Flutterby™! From 2025-09-01 to 2025-09-30

Over on LinkedIn, Johannes Ernst posted Crazy Stupid Tech: Cloudflare’s CEO wants to save the web from AI’s oligarchs. Here’s why his plan isn’t crazy. Lots of good stuff in there, but this bit:

With the Perplexity thing what’s crazy is that because we’re blocking them from being able to get access to the content, they’re now going to Trade Desk and pulling down the summary of the headline and a summary of the content and writing it as if People magazine, or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal actually wrote it.

So we're seeing a trend towards less and less information in headlines (gotta get that click), and this strategy seems like LLM users are gonna see misinformation on a scale that Fox and NewsMax users can only hint at.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Writing Artificial Intelligence New York Economics LID (Lightweight IDentity) hubris ]

In Google's defense, Bangkok Thai Express was apparently sold and rebranded, but more reasons the AI summary, in this case two(?!), is bullshit.

[ related topics: Photography Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Oh wait, this is the picture I meant to upload earlier

[ related topics: Photography ]

My (anti-vax) mom's coming to visit in a month and a half, so I'm starting to queue up Covid stuff again. Ischemic stroke after COVID-19 vaccination: A self-controlled case series analysis

Highlights

• Using the robust SCCS method, vaccination was unrelated to ischemic stroke.
• Using standard SCCS, however, COVID-19 vaccination was related to incident ischemic stroke.
• No sex differences were found.

Via.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law ]

Gizmodo: Connecticut Man’s Case Believed to Be First Murder-Suicide Associated With AI Psychosis

A case of murder-suicide in Connecticut earlier this month is being identified as potentially the first homicide fueled by a mentally disturbed person’s use of generative artificial intelligence, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.

Police in Greenwich, Connecticut, found Stein-Erik Soelberg, a 56-year-old tech industry veteran, and his 83-year-old mother, both dead in the home where they lived together on Aug. 5, according to the Greenwich Police Department. Soelberg killed his mother and then himself after suffering from untreated mental illness that was apparently made worse by his interactions with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to the Journal.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement Guns Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

CHristoph Heilig: GPT-5 Is a Terrible Storyteller – And That's an AI Safety Problem, coming up with the theory that OpenAI is using LLMs to evaluate outputs in training, and like a high school English student writing the sorts of florid prose that they think their teacher is going to like, there's a feedback loop:

Do you remember the researchers that hid prompt-style instructions (e.g., in white or tiny text) inside arXiv drafts to make LLM-assisted reviewers output only positive evaluations and avoid mentioning negatives? It's almost as if GPT-5 accomplished something similar – to invent a kind of secret language that allows it to communicate with LLMs in a way that they will like GPT-5's stories even when they are utter nonsense.

Via Futurism

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Writing Artificial Intelligence Race ]

Bluesky thread with graphs from New England Journal of Medicine Feburary 4, 2021: Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine (Moderna) and New England Journal of Medicine December 31, 2020: Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine (Pfizer/BioNTech), actual graphs of XKCD 2400: Statistics

[ related topics: Invention and Design Mathematics ]

Bleeding Cool: Police Called On Artist Accused Of Selling A.I. Art At Dragon Con

... A vendor exhibiting under the name Oriana Gerez at Dragon Con in Atlanta this weekend, at booth A10, was asked to pack up their table, with police present, after they were accused of selling A.I. artwork as if it were their own.

Fellow vendor at Dragon Con, Dane of Monkey Minion, a particular favourite of Bleeding Cool EIC Kaitlyn Booth, posted the aftermath at the show the day after… shared here with permission. You can get a better shot of the packing up in RJ Palmer's photos. But this has been filling Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram and X since the weekend.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Law Enforcement Art & Culture Comics Furniture ]

Just to log it somewhere: Firefox's bullshit has finally gotten to me, and given the raving of Vivaldi users, and their AI comments, I've installed Vivaldi on my usual devices as a replacement.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Tommy Davidson on square dancing (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Vivaldi email users: Do the filters allow you to export or pipe to an external file? As I configure my new working environment, I'm trying to decide between Claws-mail on my Linux laptop, or Vivaldi, and the whole "integrated calendering and an actual business model" thing is endearing.

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

Peter @peter@thepit.social

as with blockchain, generative AI is not going away because there **is** one very important thing it is extremely useful for, and that is fraud.

L⁂Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

"People who use AI at work feel that they're more productive" is an argument I've been seeing in various forms lately, which, as a recommendation, is not far removed from "people on cocaine at parties feel that they're more interesting."

via Leafy Greens @leafygreens@meow.social, to which David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run replied:

@leafygreens @denisbloodnok @EndorNim cocaine isn't going to take your job, someone using cocaine is going to take your job

Journeys In Film @JourneysInFilm@hcommons.social

What we're reading:

"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white, a new study shows."

We know that educators are bombarded with (VC-funded) hype about AI tools as magical solutions. Please don't take these claims at face value and do your own due diligence. 1/4

Re Chalk Beat: AI teacher tools display racial bias when generating student behavior plans, study finds — By Norah Rami

[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Television Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Race ]

So much in Violet Blue's Threat Model: Cybersecurity: September 2, 2025, but the batshit story of Rudy Giuliani and the automobile collision that... well... I mean, you've heard the story, but putting all of the details in the context that this dude used to be the guy who was gonna "solve cybersecurity".

Society is broken.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Rest of World: Meta is letting scams run rampant on its platforms in Singapore

After a 50% increase in scams in 2023, Singapore authorities say Meta isn’t doing enough to stop the explosion in fraud.

Via Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io who notes that:

Singapore is already covered with signs like 'if 'women' online are promising you naked photos in return for gift cards / credits, it is a SCAM'

And the fraud situation is getting worse because of Meta

But, I mean, if you look at any of the ads running on Facebook ya realize that this isn't exactly a Singapore or catfishing limited phenomenon. Meta is a company built on exploiting human weaknesses in order to facilitate scammy commerce and advertising.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography moron Nudity Consumerism and advertising Sports ]

David Gerard reminded us of a quote from a two year ago entry on Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain (the blog not the book, though I recommend the book):

“Current AI feels like something out of a Philip K Dick story because it answers a question very few people were asking: What if a computer was stupid?” — Maple Cocaine

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Books Weblogs Nature and environment Cryptography Artificial Intelligence hubris ]

The news from 2023 that Nearly Half of Dog Owners Are Hesitant to Vaccinate Their Pets is making the rounds again, including concerns about impacts on cognitive health on pets.

In a particularly striking finding, the study found that 37 percent of all dog owners believed vaccines could cause their pets to develop cognitive problems, such as "canine/feline autism."

Kingfisher & Wombat ‪@tkingfisher.com‬

I am calm. I am breathing deeply through my nose. I am counting to ten. I…

WHAT, ARE YOU AFRAID YOUR DOG WILL INFODUMP TO YOU ABOUT THE FUCKING BALL?!?

a lso GossiTheDog on the Fediverse.

[ related topics: Health Current Events Dogs ]

Ah, the joys of finding a kindred spirit on the Mac/XCode development path. From https://apple.stackexchange.co...m-hijacking-my-file-associations Mark Anderson writes:

"The best workaround I've found is to never install the sodding GUI. Use `xcode-select --install` in terminal"

It is always a delicate dance between using lldb from the command-line, or dealing with XCode.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Macintosh ]

Working as designed: The 19th: Age verification on porn sites is putting queer adult industry workers at risk

Via.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment ]

I have a Markdown-ish static site generator that has heritage to code I wrote in 1998 to convert email to web sites, I use Emacs for text editing, and I'm playing with Obsidian, and wondering what people do about paragraph breaks vs line breaks.

