times in his boardroom. “What the factory in Seattle needs is someone overseeing the production line. At the moment it’s just salesmen.”

Yikes!

[ related topics: Aviation Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Seattle ]

Tim Marchman ‪@timmarchman.bsky.social‬

Having a bit of a hard time with the concept that if a guy in a police uniform who has a police vehicle shows up I should lock the doors and call 911, but if a guy in a ski mask with an hGH gut appears to be kidnapping my neighbor, I shouldn’t ask who he is if I don’t want federal charges.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement Television Sports ]

Swear I'd quoted something like this before, but I can't find it. Anyway, the notion could use reinforcement. calcifer @calcifer@masto.hackers.town

It’s only vibe coding if you’re working on teledildonics devices.

Otherwise it’s just sparkling incompetence.

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment ]

Bluesky thread about the AltNPS accounts, with some interesting comparisons to QAnon.

Sitting here thinking about how, in order to fix my scanner, I tried several Ubuntu ftpd packages, and eventually ended up fixing the proftpd config so it didn't crash on attempted start.

And how these things used to just work. And what we've given up for all of this "flexibility".

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

So if Petaluma PD can't find a way to prosecute this dude, does that mean we as pedestrians get to use deadly force against motorists who infringe on. Our spaces? I'm about ready to go *off* on red light runners at Kentucky and Washington...

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay...tween-no-kings-protesters-truck/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Nothing new, but it's good to see the tech press catching on: Ed Bott on ZD Net: Your favorite AI chatbot is full of lies

Via

[ related topics: Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence ]

DTrasler Writing @Dtraslerwriting@mastodon.social

When the AI techbros are finally hauled up on charges and asked if they are guilty, their only options for reply should be "yes" or "maybe later".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm on the Grocery Outlet specials email list, and sometimes reading the item titles gives me giggles. This week's entrant: "Applaws Tuna Crab Wet Cat". I mean, I can figure out what it is, but...

This discussion about Google Gemini 2.5 giving a wrong answer with some arithmetic is interesting, especially in discussions about trying it multiple times, and how sometimes it'll use an actual calculator and get the correct answer, and how sometimes it'll say it used a calculator and still give incorrect answers.

Via.

I've just started passing the "okay, you can use external tools" flag to various LLM APIs (I'm using an abstraction layer written by a coworker), and this sense of what it tells us what it's doing vs what it's actually doing, or not doing, is only gonna get worse.

[ related topics: Mathematics Community ]

Petition to help the opposition proofread spelling....

[ related topics: Photography ]

So, yeah, you probably saw the exchange shared around the socials yesterday, but... Futurism: "Mansplaining Audacity": President of Signal Watches in Bemusement as Random Man Explains Her Company's AI Strategy to Her

"So yes, I do think I have a better insight than the president of the company."

but the thing is ... especially as I play more and more with "AI" and have more conversations with people who think these LLMs have lots of value, is that this is the behavior that the AI vendors have been rewarded for displaying. This dude is displaying value as his community has rewarded it.

[ related topics: Community Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]

Following up on my link to Low Background Steel .ai, The Register: The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

[ related topics: Cool Science Space & Astronomy Guns Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

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The authors of that Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task paper that I linked to a few days ago are managing the media exposure wonderfully, today it's Time: ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study. The juicy bits in this article start at "Post publication", including:

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Writing Journalism and Media Education Artificial Intelligence Archival Furniture ]

Reg Braithwaite 🍓 @raganwald@social.bau-ha.us

While the bartender serves us our chaser, consider the slot machine business. Were there no regulations, slot machines would not be random. They would use sophisticated machine learning—AI of sorts—to determine when a player tires of losing and dole out the absolute minimum “win” to keep them playing.

Cameras, microphones and other sensors would monitor breathing, heartbeat, posture, facial expressions, everything.

We know this to be true: That’s how the computer game industry works.

...

Vibe coding consists of pulling handles in various ways hoping for a win in the form of the AI appearing to write the program you desire. The actual mechanism is opaque, so you keep pulling the handle hoping to learn what to do.

But inevitably, some VP of Growth will write an all-hands email ordering the company to optimize for number of pulls of the handle rather than for your profitable payoff.

Welcome back to the slots.

[ related topics: Photography Games Software Engineering Education Artificial Intelligence Gambling ]

Dr. Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social has a thread about "...that "chatgpt rots your brain" paper", which I'm taking to mean Your Brain on ChatGPT:... mentioned here and here

I am asking myself: what studies would *I* design to evaluate people's usage of LLMs in keeping with learning science and without neurohype?

