Flutterby™! From 2026-04-01 to 2026-04-29

The Register: Anthropic goes nude, exposes Claude Code source by accident.

Ars Technica: Entire Claude Code CLI source code leaks thanks to exposed map file.

The New Stack: Inside Claude Code’s leaked source: swarms, daemons, and 44 features Anthropic kept behind flags, Via.

jonny (good kind) @jonny@neuromatch.social

My dogs I am crying. They have a whole series of exception types that end with _I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS and the docstring explains this is "to confirm you've verified the message contains no sensitive data." Like the LLM resorts to naming its variables with prompt text to remind it to not leak data while writing its code, which, of course, it ignores and prints the error directly.

Michael Bacon @MichaelTBacon@social.coop has some commentary and a link to that jonny thread (above).

T he Register: Claude Code source leak reveals how much info Anthropic can hoover up about you and your system, Via.

tante @tante@tldr.nettime.org has some commentary...

It is fascinating but it is as far away from actual engineering as drunkenly pissing your name in the snow. Dunno what you call the people prompting software at Anthropic but "engineer" is not it.

Reading leaked Claude Code source code, Via Lobste.rs

Rewriting Project Claw Code

Edit: MeFi thread.

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Weblogs Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Nudity Writing Artificial Intelligence Maps and Mapping Dogs Food - Bacon ]

Calishat @researchbuzz

@danlyke I'm listening to a Wall Street Millennial video about Anthropic right now and I'm not sure the CEO's butter is all the way on his pancake

Wall Street Millenial: Anthropic's feud with the Pentagon is not what you think.

I personally think it's a good thing that the the Department of War declared Anthropic a supply chain risk. Not because it actually is a supply chain risk, but because this is the first time that Dario Amadei is finally held accountable for his fear mongering and propaganda.

[ related topics: Movies History Pop Culture Video Economics ]

Microsoft Copilot Terms of Use explicitly lay out the situation:

• When you request that Copilot take Actions on your behalf, you are solely responsible for those Actions and any results or consequences.
• Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.
• WITHOUT LIMITING SECTION 12 OF THE MICROSOFT SERVICES AGREEMENT IN ANY WAY, BUT FOR THE SAKE OF CLARITY, WE DO NOT MAKE ANY WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION OF ANY KIND ABOUT COPILOT. For example, we can’t promise that any Copilot’s Responses won’t infringe someone else’s rights (like their copyrights, trademarks, or rights of privacy) or defame them. You are solely responsible if you choose to publish or share Copilot’s Responses publicly or with any other person.

Via ‪Ingrid Burrington‬ ‪@lifewinning.com‬ who also posits

Clippy popping up asking "are you not entertained?"

Edit: Tech Crunch: Copilot is ‘for entertainment purposes only,’ according to Microsoft’s terms of use. That references PC Mag: Copilot Terms Claim Microsoft's AI Is for 'Entertainment Purposes Only' which quotes this /r/BetterOffline thread and notes that:

However, the company is indicating it plans on changing the disclaimer soon. "The ‘entertainment purposes’ phrasing is legacy language from when Copilot originally launched as a search companion service in Bing," a Microsoft spokesperson told PCMag. "As the product has evolved, that language is no longer reflective of how Copilot is used today and will be altered with our next update.”

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment ]

Leader of Antioch police department texting scandal sentenced to 4 years in prison

"Police terrorist" is the language used by presiding federal judge, Jeffrey White, during the sentencing says Nisenbaum. He says Rombough's confession helped led to the signing of an MOU in December that will Nisenbaum says will transform Antioch into a "constitutional policing model." Even though the prosecution wanted a longer sentence.

[ related topics: History Law Law Enforcement Race ]

House of Saud: Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?

[ related topics: History Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

How is Federal transportation funding broken? Mass DOT Project Information — CHARLEMONT- BRIDGE REPLACEMENT, C-05-009, CHICKLEY ROAD OVER CHICKLEY RIVER.

Estimated Total Contract Cost: $9,139,470.74
Estimated Total Federal Participating Construction Cost: $9,703,075.95

Google Maps link for 296 W. Hawley Rd.. That's nearly $10M to serve a single house. Total assessed value for 72 acres and the 4br/2ba house with attached garage, $402,700 (okay, to be fair, looks like they've got an outbuilding and some solar panels).

[ related topics: Graphics Machinery Fabrication Maps and Mapping Real Estate Model Building Photovoltaics ]

Boris Cherney said "Can confirm Claude Code is 100% written by Claude Code". Time to start pushing back on those DMCA takedowns, and get Anthropic's legal team disbarred for abuse and misconduct.

https://x.com/bcherny/status/2030109840555790357

[ related topics: Law ]

QOTD: MeFi user RonButNotStupid on LLM written code (Specifically Claude Code):

It's like programming as understood by the sovereign citizen movement.

[ related topics: Quotes Software Engineering ]

At this point I'm not even sure it's worth taking note of software/package management supply chain attacks anymore, but North Korean hackers blamed for hijacking popular Axios open source project to spread malware.

[ related topics: Free Software Software Engineering ]

Defense One: AI may revive old-school tradecraft even as it transforms intelligence work

A recent article in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA- backed academic journal, argues that as AI degrades the reliability of digital communications like text messages and video calls, traditional human intelligence tradecraft — like dead drops, brush passes and in-person meetings — could regain renewed importance.

Via.

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

If the toy collectors on Facebook Marketplace place could stop referring to 1997 as "vintage", I'd appreciate it. Pretty sure that was less than a decade ago...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I really really hope that I don't have reason to refer back to this document later, but holy shit: Thoughts following the Jan. 8th NASA Headquarters meeting concerning the Artemis II Heatshield (read-only Google doc), per this skeet from Anil Dash it's written by "former Johnson Space Center engineering director (and astronaut) Charles Camarda".

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Found it! Those two images, I didn't have a blank line before the image specifier.

Deskset mavens: I think I'm loving it, except that I have two B&W images from the Library of Congress that I cannot get it to display at a reasonable size, even when I screengrab for them, or convert from TIFF with Image Magick or GIMP.

Any help?

[ related topics: Language Politics Books ]

2,400 year- old skeleton mosaic discovered in Turkey with the caption: "Be cheerful, enjoy your life"

There is some debate over the meaning of the text that’s paired with the recumbent skeleton. The writer İlber Ortaylı reads it as, “You get the pleasure of the food you eat hastily with death,” and believes that the mosaic was in a soup kitchen rather than a rich person’s dining room. But in a thorough post by Livius on The History Blog, they argue that a skeleton “partying with [the Romans] in the dining room” is consistent with the art at the time in which Kara dated it. The mosaic would’ve been a reminder that life is fleeting—so imbibe the wine, eat the bread, and enjoy it while you can.

[ related topics: Weblogs Food Theater & Plays Writing Wines and Spirits Art & Culture Birds Archival ]

Based on an ancient Cooks Illustrated article, I've been making hash browns by squeezing the grated potatoes, letting the juice sit, pouring off the water and re-incorporating the starch.

(Cook 9 minutes per side, medium heat, plenty of fat.)

I just did my first batch by squeezing and rinsing and discarding the starch, and way crispier!

[ related topics: Food Comics Databases ]

The Wharton School Research Paper: Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

Tri-System Theory is not a warning about AI’s dangers but a recognition of System 3’s psychological presence. We do not merely use AI; we think with it. In doing so, we must ask new questions: What happens when our judgments are shaped by minds not our own? What becomes of intuition and effort when a generative, artificial partner stands ready to answer? How do we preserve agency, reflection, and autonomy in a world where users engage in cognitive surrender?

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yk25n_v1

Via Matt Seybold ‪@mattseybold.bsky.social‬ who characterized it as:

The. Rise. Of. Cognitive. Surrender.

Study finds that people who use GenAI chatbots rely on them 80% of the time, and develop almost no capacity to recognize when a chatbot is feeding them faulty information.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

Finally figured out my Deckset issue. As a competent text editor user, I am really digging the trend of "all configuration happens in text files" and "tools do one thing, well."

Huh. Don't know how I've missed this "Danger! Do not operate! Man on line." tag dated 12/14/24 on this pole that I've walked past a gazillion times, but I hope dude isn't still up there somewhere, he's gotta be getting thirsty.

Also, "man on line", what century are we in again?

[ related topics: Photography History ]

Listening to "Who Killed Avril Lavigne?" on the walk to work this morning, and... it's super dumb in a good way. If you need a pop-punk flashback to the '90s made by a bunch of people who are obviously friends and having fun...

https://www.supernormal.fm/whokilledavrillavigne

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Pop Culture Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Reminder to mobile email client developers: Often people have urgent tasks to do with their phone. Nobody wants to take your five minute tour of new features when they're trying to find a login code because a friend is helping them solve their Netflix billing issue after a square dance.