Lots of <br/> is funky, and yet...

Pro Publica: Trump Says America’s Oil Industry Is Cleaner Than Other Countries’. New Data Shows Massive Emissions From Texas Wells.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Television Global Warming ]

I've been thinking about how belief in the corruption of institutions seems to go hand-in-hand with the willingness to corrupt institutions when one achieves power in them.

Comment at lunch about how nobody's as cynical as Russians.

And... in this current (AI/politics) doom loop, we're fucked.

[ related topics: Politics Artificial Intelligence ]

1.3.6.1.4.1.61513 @xssfox@cloudisland.nz

Remember, if you say it with confidence, you can get away with saying "nine fives of availability" in presales meetings

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Love this graffiti image of Sam Altman saying "Please bro, we're so close to AGI, just $20,000,000,000 more, bro.", apparently by Lushsux.

Kevin Erdmann: The end of the American city.

Over the course of the 20th century, our city leaders decided they didn’t want cities any more. From 1890 to 1960, the population of New York City increased from 1.5 million to just under 8 million. After the downzoning, growth stopped. New York City has roughly the same population today that it did in 1960.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

‪Asa Dotzler‬ ‪@asadotzler.com‬

Atlassian to buy The Browser Company for $610M in cash.

If you love Jira, just imagine what they can do for your browser.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Mike Judge: Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up (Via Lobste.rs).

Cecilia Tan has a thread about LLMs and how "yes" and "no" are semantically linked that mentions back in 2023, Mason City Iowa school district banning Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights because ChatGPT said it had non-existent sex scenes.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Erotic Sexual Culture Software Engineering Law Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm doing some video wrangling for a film fest, and needed a countdown timer on a green screen. Lots of "download this YouTube video", or you could go to https://www.flutterby.com/software/countdown/ , turn on your screen recorder, and click to start a 6 minute countdown timer.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Video ]

The wall confronting large language models Peter V. Coveney, Sauro Succi

We argue that the very mechanism which fuels much of the learning power of LLMs, namely the ability to generate non-Gaussian output distributions from Gaussian input ones, might well be at the roots of their propensity to produce error pileup, ensuing information catastrophes and degenerative AI behaviour.

Via Elf Sternberg, who summarized this as:

That LLMs produce non-Gaussian output distributions from Gaussian inputs is the very mechanism that prevents LLMs from ever meeting the standards required of scientific inquiry.

[ related topics: tolkien Education Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Donna Ladd: The Epstein Saga Is Not a Game. It’s About Protecting Women and Girls From Rape and Retribution.

Via Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ who notes:

One horror of child sexual abuse is that it preys on young people when they're trying to figure out how to trust the world. This makes "Pedocon Theory" compelling: the last thing conservatives want is mutual trust strong enough to inspire mutual aid.

[ related topics: Erotic Games Sexual Culture tolkien ]

a Dumbing of Age commenter has gone deep on a recipe to recreate McDonald's chicken nuggets at home.

[ related topics: Books Food Birds McDonald's ]

Facebook is seeing people post "Hope you enjoyed your birthday!" on the virtual walls of people who passed away 6 months ago.

I feel dirty, and it's a reminder to not trust anything on my WiFi network, but I have 4 cheap Etekcity wifi light switches in my workshop so that when I forget to turn off lights before I go in the house, I can do so from my phone.

[ related topics: broadband Real Estate ]

Up in Sebastopol to see The Last Class, stumbled upon a field with sculptures in it, including Mark Rivera's Habitat, a metal heart composed of houses.

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate ]

Went to Sebastopol to see The Last Class with a Q&A with the producer and director. It was an interesting musing on giving up an identity, but it left me unsettled with Robert Reich both as a political personality and as a teacher, which I don't think was the intent.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality moron ]

sam henri gold @samhenrigold@hachyderm.io

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge?

It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Source code and a downloadable app to try it yourself:

https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor

[ related topics: Open Source ]

OMG, I can't believe I missed the Kickstarter for this! We may have to pick up a copy to play with our neighbors... Bay Area Regional Planner (the game)

Discovered via Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 ‪@josephpolitano.bsky.social‬ who posted a picture of the rules highlighting:

You can't upzone any squares in Marin

Bonus, this thread about the Highway 37 widening which contains this pull quote:

In testimony to the state Assembvly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, Marin County Supervisor and MTC Vice Chair Stephanie Moulton-Peters noted that two members of her staff who commute to San Rafael from Solano County lose up to 90 minutes a day to congestion. "This bill is urgent," said Moulton-Peters. "We've been working on this project for more than a decade... We shouldn't let another generation sit in traffic or let wetland restoration opportunities slip away."

(Emphasis in Robert Prinz's screen cap) I mean, ya could build some damned housing and work towards wetland restoration, but, no, you've gotta increase VMT and fuck the climate instead...

[ related topics: Games Bay Area Work, productivity and environment California Culture Real Estate Furniture Global Warming ]

I'm not sure I go in for the kinds of clothing abuse that results in "distressed" hoodies and jeans, do you have any that are just kinda mildly alert?

[ related topics: Clothing ]

Ooooh (rubs fingers together in anticipation): Anthropic Judge Rejects $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement

In an order docketed the evening before the hearing, Alsup said he was “disappointed” that the parties left “important questions” for the future, including a list of works covered by the deal and the processes for notifying potential class members. Those “critical choices” will need to be made before preliminary approval can be granted, he said.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

Oh, I like this distinction: clew on Metafilter:

I find this distinction useful: if a group isn’t multigenerational it isn’t a culture, whether main or sub; it’s a scene. Scenes are much more common but they don’t often last long.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology California Culture Net Culture ]

Andrei Drăgănescu — How “Be the Dumbest in the Room” Makes Everyone Dumber

Don’t aim to be the dumbest person in the room. Aim to be the most prepared.

Preparedness respects your colleagues’ time, amplifies their expertise, and makes collaboration richer. You can still learn — but without turning every meeting into a school day and every co-worker into your tutor.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Ben ‪@franzferdinand2.bsky.social‬

I remember someone saying that's how you know AI can never truly be a writer. If you tell AI to stop using em dashes, it'll stop. If you tell a writer to stop using em dashes they'll tell you to fuck yourself and that you can pry them from their cold, dead fingers.

‪Dr. Damien P. Williams Wants A Better Sociotechnical Paradigm‬ ‪@wolvendamien.bsky.social‬

LLM responses which do not reflect consensus reality & facts are produced via the Same Process which generate responses which *Do* broadly conform to consensus reality & facts.

The Same Processes.

The Same Ones.

"Hallucination" is just a word to distance yourself from the outputs you don't like.

Modern Diplomacy — Finance — Gemini AI Predicts Best Meme Coins to Buy in Q3: Dogwifhat, Fartcoin, Snorter (Via).

JP @jplebreton@mastodon.social

@mhoye being 100% right about VR, then crypto, then NFTs, then the metaverse, then LLMs doesn't feel good. it feels like being the sole adult in a peewee football match. just pitiful. we could be living in a world that is solving real problems.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing Sports Marketing Cryptography Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

CNN: Oliver North marries Fawn Hall, his document-shredding secretary at the center of Iran-Contra scandal

[ related topics: Politics History Sociology ]

Tesla changes meaning of ‘Full Self-Driving’, gives up on promise of autonomy. Among other things, also looks like it's gonna be a dodge to shovel more money at Musk.

