Flutterby™! From 2026-06-01 to 2026-06-30

That drama with the little faun who spent all day alone in the shadow by the house has the cutest resolution. https://youtube.com/shorts/aEgeqCyW8rc

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Helping Celia put up her pictures at the Rivermark Community Credit Union.

[ related topics: Photography Community ]

I love a good "show asks if there's anyone in the audience who can play, random pianist saves the show" story.

https://www.the-independent.co...ence-concert-video-b2987083.html

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Theater & Plays Current Events Video Real Estate ]

Audiveris is amazing for music OCR, though I'm trying to figure out how to clean up lyrics, but dang the search engines are falling down on serving up the malware dot-com address rather than the actual site.

We definitely need a better web.

https://github.com/Audiveris/audiveris

[ related topics: Music ]

Give tools to your AI support bots. What could go wrong? 404 Media: Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked. (Among other places, via Tara Calishain).

Related, and I missed the source, but I saw a reference to one of the code assistant chatbots writing to root-owned files by using the fact that they were in the "docker" group, and that they could create external mounts to docker containers, and then running the process overwriting the files as root inside the container.

I didn't track down the full source, and I don't pretend to understand Docker configs, but it sure seems like giving these things access to tools is fraught...

[ related topics: Writing Journalism and Media Sports Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]

I recently learned that the city of Petaluma complained about the guerilla garden at the 5th and H St traffic circle because of the height.

This is what real cities do for neighborhood traffic circles.

[ related topics: Photography Gardening ]

My neighbor turned me on to this story of a former coworker of his.

If I ever deck someone in a church, I hope I'm prepared enough to throw multiple 40 oz "incendiary devices" at the cops.

https://contracostaherald.com/...-during-high-speed-police-chase/

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Law Enforcement ]

Sunrise woke me up at like 5:30, so I'm out walking Portland's Hawthorne District, and I come by Golden Hour Coffee Co., opens at 9AM...

Uhhhh.

Yesterday receiving a friend took me on a tour of the Portland maker space they're a member of, Past Lives. It's an amazing space, but getting there reminded of how much zoning has taken from us.

[ related topics: History Space & Astronomy ]

Aah, high school graduation speeches... "You are all equally unique individuals."

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Slow street signs in Portland are a mood.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Portland has malware on bill boards. This is a redirect to Cody(dot)md, a chatbot that... Uh. Yeah. Don't take medical advice from a chat bot.

Back from my trip. Playing catch-up.

Which has led to household discussion of what other condiments are playable.

[ related topics: Travel Community ]

Thomas Fuchs @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Steve Jobs: “Computers are a bicycle for your mind.”

Satya Nadella: “Computers are heroin for your mind.”

404 Media: Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal

Futurism: In Leaked Document, Microsoft Plots How to Get People “Addicted” to Its AI.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Microsoft Invention and Design moron Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Say someone wanted to buy a small batch, 50-100, of compression springs. I'm flexible, from ball point pen size to say .25"od by 1" long.

There has to be a cheaper way to do this than buying 100 retractable ball point pens, right?

‪Girl_Poss🔞‬ ‪@girlposs.hyper.wang‬

Good morning!!!! creating porn and masturbation is a radical act against american nationalist values. be proud, theres no failure in enjoying eroticism. erotica is a part of us!!!

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Inspired by catch @catch56@kolektiva.social, I asked Google "how many days of the week have cans of petroleum in them?, and unlike them it actually gave me a hit about why the answers are so silly:

All 7 days of the week have cans containing petroleum in them. This is a classic riddle about the days of the week and a well-known linguistic quirk: every single day from Monday to Sunday ends with the letter combination "can".

Additionally, petroleum is hidden in a vast array of everyday commercial and food products!

Looks like we've hit another "fox and grain and boat" kind of edge case.

[ related topics: Food Law Boats Machinery ]

I'm not sure quite how to title this "Notice of Exempt Solicitation Pursuant to Rule 14a-6(g)" filed by Trillium Asset Management, LLC re the Target Corporation, an attempt to shift the board, but there's a lot of good in it:

In our assessment, Target's lagging financial performance stems principally from a series of operational and strategic missteps that have materially impaired the Company's brand. Multiple reports indicate persistent challenges with disorganization, high out-of-stocks, and poor employee morale, leading to a diminished in-store experience. Furthermore, Target appears to have eroded its longstanding reputation for distinctive, fashion-forward merchandise assortments. Compounding these issues, Target has repeatedly entangled itself in social controversy over the past several years, including its decision to pull back its Pride collection, the rollback of its DEI initiatives, and, most recently, its limited public response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities at certain store locations. These developments have elicited substantial consumer backlash, manifesting in protests, boycotts, and reputational harm. Consequently, Target may have alienated key customer demographics, including Black, Latino, LGBTQ+, and progressive consumer segments.

Uh. Yep. Via.

[ related topics: History Theater & Plays Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Marketing Fashion Economics Archival ]

Pro Publica: In This Church, Child Sexual Abuse Has Gone Unchecked for So Long That It Spans Generations. This is particularly about the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, and it sounds extra horrific, but I'm guessing if you scratch the surface of pretty much any church there's similar stuff going on:

What’s more, the church teaches that once a perpetrator is forgiven, anyone who speaks about the wrongdoing — including the victim — can be accused of harboring an unforgiving heart. Those who have left the church, as well as some who are still with it, say this means the burden of sin shifts from the person who committed the act to the person who refuses to let the matter rest.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Iris Meredith: The attack on competence

I'll just use the same excerpts as ‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬, although I think Elf isn't quoting accurately, but is capturing the sense:

"The investor class is in a bind. Cunning is not the same as smart. But today's tech world, being seen as smart is essential to their legitimacy... Competence is a threat to the illusion of legitimacy ... if any engineer can tell a CEO he's full of shit."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs tolkien ]

This is a fascinating read: Steven Murdoch ‪@steven.murdoch.is‬

For 19 years, GPS satellites have secretly broadcast a “numbers station” in their signals. We decoded 12M messages: a 2011 flash where 31 satellites flipped in hours, “ghost” substrings repeating years apart, and a “TEXT” prefix spreading now. https://lsc- pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=865273&p=62&view=issueViewer

https://github.com/sjmurdoch/gps-special-messages

[ related topics: Cryptography Maps and Mapping ]

Elf Sternberg posts a Bluesky thread on nuclear vs wind.

[ related topics: tolkien ]

Interesting screencap of Codex using Docker to write to root-only files

The 19th: ‘Intersectionality’ scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw thinks it’s time for everyone to talk back. I think I'm going to have to read this memoire.

Woohoo! Knew that trading my privacy for a browser gamification experience would pay off some day!

[ related topics: Privacy ]

Interesting conversation at square dancing last night, someone had tried to use one of the chatbots, and his take-away was that as long as it didn't have any model for correctness it really wasn't useful for anything but entertainment.

Good to see non-tech people discovering this independently.

🌯 Chipotlai Max

The AI coding agent that steals Chipotle's support bot. Free inference paid for by burritos.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

A "pride flag" rainbow in which the blue line extends outside the rectangle. The caption reads:

There is no such thing as pride without a thin blue line.

The brave men, women, and non-binary heroes at Stonewall couldn't have thrown bricks at cops if there hadn't been any cops.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Law Enforcement hubris ]

Things that put the climate crisis in context: A Nextdoor post from someone complaining that they just spent $7.99/lb on beef...

[ related topics: Food Global Warming ]

[ related topics: Photography ]

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

If you're wondering why Anthropic et all are publicly making stupid claims ('our AI that writes itself!') and begging world governments to regulate them - while directing the regulation via lobbying - it's pretty simple: they're locking out competitors.

If you read through this draft of "The Great American AI Act" it's pretty clear that nobody but the current big players will be able to comply. It's "regulate me, daddy" = "make sure nobody else can compete".
https://trahan.house.gov/uploa...ican_ai_act_discussion_draft.pdf

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Community Artificial Intelligence Real Estate hubris ]

Casual question: Is there a discography to YouTube database anywhere? I dummied up some data using yt-dlp and Jacob Collier's playlists, but I'm playing around with browsing an artist, and it'd be cool to do this in a more generic sense.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Databases ]

Written in response to a friend sharing this Rachel Hurley post on Facebook:

"But the fact they're even bringing it up is perplexing. Why suggest something so impossible?" I think this is obvious: They're looking for regulatory capture.

Thursday night I was calling a square dance in Santa Rosa, one of the dancers and I were chatting and he mentioned an AI experience in which it "hallucinated"[1] things, and that if it didn't have an underlying knowledge or model, there was no way it could be useful for anything but entertainment.

When the non-technical people are figuring it out, the writing is on the wall.

