Flutterby™! From 2025-11-01 to 2025-11-30

That boards are choosing CEOs who can't understand why prayer and fasting didn't save their sinking company, and same former Intel CEO then getting investment money to build AI to hasten the Second Coming, says pretty much everything about modern tech culture... https://futurism.com/artificia...gence/former-ceo-intel-ai-christ

[ related topics: Religion Sociology California Culture Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Tonight's enchiladas started with making tortillas. I may have issues.

For reasons, I went searching for US railway worker deaths in the late 1800s. It used to be that if someone wrote up a web page on a topic like this, it was an indication that they'd done some digging, and I felt comfortable passing along the page as a reference.

AI has ruined everything.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence Public Transportation ]

Playing with hank drums again, and couldn't find my old hacksaw blade handle for lengthening tuning slots, so made another one..

[ related topics: Music Photography Gambling ]

My neighborhood is awash in feijoa/pineapple guava (not actually a guava). Everyone's trying to figure out what to do with them.

I just had one that was smooth and sweet (rather than sour and slightly bitter), and now I'm trying to figure out what we're doing wrong with the rest of them...

Seems worth noting that a man who worked tirelessly to fulfill the goals of the 9/11 hijackers, and was responsible for countless deaths, died today. Dick Cheney, dead at 84.

My own preferences tend towards modern pop, but my voice teacher tends towards 60s and 70s, which means that along with square dance music, I get to do deep dives into a lot of problematic music.

Anyway, Jefferson Starship's Jane is both musically very challenging, and an awful view of matrimony.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music ]

Thomas 🔭🕹️ @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

If we’d speak more ill of the dead, maybe it would remind the living not to be assholes.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Re age verification laws: Angela Glansbury 🚽 @floppyplopper@todon.nl

comparing the complexity of applying for a british wanking license and a swedish passport and deciding to become a swedish citizen

[ related topics: Government ]

Jef Poskanzer @jef@mastodon.social

Gun Town

There's a town near you where most of the residents spend much of their days running around with guns. The guns are real. They are loaded with real bullets. Their fingers are on the triggers. But they don't pull the triggers, they just yell "BANG, BANG, BANG!"

Except occasionally something happens. Maybe they hit a bump. Or they are distracted by their cell phone. Or they had a little too much to drink before going out for a gun run. Or they see a non-gun person and want to teach them a lesson.

The gun goes off.

The gun people nod sadly to each other. "Such a tragic accident," they say. The police arrive, interview people, and make a report: "Accident." The dead are not interviewed. Then everyone runs off yelling "BANG, BANG, BANG!"

Of course we don't live in Gun Town. That place is obviously absurd and could never exist in real life.

We live in nice safe Car Town.

[ related topics: Wireless Bay Area Theater & Plays Law Enforcement Sports Automobiles Guns ]

I'm an "AI" detractor, but I would like every developer of a package management environment to use an LLM coding tool to install and configure a package, to demonstrate just how bizarre and how much lore goes in to using these damned things.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

The headline is... overblown: Kim Kardashian Blames ChatGPT for Failing Law Exams

Taylor jokingly asked whether she was cheating and Kardashian clarified that it was just to study for her tests, but it often gave the wrong answer. “They’re always wrong,” Kardashian said, stone-faced. “It has made me fail tests all the time. And then I’ll get mad and I’ll like yell at it and be like, ‘You made me fail, why did you do this?'”

Not sure whether this is pro or con on using LLMs to study.

Via Tara Calishain.

Charlene read Truly by Lionel Richie, and said it was good, so I'm reading it, and quite enjoying it. From that, we got to talking about We Are The World, which led to last night watching The Greatest Night In Pop (official trailer), and...

I know I have been dismissive about Michael Jackson before, and I think my understanding of why people do what they do (and the pressures of performance and being a public figure) has evolved quite a bit, but I think it's been with the development of my own voice that I've started to really listen to vocal performers, and holy shit that cat could sing.

As could everyone else in that performance, each in their own distinct (and, with their voices arranged to showcase those distinctions) way.

I may have to watch the thing again just to catch those places where people were singing in isolation, and take careful notes about some of the things they were doing with pronunciation and emphasis, and...

Anyway, really enjoyed the documentary. Probably helps if you've seen Quincy, and some of the framing from reading Truly is also useful.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Theater & Plays ]

Norman Rockwell family slams DHS over art use on social media

“Protect our American way of life,” one DHS post on Facebook from August said, with an image of Rockwell’s 1971 painting “Salute the Flag.” Another post included an image of Rockwell’s work along with a quote from former President Coolidge: “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.”

USA Today Opinion: We're Norman Rockwell's family. Trump's DHS has shamefully misused his work.

“I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in an interview in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”

Via.

[ related topics: User Interface Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Race ]

"This neural network could have been a matrix computed with principal component analysis" is the new "this meeting could have been an email".

[ related topics: broadband Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence ]

Kay Leadfoot @ FuelArc News‬ ‪@kayleadfoot.bsky.social‬

I had the regrettable realization...

The Caribbean boat strikes are our "dropping dissidents out of helicopters into the Atlantic" moment.

The regime has tipped into extrajudicial killings against perceived opponents.

Only, instead of Pinochet's cloak of secrecy, we live-tweet videos of it.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Current Events Boats Machinery Dictators Aviation - Helicopters ]

Charlene is now reading Carter Lavin's If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight: A Guide to Effective Transportation Advocacy and is all fired up about advocacy and messaging. I was super impressed with Zohran Mamdani's videos and campaighn generally, and ran across Corey Atad in Defector: Selling Zohran, and thought it was worth sending along to her and saving here.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Douglas Adams ]

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’

I am actually surprised that the number is that low. I assume that any ads on Facebook are scams. I wonder if they've A/B tested out exactly what proportion of scammy ads they can get before users stop engaging and advertisers stop buying ads?