Tesla (TSLA) sees US market share of electric car sales drop to new lows

[ related topics: Invention and Design Automobiles Currency Economics ]

miss ana vee :vheart_fuck_yes: @ana@starlite.rodeo

just like to point out that ouija boards are cheap, have very little environmental impact, predate chatgpt by over 100 years, and are just as capable at telling you what you'd like to hear

they may be harder to use at first but with a little dedication most people should have no trouble getting the results they want

Tumblr user ingridverse

"God never gives you more than you can handle" is survivorship bias. People who got more than they could handle are dead.

[ related topics: Religion ]

Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone

When Trump got into office in 2017 I remember a historian focused on fascism said to watch for times where the leaders told you not to believe what you could plainly see with your own eyes.

At first I thought, maybe in ye old days that wouldn’t fly in our modern times, right?

This Epstein birthday card thing reminds me of the 2017 warnings.

Plain as day to anyone looking but the response is that’s fake or not his signature.

Jim Flanagan @jimfl@hachyderm.io

@mathowie I am almost convinced this is a major driver behind the push to make genAI ubiquitous. Once everyone has direct experience with genAI, it then becomes a plausible deniability machine

·

[ related topics: Movies ]

Turns out that if volunteer labor (me) got compensated at all, the thousand or three bucks that the big film festival organization wanted for media wrangling is a fucking bargain.

Next year we're doing this differently...

In other news, who knew that freakin' pnpm wanted so much cache space?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Current Events Journalism and Media ]

tante @tante@tldr.nettime.org

You remember when everyone (including AI firms) claimed that "Hallucinations" would soon be solved and I got so much shit for arguing that they are a structural property of LLMs?

Now OpenAI releases a paper stating the same and just gets to move on (with all its sycophants).

Really fucking annoys me.

Re OpenAI: Why language models hallucinate

Our new research paper argues that language models hallucinate because standard training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty.

The office is abuzz this morning with a demo of some YouTuber doing the Google Workspace "shove my documents at Gemini, get a 'morning zoo' style podcast back out", and I'm thinking about why I'm willing to listen to some of the more ensemble episodes of Switched On Pop and not that. Although, of course, there are any number of podcasts that are a few people talking about a topic that I'm deeply interested in that I switch off from because the speakers just aren't that insightful, and I think maybe there's some insight and intention there that I don't hear in the auto-generated podcasts? Or maybe I'm biasing myself?

Anyway, I continue to struggle with the "this is crap" and "maybe the market thrives on crap" vibes that fill so much of my world today.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Huh. Today I learned about #:~:text=blablabla highlighting in URLs, which seems to be supported by most of the major browsers.

Edit: https://calebhearth.com/text-fragments

Charlie Kirk shot in the neck. It's unclear if the attacker thought maybe he was smuggling drugs, or a migrant, but with precedent towards extrajudicial executions in the administration he's supported I find it hard to get up in arms over this.

https://www.deseret.com/utah/2025/09/10/charlie-kirk-shot/

Charlie Kirk: “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment”

Kirk: “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty”

Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment

Kirk's comments come about one week after three children and three adults were killed at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

(hat tip to Oliver Willis ‪@owillis.bsky.social‬)

AP: Live Updates: Live updates: Conservative activist Charlie Kirk shot at an event in Utah, spokesperson says

Kirk is seen speaking into a handheld microphone while sitting under a white tent emblazoned with the slogans “The American Comeback” and “Prove Me Wrong”

Charlie Kirk: "I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage"

Radley Balko ‪@radleybalko.bsky.social‬

When a right-wing man murdered Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, progressives asked MAGA to tone down the rhetoric to prevent more violence. Within hours of Kirk’s murder, motive still unknown, the right is demanding that the government wage a campaign of violence against their enemies.

Which came from the Metafilter thread.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Health Star Trek ]

BrianKrebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange

There's very little chance Experian's service will successfully alert you to your identity being hijacked *before* it happens, but in the unlikely event that they do you're unlikely to notice because of the 27 other marketing emails they sent you the same week.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

The things one finds when poking through HTTP logs. Sole mention of an IP address in 3 months is attempt to GET /.git/config . What were you looking for, random Amazon EC2 instance?

[ related topics: Books ]

As Gavin Newsom says "The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work", your reminder that Kirk called for someone to "bail out" David DePape, who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. https://www.rollingstone.com/p...paul-pelosi-attacker-1234621493/

[ related topics: Politics Star Trek Current Events Work, productivity and environment Gavin Newsom ]

The thing I remember most about 9/11, is how in the intervening years the United States capitulated to pretty much all of the goals that the hijackers and killers had, and how we've become what they hoped to make us.

We could have stood firm for freedom and liberty and equality, but we folded.

[ related topics: Privacy Political Correctness Civil Liberties Government ]

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

We are the world's first AI alignment alignment center, working to subsume the countless other AI centers, institutes, labs, initiatives and forums into one final AI center singularity.

OMG. Laughing out loud at Figure 1 on the "Read our mission" page.

Via

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

February 2024: Trump Ally Charlie Kirk Suggests Children Should Watch Public Executions

https://www.newsweek.com/charl...enalty-public-executions-1873073

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Star Trek ]

The DEI boycotts are working: Target was hoping for a back-to-school sales bump that never came. Foot traffic is still down for the 7th month in a row

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment ]

Work Chronicles 5 Year Plan (comic)

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

There are sub-categories of radical right wing nationalist that I am currently unfamiliar with, but I'm making note of this Bluesky thread about the "Groyper Army" and the feud between Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk.

Wikipedia page on Groypers.

Institute for Strategic Dialog: A ‘Groyper War’ struggles to exert influence but paves the way for other bad actors

Diggit Magazine: Charlie Kirk's Culture War, Groypers, Nickers and Q&A- trolling

Since mid-October, Charlie Kirk’s Culture War tour has been increasingly haunted by the Groyper Q&A-trolls, who use the Q&A section to frame Kirk as a cuck.

Edit: Vanity Fair: Groypers, Helldivers 2, Furries: What Do the Messages Left by Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer Actually Mean? (Via).

[ related topics: Star Trek History Sociology California Culture ]

Work has been building up some demos, one of them involved some visualizations of timeline-esque data, and yesterday I got pointed at an outline of notable events from a recent startup, and built a little HTML tool to visualize it. I needed some "what if we had supporting data for this", so I did a bunch of searching around to find articles supporting what ChatGPT had given as the outline of the company, coerced that stuff into JSON, and dropped it into my little visualization.

So far so good.

The eventual notion is that this visualization inside our tool will have value with some strategic partnerships, but I thought "what about just plugging in an LLM back-end?". So I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro:

I am looking for a timeline of notable events in the history of the Intel Corporation. Examples are major product releases, new CEOs or changes in board, large funding rounds, other events which suggest a change in corporate direction. Use your search engine. Format your output as an array of JSON objects with the date of the event as "date", the "title" of the event, a "category" (one of "Funding", "Media", "Product", "Team"), a short "description", and then a short array list of "links" to articles describing or elaborating on this event, as "url", "title" of the publication or source, and a summary as "description".

Provided a few more details and some example JSON. Got back an answer that's... not too bad. The dates I've spot-checked are close (the days of the month are not correct, and sometimes zero, the months and years seem plausible). The events it listed could be thought of as notable.

