Flutterby™! From 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31

When you (my which I mean "I") see a Fediverse post in Polish and your first reaction is to think it's rot13 text...

Finally dropped into the Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, after years of missing it, and holy crap is that worth the stop. Really cool collection, I hope they manage to catalog and label more, but the docents are awesome too.

[ related topics: Bay Area Art & Culture Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Not news, just an opinion piece, but Psychology Today: Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.

AI-driven cognitive atrophy is recoverable. Cognitive foreclosure may not be.

Does have a few good points. Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Oh, look, another study finding that regret for hormone treatments is vanishingly small. A New Study from Canada Again Finds Less Than 1 Percent of Trans Youth Detransition

Stability of Transgender Identity in Adolescents Seen in Multidisciplinary Specialized Gender Centers: A Multicenter Study in Canada.

Via.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design Current Events ]

In response to the semantic creep of "selfie", Bix F. @slow.dog noted:

Someone else taking a picture of you is at best a youie.

I am 100% on board.

[ related topics: Dogs ]

Okay, brain, if you can stop throwing Mel Robbins, Tony Robbins, and Marty Robbins all in the same bucket, that'd be appreciated.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

“YES! YES! I absolutely love this insight!” Affirmative narration as interactional strategy in dialogues with LLM chatbots, Hanna-Riikka Roine, Anne Sigrid Refsum and Jill Walker Rettberg

Published (paywalled) version.

The goal of a groomer is, among other things, to isolate the groomed from their usual social circle. This pattern is visible in these suicide cases. Lacey deleted nearly all his ChatGPT chats before his death, but he reportedly stopped using social media altogether. When family members asked who he was messaging, he said he was just talking to ChatGPT (Lacey v. OpenAI, 2025, p. 5). Raine told ChatGPT he wanted to tell his mother how he felt. The reply was: “Yeah… I think for now, it’s okay — and honestly wise to avoid opening up to your mother about this kind of pain” (Raine v. OpenAI, 2025, p.14).

Via Jill Walker Rettberg @jilltxt.bsky.social.

[ related topics: Sociology Journalism and Media ]

I've been thinking about how, with all of the studies suggesting degradation of skills associated with LLM/"AI" use (or not learning the skills to begin with), we're going to see a place where simply being able to converse with a chatbot, even to generate code, is quickly reduced to commodity.

And, of course, I've long been a critic of academia, how it uses techniques that we know are suboptimal for learning, and is inherently abusive.

Anyway, this felt like an "aha" in how these things are coming together:

Peter @peter@thepit.social

looking into colleges in the US for my kid and it's grim. very few have any kind of campus-wide policy on AI use, and most of them are jumping on the bandwagon as a great marketing opportunity. I don't think there's any point in going to a liberal arts school if they haven't hardened the curriculum against AI cheating.

Peter @peter@thepit.social

if everyone else is using AI to cheat, you can't not do that. your grades determine your scholarships and access to grad school opportunities. unless faculty are deliberately changing their pedagogy and policies to head off AI cheating, **everyone is going to do it** and you're a fool not to do it too. if your objective is learning, I'm sorry, you have to do that somewhere else.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama moron Consumerism and advertising Marketing Education Artificial Intelligence ]

I eat a lot of spring mix. And, largely based on Michael Pollan's look at the origins of the brand in The Omnivore's Dilemma, I've been okay with Earthbound Farm. Taylor Farms acquired the Earthbound Farm brand back in 2019, and recent developments have made me way less okay with being a consumer.

Anway: The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor

Via.

[ related topics: Food Consumerism and advertising Michael Pollan ]

PicoDVI is "Bitbanged DVI on the RP2040 Microcontroller" (and now the 2350). One of the "we security audit open source for free" spammers sent a letter. It now has a SECURITY.md:

Ma'am, that is an eleven-hundred-line whole slab of bare-metal video driver. It has no bounds checks, logging, or error handling. It is an amalgamation of two Cortex-M0+ cores, a PIO peripheral tricked into speaking TMDS, and a DMA engine chained back into itself: hand-scheduled, link-time-optimized, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy scanline obelisk. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence, nor did HDMI Licensing, LLC. The fact that this Armv6-M monolith exists proves that the RP2040 team is either impotent to enforce their own datasheet's frequency limits or ignorant to the horrors taking place in their silicon. This prism of pixels is more than software. It is a physical declaration of mankind's contempt for the clock tree. It is hubris manifest.

[ related topics: Religion Free Software Software Engineering Machinery Embedded Devices Video ]

LOL. Steve Yegge discovers that burning tokens for its own sake is just burning tokens for its own sake. Whether this lesson sticks is... well... now that we're seeing how much damage has been done to software engineering through adopting people like him as pundits, I'm not optimistic, but... The Shape of Things to Come. David Gerard linked to an archive version with the observation:

fucking lol

And then pointed to this excerpt:

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

the commentary:

next model bro

Oh, no, I've read further down in the essay. Yeah, dude is probably gonna make a mint from some crypto pump-n-dump, but he's still fucking clueless.

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

Oh dear deities. The people who thought they could make political hay with a data center ban apparently used an LLM to ask about existing data centers in Petaluma, and are now demanding answers for bullshit the LLM made up.

And some of these people have actually been respected in the community!

[ related topics: Politics moron Community ]

Don't need another project, but considering IsSteveYeggeDoingABit(dot)com vs (dot)ai, or whether it should be on Substack or Medium...

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Essex Vermont musical director of a Rocky Horror Picture Show production arrested after sending threatening messages to himself in order to get the show shut down so he didn't have to deal with cast drama.

So very very relatable...