Assholes.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Because better solutions for local (and, yes, national and international) news are on my radar: An AI company set out to fix news deserts. Instead, it copied local journalists’ work

Nota shut down its news sites after Axios and Poynter found dozens of plagiarized quotes, phrases and photos

I mean, it's an AI company, so of course it didn't actuall "set out to fix news deserts", it set out to exploit a human desire to fix news deserts, and of course it fucked over the actual reporters.

Via Ben Werdmuller

[ related topics: Quotes Photography Ethics Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Simon Willison has a link to the axios npm supply chain compromise post-mortem, including Jayson Saayman's description of how the social engineering worked.

tl;dr: extremely real looking contact with a company that eventually ended up as a Microsoft Teams meeting, that complained that some component was out of date, update process on that component was the compromise.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Steve Hayman 🇨🇦🇬🇱🪊 @shayman@cosocial.ca

TIL: For any prime number p >= 5, p²-1 is divisible by 24.

That's cool.

Isn't it?

Yes it is.

Steve Hayman 🇨🇦🇬🇱🪊 @shayman@cosocial.ca

Informal proof that for a prime p >=5, p²-1 must be a multiple of 24.

p²-1 = (p-1)(p+1)

p-1, p, p+1 are three consecutive integers. One of them must be divisible by 3 - and it can't be p, because p is prime. So either p-1 or p+1 is a multiple of 3.

Also, p is odd, so p-1 and p+1 are both even - and one or the other must be divisible by 4. One is a multiple of 2, the other of 4.

So the product of p-1 and p+1 has factors of 2, 3 and 4, and must be a multiple of 2*3*4 =24.

What I wanted for a MacOS Tahoe 16.4 update: performance, stability, security, better handling of switches disabling "Liquid Glass", square corners...

What I got: 🫍🪎🛘🫯🫪🪊🫈🧑‍🩰

[ related topics: Theater & Plays California Culture Macintosh ]

A good rant about a crappy tool for setting passwords in SSD encryption, or something? Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two Recovery Mode reboots to uninstall.

Read down to where they embedded Electron to show a pie chart. And then down to where they embedded 150 PNGs for a "health good" animation.

Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@vmst.io

[ related topics: Animation Health Robotics Embedded Devices Cryptography ]

Pondering differences between wealth taxes and inflation. I guess the primary difference is that with a national currency, a wealth tax is how states can independently implement the effect.

[ related topics: Politics Currency Economics Government ]

Moof! 🔜 #JetLagTheGame NL @moof@cupoftea.social

I’m told that sometimes Claude can be frustrating. I gather that interacting with it can be quite rewarding, especially when it creates passing tests in your programmes. But sometimes that dopamine rush is not quite enough. Maybe you need a bit of stroking of your ego, or a good pat on the butt when you’ve done well.

So now, someone has now taken Vibe Coding to tbe logical conclusion, and has created an interface from Claude to buttplug.io.

So now the shafting you get from AI is no longer just figurative.

Signal Bridge Android:

Signal Bridge is an Android app that lets Claude touch you through your intimate hardware while you talk. You have a conversation. When the moment calls for it, Claude sends haptic commands (vibration, pulsing, thrusting, escalation etc.) through Signal Bridge to your connected devices. You see tool-use indicators in the chat. You feel the rest.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

I have been trying to not work out square dance choreography puzzles I'm my head when I have down time, and it's reminding me of how much I miss programming with like real data structures and stuff.

Helping me clarify the directions I want to go with work.

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

Futurism reports that "Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed"

Demand is low enough that you might actually have to get Iran to bomb your data center for the insurance money rather than claim you're gonna achieve "AGI" next year this time for sure really...

https://futurism.com/science-e...data-centers-construction-supply

[ related topics: Machinery Currency Fabrication Model Building ]

Thread from ‪Bryan Culbertson 🥄‬ ‪@bryanculbertson.com‬ about normalizing self-driving car trips vs different factors, and comparing those to other modes, and pointing out that autonomous vehicles need are still 100x more dangerous than public transit modes.

[ related topics: Automobiles Public Transportation ]

NPR: Penalties stack up as AI spreads through the legal system. Mostly stuff we've already seen, but it's good to see the mainstream catching up. Via.

[ related topics: Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Campus Computing Center of the United Nations University: The Echo Chamber in Your Pocket

Two landmark papers from MIT and Stanford now offer formal proof of what many suspected: sycophantic AI is not merely annoying. It is systematically eroding both our grip on reality and our capacity for moral repair.

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians Kartik Chandra, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Science: Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Sunny Yu, Dyllan Han, and Dan Jurafsky (preprint mentioned previously, a mention in the Stanford Report)

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Ethics Current Events Education Artificial Intelligence Archival Model Building ]

Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io thread on the ICE invasion of Minneapolis and the clarity that comes from realizing that no one is coming to save you.

You've probably seen the stuff from the Artemis II mission about Bluetooth pairing issues and Microsoft Outlook ... well ... there's no way to put those words together without some sort of "clusterfuck" semantics. Anyway, Becca Royal- Gordon @beccadax@soincredibly.gay

Hot take: The Artemis livestream is a damning indictment of modern computing devices. It seems like half the radio chatter is troubleshooting email delivery problems, confusing user interfaces, or devices not booting or connecting. Literal astronauts with years of training can’t make our stuff work.

‪wendy cloudberry‬ ‪@wendycloudberry.com‬

Pine would never

Numerous social media folks are also making "Thunderbird" comments... I think this is a reminder that it's time for me to get back on Claws.

[ related topics: Humor Wireless Sexual Culture Microsoft moron Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

Maybe the LLM coding tools are getting better? daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social

The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.

I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.

[ related topics: Free Software Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

Andrew Murphy: If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems. He mentions Eli Goldratt's The Goal, which, of course, I remember reading back in high school 'cause my Dad was in management consulting at the time.

From this Elizabeth Ayer @elizayer@mastodon.social thread, I quote tooted the second in that thread with:

I think we've got a whole lot of people building software who both have no experience with the actual users of that software, and have no conceptual model for what the software does internally.

Years of "Agile" and using writing software to prototype have destroyed our collective ability to engage with the processes that we used to use.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Weblogs Software Engineering Writing Aviation - Helicopters ]

Maciej Ceglowski: The lunacy of Artemis:

Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can't even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It's as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.

Of course I mostly go back to: WTF are we doing with crewed exploration in the twenty fucking twenties. Not only is sending out robots cheaper, we learn a hell of a lot more. It's just propaganda dickwaving to put humans in harm's way.

Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Robotics Invention and Design Software Engineering Automobiles ]

taco, bird/cat :verified420: @chirpbirb@meow.social

Content warning: open source software drama, nvim-treesitter

open source software developers are getting fed up and are finally recognizing that they can just fucking leave.

the owner of nvim-treesitter gets a really shitty comment from a user saying that the update to a required version broke their workflow
the owner replies saying "hey just pin what you need instead of mainlining it if you need this for an older version"
the shitty user replies back saying "go switch to something that doesn't require interacting with people"
the owner says "OK." and ARCHIVES THE REPO
https://github.com/nvim-treesi...nvim-treesitter/discussions/8627

like, holy shit, what a power move.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Software Engineering Birds Archival ]

Hat tip to whoever's causing Reddit to send me password recovery emails. Guessing maybe it's my participation in /r/noai?

No, not the E&J Gallo wine brand, the email client.

Why is this so hard?

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

Tweaked the CSS. Please tell me if you notice anything egregious. Should work better on small screens now.

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

This is fascinating: Kathmandu Post: Inside Nepal’s fake rescue racket

Investigations reveal a vast network of trekking firms, helicopter operators, hospitals and agents staging fake evacuations, fabricating medical records and inflating bills to siphon millions from global insurers.

The tourists may be in on it, told by their guides that they can avoid a 2 week hike back from Everest base camp by saying they were sick, or may be scared into it by guides inducing psychosomatic symptoms of altitude sickness, or may be given Diamox (Acetazolamide) tablets (for altitude sickness) with excessive water to induce symptoms of altitude.

[ related topics: broadband Nature and environment Currency Aviation - Helicopters ]

The "Exciting USAA Advice Changes are Coming!" email may be the thing that drives my growing sense of unease fully into "find a new insurance company".