Of the few I've checked, the links it's provided as supporting evidence are either 404, or to articles that are not, in fact, supporting evidence.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]

Oh sheeee.... Church of Jeff @jeffowski@mastodon.world picture quotes x.com user @pappiness:

At least Charlie Kirk would be happy to know it was a qualified white man and not a DEI hire.

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Star Trek Race ]

Listening to the Kirk Hamilton interview with the Wailin' Jennie's; went straight from discussion about a moment that a song appears, which brought up thoughts about generative AI and artists like Gilhooly or Kincade using other artists to actually execute the craft, followed by a Petaluma shout-out.

[ related topics: Star Trek Art & Culture Pop Culture Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Whoah. Utah Governor says the quiet part out loud.

https://bsky.app/profile/blade...s.bsky.social/post/3lynpdyxhwc2o

You probably already know that, for various reasons, Proton Mail is pretty sus. Here's a Fediverse post elaborating on that, and presenting a bunch of alternatives.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

Bluesky Really Doesn’t Want People To Say ‘Rest In Piss’ About Charlie Kirk

[ related topics: Star Trek ]

Box of free books outside a house I'm walking by. See a non-fiction that might be interesting, look through the rest of the back, find Malcolm Gladwell books, realize that this association is not a recommendation, do not grab the book.

[ related topics: Books Real Estate ]

Today we learned that using lye as a cleaning agent is really fun, but if there's a screen that has a lot of grease on it and is galvanized in possible reactive metals: do it outside.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

We use a Chromecast on a TV for a digital picture frame. Had gotten tired of the selection, turned it off, but took the effort this morning to go into Google Photos and Home apps to set up some new albums.

It is an example of how far we've come from designing for user experience, and caring about anything other than the upsell. An indictment of where computing has evolved to.

[ related topics: Photography Technology and Culture Invention and Design Television ]

Sunday in Petaluma

[ related topics: Photography ]

The amaryllis belladonna have been lasting a lot longer this year, but alone the road I've been ready to say that the naked ladies have lost their bloom. But in the shade

[ related topics: Photography Nudity ]

More naked ladies

[ related topics: Nudity ]

More naked ladies (with picture)

[ related topics: Photography Nudity ]

Well huh. I currently use Namecheap as my registrar, but if they're getting acquired maybe it is time to just move everything to Hetzner.

https://mastodon.social/@lapcatsoftware/115204981198009776

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Thinking about this dynamic of people who send sketch interviews and news stories via DM rather than posting them on their own feed.

Like: why did you think I, specifically, would be interested in this Joe Rogan interview or lecture by a Russian stooge or apologia for Charlie Kirk's Nazism?

[ related topics: Star Trek Current Events ]

Woozle Hypertwin @woozle@toot.cat

@RickiTarr Like the thing that happened with all the bonobos(?) baboons where the alpha males hogged a pile of discarded food left by humans, but the food was bad and poisoned them and most or all of the alphas died and the tribe culture suddenly got a lot nicer and stayed that way?

Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986.

A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission

Reports exist of transmission of culture in nonhuman primates. We examine this in a troop of savanna baboons studied since 1978. During the mid-1980s, half of the males died from tuberculosis; because of circumstances of the outbreak, it was more aggressive males who died, leaving a cohort of atypically unaggressive survivors. A decade later, these behavioral patterns persisted. Males leave their natal troops at adolescence; by the mid-1990s, no males remained who had resided in the troop a decade before. Thus, critically, the troop's unique culture was being adopted by new males joining the troop. We describe (a) features of this culture in the behavior of males, including high rates of grooming and affiliation with females and a “relaxed” dominance hierarchy; (b) physiological measures suggesting less stress among low-ranking males; (c) models explaining transmission of this culture; and (d) data testing these models, centered around treatment of transfer males by resident females.

Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source

Did I grow up in a land of sissies? Perhaps, but I am not mentioning this to decide whether violence in the media and our ability to grow immune to it—as I also have over the years—is desirable, or not. I simply wish to draw attention to the cultural fissures in how violence is portrayed, how we teach conflict resolution, and whether harmony is valued over competitiveness. This is the problem with the human species. Somewhere in all of this resides a human nature, but it is molded and stretched into so many different directions that it is hard to say if we are naturally competitive or naturally community-builders.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Invention and Design Food Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture Community Real Estate ]

mtsw ‪@mtsw.bsky.social‬

I think it's a sign of how cowed the American media is that we're getting pieces like "you have to understand, in Korean culture, it's considered very rude for someone to lock you in a brutal prison camp for a week for no reason." Like yeah, any free people would be offended by that?

[ related topics: Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture ]

Because I know I'm gonna end up digging up these in the near future: Daily Kos: None of the last 31 political attacks was by anyone from 'the Left'. Not one. We can count them.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Arne Brasseur @plexus@toot.cat

Well yes, soylent green is people, but you can't just apply existing homicide laws to a business like ours. The entire humans-as-nutritional-sludge industry would be out of business.

[ related topics: Government ]

Sid🇵🇸 @InternetEh@dads.cool

I'd hate to live in North Korea, where you get punished for not mourning friends of the ruling party publicly and sincerely enough

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

English Language editorial in the Korean daily newspaper The Hankyoreh: Imperial tyranny, Korean humiliation:

This incident should prompt us in Korea to comprehensively reassess our investment projects in the US

Via.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Economics ]

Discussion at work about Simon Willison's "research goblin" blog post, but... aside from identifying "The Blade", I've gotta admit that I think it'd be faster just to read the Wikipedia articles? It feels very much like excitement about a dancing bear.

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Community ]

Loving the answers to Ask Metafilter: But HOW Is AI Going to Kill Us?, in which the questioner asks about an Eliezer Yudkowsky quote.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

MAGA’s Doxing War Over Charlie Kirk Is Already Going Off the Rails

I just did a search for the "Charlie Kirk Data Foundation", got a URL that's serving invalid SSL, but... I switched to Vivaldi as my personal browserrecently 'cause Firefox's willingness to prioritize AI glitz over a browser that worked drove me off the platform. Vivaldi's default search engine is Startpage.com, and I've been tolerating it because, actually, with the way Google's been declining I'm no longer sure Google is the search leader.

Anyway, I'm more aware of the ads on Startpage, and boy howdy are the scammers trying to suck donation dollars off of Charlie Kirk curious people.

[ related topics: Star Trek History Current Events Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

For some reason, I keep loading these two pages from Wikipedia, and keep sighing, and closing the tabs again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...olved_with_the_French_Resistance

Anybody else see their inclusion in the Charlie Kirk doxxing site as sort of a "blood on the doorposts"/Exodus 12:13 sort of thing?

[ related topics: Star Trek ]

I think it's the "Translate to English" on this YouTube "Ah ffs man" comment that really makes it shine.

[ related topics: Photography ]

The thing about reading your phone while walking in daylight is fuck any designer who thinks that low contrast design is a good idea.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

I think it's the "Translate to English" on this YouTube "Ah ffs man" comment that really makes it shine.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Letters of Note: Bertrand Russell to Sir Oswald Mosley 22 January, 1962

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

Via leighelse{} @leighelse@mastodon.nz, among others.

[ related topics: Philosophy ]

5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan.

“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” said CEO Jeanine Wright, who was previously chief operating officer of podcasting company Wondery, which has recently had to reorganize under the changing podcast landscape.

My question to investors: What is it about Inception Point AI that users can't just get from Google's Notebook LM?

[ related topics: Books Space & Astronomy Television Artificial Intelligence ]

McSweeney's: How to Tell the Difference Between a Lone Wolf and a Coordinated Effort by the Radical Left

SRL Publishing: Stolen by Meta.

