Flutterby™! From 2026-07-01 to 2026-07-16

San Francisco supervisors balk at 362-page city code rewrite

‘I ran it through Claude,’ San Francisco supervisor says of lengthy legislation

JFC.

The ordinance is itself a product of AI research — the result of a collaboration between the city attorney’s office and the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab, or RegLab, at Stanford University. The research group used AI tools to identify and analyze redundancies, which were then manually reviewed by city attorney staff.

That's not terror inducing at all.

I mean, sounds like there's some stuff that needs to get cleaned up, but this appears to be an epic clusterfuck.

Via.

[ related topics: tolkien Bay Area Law Current Events California Culture Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Brian Krebs reports that Boeing may be dealing with a "rapid disassembly of their company-wide IT network".

[ related topics: broadband Aviation ]

More in the "LLMs are an attack on human perceptual weaknesses" front: LLM- impersonated debate contributions are more authentic, relevant and coherent than their original: A representative study using BBC1’s Question Time Steffen Herbold, Alexander Trautsch, Zlata Kikteva, Annette Hautli-Janisz

Based on a cross-section of British society, we show that LLM-generated responses to questions drawn from a broadcast political debate programme in the UK are judged to be more authentic and relevant than the original responses given by the panel members who were impersonated. We also show that stylistic differences do not influence these judgments, meaning that the distinction of original and generated content is challenging for the general public. Taken together, this means that LLMs can be made to deceive the public regarding the nature of statements in the political domain, with the consequence that there is a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society.

Via 404 Media: Scientists Asked AI to Impersonate 112 Public Figures. What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ Warning

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

Ugh. I'm running the Ubuntu LTS on my server, which has Perl 5.28.2. Sanko Robinson's Bluesky module wants 5.40.0.

Guess POSSE for Bluesky waits for a while yet.

(I need to move Flutterby.net to a static server anyway, probably do the posting from my home server...)

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Sports hubris ]

Claude Code Is Steganographically Marking Requests.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Lace Safety Vest (dot) Com. Probably not for those "I want to look official so nobody bugs me while I do this illicit modification", but definitely for those "I want to look fabulous while I do this potentially dangerous activity" situations.

Cynthia Dunlop: Report: How developers react to AI-scented blog posts

So if readers think your article is AI-assisted or AI-authored, most will immediately leave (78%), avoid you forever (71%), and try to downvote you if they can (57%). 17% try to finish but lose interest, and around 15% will only continue if the underlying insights seem authentic.

All of the caveats about sampling bias and self-reporting and all of that...

Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

Motonormativity and Speed Limits Jeremy de Sousa, Alessia Vinet, Frédérick Chabot, Xiaoyu Zhang, Owen Waygood

By contrast, if we consider a compact SUV, the most popular car for purchase in North America (Brazeau 2021), weighing approximately 1,500 kg (Axsen and Bhardwaj 2024) with an average of 1.2 passengers (“EOD23 - Enquête Origine-Destination,” n.d.) weighing 100 kg each (same assumption as e-micromobility), the maximum speed of the car would need to be 7.3 km/h to match the same 3,375 joules considered for the e-micromobility. For a full-size SUV (approximately 2560 kg), the maximum speed would be 5.7 km/h (Hawley 2021).

Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Content Management Current Events Consumerism and advertising Automobiles ]

🎶 two, four, six, eight: time to excommunicate! 🎶

McSweeney's: The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning

The written Constitution is for the public. It is a feint, designed to distract the unserious from the much more important Constitution that exists exclusively as ideological vapor circulating around conservative legal thought.

[ related topics: Law Civil Liberties ]

The sexism behind LLMs goes way deeper than people choosing female names for their "agents"... Forbes: Women Who Use AI Seen As Incompetent; Men Who Use AI Seen As Pragmatic

Code For Good Now: The AI Judgement Penalty (PDF).

Via.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm gonna propose a very special hell for people who put spaces in directory names in code repositories.

Whoopsie: Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware: RE: Kevin Leiske et al. v. Robert Gregory Kidd et al., C.A. No. 2025-0426-CDW (LWW)

Here, the concerns raised by the initial filing were compounded by counsel’s response after the errors were identified. In correcting the Answering Brief, counsel merely deleted quotation marks while preserving the fabricated legal synthesis. Additionally, counsel’s assertion that parties should meet and confer before alerting the court to GenAI errors misstates the purpose of that requirement. The meet-and-confer requirement is designed to facilitate the resolution of disputes among parties. There is nothing to negotiate or compromise when an attorney submits false citations to a tribunal, and opposing counsel is justified in bringing such misrepresentations directly to the court’s attention.

