Flutterby™! From 2026-02-01 to 2026-02-19

Any body have recommendations for a smoke detector that actually lets you cook? This Firex ionization one in the main part of a house goes off if I try to use the air fryer or brown anything. Super annoying.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Real Estate ]

Saturday night, our Disney+ subscription had lapsed, and rather than resubscribe to anything we watched The Last Repair Shop, an hour long documentary on the people who run the Los Angeles school district instrument repair shop.

Went places I did not expect, gorgeously shot, uplifting. Recommended.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies ]

Erik Johannes Husom: Outsourcing thinking.

If language can indeed be a thought model, then pushing that facility over to machines has implications for the development of our own model.

Via Elf Sternberg who has a few more thoughts.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama tolkien ]

geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

Heist movies always have a moment before they introduce a new specialist where the main character is like "I know a guy" because the real treasure they were stealing was the power of networking. In my 12-week course, you'll learn--

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design ]

The Penguin of Evil @etchedpixels@mastodon.social

Whenever some politician or party apologist whines about having to stay on twitter because some of our potential voters are on twitter, remind them that probably even more of their potential voters are on pornhub but they are not active there.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

From back in December, but apropos because of Elon Musk's "data centers in spaaaace..." pump-n-dump: Matthew R. Buckley, aka "Physics Matt": The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week:

To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, political power centers, and people who really should know better, but yet another demonstration of how people who built their economic empire on a claim of STEM-based rigor and quantitative genius either can’t do basic physics or know that no one out there who matters is going to call them on it.

Although, frankly, dropping a bunch of GPUs into a decaying low earth orbit is a way to point out how rapidly these things depreciate.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs History moron Space & Astronomy Journalism and Media Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics Global Warming hubris ]

100% on today's Timdle, despite guessing at HIMYM's initial pilot episode, and the relative ordering of 5 events in the last 3 decades.

https://www.timdle.com/daily

Oh, this is fascinatingly exploitive: AV Club: Inside the hideous, exploitative, but still addictive world of vertical dramas. In China they're referred to as "duanju".

To feed that addiction, they’re going to pay through the nose. Vertical drama apps are built to obfuscate the sense of how much you’re paying, with “coins” purchased in bulk, in amounts from hundreds to thousands. Individual episodes might cost upward of 60 coins per two-minute piece of footage—and given that each drama has 70 or more episodes, this means the viewer can easily spend $20 or $30 to watch 90 minutes of some of the cheapest slop imaginable. People are paying much more to watch Tricked Into Having My Ex-Husband’s Baby on their phones than it would cost to see Sinners in IMAX.

Via Sensible Endowment.

[ related topics: Movies Currency Marriage ]

Thinking about all of the developing nation workers in sweatshops who could have been setting up regular expressions for common idioms and phrases to accomplish tasks, like "play this album" and "navigate to this space", who instead were training LLMs.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Yay! It is possible to prosecute these assholes! New body camera footage shows aftermath of ICE officer allegedly attacking activist near Chicago.

“Yeah, I was trying to grab his phone from out of his hand,” Saracco tells Brookfield police when asked about the allegations.

“He get physical with you at all?” the Brookfield officer asks in response.

“I mean he was actively resisting,” Saracco said. “He wouldn’t let me take his phone out of his hands.”

The perp is only up on misdemeanor charges, but the fucking gall of these people, thinking they can steal phones and pawn them for cash with impunity.

Via

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement Television Civil Liberties ]

I was gonna tag this on the previous post about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw, but, no, these exploits are new: Malicious MoltBot skills used to push password-stealing malware.

A report from community security portal OpenSourceMalware says that an ongoing large-scale campaign is using skills to spread info-stealing malware to OpenClaw users.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Current Events Community Cryptography Archival ]

Kate Compton‬ ‪@galaxykate.bsky.social‬

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test

Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)

Good tech.

Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)

Bad tech.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Cryptography Currency Artificial Intelligence Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

‪David Leavitt‬ ‪@davidleavitt.bsky.social‬

Chappell Roan’s dress is like my sanity:

Barely hanging on.

Salem (Oregon) Reporter: U.S. citizen injured by federal agents in Salem who demanded to see “papers,” union says

Service Employees International Union Local 503 said the woman, a union member, was driving to run errands when four agents stopped her on a Salem street. The agents identified themselves as federal law enforcement, according to the union’s statement.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement ]

Pacific Antifascist Research Collective has "A thread of ICE and CBP sex offenders and credibly accused sex pasts." I think they mean pests, not pasts, but the rest of the point stands.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture California Culture Aviation - Helicopters ]

Eeenteresting, too soon to know what this actually means, but: Windows Central: You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift

Details around how the company is going about this remain light, but sources say Copilot integrations like those found in Notepad and Paint are under review. This may result in Microsoft removing certain Copilot integrations from these apps, or at the very least removing the Copilot branding and pivoting to a more streamlined experience.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

École des Bro-Arts @aphyr@woof.group

I've been trying to teach my kids that they should stop wearing and listening to the same things everyone else does at school. It's OK to get wild haircuts, piece their noses, go thrash around at electro-punk shows.

After all...

Children should be scene and not herd.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Television Pop Culture ]

I mean, anyone who's spent time on this platform can tell ya this, but Tim Cook sold Apple's soul.

Via.

Matt Gemmell: The Fallen Apple. Via

[ related topics: Apple Computer Food ]

From Viss @Viss@mastodon.social's thread about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw that observes:

people are attaching this shit to their desktops and phones and their lives and somehow getting pearl-clutchy and surprised when it straps itself with nuclear warheads, dives into their bank accounts and detonates itself

and

i need to go look up that big "EA got sued because it got kids addicted to gambling" lawsuit because im pretty sure this is the same thing but for vibecoders

which then observes that:

oh my god, its the same fucking thing

With a link to Trulaw: EA Games Lawsuit for Video Game Addiction.