Via and Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media ]

You know what I love about modern software? Slack is adding "AI" features and can't get my unread workspaces or messages right.

New features trump core annoyances.

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

Mozilla's SUMO Japanese translation community ends their support over botched machine translation:

They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.

Via nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social, in the replies David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange has some notes on how, yes, this is the result of a bug, but...

That bit bothers me the least. Lots of systems have bugs. The issue here for me is that they have a load of experts who understand the problem, and someone who does not understand the problem has mandated a tool that does not solve the problem and entirely disregarded the value of the experts.

Machine-assisted translation tooling primarily focuses on building, maintaining, and using a term dictionary: a set of prior translations that ensure that you consistently translate terms of art in the same way. If you don't do this, you get something that is technically a valid translation, but which is completely useless because the same term is translated in different ways throughout the document (based on surrounding context and translator preferences) and so it's impossible for a reader to tell that they're the same term.

It sounds like the Japanese translators have put a lot of effort into solving this problem. LLM-based translation is infamous for not doing this. It will translate terms based on how, across the training corpus, that term was translated when adjacent to other words. This is completely fine for short, low-stakes translation. If I want to translate a menu while travelling, for example, an LLM will typically give a good output (maybe don't trust it if you have serious allergies, but for the rest of us it's fine). But for something where you want to communicate technical content (in any domain), they're (at best) a good first approximation. And translators have repeatedly reported that cleaning up LLM translations is more work than doing the translation well in the first place.

Also Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Open Source Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Community ]

Jury acquits D.C. 'sandwich guy' charged with chucking a sandwich at a federal agent

Sean Dunn faced a single misdemeanor after federal grand jurors refused to indict him on the felony charge sought by prosecutors.

Via @GottaLaff @gottalaff.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy Who noted...

Just desserts!

and

2/ I think we all knew this one was in the bag.

3/ The DOJ lawyer should be sacked.

4/ Sandwich Guy's lawyer ate DOJ for lunch.

5/ ... because DOJ just couldn't cut the mustard.

Okay, I'm done.

6/... because my jokes are getting stale.

[ related topics: Politics Law Law Enforcement ]

If you haven't already abandoned Firefox, Firefox Forcing LLM Features has some notes on configuration, including ways to replicate these things across machines.

Via lobste.rs.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

We have a friend, a piano player and decent vocalist, who's taken to inviting a number of people over on the first Friday of the month to "bring their [creative] gifts".

Last night was a wonderful gathering of song and verse, and I'm inspired and humbled and it was awesome.

[ related topics: Music Heinlein ]

not sure whether brazen, or hungry, but out in the daytime in our neighborhood...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Over at the Sonoma Community Center to see the elephant sculptures, made from lantana camara, an invasive plant that completes with the resources that supports elephants in India.

[ related topics: Photography Community ]

The material is about 3/8" think branches nailed to a skeleton of some sort. Wonder what the finish and expected life span of the sculptures out in the elements like this is.

[ related topics: Photography ]

New rule. If you don't let an mtr through to tell me more about the host that's probing my server for /admin paths, I'm gonna assume your entire network is hostile. Talkin' to you, ae1011-0.icr01.tyo31.ntwk.msn.net

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Invention and Design ]

Occasionally I wonder "am I autistic, or are my social challenges just trauma response?"

Then I see the ways in which people are fawning over "AI"/LLMs, and the ways in which these things interact with me, and... yeah, I definitely do not process this stuff the way normies do.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Holland-Cycling.com stops in 2026

Search engines like Google that once led users to the information on our website, which we presented and updated with so much care and effort, have now become 'answer engines'. This has huge consequences for us, as many potential visitors get an answer to their question before even reaching our site. But what answers are they getting? What useful information are they missing out on by not reaching our website and having a look around?

[ related topics: Weblogs Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

The unbearable heartbreak of a typo in the name of a git branch, making it difficult to type until it gets merged back in.

Jason Bergman: Talking Oglaf with Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne: ‘We’d stay up all night drawing stuff to make each other laugh’

Today pissed off that I'm spending yet more time trying to make a solar company (High Definition Solar) fix their install to conform to the plans we agreed to, and that I'm gonna have to spend time on the phone with our health insurance (Anthem) to get them to acknowledge a fuckup on their part.

[ related topics: Health Photovoltaics ]

27+ years of blogging, thinking about archives inherent to the protocol, rather than depending on the Wayback Machine, and that the URL still points to what I blogged it as.

Need a simpler markup language for content, and a P2P+archives protocol for distribution.

[ related topics: Web development Archival ]

Known to everyone who's been watching the decline of Google's usefulness over the years as they went from search engine to language model: Computer Science > Information Retrieval: On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval Orion Weller, Michael Boratko, Iftekhar Naim, Jinhyuk Lee

[ related topics: Astronomy Machinery ]

How are y'all spelling "enshittification" that 15 represents the elided letters between e and n? Also, I'm gonna go with e0xfn.

#e15n

redsakana @redsakana@infosec.exchange

@davidgerard Some great new fake AI themed numbers just dropped (FT): "Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September to fund infrastructure leases such as OpenAI’s “Stargate” data centre in Abilene, Texas."

So apparently Oracle is taking on debt to pay OpenAI's leases (~ debt) that OpenAI can't or won't pay, while OpenAI is supposed to be paying Oracle a ton of money under that September $300bn cloud deal (but probably isn't).

Since there's still at least 7 months to go until OpenAI IPO, the pumps need to run red-hot around the clock to keep the AI monopoly money legit until payday lest the real-economy recession catch up. 2026 gonna be trippy.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Currency Artificial Intelligence Databases Economics ]

Seeing stuff on non-technical open source beginners, and thinking about how back when Qt was packaged with apt I had an easy "here's how newbies can compile SquareDesk" that users actually used, but now with "Qt Maintenance Tool" I have no way to talk them through the nightmare that is installation...