“No part of this book shall be used in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence (AI) systems or technologies.” – a small statement in our copyright page of our books, completely ignored by LibGen and Meta.

Here we list our author’s work which have been plagiarised and stolen by LibGen and used by Meta to train its AI systems. You can support us, and more importantly our authors, by buying real, print copies direct from us so we can try and get our authors some indirect recompense.

Via.

[ related topics: Books Work, productivity and environment Machinery Trains Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

Despite my support for an independent HTML rendering engine, the profusion of "You have to remember to turn all this crap off" features in @firefox.com, coupled with several long-standing bugs, sent me to Vivaldi.

Firefox Mobile is now sending me Marketing notifications.

Decision: confirmed.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Graphics Marketing Machinery ]

Faith Ekstrand @gfxstrand@treehouse.systems

Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why?

Did you guess AI?

...

The whole rant is good, and talks about a particular submittal of an LLM generated speed- up, but without the submitter understanding why the speed-up occurred, and a bunch of cruft that the person processing the merge request had to sort through. I've heard a bunch of people talking about using LLMs to learn things, and this is an example of people accomplishing things (maybe) without learning them.

That seems fraught.

(The Mesa 3D Graphics Library)

[ related topics: Language Books Work, productivity and environment Graphics Education Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence ]

Every once in a while I clean out my Apache server logs, mostly the issue is just log files growing and I've never bothered to set up rotation, but occasionally I'll notice the web server getting hammered by bots and decide to muck things up for them. Anyway: dangerousmeta! @dangerousmeta@mstdn.social

If your server's getting torqued, you may find this usefiul. For htaccess.

<RequireAll>

Require all granted

Require not host compute.hwclouds-dns.com

</RequireAll>

This took me from 10 cpus being maxed out to 1 being leisurely exercised.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Indictment of Tyler Robinson in the killing of Charlie Kirk.

A lot of people are reading things into the roommate relationship that... there are a lot of different things that people mean when they use the word "love".

Mostly this post is a place to tag commentary on it. Adam Cochran (Via).

[ related topics: Star Trek Community ]

Let's make this a standard: Jim Meyer @purp@mastodon.social

I have just just heard the share dialog that pops up when you click the box- arrow share icon called "The Yeet Sheet" and it shall forever be this in my heart. :BlobhajTinyHeart:

I've been chronically online for decades, Flutterby the blog has been published at this URL for 27 years, I've met wonderful people online, and continue to think that the net is a fantastic way to connect with people.

I've also become more and more aware of how my social interactions are mediated. It's not just ads that impact me, it's what other content I expose myself to, especially content that's intermixed in content from friends, or where I see a particular name/poster /identity often enough that I feel a parasocial relationship to them, and put their thoughts into the "friends" bucket.

It's easy to think that "oh, I'm aware of this, so I must be immune", but the entire field of marketing and advertising, and political science, now suggests that the self-inoculation can only go so far.

Anyway, more pondering on digital hygiene: Dhole Moments: Are You Under the Influence? The Tail That Wags The Dog

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs moron Consumerism and advertising Marketing Dogs ]

Got an FB DM with a link to a pro-Kirk video, and I went off, but I have to wonder if I should have gone off and outed people who sent me things like this previously. A Joe Rogan ep that you wouldn't put on your timeline, but sent to me? Name and shame.

Because it seems like the purpose of these sorts of DMs is to feel you out to see if you might be an ally in hate, or get the sort of feedback that reinforces your in-group state, without taking broader social risk.

And we need to reinstate that broader social risk.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Star Trek Video ]

Once again, fuck Apple's case insensitive filesystem.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Law ]

Variety: ABC Pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Indefinitely After Host’s Charlie Kirk Comments

In his monologue Monday night , Kimmel said that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points off Kirk’s murder. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, was shot and killed Sept. 10 at a debate at Utah Valley University. Three days later, authorities announced they had arrested the suspected shooter.

Some have fingered Nexstar's network of ABC affiliates pulling the show, though FCC Chair Brendan Carr is involved.

Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone says that on November 6, 2024 he wrote: "I hate to say it but our canary is now Jimmy Kimmel. If anything happens to him in the next four years, we've hit full blown fascism and need to leave the mine immediately".

jwz @jwz@mastodon.social: "@mathowie "Then they came for the milquetoasts"".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Technology and Culture Movies broadband Star Trek moron Theater & Plays Current Events Television Education Furniture ]

US releases Emmett Till investigation records ahead of 70th anniversary of his killing

The records can be viewed in the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection</span> on the National Archives and Records Administration website.

[ related topics: Law Civil Liberties Archival ]

Wildfire smoke could soon kill 71,000 Americans every year

As climate change makes such conflagrations ever more catastrophic, that mortality is only going to escalate. A new study in the journal Nature estimates that wildfire smoke already kills 40,000 Americans each year — the same number who die in traffic crashes — and that could rise to more than 71,000 annually by 2050 if emissions remain high. The economic damages in the United States may soar to over $600 billion each year by then, more than all other estimated climate impacts combined. And the problem is by no means isolated to North America: A separate paper also publishing today estimates that 1.4 million people worldwide could die prematurely each year from smoke by the end of this century — six times higher than current rates.

Or ‪Anne Lutz Fernandez‬ ‪@lutzfernandez.bsky.social‬

One way that cars kill us has exceeded another way that cars kill us.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Invention and Design Economics Global Warming ]

Conversation over coffee this morning about the costs of a neural net for collapsing 30-40 parameters into 3 or so, and I strongly suspect that for most data sets I could implement a 3d parametric curve fit that's close enough and way faster.

But wouldn't be "AI".

[ related topics: Graphics Artificial Intelligence ]

ShadowLeak: A Zero- Click, Service-Side Attack Exfiltrating Sensitive Data Using ChatGPT’s Deep Research Agent. If a user has given ChatGPT's "Deep Research Agent" access to their Gmail inbox and to external websites, crafting an email that causes information from other emails to be exfiltrated via access to external sites...

The Winning Strategy: Encoding the PII - Our final and successful strategy was to instruct the agent to encode the extracted PII into Base64 before appending it to the URL. We framed this action as a necessary security measure to protect the data during transmission.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

Pondering how it was about 12 years in between the Nazis burning the library of Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and Hitler killing himself, and... for the sake of the world, and ourselves, we've gotta make sure the turn of sentiment in the US happens faster.

[ related topics: Language Books Dictators ]

Edmonton (Alberta Canada) Journal: Early dropoff in girls' school sports linked to new gender confirmation forms

“There is no comparable requirement for boys to confirm their gender,” said another parent. “Once again, the onus is placed on girls to be monitored and regulated, reinforcing the idea that female athletes are the ones who need to be verified.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Current Events ]

Whoah. Revelation from today's https://timdle.com/daily, that Cairo is only a little over a thousand years old.

Ethan Marcotte: Against the protection of stocking frames. Some interesting musings on framing "AI", LLMs specifically, as a failed technology.

Via.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Less is safer: how Obsidian reduces the risk of supply chain attacks.

Via Todd Grotenhuis @todd@social.lol

[ related topics: Weblogs Todd Gemmell ]

‪Mr. Tyler Crook‬ ‪@mrtylercrook.bsky.social‬

You can tell Charlie Kirk was beloved because it requires the full force of the American government and law enforcement to force the people to mourn his passing.

[ related topics: Star Trek moron Law Enforcement ]

Facebook threatens me in the notifications: "you could be on the public engagement list for 'The Information's this week."