And, yes, it is exactly this, and, as further asserted in the thread, I strongly believe that it's both deliberate, and that evidence of that is the whole kerfluffle around ChatGPT 5 and how when they dialed down the sycophancy people revolted.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Games Video Gambling ]

PC Gamer: Over 50% of game developers now think generative AI is bad for the industry, a dramatic increase from just 2 years ago: 'I'd rather quit the industry than use generative AI'

"Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it's safe to assume we've been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell," said a game design consultant in the US.

Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence ]

Maybe a good thing that will come out of these "skills" files that the slop vendors are publishing is better documentation for humans.

A lot of useful quickstart guides in those repos, for projects and libraries that aren't as well documented in their own materials.

Futurism makes my day a little brighter: The Streets Are Saying Bitcoin Is Gonna Fall to $30,000.

Okay, really optimistic would be freakin' zero, but that's a good start.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Work has me in a mood, so I went out on a walk looking for some hills, ended up going up Hayes Lane.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Realizing that the heel on my Xero running shoe has worn through too many times for the gasket material I've clumsily glued over some of the tread to solve, I'm wondering if there are any re-sole-able minimalist shoes for less than the $450 that the ultra-fashionable brands start at.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sports Shoes Fashion ]

Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence Steve Rathje, Meryl Ye, Laura K. Globig, Raunak M. Pillai, Victoria Oldemburgode Mello, Jay J. VanBavel (preprint)

Sycophantic chatbots’ impact on attitude extremity and certainty was driven by a one-sided presentation of facts, whereas their impact on enjoyment was driven by validation. Altogether, these results suggest that people’s preference for and blindness to sycophantic AI may risk creating AI “echochambers” that increase attitude extremity and overconfidence.

Via.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Red Monk: AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers

AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. Just look at what happened last month. Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghostty implemented a zero-tolerance policy where submitting bad AI-generated code gets you permanently banned. Steve Ruiz, Founder of tldraw, announced he would auto-close all external pull requests. Meanwhile cURL, the humble command-line tool that quietly powers approximately everything on the internet, just shut down its bug bounty program. After six years and $86,000 in payouts, Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL, pulled the plug. The reason? An AI onslop (pun fully intended).

Via

The AI Dirty List — Ensuring those who choose to bathe in AI slop will never be washed clean.

[ related topics: Free Software Weblogs Software Engineering Law Net Culture Community Artificial Intelligence ]

Adam Neely — Technocapitalism and the Bad Future of Music (YouTube video, an hour and a half) is some desperately needed sanity today.

[ related topics: Music Movies Video ]

OH at the "AI" meetup discussion: "It's been a bitch to have to execute my own ideas."

[ related topics: Community Artificial Intelligence ]

qdot @qdot@buttplug.engineer

inspired by CLAUDE.md, I’ve started putting markdown files named after coworkers into work code repos so I can remind them to stop doing shit to the codebase that annoys me

for some reason they’re all mad at me now, which means ill be adding commands to JEREMY.md for an attitude adjustment

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

The Intercept: Washington Post Raid Is a Frightening Reminder: Turn Off Your Phone’s Biometrics Now.

Via.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Conversation this morning that, if I understood the details right, and my own understanding of how LLMs process data (reinforced by experience) is correct... epistemia is gonna bite a bunch of projects and companies so so hard in the the near future. It's gonna hurt, bad.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

It's like all of those people who went ahead and bought drugs using cryptocurrencies without thinking through what an immutable universal public record of their transactions actually meant, but now it's applied to millions spent using predictive word generators to do spatial "reasoning"...

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

David Revoy captures the AI zeitgeist perfectly.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

stevens 🐳💨✅ @rstevens@mastodon.social

tim cook, i swear to god if i wake up in the morning and that fucking melania movie shows up on my ipod with the U2 album...

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Movies Food Television ]

We still need to cut down dramatically on cars, generally, but EVs are measurably reducing NO2 emissions in California:

Auto Blog: EV Growth Is Already Cutting Neighborhood Air Pollution Across California

The Lancet Planetary Health: Zero-emissions vehicle adoption and satellite- measured NO2 air pollution in California, USA, from 2019 to 2023: a longitudinal observational study

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Health Current Events California Culture ]

I was wrong. AI isn't like seeing a rabbit pulled out of a hat and thinking you can feed the world on hasenpfeffer, it's like seeing a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat and demanding that everybody put meat grinders in their kitchen because they think soon we'll be able to pull live steer out of refrigerators.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Artificial Intelligence ]

Oh, look, another data breach notification. How many decades of "free credit monitoring" are we up to now?

(Second prize is *two* years of credit monitor... Oh, who are we kidding, permission for yet another entity to mine my personal data for marketing.)

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

OMG, I'm giggling out loud here... Global Nerdy: Claude’s Super Bowl ads are so funny that Sam Altman’s crashing out over them collects the mentioned ads, and... I'll link the YouTube versions here for posterity, but the essay collects them in a handy format.

• Treachery
• Deception
• Violation
• Betrayal

[ related topics: Writing Sports ]

SuspectFile: Assault on Independent Journalism: Unfounded Legal Attacks over the Black Basta Investigation

In which the SuspectFile folks go through entirely too much effort and energy to demonstrate to The Hacker News’ law firm, Dennemeyer & Associates, that they're full of shit and need to stop with the false copyright claims.

This kinda stuff is why fraudulent DMCA claims really need some teeth. Pulling stunts like this really needs to hurt the fraudsters enough that it's a career limiting maneuver.