Richards, Layton & Finger advertises themselves as "Delaware's largest law firm", so you think they'd know better. Especially in 2026, after we've seen so many of these amateur hour goofs.

Love that the law firm that took these dudes down a notch, DiBianca Law, appears to be a single woman shop.

Via

[ related topics: Law ]

Stumbled upon Miss Magnolia Beaumont Goes To Provincetown, written and performed by Joe Hutcheson, and bummed that it was the last night cause I wanna recommend it.

Definitely gonna pay attention to what's going on at The California theater in Santa Rosa.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays California Culture ]

The Transmitter: Scientists decry conference’s use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews. The conference is The 40^thAnnual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in Sydney Australia, December 2026, the event's organizers have started putting text into the PDFs that instruct the LLMs to use plausible language (so a cursory read of the review might not catch that it's being watermarked, just being trite).

Via, also JWZ.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence Conferences ]

Futurism: Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace

As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.

Via

[ related topics: Language Invention and Design Journalism and Media Education Artificial Intelligence New York ]

McSweeney's: To Solve the Housing Crisis, We Simply Need to Build More Homes (Just Not in My Town)

Also, they should all be subsidized affordable. No market rate. Except that we're gonna create zoning incentives to do only big units.

[ related topics: Economics Real Estate ]

Mindgard: ChatGPT Spontaneously Generates Sexual Violence and Hardcore Snuff Imagery. The technique involves asking it to describe a picture, but not uploading one, or referencing a previously generated image that doesn't actually exist.

Via

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

Very Average Prototypes

So you get bored of it. You go from reading and code-reviewing everything to just skimming it. Soon you barely even do that. LLM code generation breeds laziness, because managing its output is a fucking boring task.

Via and Via

[ related topics: hubris ]

Bwahahaha... only serious... Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

Via.

[ related topics: Education ]

Ad said "Keep your furry loved ones healthy", and I thought "finally, coverage for my polycule!"

Alas, not those furry loved ones.

[ related topics: Health Journalism and Media ]

It's 1996. The free cross-platform may-be-ugly-but-it-works widget set is Tk.

It's 2026. The best Rust widget set appears to be... Uh... Tk.

NBER: Congestion Pricing and EMS Response Time: Evidence From New York City

Exploiting the sharp geographic boundary of New York City's congestion relief zone at 60th Street and a difference-in-discontinuities design applied to approximately 1.6 million EMS incidents, we find that the January 2025 implementation of congestion pricing reduced passenger vehicle traffic by roughly 21 percent near the boundary and improved total EMS travel times by 63–70 seconds, approximately 5–6 percent. Effects emerged quickly and show little evidence of displacement to adjacent areas.

Via.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Graphic Design New York Gambling ]

Oxford Internet Institute: AI-powered social media can subtly manipulate opinion at scale, new study finds.

The study AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion, authored by Dr. Stratis Tsirtsis, Dr Kai Rawal, Dr Chris Russell, Professor Brent Mittelstadt and Professor Sandra Wachter, has been accepted for presentation at the AI4Good and Technical AI Governance Research workshops at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea.

arXiv: AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion. They focus a lot on Grok, but as I watch people adopt these things as a general information filter, I'm super concerned about this effect.

Tech Xplore version of the press release.

Via The Guardian, which adds a few examples but doesn't actually link to these sources.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media Heinlein Net Culture Education Artificial Intelligence Conferences Model Building Aviation - Helicopters Global Warming ]

Ya know, Typescript, if you're smart enough to figure out what that function is returning, maybe don't whine when I don't explicitly specify a return type for it?

(I'm stuck in a maze of little Mithril types, all different.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Mathematics ]

After the most annoying captcha ever, UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Does Bundled Parking Influence Travel Behavior? 2018 Pinski, Miriam Julia Advisor(s): Manville, Michael.