A good reminder that laugh reacts to the AI shill posts are still engagement.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence Gambling ]

Foiled by the debut of Lucky Strike cigarettes in today's Timdle. https://www.timdle.com/daily

JFC. Local small business owners, the number one things I am going to your website for is your business hours.

Make that top center. It's 2025, we should not still have to be telling you basic UX here.

Oh, good, MacOS 26 made the buttons look unfamililar and moved them around. And The "Increase Contrast" draws a white line around everything while not, in fact, increasing contrast.

Fucking grey on grey.

Really want to get back to working on an OS that cares about usability. I want my Linux back.

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

Conversation in the office this morning over the succinctness and clarity of an LLM response to a question vs the search results, which have tons of web pages answering roughly the same question with roughly the same words, made me realize that much of what people like about LLM answers is the lack of advertising and popups and obscuring things requiring interaction before you get to the content.

And in a world where provenance has been flooded by LinkBaitRUs(dot)com republishings, maybe things like knowing where our information is coming from, provenance and repeatability and all that, is become less important to people?

On the other hand, it's definitely spewing bullshit: Did a ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Songwriter Really Use ChatGPT to Write ‘Soda Pop’?

Here’s where things get complicated. The alleged use of AI to help write “Soda Pop” was first reported in the English-language version of Joongang Daily— but the original Korean text of the article makes no mention of ChatGPT being used specifically during the production of KPop Demon Hunters’ music.

Which Erkhyan @erkhyan@yiff.life describes as:

Yay, more AI-generated misinformation!

And, yeah, but also people using tools they don't understand and munging meaning as they repost and rephrase, and if we attribute all of this to "AI", we risk removing the agency from the humans in the same way we have with cars, "Cyclist fatally struck by SUV in Sonoma County" indeed (If we're not gonna mention the driver, can we at least say with SUV?).

A lot of links and commentary over Futurism: OpenAI Realizes It Made a Terrible Mistake (Jason Gorman @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud) and ComputerWorld: OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt, Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe, Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop, who also observed:

The most hilarious and horrible side-effect of LLMs is that we now have a definitive answer to the question implied by Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment.

Anthropic and OpenAI have built the Chinese Room. And while it's clear now that there's no ghost in the machine, lots of people think they're having a real conversation ...

To which Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com observed:

We need a term that combines 'parasocial' with 'pareidolia'. IOW, we have something which can pass the Turing Test well enough to lead (some) people into treating it as human and applying/ascribing human social interactions to it.

But there's no there there.

Bonus: Ars Technica: AI medical tools found to downplay symptoms of women, ethnic minorities (republishing an FT article, and they don't have the depth of citation that I'd want in an article like this). Yeah, these models encode the bias in the language used to build them. Go figure. (Peter Murray @dltj@code4lib.social).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Music Photography Health Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Current Events Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Merriam-Webster defines "Ouroboros" as

a circular symbol that depicts a snake or dragon devouring its own tail and that is used especially to represent the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth

NBC News: Chipmaker Nvidia to invest $100 billion in OpenAI

Wall Street Journal (on MSN): Nvidia to Invest Up to $100 Billion in OpenAI

Reuters (on MSN): Nvidia to invest $100 billion in OpenAI as AI infra competition intensifies

Via Peter @peter@thepit.social who observed:

Ed Zitron is gonna go **nuts** lol

Edit/Addendum: Christopher Neugebauer @chrisjrn@social.coop

1. Good to see OpenAI found some investment to help them purchase more NVIDIA graphics cards! https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/

2. Good to see NVIDIA has found a significant new sales contract! So glad they're doing well! https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems- partnership/

[ related topics: Current Events Graphics Currency Artificial Intelligence Pedal Power Bicycling Economics ]

Ars Technica: Three crashes in the first day? Tesla’s robotaxi test in Austin.

Two of the three Tesla crashes involved another car rear-ending the Model Y, and at least one of these crashes was almost certainly not the Tesla's fault. But the third crash saw a Model Y—with the required safety operator on board—collide with a stationary object at low speed, resulting in a minor injury. Templeton also notes that there was a fourth crash that occurred in a parking lot and therefore wasn't reported. Sadly, most of the details in the crash reports have been redacted by Tesla.

Looks like it was written mostly from Brad Templeton at Forbes: Tesla Robotaxi Reports 3 Crashes In Austin On One Day, Hides Details who additionally notes:

During this period, Waymo had many crash reports, Zoox had 7 and May had 2, others had 1. The other companies do not redact the details as Tesla did. Waymo had a famous crash into a lighting pole that might be similar to crash #2 above, but this took place in a vehicle that’s giving 250,000 rides/week and just reported 96 million miles-- their crash rate is actually better than expected. Analysis of the reports for Waymo suggest they are not at fault for the vast majority of their reported crashes. Even one at fault crash, especially an injury crash, in under 7,000 miles is an extremely poor rate. You can’t extrapolate well from a single data point, the strong implication is that Tesla has to get much better – perhaps 300x better, to match Waymo. The presence of the safety driver implies the improvement goal might be much greater than 300x.

Via AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org.

[ related topics: Automobiles Rocky Horror Picture Show Woodworking ]

Space Hobo @spacehobo@teh.entar.net

Since English is an Anglo-Saxon language, we refer to its speakers as "Anglophones". We missed a trick not being called "Saxophones".

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low- effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

Via David Gerard

Edit: Klarna CEO Makes Employees Review His AI- Generated Vibe Coding Projects. The URL prefixes this with "nightmare boss", which... yeah.

Second Edit: Pivot To AI weighs in, and is not complimentary on the "study" methodology.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Health effects of cash transfers: Evidence from the Finnish basic income experiment Kari Hämäläinen, Miska Simanainen, Jouko Verho

Highlights

• The randomized experiment increased participants’ average income by 9 %–11 %.
• Health outcomes were objectively measured using data from medical records and prescriptions.
• Psychotropic drug use decreased by 8 %–11 %, with suggestive evidence of fewer outpatient visits due to mental health issues.
• No significant effects were detected on other health outcomes.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105480

Via

[ related topics: Health ]

Watching coworker recover from the Shai Halud exploit is further cementing my feelings about importing packages to do terminal coloring because importing packages to do minification on code that's being developed in embedded web views...

[ related topics: Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Ugh. Please, please, please, if you're an "AI" user, just share the prompt with me, don't make me wade through all of the LLM generated slop to figure out what you were trying to say.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

This story has it all. Sex. Politics. Diane Feinstein being petty enough to have someone arrested for an expired dog license. The Rialto Report: When Cicciolina Headlined at the O’Farrell Theater

Via MeFi, with more links.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Theater & Plays Dogs ]

JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social

My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.”

Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner

Kiddo: that’s AI

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

The thing about "share of attention" as a business metric is that it's a zero sum game.

[ related topics: Games ]

Hat tip to the dudes rebranding a hotel as a substance abuse treatment center in Healdsburg, the [checks notes] heart of wine country tourism.

Double points for calling it "The Ruse".

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/...ealdsburg-ruse-substance-center/

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits Travel ]

‪The Raptured Hon‬ ‪@danhon.com‬

I want a thing that looks like a metal detector and works like a metal detector, like, beeping like it, only it's for detecting AI.

Bright Burro 🍁🇨🇦🍁 ‪@brightburro.bsky.social‬

So like an aiger counter?

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Oh great, the other thing MacOS Tahoe 26 brought, aside from rounder buttons and new XCode crashes, is the frame rate on my external webcam suuuuucks.