And the ensuing thread is interesting, but also shows the issues with trying to quantify thinking about systems that programming as a discipline has long had.

But I think some of the notion of cognitive offloading explored in the thread is interesting as we explore if LLMs are analogous to calculators? Card files? Or slot machines?

[ related topics: Software Engineering Journalism and Media Television Graphic Design Education Archival ]

‪Jerry Kindall‬ ‪@kindall.bsky.social‬

For every book that gets banned, there are ten other books at least as subversive that the busybodies have never heard of. Those books could certainly use a boost. Let's get on that!

[ related topics: Books ]

Thinking more about LLMs being compute analogous to calculators, except for arithmetic they're for language and thinking.

And how we react to the yutes who can't make change without a cash register to calculate it for them, and how this trend is going to go.

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Solar Company Sues Google for Giving Damaging Information in AI Overviews

"This lawsuit is not just about defending our company's reputation; it's about standing up for fairness, truth, and accountability in the age of artificial intelligence," Nicholas Kasprowicz, general counsel for the solar company, Wolf River Electric, said in a statement.

Via

Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book — The research could have big implications for generative AI copyright lawsuits.

Via

Extracting memorized pieces of (copyrighted) books from open-weight language models A. Feder Cooper, Aaron Gokaslan, Amy B. Cyphert, Christopher De Sa, Mark A. Lemley, Daniel E. Ho, Percy Liang

Plaintiffs and defendants in copyright lawsuits over generative AI often make sweeping, opposing claims about the extent to which large language models (LLMs) have memorized plaintiffs' protected expression. Drawing on adversarial ML and copyright law, we show that these polarized positions dramatically oversimplify the relationship between memorization and copyright. To do so, we leverage a recent probabilistic extraction technique to extract pieces of the Books3 dataset from 13 open-weight LLMs. Through numerous experiments, we show that it's possible to extract substantial parts of at least some books from different LLMs. This is evidence that the LLMs have memorized the extracted text; this memorized content is copied inside the model parameters. But the results are complicated: the extent of memorization varies both by model and by book. With our specific experiments, we find that the largest LLMs don't memorize most books -- either in whole or in part. However, we also find that Llama 3.1 70B memorizes some books, like Harry Potter and 1984, almost entirely. We discuss why our results have significant implications for copyright cases, though not ones that unambiguously favor either side.

Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe

When people call LLMs “useless” they’re generally being kind as it’d be more accurate to call it harmful, dangerous, toxic, or risky.

It’s like calling white asbestos “useless”. Technically true in most western countries because you literally can’t use it, but it kind of elides the reason why

[ related topics: Books Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark Race Model Building Photovoltaics ]

Hang on a sec, lemme grab my random axe of kindness.

Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town

That Stevie Nicks song got a lot less magical when I moved here and found out white wing doves are just dusty pigeons.

[ related topics: Race ]

More people should interact with developmentally disabled adults, it'd give perspective to that entirely committed to happily saying things that may or may not be completely false with charming earnestness thing that LLMs do.

[ related topics: Handicaps & Disabilities ]

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 ]

As ChatGPT Linked to Mental Health Breakdowns, Mattel Announces Plans to Incorporate It Into Children's Toys

That said, we don't know the exact details of how Mattel will use OpenAI's products. But so far, it seems to be heading in a pretty predictable direction. Let's not kid ourselves here: of course Mattel is going to use AI to make a Barbie doll or what-have-you engage in full-blown conversations with your kid, or sell a Magic 8-ball that spouts even more meaningless but convincing-sounding drivel.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

hikari 🌟 (falling into the sky) , @hikari

hi there.

on 2016-11-07 i was inspired to create this pair of diagrams, and posted them to my then twitter account. the tweet is long gone, but they must have struck a chord with some people, because the diagrams have long outlived it! i guess they're as relevant today as they were then.

so let me repost them here, in never-before-published high resolution.

if you care about copyright, you can attribute these with:

 nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;© 2016 hikari_no_yume, CC BY 4.0 (International)

and ideally, please link to this post's canonical url (begins with social.noyu.me), but i don't care that much

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Copyright/Trademark ]

The Copilot Delusion

This isn’t about tools or productivity or acceleration. It’s about the illusion of progress. Because if that programmer-if that thing, that CREATURE-walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Pyrotechnics Architecture ]

I was watching Aron Peterson (LinkedIn)'s look at Google Veo, eg Day 7, Day 9, commentary on someone else's car crash scene (via Pivot to AI), which made a good context for looking at this IRL imitation of AI video.