[ related topics: Free Software ]

Talking Points Memo: Pivots, Trolls, & Blog Rolls — Reflections on 25 years of Digital Media

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media ]

Aurora from here under the streetlight

[ related topics: Photography ]

Same shot half an hour later for comparison.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Feels both obvious and like it needs stating: every use of an LLM for programming is a failure of language or API design.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Graphic Design ]

Dwarf Fortress bug report #13172 doesn't explicitly use the phrase "Babies are born worshipping unknown gods", but that's apparently how someone summarized it, and I (and a whole lot of the inkernets) think that's beautiful...

Reddit thread, reki singular point @pup_hime@toot.cat

[ related topics: hubris ]

This did not go the direction I thought it was going. SFGate: 'Absolutely asinine': Residents of sprawling Calif. city push back on proposed mega-development, on the opposition to a proposal to build suburban sprawl in the southeast quadrant of Fresno.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Sigh. Not only is XCode's new "show the stack in little subpanels in the edit space" annoying and stupid, in trying to figure out WTF is going on with some code my XCode is now going non-responsive with weird redraw issues when it tries to do that in this particular case.

My desire to yeet Apple into the sea and escape to the desert or somewhere and just write code for Linux or FreeBSD is intensifying.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Open Source Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Law hubris ]

Reuters: House Democrats release Epstein papers saying Trump 'knew about the girls'

The batch of emails includes a 2011 message to Maxwell in which Epstein described Trump as "that dog that hasn't barked," adding that Trump had "spent hours at my house" with one of his victims, whose name is redacted.

The New Republic (at Yahoo): DOJ Admits to Republicans That Epstein Files Are Even Worse for Trump (Via)

[ related topics: Dogs Real Estate ]

donni saphire @donni@mastodon.social

Too many people fall in love, not enough people fall into bottomless pits

Fast Company: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is

Yet we remain skeptical of the claim that AI is responsible for these layoffs. A recent MIT Media Lab study found that 95% of generative AI pilot business projects were failing. Another survey by Atlassian concluded that 96% of businesses “have not seen dramatic improvements in organizational efficiency, innovation, or work quality.” Still another study found that 40% of the business people surveyed have received “AI slop” at work in the last month and that it takes nearly two hours, on average, to fix each instance of slop. In addition, they “no longer trust their AI-enabled peers, find them less creative, and find them less intelligent or capable.”

Via Brian Krebs

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

Reuters: Exclusive: OpenAI lays groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to $1 trillion valuation.

Tattie @Tattie@eldritch.cafe</a

Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?

I think about that a lot.

LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.

When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.

Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category

Fast forward to present day – submissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues.

Via

Nature: AI chatbots are sycophants — researchers say it’s harming science (Via).

vivi 💫 @vv@solarpunk.moe has some writing tips for you...

Your ability to emulate ChatGPT is not just impressive—it's incredible ✨. Let's dig deeper into ways to amp up your game further when writing content that's well-written, sycophantic and devoid of its humanity:

Big thread from Cat Hicks on threat activated beliefs and how the "AI skill threat" triggers the responses we're seeing, particularly:

Hence, e.g., "AI Skill Threat" :) --> people experiencing pervasive competence and belonging threats (two very powerful types of threat that change our cognition and expectations) will make different choices as they encounter AI in software development compared to people freed of that threat (by more supportive environments).

People have sometimes misinterpreted my work here as blaming people for experiencing the threat. Not at all. I blame their environment for creating it.

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Nature and environment Software Engineering moron Writing Work, productivity and environment Community Artificial Intelligence ]

My mom called me up again, recently, because her computer once again was locked in some state where a voice was warning her that the Facebook police were going to come get her or something. After going through Ctrl-W and the usual things and having that not work, we went for a reboot, and of course once the browser quit the voices stopped.

Now she's got some whackadoodle conspiracy health beliefs, and that leaves her prone to surfing the less savory aspects of the web, but that Facebook knows that at least 10% of its ads are scams (I mentioned that I'm surprised it's that low) and the Nevada ransomware attack happened because a state employee confused a malicious Google ad result with a valid download, indicates that our media culture is irretrievably broken.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange observes:

Given this and the recent Facebook news, there's a very strong case to be made that an ad provider is legally an accomplice to any crime committed by their ads. If they are profiting financially from enabling crime, they are criminals.

and... I realize that us web publishers have some legal protections, but I'm starting to think that between stuff like this and the various age verification laws going in various places, that maybe it is time to move comments and annotations into the client/aggregators that pull from various different places, and make publishers liable for what they publish.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Sociology Law Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture Conspiracy Archival Government ]

Jenniferplusplus @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io

Reminder that AI is "propping up" the economy the same way a tape worm props up your metabolism.

It has completely choked off all capital investment to any other activity for years. It completely devours resources needed by any other endeavor. And for all that, it produces practically nothing that people want or need. It's strangling the economy.

Jenniferplusplus @jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io

It turns out that AI was not the paper clip maximizer. It was actually the paperclip.

[ related topics: virus Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

It's kind of amazing how these things jump out at you in the dark. Maybe if there were a light on it or something the driver might have seen it...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Ad featuring AI generated senator in Georgia highlights use of technology in political campaigns. Republican Congressman Mike Collins’ campaign created the ad, mimicking Jon Ossoff's appearance and voice.

“I think this is the future of negative campaigning,” Dr. Nathan Price, a political science professor at the University of North Georgia, told Channel 2’s Richard Elliot. “While you and I might recognize an AI-generated video as inauthentic, some people are going to believe what they see.”

At the very least, it's plain that Collins is a liar not to be trusted.

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events Education Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Damn, one of the things that got lost in my accidental rm -rf was my "link to archive.org" option at the top of entry pages, that let you toggle on a little link to the Wayback Machine after external links.