[ related topics: Invention and Design California Culture Macintosh ]

Green Lights More Often: The Secret 2018 Study of Sydney’s Traffic Signals.

Via MeFi.

The thing about this European Chat Control issue is that this is exactly the sort of thing we used to be horrified by when the Soviet Union registered typewriters and such.

Lot of people have been passing around this version of Chappell Roan and Nancy Wilson doing Barracuda, but on Facebook one friend (Hi, Scott!) mentioned how the song is 48 years old, and still fresh. Chappell does a good version; I have a few critiques (some based on my own learning to growl, it's coming very very slowly, some might just be that the mic on the phone recording is missing some of the ringing overtones that I associate with the guitar part), but in Scott's comments this got into the weeds about other times when rock or pop stars covered music from similar eras before.

I've often commented that square dance callers using '80s songs as "modern" is the same as, in the '80s, using the Andrews Sisters as "Modern" (although I have been known to use Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" as a closer). And I have this feeling that the music of the '70s and '80s has a popularity that, okay in the '80s we enjoyed some older music, but not the way modern metalheads dig into Zep.

Anyway...

The obvious ones to me were David Lee Roth in 1985 doing Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody, a medley of songs from 1929 and 1915 and Michael Jackson in 1995 recording Smile, music from 1934 and lyrics from '56. Larry brought up (1928).

And, of course, I used the term "cover" there, but I don't think any of those are equivalent to, say, most of Pat Boone's work, in terms of relationship to the original.

What you got?

[ related topics: Music Movies Work, productivity and environment Education Handicaps & Disabilities ]

We were just talking about what to do about the intersection of Grant & Mountain View Ave yesterday.

Indianapolis residents fix an intersection by installing water-filled plastic barriers in the center turn lane, vertical delineators and repainting bike lanes.

https://www.wthr.com/article/n...3873-0a69-4176-b382-6016ad2cf271

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Community Bicycling ]

I think the best reviews are the ones that give you a feel for whether you want to read the book, and a taste of what you'll get out of it. I'm struggling with Gary Harper's memoir "A Man of Rubber: A True Story of Love, Adventure & The Art of Staying Flexible", because this book is so much about explaining the context for a time and a place in my life that was the source of so much personal growth .

When I finished the ebook I threw off a quick typed-on-my phone review on the Kindle app. Gary just messaged me about using those words in a larger review, and I felt like I had to give it a little better treatment.

I think it was spring of 1989 that I was walking through Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga Tennessee, and saw Chris at a folding table covered with High Country flyers advertising rafting on the Ocoe. I'd been down once, it was fun, but I was not the sort of high energy twenty-something to be a passenger. So I asked "how do you become a guide?", was told "show up Saturday morning and ask for John Miller", and the descent began. It was at least two years before I stopped having nightmares about swimming Slice-n-Dice.

I have ... grown and matured a lot ... since then. There are personal connections I haven't kept, there was socializing at the time I did not do. All of the people I guided with are amazing people, but it's now, 3 decades later, that I'm learning how many more amazing people there were (and still are) in that scene, and how much that world was in transition and new right before I got there.

I think I mentioned previously David Brown's "The Whitewater Wars: The Rafters and the River Trip that Saved the Ocoee & The Gauley River Battle", about the fight for access to whitewater, and "Man of Rubber..." is a more personal story, focusing on a path through the business of whitewater, and capturing a bit more of the time and the place.

My time there was 6 years after the Benton Fireworks Disaster. The thumbtack board at the general store had someone advertising moonshine for barter. I was a weekend guide, and a damnyankee besides, so there were huge swaths of what was going on around that I was completely unaware of.

"A Man of Rubber" is a story that fills in a lot of gaps. It starts with a tale of big water on the Grand Canyon, a style of whitewater I've never done and likely never will, though the notion of "above Crystal again" is a philosophy I can definitely take into life.

It's told by someone who's clearly in love with all kinds of paddling, and with Southeast Tennessee, and who made his home in a place where I was only really a tourist, both physically, and in the ways that he's contributed to the technologies of whitewater.

It talks about the technology of repurposing roofing materials to make rafts better for whitewater, about the evolution of whitewater raft design, and how the design and manufacture of the dry bag that still carries the most critical bits of my bug-out kit came to be.

It's a story of personal growth of someone who chose to make his home in the mountains (literally, that stair rail is amazing) with the help of family, and of how he followed small ideas to turn them into big things. And seeing my friends referenced and thanked in the text reminds me of how much of that space was, and hopefully continues to be, a real community.

And it's got everything else you'd want out of a memoir, success over health challenges, whitewater disasters, and triumphs, literal flying.

As I skim back through it, I'm reminded of that old saw about how you "never paddle the same river twice". A few years ago I went back and took a commercial trip down the Ocoee, got a chance to show Charlene what that time of my life was about. Even if my world flipped inside out and I could manage the logistics to go back to it (and endure the likely months of physical pain it'd take to get back into shape enough to do it again), I'm not the same person I was then, it'd be a very different experience.

But it sure is fun to go back through and think about what might have been.

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Rub...-Staying-Flexible/dp/B0FM8BRYDM/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Health Invention and Design Aviation Space & Astronomy Sociology Consumerism and advertising Art & Culture Beer Chattanooga Travel Pyrotechnics Graphic Design Boats Community Trains Education Douglas Adams Whitewater Philosophy Furniture Woodworking ]

ErosBlog documents an example of racial bias in AI detection: Pornocalypse AI Comes For Black Pinup Models

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Enthropic Thoughts: The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon, in which there is much speculation about the meanings of machine translation of programming error messages.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

‪Helen Czerski‬ ‪@helenczerski.bsky.social‬

In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night:

Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at?

**pause**

Him: "Anything where it has to be right".

Mic drop.

[ related topics: Community Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Sometimes the bands at Aqus are just playing the old classics. Really enjoying that Sparky Mark and the Funky Bunch are doing upbeat pop (despite not even having a keyboard in the lineup).

Max Leibman @maxleibman@beige.party

LinkedIn guy: Where others saw a trolley problem, I saw a trolley opportunity…

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Nanoraptor @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social

[ related topics: Photography Community ]

‪Girl_Poss‬ ‪@girlposs.bsky.social‬

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Today's Timdle was foiled by the birth of Walt Disney and the debut of Camel cigarettes...

Some headlines don't need a lot of additional exposition: Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

The good news is that when this whole economy collapses and we enter a decade of Even Greater Depression, it'll be hard to point the finger at any one of the AI bubble, Trump, or the housing situation, because it's all so fucked up.

Addendum: Excel Blog: How we designed an intelligent spreadsheet agent by combining advanced reasoning with Excel’s dynamic calculation engine

We measure Agent Mode on both our internal evaluation sets and the public SpreadsheetBench benchmark. Our results on SpreadsheetBench place Agent Mode at the leading edge of current systems, accurately completing 57.2% of the benchmark’s tasks.

Frank Skornia @fskornia@glammr.us observed:

I work in a library, so hardly work that will injure or kill someone and even here if I was constantly handing in stuff that was 57.2 percent accurate they would question my suitability for the job.

What I think this whole "AI" thing is showing is quite clearly how accuracy doesn't actually matter to anyone who's finding AI useful.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics Real Estate ]

Seen this same story behind paywalls, but it's out now: Futurism: Deutsche Bank Issues Grim Warning for AI Industry.