Used to be that we actually liked USAA. Is there an "actually like" insurance company of any sort any more? Preferably that eschews AI?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence ]

Arizona Right Watch ‪@azrww.bsky.social‬

During the anti-ICE school walkouts in January, a group of students in Chandler were targeted by an armed agitator. Turns out it was Phoenix PD Sergeant Dusten Mullen. He admitted his plan was to try to get purposely assaulted so the teenager protesters would all get arrested (it didn’t work).

Fox 10 Phoenix: ‘Let them all assault me’: Records show armed, off-duty Phoenix cop's plan at student anti-ICE walkout

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement ]

Techdirt: The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI.

So to my friends and family members wondering why I haven’t built my own billion-dollar AI company: apparently the missing ingredient wasn’t AI — it was being willing to run a deepfake-powered spam operation selling potentially inert pills to desperate people. The AI just made the lying faster. And the New York Times made one guy appear respectable.

[ related topics: Spam Invention and Design moron Sociology Monty Python Currency Artificial Intelligence New York ]

Unpopular opinion: Rust is the C of memory safe languages.

I'd really like a performant language that lets me not have all sorts of ugly boilerplate code when representing reasonable data structures.

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

AI Company Clones Musician’s Voice, Then Copyright-Strikes Her Own Songs.

“An entity called Timeless Sounds IR uploaded AI-generated versions of my songs to all major platforms,” Campbell explained in a video update to her followers. “And to do that, they fed YouTube videos of me to an AI engine that then mimicked my voice in playing.”

Timeless Sounds IR used a music distributor called Vydia, which then filed takedown notices against her.

Via.

More reason we need some real teeth for false DMCA takedown claims.

[ related topics: Music Machinery Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark Video ]

Ars Technica reposting the Financial Times: Iran demands cryptocurrency toll from tankers passing through Strait of Hormuz

“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” Hosseini added.

Reddit r/answers asks "What made you finally decide to quit smoking for good?"

Pretty sure the smokers I've known weren't all that hung up on whether they were smoking for good or not.

[ related topics: Drugs ]

Was thinking about how some AI advocacy I've been reading recently sounds a lot like "I've got a system for beating slot machines", went Googling, and... yeah, this MGM article sounds totally like your average "how to use AI" influencer.

https://www.mgmresorts.com/en/...-win-at-video-slot-machines.html

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Video Gambling ]

"The New York Times has had its moments of good journalism, but…"

Thinking a lot about slot machine analogies recently.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Journalism and Media New York Gambling ]

At some point, you'd think that there'd be some structure to get the LLM to execute some code to give an answer, rather than just continuing down the "but we can make it more plausible" sentence generator path.

Seems particularly relevant to that stuff about ChatGPT measuring the time it takes to run a mile that's floating around right now.

[ related topics: Photography Boats ]

As the tech world bends over backwards to over-hype the Claud Mythos/Project Glasswing thing as too dangerous to be generally released, a little reminder that we've been here before...

ChatGPT in 2019: Slate: When Is Technology Too Dangerous to Release to the Public?

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

As the current administration speed runs a loss in a war it started, replaying Croesus and the Oracle of Delphi, and then starts lashing out at other institutions...

‪BeijingPalmer‬ ‪@beijingpalmer.bsky.social‬

I would simply threaten the Catholic Church with the power of the sword, a problem it has never previously confronted.

[ related topics: Religion History Databases ]

Postal Arbitrage. Using Amazon Prime to send messages more cheaply than a first class letter by gifting cheap items.

My neighborhood will hate you.

[ related topics: Books ]

Duh: Analysis Finds That Google’s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

The AI Great Leap Forward — Han Lee

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.

In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.

Same energy.

[ related topics: Cool Science Food Artificial Intelligence ]

Preprint: AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance Grace Liu, Brian Christian, Tsvetomira Dumbalska, Michiel A. Bakker, Rachit Dubey

Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes).

Via.

Edit: Futurism article.

[ related topics: Religion Theater & Plays Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Some checkboxes for a TOS: On the acceptance of GenAI — Joep Schuurkes

[ related topics: Weblogs Gardening ]

A good start: John Deere to Pay $99 Million in Monumental Right-to- Repair Settlement

While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The article also reports that older used tractors ballooned in value as farmers sought out repairable devices.

[ related topics: Current Events Currency ]

Of course, this Rust repo was last updated over 4 months ago. Why would I expect that it'd run on a modern Mac.

Guess this is gonna happen on a Linux machine.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Macintosh ]

Hmmm... The Dell i7 8Gen hand me down laptop I've been using for Linux stuff is giving me flakey display, including keeping remnants of the previous display after a shutdown and restart (I didn't know they did that these days).

Sigh. I need work to turn around.

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

Nature: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.

Via

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

Two really good ones today. That AI Great Leap Forward that I linked earlier, and Let’s talk about LLMs, talking about what software development really is, and a deep dive into how churning out code is not, in fact, going to give you an order of magnitude of productivity gain.

Via James Bennett @ubernostrum@infosec.exchange, the author

Edit: Lobste.rs summary by the author:

tl;dr

• Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet was correct.
• No Silver Bullet applies to LLMs the way it applied to other things, and empirical evidence on LLM coding impact sure seems to agree.
• You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature.
• If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.

The full post is me saying these things much more thoroughly and with citations.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Archival ]

Every time I think my voice is getting good, someone gives me a holy crap moment. Latest case is Charlie Puth making a reference to T Pain's auto tune technique, with no hardware...

https://switchedonpop.com/epis...ka-g3wnk-nrtag-fwsbl-tfsxc-szzhn https://www.berklee.edu/berkle...h-advice-switched-on-pop-podcast

[ related topics: Law Current Events ]

Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social

here’s the “AI regulation” that I want: if anyone proposing utility for an AI tool utters the words “I could imagine…”, a big cartoony boxing glove on a spring needs to pop out of a box and punch them through a wall

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

AI-Led Remediation Crisis Prompts HackerOne to Pause Bug Bounties

HackerOne Internet Bug Bounty changes.

Leading to Security Bug Bounty Program Paused Due to Loss of Funding

Via

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

I'm the showdown between the Catholic Church and the current administration I can't believe I'm siding with... I mean... Holy shit, if you'd asked me pre this administration to name an evil institution responsible for so much suffering and abuse...

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama ]

I wrote a kid's homework for them over on Reddit

My complaints center mostly around LLMs, with a slight diversion into generative AI for music and images:

My first complaint is just the quality of the output. I keep having... you know, the kinds of friends who DM you random whackadoodle Substack articles, only now they're DMing acres and acres of LLM generated slop and saying "this is so insightful" and it isn't. It's mediocre writing that often doesn't actually make sense. Really, when you use an LLM to generate prose it's doing the metaphorical equivalent of seven fingered humans, you're just not smart enough to see it.

The second complaint is the outsourcing of thinking. I mean, sure, you can make the argument that these things are analogous to calculators and you don't actually need to do arithmetic, but a lot of what I'm seeing is that people have stopped critically reading the output altogether. Or, if they're coding, they're losing the mental model of the code they're writing. Turning out stuff that appears to work, sure, but they're quickly dropping into delusions about what the LLM can and can't know, and they have no mental model for the code that's actually being generated.

Which, you know, is fine if you don't actually care how things work, but understanding how things work is how we figure out new and novel and interesting ways to use technologies, and that's not coming out of LLMs.

The third is how that ties into the anthropormophization of these things. The literature refers to this as "epistemia", but I see a lot of thinking that the LLM is thinking, and because of the "slot machine" payoff nature of these things that may be often enough to actually be really compelling, but then they use it for something where they get a grievously wrong answer, and the crater is pretty big. And because of well known issues of attention and operator fatigue, there's really no good way to outsource the kind of attention that's necessary to get good output from these things to humans. Use of them will bite you.

(Cue all of the cocky kids saying "skill issue". Dude, if that skill issue could be solved, C would be a safe programming language. Fuck all the way off with that argument.)

Then we get into the ethics of how these things are trained.

The theft of content. I don't even get that cranky about the huge percentage of traffic that's hitting my web servers from AI vendors and making it harder to have personal sites, the use of pirated materials, and remixing of intellectual properties in ways that individual humans would never get away with feels like a different set of rules. Anthropic and OpenAI pirated how many books? And they're getting a slap on the wrist, after huge efforts.

I'm old enough to remember when the record industry went after Napster users. If there were justice applied equally... well...

The power use, from local pollution to climate change to just electricity prices. If there were some sort of good coming out of it, sure, but, as pointed out up-thread, the LLMs are overhyped stupidity (every claim for success from these things has been a lie stemming from overtraining on test data or randomness), and the images are just stupid. Sure, they now mostly get the right number of fingers, but we're gonna burn down the planet for those aesthetics. Eeewww.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Music Cool Science Ethics Nature and environment Invention and Design Bay Area Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Writing Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Gambling Global Warming hubris ]

Her Name Was Nilufar Easmin. Trump posted her murder. He never said her name.