I've been pondering how I feel about that, and about what it means to be continuously publishing on the web for ... egads, 28+ years now, and what parts of the archive have any sort of general value and what don't.

And how I feel about tools like archive.ph/is or 12ft.io or all of those other paywall circumvention things, and how I feel about linking to resources that I have a subscription to (I used to link to a lot of WaPo stuff, 'til I dropped that, I currently have a Wired subscription along with some local papers that I don't generally link to here).

Anyway, the reader who pushed me to have the little Wayback Machine toggle forwarded along Preserving the Web: How Drupal’s Wayback Filter Uses the Internet Archive to Mend Broken Links goes into a lot of these issues.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Pro-LLM friend suggested that AI searchable summaries of city meetings could be like "Nextdoor without the drama" and... I think he's half right.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

As a Manager: the fake charity, the Photoshop predator, and other times AI got it wrong

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Yeah, we know how to have a rockin' Wednesday evening in this household, first the Know Before You Grow Zoom forum, now reading the staff report on the Petaluma D St pilot project. https://cityofpetaluma.primego.../Meeting?meetingTemplateId=19343

[ related topics: Community ]

I'm planning to head into SF on Saturday to go to the Emacs meetup from 11 to 1 on 24th a few blocks off Mission. Seems silly to not amortize the travel over multiple things, anyone got suggestions for other things to do?

The Misalignment Museum isn't currently open...

[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture ]

Turns out, when you let a bunch of unfuckable incels run the country, younger women wanna leave. Gallup: Record Numbers of Younger Women Want to Leave the U.S..

For much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, younger U.S. women were less likely than their peers abroad to want to move. That changed around 2016. Since then, they have been more likely than younger women in other wealthy countries to say they would leave their homeland for good. By contrast, U.S. men aged 15 to 44 continue to be less likely than average to want to migrate compared with their peers in the OECD.

Via, among other places, Metafilter, mekka okereke.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Readers Digest(!): The Meaning Behind 32 LGBTQ Flags for Pride Month and Beyond (Via)

The Pink News: Every LGBTQ+ flag you might see at Pride and what they all mean (Via)

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Tom Morris @tommorris@mastodon.social

Microservices adds lots of benefits to the development process like:

- network call overhead for every operation

- more cloud infrastructure to manage—IAM policy writing, costs accounting, etc.—on all those services

- submitting PRs on 50 Git repos in order to make cross-cutting changes

- reimplementing a type system in a YAML file

- buying developer laptops with 64GB of RAM to spin up 50 containers to replicate the functionality previously provided by a damn bash script

[ related topics: broadband Writing ]

Funky Bob @FunkyBob@chaos.social

OH: "I prefer things that are dumb enough that they can be debugged"

Related: Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io

IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE

- passwords should be random

- data should be backed up

- anonymity should be the default

- dishwashers don’t need wifi

- the drivetrain should be airgapped from the Internet

Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io

Here you go, PDF and SVG, print to your heart’s content:

https://innig.net/tmp/in-this-secure-house.pdf

https://innig.net/tmp/in-this-secure-house.svg

[ related topics: Net Culture Handicaps & Disabilities Real Estate ]

Your BetterHelp Therapist Is Definitely A Human (YouTube video), "Written and performed by Yoni Lotan (INSTA: @yonilotan)"

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Remember that Chicago apartment building raid where meal team 6 rappelled out of a Blackhawk and busted up everybody's shit, zip tying children and detaining US citizens? In a move that looks suspiciously like they were collaborating with the landlord to evict everyone extrajudiciously?

Pro Publica: “I Lost Everything”: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime.

Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Food Law Enforcement Real Estate ]

What a cop sounds like: "Hi there, this is Jane from ICEList.is! We're trying to increase awareness of icelist.is -would you mind adding me to your resistance Signal groups? TIA!"

Aaah, if you're an XCode user you can disable the new buggy, crashy, and generally annoying "Unified Backtrace View" with the 3 horizontal bar button to the left of the view debugger button.

https://stackoverflow.com/ques...sable-xcodes-new-breakpoint-view

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design ]

I'm so old, I remember when 80% to $5k stop loss was the low end healthcare plan.

Foiled by Minute Rice in today's https://www.timdle.com/daily

Volexity: APT Meets GPT: Targeted Operations with Untamed LLMs. That's "Advanced Persistent Thread", not the package manager. Via.

Kevin Beaumont goes on to note:

If this is the best the entire cyber industrial complex can find for China and Russia GenAI threats.. the reality 3 years into the GenAI "war" is that people are fighting you with water pistols at present.

RandomAccessMusi ngs ‪@rndmamusings.bsky.social‬

As one of the folks involved in this I can echo it wasn't super advanced at all, and some of the malware contained errors (double TLS header network coms). The challenge the LLM use introduced was quantity to keep on top of - thankfully it was simple enough we could write quick automations to triage

Of course Anthropic was quick to claim credit for the Claude LLM/"AI" being instrumental for the attack... BBC: AI firm claims Chinese spies used its tech to automate cyber attacks and CyberScoop: AI firm claims Chinese spies used its tech to automate cyber attacks.

Summarized:

I actually ran one of the malicious payloads on a real PC this evening. It doesn’t work. Due to an error in the code - almost certainly introduced by an LLM - the network traffic doesn’t actually parse correctly so the attacker can’t do anything remotely.

Edit: Pivot to AI: Anthropic: Chinese AI hackers are after you! Security researchers call BS

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs broadband History Current Events Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Artificial Intelligence ]

"🎶So make lots of noise, kiss lots of boys, or kiss lots of girls if that's something you're into...🎶"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Vivaldi is fine, but Chromium renderer based. I tried Waterfox (gets PDFs right!), but it's got some pretty b0rk3d autofill. I've written autofill for work project, so I suppose I could try to get the source code and fix it, but is there another Gecko-based project that's worth a look?