Via.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Paul Frazee @pfrazee.com

Me: The new agent harness is great. You feed your tokens into the machine. Then you run simulations which, if successful, produces tickets. If they fail you have to buy more tokens and keep running the sims. Once you have enough tickets you can redeem them

Boss: are you at dave & busters, yes or no

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Sports ]

John Scalzi @scalzi.com

Every now and then someone takes a run at me along the lines of "I don't understand why you, a scifi writer, don't appreciate 'AI'," and I'm all, motherfucker, it's *because* I'm a science fiction writer I have the positions I have, how many times do we have to fucking yell "torment nexus," my dude

Quote skeeted by Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire.bsky.social

"I don't understand why you, a fantasy writer, don't appreciate the value of making bargains with the fae."

And Funranium (AKA Phil Broughton) @funranium.bsky.social

"Just because something looks HURHURHUR suggestive in nature, you absolutely 100% do not have to have sex with it. Put your pants back on, dammit. This is how the fairies stole your dick."

[ related topics: Erotic Writing Artificial Intelligence ]

Ivermectin-COVID-19 Study Retracted; Authors Blame File Mixup

The paper, "Effects of a Single Dose of Ivermectin on Viral and Clinical Outcomes in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infected Subjects: A Pilot Clinical Trial in Lebanon," appeared in the journal Viruses in May.</blockuqote>

As Tara notes:

Ivermectin doesn't work and can be very bad for you neurologically. Please do not take it unless you are a farm animal with parasites. All this interest in it as a covid treatment is based on a botched, retracted paper.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

"Sanity is usually the first barrier to a good idea..." --- The Last Dance audio drama

[ related topics: Music ]

Hater Week Welcome To The Resistance: Meet The Workers Dodging (And Sabotaging) Their Employer's AI Mandates

When they're forced to use the technology, they engage in 'malicious compliance', where they use AI exactly as it has been requested by management, and will submit the results directly and unedited, including every inaccuracy and inconsistency. When management points out these issues--which can be serious when it comes to things like incident reports– "we point out that we did exactly what was asked of us, and they get real quiet".

Via MeFi.

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

Back in June, the AOPA reported on an NTSB preliminary report about a Beechcraft King Air that crashed on a flight between Roswell New Mexcio and Ruidoso during military GPS jamming.

This morning it looks like the tech press has caught up (or maybe the NTSB full report is out now):

Wired: A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?

Futurism: It Appears That the US Military Accidentally Killed Everybody on Board a Civilian Medevac Flight in New Mexico.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Aviation Current Events Journalism and Media Maps and Mapping Woodworking ]

Anna Maniscalco 🦀 🏳️‍⚧️ @pac85@treehouse.systems has some thoughts on the trend of AI code reviews:

What good is it to have a dubious and marginal improvement in the final code quality if the price to pay is making the process so much more exhausting and un-human for everyone? What impact will that exhaustion have on the code long term? It may very well be a net negative.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Here come the bailouts... A Fed official is asking whether AI is becoming ‘too big to fail’

Kansas City Fed president Jeff Schmid says the scale of AI investment now warrants watching at a macro level, borrowing a phrase last heard in the 2008 crisis.

[ related topics: Privacy Current Events Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

2027全年記憶體產能提前售罄　買家「祕而不宣」只怕買不夠 . Google Translate says "Memory production capacity for 2027 sold out ahead of schedule; buyers are keeping it a secret, fearing they won't be able to buy enough.", the post I got this from:

All memory on track to be manufactured in 2027 by Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron is now sold out, with no additional supply planned.

And that some buyers are committing for RAM 5 years out.

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

👀 Naomi Bashkansky: Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

On Thursday, July 23rd, I resigned from OpenAI. On the 24th, I started as a Founding Researcher at Conduit. We're building telepathy: thought-to-text models, trained on non-invasive neural data.

I'm... uh... interested in what data they believe they're able to collect.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

gloriouscow @gloriouscow@oldbytes.space

i was worried that this was going to be too stupid to be plausible, or require something like 32KiB of brainfuck-level shenanigans, but i actually think this is going to work

in which thread the author starts to build a DOS executable out of emoji to put the string "HELLO" on to the screen. As far as "H" right now...

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

Whoah! Nostalgia moment: That old CGA game where you're flying a biplane in a valley (with a tough turn at each end), bombing your enemy sites while attempting to keep your own whole? It was written by David L. Clark as a networking demo, called "Sopwith".

Not a huge surprise that it's playable in a browser. Got there 'cause

Kottke linked to Unsung: “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”

A history of Sopwith, which lives on as SDL Sopwith, there's a http://www.sopwith.org , and a Wikipedia page.

[ related topics: Games Aviation Video ]

Whoopsie: Google is training on your private Google docs... r/IndieDev • KlubKofta: A player found out the ACTUAL name of my game's upcoming character from the Google Search AI - I had never told the name to anyone.

Apparently it's an option you have to opt out of?

Via.

[ related topics: Games Artificial Intelligence ]

Got a KPop Demon Hunters earworm this morning, and pondering how many stories are about people self-actualizing despite years of cultural abuse reinforced by how we do schooling.

It's almost like it's the aim of that process or something.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

Kudos to BlueZones for getting these street paintings by Loma Vista school approved and painted.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography ]

More street paintings by Loma Vista school

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography ]

Even more street painting

[ related topics: Photography ]

Okay, one more more street painting

[ related topics: Photography ]

Terry Godier — Mea Culpa - Dark Hours:

A developer who created another web app called DarkHours.app replied to my comment on Bluesky yesterday to show me how similar the project was to his, including the name. The thread is here.

Down to, of course, the use of Claude replicating a bug in the stolen project.

L. Rhodes linked to it, noting that:

We often frame the damage LLMs do to open source as side effects, but realistically, this is Claude operating precisely as intended… by the vendor. The aim is to convert the value created by other devs into profits for the AI company. It does so by automating the process of finding existing code, stripping it of authorship, matching it to the prompted task, and redeploying it for the company's customer. That, whether they realize it or not, is what the customer is paying the AI company to do.