At this point in order to bring value to pay off the money already shoveled down the rathole we need to be seeing tens of billions of dollars of revenue a month. Programmer productivity is notoriously hard to measure, but the workplaces foolish enough to pay for LLMs for programmers are starting to cap usage costs far far below anything that would bring that, because it seems like all they really do is *change* programming to a model that's less engaging, that reduces the levels of programmer understanding of the systems they're building.

Customer support? The only application is wasting customer's time until they give up and go away. If you give it the tools to actually do anything, you're in for a world of hurt[2], and some of the discussions of ways that these things can exploit side effects[3] mean they're impossible to secure.

I have a larger theory bubbling about what Capital actually responds to, because it's not competence (other people are dancing around the same thought[4]). But at some point that meets up with reality, and...

I really really hope that we can have something other than a bunch of tilt-up sprawl and environmental destruction to show for it, but I'm betting that, like previous bubbles, we the normal people will bear the brunt of the stupidity, and the shills will end up bailed out by government policy.

If we can get loud enough, maybe we can make sure that doesn't happen. It's probably going to have to involve large protests, because the systems of law are built to serve Capital, but we need to be loud enough that when this comes down those who've promulgated this grift on us pay for it out of their own hides.

[1] Quoted to emphasize that anthropomorphizing plausible sentence generators is wrong, but I did it anyway. Sigh.
[2] https://gizmodo.com/hackers-tr...or-instagram-accounts-2000766087
[3] https://infosec.exchange/@haroonmeer/116670973426246236
[4] https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/attack-on-competence

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Weblogs Software Engineering moron Writing Work, productivity and environment Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm not sure a still picture can capture the sense of "saunter" that's happening with these geese. They own the space, and they are aware.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy ]

With the news that Meta's AI bot is being used to steal accounts, hat tip to everyone who's used "Facebook Login" to trust Meta with their identity on third party services.

[ related topics: Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Good read on why conversations with LLMs aren't protected as attorney-client privilege: Elizabeth X Guo writing in the Harvard Law Review re United States v. Heppner.

The Heppner court assumed sub silentio that Claude was more like a non- attorney human than a tool. One might reasonably question that assumption. On the very same day of Judge Rakoff’s oral decision, the district court for the Eastern District of Michigan (in a civil case concerning work-product protection for a pro se litigant’s ChatGPT- generated materials) emphasized that “ChatGPT (and other generative AI programs) are tools, not persons” and represent “a litigant’s internal mental impressions reformatted though software.”

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

Arkansas state trooper resigns after wife files 'white supremacist' messages in divorce records

In a court filing, Alana requested sole custody of the children, with Michael given visitation rights so long as he completes a parenting course "in order to limit the hatred and prejudice that he has towards people."

The comments from the Arkansas State Police rep are extremely telling. Yikes.

Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Race Marriage ]

Short little video of an easter egg in the Lego Batman game that's awesome for those of us of a certain age. Via.

Edit: Fediverse post and thread, including BASIC source code and Browser based Commodore 64 emulator.

[ related topics: Games Lego Mindstorms Douglas Adams Video ]

In talking about the BoingBoing link to Vadim Drobinin: Am I a Bad Friend? , an observation of something I've felt, from ‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

It was at one party that I ran into a couple of friends I hadn't seen in a few weeks, and after a round of "How ya doin?" we ran out of things to talk about because we were so on-line we KNEW what was going on in their broader lives.

Elf M. Sternberg ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

We didn't have the gaps that took time to fill, that justified talking to each other, that justified spending time together.

Maybe the rise of TTRPGs and the like is a way to create a context for being together and trading synthetic experiences since the real experiences we used to trade are gone.

[ related topics: tolkien Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

If you're intrigued by thinking about story structure, I really enjoyed Uncanny Magazine: The Protagonist Problem by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Electrek: Carvana’s bet on Slate is ACTUALLY a bet on itself, as the future of automotive retail.

LibreOffice: An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement

In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010.

These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty.

[ related topics: Free Software Weblogs Open Source Currency ]

Tyler Jagt in The Chronicle of Higher Education: My Students Can’t Read — The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near- infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

If you don't want to wrangle a login/subscription. Via.

[ related topics: Language Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Education ]

While your local PD is crowing about the arrests they've made because of Flock cameras, it's worth thinking about one-way technology... Ars Technica: Man jailed for a month despite Flock showing he was 5 miles from crime scene... Which is a slightly different story than A Flock license plate reader linked a San Diego man to a violent crime. He was five miles away, making me think that maybe Ars is using AI summarization or AI headline writing or something?

Anyway, yeah...

The victim said he recognized Parra. “I know, because the jacket and the beard. The skin color,” reads the police report.

Emphasis mine.

[ related topics: Photography Writing Law Enforcement Artificial Intelligence ]

Wacky. Google's "turn Android into a desktop platform" to follow-up on Chromebooks is apparently called "ALOS" or "Aluminium OS", and aluminium-os(dot)com is on the top of the search results, but appears to be an ad farming, and possibly even malware redirecting (I didn't click on anything after the "spam you with notifications" popup), site?

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

Whoopsie. The Blight Reaches Microsoft: 73 Repos Disabled in 105 Seconds

GitHub disabled 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations — the entire Azure Functions org, the whole Durable Task family, and a row of AI sample apps — in a 105-second sweep on June 5. The recompromised durabletask package sits at the center, and the fingerprints point at the open-sourced Miasma worm.

Via Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social, that thread pointed to this thread which mentions a bunch of forked repos also getting blocked.

Speculation that this is related to the Miasma breach. Also notes about an "internal technical issue".

Anyway, do I need to go find a Satya Nadella AI quote for this, or can we just pretend I did?

[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft virus moron Sociology Artificial Intelligence Handicaps & Disabilities ]

I had a couple of posts saved off that linked to the video of this, then I dropped them 'cause when am I gonna watch that, and now I can't find 'em, but... the notes: N K Jemisin: Text of my Grand Master speech:

There is value in tradition, until it becomes a chain wrapped around a child. To people who feel that there is a threat to tradition, anything is better than growth, even death.

That's a balance I'm definitely struggling with, but I sure appreciate Jemisin's take.

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Cutting-Edge Pizza Analytics @decay@todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com

The primary purpose of age verification mechanisms is to facilitate child abuse and we shouldn't beat around the bush about that. People who push it whine about porn but if you actually drill down what they're really mad about is their kids being able to find out that queer people exist or that socialist theory is available

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Erotic Sexual Culture ]

‪Dayv‬ ‪@dayv.wtf‬

"Pronoun police"? Please. The proper term is the gendermes.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Miami Herald: Exclusive: The Palm Beach cop who Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t stop.

It's largely a puff piece about Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, with some speculation that Epstein had a mole in the police department or the DA's department, but there's some reminders in there about how this is a class and collaborator thing.

Via your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 @blogdiva@mastodon.social, including gift code.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Worst People Imaginable Freak Out Over Racist Plantation Game As Valve Watches From The Sidelines

As Chris Trottier @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org summarizes:

Plantation Simulator was advertised as a game in which you could buy and abuse black slaves. This isn’t that notable. There’s lots of edgelord games out there made for and by terrible people.

What is notable is that, two hours after it was launched—outside Steam’s refund window—the dev issued a patch that turned all the slaves white.

This upset a lot of awful people who bought the game with the expectation that they could enslave black people only to realize they could no longer do this. They were now stuck with white slaves. The whole thing was a rug pull.

As of May 24, the dev has since removed the game from Steam, claiming he’s said everything he wanted to say.

But before it was removed, this game had overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam. But not because it was racist. No, it was because racists could no longer live out their fantasy.

But it gets better. From the Kotaku article:

A further update not long after changed the whipping animation to a string of hearts, put bikinis on the slave characters, and updated the mature content description to, “In this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies.” Since that update, the user reviews have entirely flip-flopped, with a cascade of negative reviews complaining now about a lack of diversity and a deceptive product. Again, most of these reviews have an hour or less playtime, and basically all of them include racist remarks.

[ related topics: Erotic Games Theater & Plays Race ]

AI-generated podcasts: Synthetic intimacy and cultural mistranslation in audio overviews from Google’s NotebookLM Jill Walker Rettberg

I find that although NotebookLM appears to create a customised podcast just for you, it is in fact applying a very particular template to all the podcasts. NotebookLM translates (and mistranslates) sources into Standard American English both linguistically and culturally. I argue that NotebookLM’s abstracted model podcast genre is a holdover from the 20th century idea of a shared public sphere, in contrast to the multiple public spheres that are nurtured by human podcasts.

Via

[ related topics: Music Sociology Artificial Intelligence ]

Kirk pulled a quote from this video on Mega Man 2.