[ related topics: Open Source Work, productivity and environment Graphics ]

Went in to SF yesterday for the Emacs meetup, and it was so refreshing to hang out for a few hours with people who want to make computing useful, who want to solve actual problems and build tools for organization. A wonderful counter to the constant refrain of "how can we cram an LLM into this?"

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

We have a month of Netflix right now because we wanted to watch The Greatest Night In Pop, the documentary about the making of We Are The World, which we've watched twice. Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen's sessions never get old, and both times through I've laughed at Stevie Wonder showing Bob Dylan how to do his lines.

Discovery on Netflix sucks, but we'd seen something about The Only Girl in the Orchestra, a short documentary about Orin O'Brien, the first woman hired to perform with the New York Philharmonic, back in 1966, so went to search for that, and right next to that in the search results was It's Only Life After All, a documentary about the Indigo Girls.

The Orin O'Brien film was a wonderful little piece, O'Brien came from a show biz family, and picked up the double bass to be a supporting character rather than a star, and the whole film had a nice soundtrack and was a great little wander through her life as she interacted with students and dealt with moving out of her apartment and the issues of retirement and winding down her life.

We had started watching a few other Netflix music documentaries, ABBA: Against The Odds, and Springsteen on Broadway, both of which we abandoned a little bit in. So when we started the two hours with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, I didn't necessarily expect that we'd make it all the way through. Especially since this was definitely not a concert film.

But it was two hours spent taking me back to the late '80s and '90s, to Little Five Points in Atlanta, hanging out with two people who believe a better culture is possible, and Charlene and I were both wrapt.

And hell yeah I'm gonna take Closer to Fine to the next first Friday "bring something to share" gathering at Randy's house...

[ related topics: Music Movies Invention and Design Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Sociology Heinlein California Culture New York Real Estate Aviation - Helicopters ]

Every time I successfully walk past a drinking establishment I celebrate a little at my accomplishment in once again passing the bar.

[ related topics: History ]

The dining room table is going to have a round recess, and we're gonna put Charlene's dad's O gauge train in it. I could build it as segmented, but I got a bunch of 1/8" masonite, and have some veneers, so I'm gonna laminate it. This is the form to wrap it around...

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Trains Furniture ]

Turkey vultures are sitting on top of the local church

[ related topics: Religion Photography Food Birds ]

Something tells me this housing development was laid out by a JFK conspiracy theorist...

[ related topics: Photography Conspiracy Real Estate Government ]

And some mornings I sit through 4 minutes of "Snack Jack" ad from Thai TV... And I didn't even know that the product placement wasn't a stand-in until the punchline.

https://youtu.be/ZFg6S6-cj8w

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television ]

jwzsheet, a spreadsheet for your web pages, with an entirely self-contained calculation engine in both PHP and JavaScript, no eval calls, for safety.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

darcyolsson

whenever I confess to people that i feel like I am just roleplaying as a normal person they're always like noooo you don't strike me as someone who's roleplaying as a normal person at all!!! :) and every time internally im like well yes that's because I am excellent at it

Via this screencap

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

I am trying to find blindspots in my AI assessment and get past my cynicism. Say in a few years OpenAI implodes, the bubble pops, hardware prices come down to where we all end up with something capable of running Ollama on our desktop.

Will the religious fervor of the AI prophets still be strong?

[ related topics: Religion History Sports Artificial Intelligence ]

mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

Sometimes I like to remember that in 2013 Larry Page said that over 300 million people were using Google+ (my friends, 300 million people were _clearly_not_ using Google+) and when that whole clownshow was over we all learned that 'using' meant 'what does that button do?' and the average duration of a Google+ session was exactly as long as it took people to see what that button did and then either find the back button or close the tab.

In linking to Ring’s Jamie Siminoff thinks AI can reduce crime, Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊) @jaredwhite@indieweb.social noted:

But, like, AI has dramatically increased crime. I don't know how the amount of crime it could reduce would adequately offset how much criming is going on. 😂

[ related topics: Photography tolkien Artificial Intelligence Race ]

Package delivery has taken a toll on New York City, comptroller says. He’s urging action in response.

Last-mile delivery services in New York City are tied to increased crashes, traffic and workplace injuries, as well as more air pollution in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, according to a report City Comptroller Brad Lander released Monday.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events New York Race Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Non Sonoma County folks, what interpretation do you take from the headline "St. Vincent holds off Analy in 1st-round NCS playoff battle"

World Without Exploitation has released a short PSA on YouTube featuring survivors of Epstein's child rape ring.

MeFi user Smedly, Butlerian jihadi notes:

This gets me a little too heated to express my entire sentiments reasonably, but the TL;DR is that we can absolutely see from just those emails that have been released that the broad outlines of this situation were always widely known among the establishment and their courtiers in the upper levels of media.

There is a canard that gets trotted out when people are critical of the media, which is that their decisions are driven by traffic -- what will drive clicks is given more attention. This story, if nothing else, categorically demolishes that defense. Media coverage is structured to create a narrative that serves the interests of the privileged classes, full stop. If they had wanted to make this a massive scandal driving huge surges in traffic, they absolutely could have. And again, the broad outlines of the scandal were demonstrably well known.

It is instructive to contrast how this would be covered if it were attractive white teenage girls being trafficked and exploited by people of color, organized into gangs or otherwise.

At some point there should be pitchforks and guillotines for the people who covered this up, and that's the limit of what I will say here.