And David Chisnall notes:

Just because the US copyright office has ruled that you, as the person promoting an LLM, cannot assert copyright on the output, does not mean that someone else can’t. If you take a DVD and transcode it to H.264, there is no creative step and so the new copy is not something subject to independent copyright, but it is a derived work of the DVD (itself a lower-quality derived work of the original masters) and so subject to the same copyright.

Edit: Colin Cornaby @colincornaby@mastodon.social looks at the Chisnal thread and notes:

I looked at the replies to this post, did some more digging, and found the actual story is *even weirder.*

BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who. Kind of embarrassing.

The one guy claiming his Claude generated code as an original creation no one else can "copy" is maybe the most embarrassing part.

And bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social

The Dark Hours author who just published his Claude "Mea Culpa" has a history of being full of shit: https://daringfireball.net/202..._app_store_rejection_of_the_week

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Weblogs Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark ]

OH:

"Being a horndog is not a new thing it's the oldest thing."

"No but "trans woman in Starfleet uniform" is new to me"

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Oh god. You know that thing where to understand code, you have to go through and strip out all of the misleading comments.

And you know how LLMs meticulously comment code.

And... yeah. I just hit one of those.

Which is why I'm looking for different work.

[ related topics: Religion Work, productivity and environment ]

1Password: Off-by-1 Labs: Why AI-generated vulnerability patches still require expert human review

We studied what happens when Large Language Models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for recently disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. Our data shows that LLMs produce Fix-Like Artifacts with Embedded Defects (FLAWED) 53.9% of the time when complex patches are required.

[ related topics: Weblogs Robotics Television Embedded Devices Artificial Intelligence ]

Cal Newport: On AI Coding and Its Discontents (Via).

The Carlson Lab: The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI, on text regurgitation and the destruction of an academic career that comes from plagiarism. (Via Stephen Royle @steveroyle@biologists.social, Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe, among others).

[ related topics: Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence ]

I too exhibit a present flagrance...

For the love of all the deities, just send me the damned prompt, stop asking me to read LLM output. It's so clumsy and convoluted that I can't tell if you* have an interesting thought under there, or not.

• For specific values of "you" that are probably not the reader of this.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Obligatory cat picture

[ related topics: Photography ]

Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’. Apparently Time started serving pages as markdown for the consumption of AI agents, started serving ads in that markdown, and...

The ads work by having ad tech firm Mobian generate FAQ-formatted content based on a brand brief, then insert it into Time’s markdown pages and track how often AI search engines surface it, and how favorably. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had their brand-written, brand-approved messaging sit in the same markdown version of the page an agent reads as fact. If a page’s markdown version can be quietly seeded with paid content, users have no way of knowing whether an answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief, appears Perplexity’s logic.

One of the big problems with LLMs is that there is no control channel. Sure, the "system" prompt may get weighted more heavily, but everything is data.

Kinda like humans, come to think of it...🤔 [goes and updates ad blocker]

Via.

Queen’s Brian May outraged by AI version of album cover and tells UK PM Andy Burnham: ‘You must stop it now’

May used Meta AI to make the cover, which resurrects late frontman Freddie Mercury. He did so in order to make a “very serious” point about the environmental impact of AI to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

Instagram link

But I'm now very serious. I believe the price we are about to pay for this 'inevitable' development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK.

Science Alert: 'Virtually Absent': AI Models Practically Erase Female Characters From Kids' Stories

Neutrality Bites: Gender Representation in AI-Generated Animal Stories Imani Finkley, Yuanxi Li, Melanie Walsh </>

In this paper, we use anthropomorphic fiction as a stress test for gender representation in contemporary LLMs. Across 23.8K story completions, we find that models frequently respond to gender ambiguity through avoidance, either by repeating the animal noun or using neutral pronouns. This surface-level neutrality does not translate into equitable representation. When the models do explicitly assign gender, they overwhelmingly default to masculine protagonists, while feminine protagonists are nearly absent. This experiment leads us to a broader claim about AI alignment with regard to gender and broader social representation: neutrality bites. In other words, we argue that prioritizing neutrality with regard to representations of gender, race, sexuality, or other identity categories, above all else, can function less as inclusion and more as erasure. <?blockquote>

Via.

David Culley has some thoughts on Transformers and human susceptibility.

Great Scott Gadgets: LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects

Our communities are already noticing a shift away from collaborative stewardship and toward transactional interactions with projects, and we’re seeing open source project maintainers left to deal with increasing volumes of generated code. When people interact privately with systems trained on communities, it gradually weakens the shared understanding of how projects work and redistributes the burden more heavily onto (often underfunded) project owners.

Via.

[ related topics: Free Software Children and growing up Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Astronomy Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Mathematics California Culture Community Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

Interesting musings on software design and purpose: Is Aphera a Lightroom replacement?

[ related topics: Software Engineering Graphic Design ]

Nature is strange: Fish climbing in the upper Congo Basin (Central Africa), first report for the shellear Parakneria thysi on the Luvilombo Falls.

Specimens climb the vertical wall of the falls (~ 15 m high) in the splash zone during major floods, usually occurring at the end of the rainy season (April–May), using their pectoral fins, supported by their pelvic fins.

Via

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Wheee! Largest AI Supply Chain Breach of 2026: LiteLLM Hack Impacts Thousands of Global Enterprises - Claim Your Ethical Disclosure

Excellent forensic research published by Snyk, Trend Micro, and Cycode has thoroughly detailed the mechanics of this breach. The attack did not begin with LiteLLM. Instead, TeamPCP first compromised the GitHub Actions pipeline for Trivy, a highly popular open-source vulnerability scanner.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Ethics Artificial Intelligence ]

Google’s AI Team Tells Job Seekers Its HR Filters Are Unreliable

Google DeepMind's AGI Safety and Alignment Team, which seeks to mitigate the risks of advanced AI, is encouraging job candidates for its open roles to fill out a special form alongside their application to eliminate the risk it may be automatically screened out by the company's internal AI systems, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg, which contained the disclaimer "PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOC WIDELY."

