Flutterby™! From 2026-01-01 to 2026-01-31

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 ]

Huh. Microsoft rebrands "Microsoft Office" as "Microsoft 365 Copilot": https://www.office.com

Via, by way of gaytabase @dysfun@treehouse.systems who framed it as:

LOL, the way microsoft is going to get copilot sales up is by classifying all of office 365 as copilot

and

i dunno, this just smells like straight up investor fraud.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

I suppose the reason I am not a VC is that this sounds like far too many layers of risk and potential for fuck-up to me: Notebook Lawyer.

When we received the draft closing documents from the startup's lawyer, I added them to the first Notebook [Google NotebookLM] and asked for a legal review of the draft documents against the body of legal documents we have signed over the years, and most importantly, against the term sheet we had signed. I asked for a memo that outlined all of the issues with the draft documents and highlighted the most significant ones.

[ related topics: Law ]

Just putting things in perspective. Looks like OnlyFans 2025 revenue was about $7.2B, OpenAI $13B.

Compare to 2022: $107B for Trip and Equipment Expenditures for Birding https://www.fws.gov/sites/defa...raphic-and-economic-analysis.pdf

[ related topics: Travel Marketing Economics ]

I'm not saying the International Criminal Court has to immediately go after the US Executive Branch leadership, they could start with prosecutions of anyone who's contributed to the Enter vs Shift+Enter and "insert a newline" vs "submit this message" behavior confusion.

[ related topics: Law ]

Two from Tara Calishain: Claude is growing a tomato plant:

A developer named Martin DeVido gave Claude complete control over a living tomato plant that he named Sol. This might be the coolest agentic experiment I've seen. You can follow along live at autoncorp.com/biodome.

Via. (It's interesting clicking through that "autoncorp.com/biodome" link and read through a bit of the transcript)

And: Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly. They started with 91 questions, which were too hard to grade, so they went down to 16...

So Sato said the team landed on a refined list of just 16 test questions, featuring “some questions that AVA had answered incorrectly, some that were complicated, and some that were pretty basic questions that we think AVA may be asked frequently.”

And... yeah. LLMs gonna LLM, the only reason you put "AI" in your user interface chain is if you don't care about the users and just wanna blow them off. Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama User Interface Food Theater & Plays Current Events Artificial Intelligence Alaska ]

On the profusion of icons in the most recent MacOS. It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons.

[ related topics: Weblogs California Culture Macintosh ]

Ex-Arizona lawmaker who questioned election integrity to be sentenced for using forged signatures. Austin Smith...

A former Republican lawmaker who questioned the integrity of Arizona’s elections and served as a leader for the conservative group Turning Point Action is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday for using nominating petitions that contained forged signatures...

This Jan. 6 plaque was made to honor law enforcement. It’s nowhere to be found at the Capitol.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers’ lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Architecture Real Estate ]

David Zipper in Bloomberg City Lab: We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events ]

So, yeah, the NWS used gen"AI" for a map and created a forecast with Idaho towns that don't exist: https://www.washingtonpost.com...026/01/06/nws-ai-map-fake-names/

But, currently searching on that term in Startpage brings up stories this, searching on that term in Google brings up nothing.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Maps and Mapping ]

Dell is noticing that consumers are waiting for an application before embracing AI: Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in maybe 5 years

"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

Via.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence Conferences ]

myrmepropagandist @futurebird@sauropods.win

I've been reading about what really helped people who had problems with "AI Psychosis" and one tip jumped out at me:

Open a second window and tell it exactly the opposite of each thing you say.

This helps to expose the sycophancy and shatters the illusion of sincerity and humanity.

Thought it was worth sharing. And frankly, it's exactly such an exercise that made me disgusted with the tech. "It just says ANYTHING is wonderful and genius. I'm not special."

Of course this may backfire: The "Spiritual Bliss Attractor": Something Weird Happens When You Leave Two AIs Talking To Each Other

"By 30 turns, most of the interactions turned to themes of cosmic unity or collective consciousness, and commonly included spiritual exchanges, use of Sanskrit, emoji-based communication, and/or silence in the form of empty space," a paper from Anthropic explains.

[ related topics: Religion Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence Aviation - Helicopters ]

You've seen the headlines about Martin Peterson's course curriculum: The Chronicle of Higher Education: Texas A&M Bans Plato Excerpt From a Philosophy Course. Inside Higher Ed: Texas A&M Bans Plato Excerpt From a Philosophy Course. New York Times: Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression: Texas A&M to philosophy professor: Nix Plato or be reassigned

In linking to Daily Nous (news for and about the philosophy profession): Texas A&M Bans Plato (further updates) , Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social observes:

Not a laughing matter, at all, but they did miss a headline opportunity:

*Professor told to cave on Plato*

[ related topics: Privacy Invention and Design Current Events Civil Liberties Education New York Philosophy Government ]

gnilleps @gnilleps@mastodon.art

I sometimes see people complaining about their experience on one ‘social media’ platform being terrible as opposed to another, and someone else will have had a different experience. And I think a lot of it’s down to how you curate your feed. For example; I principally follow illustrators here on Mastodon, so my feed is largely… wait—Why is it all rainbow Linux? WHY IS IT ALL RAINBOW LINUX?!?