[ related topics: Automobiles Community Artificial Intelligence Video Gambling ]

Nikita @kytta@polymaths.social

The street that my mum lives in is a one-way street, but wasn't marked as such on #Google Maps. This caused many drivers to drive the wrong way. I have tried to edit it on Google Maps (there is such functionality), but to no avail. No matter how often I submitted a change (with photos of street signs!), Google said "Sorry, we could not verify it".

Solution: Edit the street on #OpenStreetMap! A few months after I did this, Google seems to have stolen the data, as it regularly does, and now the street is correct in both datasets!

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

The Beaverton: Canadians travelling to the US advised to not fucking do that

“Canadians are welcome in California. It’s perfectly safe to visit,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “Just so long as you take a few basic travel precautions, like travelling on a valid passport, teleporting over the border, moving undetected in the shadows in the dead of night, getting the telephone number of an immigration attorney tattooed to your upper thigh, saying a heartfelt goodbye to your pets and the people who love you, and appointing someone to water your plants just in case you disappear into a labyrinthian nightmare of an extrajudicial immigration enforcement system that no longer answers to judge nor common mercy.”

Via

[ related topics: Bay Area Law California Culture Phreaking Gardening Gavin Newsom ]

Mo @mkelly@mastodon.ie

Pretty sure that using the LLM-based IDEs are playing a long game where eventually I don't check the output as carefully as I should, and all apps they create converge on a Rickroll.

[ related topics: Games ]

I'm out doing location scouting of bus stops for a little "good trouble", and I'm seeing parts of the city that I've only driven by in the past. I would love to know how many people actually visit this park. Walking half a mile along high speed roads to sit at this bench at a major intersection...

[ related topics: Photography History Public Transportation ]

S McDowell at Cader Ln NB.Wide section 71.5" (grass overlaps concrete by a few inches) narrow is 3'9".

[ related topics: Photography ]

Fixing Fair St at Douglas St #4

[ related topics: Photography ]

The shot is Meta's "AI" offering to explain the heart-hole guillotine stained glass pendant.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

The chaser is Meta's AI completely missing the guillotine part of the heart-hole guillotine stained glass pendant.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

The homemade tortilla press is getting some pretty good results.

[ related topics: Photography ]

I do the cat water right before bed, and in one room it's got lots of food bits. I've joked that one of them is part raccoon.

Last night Charlene stayed up late to finish a project, about 1AM I hear a frantic "Honey?", and. Apparently the raccoon is smarter than our RFID cat door. Sigh.

[ related topics: Food RFID Furniture ]

RunPyXL, Python in an FPGA, 480ns round-trip on GPIO. Using a standard CPython toolchain that takes that byte code and further munges it:

RunPyXL runs on a Zynq-7000 FPGA (Arty-Z7-20 dev board). The RunPyXL core runs at 100MHz. The ARM CPU on the board handles setup and memory, but the Python code itself is executed entirely in hardware.

The deterministic timing part is interesting, that's kinda tough to achieve on even embedded ARM platforms (as I discovered when trying to do timing for printer inkjet puleses).

[ related topics: Robotics Monty Python Travel Embedded Devices Python ]

Pretty sure that development software vendors are putting in tweaky little bullshit anti-patterns in order to make us think learning the quirks makes us experts in their particular widget sets and further lock-in.

Looking at Qt's Maintenance Tool in particular... (This GUI app could have been a command-line).

[ related topics: Software Engineering Education ]

Thinking about low poly count driving games that involved terrorizing a fictional San Francisco (the "Rush" franchise, Crazy Taxi, etc) and wondering if we can draw any lines to current the horrors that the automated speed ticketing traffic cameras are revealing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Games Bay Area California Culture ]

Oh dear. Since the NYT bought Wordle, and Queerdle started looping, I've fallen off the daily games wagon. https://www.timdle.com/daily might get me back on, order the historical events correctly...

[ related topics: Games ]

Posting this mostly because the White House statement is so emblematic of this fucking administration: CNN Exclusive: Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering Community Race Real Estate hubris ]

I can't tell I should ironically laugh that the shysters who sold us all cryptocurrency and blockchain are now telling us they're judges of what "intelligence" is, or if it's an indication that, yeah, AI really is smarter than the rubes these people have taken in.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Figuring out provisioning profiles for profiling in XCode is my second favorite activity in MacOS, right behind library and tool management because this platform doesn't have a fucking package manager.