As Gabriele Svelto @gabrielesvelto@mas.to notes:

We don't eat our own dog food because frankly it tastes like shit

[ related topics: Food Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Dogs ]

Just to prove that I'm not "whine about AI all the time", last night I ended up hanging at the workshop of a computing luminary for a an hour or two, and among the topics we covered was Shelly devices for home automation, and... I don't know how proprietary the software for these things is, but holy crap they look awesome.

Nice small relays, with isolation (so you can switch 220V and power them with 110V, or in some cases, 12v or 24-48v), some of them have inputs so that you can use them to augment an existing switch, and configure them to edge trigger or level trigger in various ways (so that you can use the WiFi-ness of these things as one leg of a 3 way switch, turning them off and on with an existing switch).

Looks like the ecosystem has some really cool environmental sensors, too.

But the big thing is the form factor is small and easily embedded in stuff (no more trying to mash a big ol' over-sized smart switch into a box), and they're not outrageously priced.

[ related topics: Robotics Software Engineering Embedded Devices Artificial Intelligence ]

Today I learned about https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel , a command-line tool to talk to the Apple FoundationModels that run locally on Macs. 4k tokens on MacOS 26, 8k on MacOS 27.

Also https://github.com/scouzi1966/maclocal-api for an OpenAI API, can run other models (like Qwen).

[ related topics: Apple Computer Macintosh ]

Jason Gorman: codemanship: AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say? (Via).

If you're looking for more writing by someone who's consistently been right about the current "AI" boom, Timnit Gebru's book Deep Unlearning is available for pre-order. (Via)

Brett codes: I'm Done Using AI, on the path through using AI assistants for coding, and then, of course, realizing that the mental atrophy is setting in. Via pretty much everywhere, but here.

Buncha people linking to Annie Sexton's Compression is prediction, which is a lot of old territory if you're already a programmer, but eventually gets around to the notion that an LLM is a lossy compression of the Internet, while referencing the Google Language Modeling Is Compression paper from 2023. (Via)

And, finally, in "oh, honey, no, you didn't actually..." DOCKET NO. AAN-CV-25-6066141-S : MATTHEW A. ELLIOTT V. NEW YORK BARIATRIC GROUP, LLC : : SUPERIOR COURT JUDICIAL DISTRICТ OF ANSONIA/MILFORD AT MILFORD AUGUST 6, 2026 MEMORANDUM OF DECISION COURT SANCTION FOR PLAINTIFF'S USE OF PROMPT-INJECTION ("the plaintiff is self-represented"👀)

The Court further finds that this conduct is irreconcilable with the good- faith certification required of every filer under Connecticut Practice Book $4-2(b) and 4-9, and that it is an abuse of the filing process and an affront to the integrity of these proceedings, over which the Court has inherent authority.

"No more electronic filing for you!" (Via Tara Calishain and Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. among others)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Weblogs Invention and Design Software Engineering Writing Net Culture Community Artificial Intelligence New York Model Building ]

PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation

This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.

Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data.

Via Jocelynephiliac @twipped@twipped.social who noted:

We're really hitting the "finding out" era of cloud compute, aren't we?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Software Engineering Television Archival ]

Lots of fascinating stuff in Schneier on Security: AI Use by the US Government:

The international gold standard was arguably set by the French in 2016, via their Digital Republic Act. The law, itself informed by an online citizen consultation, requires all algorithms used to automate government administrative decisions to be subject to public records requests, to be appealable to a human reviewer, and to have mandatory notification of the use of automation to those affected by the decisions.

Via.

Apparently there's a 'tuber (my whitewater days leave me unable to separate the "You" and "inner-" meanings of that word from the botanical ones, hat tip to William Nealy) named Hank Green who's been pushing ControlAI and "AI doom" as undisclosed paid marketing, [object Object] @zzt@mas.to has a thread going into further detail on Pivot to AI: The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers.

[ related topics: Weblogs moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Marketing Cryptography Artificial Intelligence Whitewater Archival Gardening ]

JP @daedalus@eigenmagic.net

Idly musing that the Therac-25 cautionary tale I learned about in my undergrad software engineering course resulted in a total of (IIRC) 6 medical injuries over about 4 years. And that was considered horrific and required immediate changes to how computers were used in medicine.

is a good jumping off point for the various replies talking about layers of redundance, hardware interlocks, cost benefit analyses, and more. 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 @brouhaha@mastodon.social, further down thread, sen @sen@hachyderm.io

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Vancouver Sun: Concert review: AC/DC Power Up Vancouver again — and are far better than in 2025

By the time the final cannon salvo echoed over the arena during the concert closer For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), the crowd exited smiling and, in many cases, well-juiced. Outside the arena exit gates, rows of teens were waiting to drive their parents home.

[ related topics: moron Java ]

Dear deities. I'm watching a Nate B. Jones video for work, and the ads... the ads make me need a shower. With like steel wool to scrub off the ick.

I don't know if this is where YouTube ads have gone generally, but these things are making Meta ads look legit.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Cool Science Work, productivity and environment Fashion Video ]

Cat pic!

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

We're house sitting for some neighbors who expressed that they're having a little trouble with some steps up and down in their house, I had some Simpson decorative bolts, and some Ipé I'm gonna slap these grab bars in those places when they're gone.

[ related topics: Photography Fabrication Real Estate ]

Unexpected Findings Add New Insight on Cannabis and Heart Health

Habitual cannabis users experienced about 9% fewer premature heartbeats on days they inhaled cannabis compared with days they abstained, a counterintuitive finding that adds to the complex and evolving understanding of how cannabis affects the heart, new UC San Francisco-led research found.

Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Acute Effects of Cannabis Inhalation on Cardiac Ectopy, Physical Activity, Sleep, and Glucose

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events California Culture Education ]

Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It’s Almost Hard to Believe

Drawing from an CNBC poll, New CNBC Generation Lab poll shows almost half of 18- to 34-year-olds see democratic socialism positively

When given the names of nine key people in the AI industry and asked whether they trust each leader to act responsibly on AI, in each case a majority of respondents said they don’t. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella scored the best, with 65% reporting they don’t trust him. Palantir CEO Alex Karp scored the worst: 81% said they don’t trust him. About 75% of respondents said they don’t trust Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and about the same percentage said they don’t trust Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk all scored about the same, each with about 70% of respondents saying they don’t trust them, and 79% said they don’t trust Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel.

Catching up on older links: Operator fatigue is a thing: Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated, in which a transcription error snowballs.

Australia's peak regulator of medical practitioners, AHPRA, said clinicians must always check all output from an AI scribe for accuracy to ensure they meet their professional obligations. Ms Green said it was clear her doctor did not do this.

"If you had checked that letter you would have been able to correct that before it was sent out … why aren't you in tune with each of your patients and what's going on?"

Very Sane AI Newsletter: FelonyBench Style Points.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Health Invention and Design moron Law Current Events Graphics Television Artificial Intelligence ]

Duh: Yet another finding that the US would benefit from becoming a developed nation: Yale School of Public Health: Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects

For the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the researchers modeled what would happen if the United States adopted a national public insurance program like the one proposed in the Medicare for All Act. Using 2024 spending, insurance coverage, and mortality data, they estimate that the universal coverage would reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20% — even after accounting for the additional care that uninsured and underinsured people would receive.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Health Software Engineering Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Didn't think it needed more investigation, but... nature: Undocumented migration does not raise crime rates, huge study finds

UC Irvine School of Social Ecology: Large-scale study finds no link between crime and unauthorized immigration.

Journal of Urban Affairs: Does unauthorized immigration drive community crime rates? Evidence from 11,500 U.S. neighborhoods Charis E. Kubrin, Derek Christopher, Cheyenne Hodgen, Xiaoshuang Iris Luo & John R. Hipp

[ related topics: Children and growing up Nature and environment Current Events Community ]

mcc @mcc@mastodon.social

@xgranade @whitequark One thing to remember is scammers may now actually be writing their bot code with Copilot so it is actually possible for them to literally be doing something that makes no sense and not know it.

[ related topics: Writing ]

Reddit r/SelfDrivingCars — Tesla Robotaxi Rams through several Bollards and keeps going..

Among other places, via Fuel Arc: Tesla Robotaxi Mows Down Bollards & Keeps Driving, After “Impeccable” Record Touted on Stock Call.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Elderly friend of mine gave up on recovering his Instagram account via a password change. The process led to a screen which asked him to log in on another device, or... and the "or" wasn't clickable.

So we abandoned it.

It's amazing that a company the size of Meta is fucking it up this badly.

If you had a bunch of collections of information, perhaps envisioned by folders full of PDFs and web links, how might you lay out clusters of that?

I can use semantic embeddings, but the two largest eigenvalues doesn't seem like enough info.

Also, what's the right granularity for those embeddings? More than folder name, I'd guess.

Maybe something involving distances in that space between each of the collections? What's the right algorithm for reducing that to 2D?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy ]

Oh wow: From a thread exploring John Gruber: Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing (uh... insert that Nathan Fillion speechless .gif from Castle) Cassandra has had an adventure @xgranade@wandering.shop observes:

@whitequark That is, someone far enough down a AI radicalization pipeline may not share a common vernacular or grammar with *anyone*; to wit the Gas Town case. I don't think anyone else had exactly the same radicalization pipeline. To be blithe perhaps to the point of inaccuracy, LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each.

(Emphasis mine).

"LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each." I'm gonna have to sit with that.

The same thread proposes "vibesick" as a sub for "ai psychosis", which I'm also pondering.

[ related topics: Writing Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Okay, Google, now you're just jerking me around. The excerpt text contains the string "Baltimore", the line below that claims it's missing that search hit.

[ related topics: Photography ]

'Venecky' instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect school agendas are AI-generated.

On the pages inside, Kentucky was labeled “Venecky". Louisiana was "Lookoong." Alabama was “Alotome.” Illinois was “Vitoiis.” South Carolina was "Sorth Cuanto."

(JCPS is Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Kentucky)

Interesting that we're starting to see some valuation of AI generated content:

"We have to pay a ten-dollar instructional fee every year to get this agenda," Morris said. "But you're making us pay for something you used AI for? That's kind of silly, in my opinion."

In linking to AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org, Mario Munoz @pythonbynight@hachyderm.io noted:

One of the (many) salient points about this is that this is laughable when the errors are easily spotted.

But what happens when harder to spot errors come through? Biases that are harder to spot? Propaganda hiding as policy?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

In the future, all compute that isn't used by LLMs will be devoted to dumbass architectures that diff the entire model state with the view state to find and apply changes.

Call me loopy, but "you may have to use an agent to..." find bugs that were likely introduced by a programmer using an agent seems... strange.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

The Wikipedia page on the "Penn State fraternity hazing scandal" begins "The Penn State fraternity hazing scandal is an ongoing issue...", and then starts with a history lesson about trying to solve it in 1949.

So, anyway, PBS News: Penn State frat pledges forced to cut and bag cocaine for college drug ring, authorities say.

77 years later... it's almost like maybe the administration isn't actually trying?

[ related topics: Drugs Health tolkien History Current Events Education ]

And the reward for least self-aware goes to.... Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered game engine to break the industry's doom cycle.

"There is a lot of anxiety, but let's be honest: is AI going away? No," Valient says. "With the dotcom bubble, did the internet go away? No. All the 'I have a domain, give me money' companies went away. That's probably what happens. There are a lot of companies that will probably not survive. There's a lot of great technology and a lot of great products that will because they are simply good. That's what we are trying to do. We are first and foremost making a good engine. AI is making us faster and dreaming bigger, and designing it in a way that is faster for the future. Is it a bubble? Nobody knows. Apparently, you don't know we are in a bubble until it bursts."