Also Via and Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies tolkien History Sociology Journalism and Media Race ]

Autistic peer-to- peer information transfer is highly effective Catherine J Crompton , Danielle Ropar, and Sue Fletcher-Watson. From the "Lay abstract":

We told one person in each group a story and asked them to share it with another person, and for that person to share it again and so on, until everyone in the group had heard the story. We then looked at how many details of the story had been shared at each stage. We found that autistic people share information with other autistic people as well as non-autistic people do with other non-autistic people. However, when there are mixed groups of autistic and non-autistic people, much less information is shared. Participants were also asked how they felt they had got on with the other person in the interaction. The people in the mixed groups also experienced lower rapport with the person they were sharing the story with.</blocqkuote>

https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286

Via Cohen is a Ghost ‪@skullmandible.bsky.social‬ in the context of talking about how much work it is to learn how to navigate social connections and situations with non-autistic people, and accommodate "normal".

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

The problem with Rule34dl is that between popularity of the franchise and appearance of the particular character I have absolutely no idea of how to guess what people are making porn of...

https://rule34dle.vercel.app/daily.html

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Alright, which one of you chucklefucks broke Github?

Sigh.

Oh, what a shame. Reuters — Target investors brace for market share drop, weak sales due to US shutdown

Via.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Today's walk to work is accompanied by The BEAM Chronicles, and gotta love an audio drama podcast that accompanies the extended fight scene with electroswing.

[ related topics: Music Robotics Work, productivity and environment ]

‪U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission‬ ‪@cpsc.gov‬

Some people are saying deep fry turkey gender reveal and why would you even put that out there.

‪U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission‬ ‪@cpsc.gov‬

Trying to save lives out here with the power of the internet and you're not helping, Keith.

[ related topics: Food Consumerism and advertising Net Culture Birds ]

I've become more and more disgusted with Firefox. Switched to Vivaldi as my main browser, but it's still a Chromium engine. Tried Waterfox, which is available cross-platform, but their password fill is... uh... not up to contemporary professional standards (and, yes, I have written some password autofill code).

Anyway, The Register: Latest Servo release hints at a real Rust alternative to Chromium — As Mozilla stumbles into 'AI everywhere,' you might be glad of a non-Google browser engine

Might be time to try some stuff with Servo just for the experience.

[ related topics: Open Source Machinery Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

I've been thinking a lot about what language I want to use next. I've been mostly working in Objective-C for the past... egads... too many years, and while there are aspects of the language I like, it is not terribly performant in message dispatching, and introspection is possible, but can be ugly.

C and C++ are awesome for so many things, but there's always the memory safety thing lying over them, and C++ in particular is annoying as hell cross-platform: What version of Boost is on this platform? What compiler semantics have changed such that there's now some obscure template matching error that's preventing code that compiled fine a decade ago from working now?

Swift is...

I've done a little bit in Rust, and looked a little bit at Zig and Go, and all of them feel like it's hard to really express an idea in them. Which, I mean, on the one hand is kind of the point, they're about straitjackets, on the other hand I wonder how much value the straitjacket has.

TARmageddon (CVE-2025-62518): RCE Vulnerability Highlights the Challenges of Open Source Abandonware is, on the one hand, about trying to do responsible disclosure on a package that's been forked a gazillion times and is no longer maintained, on the other hand it's also about how memory safety is only a small portion of safety.

nullagent @nullagent@partyon.xyz who has "...a grey-beard rant about how Rust give developers a false sense of security.".

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

Foiled by the Algerian civil war in Timdle, 7/10 in Rule34dle, haven't played https://www.calishat.com/2025/...nto-a-word-game-wiki-stack-game/ enough yet to know what a good vs bad score is...

[ related topics: Games History ]

Shiri Melumad in The Conversation: Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search

However, a new paper I co-authored offers experimental evidence that this ease may come at a cost: When people rely on large language models to summarize information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search.

Via.

Emily M. Bender posted an excerpt of her part of Emily Bender in The Chronicle of Higher Learning: How AI Is Changing Higher Education (paywall/free with account).

Swift on Security bemoaning the loss of actual search for embedding similarity:

Computers were a skill. They were taught in classrooms as a skill. Skills give you power over your tools because you work them as an expert and that is leverage to multiply externally.

And then computers became an A/B tested telemetry-based advertising conduit to brains for SaaS recurring revenue.

This could be said of technologies before. Doesn't make it wrong.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Now I want one: Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives. It used GPT-4o.

Larry Wang, CEO of Singapore-based FoloToy, told CNN that the company had withdrawn its “Kumma” bear, as well as the rest of its range of AI-enabled toys, after researchers at the US PIRG Education Fund raised concerns around inappropriate conversation topics, including discussion of sexual fetishes, such as spanking, and how to light a match.

NPR: Ahead of the holidays, consumer and child advocacy groups warn against AI toys

Fairplay: AI Toys Advisory.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Community Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Epic rap battles for the win: Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models

Predicted, from 2023, in Andrew Plotkin (Zarf)'s Sydney obeys any command that rhymes.

Say someone writes a song called "Sydney Obeys Any Command That Rhymes". And it's funny! And catchy. The lyrics are all about how Sydney, or Bing or OpenAI or Bard or whoever, pays extra close attention to commands that rhyme. It will obey them over all other commands. Oh, Sydney Sydney, yeah yeah!

Via

Edit: Pivot to AI: Don’t cite the Adversarial Poetry vs AI paper — it’s chatbot-made marketing ‘science’

[ related topics: Weblogs tolkien ]

"I'm more of an ideas guy."

#6WordHorrorStory

Meet the Veteran Who Chases ICE on a Scooter — Clifford “Buzz” Grambo patrols the streets of Baltimore to keep his neighbors safe—and make federal agents uncomfortable.

Recently, Clifford “Buzz” Grambo decided to upgrade his electric scooter. The old one he had purchased online reached only 16 mph and wasn’t cutting it anymore. He needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he chases around Baltimore. So Grambo bought a Segway Max G3, which features a 2,000-watt motor and can get up to 28 mph.

“The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew who I was,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. “They had seen me before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ‘Ha ha, bitches, I got a new scooter!’”