Via.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Journalism and Media Copyright/Trademark ]

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK — FLYCATCHER CORP. LTD and FLYCATCHER TOYS, INC., Plaintiffs, -v.- AFFABLE AVENUE LLC, doing business as CJ DIST; OZMOS COMPANY LLC; EYTAN GROSSMAN, doing business as EYG DEALS; CREATIVE REWARDS INC.; JOSHUA CHAVEZ, doing business as ONESTOPFASTSHOP; TOP EXPERIENCE COMPANY LLC, doing business as WE PAY COST LLC; PRETTY PRINCESS LLC, doing business as NORVI; AYANEE LLC; FORTUNA KG LLC, doing business as FORTUNAKG; JAXSON MANAGEMENT LLC; JOAN ALEXANDER SORIANO, doing business as PRIMECHOICEMART; A WAHABI CORPORATION, doing business as MCPROFITS; MODA ORIGINAL LLC; VALLEY BODEGA WHOLESALE INC.; EYAD WAHBY; SAM SHAMLOO; S&N GLOBAL SUPPLY INC.; VALUE VALLEY WHOLESALE LLC; ADAM HAMIDA; and JOHN DOES 1 to 25, Defendants.

The whole thing is delicious, it's a lawyer repeatedly fucking himself up by depending on Google search and LLMs.

On August 22, 2025, the Court held a conference to discuss Mr. Feldman’s conduct. It set out to understand how his citation errors came to be and to what extent he used AI assistance to generate his submissions to the Court. The Court began by placing Mr. Feldman under oath (Dkt. #223 (“Tr.”) at 4-5) and then proceeded to ask him a series of questions.

Via.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Artificial Intelligence New York Conferences ]

Gizmodo: Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017. tldr: They were still getting used to the technology, and didn't realize that when they pushed the "record" button the recording included the previous 30 seconds during which they were actively planting the drugs.

Now, presumably, they've learned to wait.

Via.

[ related topics: Drugs Photography Health Law Enforcement Gardening ]

Mike Taylor 🦕 @mike@sauropods.win

I was thinking about how strange it is that the cupboard in a bathroom is called a "vanity unit", and then I got to thinking, what if all your furniture was named after the seven deadly sins?

* Bathroom cupboard = vanity unit

* Paid-work office = avarice unit

* Computer gaming station = anger unit

* Device running social media = envy unit

* Bed = lust unit

* Induction hob = gluttony unit

* Sofa = sloth unit

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Bay Area Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Sports Furniture Home Improvement ]

Most Consumers Are Aware of AI, but One-Third Don’t Want It in Their Devices, Circana Reports

CHICAGO – January 27, 2026 – Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more commonplace in the eyes of many consumers, but there are still hurdles to overcome in getting the masses to adopt these capabilities as benefits in their devices. According to “The Evolving Ecosystem”, a recent Connected Intelligence® report from Circana, LLC, 86% of U.S. consumers 18+ are aware of AI in smartphones and other technology devices, but 35% of them are not interested in AI in their devices.

Via PC Gamer: One-third of consumers don't want AI on their devices, report finds, and it's not because they don't understand it: They just don't need it

The problem with AI isn't that it's not been clearly explained. The problem is, it sucks.

Via

[ related topics: Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence ]

I mean, yes, you should go to Bandcamp and buy Megan Lynch's Songs The Warner Brothers Taught Me, but no, Chrome Gemini Assistant thing, FiddleStar is Megan Lynch Chowning, a completely different person.

(I'm trying to have informed conversations at work about these stupid things, I'm constantly amazed at how wrong they are.)

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

Perfection https://thehardtimes.net/blog/...of-a-known-rapist-and-pedophile/

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Weblogs Marketing ]

Actually putting the parts together to figure out whether knees actually fit and under and how much height there is for the train and so forth...

Current thought is to maybe do veneer mountains on the interior sides, need the hatch to access the power supply and figure cable routing.

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Trains Woodworking ]

Clearing out things I don't have room for things that are artifacts of activities of times gone by, a banner from the Vallejo Pioneers Square Dance Club.

[ related topics: Photography ]

nature medicine: Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study.

LLMs generated several types of misleading and incorrect information. In two cases, LLMs provided initially correct responses but added new and incorrect responses after the users added additional details. In two other cases, LLMs did not provide a broad response but narrowly expanded on a single term within the user’s message (‘pre-eclampsia‘ and ‘Saudi Arabia’) that was not central to the scenario. LLMs also made errors in contextual understanding by, for example, recommending calling a partial US phone number and, in the same interaction, recommending calling ‘Triple Zero’, the Australian emergency number. Comparing across scenarios, we also noticed inconsistency in how LLMs responded to semantically similar inputs. In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice...

404 Media: Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Law Journalism and Media ]

From Lagging to Leading: Validating Hard Braking Events as High-Density Indicators of Segment Crash Risk

This study systematically evaluated the correlation at individual road segment level between police-reported collisions and aggregated and anonymized HBEs identified via the Google Android Auto platform, utilizing datasets from California and Virginia. Empirical evidence revealed that HBEs occur at a rate magnitudes higher than traffic crashes. Employing the stateof-the-practice Negative- Binomial regression models, the analysis established a statistically significant positive correlation between the HBE rate and the crash rate: road segments exhibiting a higher frequency of HBEs were consistently associated with a greater incidence of crashes.

Via.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement California Culture ]

geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

Sex? lmao nah, we're on the INTERNET forming TRANSIENT and stressful PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

How do we know AI is a grift? School admins are bypassing sanity in order to shovel money into it. San Francisco Unified School District Approves OpenAI Contract, Bypassing Board and Raising Student Privacy Concerns.

Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy Bay Area California Culture Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Doug Bayne‬ ‪@rattleplank.bsky.social‬

Did anyone see the big game?

I didn’t.

Just a bunch of people running around.