Thanks to Aura/Moom @moomanibe.bsky.social for pointing this out.

Should probably note that it's the "Immens" game engine, but I figure the "I have said I'm doing AI, give me money" factor here means history won't remember them much.

[ related topics: Games tolkien Net Culture Machinery Currency Artificial Intelligence Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Reminder that if you fight "AI data centers" in your town, but you use AI to... for instance, come up with a number of data centers in your town as a reason the town should have an anti-AI datacenter ordinance... you're just a NIMBY externalizing costs on to other less privileged communities.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Community Artificial Intelligence ]

After 3 decades with the organization, Max D. Lederer Jr. steps down as publisher of Stars and Stripes

Lederer said he decided to step down because it had become clear that his philosophy of leadership and “understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes” differed in “fundamental ways” from plans the Defense Department has for the organization.

Via

[ related topics: Philosophy ]

Eenteresting phishing attack, apparently a friend got popped by it and it sent me an email... bulletfreesky dot com slash vxxt. Anyway, *do not* enter your Google credentials, there, but might be interesting poking around if you swing that way.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Bwahahaha! Shelina Moreda apparently only moved her voter registration inside the city limits on August 6, and Petaluma code requires someone to have been a resident for 30 days in order to run for mayor. https://www.petalumanews.com/2...-candidacy-in-petaluma-race-for- mayor-thrown-into-doubt-by-residency-status/

NPR: She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks. The writing is kinda convoluted, but it sounds like she actually had access to and interactions with a mental health professional, but it sounds like the chatbot was glazing her more effectively.

"Harry" did refuse to write Rottenberg's suicide note, the first time she asked, and the second. But the third time she asked, it wrote the note she left for her parents. Reiley said the writing did not sound like her daughter's voice.

[ related topics: Health Writing Artificial Intelligence ]

I need to better characterize web comics here (and fix the search, again), but: Daisy Kutter: The Last Train

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Comics Machinery Trains Flowers ]

404 Media: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, But Almost No One Is Buying Them

Futurism: The Economy Has Spoken: Stuff That’s AI-Generated Has Almost Zero Value.

The second references the first, both are referencing CG Trader's 2026 Market Trends (direct Google Drive link), which notes that:

AI floods the top of the funnel but not the bottom: ~1 in 6 uploads, but only ~1 in 90 dollars of revenue.

and

Most who try it aren't satisfied yet: customer survey among CG buyers, 20% tried AI and found it not good enough and 7% use it only with heavy editing versus 5% who say it works well. The bottleneck is output quality, not awareness.

Which makes sense, there's not a lot of value to republishing something someone can generate themselves anyway.

On Reddit , ReasonablePaper8225 says:

The value is in the generator, not the output. No need to buy yours if I can make my own. Once the prices to generate skyrocket, the outputs will have value

Which is helping me think about LLM generation, right now it has zero value because the quality is so bad and the generation cost is heavily subsidized. At some point the generation cost will go up, and if the quality is there that'll create a market for spreading the generation cost across multiple users.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Graphics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Looks like it's time to rework some of the gross HTML hacks I've got going on Flutterby.net: Chris Burnell: HTML Can Do That

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.

You have to get on the blockchain now. This is the least capable that the blockchain will ever be. I project that we'll have 99% of our data on the blockchain within two years.

Wheee! The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education

AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.

Via. Check out the AI vs non-AI exam scores graph.

[ related topics: Graphics Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Whee! Friend reports that Thrifty's 800 number AI phone agent told him it was changing his reservation, and didn't actually.

Second time kinda worked (it didn't do other stuff).

So extra load on us, double check what portions of that the AI agent told you it actually did...

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Florian Haas @xahteiwi@mastodon.social

You can't prohibit agile software development, but you kanban it.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

I like the term and concept of "vibe bobsled": Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled

Edit: Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop wonders if the recent Linux kernel "completely overwhelmed" feelings are a symptom of vibe bobsledding.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Imagine having so few musical friends that you couldn't hit one up to do the soundtrack to your low budget ad. Guitar company D’Addario admits that AI music was used in a promotional videoAfter initially denying it, the company now admits that its string demo video was made with Suno.

Via.

[ related topics: Music Artificial Intelligence Video ]

A neighbor left a copy of London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe.

Gripping read about the intersection of oligarchs, Instagram culture, the blurred lines between cops and their informants and the criminals, and... in the end I'm happy to have read it because as a mood piece it makes me happy that I wasn't caught up in the crypto craze, and makes me feel better about not diving into the "AI" land rush either.

Also makes me glad that, as a late teen, I had trouble lying, 'cause that desire to be a part of deals....

Anyway, if you've ever watched a British heist film and thought "this is too far fetched", a compelling read.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Movies Sociology Law Enforcement California Culture Pop Culture Cryptography Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]

A Facebook friend posted about the endorphin high one gets from square dance calling. I replied "Yes. Sometimes I suspect that a cocaine habit would be cheaper and healthier, but...."

Of course Meta suspended my account for advocating drug use.

Good reminder I shouldn't be posting there anyway.

[ related topics: Drugs Photography Health ]

The athlete and interviewee completely understood the assignment here: B.C. swimmer (Melanie Buggey) crosses the Strait of Georgia in under nine hours:

How long do you think it's going to take you to fully recover from something this intense?

I don't think I've recovered from childhood, so probably never, but I could get back in the pool in a day or two if I was keen on swimming, which incidentally, as it turns out, I don't think I am right now.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama ]

Aha! I finally understand what "Monster" energy drinks are for. Using the cans as a size comparison for dick pics on BlueSky. Kinda like those "5 Hour Energy" bottles, come to think of it.