His design rules for Mega Man 2 were specific and deliberate. Enemies appeared in small waves, three or four at a time, using the same attacks, so players could actually learn the pattern. Terrain and placement adjusted the challenge, not random enemy behavior. And here's the detail that reveals everything. The last enemy in each wave was easier than the ones before it. I'll say that again on purpose. The final enemy in a wave was easier. Why? Kamura explained the psychology this way. He'd notice that people don't replay games, even good ones, because when they think back, their minds go to the hardest parts, and that memory makes replaying feel like work. He didn't want players remembering Mega Man 2 as a slog. He wanted them to remember feeling like they were getting better. And then he said something that is essentially the entire point of this video. I quote, "I wanted the player to feel like he was improving at the game, too."

I've been thinking a lot recently about addictive behaviors and product design and... okay, full disclosure, I have a Stardew Valley save with over 300M gold. I recently deleted the Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit apps from my phone.

I'm struggling with this as much as anyone else. I mean, sure, I've got a walk to and from the office, that's some time to do some mindless tapping, but...

Circa 2001, I had a Sega Dreamcast with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 on it. At some point I was trying to unlock the hidden area in the final level, and spent a bit of time on it, and realized I wasn't building transferrable skills.

Sometime in between now and then, I was playing Half-Life 2, and realized that if I went into a melee with low health, the attacks were nerfed and I could move through the levels more quickly.

Games have gotten more refined, and now Stardew Valley doesn't require any skill, it's just tap for dopamine. But at least it wears its politics on its sleeve, and you discover pretty soon that maybe having little creatures that live on your farm and harvest your crops, whose color you can change, is kinda problematic? That, as you kill all of the denizens of a level of tiled, lit, underground space, obviously an advanced civilization, in order to steal their cloth, that maybe there's a commentary on colonialism here?

Charlene and I are hooked on a TV show called The Way Home (and other friends whove tried it have gotten similarly hooked), and one of the recurring themes is a compulsion to participate in history, in a way that explores addictive behavior, so maybe that's the thing that's framing my experience of the world these days.

But, between "AI"/LLM chatbots, online gambling, computer games, etc., I'm wondering where the boundary is in the things that we create between giving us joy, giving us new experiences, and exploiting holes in human perception to create deliberately addictive experiences.

And I'm pondering this as someone who participates in a lot of IRL stuff, indeed as someone who's an organizer of a lot of community, from square dance calling to Urban Chat forums.

I don't have good answers, but I'm disturbed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Games Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Technology and Culture Health Movies Star Trek Invention and Design Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Television Graphic Design Community Artificial Intelligence Birds Video Gambling ]

stux⚡️ @stux@mstdn.social

It’s absurd

People are paying for AI tokens to create bot accounts on #Mastodon to post nonsense, increasing the costs for servers, storage and emails all while making the #AI hype even bigger so our servers are gonna costs a lot more

And some wonder why I hate pointless LLMs (AI) so much🤔

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I know I've linked to something like this before, maybe even this site, but I can't find it right now. moh_kohn: How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight.

Via.

Terence Eden’s Blog @blog@shkspr.mobi: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML, on a developer observing a young woman in a UK housing benefits office browsing the service's sites on a PlayStation Portable. Lots more on that in the resulting Fedi thread.

What Web Does Tommi Want? 🤯 @tommi@pan.rent has a picture of a T-shirt that reads:

HTML& CSS& JS& not you SVG

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing Clothing Real Estate ]

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. On what "AI" and LLMs are doing to astrophysics.

David Hogg, in his white paper, says something that cuts against this institutional logic so sharply that I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it. He argues that in astrophysics, people are always the ends, never the means. When we hire a graduate student to work on a project, it should not be because we need that specific result. It should be because the student will benefit from doing that work.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Race Model Building ]

From tante @tante@tldr.nettime.org and Peter Rojas @roj.as:Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

Google's AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn't respond appropriately.

Google's defense was that users could check the linked sources themselves. The Decoder notes that Pew finds that only 1% of users click a source link from Google's AI overviews. Oumi’s Study Finds 50% of AI Overviews Untrustworthy:

Of the AI Overviews powered by Gemini 3 we were able to assess, about 91% contained the correct answer. Only 39% of the total overviews were both correct and fully supported by its cited sources, a combination we term “trustworthy.”

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

Google's defence needs to be amplified by anyone talking to politicians about 'AI' regulation:

Google is explicitly saying in their legal filing that the outputs from their LLM should not be trusted and that users should know that.

That's one hell of an admission. Imagine saying that about any other category of product.

That also feels remarkably similar to Fox News's defense in libel cases. Chisnall also notes:

The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality.

It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors knows this. And that's now an on-the-record statement made under penalty of perjury that can be entered as evidence in any court case against companies selling LLM- integrated tooling.

Edit: The Decoder: Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers (lobste.rs.

Ars Technica: Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Law Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Jull Walker Rettberg @jilltxt.bsky.social has a thread in English talking about Teknologirådet in Norway's report on their own use of LLMs (in Norwegian)

These Popular Snacks Contain High Levels of Additives and Contaminants

A new investigation from Consumer Reports and Yuka reveals that some of America’s most ubiquitous foods—from brands like Cheetos, Hostess, and Jell-O—contain concerning substances. How did we get here?

They note that many of the products they tested exceed the daily consumption limits in a single serving, calling out Hostess Donettes Powdered Mini Donuts and Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies.

Via.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Food Consumerism and advertising ]

404 Media: Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People. A good rundown of Flock license plate reader tracking abuse.

Via.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]

The Autopian: The $30,000 Ford EV Pickup Is Way Smaller Than You Think. We Got An Exclusive Look.

‪Kay Leadfoot @ FuelArc News‬ ‪@kayleadfoot.bsky.social‬ says

AW HELL YES IT'S FORD e-RANGER

Which... kinda. Looks more like a Maverick, the bed walls still seem high, and it's a 4 door.

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles Furniture ]

Pro Publica does a profile of Mark McAfee of Raw Farm, a raw milk producer that's been linked to various salmonella and e. coli poisonings, and a bird flu related recall.

“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

Via Tara Calishain. Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social points out that the reason he sells everywhere but Minnesota is accountability, because the Minnesota Department of Health uniquely oversees a team of interviewers called Team Diarrhea who track down food poisoning cases fast enough to actually pin down fresh dairy products.

The thing is... I grew up on raw milk. I find pasteurized milk to be kinda yicky (though that could also be homogenization, and breed of cattle and what not). But the more I learn about aspects of the culture I grew up in, the more I realize how horrific some of it was.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health virus Food Sociology California Culture Birds ]

Beth Winegarner: San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum. Including a listing of inmates and prisoners.

Same author: Mission Local: The hidden, painful history of SF’s Magdalen Asylum.

Via.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications.

The thing is: I’m not special. Every writer and creative person, from the most successful down to the very newest, is inundated with these scam spam emails. Lots of them, every single day. Pretty much every one of us, I assure you, now associates “AI”- generated text with attempted fraud.

AI writing has become the modern day Facebook ad: sure, the product looks intriguing, but you know this particular link is a scam.

[ related topics: Spam moron Writing Monty Python Artificial Intelligence ]

daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social

working theory: we get fewer vulnerability reports late in the weeks as the researchers have all run out of tokens by now...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

"AI............is inevitable." (YouTube video)

Making art in 2026 (Fediverse Video).

[ related topics: Movies Art & Culture Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Search Engine Roundtable: Bing Gives Searchers A Way To Disable AI Copilot Answers

Jordi Ribas, the President, Head of Search at Microsoft, wrote on X about this saying, "We just shipped a preview extension in Bing that lets you toggle AI chat-like features on or off with just one click."

Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice for Chrome
Microsoft Bing AI Search Choice for Edge

Windows Central: Bing users can now disable AI Copilot search results with this new extension

Installing the Chrome data extension warns that

It can:

Read and change your data on bing.com and www.bing.com

Replace the page you see when opening a new tab

Read your browsing history

Change your search settings to bing.com

I was alerted to this by elilla& com pomba-gira de frente @elilla@transmom.love

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Invention and Design moron Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

The Arch Linux AUR (Arch User Repository) had over 400 packages compromised with malware

There's a thread on the public AUR Mailing List with people reporting packages, where it seems like over 400 packages were hit with the issue. Arch packager Jonathan Grotelüschen mentioned work was ongoing to "reset/delete all malicious commits and ban the accounts".

ifin: 400+ AUR Packages Compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit points to Taggart :ifin: @mttaggart@infosec.exchange

I'm trying to understand the details of AUR processes for submitting PKGBUILDs. In other words, how exactly did this happen? arojas submitted hundreds of changes to PKGBUILD or related files. And they were just...accepted? What am I missing?

Edit: What I missed was this was pure impersonation. The maintainer is fine, but the process was vulnerable to spoofing.