If they’re not going to release big game onto the field, they shouldn’t call it that.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Sports ]

We've just had a complete reversal. So far as I can tell from the headlines of takes on Bad Bunny and libertarians, the New York Times has gone completely into absurdist satire, and The Onion has become the reporter of record of serious news.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food Current Events New York ]

Those of us of a certain age remember the covers to Byte Magazine very fondly: "Robert Frank Tinney, of Washington, Louisiana, passed away peacefully at River Oaks Nursing & Rehabilitation Center on February 1st, 2026, at the age of 78."

https://tinney.net/in-memoriam

[ related topics: Ziffle ]

This is fascinating: Tracing the social half-life of a zombie citation. In which the author starts working backwards from a reference to an academic paper with his name on it that he had not written, and looks at how references to that paper have evolved, with various different subtitles.

Finally, is AI really to blame here? When I first posted about my experience with the zombie citation, the library scientist Aaron Tay took it upon himself to do a little investigation which he wrote up as an in-depth blog post. He refers to these as “ghost references” and rightly points out that this problem pre-dates generative AI. In fact, he pointed out that at least a couple of the ghost citations of “Education governance and datafication” pre-dated the launch of ChatGPT and mainstream uptake of generative AI. Most likely, Tay suggested, the reference to this work was first generated through simple human error or malpractice. It’s really impossible to know.

[ related topics: Language Books Weblogs Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

Oh snap: Jennifer 🍄 @JenYetAgain@beige.party

in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with.

this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.

[ related topics: Games ]

Fucking yikes! A Reuters special report: As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts.

At least 10 people were injured between late 2021 and November 2025, according to the reports. Most allegedly involved errors in which the TruDi Navigation System misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads during operations.

Via.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Zero Tolerance on attorney AI use is a press-release worthy marketing tool: Powerhouse Litigation Shop Troutman Amin, LLP Bucks Legal AI Trend: Announces "Zero Tolerance" Policy For Generative AI Usage By Firm Attorneys

"The use of any generative AI software in the practice of law is a complete disgrace." Firm founder Eric J. Troutman says. "We look to hire and train the best lawyers in the world-true legal talents that would never trust some hallucinating software program to do their job for them. The laziness and poor judgment on display at some law firms right now is simply astounding."

Via

[ related topics: Software Engineering Law Current Events Consumerism and advertising Heinlein Marketing Machinery Trains Artificial Intelligence hubris ]

On the bus in 101 northbound traffic. Fuck your reduced HOV lane hours.

[ related topics: Public Transportation ]

mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca

I spent $20,000 and two weeks in 32 different McDonalds. Then I put it all in one big bag and shook it. When I looked inside, I found most of one Big Mac. This changes everything.

[ related topics: Macintosh McDonald's ]

Thinking about those videos that came out of the occupation of Iraqi cities of US forces shooting up commuters and people just trying to get around and live their daily lives, and how somehow our political process decided that it was a good idea to bring that chaos to domestic policing.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/...nas-coffee-ice-car-crash-st-paul

[ related topics: Politics moron Theater & Plays Automobiles ]

Assaad Abousleiman on LinkedIn

The last decade of software was built to capture attention.

The next decade will be built to give it back.

I don't agree with his "plausible sentence generators are the future" conclusion that the rest of this essay goes on to conclude, but I like the strong opener. We have a decade or so of computing that's actively user hostile, and we need software which we can trust, which is on our side.

I do agree with two points:

First, that we need to treat the computing developments of the last decade or decade and a half as actively hostile. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al all have gone completely over from enabling us to finding ways extracting every possible bit of value from us.

Built in applications on our platform have gone from utilities to worthless for our own data unless we cave to demands for additional subscription payments. From media players to just using our own damned hard drives, it's getting harder and harder to use our own data, the focus becomes ways to sell us mediated subscriptions.

We're no longer in control of what we see, instead we're being fed information that serves the wants of capital in ways that emotionally triggers us, with automated measures of the efficacy of those information feeds. Our conversations with our friends and our communities are being mediated by hostile forces.

In the social media and email tools of the '90s, we had the ability to build incredibly nuanced filters to help us automatically control what information we were going to let the assholes impose on our lives. Now, the best of these tools (things like Mastodon on the Fediverse) give us simple yeah/nay keyword filtering.

Second, that this software needs to help us automate processes that we currently do manually. As operating systems have moved from the command-line to GUI, we've lost the physical artifacts of process. I think it's worth diving deeper into this.

Every use of an LLM to write code is an acknowledgement of the failure of the programming languages that it's implementing code in. We can describe the process well enough that a lossy plausible sentence generator can guess at what we meant, why can't we make the language express that same meaning unambiguously, in ways that are accessible?

We need a move forward in computing language design to give us languages with grammars flexible enough that people can express, and we can iteratively guide them into a repeatable formal definition that they understand, and that the computers can deterministically execute.

Finally, we need business models, and computing tools, that serve us, rather than those who are looking to further exploit us.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron Writing Journalism and Media Graphic Design Community Douglas Adams ]

We should not have to keep pointing this out, but... T he Register: AI connector for Google Calendar makes convenient malware launchpad, researchers show

Layer X Security: Claude Desktop Extensions Exposes Over 10,000 Users to Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Our recommendation is straightforward:

Until meaningful safeguards are introduced, MCP connectors should not be used on systems where security matters.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

Max Leibman @maxleibman@beige.party

Oh, sure—when *the company* automates my job and keeps collecting the profits, that's "innovation," but when *I* automate my job and keep collecting a paycheck, that's "timeclock fraud."

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

Wishlisting cameras to replace our Ring system, and holy shit marketing departments are failing. Looks like Reolink is the leader, but digging through each product description and trying to figure out how these things fit together is a total pain in the ass.

User stories, folks. Use them.

[ related topics: Photography tolkien Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Mexican Cartel ‘Drones’ Near El Paso Airspace Were Actually Party Balloons: Report

This article was updated to note that CNN reports there were at least four party balloons shot down by DOD, not just one.