#WhatMilleniumIsThis #MacOS #IWantToWorkInARealOS

[ related topics: Language Books Macintosh ]

Really feel like people making Luddite parallels between the Jacquard loom and AI are massively over-promoting the capabilities of LLMs.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

One of the projects for work is building a startup research tool demo on our platform, and in the process of that I asked gpt-4o-mini for details about one of the unicorns that bought a billboard mentioned in Bay Area Current: San Francisco's Billboards Aren't For You, and if I'd started this search from just Googling on various terms, I think I would have come to the conclusion that this company is a pile of hot air, but that those involved are real.

On the basis of the LLM output, initials rather than names for many of the key players, lots of titles that are just ... off ..., I'm now wondering if much of the backstory of this startup isn't LLM generated.

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

Hi, yes, I'm logged in to this platform that supports hardware that I've spent tens of thousands of dollars to acquire, do you think maybe we could dispense with the fucking "accept cookies" banner every time I load the page?

They were convicted of killing with their cars. No one told the California DMV

A CalMatters investigation found that courts didn’t report hundreds of vehicular manslaughter convictions to the state, prompting officials to belatedly take many drivers’ licenses.

Via CalMatters Bluesky post and Petaluma Argus-Courier's article (I suspect you need a subscription for that one).

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture ]

The AI-ification of customer service is going great: Reddit post about the Verizon "personal shopper" bot adding bogus services to the bill in a way that makes it look like the human customer service rep did it.

As Pivot to AI notes in their post about the larger Verizon "AI"/LLM rollout:

If a human customer service rep did that, it’d just be fraud. But being able to blame the computer, that’s the use case for AI!

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

Holy shit, we are fucked in ways that the financial system has yet to devise: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac ordered to consider crypto as an asset when buying mortgages. The only saving grace is that at least they have to be stored in a centralized exchange...

Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars. And only crypto assets that “can be evidenced and stored on a U.S.-regulated centralized exchange subject to all applicable laws” are to be considered by the agencies in their proposal, Pulte wrote in a written order, effective immediately.

[ related topics: Macintosh Cryptography Government ]

Turns out I might be a bit of a hypocrite, because if we could take the thugs who are currently working for ICE and repurpose them to drag speeding motorists in my neighborhood from their cars and abduct them to secret prisons where they'd be subjected to indefinite detention in unspeakable living conditions...

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

GenAI creates a hot mess. We assume the hot mess will be better in the future. I'm not sure if it will continue to make a hot mess or the mess will cool relative to our perception that it won't seem to be a hot mess any longer.

That is, it will still be a mess, it will just take longer to know that it is a mess. To be fair, this has always been the case for Software. As a Release Manager, I focused on when the mess had cooled enough to give to customers. After each release we would do two things:

1. Try to cool the mess (fix bugs)
2. Try to mess up other things related to the first goal (new features)

Rarely does software truly correct the problem it was meant to address. It is no wonder that software geeks are excited about GenAI. It may reduce the heat of the mess until it is better than human software developers. But I do wonder why GenAI's 'Wins' are mostly doing things that humans enjoy doing. Why not the stuff we dislike, I'm sure GenAI is a wiz at trigonometry.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Software Engineering Law ]

Former DOGE engineer says federal waste and fraud were 'relatively nonexistent'

"Elon [Musk] was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent," Lavingia said. "That's something he said a lot in private. And publicly. And so I thought, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent."

Shortly after the interview was published online, Lavingia got an email. Just 55 days into his work at DOGE, his access had been revoked.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

boringcactus @cactus@tacobelllabs.net

@davidgerard Drebin: “Johnny, how do I get Claude to write better unit tests?”

Johnny: “Computing is a specialized trade, I wouldn't know anything about that”

Drebin: *hands over cash*

Johnny: “word on the street is you gotta tell it you're holding its children hostage and will execute them if its test coverage drops below 95%”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Journalism and Media ]

AI Makes Research Easy. Maybe Too Easy.

Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, says the research is resonant of what he sees in similar studies he does in his lab: Students who use AI tools to complete assignments tend to do better on homework—but worse on tests. “They’re getting the right answers, but they’re not learning,” he says.