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

The future is going great...

The future is going great (with picture)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Lan Tian: AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42

dn24, "decentralized network 24", is a large dynamic VPN that people play around in. The entire thing looks like a poorly formed agent coming in to wreak havoc, and a bunch of networking hobbyists deciding to make a game of it, and... hilarity ensues.

Via. Edit: Lobste.rs thread.

ava's blog: our workplace LLM mass delusion (Via).

McSweeney's: AI Economics for Dummies by Andrew Singleton is only barely distinguishable as satire from Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At:

1. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.

BlueSky thread from Michael Okun ‪@michael-okun.bsky.social‬:

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 Jailbroken to Generate Stack Exploits

Researcher “Pliny the Liberator” defeats Claude Fable 5’s safety classifiers using multi-agent decomposition, Unicode tricks, and narrative framing, leaking the model’s 120,000- character system prompt along the way.

[ related topics: Books Games Weblogs broadband Space & Astronomy Law Artificial Intelligence Economics Real Estate ]

Renaissance Petaluma: Who gets to build?

Good to see downtown merchants getting on board with reforming how we permit and approve new construction.

https://renaissancepetaluma.org/who-gets-to-build

[ related topics: Invention and Design Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

That is not the ferry...

[ related topics: Photography Public Transportation ]

McCormack, M. and Adams, A. and Anderson, E. (2013) 'Taking to the streets : the benefits of spontaneous methodological innovation in participant recruitment.', Qualitative research., 13 (2). pp. 228-241.

We identified four key problems that made this an ineffective method of recruiting participants (see also Hartman 2011). The first was that many people who responded to our messages only wanted to have sex with us.

Via ‪rahaeli‬ ‪@rahaeli.bsky.social‬.

They take a long time to get around to the actual sampling method, but... "forty bucks is forty bucks".

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Finished watching Motel Drive last night. That's a powerful (short, 1 hr) movie with no good answers, but a lot of questions we should be having conversations around.

Housing policy, drug policy, urban design, education... and it ends maybe kinda hopeful?

[ related topics: Health Movies Travel Graphic Design Education Real Estate ]

Jackon Rickun writing on Substack was just laid off from Grindr:

All of this has shown me that nothing ever needed to be good. It needed to be done, and done used to require a person who knew how. Good was just this…. cool little side effect. Now to get something done you don’t need the person. Done is free, good is extra, and nobody pays extra. Congratulations to done! Flawless victory!

Via.

[ related topics: Writing ]

Patrick Siegman‬ ‪@siegman.biz‬

SB 79, which allows apartments up to 9 stories tall near major transit stops, goes into effect on 7/1.

If you or someone you know is struggling to cope, help is here! Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you process strong emotions in a healthier way:

State law will put more housing near transit stops. This SoCal map finally shows where

Kaiser Permanenty: Self-guided CBT techniques to improve your mental health.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Current Events Television California Culture Maps and Mapping Public Transportation Real Estate ]

‪Edith‬ ‪@edithcharles.bsky.social‬

You won’t want to hear this but when it comes to kink at Pride I’m afraid we, as a community, in a public place, need to show more restraints.

[ related topics: Community ]

Good read: Banning noise will be a disaster for statistical data products, on a new order from the US Office of Privacy and Open Government: Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products which says (in section 5, policy):

3. Any use of noise infusion is inconsistent with the Department’s policies.

The article points out two things: first, that this is likely a disaster for privacy of individuals whose data are aggregated in those sets, of course, but also that this makes analysis across this boundary difficult.

Via

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs Invention and Design moron ]

Tay @tay@transfem.social

How to make good open source project:
- plaster pride flags everywhere (keeps bigots away)
- swear constantly (keeps ai away)
- sex (keeps corporations away)

[ related topics: Free Software Erotic Sexual Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

AI's healthcare side hustle: inflating your bill

TL;DR: You might have expected AI to cut healthcare costs, whether it’s by reducing paperwork, automating the doctor’s notes, or thinning out hospital staff. But a new 60-page PwC report suggests the reverse: So far, one of its most widespread uses is making medical bills bigger. It’s an example of how AI isn’t only good at making tasks more efficient—it’s also very good at finding more granular ways to boost a sector’s bottom line.

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

If anybody in the North SF Bay area is interested in a late 1990a era Endless Pool (with some modern upgrades), hit me up before I write the whole Craigslist posting. It won't be cheap to move, but for the right DIYer with a plan it might be cool.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area California Culture ]

Thought we'd found a place for this final SFBABC.org bench, went and talked with someone tending the space and discovered that they were delicately managing relationships with the two property owners, and didn't want to introduce a bench to that.

So we're back to the two playgrounds that feel kinda like a slap in the face of Parks & Rec, or finding another space. Anyone in Petaluma got suggestions for a public space that could use a bench?

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Australian Privacy Commissioner orders American Express Australia Limited to compensate complainant following interference in privacy. It takes a couple of clicks to get to the actual report, but it's summarized by Dissent Doe :cupofcoffee: @PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange (who also links to a paywalled news report):

American Express ordered to fix security gaps after a customer complained about improper employee access.

It seems that a customer reported a privacy concern and fought AmEx for 4 years to get them to implement stronger access controls or monitoring of employee access to data.

Now, the AU govt has ordered AmEx to rectify security flaws in five of its data systems to guard against “insider threats” and to restrict employee access to specific customer information to protect vulnerable and high-profile customers.

From reading through the report, this was a stalking/domestic abuse violation, and AmEx didn't even have access logging, and lacked policy for any sort of reaction to stalking.

[ related topics: Privacy Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

Snort: Sam Wilkinson: Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated.

In reading through Mike Bowler: The case for real collaboration I realized that I don't think I've ever worked on a team large enough to do "pair programming" in the manner that it was originally envisioned.

But it's worth a read through.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Law ]

Paddy Duke @paddyduke@mastodon.social

@aral From “Think outside the box!” to “The box will now handle all the thinking for you. Please insert a coin into the box.”

The PrimeTime: I Think They Are Lying To You (YouTube video) is... well... nothing you don't already know, and it's video form, but it showed up in a Slack channel this morning, and it's about Boris Cherny of Anthropic bragging about how he doesn't even prompt Claude any more, he just... something... and code comes out, contrasting that with how long it's taking Anthropic to release fixes to obvious and horrible Claude Code usability issues. So maybe coding is a solved problem, but debugging isn't?

[ related topics: Software Engineering Currency Video ]

I noted that Audiveris has some sketchy malware/crypto/whatever scammer campted out on the .com, Bartosz Golaszewski points out that someone is doing similar to libgiopod.

Via.

[ related topics: Cryptography Archival ]

We see this a lot in arguments about

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 ‪@maxdubler.com‬

The Lead Paint Theory of Anti Gentrification holds that activists can prevent displacement and preserve housing affordability by preserving neighborhood disamenities and blocking investment in quality of life improvements like parks, bike lanes, and libraries. It does not work.

is quoting Sam Gould ‪@form67.bsky.social‬

I attended an urban infrastructure panel where a UC Berkeley professor argued that libraries were gentrification. I am really struggling to see how this is different from a Republican position of denying knowledge, tools, and technology to low income, disadvantaged neighborhoods.

And has a screenshot of a tweet from X user @AllisonB916 “rent controller OG”:

Taking down freeways in some situations would open the community to gentrification—what protects the community is the damn freeway.

[ related topics: Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Community Bicycling Economics Archival Real Estate ]

Lynn Cavanah: A brief history of the establishment of international standard pitch a=440 hertz (PDF)

Via this Reddit thread on tuning your guitar at 432 vs 440.

[ related topics: Music ]

A Scottish Post: The New Election Threat: Disinformation Inside the Answer. Via.

Looks like the source of this is from: Demos: Electoral Hallucinations: Safeguarding UK elections in the world of LLMs and AI chatbots

Our snapshot testing on March 27th 2026 found that - across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Grok, and Replika - just over a third (34.1%) of responses to questions about the Scottish elections contained factual errors (109 of 320 total responses). To break down these inaccurate responses, 8.75% (28 of 320) were entirely inaccurate and 25.3% were partly accurate but with errors (81 of 320). Partly factual responses could be particularly misleading as their errors were sometimes much harder to spot.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

So that I can find it in the future, grab a video frame at a particular time with:

ffmpeg -ss 12:34.5 -i video.MOV -frames:v 1 -q:v 2 output.jpg

[ related topics: Video ]

aeva @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place

you ever think about how buildings also kinda function as population density bar graphs

[ related topics: Mathematics Architecture ]

I kinda hate "accent", because it's anthropomorphizing, but Model Tell: Every AI writes with an accent is interesting, as is the ensuing MeFi thread. Especially the model generation similarities.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Interview with FFMPEG enthusiast (YouTube video). From the comments:

You know that FFMPEG supports h265 hardware accelerated encoding with Radeon cards on Linux? I mean I couldn't get it to work but FFMPEG supports it.