Via, which QT'd this skeet.

Sean Conner: Some comments about my being called out by an LLM and other random links about LLMs

Linking to Psych Safety: The Vasa disaster, about the decision-making processes involved in the building of the Swedish warship that sank after sailing a kilometer and a half in 1628 (and which now has a museum). It's a good read, but MeFi user Aardvark Cheeselog

"That's a terrible idea, Your Majesty," said no shipwright to a king, ever.

which, not a novel idea, but it also made me think "said no DOT to a citizenry asking for more lanes, ever", etc.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Art & Culture Boats ]

https://yesify.net

Enterprise-grade affirmations powered by cutting-edge agreement technology. Stop thinking. Start agreeing.

Tire dust as a major automobile pollutant has been mentioned too many times previously to link 'em all (well, okay, a previously smattering: 1, 2, 3, 4), KUOW: Every tire produces a chemical that kills coho salmon. Can scientists pump the brakes? adds the twist that a University of British Columbia study suggests that artificial turf fields use waste tire infill as a cushion. They propose additional filtering for new sports fields, but wonder what can be done to treat existing ones.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Education Archival ]

If there's one thing that attempting to use the Gemini CLI to code with has taught me, it's that there's really no substitute for learning the technology yourself and doing it right in the first place.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Education ]

Abandoned ill-fated attempts to prompt Gemini CLI to rewrite the CSS, made a few fixes by just learning the technology in the first place. Hopefully that broke less stuff this time around.

[ related topics: Education ]

A MeFi thread about restoring scroll position, and then looking at the Lit JavaScript library has me wondering: Is there a web MVC framework that doesn't rely on breaking the user experience by writing the web page from code?

https://ask.metafilter.com/389...ll-position-not-a-solved-problem

[ related topics: Language Books Writing ]

I don't remember seeing "international inc" as a superlative to that particular exclamation....

[ related topics: Photography ]

It's beginning to look a lot like Katie Porter.

Gil Duran in the Sacramento Bee: Yes, Xavier Becerra sued Trump. But here are some ugly truths about his record as AG (Via)

Democrats Say Rep. Eric Swalwell Personally Pitched His Political AI Startup to Lawmakers (Via)

Swalwell campaign imploding after new sexual assault allegation

Multiple people resigned in advance of a report that an ex-staffer accused him of sexual assault.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design moron Current Events Beer Artificial Intelligence ]

Have a project that might be good for Rust. People like libcosmic. Fix the issues with dependencies and architecture, run:

cargo generate gh:pop-os/cosmic-app-template

Get to where it asks for a "Repository URL", and:

⚠️ Sorry, "ssh://danlyke@www.flutterby.com/home/danlyke/var/git/squareplay2" is not a valid value for repository-url

Does everything have to suck? Can't anything just work?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Cryptography Architecture ]

Finally, we've found the corporate role that AI can replace: Meta spins up AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to engage with employees

The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI.

Via

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

Soatok Dreamseeker @soatok@furry.engineer

Some furries: "hehe I'm furry trash"

Me: "yiff-raff"

Jewish Currents: When Jewishness Means Genocide

My partner and I were hiking recently on an international trail in Spain. People passing each other on the trail would say hello in different languages. I was joking about the possibility of saying “shalom” to people. And it immediately became clear to both of us that today saying “shalom” would be provocative. I was thinking about how the word “shalom,” which is a nice word, a word of greeting, opening, peace, has become a marker of hate, in a sense. And then it dawned on me that there was a different but comparable process with the word “heil.” In German, it basically means holiness, peace, wholesomeness— good things. But it became the word for evil. You would not utter it today, in Germany or anywhere. And the comparison between these two words was very heavy, but it was there. It was not an intellectual process. It was kind of an instinctive feeling.

Via

[ related topics: Religion Nature and environment ]

Oh, yes, this object has the method as_secs_f64(), that's definitely letting me abstract out the code to the appropriate floating point size for whatever target platform this ends up running on.

[ related topics: Sports Boats ]

Neville Park @nev@status.nevillepark.ca

ahem In the original novel Dracula, it must be a crucifix (that is, a fancy schmancy cross with Jesus on it) to properly repel Dracula. In later works, a simple cross suffices. This implies Dracula is getting more Protestant over time. In this essay I will

[ related topics: Religion Humor Writing ]

Fascinating article on people deliberately colliding automobiles into trucks for the insurance payout: New Yorker: Letter from New Orleans: The Car-Crash Conspiracy — High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy.

Via.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Automobiles Machinery Conspiracy Hurricane Katrina Government ]

Just pondering about what's "easy" with an LLM coding assistant, and what's hard, and how the languages I've used have influenced the kinds of code I've written, and how the use of an LLM assistant is going to change what our software looks like.

Like: If we can't get our LLM assistant to fix a UI issue, are we just gonna abandon that interface mode?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama User Interface Software Engineering ]

Prior to modern technology, wealthy patrons had to pay actual artists to create grotesque charicatures using religious imagery to valorize themselves.

[ related topics: Religion Art & Culture ]

Futurism: The Effects of AI-Generated Code Tearing Through Corporations Is Actually Kind of Funny — Womp womp!

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

OMG. There have been a number of companies making plastic construction toy bricks compatible with Lego bricks. Now Utah has entered the chat: Brick 'em Young, including sets for various Mormon temples, and a nativity set.

Via Sean Conner.

[ related topics: Lego Mindstorms Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

The Onion: Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto.

Via.

[ related topics: Food Community ]

Dragon in a Fez:

keep thinking about how I wrote in my dissertation about how every time a new form of public/social space emerges it’s immediately popular with kids and teenagers who see it as a chance at freedom and then adults colonise it and kick them out. this happened with malls in the 80s and diners in the 50s and pool halls in the 20s. my dad was doing research on this trend in like 1975. and I was like “yeah so this is going to happen to the internet” and then five years later every government suddenly decided to ban kids from everywhere online. I hate being right especially when I don’t even get paid for it

[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy Invention and Design moron Space & Astronomy Civil Liberties Net Culture Government ]

In linking to Politico: The whisper network that caught up to Eric Swalwell, David Dayen ‪@ddayen.bsky.social wrote:‬

Several important nuggets in here:
• Swalwell was rebuilding Newsom's inner circle; he was the establishment hope
• One lobbyist: "Were we willing to delude ourselves or not ask questions that should have been asked? 1000%"
• His campaign started sending cease-and-desists last year

Via

[ related topics: broadband Current Events ]

Remember those pictures of ChongLy Scott Thao, a U.S. citizen of Hmong ancestry, in a plaid blanket and blue shorts, and nothing else, being escorted through the snow by ICE thugs?

Ramsey County officials investigate alleged kidnapping of St. Paul man by federal officers

Fuck yeah. Take them down.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events ]

Car headed to strip club crashes into Avondale violin shop

“We also were able to recover seven cellphones, one of which was on and indicated that the party was traveling to Pin-Ups,” Bryant said.

Via Tara Calishain, who noted:

🎶 That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia 🎶

[ related topics: Music Sexual Culture Current Events Automobiles ]

OpenAI CRO Tells Staff Anthropic Inflates Run Rate by $8 Billion:

The compute section reads like a second front. OpenAI told its investors four days earlier that Anthropic is "operating on a meaningfully smaller curve," projecting 30 gigawatts of OpenAI capacity by 2030 against 7 to 8 gigawatts for Anthropic by end-2027. Today OpenAI runs roughly 1.9 gigawatts. Anthropic runs 1.4. "Even at the high end of that range, our ramp is materially ahead and widening," the investor memo read.

Gotta say that, on the one hand, I get it, on the other hand measuring success by energy consumed is kinda like measuring programmer productivity with lines of code written or AI tokens billed or something.

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

Finished CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring last night. Read it on the suggestion of a friend. I forget the context in which it came up, but...

It makes a compelling case that the LAPD and DA's office told a story about what happened that wasn't consistent with the facts, and that there was a lot of bumbling between the LASD and the LAPD. It raised a lot of questions about why Manson and his entourage may have been treated very leniently before the murders by both law enforcement and the judiciary. It points out a whole lot of intersections between the CIA's MKUltra program and various aspects of the '60s counterculture that intersected with Mason and crowd.

What I don't know after reading this is how out of the norm these various connections are. We know from so many cases in the intervening years that the LAPD and the LASD as institutions have practices of altering crime scenes and reports to fit a DA's narrative, and that judges are wont to, say, give young women who are having their first interactions with the court a little leniency in hopes that they can straighten themselves out without punishment (since, let's be fair, that's the main remedy courts have).