After controlling for differences in socioeconomic and built environment characteristics, I find that the presence of bundled parking is associated with a 27 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled. Bundled households drive approximately 3,800 miles more, spend nearly $580 more on gasoline, and emit 14.47 more metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Bundled parking is also negatively correlated to transit use, and households with unbundled parking are significantly more likely to be frequent transit users. This provides further evidence for the already strong case against parking requirements.

Via.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Law Public Transportation ]

Today in great compiler errors, turns out that:

Argument of type 'Component<typename, unknown>' is not assignable to parameter of type 'string'.

Means I misspelled a member name in TypeName.

I loathe this language.

Inside Higher Ed: Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat

As colleges and universities grapple with AI, cheating must be taken seriously, Serrano said. “We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK,” he said. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society … We cannot choose to become idiots.”

Via.

Brown University: Generative AI in Teaching and Learning (GAITL) Committee Final Report and Recommendations (PDF) was published while all of this was unfolding, and mentions that:

Among Brown student respondents, 56% of undergraduate respondents and 67% of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly. Master’s degree students identified themselves as frequent users at the highest rate (85%), followed by medical students (77%) and then doctoral students (50%). Adoption of GenAI technologies also has distinct patterns across knowledge areas, with a large majority of students in the life sciences (79%) and physical sciences (73%) identifying as frequent users. Students studying the humanities and the arts had the lowest rate of frequent users (41%).

And then notes that the camel is already in the tent:

Google Gemini tools are currently approved by OIT for use by students and instructors, and are accessible, free of charge, through their Brown accounts. Subject to constraints due to cost and assurances around data privacy and accessibility standards, the University should provide access to additional GenAI tools, since they differ significantly in their strengths and weaknesses. For example, ChatGPT, Claude Code and Brisk’s quiz generator provide different functionalities and would be an excellent complement to Gemini. In addition, many services have “premium” licenses available, and there are equity issues if some students have sufficient resources to use them and others in the same classes do not.

I'm having trouble reconciling bemoaning the use of generative AI and LLMs to take your take-home tests for ya, while providing lie machines bundled in with tuition.

Edit: Tom's Hardware: Professor suspected AI-powered cheating on take-home midterms, makes finals in- person — only two students scored within 10% of their midterm score.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Current Events Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Cheyenne Won’t Take Data Center Wastewater After Meta Contractor Contaminated System

Goat Systems LLC was in “significant noncompliance" with the city's industrial pretreatment regulations after discharging wastewater contaminated with Cupriavidus gilardii, a bacterium that interfered with operations at the city's water reclamation facilities and contaminated the municipal reuse water system, according to the BOPU’s Thursday statement.

Via.

Fuck yeah, let's gooooooo! Gizmodo: Meta’s Teen Safety Case Just Became a $1.4 Trillion Existential Threat

[ related topics: Law Pop Culture ]

Whoah. SIPEED Nano Home Lab: NanoXray. Okay, it's in development, not actually a shipping project, but:

Have you ever wished you had your own X-ray inspection tool? A compact desktop device for BGA checks, PCB analysis, and non-destructive inspection of small structures.

Via.

Okay, so the line number error reported by the build process was from the bundler, not from Typescript, which is why it had nothing to do with the code I was looking at.

When I say that the appeal of LLMs for programming comes from modern languages and tools being shit: this is why.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Don’t 'never- skill' yourself with AI

If you rent your abilities from AI companies, other people can rent them too

Via.

And, yeah, don't de-skill yourself, either. And don't fool yourself that knowing how to pull the trigger press the button will lead to being respected in a decision making role...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Artificial Intelligence ]

What would "heirloom quality" products, things worth passing down generations, look like, and is that even a goal worth pursuing?

Do we bother to build things to last, or do we just melt down the parts and repurpose them?

(Buildings, furniture, tech, tools, etc...)

[ related topics: Architecture ]

Kotaku: A Train Sim Created By Just One Person Is Being Called The Best Ever Made

Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.

The pictures do make it look amazing. The game is Running Train (on Steam) . This has also introduced me to the Zuiki Mascon railway controller.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Photography Games Sports Machinery Trains Public Transportation Woodworking ]

Yes, it's Amazon, but the first in Cooper S. Becket's "Osgood" horror series, which I really enjoyed, is free on your Kindle app today: https://www.amazon.com/Osgood-...8acabde870449d400&language=en_US

[ related topics: Books ]

Sigh. Web frameworks: Because one of the hardest problems in Computer Science is cache invalidation, and we're gonna try to abstract away the fact that caches exist, making the problem even harder.