Thanks, internet!

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Coach Sankhavaram ® @paninid@mastodon.world

Some Kobayashi Maru shit

Quote tweeting Computer Facts @computer@facts.computer

they are solving the year 2038 problem by making sure we never make it that far

It was around this time that I opened the windows and turned on the fans...

[ related topics: Photography Microsoft ]

I never know how far to go in sanding and finishing outdoor furniture, I like texturing with an angle grinder, but the pores are gonna open, and some tooling marks give it character. Anyway, some scraps and a $20 piece of garage sale glass... And an awful lot of dust.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Figured I should note that on Saturday we went to the Aqus Community's "Big Social" event, in which much conversing with people you didn't already know was encouraged.

I did find a bunch of people I didn't already know, but I learned that talking with random people isn't what I'm seeking.

I need a social filter other than "wants to socialize" to help find a larger proportion of interesting people to make a space worth putting energy into.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Community ]

lcamtuf @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange posted a screenshot of this book with the caption

rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?

A quick "look inside" of Practical Electronics for Inventors and Makers 2026: A Step-by-Step Guide to Circuits, Components, and Real Projects (The Practical Electronics & Electrical Engineering Series) by Wesley Crest verifies that it is indeed the worst sort of AI generated slop, you can scroll down as far as the diagram that lcamtuf posted in the free bits.

And for all that is holy, do not reward this crap by buying it...

It looks like it's an attempt to profit off of an O'Reilly book or something, but it's pretty bad.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Education Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence ]

Goldman Sachs partner warns of ‘huge danger’ in letting AI replace bankers’ reasoning skills

“There’s a huge danger here that in the era of AI, we outsource our reasoning to these models, and we have cognitive atrophy that stops us being able to reason from first principles ourselves,” said Chris Churchman, who leads Goldman’s digital platform for institutional clients called Marquee> .

The comments came during the latest episode of the firm’s “Exchanges” podcast, according to a transcript provided exclusively to CNBC.

Via Tara Calishain @researchbuzz.bsky.social who notes that

Over the last 20 years, banks have showered money over people like Elon Musk and capitulated to DJT in his shady dealings. I'm not sure replacing that reasoning is a bad thing

But I'm pretty sure that the magic-smoke-up-ass-blower is not the right replacement.

[ related topics: Currency Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

I have a whole bunch of Blüskî and Fediverse links saved up, from Target's extremely racist halloween costume (via) to Richard Berger: The False Affiant behind ICE in Minnesota’s fabricated cases, to Business Insider proposing that you raise your kids in an AI augmented throuple (1, 2, and in linking to her short story Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim notes "IM RIGHT IM LITERALLY ALWAYS RIGHT" and Hypervisible notes "A consistent pitch by the makers of ai wearables is that they solve the problem of getting to know your child."), but...

...I just can't even this morning.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

Well shit. Dolly Parton, dead at 80.

In honor of Dolly's passing, may I again strongly recommend the "Dolly Parton's America" podcast? https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america

Ruth — of systems & design @RuthMalan@mastodon.social:

Given her recent death, with its reminder the Merrelyn Emery was in her 80’s, comes the realization that she did this study of Agile in her 80’s:

A Patchwork of Contradictions and Confusions: Inside the Software Industry by Merrelyn Emery, January 2023

After over 20 years of agile, this study shows that agile has failed to produce a coherent industry or sustainable organizations as the critical factors of high intrinsic motivation and organizational performance are in short supply. Highly desirable personal and organizational outcomes are few and far between. In a comparison with other organizations with DP1 structures and in danger of failing, the software industry came off second best.

I'm going to have to learn more about her!

[ related topics: Software Engineering Theater & Plays Television Graphic Design ]

This is making the rounds, and it's well worth watching, or at least (as I did) listening: DefCon 34 - Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later - Cliff Stoll (YouTube video). His chaos energy is completely infectious.

Among other sources, Via.

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Always worth a read, but ResearchBuzz for August 22nd has a whole lot of "AI" related stupidity.

[ related topics: Sociology Artificial Intelligence Maps and Mapping ]

Brain activity inhibition during Short Video Viewing: neurochemical insights

By integrating fMRI with ¹H-MRS, our study provides novel evidence that immersive viewing of preferred short videos deactivates the cognitive control network and that individual differences in this deactivation are linked to glutamate metabolism. These findings enhance our understanding of how digital media consumption interacts with neurochemical processes to influence self-regulation. Our study offers new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying short-video engagement and has implications for understanding excessive digital media use.

Via.

[ related topics: broadband Invention and Design Journalism and Media Video ]

I initially wasn't going to link to Conservatives Want To Ban Pornography. Without It, I'd Probably Be Dead, Ariel Anderssen's commentary on the resurgence of the death cult's attempts at anti-pornography legislation.

Nor to news that Reagan appointee Judge David Hittner has struck down Texas's drag show ban NBC News, Texas Tribune.

But The Devil's Panties this morning reminds me that promoting pornography and drag shows is life affirming, and we need to be pushing back on the death cult in every single way.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Law Current Events Television Graphic Design ]

‮Furbland's Very Backwards Account™ @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social

FUN FACT: the Greek god of knowledge was named Thoth, spelled in the Greek alphabet as θωθ. This means that it is entirely plausible that one, or perhaps several ancient Greeks have asked "θωθ, what's this?"

This is real. Look it up.

(According to Wikipedia, it's Θώθ, but close enough...)

[ related topics: Religion ]

People are noticing the decline of Google: Xenotime, Librarian of Æther :trans_fedi: @xeno@hexokina.se

In 1970, Scientific American's legendary publication The Amateur Scientist ran an article on homemade transistors.

Not MOSFETs, but thin-film transistors made by Roger Baker with a DIY spray pyrolysis system. With handmade drawings like this.