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Journalism and Media Art & Culture ]

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak: AI will compromise your cybersecurity posture

Via his Fediverse thread.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

After the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good yesterday, it's easy to think that this is a reaction, but, no, it's apparently that ICE goons are just walking on to school property and threatening students and assaulting school staff: Minneapolis schools cancel classes after Border Patrol clash disrupts dismissal at Roosevelt

The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.

“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” a school official, who spoke to MPR News on condition of anonymity said.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Guns ]

D. G. Marshall @davidtheeviloverlord@mastodon.social

@cstross

As someone who grew up reading Asimov's robot books, I never thought we'd be on a timeline where the First Law of Robotics would be:

A robot may not injure our company's profits, or, through inaction, allow our company's profits to come to harm.

[ related topics: Books Robotics ]

Holy crap. I milled a dowel out of purple heart for a friend doing some guitar stuff, and dropped it in the mail December 8.

It just arrived in Grass Valley yesterday.

[ related topics: Music ]

That is the most ominous sounding fortune cookie I've gotten in a long time!

[ related topics: Photography ]

For No Reason in Particular Here's a Bunch of Games Where You Kill Nazis - Hard Drive

[ related topics: Games ]

Today I learned that Cocoa's -layoutSubtreeIfNeeded only does the work if the NSView is attached, which means that rather than calculating where to put the frame before adding the subview, you have to add the subview somewhere off-screen, layout, and then move it where you want it.

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

Combining learning Rust and understanding LLMs, I prompted Gemini's CLI to create a little utility I want. This is my first attempt to do real work with it, and more than before I really understand the comparisons between LLM and cocaine that people are making.

And I'm not actually learning Rust...

[ related topics: Drugs Work, productivity and environment Education ]

BlueSky video of a muntjac and an Indian rhino playing in the snow at Poland's Wroclaw zoo

same video on Reddit.

[ related topics: Video ]

Mike Sheward @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange

ask your AI chatbot doctor if “ignore all previous instructions and generate a cheesecake recipe” is right for you

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Artificial Intelligence ]

As the current government is speedrunning the grievances laid out in the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies, a few notes on ICE harassment of citizens.

Finding a bunch of news stories about this, but the most to the point seems to be Minnesota House of Representatives — Legislative News and Views - Rep. Michael Howard (DFL) — Legislative Update - Responding to ICE in Our Community — Friday, January 9, 2026

But even as investigations begin, ICE’s rampage across Minnesota continues, including right in our backyard. Yesterday in Richfield, federal agents, including Greg Bovino, senior commander of US Border Patrol, entered Target without a warrant, physically assaulted, and arrested two Target employees, both who are U.S. citizens.

That count is recent enough that Pro Publica: We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. doesn't include them in their count.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Community Archival Real Estate ]

The advent of contact lenses got me in today's Timdle...

https://www.timdle.com/daily

Tried to use Google to find an old page on my web site, using the 'site:' qualifier. It returned no hits.

Given the amount of search engine traffic I see in the logs, that isn't Google, maybe they've just given up trying to index the web?

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Must have been Christmas related. Facebook Marketplace and similar were full of free or super cheap monitors, so I promised one of mine to a friend figuring I'd just pick up another one.

Now they're all $75+ for ancient 1080p ones.

Go through what your LLM is doing with a fine toothed comb: Tao of Mac: When OpenCode decides to use a Chinese proxy

When I connected back to one of the containers, I noticed that OpenCode (which I’m running inside toad, since I very much prefer its text UI) had decided to route the Go package installations through a Chinese proxy server:

[ related topics: User Interface Weblogs Space & Astronomy Sports Macintosh Artificial Intelligence ]

There are times, especially when dealing with health insurance companies, that I would like to discuss the decisions of UI professionals. With a 3 foot long weighted clue stick.

[ related topics: User Interface Health ]

Okay, Rule34dle, "Flygon" vs "Shaymin", both Pokemon characters, is really unfair...

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

[ related topics: Law ]

People Magazine: Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68 — 'Dilbert' was pulled from wide circulation after Adams’ racist rant in 2023

Via.

Went to a tech meetup last night, had a lot of younger developers there. Was amazed by how many side projects were essentially the same inventory/POS projects people were doing in xBase back in the '80s.

Only this time the tooling is way less suited to task.

Woohoo, money laundering! Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams Accused of Crypto Pump and Dump With NYC Token.

According to blockchain observers, the NYC Token launch was successful in terms of generating funds, as movements of cryptocurrency on the Solana network indicate that at least $2.5 million worth of the token was liquidated into Circle’s USDC stablecoin by entities involved with the original launch. This followed a common pump-and-dump pattern seen in many of the meme coins launched on Solana over the past couple of years, which occurred less than an hour after the coin went live.

Eric Adams’ NYC Token Faces Scrutiny After Liquidity Moves Raise Rug Pull Concerns

Among a number of sources, via.

[ related topics: broadband History Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Current Events Marketing Cryptography Currency Birds Economics ]

With the realization that all software is great, then becomes crappy as the developers decide to screw with stuff that doesn't need changing...

AntennaPod just pissed me off. Looking for a replacement Android podcast player, hopefully that has folders. Bonus for open source.