CBS: Airspace closure followed spat over drone-related tests and party balloon shoot-down, sources say

[ related topics: Current Events ]

KJ Charles has a Bluesky thread about the AI powered evolutions in the "book club" scam.

[ related topics: Books moron Artificial Intelligence ]

If GenX would stop using "f/u" to mean "follow-up" in email subject lines, I wouldn't complain.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Michael W Lucas @mwl@io.mwl.io:

Inspired by a discussion elsewhere:

I've been on the Internet since 1987, started a career building the commercial Internet in 1995, and have spent the last 25 years writing books about how to build foundational Internet infrastructure. I've consulted for and worked with any number of dot-coms, and the one lesson I've gotten over and over again?

The Internet's business model is betrayal.

We have no smart lights. No voice assistants. No Alexa or Siri. No video doorbell. Our thermostat and appliances constantly complain about their lack of Internet. None of this stuff is safe.

The Internet tech I do use? A desktop PC. Email on my phone is for travel only: airplane tickets, hotel reservations, hockey and concert tix. Location on my phone? Nope, we use a dedicated non-networked GPS in the car. The microphones are off.

How can a light bulb betray me? I don't know. I do know that the vendors have put a LOT of thought into it, though, and I can't out-think all of them.

[ related topics: Books Star Wars Aviation Bay Area Writing Sports Travel Net Culture Automobiles Community Maps and Mapping Video ]

"Inspiration without technique - if it exists at all - is merely flair. If inspiration is all you have it will abandon you when you need it most." -- David Ball in "Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Wyze (surveillance cameras): Definitely only for dogs (YouTube), parody of the now infamous Ring Super Bowl ad.

Via

[ related topics: Photography Movies tolkien Sports Dogs ]

Today in "don't start none, won't be none": Video raises questions about DHS role in Eugene riot damage. Looks like DHS broke their own windows.

[ related topics: Microsoft Current Events Video ]

Scott Shambaugh : An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

Via, and Via, and Via, with a bonus.

[ related topics: Community Artificial Intelligence ]

While I'm being annoyingly prescriptivist about language, if we can stop referring to "updating the language in the prompt" as "training", that too would help me take AI proponents more seriously.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Ladies and Gentlebeings, the chucklefucks that we have collectively decided need to be in charge of where our capital is allocated: IBM: The enterprise in 2030

While 59% of executives say quantum-enabled AI will transform their industry by 2030, only 27% expect to be using quantum computing by then. This gap between quantum’s potential and industry preparation creates massive opportunity for the organizations that act decisively today.

Via Sophie Schmieg @sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange, in the responses Q ✨ @q@glauca.space observes:

@sophieschmieg what the hell even is quantum AI? we made it even less deterministic??

Meanwhile, this morning I've been fighting with the Gemini CLI plausible sentence predictor because its sentences aren't, frankly, even fucking plausible this morning.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence ]

Tagir Valeev @tagir_valeev@mastodon.online

Today we had a fire alarm in the office. A colleague wrote to a Slack channel 'Fire alarm in the office building', to start a thread if somebody knows any details. We have AI assistant Glean integrated into the Slack, and it answered privately to her: "today's siren is just a scheduled test and you do not need to leave your workplace". It was not a test or a drill, it was a real fire alarm. Someday, AI will kill us.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Pyrotechnics Artificial Intelligence ]

reddit/r/meshtastic: My wife called Meshtastic "Tinder for Linux users". I'm never going to emotionally recover from this.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Marriage ]

I have questions on Section 230, but/and found this a useful read: Mike Masnick: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Goes To Washington DC, Gets Section 230 Completely Backwards

Forbes, June 15, 1929: Stock Values Anticipate Golden Age by R.W. McNeel.

In part the great advance in the industrial stocks has been due to a change in investment psychology. In years past there was a point at which a bull market should logically stop. That point arrived when prices advanced to a level where the average yield of high grade stocks was no more than the yield on high grade bonds. Since common stocks carry the risks of business it was believed they should not sell to yield less than the securities which did not carry the risks of business.

In the last few years, however, the mental outlook of investors has changed. The income return on stocks has been at a discount and prospects of future growth have occupied almost the entire attention of investors. As a result, securities which offered the investor nothing but stability of earning power with a fair income return have not been desired, but those which seem to offer possibilities of great expansion have been in demand even at prices far beyond anything justified by current earnings or income return.

Start at page 18 of the PDF...

By way of this thread that's got a whole bunch of choice bits of history...

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Microsoft History Economics ]

Mike Sheward @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange

had a good conversation earlier that went something like this:

them: “is AI making pentesting easier?”

me: “yes.”

them: “why, because you can use it to look for vulnerabilities in code quicker?”

me: “no, because it generates vulnerabilities in code quicker”

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Spent the morning fighting with Gemini CLI to get it to do what I asked. As I see people talk about how productive they are with LLM code generation, I'm mostly struck by how overly complex we've made software development, and how it's been made inaccessible to people that should be finding it easy.

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

Skip the Tips — Can you escape the tip screen?

An online game about the trend of using tools of historic economic repression to boost profits by exploiting sympathy drawn from awful economic policy.

[ related topics: Games Race Economics ]

I love everything about this: ChatGPT Magic 8 Ball _offline_version_

Now you can save water and electricity while carrying one of the world’s most powerfully annoying AI chatbots in your pocket.

Have every whim affirmed with up to 20 of the most popular ChatGPT responses. Smooth your brain into a frictionless hypermind capable of instant regurgitation via a corporate flattery and theft engine.

Via.

An International Times blog post with more pictures.

[ related topics: Cool Science Machinery Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

Not sure there's enough here to really suggest a read, but I feel like I wanna log it anyway: Tom's Guide: QuitGPT is going viral — here’s why people are cancelling ChatGPT

Organizers claim that tens of thousands of people have signed up to quit their subscriptions so far — a sign that the protest has moved beyond anonymous threads into organized activism. The QuitGPT site claims 700,000 users have already committed to the boycott.