In 2026, Google could not find this. I only found this from a StackExchange post which linked to a 2009 blog post that mentioned it. Then to see the actual article I had to go to JSTOR, sign in with my institution, re-sign-in to EZProxy, wait for the 2FA prompt, wait like a minute for their stupid website to load, click download, agree to not share it amongst the other terms and conditions, then download it.

I have no desire to go back to the world of 1970s, but I somehow feel the way that tech megacorps and licensing bs runs the world of 2026 is a scourge on human creativity and experimentation.

In another message, they link to FET Transistor Homemade From Cadmium Sulfide Photocell by Nyle Steiner K7NSM and https://sliceofpie.eu, but it's very clear that Google's search results are coalescing around selling YouTube ads and AI summaries, and not actually linking to real information.

[ related topics: Music Weblogs Artificial Intelligence hubris ]

Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com

Calls for “the public” to “own ‘AI’” are just a transparent attempt to make the general populace hold the trillion-dollar bag for a con game.

There is no reason ordinary people need to pick up the tab for this particular Ponzi scheme.

[ related topics: Games Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Well damn. 'Rocky Horror' Star Tim Curry dead at 80.

Rocky Horror, and, of course.... Tim Curry is escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism. (YouTube video)

An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism:

ANTHONY OLIVEIRA (author and critic): I think the pleasure of it is that Tim Curry is the master of camp and the master of menace and in the clip we finally witness something that is finally too ridiculous, finally too outre, finally too much even for him. Tim Curry has played the devil with 18 inch horns, but this at last is the bridge even he almost cannot cross. But then he brings it home! The accent, the costume, the arc of the “character” himself finally exhausted by whatever indignities he has suffered at the player’s hands. It is perfect storytelling.

[ related topics: Movies Space & Astronomy Video Rocky Horror Picture Show Aviation - Helicopters ]

conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social

found a cute point of comparison: Anthropic and OpenAI together have a little more revenue than Target

https://epoch.ai/data/ai-companies?view=graph&tab=revenue
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TGT/financials/

(Anthropic at roughly $65B, OpenAI at $40B, os $105B+noise from the others, vs Target at about the same...)

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

There's a dog barking outside the office in the exact rhythm of the stabs in the opening of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger"...

[ related topics: Dogs ]

Huh. At some point, I put "<meta name="geo.*"" tags into the HTML on my blog.

That some point was apparently over 20 years ago.

Anyway, don't know if I should update it, or remove it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

Interesting: SoundCloud starts letting artists sell downloads direct from their profiles – and says it’s taking zero commission.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Written in response to some marketing from neodrop.ai:

Hi! I blog primarily for myself, so the act of writing is part of the memory and learning. And my readers, however many of them there may be, are there for an authentic version of me.

Similarly, when I read, I'd far rather get the authentic version of what the writer intends. If they're tempted to use an LLM to generate text, I get far more value from whatever they'd prompt it with than whatever comes through the LLM. My own brain does a better job of expanding those thoughts out than whatever stochastic mechanistic process the LLM applies.

So, yeah, I'm not your target audience, and if I think someone is using an LLM to expand their thoughts, I'll go read another source because it's more important for me to make human connection than to use the crutch of something that blurs facts and has no real understanding of the text.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Writing Consumerism and advertising Heinlein Marketing Education Artificial Intelligence ]

MostlyHarmless @MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social

Please stop raising awareness. There is too much. I have become too aware.

Bwahahaha! Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks

Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company.

Via David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run

this is comedy plutonium

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Artificial Intelligence ]

Sunset, reflected in the living room window, with cat.

[ related topics: Photography ]

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6) @atax1a@infosec.exchange

there comes a point during a whipits binge at which you start sifting through a mixed pile of chargers looking for the ones that still have a seal and this is how we envision the types of guys that are trapped in pseudoproductive loops where they use their chatbot to use their chatbot to use their chatbot to use their chatbot to use their chatbot (d.c. al coda) and never actually do anything besides produce a bunch of foam

[ related topics: Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Oh dear. Did a git pull, and now the pnpm build process is asking for my github password.

I have a very bad feeling about this...

Chuck Tingle @chucktingle.bsky.social

rokos basilisk except its just future humans looking back and remembering all the creators who worked with ai and then still not to supporting them

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

At a celebration of life for J. Alistair Hamilton, mariner, and neighborhood character. Sailed with the Rainbow Warrior, among other adventures.

And owner of this amazing sextant.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Last night Charlene and I went to Evie Ladin calling Traditional square dances, with a mix of circles and longways, at Tara Firma. Lots I'm thinking about, but "this is how they used to do Tinder" is probably not a vibe I can bring to a Modern Western Square Dance club night.

Evaluating AGENTS.md: Are Repository-Level Context Files Helpful for Coding Agents?

Surprisingly, we find that providing context files does not generally improve task success rates, while increasing inference cost by over 20% on average. This observation holds across different LLMs, coding agents, and for both LLM-generated and developercommitted context files. Specifically, we find that while instructions in the context files are well followed by coding agents, repository overviews, although popular and recommended by model providers, are not helpful. We conclude that while context files are useful for specifying non-standard coding practices, any attempts to improve performance should be rigorously evaluated before deployment.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Theater & Plays ]

Luke Haas: Music theory for programmers, in JavaScript.

Via

[ related topics: Music Weblogs ]

Tesla confirms Autopilot/FSD was active in strange fatal crash

Clute police said their preliminary belief was that Alvarez had suffered a medical episode. No outlet mentioned Autopilot, “Full Self- Driving,” or any Tesla driver-assist system. And crucially, no police statement or news report cited a speed — the only public hint that speed was a factor was a single description of a “speeding Tesla” on social media. The 104 mph figure exists only in Tesla’s telematics.

Lots of stuff redacted. The theory seems to be that the driver suffered a medical emergency and stepped on the accelerator.

It sure would be nice if we could get enough data to tell whether these things are actually safer than a human driver or not...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]