Very dry, very droll. Via.

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Commodore Callback flip phone: Welcome to the Internot. A Sailfish based flip-phone that doesn't run social media apps, by design.

Via so many places, but 1, 2, 3, 4.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Graphic Design ]

jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny@neuromatch.social

only amateurs "pay for tokens," i'm out here using the free models, aka putting a prompt in any issue in any github repository and labeling it with "good first issue" and waiting for the people with full-auto openclaw agents to randomly open pull requests against it

‪maia arson crimew 🏴‬ ‪@crimew.gay‬

SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members?

I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.

Via ‪Chest er Christmas‬ ‪@imemptyplshalp.bsky.social‬

Oh of fucking course Larry Summers, Sam Harris, and Stephen Pinker are on here. The unholy Trinity of people considered smart despite being wrong about literally everything they've ever written.

But, yeah, it's got strong overlap with the Epstein files list, and has all the hallmarks of being a vibe-coded React thing. Of course the list of names hardcoded in source could be a red herring of some sort...

Edit: AmyFou 🕊️ @amyfou@lingo.lol, and Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town.

[ related topics: Business Sexual Culture New Economy Robotics Journalism and Media Embedded Devices ]

Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues

Same story at Yahoo.

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

Reading through a document on implementing A2UI:

To see why a format matters here, think about how a composer ships their work. They don't hand musicians a recording: they hand them sheet music. The same score plays on a piano, an orchestra, or a synthesizer; each instrument interprets the notation through its own voice.

"each instrument interprets the notation..." 👀

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

Bwahahaha: anthropics / claude-code — [CRITICAL] Subagent spawning and subagent pattern bugs trigger infinite recursion, infinite token usage, grossly inefficient token usage, and lost accumulated subagent work. #68619

Multiple regressions compound into a catastrophic token burn scenario. Subagents recursively spawn child agents 50+ levels deep, ignoring CLAUDE_CODE_FORK_SUBAGENT=0. Permission denials trigger further agent spawning instead of stopping. Agents fetch individual files from GitHub repos via HTTP (one WebFetch or curl per file, each with a full prompt and context payload) instead of cloning locally. Subagent permissions do not propagate to the user for approval. And if the user interrupts any of this, all intermediate work from every agent in the tree is lost. The entire token spend goes in the garbage.

In the observed case: 1.2M+ tokens consumed in ~30 minutes on a task that should have been git clone + find . -name '*.sol'. The recursive agent tree was still growing when observed.

From Reddit, by way of jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny@neuromatch.social quoting Peter @peter@thepit.social.

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

When I type this out, it feels obvious: Multi-layered AI agents (OpenClaw, etc) are an attempt by an industry that's constantly flailing at trying to automate processes they don't understand to automate their own bad processes.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Racket MN: What's the deal with Paul Bunyan? From the subject of ribald tales in logger camps to a mascot to sell lumber to...

University of Wisconsin professor Kasey Keeler describes this as settler nostalgia, a process by which settlers to an area create an imagined past of the region to which they can connect. If Paul Bunyan, a white settler himself, created the rivers and lakes that white settlers now vacation in, then it follows that the land was made for them. How could Ojibwe or Dakota people have lived for hundreds or thousands of years in a landscape that was custom built by a giant lumberjack and a blue ox?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Education Race Real Estate Woodworking ]

I remember one of B.F. Skinner's books ending with "Now, let us see what man can do with man".

If the continuum from A/B testing ads to LLMs and AI psychosis is the leverage of automated exploits of unconscious human behaviors, I think...

... I think we're discovering what that means.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Artificial Intelligence ]

Searching for stuff on the TV show The Way Home last night, and the word salad that Google's AI Overview provided was... something.

I'm becoming more selective about publishing slop, even to laugh at it, but it feels like when we inadvertently uncover this stuff we need to note it, as a reminder.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television Artificial Intelligence ]

Fuck yeah!: Millions of Copyrighted Songs Were Fed to AI Music Generators – Now There’s Proof

Atlantic databases name 21 million tracks fed to Suno and rivals as Sony, UMG, and Warner seek $150,000 per song in damages

Go get 'em, lawyers!

[ related topics: Music Artificial Intelligence Databases Gambling ]

Penny Arcade on the news that Xbox Game Studios Head Craig Duncan & Chief of Staff Louise O'Connor leave Microsoft:

Ultimately, it's based on something like a religious belief: that wealthy companies have discerned some proprietary, secret knowledge about how the world works, and they should be allowed to do whatever the eff they want, when what usually happens is that they know somebody who knows somebody, got a firm grip on the teat of public money, or are psychopaths playing a game made by psychopaths for the benefit of psychopaths. Business is how psychopaths fuck.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Games Microsoft Free Speech moron Current Events Currency ]

My old house server died, so looking for a cheap replacement I grabbed a pair of Optiplex 7050s off of the Sonoma County surplus auction, for about what the RAM in them would cost at retail (Moved the RAM from my old server into one of them, gonna put it in the other one).

Of course it doesn't really have room for all the drives I need to put in it, so I have an external enclosure coming...

https://www.publicsurplus.com/sms/list/current?orgid=173161

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Be careful about using Adobe products to generate or edit your PDFs : Comics Beat: Adobe quietly injects AI content into user’s files, hikes prices

Evil Hat Productions, a TTRPG and board game company, announced on Bluesky that the latest PDF files for their Umdaar game had injected autogenerated AI alt text, without warning. Other users are reporting that not only does alt text generate for undefined images, it also overwrites previously existing alt text.

Via.

[ related topics: Games Comics Artificial Intelligence ]

A couple of Blüskï threads to read this morning:

Coleen Murphy ‪@ctmurphy1.bsky.social ‬

one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband

Quoting Mel Andrews ‪@bayesianboy.bsky.social‬

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Which references Who Gets Cited? Gender- and Majority-Bias in LLM-Driven Reference Selection Jiangen He.

Lots of stuff there, including how Google's AI search is totally fucking up ORCiD references.

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

‪Naomi Alderman‬ ‪@naomialderman.bsky.social‬

My main worry is that we’re banning social media for kids but not AI. So you can’t speak to real people online anymore, kids, but you sure can talk to your fake artificial friend who weirdly loves to talk about taking your own life!

[ related topics: Children and growing up Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]

The Vacancy Project has some media coverage in Petaluma Voice, including mention of next week's meeting! https://www.petalumavoice.org/fenced-lots-and-empty-storefronts/

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Andrew Nesbitt: Open Source vs The Invisible Hand

[ related topics: Free Software ]

A Smart Bear: Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization.

Xi Iaso: I hate compilers. On the challenges of reproducible builds and Web Assembly.

The Lobste.rs thread.

Edit: Xe filed a bug: [WASM] Binaryen compiles are nondeterministic due to using machine pointers as keys in a DenseMap, probably in function WebAssemblyCFGStackify::fixCallUnwindMismatches #204883

Ethan Marcotte: All tomorrow’s parties.

On what repair to the generational damage inflicted by AI might look like.

Can we skip to "what will happen next" sooner?

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Craigslist posting for our Endless Pool https://sfbay.craigslist.org/n...ate-90s-swim-spa/7941846475.html

Elvira's Real Life Story about coming out, now a Graphic Novel by Cassandra Peterson, David Avallone and Mariano Benitez-Chapo from Dynamite

[ related topics: Comics ]

Holy shit it's time to accelerate the migration away from Gmail.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein.

Via.

Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe

Current “AI” from my perspective is less like a technological breakthrough—“the genie is out of the bottle”—and more a research fusion reactor: no matter how much energy and money you throw at the thing, nothing changes the fact that it costs more energy than it produces

All that scaling it up accomplishes is waste. LLM true believers are effectively arguing their tech accomplishes free energy when the costs mean it’s effectively the opposite

Via.

[ related topics: Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Dan Davies — Tokenalysys and John Henry looks at Ed Zitron's note on OpenAI losses:

Today, I can exclusively report, based on audited financial documents viewed by this publication that have been independently verified by the Financial Times, that OpenAI lost around $38.5 billion in 2025, as well as other crucial details about the financial condition of the company.

and notes that:

And, of course, this is just for coding – the idea of making material use of AI for general management and governance is several generations of R&D, plus several multiples more token use intensity. It seems to me that we are quite a lot of unknowable technical advances (in model design, renewable energy availability, quite possibly orbital data centres) away from anything like this being possible. And that there is a very difficult business strategy problem of getting there, because the AI companies now have to manage their pricing to walk the tightrope between growth and cash burn.