We also know that various US federal agencies engage in some sketchy shit in terms of internal US policies, and what university research gets funded, and a lot of this stuff may have been cleaned up a bit in the intervening years, with IRBs and all.

And the book acknowledges all of this.

So, yeah, a good read in understanding how, for instance, "conservative" factions act to make sure that the counter-culture acts in the ways that they fear, in seeing a lot of how prosecutors and "law" enforcement act to reinforce their initial suspicions, in how so much of society is intertwined. I recommend it from that front.

But frustrating (and, again, the author acknowledges this) that in the end this is the tangled yarn of a connection board without a clear picture emerging. It's the tale of the decisions a society makes, without an overarching story.

Fascinating read, I'm glad I went through it, but still trying to figure out what it means.

[ related topics: Books Software Engineering Sociology Law Law Enforcement California Culture Education ]

Lots of good stuff to think on in this: Simpson Center: Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of "AI": The View from the Humanities, Emily M. Bender (YouTube video)

I've been trying to understand how to use the Gemini CLI to write non-trivial code. There's a lot of waiting for "Thinking..." for the better part of an hour for it to come back with something that... sometimes works? Maybe is good for fleshing out a very rough version of code, but it's clear that at some point I'm going to have to go back in and use specific language to actually get it right.

Which is reiterating my feeling that if we're using LLMs for fleshing out code, our real issue is that our environments and languages have failed us.

Meanwhile, for work, I'm also looking into the AI integration into Notion. Of course the first thing that Notion wants me to do is to install an app (hey, spyware!) that doesn't seem to actually have any features that you'd hope for from an app. No worries, telemetry is whatever, I'm glad that this thing can't go poking around in my filesystem.

At least not visibly.

But beyond the basic "Chatbot thinks I should be 'Settings', the App calls that 'Preferences'" language mismatch, it's giving me quite a bit of instructions that just don't work. And, I mean, hey, keeping documentation up with the app is always a challenge, but it really feels like someone has off-loaded the process that should be creating the documentation, to the chatbot.

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

The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.

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

For every developer who views software as craft there are a dozen who view it as a paycheck don't give a shit otherwise. If AI is a force multiplier, it's multiplying the impact of the "don't give a shit" developers much more than anyone else

[ related topics: Interactive Drama tolkien Software Engineering Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

U.S. Department of Justice: Attorney General Pamela Bondi Directs Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty for Luigi Mangione.

CNN: Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart offered plea deal to avoid death penalty

[ related topics: Law Law Enforcement ]

Amusing AI slop in the wild. Facebook post from a page titled "African American/Black History" on Ray Charles says:

The students sent a telegram to Ray Charles's hotel room. They asked him not to play. Charles read that telegram and could have simply canceled. That would have been enough for most people, and most tellings of this story stop right there.

Emphasis mine. Uh. Yeah. Huh.

[ related topics: Travel Artificial Intelligence Race ]

Turns out when autocorrect turns "Petaluma" into "proteins", the search isn't terribly useful.

When we made a YC application, there was a question: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

I'm reminded of this reading "Empire of AI".

I see it as an indication that YCombinator requires you to have fucked people over to qualify.

[ related topics: History Artificial Intelligence ]

"If you have a structure of the future where there's a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you're working on, that's great for society. It's actually not that good for your business."

Peter Thiel, as quoted in Karen Hao's book "Empire of AI"

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Books Invention and Design History Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Science Based Medicine: No Pandemic Revisionism: Since They Won’t Remind You, Here’s What Drs. John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, Actually Said 6 Years Ago

This is a really good read: Friday Archaeology: A Communist Apple II and Fourteen Years of Not Knowing What You’re Testing

I grew up using Правец (Pravetz) computers — forgive the Cyrillic, but we Bulgarians invented the alphabet, even though half the Slavic world claims the credit, and besides, it makes any noun look like classified military hardware. Every Bulgarian of a certain age used one. The Правец 82 was the machine in my school, with its yellow plastic case, black keyboard, red RESET key, and the unmistakable aura of a computer that had been reverse-engineered from a capitalist original by engineers who had never seen Cupertino and didn’t need to.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Children and growing up Weblogs Law Heinlein ]

Adële's blog: The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client

What I wanted was something in between: a client that runs in a plain browser, handles images properly, but does not require a JavaScript engine to display a list of posts. The API returns JSON; a server-side script can turn that JSON into HTML just fine. We have been doing that for 25 years.

So I built SmolFedi.

Think I'm gonna have to install and play around with this.

[ related topics: Weblogs Machinery Handicaps & Disabilities ]

In response to Peter @peter@thepit.social

ChatGPT was released to the public four years ago and today i can't think of a single software feature or product that uses it that i would miss if it disappeared today.

Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love writes:

@peter @Binder I've been in ML/data science since 2018, formally, but worked with big data in a scientific sense since the mid 90s and one thing that keeps striking me like a thunderclap is how no LLM bro seems to be aware that while there have been refinements in the statistics and efficiencies of architecture, there hasn't been significant improvement in the fundamental outcomes of the statistics since probably 2019?

The lack of progress defies Moore's "law" and no one in the pro LLM space wants to even mention how "progress" has seemingly halted. Or was never happening in the first place.

There's a paper from a year ago (I'll dig the citation out of Computerphile's archives in a bit) that posits that any significant difference from feeding LLMs more content asks for an impossible amount of new ingested (stolen) information if the aim is to train a general LLM. In other words the method has already peaked.

It is just one paper. But to me it explains further AI development more as a profiteering Ponzi scheme and not actual Golden Age of Humanity and Computing.

The paper is No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance which, it looks like, I haven't linked to before.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Software Engineering Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Mathematics Machinery Trains Artificial Intelligence Architecture Archival Model Building Joss Whedon - Serenity / Firefly ]

Welp, it just happened to me. Luckily, I had a backup. I've been trying to figure out if I'm being unduly harsh on LLM code generation, so I started asking Gemini CLI to build an app.

An app that accesses an existing database.

It's been an interesting process. I now understand how a lot of regressions are happening at work, it's super easy to have the LLM rewrite code that I didn't ask it to.

But you can see where this is going.

Luckily, I have a backup of the database.

What's most interesting to me is that, by the time it finally happened, I was actually angry. I typed

What the fuck? Why did you drop my old table?

before I realized that I was, in fact, anthropomorphizing the plausible sentence generator.

I even got lulled into a false sense of security because as the code generation proceeded it was doing things that added columns to the database schema and I figured I'd just fix that stuff up later in code.

Yesterday, I saved off Fi 🏳️‍⚧️ @munin@infosec.exchange

really wish that I had a more accessible way to explain "something that is right 90% of the time is vastly more dangerous than something that is wrong 90% of the time" to people.

Today I'm wondering how one might set up Gemini CLI to run in a container or chroot jail...

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

WTF? Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 700%

I'm guessing it's one of those "people with an idea find a small cap company to take over the board of rather than go through the diligence to IPO" plays.

[ related topics: Shoes Artificial Intelligence Birds Economics ]

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose. On VF Corporation buying JanSport, The North Face, Eastpak, Kipling, Eagle Creek. Segmenting the market, making the low and mid range values crap to do value extraction from the brand.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Economics Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

This whole thread: Gwen Snyder is uncivil ‪@gwensnyder.bsky.social‬

Spending a lot of time ripping out crab grass by hand so my clover can take root out back, and it has me meditating a lot on what it means to take out fascists.

We always used to say it was whack-a-mole, it wasn't.

Successful antifascism in a democracy is a practice of weeding

Whoah! I've had them on a recurring donation for a little while, Petaluma Voice has launched... errr... hatched!

https://www.petalumavoice.org/petaluma-voice-hatches-today/

AI Media House: Uber Let AI Write the Code. It Blew the Budget

Uber exhausted its annual budget for AI coding tools within the first months of 2026 as internal adoption scaled faster than expected, according to a report by The Information.

Via

[ related topics: Software Engineering Journalism and Media Television Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

Last night filling in for Eric at Tam Twirlers, tonight calling at Circle n Squares.

Square dance calling is definitely a joy and a bright spot right now.

Bwahahahaha: AI token freeloaders are coming for your customer support chatbot

“A normal customer service interaction of ‘Where’s my order? What are your hours?’ runs maybe 200 to 300 tokens. Someone asking the bot to reverse a linked list in Python is generating more than 2,000 tokens easy. That’s roughly a 10x cost multiplier per session,” says Nik Kale, member of the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI) and ACM’s AI Security (AISec) program committee.