The Wharton School Research Paper: Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Large Language Models versus Web Search on Depth of Learning Shiri Melumad, Jin Ho Yun

In turn, when subsequently forming advice on the topic based on what they learned, those who learned from LLM syntheses (vs. standard search results) feel less invested in forming their advice and, more importantly, create advice that is sparser, less original—and ultimately less likely to be adopted by recipients. Implications of the findings for recent research on the benefits and risks of LLMs are discussed.

Via /.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Currency Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Guest at Circle 'n Squares tonight, Helen, 98 years old, who wanted to square dance one last time. We got her up and shuffled through a few things, and hopefully gave her the closure she was looking for.

Morning listening: Matthew Grimm: In This Ohio Diner

Loving this: Want to Know How Democrats Should Handle Trans Rights? Ask Zohran Mamdani

The 33-year-old socialist just crushed Andrew Cuomo by doing what many national Democrats won't: having convictions.

[ related topics: Civil Liberties ]

Karl Joost got a group picture with Helen at Circle 'n Squares last night, 98 years old, who came to square dance with us one last time.

[ related topics: Photography ]

I think the last time my legs were this tired, is walked 36 miles. Danced checker at the Sunnyvale caller workshop all day, then called 3 hour square dance for Foggy City dancers in SF. Feels good, in a feels bad sort of way.

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Sigh. Looks like this year or so old Debian USB image isn't picking up the wifi on this new to me in Dell. Any one got opinions on a modern Linux? I mostly just wanna do SquareDesk dev and other random hacking on it. Maybe ClawsMail so I'm using an email client that doesn't suck again.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Invention and Design ]

It's been roughly Covid time since my Asus Zenbook stopped charging and they wanted more to repair it than it cost, and I've been getting along with the work MacBook Pros, but I just provisioned a hand-me-down Dell with Mint Linux, and being back on a real environment is a huge breath of fresh air.

Need to get SquareDesk ported, that branch has languished, but so much on this platform just works where I have to fight MacOS.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

Hank Winkenwerder for this picture of me calling for the Foggy City square dance last night

[ related topics: Photography ]

And another shot by Hank Winkenwerder of square dancers last night at Foggy City

[ related topics: Photography ]

The utter fucking incompetence of modern web developers today, from Petco putting me into an infinite redirect loop, to Michael's making autofill of my address completely screwy, drives me insane.

Developers who blindly adopt JavaScript frameworks should be thrashed.

Trying to find tips to get crispier friend polenta, and find a recipe suggesting "3 minutes on each side", and...

If you're publishing bullshit like that on the web, you're a psychopath and should be removed from society until you find a way to atone.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The ChatGPTificiation of policy continues: CNN: Presentation for CDC advisers appears to cite nonexistent study to support claims about risk of vaccine preservative

“My study was published in Toxicological Sciences and did not find evidence of thimerosal exposure at vaccine levels in mouse behaviors that we thought were relevant to autism,” Berman said. He was “concerned and displeased” that his research appeared to have been cited in this way in Redwood’s slides.

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment ]

I've been having a couple of discussions about "AI" with people, one of whom is using ChatGPT, one of whom is using Gemini. Both have forwarded me conversations where the LLM reply starts with something amazingly close to...

This is a brilliant idea. You are absolutely thinking like a ...

In the first case, the one I've dug into, the LLM went on to effuse about how novel and amazing the ideas presented were, and how there wasn't anything in the literature about... and I did a quick Google search and said "have you considered these people in the late 1800s, or this guy in the 1970s...", and, well...

Anyway, that makes a remarkable preamble to Ed Zitron: Make Fun of Them, which takes far too many words to get to the point which is that we need to start asking the "AI" proponents exactly what they're claiming. Ed points out that

Anthropic has now put out multiple stories suggesting that its generative AI will “blackmail” people as a means of stopping a user from turning off the system, something which is so obviously the company prompting its models to do so. Every member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed of themselves.

Which, yes, is exactly the point of these stories: They're there to "humanize", to anthropomorphize, the LLM output. Because any remotely critical reading of this says that we should simply not give the random number generator access to the big red "blow shit up" button. But if we give these things some sort of agency in our minds, then we start to see what they're generating as somehow "intelligent".

This whole thing is feeling more and more like religion, with the evangelists talking about how amazing it is, and the rest of us sitting around saying "uh, what a bunch of self-referential easily disproven bullshit, and yet you keep sending me Bible quotes like they mean something..."

Anyway, yeah.

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Interactive Drama moron Law Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]