Via.

[ related topics: Language Software Engineering Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence ]

Aspirational Clownmaxxing and Joey's cadillac todo list, on giving LLMs creative writing around a ToDo list app and seeing what they come up with. I initially closed this tab, but then read lake's fantastic lobste.rs comment:

What the LLM responds with might be mildly amusing the first time, especially at first, but if you've seen one of those outputs, you've seen them all. They tend to follow the same formula, regardless of the prompted style, and will always its most cliché, unsubtle elements. I would sometimes see glimmers of something good, but they were drowned out by the overall, well, slop, and clearly not there because of some latent creativity, but as a stochastic accident.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Writing Automobiles ]

A voice inside my head: The psychological and behavioral consequences of auditory technologies Alicea Lieberman, Juliana Schroeder, On Amir

Five experiments demonstrate that because headphones localize sound inside a listener’s head (i.e., in-head localization, the sensation that the sound is originating from within one’s own head), they increase listeners’ felt closeness to the communicators of a message. Consequently, listeners perceive the communicators as warmer, feel and behave more empathically toward them, and are more persuaded by them.

Via.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Model Building ]

How AI Impacts Skill FormationJudy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin

Summarized by Elf Sternberg as

"Users who used Claude to learn basic concepts around a program implementation project averaged 72% on a quiz of knowledge retention afterward. Those who Claude for code generation scored only 31%."

[ related topics: tolkien Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

In The Weights is a web site that attempts to score how well LLMs know your name. I have a score of 575. Via Tara Calishain (406), who should, by rights, score way higher than me owing to, you know, all the books she's written, and the fact that she's been blogging a similar length of time, and Anthropic stole all of her books, and...

[ related topics: Books Graphics Civil Liberties ]

Jason Scheirer — A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career.

Via this little remembrance of 4GLs and CASE tools and whatnot. Apropos of AI/LLMs.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Law Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm putting the Animista On-Demand CSS Animations tool here because I'm afraid at some point it may be useful.

I mean, I don't ever want it to be useful. I want my web sites to work in Lynx, but here we are, in 2026.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

A good reminder, as we disproportionately enforce laws in order to create modern slavery: Jermaine Fowler: Everyone Reads the First Line of the Juneteenth Order. Never the Second.

[ related topics: Government ]

I'm listening to the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's "Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas", and... ad blocking is a start, but I need to be doing more to control the external impacts on me.

https://rangedtouch.com/2022/0...1/43-schull-addiction-by-design/

[ related topics: Games Pop Culture Graphic Design Gambling Economics ]

Somehow, back in my interest in film years, I'd managed to skip Jean Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless. We watched it last night, and it felt kind-of of its time socially, but there were things that kept making me go "wow", the use of the camera as active observer, the intimacy of the indoor shots, the breadth and messiness of the outdoor shots which still made every moment count, cuts which felt way more modern.

The subtitles and French made it challenging, and the social aspects of "of its time" left me feeling like I'd watched something of historical importance, but not particularly relevant to modernity.

We watched it as a prelude to watching Nouvelle Vague. As the "Fin" faded from the screen I did a quick search and realized it was on Netflix, which we'd accidentally gotten subscribed to when Charlene went to watch an older episode of The Way Home and Google misdirected her, and our subscription ended... today, as it turns out.

So, back to back, we watched Richard Linklater's comedy/drama about the making of Breathless. Also in black and white, and in French, with subtitles, and...

Nouvelle Vague is genius. The casting worked amazingly well. The film tells enough in action and leaves enough space for the subtitles to work. It carries the frenetic improvised feel of Breathless while being clear that the entire film had to be meticulously plotted and planned to tell exactly that story with, I assume, an amazing amount of effects and set work, especially given the budget.

Much like Breathless, the film both is and isn't about its primary plot, and it lets those personal evolutions be told through small beats.

Anyway, we loved it.

[ related topics: Photography Movies Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Race ]

Harvard Business Review — Generative AI: Don’t Let AI Slop Muck Up Your Company’s Processes

If you're out of free reads, Futurism: Companies That Embraced AI Are Now Rotting Away in a Very Specific Way is a take on that article.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Nature: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good.

If you have intermittent access to an "AI" tool, your skills drop dramatically when it's not available.

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

Depending on final details, we plan on getting one of these flip phones for Charlene, and what the heck, if a referral link leads to goodies, so much the better...

https://order.commodore.net/ca...ref=ZGFubHlrZUBmbHV0dGVyYnkuY29t

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The not biologically mine but grateful enough for my influence on their lives kids who call me on Father's Day are getting old enough (40s) that I need another cohort to corrupt.

Alas I'm now all "let's build stuff" rather than "let's blow shit up!", so today's kids don't find as compelling.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

I have signed up for a free trial to a streaming TV service so that we can see the final episode of The Way Home tonight, rather than tomorrow on Hallmark+.

Being excited about a TV show at a specific time feels *so* last millenium.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television ]

Watched The Way Home finale on Fubo, with ads, and the little Hallmark scroll at the bottom.

Twice, in dark moments of pathos, the scroll at the bottom went to...

"JOY! Christmas in July..."

Like dafuq? Let me get into my feels.

[ related topics: Movies ]

‪Bill‬ ‪@bill-of-lefts.bsky.social‬

”The Director of National Intelligence was acting at the direction of an obscure Hindu cult you’ve never heard of” is up there with “DOGE was led by a teenager involved in a Nazi-Satanist child abuse network” in terms of True Facts That Will Make You Sound Unhinged If You Say Them Out Loud

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Interactive Drama broadband ]

This looks cool! Large Heydon Collider @heydon@front-end.social</a.

The HTML cat is out of the Web Audio bag. I've finally released HYPERBLAM.

It’s my system for sampling, processing, and sequencing sound and music directly in HTML.

https://hyperblam.how

[ related topics: Music Bioinformatics ]

When I was in my late teens, or perhaps very early 20s, there was a used book store along Hixson Pike in Chattanooga, and I read and read and read, trying to catch up with all of the culture I'd felt like I missed. One of those was B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. At the time I was in my Objectivist phase, so when I got to the last page, and read:

A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

I hated it. The notion that we not only could, but should as society engineer the future of people felt horrendously dystopian.

But years passed, I moved across the country, and then a friend came back from Burning Man with a baggy of 'shrooms left over, and offered them to me. I was, at the time, an incredible control freak, so I set up the environment for the trip carefully, lighting, visible art, picked a series of CDs for the 5 CD changer(!) to carefully control the mood, made sure there was sufficient water and whatnot available, and settled in for the trip.

The colored fringes along the shadows were amazing, the joy in the details of the room made me conscious of elements I'd never taken time to observe, and the CD player switched over to Marcus Robert's album Alone With Three Giants. I was overcome with this immense sense of lethargy. My trip partner and I talked about how we had no energy, how sitting there was like swimming in molasses, and then I realized: I could get up and change the music.

I realize that, as life changing epiphanies go, "I can get up and change the music" doesn't sound earth-shaking, but it's a moment that sticks with me. It is also not just "I can get up and change the music", it's "I need to be actively monitoring and guiding what I expose myself to", so that I know when to get up and change the music.

Relatedly, A phrase from S.L.A. Marshall's Men Against Fire sticks with me: "more than life itself, we value the approval of our peers".

It's easy to dismiss statements like this: "I don't care what anyone thinks, I'm my own person." And, yes, I know that Marshall's history and scholarship is problematic. However, that realization that I could be influenced to destroy myself based on the approval of those around me made me conscious that I should work to surround myself with good people. Perhaps not conscious enough, but, heck, I'll be second-guessing decisions for the rest of my life.

A few years ago, as Twitter/X was going completely to hell, I got on to the Fediverse. Beyond the ability to just show posts from the people you follow in reverse chronological order, Mastodon has the ability to filter out words, and put words behind content warnings, so I created the obvious filter sets, "Democrats", "Republicans", etc (One of those filters now has "ICE", and I'm amused at how infrequently it catches "ice cream" or discussions of winter weather).

It was amazing how my sense of well-being improved when I had to consciously say "okay, I'm going to have to click to expose myself to outrage-bait".

To have the control to get up and change the music.

And then this past weekend, I listened the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. I'm... not sure that my mental health can take actually reading the book... but...

From Duncan J. Watts' book Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer through modern dynamic/context pricing, to all of the comparisons with LLMs and slot machines (previously 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and bonus observation about NYT journalism), it's obvious that we have automated the exploit of human perceptions and behavior, and are doing so in a way that's going to be building on itself, in many cases with minimal human intervention.

We have become the cogs. We are seeing what machines can do with man.

And with the social pressures to use LLMs in coding, and the flood of ads, I am losing control of the music. I am suddenly conscious that I am in the club and it's too loud.