Via.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Monty Python Artificial Intelligence Python ]

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange has "A few notes about the massive hype surrounding Claude Mythos", and points out that Anthropic apparently isn't using it on their own code: Beyond Machines: Anthropic Claude Code Leak Reveals Critical Command Injection Vulnerabilities.

Vidoc Security: We Reproduced Anthropic's Mythos Findings With Public Models.

Anthropic framed Mythos and Project Glasswing as proof that frontier AI vulnerability research now needs gated access. We tested the public, patched cases with GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 and found that the key building blocks are already accessible outside Glasswing, while reliable operationalization remains the real moat.

This thread that has a lot of good resources stemming off of AISI: Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities.

[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

erdgeist @erd@gei.st

OR: There will be no WW3. They’ve abandoned numbered releases and switched to a live service model with seasonal events.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

Morning giggle: Humanoid robot in some sort of race demo trips, destroys itself, is carried away on a stretcher (video).

[ related topics: Humor Robotics Video ]

LLMs have so poisoned the concept of "AI" for me that I automatically assume any pitch involving the phrase is bullshit, even if there might actually be reasonable machine learning behind it.

(This particular musing brought to you by email from NoamAI, no link 'cause I'm not sure if it's legit.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Fun little thread on the Utah teapot of computer graphics.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

The best part about this little bit of irony from this thing that's apparently just reskeeting anything with "AI" in it, and is likely just a bad reselling of someone else's LLM API, is that the link on their home page to their pricing is 404.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

rtyler @rtyler@buoyantdata.social

eternal sloptember

(reference)

Oh eeenteresting: Google's models respect Anthropic's poison pill constants. At work we just tried to use the Gemini API to summarize Flutterby, and it kept throwing errors.

Bwahahahaha!

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Cognitive Resonance: An illustrated guide to resisting "AI is inevitable" in education.

Which links to Pure Genius (dot) Education, which is brilliant.

[ related topics: Comics Education Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence ]

3 sentenced in 'unbelievable' bear attack insurance scam:

But the video and photos from the scene didn’t look quite right. During the investigation, detectives sent the footage to a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who “concluded the animal shown was clearly a human in a bear suit,” according to the news release from the California Department of Insurance. The team then realized similar claims had been made about damage to two Mercedes vehicles.

The news release includes a link to a Flickr image set that includes a picture of the bear suit. No human in it, alas.

[ related topics: Photography moron Current Events California Culture Automobiles Video ]

Lucy, the office pup, eyes deep in a Penry Park gopher hole.

Lucy, the office pup, eyes deep in a Penry Park gopher hole. With picture.

[ related topics: Photography ]

The boats have arrived for Butter and Egg Days.

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

Oh shit. Windows Defender exploit.

Via

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

SMS with a verification code from a 5 digit phone number I don't recognize. Moment of panic, then I search for the number and discover it's the Safeway Rewards login process.

Sorry, evildoer, you will not hijack my grocery coupons today!

[ related topics: Douglas Adams ]

State Bar of California: Attorney John Eastman Disbarred by the California Supreme Court.

Context for this Bluesky thread debunking the various people attempting to exonerate him.

Via.

[ related topics: Law Current Events California Culture ]

Is there either a really good intro to Rust's libcosmic, or a better/more mature widget set for Rust that isn't Qt?

I'd love something lightweight, but a table that doesn't appear to have edit in place capabilities, or truncate/wrap for long fields, seems... more archaic than I want.

[ related topics: Furniture ]

Down to Sausalito for the community garage sale this morning, and we're taking the slow way home. Stopped in Roy's Redwoods, first time we've been there since they refinishef the trail revamp.

Miss the old sense of wandering through forest but, given the increase in visitors, it's really nice.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Community Sausalito ]

Some days I think we're seeing the consequences of Computer Science education having become chanting "Resource Acquisition Is Initialization" as a religious incantation rather than actually building mental models about code and systems.

[ related topics: Religion Education ]

Provident decided to shut down our local hospice supporting thrift store, which sucks, but they're selling stock at 50% off. I got some honest-to-god programmer socks for a buck.

[ related topics: Religion Photography Software Engineering Clothing Economics ]

Pondering how the connectionist approach to AI had a quick flash with LLMs, but in order to actually make this stuff appear to be useful they need to be layered under regexes and tool guidance.

Conceding the field, once again, back to the symbolists.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca

"The Devil Went Down To Georgia" says that the Devil was "in a bind because he was way behind and he was willing to make a deal", suggesting that Satan Himself - note that the song specifies "the Devil", not "a devil" - has monthly quotas and faces consequences for not meeting those quotas. From this we can infer the existence of a greater and more sinister being capable of imposing KPIs on Satan Himself, suggesting in turn that KPIs themselves are the product of something more evil than Satan.

tef @tef@mastodon.social

i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical

i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend

as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars

so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses

[ related topics: Bay Area Mathematics Public Transportation ]

That Privacy Guy: Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop. Stuffs a bunch of browser extensions into your system.

Via Matthias Ott @matthiasott@mastodon.social

Can confirm this for Arc, Brave, Edge, Chromium, and Vivaldi on my machine:

#Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs hubris ]

Truth: Dave Winer ☕️ @davew@mastodon.social

Something that hasn't largely been noticed, we no longer have personal computers.

[ related topics: Dave Winer ]

JFC: The first agentic cannabis device

Not just a vape. A connected earning device. Gudtrip combines premium cannabis, blockchain rewards, and AI-powered asset tools in one product.

Created by Puffpaw, who sells a device as

...a smarter way to beat nicotine addiction by vaping for crypto rewards.

My mind boggles.

[ related topics: Cryptography Artificial Intelligence ]

Mississippi Free Press: Editor’s Note | We Unknowingly Published an AI Column by a Fake Author. Here’s What Happened. Not a whole lot of new there, they missed it, they feel bad, they're working to tighten up their processes. Via Taggart :ifin: @mttaggart@infosec.exchange who noted:

What happens when you must wonder if everything you read is synthetic, meaningless, intentionless wordloaf? What happens when most of the text around you actually is?

This is not about economics. It's not even about climate. It's about the damage to the metaphysical fabric of human existence.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Objectivism Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics Global Warming ]

Listening to Darknet Diaries: Superbox, in which Jack Rhysider interviews D3ADA55 about a pirate TV box that's sold via BestBox and Wal*Mart (through their third party online programs), through an MLM scheme at your local farmer's market, and mailed unsolicited for free to people who work in the petroleum industry, and sold under other brands such as "Magabox" ("Show your patriotism by putting a foreign threat actor's tool on your local network").

And, of course, is not just core to some sort of botnet, but is also exploited by other players for integration into other botnets.

I've been, you know, kinda concerned about the various embedded devices that I've dropped on to my network ("Hey, solar power controller! Cameras! Other stuff that I probably don't even remember that I added!"), but... yeah.

Edit: FBI: Home Internet Connected Devices Facilitate Criminal Activity — Alert Number: I-060525-PSA

[ related topics: Photography Technology and Culture Movies broadband Robotics Work, productivity and environment Television Pop Culture Embedded Devices Economics Photovoltaics ]

Is anybody else having kerning problems reading "Ternus" as "Temus", and thinking about the future of Apple?

(Not a dig at the guy, the MacBook Pro has definitely been rescued from the Ives era. Even if it's hobbled by Liquid Glass )

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama ]

UCLA Center for Parking Policy: Minimum Parking Requirments - A Research Synthesis

Eliminating minimum parking requirements does not eliminate the environmental, social, and economic harms of parking, but it can reduce their severity. Research indicates that the early effects of repeal are modest rather than dramatic. After requirements are lifted, drivers make more efficient use of existing parking infrastructure, and developers also continue to supply new parking. As a result, the total number of spaces and vehicles citywide may continue to grow while the number of parking spaces per capita declines over time. Minimum parking requirements exert a long shadow, having been entrenched in U.S. cities for more than 75 years. Even after repeal, cities will be dealing with the legacy of an oversupply of parking for many years to come.

I've only gotten as far as the executive summary, but my takeaway is that we should be probably aggressively pursuing parking maximums, not merely repealing parking minimums.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Economics ]

Were Abby‬ ‪@kellylink.bsky.social‬

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence hubris ]

The Onion (video): Fractures Emerge Between GOP’s Pro-Pedophilia, Extremely Pro-Pedophilia Wings

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Food Video ]

I've eventually, after looking at situations like Spade Cooley, come around to the fact that it's not bad to support the estate of people who've done horrific things, if the estate is paying into funds which help the victims. I can "separate the art from the artist" when the art is helping mitigate some of the damage.