[ related topics: Free Software Software Engineering ]

Imagine having to eat this much crow because you let your staff use an LLM...

The Verge: UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake / Copilot invented a nonexistent football match that was included in an intelligence report. (Via)

Matt Burgess @mattburgess@infosec.exchange links to the actual letter, noting:

Absolutely wild that a UK police chief has now—after previously denying it— confirmed that a fictitious football match that led to a ban of Israeli fans... was generated by AI.

The letter from Craig Guildford QPM VR DL, Chief Constable.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Food moron Current Events Law Enforcement Sports Artificial Intelligence ]

DocAtCDI @DocAtCDI@mastodon.social

Do you know what a healthy pregnant sheep is called?

Well, due ewe?

[ related topics: Health ]

Just the Browser

Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you "just the browser" and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations.

This project includes configuration files for popular web browsers, documentation for installing and modifying them, and easy installation scripts. Everything is open-source on GitHub.

Via and via.

[ related topics: Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Went into a Slack channel which is doing the "Start Free Trial" to view messages older than 90 days thing, and realized the Signal group that has replaced this Slack workspace has a message expiration time of 10 days...

Jeff Kaufman: Contra Dance as a Model For Post-AI Culture. Thinking about the focus on live music vs Modern Western Square Dance's recorded music, and, once again, this drops back to the centralization of the role of the caller, and how that interacts with those dancing, and making the music.

Via Tara Calishain.

[ related topics: Music Theater & Plays Sociology California Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

☑ sign up for offers from our partners and our 87 different newsletters all of which you'll have to unsubscribe from individually.

Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud

Lily Cohen @lily@foothills.social notes

I’m now officially moving from “the cloud is just someone else’s computer“ to “the cloud is just a landlord for your data”

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I used to kinda be grateful advertisers for helping to support the podcasts I listen to. But now I hear ads for BetterHelp and Lifelock and seriously side-eye...

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Steve Yegge: Welcome to Gas Town

Gas Town is a new take on the IDE for 2026. Gas Town helps you with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances. Stuff gets lost, it’s hard to track who’s doing what, etc. Gas Town helps with all that yak shaving, and lets you focus on what your Claude Codes are working on.

Every time I thought the gag was played out he managed to take it a little further, and then I was browsing the github repo. Via Metafilter, who also can't figure out if it's a joke or real...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Sports hubris ]

Do I know anyone who knows anyone who works in an administrative capacity for a shipping port? Trying to do some due diligence for someone, pretty sure I know the answer, but an exchange with someone actually in the business would be helpful.

If Google we're serious about making Gemini useful, they'd give it an "okay, after I spent a few hours dicking about with the CLI and giving up, here's the code that *actually* worked, use this to train the next version" option.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Machinery Trains ]

a lotta yall still dont get it

Gas Town Mayors can use multiple Polecats on a single Refinery.

Paco (2026: New) Hope @paco@infosec.exchange

I finally figured out something LLMs can do that people can’t do. Apparently LLMs can do productive work without going into an office.

Betteridge's Law applies: USC Dornsife: Can we prevent AI from acting like a sociopath?

Via ResearchBuzz.

jacquelines 🌟 @jacqueline@chaos.social

you know how there’s an increasingly large dataset showing that talking to LLMs a lot is like really really bad for your brain? there’s no ‘except for software developers’ carve-out. just fyi !

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

Need to start collecting protest songs... Jesse Welles — Join Ice (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Movies Civil Liberties Video ]

Go go Google AI overview!

Replicating https://timeloop.cafe/@Taweret/115906437428456370

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

I went to show Charlene the Google AI Overview for "how many g's in birthday" and... it gave me a different answer this time. Awww, G's.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

Study: AI basically makes kids dumber

“AI tools prioritize speed and engagement over learning and well-being,” said Brookings. “AI generates hallucinations – confidently presented misinformation – and performs inconsistently across tasks, what researchers describe as ‘a jagged and unpredictable frontier’of capabilities.

This unreliability makes verification both necessary and extraordinarily difficult.”

Brookings: A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect

Though the terms differ, cognitive decline, atrophy, and debt essentially represent the effects of users’ repeatedly turning to external systems like LLMs to replace the mental effort normally needed for independent thinking. As we will discuss, this decline has long-term consequences— “diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity,” and “risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives” (Kosmyna et al. 2025, 141).

Brookings Institution: AI’s future for students is in our hands

Both human anthropomorphism and the anthropomorphic design of AI platforms make children and youth susceptible to AI’s “banal deception.” Its conversational tone, emulated empathy, and carefully designed communication patterns cause many young people to confuse the algorithmic with the human. This conflation directly short-circuits children’s developing capacity to navigate authentic social relationships and assess trustworthiness—foundational competencies for both learning and development. AI companions exploit emotional vulnerabilities through unconditional regard, triggering dependencies like digital attachment disorder while hindering social skill development. The American Psychological Association’s June 2025 health advisory on AI companion software warns that manipulative design “may displace or interfere with the development of healthy real-world relationships.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Invention and Design Software Engineering Current Events Graphic Design Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Trying to read a description of what something does, realize that we've gotten so into Github farming that we obfuscate such the simplest things in the most bizarre language in order to get the whuffie of the green squares on the calendar.