[ related topics: Civil Liberties Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence ]

CNN: One year on from dismantling of USAID, study projects that global aid cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030

Now, a new study published in The Lancet medical journal aims to quantify the human toll of those budget decisions – projecting that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030, if the current funding trend continues. About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.

White House admits using key agency's funds for Project 2025 architect Russel Voight's security detail

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Invention and Design ]

So say you have an old power wheelchair chassis that you wanna hack into some sort of set of vehicles, that probably aren't gonna get used all that much. What's the best technology for 24v of battery to play with? Probably just a pair of deep cycle lead acid batteries, huh?

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling Handicaps & Disabilities ]

With the Super Bowl, and with The Olympics, there have been a number of comments trying to separate dunking on the politics of the games from dunking on sport.

And I have some dark dark news for you about what sport is and how the rules are created to support particular social structures.

[ related topics: Politics Games Current Events Sports ]

This is a lot, but it's important: The Woman Alex Pretti Was Killed Trying to Defend Is an EMT. Federal Agents Stopped Her From Giving First Aid.

Prosecute ICE is the centrist position.

https://theintercept.com/2026/...ti-first-aid-emt-federal-agents/

Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, report claims. An internal memo:

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the document reads.

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron Space & Astronomy ]

Petition to turn this sculpture garden into a ropes course...

[ related topics: Gardening ]

We, humans, are already an attack surface, "social engineering" is the most effective compromise. LLMs allow others to leverage that attack surface.

joshuaz 1.bsky.social ‪@joshuaz1.bsky.social‬

Note also that one prime known in the last series is 1031 1s in a row. If you know this you can tell people you have an 1031 digit prime memorized and then go "1111...." They'll likely walk away, but then they'll also now have an 1031 digit prime memorized.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Kit Bashir @Unixbigot@aus.social

“Come with me if you want to live”

That old line.

“I said, come—“

“I KNOW. I’M THINKING.”

“What, uh, why, I mean, your destiny”

“Siddown, kid”

“There’s no time”

“You’re a time traveler. They could have sent you back with plenty of time to act, but they made it so you’re rushed and disoriented. Sit.”

“I don’t get it, you’re in danger…”

“The time war is a manufactured crisis. Keeps wages down, gives the people an external threat to distract from the real villains”

“Prove it”

I handed her a copy of “So, you’re a child soldier in a proxy war”, then tapped my earbud. “Control, the tip was genuine, I’ve got another one.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #Title_No_Time

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment ]

Saw someone talk about how AI lets them do things that would take their IT department $500k to implement, and maybe it's time to concede that Agile has been a total disaster?

We know how to build good software. We choose not to.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]

We had a Cuisinart electric tea kettle that we loved. It died. We replaced it with the same one, and that started making weird annoying noises(!).

Replaced that with a used Veken off of Facebook Marketplace, but various interface elements of that suck. So we're still looking.

Are there differences in reliability between a $50 kettle and a $200 one, or are they all just bling?

First of all, what did Oregon do to the person who named the "Oregon Grape" after it. Second, I now have Opinions about the landscape designer who recommended it.

It finally sprawled enough that Charlene said she wanted it out, and I suspect I'll be following runners all summer...

Unlike reports from ChatGPT, Google's "AI" seems smart enough to know that I'd have to drive my car to the car wash. Unless, of course, I was going to use a self-service bay.

Inspired by this thread.

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Automobiles Artificial Intelligence ]

A programmer's loss of identity. I guess I'm lucky in that my association between mean and the Internet's notion of "programmer" kinda diverged when /. got funding, but this is an interesting meditation on how the general adoption of slop prompting as "programming" is changing the identity of those of us who think that reasoning about systems is important.

Via Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe

Meanwhile, Chris Dickinson @isntitvacant@hachyderm.io linked to Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building (PDF) (You may remember Naur as the "N" in BNF notation) in response to Simon Willison's acknowledgement that LLMs separate him from the model building:

I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work, which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about, eventually leading me to lose the ability to make confident decisions about where to go next.

In linking to Margaret Storey's How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt (which also links to the Naur piece).

In response to Simon's note, Jed Brown @jedbrown@hachyderm.io wrote:

I believe the effect you describe becomes more insidious in larger projects, with distributed developer communities and bespoke domain knowledge. Such conditions are typical in research software/infrastructure (my domain), and the cost of recovering from such debt will often be intractable under public funding models (very lean; deliverables only for basic research, not maintenance and onboarding). Offloading to LLMs interferes not just with the cognitive processes of the "author", but also that of maintainers and other community members.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

datarama @datarama@hachyderm.io

2010s: There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer.

2020s: There is no Claude, it's just someone else's code.

datarama @datarama@hachyderm.io

2010s: Old Man Yells At Cloud

2020s: Old Man Yells At Claude

So Ars Technica wrote a thing on the Scott Shambaugh: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (linked earlier), except that they used an LLM and it synthesized quotes that didn't actually get said or written. @mttaggart@infosec.exchange has a thread on this with receipts and archive links.

From this thread it appears that the slop publication was inadvertent from the editor's perspective.

Edit: Ars Technica: Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy. We have reviewed recent work and have not identified additional issues. At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident.

And a mea culpa from the author, summarized by Michael Taggart:

First, this happened while sick with COVID. Second, Edwards claims this was a new experiment using Claude Code to extract source material. Claude refused to process the blog post (because Shambaugh mentions harassment). Edwards then took the blog post text and pasted it into ChatGPT, which evidently is the source of the fictitious quotes. Edwards takes full responsibility and apologizes, recognizing the irony of an AI reporter falling prey to this kind of mistake.