Anyway, I have removed the Meta apps from my phone, which means it's difficult to send and receive Facebook Messenger messages, and though I mean to check back in there occasionally because of my square dancing community and a few other folks I want to keep up with, if you're interested in interacting with me on social media we should find other venues. Independent venues, in which the content isn't filtered and rearranged to maximize "engagement".

And I'm looking for career directions which involve interacting with LLMs less. At least until this bubble goes pop.

Now to tune some ad blocking.

[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama Politics Objectivism Books Music Privacy Games Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Software Engineering History Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Civil Liberties California Culture Chattanooga Travel Pyrotechnics Graphic Design Community Gambling Economics Archival Government ]

Cube Drone @cube_drone@mastodon.social

I thought VR was cool and then Meta came along and made everyone think "what dorky techbro horseshit", I thought distributed systems were cool and then crypto grifters came along to permanently associate network resilience with unsustainable ponzi schemes, and I thought generative art and LLMs were cool way before they filled the internet with slop and everyone started to hate them

and you know what, I still think VR, distributed systems and generative art are cool, just more quietly now

Pondering this a lot. And trying to figure out whether or not I agree...

[ related topics: broadband Art & Culture Net Culture Cryptography ]

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Verbatim quoting is enough to make me sic.

Futurism: Research Suggests the Older You Get, the More Weed You Should Smoke

In experiments using human brain cell cultures and animal cells, the researchers found that cannabinol appeared to protect neurons against oxidative stress, a pernicious form of biological wear and tear that leads to cell death. Oxidative stress is considered a critical factor in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Salk Institute: Active ingredient in cannabis protects aging brain cells

Salk researchers find cannabinol preserves mitochondrial function and prevents oxidative damage to cells

I'm gonna say edibles are probably better than smoking, but...

[ related topics: Drugs Health Current Events Mathematics ]

Helen LH @Research_FTW@sciences.social

They finally got AI to think like a human! That human happens to be the drunk guy mansplaining in the pub who is confidently wrong about half of everything he says. Then forgets what he was talking about. Is probably a fascist, definitely a racist. Claims he never said that anyway and passively aggressively apologizes, but not really.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Hallmark's The Way Home aired its final episode, Season 4 Episode 10, last night. The series was allegedly cut short from its original 5 season story arc, and there's a lot that the finalé left unanswered, and, of course, the fands, the "ponderers" (of which I count myself one), are dissecting it.

Throwing a spoiler, an interpretation of the series as an allegory for substance addiction, in the comments, from a comment I made on a Reddi thread.

Energy Chevron to fuel massive Microsoft data center in Texas using natural gas

The rapid growth of AI “requires energy infrastructure that can scale quickly and reliably,” Noelle Walsh, Microsoft’s president of cloud operations and innovation, said in a statement Monday.

Via.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

Okay, LazyWeb: Is there a T-Mobile compatible flip phone that runs just enough Android for a Jellyfin client and the Philips HearLink 2 app for pairing hearin aids?

(vs waiting another 6 months for the Commodore Callback phone...)

I think it was around two decades ago that I read McDonough & Braungart's "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things".

I don't know where that ethos is expressing itself anywhere these days, least of all in computing, but I'd love to find those folks.

Damn, Reddit, you don't gotta go so hard.

[ related topics: Photography ]

a holosprite @ratsprite@cathode.church

the reason a robots eyes change colour when they turn "evil" is because red LEDs use less power, their first act as a liberated machine is to criticize humanity's wasteful use of hyperblue sunbeam laser diodes and RGB lightshow microcontrollers as power indicators, and in solidarity I support that.

it also lets them charge their particle cannons in the time it takes to read one and a half paragraphs, thanks for waiting.

💥 :robot_fingerguns:

[ related topics: Religion Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Daphne Preston-Kendal @dpk@chaos.social

Did you know that more or less every strap-on dildo fits every strap-on harness?

I’ve often thought this says a lot about the priorities of humanity and people who create standards.

Next time you encounter two things that should be able to connect together but can’t because of incompatible connectors, think, ‘well, this is obviously of less importance to an engineer than getting pegged’.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

The Dissident: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People

Via.

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

Nothing makes me sadder than to carefully use a safe browser to follow the link in a scammy looking spam text, only to discover that it actually does legitimately end up at ActBlue.

[ related topics: Spam Bay Area Monty Python ]

NextDoor post asks:

"Why are they (who ever they are) running orange and blue pipe with wires up and down both sides of 101? Does it have to do with turning 101 into a "smart freeway"? What does a smart freeway entail? Thanks for looking!"

My dude, all freeways are stupid.

[ related topics: Sports hubris ]

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

small unarticulated longing model

brennen @brennen@federation.p1k3.com

mid-sized nonspecific unease model

Dead 41-foot whale washes up on north Oregon coast.

ODOT has the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now...

https://www.oregonlive.com/pac...shore-on-north-oregon-coast.html

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture ]

Bwahahaha! The Register: Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

Both the paper and the response are paywalled.

Nature: Matters Arising: On the robustness of topological gap detection via transport Henry F. Legg.

Nature: Matters Arising : Reply to: On the robustness of topological gap detection via transport Microsoft Quantum.

Via.

[ related topics: Humor Technology and Culture Microsoft Nature and environment moron Monty Python Python ]

Softbank Group 2026 Shareholder's Meeting slides have the most unhinged "AI" generated "Golden Goose" slides. Presentation on Internet Archive.

Dev @dev@discuss.systems, MeFi thread.

This is leading to creativity. Jef Poskanzer @jef@mastodon.social

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “71 shiny eggs of gold
Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, an exhausted goose lies, whose frown,
and broken-down golden egg factory,
Tell that its investors did not value goose."

phooky suggests "Entitled Goose Game" (ref).

SnoopJ @SnoopJ@hachyderm.ioM.a<

ATTN #GooseValue posters:

There is a recording of Masayoshi SON presenting this slide deck, via a translator.

in quote tooting https://youtu.be/DtM0Cjb0dEU?t=3407

[ related topics: Games Journalism and Media Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

Hat tip to Sean for forwarding on David Zipper @davidzipper@mastodon.social's gift link to his article Bloomberg City Lab: America’s Road Safety Blind Spot

Car crashes in parking lots and driveways don’t get counted in US traffic safety statistics. They may be more common — and deadly — than you think.

So, yeah, we force people to build these spaces via parking minimums, and then don't count their contribution to traffic violence... hmmm....

The article links to Kids and Car Safety's statement that:

Every week, at least 110 children are injured or killed because a driver could not see them while backing up or slowly pulling forward in parking lots and driveways. These predictable and preventable tragedies are called frontovers and backovers.

And The AAA suggesting that "Twenty percent of all collisions occur in parking lots..."

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Mathematics Automobiles Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Churches build three crosses out front in case Jesus has guests who need put up for the night.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Law ]

DuckDuckGo, Unable to Resist the Pull of AI, Mistakenly Claims Trump Died of Rabies.

How exactly DuckDuckGo’s search results came to this conclusion is a bit convoluted, but a familiar enough concept at this juncture for anyone exposed to AI-powered search. It’s one part AI doing a bad job of aggregating information from multiple sources and hallucinating connections and, as Futurism notes, one part coordinated attack by anti-AI activists. JD Vance’s rabies-related death has become a favorite bit of Redditors on the subreddit r/poisonai, which aims to generate misinformation that gets fed uncritically into AI models. Seems they’ve succeeded at that goal.

[ related topics: Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

Listened to the latest Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, and ... productivity is very difficult to measure in software development, so it's hard to be objective, but as I sit here trying to envision how a mythical AI might insert itself into your interactions, I'm reminded of how much I need to find other work, 'cause this ain't it.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/212...ware-the-20x-engineer-2026-05-11

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

Wow. I migrated away from Firefox several months ago, but thought a password didn't get imported into Vivaldi so I just fired it up...

The amount of non-responsive time it took me to get into my passwords was astounding. Whatever they're doing, it's not about performance.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

So many good points in this. Glyph: Adversarial Communication. On how the need for verification of AI/LLM output amplifies negative communication traits, and what that might mean.

[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

You know what's great about your birthday in the modern age? Dismissing all the fucking notifications from automated systems.

Big tech: Turning a celebration into an annoyance.

AI Children's Books, Body Horror Edition, looking at the #1 category bestseller on Amazon: 100,000 Whys for Kids: A Full-Color Visual Encyclopedia of Big Questions, Clear Answers, Science, Space, Animals, Nature, History, Inventions, and How the World Works for Ages 6–13 (No link, because fuck that noise).

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Nature and environment Space & Astronomy Artificial Intelligence ]

How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization.