I've also come around (and there's history on Flutterby, eg, of me being dismissive) to understanding that Michael Jackson was one hell of a singer, and, the product of a very fucked up childhood, and product of a very fucked up society in how we, collectively, handled his celebrity.

So I've been kinda looking forward to the upcoming Michael Jackson movie.

But I'm also well aware that... there's some problematic shit here. And somehow I missed this headline from January of last year, that Michael Jackson Biopic Needs Major Reshoots After Discovery of Past Legal Agreement with Molestation Accuser: Report.

More recently, Inside the ‘Michael’ Overhaul: $15 Million Reshoots, Removing Child Abuse Allegations and What’s in Store for Sequels which names the accuser whose lawyer made sure that there was to be no mention of said accuser in future films. Decades ago.

(Still) An(gr)i Bundel ‪@anibundel.bsky.social observed:

I feel like not enough reviewers know they had to remake the entire final third of the Michael Jackson movie because it falsely exonerated him, and it turned out the kid’s lawyer foresaw that shit in the 1990s and made sure to include a clause that the estate could never ever do that on film.

‪(Still) An(gr)i Bundel‬ ‪@anibundel.bsky.social‬

Note I said “remake.” As in, the Jackson estate apparently had *no idea* they had signed something 25 years ago that prevented them from ever defaming the kid until the movie was basically finished.

I can't imagine that the estate's legal team somehow dropped this. I would think that the screenwriters would have been working with these settlement agreements all the way through.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Movies History Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Archival ]

Update from "nobody thinks they're the villain in their own story" to "anybody who thinks they're the hero in their own story is probably the villain."

Beyond Code Snippets: Benchmarking LLMs on Repository-Level Question Answering March 2026

Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate two widely used LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) under both direct prompting and agentic configurations. We compare baseline performance with retrieval-augmented generation methods that leverage file-level retrieval and graph-based representations of structural dependencies. Our results show that LLMs achieve moderate accuracy at baseline, with performance improving when structural signals are incorporated. Nonetheless, overall accuracy remains limited for repository- scale comprehension. The analysis reveals that high scores often result from verbatim reproduction of Stack Overflow answers rather than genuine reasoning.

DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2603.26567

Via

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

Walking to work a little early this morning. Tons of kids biking on the sidewalk. Paint bike lanes really don't protect anyone, do they?

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

I'm learning Rust, and wow am I feeling the "docs are not written for humans" thing right now. And nor are forum responses. A lot of "I'm so smart, mark that particular example up this way", not a lot of "here's how to structure your code out of this mess".

[ related topics: Community Education ]

Vaccine. Volume 40, Issue 51, 5 December 2022, Pages 7500-7504 A historical analysis of vaccine mandates in the United States military and its application to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate Capt Brian P Elliott, Col Steven Chambers

doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.017 PMCID: PMC9376337 PMID: 35989135

Via

Financial Times (subscriber only) Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’.

Bloomberg Law: Sullivan & Cromwell Apologizes to Judge for AI Hallucinations.

Dietderich said he also apologized to lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner who alerted him to the errors. Matthew Schwartz, Boies Schiller’s chair, is counsel to Chen, according to a court document.

Some "what goes around here", Boies Schiller Flexner's John Kucera was in the hotseat last year for AI slop in a case against the Church of Scientology.

Above the Law: Sullivan & Cromwell Files Emergency ‘Please Don’t Sanction Us For All These AI Hallucinations’ Letter

Alerted to this by ‪Indefinitely Extended Hat‬ ‪@kenwhite.bsky.social‬

TFW Sullivan & Cromwell charges you $1200 an hour for a Yale graduate to ask grok “is this argument sus”

[ related topics: Religion Scientology Law Current Events Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Furniture ]

The Conversation: It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect is a look at Social Development: Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses Reveal no Gender Difference in Neonatal Social Perception

Existing evidence supports a possible maturational difference but not a specific social advantage for girls at birth. While more research and better reporting are needed, the present findings challenge the claim that girls are innately more socially perceptive than boys.

‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ summarized this as:

The evidence is pretty clear: boys will be boys is a myth. Kids are sociable creatures. We TEACH boys to be monsters and to hate girls. We TEACH boys to interpret puberty as an alienation from girls.

But it's also further confusion in my own search for identity, thinking about how much of who I was that I regret being in my 20s is a function of neuro-divergence vs my Waldorf school experiences.

[ related topics: Children and growing up tolkien Invention and Design Television Mathematics ]

Pondering Rust's fascination with f32 types. I remember being concerned about memory usage and floats vs doubles in the late '90s, but in the intervening decades I thought we'd kinda agreed that unless there's lots of them, doubles were faster. Am I just the wrong level of old?

Jaimie's Erotica @Jaimieserotica@kinkycats.org

Now that Apple have announced a new CEO is due to arrive soon, I wonder if they'll be deliberately slowing Tim Cook down with a view to completely bricking him when the new one arrives?

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Erotic Invention and Design Food ]

Public Domain Review: First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming, by Eunice Foote (1856)

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: Mobile phone short video use negatively impacts attention functions: an EEG study

These results suggest that an increased tendency toward mobile phone short video addiction could negatively impact self-control and diminish executive control within the realm of attentional functions. This study sheds light on the adverse consequences stemming from short video consumption and underscores the importance of developing interventions to mitigate short video addiction.

I'm... skeptical of EEG studies and results, and the "this is an addiction" opener, but wanted to find a place to refer back to this.

Via.

[ related topics: Video ]

So I'm fleshing out this app with Cosmic/Iced, and... is there a cross-platform widget set for Rust that's lighter weight and not so "rerender everything when the data model changes" based?

Preferably with a reasonable table control that has in-place editing, and cropping of columns with variable length (so a cell with long data in a column that fills doesn't overrun the next column)?

[ related topics: Furniture ]

maxine 🇵🇸 @maxine@hachyderm.io

Consider the following: rust rewrites of projects like coreutils exist purely to remove copyleft licensing. The supposed security and performance gains are irrelevant, and while memory safety is important, logic bugs don’t suddenly cease to exist just because it was written in Rust.

Phoronix: Ubuntu Rust Coreutils Audit Revealed 113 Issues, Ubuntu 26.10 Aims For "100% Rust Coreutils"

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Current Events ]

Ah, yes, when you have to use QuickTime Player to screen record XCode to catch the stack trace before XCode shits itself...

Got a Nixle alert to avoid Petaluma Boulevard South at Mountain View Ave so of course we had to walk down and see. Not sure how this happened, but I think the wheels side is supposed to stay down

[ related topics: Photography ]

Waymo Is Not In The ‘Vision Zero’ Toolbox: Data

Waymo has told advocates that expecting it to respect bike lanes is “too high a bar” because customers expect to be dropped off in them, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition.

“People always point out that unlike human driven cars, the AVs stop at lights and obey the speed limit. However, they are really only as good and effective and safe as they are programmed to be,” White said. “Waymos pull over into bike lanes all the time for pickups and drop-offs and that’s neither legal nor safe but the companies say that is a normal practice and that’s what customers expect.”

Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar” – because customers want to be dropped off in them, autonomous vehicle firm Waymo tells cyclists

Last June, a cyclist in San Francisco sued the Google-owned company after she was seriously injured when one of the brand’s driverless taxis stopped in a cycle lane and a passenger opened its back door, striking the cyclist and causing her to smash into another Waymo car that was also illegally blocking the bike path.

[ related topics: Bay Area Law Current Events California Culture Automobiles Pedal Power Race Bicycling ]

Looking at Rust GUI libraries, and I guess we just assume that compute is cheap enough that for every tick of the song playback slider/transport, we're willing to re-render all of the text and tables in the window as well now?

(I'm headed towards Relm/gtk4, which also gives me the hives. Sigh.)

[ related topics: Graphics Furniture ]

While I'm finding cool stuff in Rust: Pest

pest is a general purpose parser written in Rust with a focus on accessibility, correctness, and performance. It uses parsing expression grammars (or PEG) as input, which are similar in spirit to regular expressions, but which offer the enhanced expressivity needed to parse complex languages.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

Minetta Transportation Institute — MTI Electric Bicycle Safety Study Identifies Illegal, Over-Powered Devices as Key Problem

While nobody knows how many of these illegal electric bicycles are on the road, the percentage might be quite high. Counts of electric two-wheelers parked at a dozen northern California middle and high schools found that almost 90% may not meet the standards for legal electric bicycles. Some of these devices have as much as eight times more power than legal limits.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law California Culture Pedal Power Bicycling ]

An organization I'm involved with is running up against email providers fighting with MailChimp tracking links. It's unclear at what level of payment MailChimp stops adding that stuff.