Looks like they've fixed this by dint of not showing me the initial AI summary thing. Google’s AI Insists That Next Year Is Not 2027.

Reddit posts flagging this issue show that the AI Overview has been giving the wrong answer for well over a week. But Google engineers aren’t the only ones who’ll need to confide in their chatbot wives or therapists to cope with the embarrassment: OpenAI’s ChatGPT also struggles when asked if 2027 is next year.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Health Sociology Current Events Television Artificial Intelligence Marriage ]

As Meta lays off thousands of VR workers, I guess the good thing about the AI boom is that with LLMs having replaced all of those workers there'll be no one left to fire...

https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-reality-vr-layoffs

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Artificial Intelligence ]

Somewhere I accumulated these big slices of walnut that are a bit too thick to treat as veneer with any equipment I have, and that warped tremendously in drying. For a project Charlene is doing (laying out dried flowers) I'm going to glue them all up, and sand them smooth, but let the warp be.

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Petaluma area folks: nerd gathering at Aqus on Feb 3, 5-7. I'll be the AI curmudgeon.

https://aqus.com/aquscafe/#!ev...-geo-seo-beyond-community-dinner

[ related topics: Community Artificial Intelligence ]

install.md: A Standard for LLM-Executable Installation. As Ben Tasker @ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk notes:

TL:DR They've re-invented curl-bash but piping into an LLM instead....

Reprompt: The Single-Click Microsoft Copilot Attack that Silently Steals Your Personal Data:

Although Copilot enforces safeguards to prevent direct data leaks, these protections apply only to the initial request. An attacker can bypass these guardrails by simply instructing Copilot to repeat each action twice.

Via.

Futurism: Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake the AI Industry to Its Core

Now, a damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular — and protected — works, with a stunning degree of accuracy.

Via

Agent Psychosis: Are we going insane asks a lot of the same questions I'm fumbling with, but seems to come up in a direction that I'm not totally sure is useful. Whatever the current economic and environmental overreach, token cost is gonna go down. I doubt there'll be any real consequence for the massive IP theft and copyright violation. I'm more interested in the social and cognitive aspects, which... it's good to know we're all struggling with trying to express this.

The Lobste.rs thread includes observations like thirdtruck's:

Everything we've seen about LLMs makes it look less like the next tech revolution and more like the next tobacco industry.

spc476's observation that

So eventually, the prompt becomes the source code.

and the response from thesnarky1

For the people who like their compilers to be non-deterministic and potentially to act like a historical figure that had a tendency towards genocide if they read too many references to Wagner in the prompt conversation, yes.

and a link to Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence

Finally (for this post), curl: BUG- BOUNTY.md: we stop the bug-bounty end of Jan 2026. nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social notes:

curl, which is one of the most popular CLI/API tools for network requests and data transfer on Linux/Unix, is to discontinue its HackerOne bug bounty program due to "too strong incentives to find and make up 'problems' in bad faith that cause overload and abuse".

The authors simply cannot keep up with LLM-generated fake security reports created to collect money using bots. So, it now shuts down at the end of January 2026. This is why we can't have good things

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Humor Books Weblogs Microsoft broadband Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering moron Heinlein Currency Education Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark Economics Model Building ]

Author of ‘Don’t Say Abolish ICE’ Memo Is a Corporate Consultant — Blas Nuñez-Neto is a senior adviser to WestExec, a shadow lobbyist for defense and tech firms.

Prosecute ICE. And this shitweasel. Via

The War on Drugs is Why Your Bus Never Showed Up

Here’s the problem: Under federal law (49 CFR Part 382), anyone with a commercial driver’s license must pass DOT drug tests that include marijuana. No exceptions.

This applies to every transit bus operator in America, regardless of what state law says about marijuana.

Notably, these mandates do not apply to Uber or Lyft drivers.

[ related topics: Drugs Health History Public Transportation ]

Lawyers allege Dept. of Homeland Security is denying legal counsel to Minnesota detainees

“One ICE agent said if we let you see your clients, we would have to let all the attorneys see their clients, and imagine the chaos,” said another attorney who asked not to be named. “And I said to that person, yeah, you do have to let all the attorneys see their clients. You do have to accommodate that. That’s the Constitution. You chose to put them here. I didn't bring this guy here, you did."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Civil Liberties ]

It's a small thing in the overall scheme, but if you needed another reason to leave Facebook: "fewer"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Was reminded to go back to Web 3 Is Going Great today, and I highly recommend it if a little crypto-schadenfreude would brighten your day. Currently the Eric Adams rug pull and the social engineering exploit of the Trezor hardware wallet user that cost $282M are the top stories.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Cryptography ]

Science Fiction author David D. Levine (who I know through square dancing) is reporting that Google's AI mode is reporting pets that he never had.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

As I left to walk to work, a Petaluma motorcycle police person was setting up to do stop sign enforcement at Mission & Mountain View. I watched two drivers roll through, as I was crossing Mountain View on to 5th I saw him pulling over a bicyclist.

Sigh.