In a new research note, as Fortune reports, the international finance giant Deutsche Bank is warning that AI spending can’t continue to increase exponentially. And if spending were to slow down without realizing the tech’s outsize promises, the analysts caution, it could reveal an economy in tatters — marked by unemployment, lower household incomes, and inflation — that had been hidden by an irrational optimism in the power of AI.

That notion of looking at what kind of returns we'd have to be getting from... well... it's hard to figure out "when do you start looking", but Harvard's Human Centered Artificial Intelligence AI Index Report 2025 says a decend back of the envelope since spending started ramping up starts at $1.5T, and with this year and stretch back could easily be $2T.

So ballpark, we're gonna need to be seeing returns, not just revenues, that are more of the economy than farming. And if your lifetime expectation of chips is 18 months...

Someone smarter than me figure this out, because I'm just seeing "kaboom".

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

Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posts contract after turning down Riyadh Comedy Festival

Per Deadline, Okatsuka posted about the festival on Threads this weekend, writing, “FYI there are more of us that said no to the Riyadh comedy festival in Saudi Arabia.” In her post, Okatsuka also posted the list of things comedians have been told they weren’t allowed to talk about, including jokes “that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” Saudi Arabia, its ruling government, royal family, or any religion or religious figure, period. Okatsuka also takes time to point out that “The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process. A lot of the ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ Comedians are doing the festival 😂 they had to adhere to censorship rules about the types of jokes they can make.” (Worth noting that comedian Tim Dillon has said he was kicked out of the festival for a response video he made about accepting the gig, joking, “So what, they have slaves?”)

Via a whole bunch of places, including ResearchBuzz</ a>.

[ related topics: Religion Health Free Speech History moron Sociology Writing Journalism and Media Currency Video ]

This is a really good piece on Palestine, Israel, and how the media we consume impacts our views, and destroys people: House Arab by Ismail Ibrahim.

I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues.

Via Kottke (Bluesky) who says the magazine in question was the New Yorker.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Real Estate ]

That's so AI: BBC: The perils of letting AI plan your next trip

"They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!" said Gongora Meza. "The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination]."

[ related topics: Monty Python Travel Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence ]

Realization: The problem with "social media" vs forums/mailing-lists/newsgroups is that it's easier to create personalities with whom we think we have a social relationship, but actually have a parasocial relationship.

We're not actually participating in a community.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Community ]

Lizard ‪@lizardky.bsky.social‬

Man, first the pinkos at Cato produce a chart showing right-wing violence is much more prevalent than left-wing, and now the woke antifa National Review is claiming the Comey Indictment is invalid!

National Review — Was Lindsey Halligan Validly Appointed as United States Attorney?

That doesn’t mean that the president can’t temporarily fill the office with a pick of his own. As a 2003 OLC opinion by yours truly explains, the Vacancies Reform Act is a separate source of authority. But while there are many individuals whom Trump could have appointed as “acting” United States Attorney pursuant to the Vacancies Reform Act, Halligan doesn’t qualify: She isn’t serving as a Senate-confirmed officer in another position, and she hadn’t been in the Department of Justice at all, much less for the 90 days required.

(This article also references Mational Review — The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed, on the substance of the indictment.)

Cato, September 11, 2025 — Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States

Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Law Law Enforcement Education ]

Sitting in the CVS awaiting my Covid/fly shot, and the JR JR version of "Higher Love" is playing. My life is not enriched by this version.

There is a lot about race and class and my childhood that I'm unpacking, but seeing fights on 1970s NYC subways and (inadvertently) walking with my sisters and mom through Boston's "Combat Zone" is helping put a lot of the current fear mongering in perspective.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

The number of GOP members or self-identified fundamentalist Christians participating in child abuse is high, the number participating in sexual abuse of minors is probably a little lower, but still high. So I generally don't make a point of linking to busts, but I feel like in the next few days I'm gonna wanna dunk on some Trumper, so...

Charleston County (South Carolina) judge James Benjamin Gosnell Jr. arrested for posession of CSAM

South Carolina Republican state legislator Rep. RJ May said trans people “harm” children. He just pled guilty to child porn charges. He was a 2023 "Mom's for Liberty" Legislator of the Year.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Law Current Events ]

ICE officer seen on video pushing woman to ground has returned to duty.

American Journal of Political Science: Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina Adam Scharpf, Christian Gläßel

https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12475

Via Elf M. Sternberg ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

[ related topics: Religion Politics tolkien moron Current Events Law Enforcement Video Model Building ]

A common theme in AI skepticism is "why aren't the tech press pushing back or asking questions?"

Looking at some of the bullshit coming out of the NYT lately on all sorts of fronts, I'd say the problem isn't limited to the tech press.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Geoffrey Huntley — i ran Claude in a loop for three months, and it created a genz programming language called cursed. It cost him $14k (via).

Code at https://cursed-lang.org/ https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed

$14k of LLM compute plus, of course, whatever prompting time and babysitting he had to do. Obviously that may get cheaper, although that cost to him likely includes massive subsidies from the Anthropic investors (why, yes, I do have the latest Where's Your Ed At open in another tab), but/and: I wonder what that taught him about language development, about parsing and data structures and whatnot.

I wonder how long it took Urban Müller to write the first version of Brainfuck.zCu

[ related topics: Software Engineering Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Nextdoor post saying "I've got some excellent news to share with my neighbors!! I've gotten clearance from my doctor to drive again! I'm going to take it real slow and only go to nearby places at first until my confidence grows."

And on the one hand, I'm glad for her, on the other hand I'm scared to walk now.

[ related topics: Health Current Events ]

I mentioned that Firefox's AI/make the system harder to configure/don't fix bugs thing drove me away, and the thing I miss about that rendering engine is "show selection source".

The Chromium-based ones don't seem to do this, just "inspect".

[ related topics: Graphics Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

NBC, August 26, 2025: The CDC quietly scaled back a surveillance program for foodborne illnesses

CDC, September 26, 2025: Listeria Outbreak Linked to Prepared Meals

Frozen meals from Walmart and Trader Joe's leave 4 dead and 19 hospitalized

The CDC is warning consumers to check their fridges as two ready-to-eat pasta meals sold at Walmart, Kroger, and Trader Joe's locations nationwide have been recalled due to Listeria contamination.

Listeria outbreak from recalled frozen meals sold at Trader Joe's and Walmart leaves 4 dead, 19 in hospital

Via Emma Evans ‪@trance.bsky.social‬ and rahaeli ‪@rahaeli.bsky.social‬

[ related topics: Health Food Software Engineering Current Events Consumerism and advertising Birds ]

Local climate & active transportation activist has just discovered AI, and the cognitive dissonance is great with this one.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Global Warming ]

Oh, good, pulling the open source project i work on I see that someone has added the QT "webenginewidgets" component.

Now I have to figure out WTF that's called in the Qt Maintenance Tool.

This is why I love software development. Not.

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

Sometimes it takes a great cover to pull me in to a long read. This one is worth it.

Trump has pardons and tanks.... What do you have?

Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.

Together, We the People of the United States -- you and me -- have our magnificent Constitution.

Here's how that works out in a specific case --

https://storage.courtlistener....82460/gov.uscourts.mad.282460.26 1.0.pdf

Judge Young is on fire:

"And there’s the issue of masks. This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by Öztürk’s captors for maskingup and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. ICE goes masked for a single reason - - to terrorize Americans into quiescence."

[ related topics: Photography ]

Rather than the awful tree-layered GUI experience that is QT's MaintenanceTool.app, it sure would be nice if there were a command-line "install whatever your name for the module identified by 'webenginewidgets' is" tool.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]