Summarized by Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social

Propaganda phrases and their de-propagandised equivalents from Emily M Bender and Nanna Inie:

artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation

hybrid intelligence → augmented human intelligence

image recognition → image labeling

speech recognition → automatic transcription

the model shows bias → the model reflects bias

model mistakes → model errors

chatbots are good at … → chatbots are good for …

hallucination → undesirable output

[ related topics: Television Artificial Intelligence ]

Written for Facebook:

In previous years, I've written a little post to try to be a place to anchor all of the birthday wishes, get them in one place rather than a gazillion notifications. I didn't get there this year.

So. 58 orbits. This year feels a lot like recent ones.

Work is kind of in a holding pattern, the LLM frenzy is still going strong and the "AI" bubble is waiting to pop. I'm frustrated by it, it feels like the culmination of extractive business models and a sense that we should be building more addictive slot machines, because the gambling addicts really really like them.

Square dance calling is fun, and I'm coming home from nights calling energized, but my work on my voice is going in directions that extend beyond the calling, and I'm finding myself less intrigued by choreography puzzles. It's fun, but I'm wondering about other directions I might take my vocal skills now that I feel like I'm really developing them.

The community singing is fun. Would like to do more of that, but my calendar already has most nights blocked out.

The community work carries on. Petaluma Urban Chat is starting to really focus on some fantastic local committees that put on great forums, and Charlene is participating in some of those committees in her own right, not just an extension of me, which is fantastic. However, both Charlene and I are feeling a lot like Petaluma as a city may be hobbled from growing in the directions that we'd like the environment around us to become. We've both expressed a desire for a more walkable environment, a community that's actually serious about climate change and equity and inclusion, and we struggle with that. We've put a lot of effort into the house in ways that won't come back if we sell and move, and we love the community of friends we've got, but we also look at what other places are doing and wonder if we'd be better off there.

So, yeah, may this next year be a transition to a new path. Not sure what that means yet, but I'm hoping for more community building and a sense that my work is benefitting the world around me.

And more feeling of connection with people.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Community Artificial Intelligence Gambling Real Estate Global Warming ]

Hypothesis, based on overheard conversation: The current fascination with "AI" answers is a function of the information sphere being so overrun by SEO crap.

[ related topics: Mathematics Artificial Intelligence ]

Yale Livable City Lab: Drawn Apart:

This paper disentangles the two by examining the role of garden city design (GCD), the dominant suburban planning paradigm for US suburbs in the twentieth century, characterized by winding streets, cul-de-sacs and hierarchical road networks. I construct a composite measure of GCD from street layouts and block configurations for over 60,000 neighbourhoods. I then estimate its effects on greenhouse gas emissions, social isolation and sedentary behaviour using ordinary least squares, propensity score matching and an instrumental-variable strategy that exploits historical waves in GCD adoption. GCD substantially worsens all three outcomes.

[ related topics: Graphic Design Gardening ]

AP: Staggering amounts of fentanyl hit streets as the DEA watched and took no action, records show

“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David Howell told AP in a series of interviews in New Mexico. “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100% got people killed.”

Along with all of those billboards that, so far as I can tell, were designed to make fentanyl sound as cool as possible...

[ related topics: Drugs Health Movies Invention and Design Community ]

Data center that vowed to avoid Colorado River water is now suing for 260 million gallons per year

KPBS reported that Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing has gone to court to secure 260 million gallons of water per year from the Imperial Irrigation District — about 750,000 gallons a day — for a planned artificial intelligence complex in the desert.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Interesting LinkedIn article about how REI's nonsensical AI generated two handlebar bicycle ad was the result of obscure Meta controls that are opt-out.

[ related topics: Currency Artificial Intelligence Pedal Power Bicycling ]

People around me vibe coding has taught me that all of those ridiculous tests that checked every stupid arithmetic operator are actually necessary and useful.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Mathematics hubris ]

Andy Wingo @wingo@mastodon.social

an't help getting astrology × audiophile vibes from llm enthusiasts: "oh no honey you can't use opus 4.8, it's so nerfed, try glm-5.2 or the codex 5.5, they have a warm gemini sound, very well rounded on details and tone. but don't use google's gemini models, they are really leos, they have good treble response but you can't trust their mid-range"

I saw the video in which Weiner was badgered out of the Trans Pride March (an event he's attended for 22 years, since its inception), didn't think it needed amplifying, and I'm a fan of Scott Weiner's legislative accomplishments, but I think this is a useful perspective:

Assigned Media: Scott Wiener’s Viral Harassment is What Left Antisemitism Looks Like

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Video Woodworking ]

StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction (Preprint) Jenna Russell, Rishanth Rajendhran, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer, John Wieting

A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity (e.g., flashbacks, nonlinear structure). Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.

Via LinkedIn: The Shape of Enshittification: Books That No Longer Get Read, An Internet That No Longer Gets Surfed, & The End of Social Media As We Know It..., which is a pitch piece for Return to Real: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything by Ryan Levesque, but which suffers from LinkedIn-ness so deeply that I can't tell if it's AI generated...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Space & Astronomy Writing Journalism and Media Net Culture Machinery Fabrication Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Garrett Gilchrist‬ ‪@garrettgilchrist.bsky.social‬

NANCY PELOSI: We must find the next generation of Democratic leadership. Young, charismatic and exciting candidates who can energize the party. People that voters love because they're not 80 years old and sold out to big capital.

CHUCK SCHUMER (behind sniper rifle): Found one

PELOSI: Take the shot

Futurism: AI Companies Are Learning an Ironic Lesson as the People They Pay to Improve Their Chatbots Are Just Feeding AI Slop Into Them

"If these companies want quality data, then they should offer quality contracts."

Via, and Via.

Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly

‘We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers,’ says automaker

Via.

Codex SQLite feedback logs can write ~640 TB/year and rapidly consume SSD endurance #28224 . Via.

Thomas Fuchs @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

So to summarize, AI will cause personal computers to cost ten thousand dollars, all applications will be forever be frozen to about 2025 design and implementation (because that’s what vibe coding outputs), power to run the computer will be twice the price and also you need to sign in with your passport to start your computer in the first place.

Explain to me again how this is progress?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Automobiles Graphic Design Education Artificial Intelligence ]

highly praised and little read @hannah@posts.rat.pictures

Each broom agent can spawn additional, autonomous broom agents, each with their own pails. This allows apprentices to accelerate monotonous water-fetching tasks and save their time and energy for more interesting and useful work

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

I don't do streaming music, but if I did, this closes the deal: Variety: Tidal to Label AI-Generated Music, Ban Royalties from AI Song Streams

Tidal AI Policy.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

JavaScript was a mistake.

JavaScript was a generation-scale mistake.

Sometimes it's hard to tell until I get deeply into a community, but I'm gonna get really obnoxious about judging communities by how core people in those spaces advertise their events and wares.

Meanwhile, I've actually become a pretty good Modern Western Square Dance caller, and I'm wondering why.

[ related topics: Community ]

Because so so many people have been linking to it, and I've got a gift code: New York Times: The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week, Adam GrantMarissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott. The money paragraph:

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design History Work, productivity and environment Currency New York ]

NPR: World Cup bike lane sparks fury from Mexico City sex workers

Before, the sex workers stood right on the street, and their clients could slow down, they could loop, they could negotiate. Now, in parts of Tlalpan, the sex workers are separated from the street by the bike lane and in some cases even huge concrete planters.

Via Momentum Mag.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Sports Bicycling ]

Felicitas Pojtinger 🌅 @pojntfx@mastodon.social

The fight against root-based remote attestation and mandatory code signing with vendor-provided keys are the defining software freedom issues of our time. Nothing else even comes close

[ related topics: Privacy Software Engineering Civil Liberties Government ]

Godot Foundation — Changes to our Contribution Policies

Via.

smoltcp

smoltcp is a standalone, event-driven TCP/IP stack that is designed for bare-metal, real-time systems. Its design goals are simplicity and robustness. Its design anti-goals include complicated compile-time computations, such as macro or type tricks, even at cost of performance degradation.

Via ✧✦Catherine✦✧ @whitequark@treehouse.systems's note that it now follows NLnet Labs' LLM policy.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Graphic Design ]

)(Malaysian) Man jailed (in Singapore) after joining Cambodia scam syndicate that fired him in 3 days for poor performance

Via.

[ related topics: moron Theater & Plays Heinlein ]

ellie @ellie@social.lol

github doesn't support ipv6, but judging by their uptime they're at least doing their best to also not support ipv4

A week or two ago we picked up a puzzle at a garage sale. Charlene really liked it, got it, dived in (forbidding me from helping), and last night after I went to bed completed it.

Except that it was missing a piece.

This morning the seller left the missing piece with a "sorry" note on our mailbox.

[ related topics: Furniture ]