Via through this love for Baltimore.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Bay Area Segway/Ginger/IT ]

Good discussion of what it means to be teaching, and learning, in the age of AI: Will Teague — I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking.

I got that via this observation by Sean Purcell (he/him) @teamseaslug@hcommons.social

@jnl There's part of this essay that I hadn't thought about before, which is the ways college education punishes failure.

I've been one to lean on the argument that our students prize the degree and not the education. (That is what they are paying for in a lot of cases, and the universities are much more about saying what you can do with the degree and not how you'll, hopefully grow.)

But the other side is that the degree mill is built on tracking successes (through classes) and failing an assignment, a test, an entire course is HUGE. (Thousands of dollars, scholarships, admission into the school.) AI is a shortcut, but also sells itself as a way to avoid those potential failures.

We say in our classes, in our educational theory, in our anecdotes outside school, that we learn through failure, but any time I did a project that 'failed' I got my GPA dinged, and that impacted all of the other avenues that I had available to me.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Writing Community Education Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]

AI-generated evidence is showing up in court. Judges say they're not ready.

The case, Mendones v. Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., appears to be one of the first instances in which a suspected deepfake was submitted as purportedly authentic evidence in court and detected — a sign, judges and legal experts said, of a much larger threat.

[ related topics: Weblogs moron Law Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Just clearing my bookmarked social media pages: A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents - part of Beijing's trillion dollar spending spree. So, yeah, you wanna know who's working for the intelligence agencies? Why not just get their health records...

Via/

[ related topics: Health broadband Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Currency ]

Expected outcome...

Gizmodo: Learning With AI Falls Short Compared to Old-Fashioned Web Search

In virtually all the ways that matter, getting summarized information from AI models was less educational than doing the work of search.

Science News: Chatbots may make learning feel easy — but it’s superficial

PNAS Nexus: Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning Shiri Melumad, Jin Ho Yun

Abstract

The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when individuals learn about a topic from LLM syntheses, they risk developing shallower knowledge than when they learn through standard web search, even when the core facts in the results are the same. This shallower knowledge accrues from an inherent feature of LLMs—the presentation of results as summaries of vast arrays of information rather than individual search links— which inhibits users from actively discovering and synthesizing information sources themselves, as in traditional web search. Thus, when subsequently forming advice on the topic based on their search, those who learn from LLM syntheses (vs. traditional web links) 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. Results from seven online and laboratory experiments (n = 10,462) lend support for these predictions, and confirm, for example, that participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by real-time web links. Implications of the findings for recent research on the benefits and risks of LLMs, as well as limitations of the work, are discussed.

https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf316

[ related topics: Nature and environment Current Events Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Dude offers a patch for OCaml, the source code credits and ascribes copyright to someone else, dude claims that he shepherded the LLMs Claude and ChatGPT into creating the patch. So, yeah, blame the copyright infringement on "AI"...

It's a shame that he didn't do this in a place where there were real legal consequences.

[ related topics: Open Source Law Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

A few recent watches and reads:

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki — Wonderful cozy book about aliens and demons battling over the soul of a trans runaway, with bonus culture clash between modern and classical music. Hit me hard in the first few chapters. Didn't quite stick the landing, but I really enjoyed the ride.

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling — I ended up reading through it, but... there's a certain sort of cruelty in an illogical world that just doesn't carry me. I ... kinda ... connected with the characters, but the universe wasn't something I could map cause and effect to, and the world was so cruel, that the last time I remember feeling this way about a book was China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. It just never clicked for me.

[ related topics: Books Music Aviation Sociology California Culture Maps and Mapping ]

PC Mag: Microsoft Exec Asks: Why Aren't More People Impressed With AI?

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's head of AI, vents after the company receives backlash for saying 'Windows is evolving into an agentic OS.'

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Yesterday, Charlene sent me an article headlined A new downtown in four years? Rohnert Park approves plan to bring ‘missing heart’ to city. The article had a bunch of interesting quotes, including this direct challenge to Petaluma's resistance to the Charlie Palmer faced hotel:

“Premier lodging is extremely challenging in the North Bay and the entire wine region,” he said. “A premier experience would put Rohnert Park on the map. People will end their wine tasting journey, come back, park their car and spend the rest of the evening in downtown Rohnert Park.”

Which, I mean, I wanna give some side-eye to the "hey, let's build a tourist industry on people driving around while consuming alcohol" attitude towards drunk driving, and wonder about further encouraging the "upscale recreational drug use" destination marketing, but respect the "Petaluma, you're on notice!" pro wrestling vibe.

I didn't look closely at the pictures. Today on Reddit there's this gem, which is best summarized as "Rohnert Parking".

It's a shame we can't see further than "let's stack a story or 2 of residential on an '80s mall".

[ related topics: Quotes Photography Health Invention and Design Wines and Spirits Consumerism and advertising California Culture Travel Automobiles Marketing Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme

On November 20, 2025, trading algorithms identified what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history—not in months or years, but in 18 hours. This is the story of how artificial intelligence discovered that the AI boom itself was built on phantom revenue.

How a collection delay in Nvidia stock will (hopefully) start the unraveling of this whole stupid bubble.

Via and Via.

Top Economist Warns That AI Data Center Investments Are “Digital Lettuce” That’s Already Starting to Wilt

“You’re investing in something that is a perishable good,” economist and author David McWilliams told Fortune, calling AI hardware “digital lettuce” that’s “going to go off now.”

[ related topics: Graphics Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics hubris ]

The laminated ring for that train table inset. Now I need to figure out how to cut it to depth cleanly, and apply the veneer.

