Flutterby™! From 2026-01-01 to 2026-01-04

Through my windshield with my phone in the mount, so bad quality, but the roundabout at Petaluma Blvd S and Crystal Ln/Caulfield is doing what it was designed to do, slowing down dangerous drivers and keeping them from injuring people.

[ related topics: Photography ]

No shit: LA Times: Immigration raids linked to significant California job losses, analysis finds

Of course since it punishes California, this is going according to plan.

[ related topics: Heinlein California Culture ]

Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

I don’t know why some people are pretending that Mamdani’s ‘old clips as Mr Cardamom’ are embarrassing.

I think his Mr Cardamom persona makes him funnier and cooler than anyone who finds it embarrassing. Especially the one where he gets Madhur Jaffrey to rap as his cool grandma

Mr. Cardamom - Nani (starring Madhur Jaffrey) (YouTube video)

I was previously unaware of this, my esteem for him has gone up.

[ related topics: Video ]

A toot from Micr0byte @micr0@wetdry.world about turning off his "altbot" AI image description bot, in response to this thread starting with a toot from @anantagd@ieji.de talking about what, as a blind user, they'd like to see in alt text, and how the altbot was creating the opposite of that.

Edit: MeFi post, in which commenters express much skepticism

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Edit: Looks like a hoax: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

Reddit /r/confession: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it.

And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay.

If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don't have to.

Via this Toot, which captured the post in images.

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

The Eclectic Light Company: Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief

As Jon_Alper @jon_alper@mastodon.online wrote:

Dear Craig (Tim cc’d)

Subject: Small Request

Body: At your earliest convenience please uproot all the seeds sown by Alan Dye’s efforts and salt the earth wherever he tread.

For reference, begin with this primer.

Though, frankly, I fear the Mac may be beyond reform at this point.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

Microsoft's head of AI doesn't understand why people don't like AI, and I don't understand why he doesn't understand because it's pretty obvious, by Tyler Wilde

Via

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

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella really wants you to stop calling AI "slop" in 2026 — "We are beginning to distinguish between spectacle and substance.". Well, yeah, that's why we've been using the term "slop", because it's all fucking spectacle.

"We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,"

I'm with ya, it's all slop, though I don't see why we need to replace that term.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

I have been taken to task for calling the susceptibility to "AI" a developmental disability, that it's a form of animism, exhibited by people who never really left Piaget's Preoperational Stage. It's a clumsy comparison, and I'm glad to see the term "Epistemia" emerging in the literature to describe the inability to distinguish linguistic plausibility, and indeed faculty, from an actual operational model.

Epistemological Fault Lines Between Human and Artificial Intelligence Walter Quattrociocchi, Valerio Capraro:

By systematically mapping human and artificial epistemic pipelines, we identify seven epistemic fault lines, divergences in grounding, parsing, experience, motivation, causal reasoning, metacognition, and value. We call the resulting condition Epistemia: a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Maps and Mapping Model Building ]

Mike Sheward @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange

@GossiTheDog The AI girlfriend feature was developed so Cybertruck owners could understand what it might feel like to impress someone with their purchase.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence ]

Found an old 250GB SSD to be a boot disk for this hand me down 96G dual Xeon machine. Realized that the last time I had a machine with this low a storage to RAM ratio it was a 143k floppy drive on a 64k Apple ][+.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Shoes ]

Had lunch today with a Trump and Musk supporter who is, on a steady diet of YouTube, remarkably uninformed. It's going to have to get bad enough to affect people like him (he'll be dead first) before it turns. We have a long way to go.

Thinking this morning about how many people my mom's "alternative" healthcare beliefs and advocacy have killed, how I'll always be trying to excise those roots from my own thinking, and what I owe her, and my sisters, in familial peace and continued interactions.

Still need to build the under layer and the pedestal, route the top round, and the inset for the glass. So, yeah, most of the table, but... Progress!

[ related topics: Photography Furniture ]

The hard part of this stage of table construction is fitting the glass, and anticipating the depth before I sand things, and how much the flatness of this is going to alter as I assemble it. Getting a bunch of tear out in the joints, have to work around that.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Machinery Fabrication Model Building Furniture ]

Cutting the table rim round. Big breath, mark the jig for reassembly as close as I can to reconstitute it, but take it in to make sure the glass really fits, then do the recesses on the bottom

[ related topics: Photography Furniture ]