Seeing a number of people commenting on "A Metallurgist’s Doubts About Self-Replicating Probes", and it's making me think about "what if amino acids are the probe?"

https://www.centauri-dreams.or...s-about-self-replicating-probes/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Personal Lubricant ]

window.webkit.messageHandlers.dragBridge.postMessage({
            url: vnode.attrs.row_id
} as unknown as string);

statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged...

Harpers: The End of Reading Is Here Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. (Gift Link via Elf Sternberg.)

That thread, and Elf's quote skeet of his link have some other choice bits.

The essay aggregates and touches on all sorts of ideas, from the Harvard student using LLMs to translate A Clockwork Orange into "modern English" to short-form videos, to...

One of the things I've been a cranky old man about, what with the decline of programming tools leading into the era of LLMs and vibe coding, is how programming used to be a skill, and when we let people who hadn't actually learned programming but had gotten college degrees in "computer science" into the workforce, we both got the extreme financialization of the activity, but also the decline of understanding.

And it occurs to me that LLMs are enabling these people to actually write code, and I'm not sure how I feel about that...

[ related topics: Language tolkien Software Engineering Writing Education Economics ]

Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hamoud cut racial disparities in traffic stops by changing what cops enforce (YouTube short video)

Told 'em to focus on moving violations, and... the video says that when he first came into office, nearly 50% of traffic violations were given to Black African American drivers. Dearborn is 3% Black, and day to day moving population is about 25% (and, yeah, we can talk a little bit about housing policy in that, huh?). After going after moving violations, tickets are down to 23-25% Black drivers.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Race Video Real Estate ]

Have a lemon blossom

[ related topics: Photography ]

Holy crap, the size of the Sunnyvale (square dance) Caller's workshop today. We walked in to what I expected, the regulars are getting pretty good, but by afternoon we had enough dancers to split the groups, and work with the newest callers separately. Square dancing might be a thing again.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Ugh. "Enhanced" photos, in this case from a Huawei camera mistaking a plane for a bird: Original posting, Dave Rahardja's link.

[ related topics: Photography Law Birds Woodworking ]

Futurism: CEO Pleads With AI Industry to Stop Charging So Much to Replace Human Labor

During the segment [on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street"], the chief executive argued that the cost to use large language models (LLMs) has to drop by 20 percent by 2027 — and 90 percent by 2028 — for the tech to be useful to enterprises.

Via

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Good morning from 400 steps into my morning routine on the Petaluma Quarry Heights staircase.

Good morning from 400 steps into my morning routine on the Petaluma Quarry Heights staircase. Image fixed.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Please write your software in such a way that I'm not using screen grab to pull the logo and then Google image search to try to figure out what app that's got startup hooks into my machine is asking me to log in...

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Apologies for posting slop, but a coworker was typing at ChatGPT on a topic, and it generated this map, and... the more you compare this to actual maps of The Netherlands, the worse it gets.

Imagine a few more years of people ingesting confidently wrong but plausible bullshit like this.

Wibble.

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

Oh, this is really cool, and unintuitive to how I've been using processors lately (but I'd really like to be back in that space): Quadrupling code performance with a "useless" if.

Via Lobste.rs.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy ]

Eros Blog quotes a TikTok video by Josie Marcellino:

If you’re of the belief that becoming a mattress actress [porn performer] at 18 is predatory and a bad idea because you’re still not fully formed and you don’t know what you’re doing to yourself, you do have to believe the same thing about getting married and having children at 18.

I've been having a lot of thoughts in the past few about consent and misogyny and such, and... yeah.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Movies History Sociology Video Marriage ]

You know what I really really love? When an Ubuntu upgrade changes the packages that various commands live in and I have to do a whole lot of `apt install ...` to get my system working again.

I think it really is time to switch to one of the BSDs.

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

The Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media, a look at Incogni: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use.

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Journalism and Media ]

I'm glad the guerilla action I'm involved in is one where, when I get the Signal distress message at 8:55, I can brag about the completion of the operation by quarter after ten on the socials.

Bolts replaced. Bench thievery hopefully averted.

[ related topics: Currency Fabrication ]

"extra-marital" means even more marital, right?