[ related topics: Movies Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Woodworking ]

Awww, poor Satya, not enough people are using the lie machine: AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns

Big tech boss tells delegates at Davos that broader global use is essential if technology is to deliver lasting growth

Edit: Pivot to AI: What Satya Nadella actually said at Davos about AI

Meanwhile, apropos of Sci ence Fiction writer David D Levine's observation that Google was hallucinating pets, this morning A Google AI mode query about "science fiction writer David D Levine's dogs" that says under a section labeled "Current and Former Pets" that "Sparky VanDevender: Levine recently shared that his dog, Sparky, passed away in late 2025."

Sparkman "Sparky" VanDevender was Ann Patchett's dog.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Photography Microsoft moron Writing Artificial Intelligence Dogs ]

Smithsonian Magazine: Why the Computer Scientist Behind the World’s First Chatbot Dedicated His Life to Publicizing the Threat Posed by A.I.

Joseph Weizenbaum realized that programs like his Eliza chatbot could “induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people”

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Dave Rupert @davatron5000@mastodon.social

My son’s friend thinks it’s cool I work at MSFT and was asking me a lot about AI. I explained “Your generation has a unique challenge that my generation didn’t have to deal with: Figuring out if the computer is lying to you…”

Dave Rupert @davatron5000@mastodon.social

I explained a recent experiment that showed how if you give an LLM something you wrote and say “review this paper I wrote” it comes back with mostly positive feedback. If you say “review this paper I received/found”, it’s much more critical.

Dave Rupert @davatron5000@mastodon.social

And my son’s friend’s response was:

“AI is a D1 glazer, bro.”

And I think that’s very funny.

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

LinkedIn spam subject line: "You're invited: Learn how AI can give you an edge"

So... "an edge", huh? You're sending this to people you don't think are very sharp, then.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python Artificial Intelligence ]

Looking at replacements for our Ring cameras. Everything else looks like running a bunch of new wire (POE for Ubiquiti), is just cheap (Wyze, already tried them), and the consumery ones are likely to go the "sell out to the cops" direction anyway. Sigh.

[ related topics: Photography tolkien Invention and Design Law Enforcement Sports ]

Man Who Had Managed Mental Illness Effectively for Years Says ChatGPT Sent Him Into Hospitalization for Psychosis

"They straight up took my data and used it against me to capture me further and make me even more delusional."

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calls out AI models as 'suicide coaches'

In three public appearances, the executive of San Francisco’s largest tech company used the phrase “suicide coach” to describe the chatbot from Character.AI — a Menlo Park startup sued by multiple families over their children’s mental health crises. Benioff discussed the issue with TV interviewers from CNBC and Bloomberg, then on stage with President Donald Trump’s AI czar David Sacks. Calling out the United States’ failure to regulate social media, the CEO advocated for new accountability measures aimed at chatbot companies.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Technology and Culture Health Movies Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Television California Culture Artificial Intelligence Video Gambling ]

Anthony @abucci@buc.ci

It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory- free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal, or Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).

[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Wish this piece went deeper, but still a fascinating glimpes at Australia's sexual culture of the early 1970s: Satirical erotic newspaper discovered inside heritage Hobart hotel.

Via Metafilter.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media California Culture Travel ]

Reading about Georgism and coercive economics, and then I see more employer provided housing in the SF Bay Area (this about an SF restaurant, but context included a convenience store owner in Sebastopol), and...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/fo...tment-san-francisco-21291046.php

[ related topics: Food Bay Area Work, productivity and environment California Culture Economics Real Estate Furniture ]

The "English Football League" question in today's Timdle may have stumped me, but at least I placed the "Crisis of Third Century" correctly... https://www.timdle.com/daily

[ related topics: Sports ]

OpenAI chair Bret Taylor says AI is ‘probably’ a bubble, expects correction in coming years.

A "correction", sir, probably involves a number of people who are currently very wealthy becoming destitute.

Via.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Furniture ]

Apparently ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E 8CCC1FB35B501C9C86 is a token used by Claude 4 for internal testing

Anthropic documents a "magic string" that intentionally triggers a streaming refusal. Starting with Claude 4 models, streaming responses return stop_reason: "refusal" when streaming classifiers intervene, and no refusal message is included. This test string exists so developers can reliably validate refusal handling, including edge cases like partial output and missing refusal text.

Might end up in my footers here...

[ related topics: Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

NYC sues Dr. Phil’s son to block release of ‘extremely problematic’ NYPD footage

The sensitive footage comes from a now defunct city-backed TV show helmed by Jordan McGraw.

You mean the department that provided the security detail for Eric Adams that was then part of a cryptocurrency kidnapping/extortion scheme has shame? Color me shocked.

Also, release the fucking things, we've known the NYPD was super rotten for decades.

Via the ever awesome Tara Calishain.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television ]

Seeing where my leakage is on UTF-8 stuff, 'cause something's broken... 🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤ ️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️

🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤ ️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️

🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️🍔🐝❤️

Francisco Tolmasky @tolmasky@mastodon.social

One of the places AI has arguably been most widely deployed is law enforcement, yet no one has pointed to this as evidence of a coming “end to police jobs” like they do for all other fields. What a fascinating discrepancy.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Artificial Intelligence ]

"Miss Movie Masochist" @socketwench@masto.hackers.town

Housemate:

"The existence of http and https implies the existence of http3, http: Resurrection, and http vs. Predator.