Suggestions for migrating away, including alternate vendors and procedures, welcomed.

[ related topics: Sports ]

You could be somewhere else, or you could be at North Bay Python this weekend.

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Fantastic talk from Christopher Neugebauer to open North Bay Python: ""What is Correct?" and is that even the right question any more?"

I'm gonna have to rewatch this to let the lessons sink in.

#NBPy

[ related topics: Monty Python California Culture Python ]

"Debrief" implies that there is also "deboxer".

And what other types of furniture samples are there besides stool?

Continuing my exploration of finding a lightweight cross-platform widget set for Rust, and it's reinforcing my feeling that software development has become completely unserious.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Repeat of yesterday's picture, now with more sky texture. You should be at North Bay Python.

#NBPy

[ related topics: Photography Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Mario Munoz @pythonbynight@hachyderm.io "An Economy of Empathy" talk is definitely one I'm going to go back through and listen to with Charlene, and is the righteous sermon I needed this morning.

#NBPy

[ related topics: Religion Economics ]

This talk by @kattni@kattstodon.com is reminding me how much my model of how human behavior changes has evolved over the course of my life. I don't know if that's a general change in society or in the community I surround myself with, but I hope it's the former.

I appreciate the insights.

#NBPy

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Community ]

Joelle Maslak's talk "What Feminist Theory & Praxis Says About Internet Networking" has me thinking about "the cost of crossing boundaries" not just between process isolation or network locations, but also social boundaries.

#NBPy

[ related topics: broadband Net Culture ]

"The impact of a system is what we continue to allow." - amanda casari

#NBPy

If you believe that the best part of a conference is the hallway track, this year's North Bay Python feels like that. The conversations and presentations feel like the sort of thought provoking topics I want from a conference.

#NBPy

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Monty Python California Culture Conferences Python ]

"Technology is here to serve people, not the other way around." - Philip James

Not a "to serve man" reference.

#NBPy

"Technology only helps if your successor understands it." - Philip James

#NBPy

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

"The laser pointer does not own you." - @baconandcoconut@freeradical.zone

#NBPy

‪Jeff Baker‬ ‪@jwbee.bsky.social‬

AI has already taken my software job, not in the sense that I don't have one, but in the sense that I now hate the job and most of the other people.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

Wow. Archive.org has Byte Magazine online now. Via.

Mario Munoz has put the text of his Sunday morning talk at North Bay Python online. I'm waiting for the recording to experience it again, but it was exactly the Sunday morning angry sermon I needed: https://pythonbynight.com/talks/empathy

Via his Fediverse post

[ related topics: Religion Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Wolf SSL: Why C Remains the Gold Standard for Cryptographic Software. Lots of good stuff in here, including:

Side-channel resistance is difficult in any language.

What is true: as abstractions obscure execution behavior, side-channel properties become harder to reason about and harder to verify at scale. Rust provides tools to mitigate this—but using them extensively means abandoning most safety abstractions, bringing the problem space back toward C.

The issue is not impossibility—it’s verifiability without abstraction collapse.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Space & Astronomy ]

Fox 35: VIDEO: Truck runs over 250K Lamborghini in parking lot

By way of ReindeR Rustema @rrustema020@mastodon.nl

@notjustbikes about SUVs that are too dangerous.

In Orlando a lady in a huge monster truck drove her machine on top of a Lamborghini sports car in the parking lot of Crunch Fitness. Because she couldn't see the car.

Not fake, confirmed by journalists. https://www.nu.nl/325970/video...peperdure-lamborghini-in-vs.html

Another angle: https://youtu.be/mR1ojA5tlSs?si=zT_HHZ

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Automobiles Machinery Fashion Video ]

NowWeAreAllTom @tom@labyrinth.social

please join me in condemning the appalling bloodshed. we need a much more secure and refrigerated solution for the storage of blood. a shed is insufficient

Extremely simple little music player display, in Rust. MacBook Pro M2. The egui library is costing me 8.22ms per update (measured over 1k updates).

I'm offended by how inefficient this is. Is there a Rust GUI library that's actually practical, or that does minimal repaint/refreshes?

[ related topics: Language Books Music Photography ]

Kinda thinking LLM coding is like playing with live grenades. I mean, sure, you're bored, they're something to juggle, and hot damn, did you see that behind the back under the leg combo, why are you backing away, this is really cool?

Anyway, Tom's Hardware: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue

Via Peter @peter@thepit.social who observes:

That thread also has the original Twitter thread.

Also, if an LLM does nuke your data, please, for the love of all that's holy, do not ask the plausible sentence generator why it deleted your data. It does not "know". It doesn't matter how frustrated and angry you are. It just exposes that you are suffering from epistemia (mentioned previously).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Software Engineering Theater & Plays Artificial Intelligence Databases Public Transportation Archival ]

After years and years of tolerating it, I finally fixed an issue with how the Flutterby formatter handles <br> tags. Actually, not so much how it handles it as with how modern browsers handle </br> tags.

Anyway, in the process I willy-nilly changed the doctype. Holler if you see anything stupid, or if I regressed utf-8 handling again, or something.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama hubris ]

ni cole4fox -> GPN @nicole4fox@datastream.cortexvoid.net

"I'm down for whatever as long as it doesn't increase shareholder value"

pubes with poop on em @poopypubes@jorts.horse

Me: it's not OK to stan any side of a war
Iran: *bombs an Oracle data center
Me: *biting knuckles, squirming*

[ related topics: History Databases ]

My talk on Modern Western Square Dancing at North Bay Python this weekend is live...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJVvaz8eFwA

#NBPy

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Monty Python California Culture Python ]

Wow. So this weekend at North Bay Python, the Apify folks were doing a "try out our API, win something". I'd had a glass of wine, so I fired up my phone, did a few queries to enter myself in the raffle, and carried on.

I'm not sure what I did that's ongoing, but just got the "you hit your $100 intro bonus API cost" email.

So clearly there was something I didn't understand. Another entry in the "I'm scared of cloud billing" bucket.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits Monty Python California Culture Python ]

This post was made blank.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

that genehack guy from that dead bird site ‪@extremely.website‬

Current status: wondering what percentage of my GenAI skeptisim is grounded in having lived thru the Matt’s Script Archive phase of the “this lets everybody code” era.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Birds ]

Woman’s Talkspace therapy app sessions exposed in court

Don't fucking trust pyschotherapy apps. Holy shit.

Via, MeFi thread.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Lobste.rs this morning:

* Ghostty leaving github (comments) * Github banned me for no understandable reason (comments) * Before GitHub (comments) * From GitHub to Codeberg/Forgejo (comments) * Ditching GitHub (comments) * An update on GitHub availability (comments) * Github Actions is the weakest link (comments)

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing Current Events ]

Feminist Hacking: MaKING Printed Circuit Boards with Wild Clay

Via Tom's Hardware: Hacktivists share a guide on making working electronics PCBs made from natural clay with prehistoric technique — ethical hardware tutorial explains how to find clay, stamp 3D printed circuits, paint traces, and fire tablets

Via Calishat @researchbuzz

[ related topics: Ethics Work, productivity and environment Graphics Pyrotechnics Douglas Adams ]

University of British Columbia: Are you addicted to your AI chatbot? It might be by design

AI chatbots can grant almost any request—a celebrity in love with you, a research assistant, a book character sprung to life—instantly and with little effort. New research presented at the  2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems suggests that this genie-like quality is fuelling AI addiction, and that chatbot design could be partly to blame.

Via ResearchBuzz

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Current Events Graphic Design Education Artificial Intelligence Conferences ]

dave @dthompson@toot.cat

all this talk about tokens this and tokens that. they turned my profession into chuck e cheese.

KDE is turning 30 this year!

KDE contributor Farid inspired us to take on the “30 for 30” challenge: for our 30th birthday, we are asking you to do something to help the environment and make the planet a nicer place to live in. Farid is planting 30 trees and we want you to come up with something similar.

Film you and your crew carrying out your effort and we will promote your project on social media.

Here are some more ideas:

• Rescue 30 computers (or more!) from ending up in a landfill
• Upcycle 30 phones with a free mobile operating system
• Clean up 30 hectares of woodland
• Convert 30 people to a free operating system
• Take 30 techbros to court so they stop building AI datacenters

Via.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Gardening ]

Lots of stuff I'm struggling with in this, and I need to rewatch it:

North Bay Python: "What is Correct?" and is that even the right question any more? - Christopher Neugebauer - 2026 (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Movies Monty Python California Culture Video Python ]