[ related topics: Quotes Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

Interesting video about using a nibbler for cutting sheet metal, including building a nibbler table (like a router table), and using templates to get accurate repeatable cuts with the technique. No Laser Cutter? No Plasma Cutter? No Problem! Accurately cut sheet metal with low cost tools! By Rebecca Valentine.

I have lost a couple of the disks for the bottoms of some tart tins, and have been trying to figure out how to cut replacements. Need to get a nibbler and find some stainless steel sheet.

[ related topics: Cool Science Movies Video Furniture Woodworking ]

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Today in InfoSec Job Security News:

I was looking into an obvious ../.. vulnerability introduced into a major web framework today, and it was committed by username Claude on GitHub. Vibe coded, basically.

So I started looking through Claude commits on GitHub, there’s over 2m of them and it’s about 5% of all open source code this month.

https://github.com/search?q=au...ype=commits&s=author-date&o=desc

As I looked through the code I saw the same class of vulns being introduced over, and over, again - several a minute.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Current Events Heinlein Woodworking ]

bob @bob@feed.hella.cheap

if the LLM-generated content is adding value then distributions of users/viewers/readers should be getting heavier tailed. are they? so far I've only seen people talking about number of books/apps/etc published which is unrelated to value

I suspect there's not a lot of value for the LLM wielder who's trying to push their material out to the wider world. If you want LLM generated content, you chat with the chatbot yourself and get a personalized experience. No real value to someone else talking with the chatbot.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books ]

Think Academy Education Briefs: Sweden Education Shift: From Digital Learning to Pen and Paper.

I'm taken back to those conversations in the '90s where school board members, and administrators, were talking about "we need tech in the classroom!", and teachers, and sane people, were saying "what's the curriculum need?"

Especially as we've learned how students process pencil and paper note taking differently from typed note taking. And, heck, I'm still learning how I react differently to ebooks (on a multi-purpose device) vs paper books.

via Bruce Sterling

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Weblogs Education ]

Abraham Lincoln's letter to Henry L. Pierce declining an invitation to speak in Boston at a birthday celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson (that may have been intended to be read at the event):

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

Via.

[ related topics: Religion Privacy Civil Liberties Automobiles Government ]

Claudio Nastruzzi in The Register: Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and "blood" reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.

[ related topics: Writing Artificial Intelligence ]

Sarah J. Jackson‬ ‪@sjjphd.bsky.social‬

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Heinlein Community Real Estate ]

I mean, yes, Open AI has two and a half times the revenue of OnlyFans, and projects that it will have similar numbers of paying subscribers by... Checks notes... 2030...

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

CalMatters: Housing advocates still waiting for state-ordered stair report

In the fall of 2023, the California Legislature tasked the state’s fire safety regulators with writing a report that some housing affordability advocates say could make it easier to build bigger, airier and better lit apartment buildings in California’s housing-strapped cities.

The Office of the State Fire Marshal was given until Jan. 1, 2026 to come up with a report on single-stair apartment buildings — a type of mid-sized multifamily development legal in much of the world, but effectively banned across most of North America.

And of course... here we are.

[ related topics: Writing Law California Culture Pyrotechnics Architecture Real Estate ]

No Boilerplate @noboilerplate@namtao.com

PSA: If you block the `claude` user on GitHub, you'll get a warning every time you view a repo with that user in its commit history.

Now, the moment you look at a repo, you can immediately adjust your expectations.

You may do so here: https://github.com/settings/blocked_users

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

the network is the computer (aspirational) → the network is the computer (oh god what have we done)

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

everything is a database (wryly observational) → everything is a database (thousand yard stare)

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

software delenda est (solemn agreement) → software delenda est (jesus christ not like that)

[ related topics: Religion Humor broadband Software Engineering Databases ]

Hacker News thread about Claude Code leaking prompts from unrelated projects.

Reddit: r/ClaudeCode SwordStroker: Claude Code leaked me someone else's response (I believe)

Opened it today and asked a question then it responded in a way which does not make sense at all like it was someone else's response. Then when I asked like I did not ask you this and what is "Exodus", it just kept burning tokens and I cancelled it at 10K token.

Via

[ related topics: Current Events ]

If you're seeing "code morge" floating around as a meme today, this thread talks about a bodged "AI" generated image on Microsoft's site purporting to tell you about git, badly refactored from this blog post.

Good time for meme generation, since JWZ recently uploaded a remastered version of "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" on the 25th anniversary.

You are on the way to destruction. You have no chance to survive make your time.

Edit: 15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram. Via.

"you certainly will not regret morging continvoucly" meme.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Weblogs Microsoft Movies moron Marketing Boats Artificial Intelligence ]

Santa Monica deploys AI powered parking cameras to protect bike lanes.

Via ResearchBuzz

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence Bicycling ]

Risk of death from pregnancy in the US is 44 times higher than that from abortion, new analysis reveals

"It was already fairly alarming that you face a 14-times greater risk of death from continuing a pregnancy [compared to getting an abortion]," lead study author Maria Steenland, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Health, told Live Science. "But the statistics we report here suggest that this risk is really much, much higher."

JAMA: Pregnancy- and Abortion-Related Mortality in the US, 2018-2021 Maria W. Steenland, Kerra Mercon, Benjamin P. Brown, et al

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Health Invention and Design Theater & Plays Mathematics Education ]

The Register: CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price — Boards demand measurable ROI as budgets, bonuses, and jobs hang in the balance

The report, "The 7 Career-Making AI Decisions for CIOs in 2026," claims AI is facing corporate accountability in 2026 after several years of investment into research and pilot projects. CIOs are worried their careers are on the line if the tech's effectiveness falls short of expectations.

Seems completely fair to me: treat AI spending as R&D.

Via Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

(carbon)plan: Open Climate Risk wildfire risk map.