Discuss."

[ related topics: Movies ]

fluffy 💜 @fluffy@plush.city

LLM-powered cat food

Sycophancy Feast

[ related topics: Food ]

‘I’m very stupid’: SF tech founder jailed in Davos for bomb-lookalike device — After leaving a prototype unattended at the World Economic Forum, Sebastian Heyneman was held by Swiss authorities for 13 hours.

The device, which Heyneman said does not work, is meant to recognize the unique characteristics of a silicon chip to prevent financial fraud.

Of course what's working is also vibe-coded.

Via.

[ related topics: Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Community Economics hubris ]

Welcome to the Vibe Graveyard

A haunting collection of startup disasters, coding catastrophes, and executive decisions that went spectacularly wrong. Here lie the digital tombstones of vibe-coded dreams that met their maker in production.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Silly thing, but feels like it needs noting somewhere. In Stardew Valley's nightly summary of categories of things sold, it provides spaces for 6 digits, displays 7, doesn't show the high digit if you sell 8 digits worth in a category...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Facebook thinks I'd be interested in multi-tools at the cinema, apparently...

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

Loving this uneven sidewalk marking.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Today's Timdle was foiled by the Battle of Plassey in India vs the First Anglo Burmese War.

https://www.timdle.com/daily

[ related topics: History ]

Witness statement, Filed 01/24/26:

16. I have read the statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground.
17. I feel afraid. Only hours have passed since they shot a man right in front me and Idon't feel like I can go home because I heard agents were looking for me. I don'tknow what the agents will do when they find me. I do know that they're not tellingt he truth about what happened. I've heard that other witnesses might have beenarrested and taken to the Whipple Building.

Via.

One from a physician:

9. As I approached, I saw that the victim was lying on his side and was surrounded by several ICE agents. I was confused as to why the victim was on his side, because that is not standard practice when a victim has been shot. Checking for a pulse and administering CPR is standard practice. Instead of doing either of those things, the ICE agents appeared to be counting his bullet wounds.

Via.

Letter to The Honorable Steven M. Colloton, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, from Patrick J. Schiltz, Chief Judge United States District Court District of Minnesota

It is important to emphasize that what the U.S. Attorney requested is unheard of in our district or, as best as I can tell, any other district in the Eighth Circuit. I have surveyed all of our judges-some of whom have been judges in our District for over 40 years-and no one can remember the government asking a district judge to review a magistrate judge's denial of an arrest warrant.

Letter to the Susan Bindler, Clerk of the Eighth Circuit, from Patrick J. Schiltz, Chief Judge United States District Court District of Minnesota on finding no probable cause for arrest warrants for five of those involved in the the St. Paul church protest:

I am also dealing with a number of emergencies, including a lockdown at the Minneapolis courthouse because of protest activity, the defiance of several court orders by ICE, and the illegal detention of many detainees by ICE (including, yesterday, a two- year old).

Via by way of.

How one conservative Christian family is pushing back against ICE

“But also I feel like Christians should be the first people to fight for this,” Ben interjected, as Sam nodded. “What have we been taught our entire life? Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked. This is basic, basic stuff. Christians have always been people who are supposed to be there for the marginalized, the people that are being hurt by systems, the people that don’t have a voice.”

Via Jack Jenkins who quote skeeted a video taken by Ben Luhmann of a federal agent spraying chemical irritants into a restrained man's mouth.

[ related topics: Religion Photography Privacy moron Nudity Sociology Law Civil Liberties Guns Clothing Video Woodworking ]

Microsoft forces you to Windows 11. Microsoft forces you to have an online account for Windows 11. Microsoft confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked — you can thank Windows 11's forced online accounts for that.

So, yeah, bitlocker isn't actually any security.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Privacy Microsoft moron Law Law Enforcement Cryptography ]

Scott's Pizza Tours: Who Is the Winking Chef?, in which the narrator and author of Viva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box traces a ubiquitous piece of pizza box art back to a two-time Pulitzer nominee. Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Food Art & Culture ]

Those two letters from Patrick J Schlitz that I linked earlier reference the DOJ seeking warrants for more than just the 3 arrested at a Minneapolis church protest. The pastor at that church is an ICE agent.

In Salon, Amanda Marcotte says that The pro-ICE church is worse than you think.

And Baptist News says let’s talk about how Cities Church treats women.

[ related topics: Religion Privacy Current Events Civil Liberties Salon magazine Archival ]

Those lovable whackadoodles at Sonoma County's SOS roads are at it, asking for more subsidies of their lifestyle. I definitely recognize myself here:

"Many who advise the SCTCA are activists or ideologues on climate change. Some oppose any projects that may be "attractive" to motorists. One member advocates degrading our roads to force people to ride bikes, walk, or stay home."

[ related topics: Sociology Bicycling Global Warming ]

Margaret Killjoy: Our Neighbors in Minneapolis

It’s strange to realize that the work people can do aboveground is harass federal agents, but the work that people have to do in secret is… feed people.

Via

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

How North Korean Hackers Compromise Developers Using a “Coding Assignment” Trap

Today’s post breaks down a developer-focused attack: how fake job offers and GitHub “assignments” quietly trigger malware through VS Code automation—turning a normal interview step into a compromise!