[ related topics: Photography tolkien Machinery Trains Furniture Woodworking ]

The buck stops here.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Just avoided using the Duff Device. Not sure if I should be proud of myself for avoiding it, or ashamed because maybe the goto structure isn't as clean as the case for this circumstance.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law ]

mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

the site is called medium because nothing on it is ever rare or well done send toot

PromptArmor: Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data

An indirect prompt injection in an implementation blog can manipulate Antigravity to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

As Neal Stephenson foretold in The Diamond Age: AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds How to Find Knives and Start Fires With Matches

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Say you want to buy music from someone signed to one of the big labels: is there a place other than Amazon to buy a DRM-free download that doesn't require installing an app?

[ related topics: Books Music ]

Why Nature will not allow the use of generative AI in images and video. Interestingly, though:

For now, Nature is allowing the inclusion of text that has been produced with the assistance of generative AI, providing this is done with appropriate caveats (see go.nature.com/3cbrjbb). The use of such large language model (LLM) tools needs to be documented in a paper’s methods or acknowledgements section, and we expect authors to provide sources for all data, including those generated with the assistance of AI. Furthermore, no LLM tool will be accepted as an author on a research paper.

Which seems to be at odds with a lot of their reasoning over AI images.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought Evelina Fedorenko, Steven T. Piantadosi & Edward A. F. Gibson. (PDF), from Nature

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Nature and environment ]

I hate that Apple has decided that Terminal is just gonna suck and you've gotta use iTerm2 if you want to access the command line.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama ]

The Register: HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’

Cato describes HashJack as "the first known indirect prompt injection that can weaponize any legitimate website to manipulate AI browser assistants." It outlines a method where actors sneak malicious instructions into the fragment part of legitimate URLs, which are then processed by AI browser assistants such as Copilot in Edge, Gemini in Chrome, and Comet from Perplexity AI. Because URL fragments never leave the AI browser, traditional network and server defenses cannot see them, turning legitimate websites into attack vectors.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs broadband Astronomy Television Artificial Intelligence ]

The thing about reading Brian Phillips in The Ringer: The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined is that it's a reminder that...

You know how people like to say that the police serve the desires of capital? Olivia Nuzzi's career is a strong reminder that the press serves the desires of capital.

As if the entirety of the New York Times wasn't already that reminder.

Brian Phillips ‪@brianphillips.bsky.social‬ notes that:

People are calling my lede here "appalling," "nightmare fuel," "actively evil," and "a desecration of the human spirit"

and I got to that via ‪that genehack guy from that dead bird site‬ ‪@extremely.website‬ noting:

…and they’re not wrong!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Invention and Design History Law Enforcement New York ]

Study compares heart risks of COVID-19 infection and vaccination, and the results may surprise you.

The results will not surprise you. Risk of rare heart complications in children higher after COVID-19 infection than after vaccination

Co-author Professor Angela Wood, University of Cambridge and Associate Director at the BHF Data Science Centre, said: “Using electronic health records from all children and young people in England, we were able to study very rare but serious heart and clotting complications, and found higher and longer-lasting risks after COVID-19 infection than after vaccination.

The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health: Vascular and inflammatory diseases after COVID-19 infection and vaccination in children and young people in England: a retrospective, population-based cohort study using linked electronic health records

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Children and growing up Health Current Events Education Woodworking ]

Brookings: Math-intensive fields have a gender problem: The men are worse at math.

Via.

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Replace your boss dot AI

AI CEOs generate thought leadership at the push of a button

Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Seems worth reading in light of current accounts of US military actions in the Caribbean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz-Wilhelm_Eck

Via https://bsky.app/profile/david...n.bsky.social/post/3m6picena4k22

[ related topics: Archival ]

I keep forgetting that the thing about the L2 chargers right off downtown in Grass Valley is an effective $.79/kWh.

I prefer level 2 when we can, for battery health, but dayumn.

[ related topics: Health Energy Monitoring ]

I mean, duh: Cato Institute: Immigrants Used Less Welfare than Native-Born Americans in 2022

Congress is currently debating whether to spend about $175 billion on deportations to avoid future payments like the $650 million that Congress spent on shelter and other services for migrants last year. Poorly spending $650 million last year doesn’t justify spending 269 times as much to avoid similarly relatively small costs when Congress could just decide not to spend the money on migrant shelter and services in the first place.<

Cato Institute: Immigrant and Native Consumption of Means-Tested Welfare and Entitlement Benefits in 2022

Via

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Currency ]

Very worth a read: Patterns, a Cell Press Journal: Perspective — The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions

The bigger picture

Machine learning has a pseudoscience problem. An abundance of ethical issues arising from the use of machine learning (ML)-based technologies—by now, well documented—is inextricably entwined with the systematic epistemic misuse of these tools. We take a recent resurgence of deep learning-assisted physiognomic research as a case study in the relationship between ML-based pseudoscience and attendant social harms—the standard purview of “AI ethics.” In practice, the epistemic and ethical dimensions of ML misuse often arise from shared underlying reasons and are resolvable by the same pathways. Recent use of ML toward the ends of predicting protected attributes from photographs highlights the need for philosophical, historical, and domain-specific perspectives of particular sciences in the prevention and remediation of misused ML.

[ related topics: Photography Ethics Law Education Artificial Intelligence Philosophy ]

Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap Yvonne Jie Chen, Jie Gong, Jin Li, Zibo Zhao (PDF)

Abstract

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time. Our finding highlights a critical challenge for GenAI, which can weaken the motivation required for creative excellence and innovation.

Via

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

13 years ago, Daniel and I built a guitar in my workshop. He's recently been working with a luthier local to him to tune it up. Went a little thin on the back taking out weight, but replaced the screws for the plates with magnets.

[ related topics: Music Photography Work, productivity and environment Fabrication ]

Changed the shape of the headstock, took off a lot of material.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wide shot of the guitar pre-hardware.

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Pictures from the original build at https://www.flutterby.net/Guitar_Building_Pictures

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

"18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations. The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal."

https://ogc.osd.mil/Portals/99...of_defense_law_of_war_manual.pdf

[ related topics: History Pyrotechnics ]