Via.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Global Warming ]

Tech-Cowboy in Reddit r/ExperiencedDevs: An AI CEO finally said something honest

Dax Raad from anoma.ly might be the only CEO speaking honestly about AI right now. His most recent take:

“everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code

here's what things actually look like

- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping

- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life

- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend

- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon

- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real

- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills”

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

So much good stuff in this. Even more impressive that she's talking off the cuff. Rep. AOC Speaks at TU Berlin on The Future of U.S. Politics (YouTube video). Around 1:07:30 in response to an audience question:

One of the critiques that we have of capitalism is that it is its goal is isolation and one of the last frontiers that they want to commodify is human relationship and connection. They don't want your friend to drive you to the airport because they want you to give money to an Uber. They don't want you to care for your friend's children because they all of these things the fragmenting of community is where you can make money. And so when we defy that uh in small acts like driving your friend to the airport uh or in larger acts like what coming out and buying a vest and putting it on and blowing a whistle when they saw an ICE agent. All of this scaffolds on one another. Especially in a moment where right-wing populace populism is ascendant, it preys on communities not being in connection with one another. You can build suspicion of your immigrant neighbors or of your queer friend at school if people don't have those relationships. And one of actually the good news is that the fastest way that you can diffuse movements like that is actually building those social ties because then when you know these horrible caricatures are said in public, people say, "Wait a second, no, I know my friend that's like this and they're they aren't like that." And so it it is the kind of stuff that often gets taken for granted, but when you do it day in and day out, it becomes really important building blocks for safety in numbers.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Movies Aviation Current Events Community Currency Video Woodworking ]

Work thinking about the nature of tools has me thinking on tools which augment human intelligence, which help us conceptualize and think better, and tools which supplant human ability.

It's a continuum, but there's only so much information that can be put in and gotten out via a chat...

[ related topics: Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment ]

Something Positive on AI and Valetine's Day and virtual relationships

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

A lot of discussion out there about how to create a culture of quality in a world filled with AI slop, especially in Open Source.

Some random links:

Joan Westenberg: The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

I don't mean you need a certificate to write Python. I mean something closer to what the Debian project has done with its Web of Trust model for decades: existing trusted contributors vouch for new ones. Your vouching carries weight proportional to your own standing. If you vouch for someone who turns out to be a spam vector, that costs you something. The system works because it makes reputation legible without making it bureaucratic.

@Daojoan on the Fediverse, lobste.rs.

Jared White on the Fediverse proposing an end to anonymous contributions, with pushback from David Gerard citing the awfulness of real name policies.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Spam Open Source Invention and Design Sociology Law Monty Python Graphics Mathematics California Culture Community Artificial Intelligence Race Python ]

@nash@labrynth.social made a little image that I'm gonna recreate in HTML:

	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic
Good	Creating	Crafting	Cobbling Together
Neutral	Constructing	Inveting	Fashioning
Evil	Devising	Developing	Concocting

[ related topics: Furniture ]

Arxiv Computer Science > Computers and Society: The Rise of AI Search: Implications for Information Markets and Human Judgement at Scale Sinan Aral, Haiwen Li, Rui Zuo

Our results also show AI search surfaces significantly fewer long tail information sources, lower response variety, and significantly more low credibility and right- and center-leaning information sources, compared to traditional search, impacting the economic incentives to produce new information, market concentration in information production, and human judgment and decision-making at scale. The social and economic implications of these rapid changes in our information ecosystem necessitate a global debate about corporate and governmental policy related to AI search.

Via.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics Model Building ]

Just playing with analogies: If the personal computer is the bicycle for the mind, GenAI is, perhaps, the automobile for the mind?

With all of the negative externalities and social implications that that implies.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Minnesota Star Tribute: Renee Good memorial site in south Minneapolis doused in gasoline — Damage from a burning pile of wood was minimal but police are investigating.

As Lupita Nihongo‬ ‪@otsumamiboy.bsky.social‬ notes

This is the kind of thing white supremacists have been doing to Emmett Till’s memorial for decades.

It’s wild to see them do this to a white woman who the entire world saw extrajudicially murdered.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Law Enforcement Race Aviation - Helicopters Woodworking ]

PC Gamer: Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in 'AI slop' code contributions: 'I don't know how long we can keep it up'

Rémi Verschelde ‪@akien.bsky.social‬'s BlueSky thread.

Via.

[ related topics: Games Software Engineering Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

Happy Ash Wednesday to those who celebrate. This Is My Boomstick! - Army of Darkness (2/10) Movie CLIP (1992) HD (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Movies ]

Nature: The political effects of X’s feed algorithm Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

Via

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron Journalism and Media ]

Getting LLMs to repeat hogwash for fun:

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes

I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled "The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs". Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn't exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission, including Drew Harwell at the Washington Post and Nicky Woolf, who co-hosts my podcast. (Want to hear more about this story? Check out tomorrow's episode of The Interface, the BBC's new tech podcast.)

Via Thomas Germain (the author) on Bluesky.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Writing Journalism and Media Monty Python Artificial Intelligence Dogs ]

Whoopsie. Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies.

"A code issue is allowing items in the sent items and draft folders to be picked up by Copilot even though confidential labels are set in place," Microsoft added.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Current Events ]

A question of particular interest to me because family lore tells of my mother's father's father, a grain dealer at the end of the horse and carriage era, who was gifted with Prohibition, and who managed to piss it all away.

Anyway: a stinky ox 🐂 @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales

Having lived with an actual pony for a while, now whenever I see My Little Pony I can't help but wonder where the ABSOLUTELY PRODIGIOUS AMOUNT OF POOP such a population would inevitably create ends up. They must have a super advanced sanitation/sewerage system in Ponyville, although we never see any visible evidence of its infrastructure.

(And it can't be the first time I've used that subject line on a Flutterby blog post.)

[ related topics: Weblogs Sociology ]