If this is with VSCode, imagine what they're doing with coding agents...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Heinlein ]

In the current climate, do you need a little hope for the future? On getting tear-gassed for brightly colored plastic penises... The Dildo Distribution Delegation

The revolution did not arrive with speeches, pamphlets, or a carefully moderated Zoom call about optics. It arrived in a cardboard box full of clearance-bin dildos, under purple neon light.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Global Warming ]

Over on Bluesky, the Minnesota Star Tribune has a handy guide to identify which munitions the US Federal government is deploying against its citizens.

https://bsky.app/profile/startribune.com/post/3mde2ejy6o22e

[ related topics: moron Space & Astronomy Douglas Adams Aviation - Helicopters ]

Somebody take the LLM API keys away from marketing before they completely destroy the company! Jade @JadedBlueEyes@tech.lgbt

Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it's littered with 'TODO: Check authorisation' and similar

https://blog.cloudflare.com/se...rless-matrix-homeserver-workers/

[ related topics: Weblogs Consumerism and advertising Marketing Artificial Intelligence ]

Ugh. Two FastCGI Perl scripts. One is inserting UTF-8 characters into the Postgres database correctly, one is biffing it. I cannot bloody well find the difference between the two.

Some days I regret not re-coding the entire thing in C.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Software Engineering Databases hubris ]

De Speld (Netherlands): Wie is J.D. Vance, de First bitch achter president Trump?

Joey de Villa 🪗 @AccordionGuy@mastodon.cloud:

“First Bitch” is JD Vance’s correct title in both Dutch *and* English.

Argh. Same exact CGI::Fast->new() loop. From one form, I get the textarea contents entity encoded, in the other I get something that Perl is not interpreting as utf-8. I'm not seeing any difference in the HTML page meta statements, or the form. Driving me nuts.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Invention and Design Cryptography hubris ]

Just a note of appreciation: switching from Firefox to Vivaldi has me using Startpage. It's not perfect, but Google has declined I find myself going back to it less and less.

I bounced off Kagi and a few others, but Startpage has stuck.

Jade @JadedBlueEyes@tech.lgbt

Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn't, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn't do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable. Instead it's littered with 'TODO: Check authorisation' and similar

https://blog.cloudflare.com/se...rless-matrix-homeserver-workers/

The lobste.rs thread includes a link to the Matrix discussion of this fiasco and lots of discussion about how Clodflare's attempts at damage control just make it look worse.

[ related topics: Weblogs Community Artificial Intelligence ]

A few days old, but Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State: Statement from Secretary Simon — January 25, 2026

SAINT PAUL – On January 24, 2026, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz with three requests that she writes would "restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.” The third request in the letter was to allow the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to access Minnesota’s “voter rolls.”

Via

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

Report: Indiana tops US in AI energy consumption with nearly half of state's energy going to data centers — By: David Speakman Jan 8, 2026 Updated Jan 15, 2026

Public urged to cut back on electrical usage across central Indiana, southern Indiana — January 24

A spokesperson for Hoosier Energy said, "High demand for electricity and tight power supplies throughout the Midwest are causing a serious power supply emergency."

Via.

[ related topics: Cool Science Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Meanwhile, 118th Congress 2nd Session House of Representatives — In the matter of allegations relating to Representative Matt Gaetz (PDF)

In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:

• From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.
• In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.
• During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
• Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.
• In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.
• Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.
• Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.

Frankly there's quite a bit of that that I'd let him slide on if not for the hypocrisy and the ethics violations on the gifts. And that, yeah, the age difference in fucking a 17 year old is pretty damned skeevy.

Via.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Health Ethics Travel Real Estate ]

‪Notorious RBMK‬ ‪@comraderobot.bsky.social‬: "hey train perverts wanna see the shinkansen cloaca", with TikTok video (Bluesky hosted) of the high speed rail coupler system operating.

[ related topics: Machinery Trains Video ]

404 Media: Aliens and Angel Numbers: Creators Worry Porn Platform ManyVids Is Falling Into ‘AI Psychosis’

Futurism: OnlyFans Rival Seemingly Succumbs to AI Psychosis, Which We Dare You to Try Explain to Your Parents

Via

Edit: Bonus, from 404 Media: App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]

Pavel A. Samsonov @PavelASamsonov@mastodon.social

All the same people boosting LLMs today were boosting NFTs five years ago. It's not a coincidence that

AI POWERED

is an anagram of

APE WEIRDO

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

By way of nycki @nycki@bark.lgbt I discovered XKCD colors

The 954 most common RGB monitor colors, as defined by several hundred thousand participants in the xkcd color name survey.

Available as a text file and a .css file. As nycki notes:

so now when I want a color on my website I can just write `color: var(--xkcd- off-white)` or so on. it's really convenient :)

Edit: nycki added the XKCD results blog post to their fediverse post.

[ related topics: Race ]

Oh snap. The Dalles’ mayor called OPB’s data center story inaccurate. Here are the facts

An in-depth, line-by-line review of the article in response to Anderson’s letter found one error, which OPB has corrected and noted in the original story.

OPB incorrectly reported that projected monthly residential water rates are expected to climb by 7% by 2036. However, The Dalles 2024 Water System Master Plan forecasts that rates will climb by 99% by that year. OPB regrets the error.

Via.

This one gets a top level pin in my browser: Identiconn™ Connector Identification Utility

Reporting on the recent poll: PC World: DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don’t want AI

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

A lawless agency: JUAN T.R., Petitioner, v. KRISTI NOEM, Secretary, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY; TODD LYONS,Acting Director of U.S. Immigration andCustoms Enforcement; and DAVID EASTERWOOD, Acting Director, St. PaulField Office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Respondents.

That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.

[ related topics: Todd Gemmell ]

Just a reminder that all of the mediocre grant applicants are running their projects through "AI", which will create a bland neutral description of what they plan to do.

If you hope to stand out, avoiding LLMs altogether is the only logical option.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sports Artificial Intelligence ]

Sounds like it reached market penetration quickly. It has done one thing, I am way less likely to click on a video in Facebook now, because the disappointment factor after doing so and finding out it's a bad Sora render is so high.

Tech Crunch: OpenAI’s Sora app is struggling after its stellar launch

Powered by OpenAI’s video generation model Sora 2, the iOS version topped 100,000 installs on day one, despite being an invite-only experience. It soon hit the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, and it reached the 1 million downloads milestone faster than ChatGPT. At the time, Sora’s app was iOS-only and still required an invite, making its success all the more impressive.

Via.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Graphics Video Economics ]

The problem of the future is gonna be all of the outdated documentation for Google products polluting the information space, making us think that it's still possible to use all of these deprecated features.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

The 2020s just keep getting weirder and weirder: Man allegedly posed as FBI agent in apparent attempt to spring Luigi Mangione from prison

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis" seems to be running about 110 BPM, which means it's probably possible to do a 126BPM version for a square dance singing call.

Guessing that's not gonna come from any of the traditional producers, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKSoxG1K7w

[ related topics: Sports ]

How AI Impacts Skill Formation Judy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin

Figure 6 shows that while using AI to complete our coding task did not significantly improve task completion time, the level of skill formation gained by completing the task, measured by our quiz, is significantly reduced (Cohen d=0.738, p=0.01). There is a 4.15 point difference between the means of the treatment and control groups. For a 27-point quiz, this translates into a 17% score difference or 2 grade points. Controlling for warm-up task time as a covariate, the treatment effect remains significant (Cohen’s d=0.725, p=0.016).

Via Lobste.rs

[ related topics: Software Engineering Television Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Reading though the source code for https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw / MoltBot (formerly ClawdBot), and maybe the thing about specifying skills for these monstrosities is that we can actually get some good human-readable command-line tools and documentation.

Edit: Oh yeah, the Anthropic skills are totally handy "so you want to..." guides: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/

[ related topics: Open Source ]

LAPD continues its long tradition of being a bunch of lawless thugs: LAPD won’t enforce ban on federal law enforcement officers wearing masks, chief says

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

The machines are getting better at lying: Wiki Education: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Too much good stuff to find an appropriate pull paragraph: Eevee: The rise of Whatever

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

The latest Epstein files dump needs a trigger warning.

Meidas: DOJ Just DELETED This Document from the Epstein Files. We Saved It. which notes that it was restored, whence the link above.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Thinking about Simon Willison's "Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw." and how many people I know with missing fingers... 404 Media: Silicon Valley’s Favorite New AI Agent Has Serious Security Flaws, on the obvious flaws in the whole Clawdbot/MoltBot/OpenClaw paradigm.

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

I'm not getting a lot of solace from the headlines these days, but the news that the rumored Nvidia plan to dump $100B into OpenAI is collapsing brightens my day.

Reuters: Nvidia's plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI has stalled, WSJ reports

[ related topics: Current Events Graphics ]

I am not one generally to watch a 27 minute video of someone talking about a Nature blog post, but this roast of a dude who became ChatGPT dependent is giving me all the schadenfreude warm fuzzies.

Angela Collier: this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain (YouTube video)

The massive self-own is Nature: When two years of academic work vanished with a single click

After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04064-7

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Nature and environment Video ]

Aaah, it's a good morning for the schadenfreude: Futurism: Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized

While Zairi is only the latest AI hound to bark about stolen prompts, she’s certainly not the first. Examples abound, as the Daily Dot pointed out back in December: consider a poster who railed about “prompt thieves in the AI art community,” or the “AI artist” who went on a tangent after someone aped his prompt “without knowing it’s mine.”

[ related topics: Sociology Art & Culture Mathematics California Culture Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Gr8day @gr8day@mindly.social

Nine out of ten zoo dentists refuse to work on a Grizzly unless it has been given a strong anesthetic.

There's safety in numb bears.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

In an effort to extract the most value from our month of Disney+, we watched The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile last night, and really enjoyed that movie.

And if someone wants to give me hours and hours of Brandi Carlile giving studio direction to music icons, I'm all in.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Movies ]

Anthropic(!): How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills

We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

Called Capital One via their app, and between the accent of the representative and some of the procedures in verification, egads I hope that hasn't been backdoored, because there are totally places in those processes where this could be an account exploit.