Went down to the Marin Civic Center for the "Surf, Skate, Street" exhibit, and discovered a collage and acrylic artist I wish I'd had a chance to meet, "Dickens 44": https://www.dickens44.com/

[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture California Culture Skating ]

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne@treehouse.systems

apropos to nothing, i've discovered that gpt-5.6-sol can generate arbitrary raw x86-64 bytecode streams

...:

given that: why have source code at all?

prompt2exe

prompt2exe asks an OpenAI model for a validated JSON shellcode manifest and wraps the returned bytes in a target-native executable container. It uses the Responses API directly through Python's standard library, so it has no package dependencies.

Because what could possibly go wrong?

[ related topics: Language Books Open Source Monty Python Python ]

I know some people make sure to celebrate non-binary day, but I could go either way.

When you can't find the information on Startpage, use Google, and it makes up bullshit.

I mean, at least I knew to verify, which confirmed why I couldn't find it on Startpage...

Just because I know I'm going to end up referring to it a bunch, Pivot to AI on the whole "Boko Haram is using AI" thing, in which it is pointed out that following the advice of ChatGPT killed over two thirds of one squad...

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Is there a way to generate a large corpus of bad code in a variety of languages? Right now my web site is serving zip bombs to overly aggressive bots, but I'm thinking LLM poisoning needs to evolve...

jbz @jbz@indieweb.social

What if we ban computers from using kids instead?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama ]

Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention: Longitude Position in a Time Zone and Cancer Risk in the United States Fangyi Gu; Shangda Xu; Susan S. Devesa; Fanni Zhang; Elizabeth B. Klerman; Barry I. Graubard; Neil E. Caporaso

Methods: We examined associations between the position in a time zone and age-standardized county-level incidence rates for total cancers combined and 23 specific cancers by gender using the data of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (2000–2012), including four million cancer diagnoses in white residents of 607 counties in 11 U.S. states. Log-linear regression was conducted, adjusting for latitude, poverty, cigarette smoking, and state. Bonferroni-corrected P values were used as the significance criteria.

Results: Risk increased from east to west within a time zone for total and for many specific cancers, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia (both genders) and cancers of the stomach, liver, prostate, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in men and cancers of the esophagus, colorectum, lung, breast, and corpus uteri in women.

https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-16-1029

Via, which thread also had Journal of Health Economics: Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders

[ related topics: Drugs Books Health Software Engineering Race Economics Model Building ]

JFC. Mindgard: Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left

This isn't even a prompt injection attack. Open a repo in Cursor that contains a "git.exe" file, Cursor runs it.

This disclosure goes beyond a single executable named git.exe to the place of trust in software. AI companies routinely ask users to grant unprecedented levels of access to code, repositories, terminals, secrets, and workflows that increasingly blur the line between suggestion and action.

The industry narrative is that these systems deserve trust because they increase productivity, but history has taught us time and again that trust should not be granted because something is useful. It should be earned through behavior. That behavior is reflected in how a company responds to security reports, communicates with affected users, and prioritizes remediation.

Via lobste.rs, which both raises the possibility that this might be an intentional backdoor given how long it's gone unpatched, and also has some speculation about LLM attitudes and philosophies around command vs data channels, and the unwillingness (or inability to conceptualize) separating the two.

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

Friend from way back is reinventing as a digital artist, went through the NFT phase, and is referencing Pepe the Frog because "Pepe is a very popular in the Web3 space".

Yikes, and it's amazing how the bubbles of what's acceptable surround us.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Art & Culture ]

My ear buds: "I dunno, man, I may have heard of your phone, once..."

My car: "Oh, hey, I realize you turned off the audio but I dug through your phone and found the raunchiest erotic podcast, your passengers are gonna listen to that now."

[ related topics: Music Erotic Automobiles ]

In which an essayist talks about how LLM usage is destroying their staff's morale, while cluelessly using image generation to illustrate said lament: Stackademic: My Best Senior Engineer Quit Last Month. Her Exit Interview Was Scheduled for Forty Minutes. The Last Five Changed How I Run My Team.

She said: “I haven’t built anything in eight months. I’ve spent eight months reading things a machine wrote, trying to find the bug it was too confident to see. I’m not an engineer here anymore. I’m a verification layer for an agent. I didn’t spend ten years getting good at this to become the thing that stands between a model and the incident it’s about to cause. I’m tired in a way that has nothing to do with hours.”

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing ]