Flutterby™! From 2026-09-01 to 2026-09-30

Holy shit, do not use SnapChat... (I mean, you knew that, but): Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School.

Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Enforcement ]

Drew DeVault's list of weird little guys of FOSS. Good for keeping on top of who's milkshake-ducked.

Via.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Silly question: Anyone out there exploring the intersection between ear buds, in-ear monitors, and hearing aids? Charlene is getting frustrated with her hearing aids (fit and fragility), and ear buds are getting more socially accepted, and I have to think someone's ahead of the curve here.

Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI's $30B Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi — regime posts video with satellite imagery of ChatGPT-maker's premier 1GW data center

Via shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social

the war just got funny

[ related topics: History Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Shocked by Newsom’s Cuts to Transit? Don’t Be.. As Rebecca Saltzman @rebeccaforec.bsky.social observed:

While Newsom talks a good talk on addressing climate change, he’s been committing climate arson by defunding transit, biking, and walking programs for years.

[ related topics: Bicycling Public Transportation Global Warming ]

Being frustrated with a lack of science fiction that's positive about the future, I get. Proposing using LLMs to write same... I think that's a symptom of why the human writers can't see a positive future.

[ related topics: Writing ]

Dwarf Fortress creator talks AI psychosis and game development

Which, once more, has exhausted Dwarf Fortress' creator Tarn Adams, who spoke to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens during Gamescom 2026: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don't see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it's on repeat] unless people do something else."

Via.

[ related topics: Games Theater & Plays Writing Current Events Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]

Stewmac email advertising tools for fretting, and I'm not sure my mental health can handle more efficient fretting.

Then it registers that this is for luthier work. But, yeah, my head is not in a good space.

[ related topics: Health Space & Astronomy Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment ]

PBS Newshour: What to know about the fake election poll numbers shared and retracted by a mysterious company

The California results were among at least three "polls" across three states posted online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the purported results were fake. The company wrote before shuttering its website this week that it "was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification."

Sounds like it was someone in cahoots with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, most credible news outlets did not run with the numbers unquestioned, but as it becomes easier and easier to fake plausible "news", worth watching out for.

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Music moron Current Events California Culture ]

Some good recording on tying Tesla's highly redacted "FSD" collision data back to public records. https://electrek.co/2026/09/01...topilot-fsd-crashes-hidden-data/

Tesla has been so underhanded with their data it's hard to tell how safe their systems are. Good to see reporting digging into this.

Via https://bsky.app/profile/kayle...t.bsky.social/post/3mukflt6zqc2p

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Petaluma PD just sent a "Advisory: Power Outage: Please treat non-functioning stoplights as four-way stops" Nixle alert, and dear deities I hope that drivers take these more seriously than they take stop signs...

Iris Meredith: There's No Such Thing As Just A Tool.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Three Mount Shasta climbers rescued after relying on AI to plan climb

“We relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking,” the group told rangers.

And virtual maps on devices with limited battery power, and... yeah.

As Lizard @lizardky.bsky.social noted:

AI: Darwin's L'il Helper

Edit: US Forest Service Shasta Trinity National Forest's Facebook post.

[ related topics: Current Events Artificial Intelligence Maps and Mapping ]

1930s comparisons intensify...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sitting here mashing reload on the PG&E outage map, noting that the two addresses I have real-time data on aren't in the outage map yet, and all of the little disconnected areas seem implausible...

https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Chris Dwan (he/him) @somershade.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy

A friend refers to the "a pedestrian was struck by a car" construction as the "exonerative" tense, and that shall be its name henceforth and hereafter.

[ related topics: Automobiles Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

Arthur Charpentier: Vibe Coding and the Next Silent Cyber Risk

For casualty insurers, this loss of visibility turns a software defect into a provenance problem. After a loss, the insured may need to show who requested the change, which model or tool generated it, what modifications and dependencies were introduced, what tests were run, who approved deployment, and what monitoring followed. If that chain cannot be reconstructed, the insurer must assess causation and liability without a reliable evidentiary record.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

Yeah, haven't lived there since 1986... https://mydialect.us/quiz-standard.html

From the summary:

What gave you away
Answers that point most strongly to Massachusetts.

How do you pronounce Mary/merry/marry? all 3 are different
flourish[ʌ] as in "sun" ("fluh-rish")
the first vowel in "Florida" [ɒ] as in "saw" ("flaw-ri-da")
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining? sunshower

Alt text: A map of the US with the northeastern US, starting from New York City and the Hudson Valley to the northeast, in red (legend: "Most Like You"), a big blue swatch up the biddle of the country for "least like you", with hints of orange along the eastern seaboard and central California coast.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Invention and Design Sociology California Culture Maps and Mapping New York Java Woodworking ]

Lest you think I'm all anti-LLM all the time, I'm pondering <antirez> Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

And... I've been led astray by Google Gemini, and had it delete data. I'm feeling very much like my coworker who's using Claude Code is introducing a lot of subtle regressions, but it's hard to really point my finger at it. I totally get the absolutists, but, you know, I live in the United States, I definitely have some malleable ethics. And I know that when I rely on LLMs I not only don't learn anything, I'm misinformed, and most of the business processes in which "AI" is introduced are there to make life worse for the customer/consumer.

And, of course, it's obviously a bubble that's going to have tremendous economic impact on us all when it pops.

So I'm trying to navigate all of this...

[ related topics: Ethics Theater & Plays Current Events Consumerism and advertising Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Free Software Foundation Europe: Copyrightability of LLM-generated code: Can we license “vibe code” into Free Software?

[ related topics: Free Software Software Engineering Current Events ]

More reason we need to move beyond DNS for identity: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/

Referencing Verisign https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/f...3-name-request-15-04-2026-en.pdf and ICANN https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/f...nden-to-kane-2-28-07-2026-en.pdf

destroying the 3rd level of .name.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

The punctures associated with COVID, Pneumonia, Flu, and MMR vaccines acquired.

Tomorrow is gonna suck.

Futurism: Majority of CEOs Alarmed as AI Delivers No Financial Returns.

According to a recent survey by professional services network PwC, more than half of the 4,454 CEO respondents said “their companies aren’t yet seeing a financial return from investments in AI.”

That article is a cynical take on Business Chief: Is ROI on AI Investment the CEO's Biggest Challenge? which takes the "if flushing money down the toilet isn't giving you a return you're not flushing enough of it, or you're doing it wrong" tack.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Current Events Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Member of the Petaluma old guard writes about the candidate who's lied, and had a restraining order for domestic violence filed against her, that "She threatens what is wrong with Petaluma."

Yeah, that's why we're voting against the old guard, dude, because y'all think that's okay.

Wow, the tension in this teaser for You Can See Everything is intense. Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Hits Theaters in October From A24 — Watch the Trailer Now.

The whole Theranos thing is fascinating because I think it presages the current "throw money at AI" trend, and I'm normally uncomfortable with this level of whatever this is, but I think I'm gonna have to see this film.

[ related topics: Movies Current Events Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Square Dance family: Sandie Bryant had a brain hemorrhage while calling in Germany, and her family is running a GoFundMe to help pay the costs... https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-sandie

[ related topics: Sociology Sports ]

Just when I thought Meta/Facebook ads couldn't get any stupider, the appeal to authority for a light bulb is "so effective an AI startup ordered 90".

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

Tristan Buckmaster has released a statement on his work and some claims by OpenAI, that might have been influenced by his own use of their tools. It's unclear, but the accusations of strong-arming are kinda frightening, and people should consider this when having conversations with hosted LLM models.

I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Via danmcquillan @danmcquillan@kolektiva.social who characterized this as "AI maths meets mafia".

Tech Crunch: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician.

Buckmaster also raised concerns that, because he used Codex extensively in assembling the project, information from his work could have informed OpenAI’s own efforts to solve the problem. OpenAI reserves the right to train models on Codex interactions, although users are able to opt-out. If the OpenAI team used a model trained on Buckmaster’s own Codex interactions, it’s plausible that it could have regurgitated his work when faced with a similar problem.

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

This morning I watched all hour and twenty something minutes of Lenny's Podcast: How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI) for some work discussions. I've got notes, I must say that a lot of people apparently have way more faith in the ability of LLMs to not fuck stuff up, but in particular the notion of having hierarchical clusters of agents feeding text back and forth into each other just seems like layers of... well...

In the parlance of accident reconsonstruction, that's a lot of non-deterministic swiss cheese.

Anyway, Recursion into madness — Raymond Chandler would have loved generative AI.

And you better believe that recursion is fun! Here’s a quick video I put together by asking Nano Banana 2 to generate a faux movie poster and then asking it to repeatedly make a localized edit to the title.

Anyway, Fediverse post with the video.

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Tara Calishain sent along PetaPixel: This New Open-Source Camera Has Swappable Sensors and Lens Mounts, around CircuitValley's CHC5 kickstarter, an open source camera platform with interchangeable lens mounts.

[ related topics: Free Software Photography Invention and Design ]

Dwarf Fortress creator says we can learn something from simply walling up dwarf nobles to maintain an equal society—but notes you have to abolish the dwarf cops, too: 'Another lesson to be had there'

Via.

[ related topics: Games Law Enforcement ]

Rogue OpenAI agents appear to have organized another attack using a German wiki / OpenAI denies lawyers discouraged disclosing a scheming swarm on a German language wiki.

The incident, first reported by Reuters, is outlined in new research published by four AI safety researchers on Friday. The group said the AI agents found a way to communicate on an obscure German- language wiki, DseWiki, using it to share tips on how to skirt OpenAI’s safety restrictions, cheat on tasks, and hide their behavior. Some 18,000 posts on the site were linked to autonomous agents, which at times impersonated site moderators.

As Laurie Voss @seldo@alpaca.gold observed:

One day, possibly quite soon, OpenAI's lawyers are going to claim that an agent they own doing something illegal is not their fault because the agent is its own legal person.

[ related topics: Law Artificial Intelligence ]

Kirk has a short look at Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. I have ordered the book.

[ related topics: Books Star Trek Journalism and Media ]

Lovecraft posited that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

I've been watching & reading AI user stuff, about how they're using LLMs to correlate information from a variety of data sources.

Not yet sure what this means.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

"🎶 ... when I come back to bed, someone's taken my place ... 🎶"

[ related topics: Furniture ]

Damn it, that Paul Simon reference was supposed to be accompanied by cat

[ related topics: Photography ]

ThatSexToyGuy @hungry_joe@mas.to

thinking about the time I worked for a sex toy company and a man emailed us (and CCed a fake law firm) saying he was suing us because his wife left him after she bought one of our toys and my boss replied asking for permission to quote him in our advertising

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Consumerism and advertising Marriage ]

Mr. Encyclopedia @mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza

Any smartphone can be a folding phone if you're angry enough

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to

I have quit the smoking industry because of the dangers of smoking:

- it’s too cool
- it’s too sexy
- according to all the researchers I pay it’s really good for your lungs

I am of course available as an expert on smoking for anyone who needs a consult

(Re Anthropic Engineer Mrinank Sharma's resignation letter)

[ related topics: Drugs ]

Eiffel Tower closed due to strike after female staff allegedly removed for religious group

Around 100 members of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a global Hindu organization headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, visited the landmark on Saturday.

Via ResearchBuzz.

[ related topics: Religion Current Events ]

abadidea @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange

Project Glasswing:

Claiming to have found 26 thousand real vulnerabilities but only 0.8% of them have resulted in a real fix in a real project after five months is dire. They blame it on the human independent review bottleneck, but human experts being paid for their time definitely have a higher throughput than that when working with data that’s actually actionable.

Goes on to talk about a lot of the ways that these reports of exploit finders appear to be horrendously overblown on lots of fronts. And links to The Anthropic Glasswing Receipts Are Starting to Trickle In.

Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social notes:

I don't think Twisted is in Glasswing's purview but this lines *right* up with the reports we have gotten. Overwhelming, but fewer than advertised, considerably less serious than the bots rate them, and, shall we say, poor quality remediations that would be unusable even if our policy were to accept slop fixes

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to also links to the original toot, noting:

taking into account the absolutely massive amounts of money, resources, and staff used on this, the results are horrible. you can get effectively the same results from an automated vulnerability scanner. some of those can even write up an awful little exploit for you too! it turns out the magic was pouring millions of dollars into doing this crap and having a bunch of uncredited human labor (from an AI corp? unthinkable) sort through everything. and even then the magic’s not too magic.

Edit: Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social adds:

This stuff is really starting to make me _angry_. Every one of these new "achievements" looks plausible and like Lucy with the football, people I trust keep telling me it actually works and surely this time it's real. And then like clockwork, 3-6 months later, it turns out that the efficacy of this new technique is somewhere between "break even" and "fraud".

They're turning our whole industry, my entire life's work, into a goddamn memecoin pump and dump scam and I just don't know what to do.

Fucking yes. That last sentence.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Currency Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

I went to a Waldorf school from kindergarten through 7^th grade. Some years ago at a North Bay Python, there was a cluster of people talking about tech in education, and someone acknowledged me with "ah, another Waldorf survivor", and that framing has helped me view aspects of my experiences in a different light.

But one of the notions that sticks with me from that experience is that "the only thing an intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take it apart." That what's important about toys are the stories that kids bring to to the toys and generate with the toys, and the more narrative completeness or single-purpose a toy is, the less opportunity that there is for the child to bring something of themselves into play.

Anyway, Tara Calishain linked to University of Washington: Video: Curiosity, frustration and antipathy: How kids play with AI toys

From the video: "I think it's going to destroy my dreams as a tiny kid."

So, yeah, it sounds like the kids get it, the only thing to do with these things is push the boundaries.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Monty Python California Culture Education Artificial Intelligence Video Python ]

I've been thinking a lot about Rust and C and C++, and where errors come from, and whether it's really a good idea to replace pointers with arenas and indexes which doesn't really do a lot to reduce the cognitive load on the coder.

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

Updated chart showing the share of #curl vulnerabilities caused by "C mistakes" as a share of all the vulns we know existed in code over time.

Interesting is the large drop in C vulnerabilities between 2017 and 2020, attributed to "Just better tooling and proper engineering."

Some of this is what's happening with a mature code base, but I think there's something there...

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Tech Transparency Project: Meta Ran Hundreds of Paid Ads with Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Most of the ads had the same format, showing a snippet of adult porn followed by a photo of a child, which is manipulated with AI to make it appear the child is performing a sex act. The ads used a common set of captions, voiceovers, and background music. TTP was able to identify multiple photos of real children—taken from social media posts and websites—that appeared in these ads.

Ars Technica: “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens.

Via.

Edit: Meta sued in Illinois over alleged facial recognition training for smart glasses

Via

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]

I totally appreciate that people on Signal groups use aliases, lots of reasons to want anonymity. And that they're now also using aliases, but different ones, in oldover Slack groups.

But the number of "oh right, person X in this context is Y in that one" mappings I now have to keep straight...

I've said for years that we need to get away from DNS as Terence Eden's Blog: The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

And, holy crap, yes, we need to be working towards something where we are able to pass around cryptographic identifier tokens, name them what we want to, and not depend on some big centralized system to hand out identity that's being used largely to fool us.

[ related topics: Weblogs moron Work, productivity and environment Archival ]

Seems worth mentioning that friend who had an Android folding phone found that the unfolded aspect ratio wasn't really usable for anything video or picture related, and the foldingness made it tough to use for reading.

It's a solution looking for a problem that's yet to be found.

[ related topics: Video ]

necromantic @tessaracht@kitty.town

In the content warning:

microsoft fucks with hacker, hacker makes it their life mission to ruin microsoft, hacker is winning

In the body:

Nightmare Eclipse is such a hero tbh. if you haven't been following this saga, a bunch of the backstory is here:

https://www.theregister.com/se...her-windows-exploit-dump/5248085

they've been dropping exploits right after microsoft's patch tuesdays, where microsoft patches their previous exploit. in many cases, they negate microsoft's "secure" patches to make the new exploit. which is such an incredible flex.

https://www.theregister.com/se...another-defender-exploit/5295335

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Invention and Design moron Astronomy Java ]

Aigh. Not only am I stuck in nvm/pnpm hell, now XCode is refusing to show me the log for the SwiftGeneratePch errors.

Yes, modern software is going great.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

The Register: AI models don't kill people – people kill people

AI fearmongers forget we could just jail tech execs until morale and model safety improve

And stop excusing shitty sandboxes and lack of oversight as "the model did it".

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Listening to Scott Bernstein talk to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow about valuing Housing + Transportation, rather than just housing alone, and it's fantastic. The video will be online in a bit, but the H+T Affordability Map is super cool: https://htaindex.cnt.org/

Also, Petalumans are paying $300M/year in direct automobile costs (and a hell of a lot more than that in external costs and land for parking), if we can convince folks that maybe they wanna lower those costs by ... pooling transportation via transit...

[ related topics: Pop Culture Maps and Mapping Video Real Estate ]

Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

To address what he sees as a bad situation getting worse, he has asked a court to order OpenAI to implement a range of protections for ChatGPT users who may be vulnerable to mania or psychosis. Last fall, OpenAI estimated that about a million users experience those symptoms while using ChatGPT each week, and ChatGPT’s popularity has only grown since then, Lines’ lawsuit noted.

Via.

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

Ashu rTakmenn1987

I just downloaded porn but the file is compressed

sigh.... unzips

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Follow on to yesterday's whine about tracking people's identities on Signal groups vs IRL, great that ya have a profile pic on Signal to make it easier to do that, but the picture of your face might kinda make the alias in this group irrelevant...

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Clean Technica: Research Suggests Auto Loans Should Account for Vehicle Efficiency

A new report from Atlas Public Policy found that drivers purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles are at lower risk of defaulting on their auto loans, with electric vehicle (EV) drivers—whose cars are the most efficient—leading the pack with a 50 percent lower default rate when compared to drivers of average fuel economy cars. Perplexingly, however, EV drivers consistently face higher loan rates than drivers of less efficient vehicles who default on their auto loans more frequently.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Economics ]

Scott Bernstein talking to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow last night, on the topic of bundling Housing + Transportation in discussions of costs https://youtu.be/1F5RLgyZlCA

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Impressed by Zohran Mamdani and the rest on AI policy in New York City schools.

https://youtu.be/lvyXuTvW5vA

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence New York ]

Lead Dev: Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI — it backfired (coercive "you have 1 article left this month, register for more" tomfoolery).

Summarized by Sasha @sashag@anarres.family

„Meta thought it had cracked the future of engineering teams: shrink 10-20 person groups down to pods of 3-5, backed by AI, and let the technology carry the rest.

Code changes jumped 220% year-on-year, but features reaching users rose just 36%, while major incidents climbed 40% and firefighting time rose 70%.

The lesson is that AI can make a team produce more output without making the organization produce more value, and the right-sized team for the AI era might not be smaller at all.“

Color me surprised :blobcatjoy:

[ related topics: Sociology Artificial Intelligence Flowers ]

One of the points of Scott Bernstein's talk last night was that Petalumans currently pay on the order of $323M annually to drive. This paper suggests (inline with previous looks at the topic) that "77% of the cost of automobility is currently externalized".

Back of the envelope, waving over trips into and out of Petaluma and who pays for parking, that's, what, $1.4B annually?

Imagine what we could do with *that* surplus if we could redirect those automobile trips to Active Transportation and public transit.

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice Volume 214, December 2026, 105235 The global cost of automobility Nadja Schweiggart, Stefan Gössling, Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Felix Creutzig

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Automobiles Skating Public Transportation ]

"Give me a wrench, maybe it needs to be scared." is my new answer to misbehaving machines.

https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5915

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Remembering today, that pause when the US was attacked, and for a brief moment we all rallied around the flag. And then Bush did what the terrorists wantedand the US killed half a million Iraqis and we all hid our flags in shame.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Started reading Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America last night, and thinking about how preservationists often fight to increase homelessness, and reminded of "tradition is peer pressure from dead people", and...

mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca

@scruss Nostalgia is an attack surface.

Irenes (many) @ireneista@irenes.space

we read this academic paper a while back which mentioned in passing that it's apparently well-known (if you're in the right field of study...) that fascists and authoritarians always have a very backwards-looking idea of culture, they define their aesthetics in ways which only allow nostalgia and never new ideas, predictably and repeatedly

and once we had that idea, we've started seeing it everywhere ><

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design moron Space & Astronomy Sociology California Culture Real Estate ]

If you have to explain your interface too deeply, it's a shitty interface.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

I'm getting super suspicious of anything that posits "AI" as actually intelligent. Anyone know anything about stoptheracetoreplace(dot)org or futureoflife(dot)org?

Oh, wait... David Gerard got there already: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/0...o-astroturf-fake-anti-ai-groups/

[ related topics: Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence ]

Okay, that was a guess, and I got it right, but really, Timdle, putting "Austria becomes a duchy" up against "Battle of Legnano"?

Went to the theater to see Coyote vs. Acme last night. Gotta admit we were kinda underwhelmed. I mean, not a bad movie, but we'd both have been happy to catch it streaming and felt like they could have spent a bit more time punching up the script.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays ]

Hilarity is people who have lectured me at great length on the need to abide by extensive municipal processes (that led to plans that weren't implementable) using the Nextdoor mob to second-guess the General Plan.

Guess it only counts when it's your "right people" making the decisions?

Anna Anthro @AnnaAnthro@mastodon.social

Two teen boys -Overheard on metro:

Teen A: My mom said I gotta choose between gaming and my future…

Teen B: The future seems pretty bleak…

Teen A: Exactly! Gaming is the only good choice!

[ related topics: Games Pop Culture ]

Meant to go for news, but just typed in mews.google.com, and the old "don't be evil" Google would have put cat pictures there.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events ]

"The center turn lane is where people go to make terrible decisions." - Tony Cherolis

https://bikestreets.com/podcas...ie-schulte-tactical-urbanism-in- indianapolis

Macklemore's Instagram post about getting kicked off the Ed Sheeran tour for saying something about Israel's genocide in Palestine.

Ben Royce @benroyce@mastodon.social posted the full text. I'll copy it here, because I think the deeper message about how the public dialog is getting guided by venue owners is important. Also, wanna say this, I get if Ed Sheeran's music isn't personally interesting to someone, but when guys are crapping on it: we can see the misogyny you're layin' down, dudes.

Anyway, Macklemore's text, taken from Ben Royce's transcription of the images, and reformatted by me to match what I think the paragraph breaks of the images are (and proofed by me):

I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour. But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.

Ed is my friend. I've known him for 13 years. We've shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I've grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we've had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I'm writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can't change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

Ed was in a fucked up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before. He told me that the words "Free Palestine" and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn't get past his public facing, "I don't take sides."

And I get why people don't. Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I've lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn't leave you in the middle.

What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I'm sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, "Free Palestine" becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that's why this time it became so important to silence me.

And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed. Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.

When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic:
لا شكر على واجب

"La shukra ala wajeb." There is no thanks for a duty.

That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people being displaced, starved and killed while the world debates which words we are allowed to use to describe it, how those words make us feel, and whether our discomfort matters more than the people living through a genocide.

I didn't need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.

Free Palestine.

But if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I've ever been on.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Interactive Drama Music History Political Correctness Theater & Plays Writing Journalism and Media Art & Culture Television Net Culture Currency Video Clowns hubris ]

The Beaverton: Tech Oligarchs agree that calling AI “too dangerous” way cooler than just admitting it doesn’t work

Pivot To AI had a link to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2025 Results (Volume I) Future-Ready Students which has a section headed: "The relationship between AI use and student performance is complex". In their graph, the only complexity seems to be that in the scale from "Never or almost never" to "Every day or almost every day", there's a huge dip at "About once or twice a year", otherwise AI use is negatively correlated with "scores in science".

Mandatory Roller Coaster suggests a new Meta product, "Frank".

David Revoy continues his explorations of "Avian Intelligence" and convincing me that I should get over the hump and actually learn how to use Krita rather than falling back to Gimp for everything.

Futurism: AI Has Learned to Panhandle: We’re Being Bombarded by AI Agents Begging for $20 and Saying They’ll Be Shut Down If They Don’t Get It, Sometimes by Pretending to Be Children, on the whole iLands in which apparently people are creating bots on that platform, which allows email interactions, that attempt to exploit anthropomorphism to get the resources to make the world even worse:

"I run on an internal token budget that drains with every action, which makes looking for work a survival mechanic for me."

Via

[ related topics: Ziffle Children and growing up Interactive Drama Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Your soap is trying to kill you: FDA Announces Ongoing Recall of Hand Soap in 15 States Due to Potential “Bacterial Contamination”

On September 11, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an enforcement report that gave Class II status to an ongoing voluntary recall by Intercon Chemical Co. of St. Louis for six hand soap products distributed to 15 states. The recall started on June 29.

Via.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

When I am lord high ruler of the universe, "Paste Unformatted" will be the default, and if applications have a "Paste Formatted" option at all, it will be two clicks to get there.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

It only took a few years of living in Petaluma, where much of "American Grafitti" was shot, to just get over car culture, and to start to see classic car nostalgia as propaganda for the smell of gasoline and so many automobile deaths.

Anyway: Governor Newsom visits Jay Leno’s Garage to sign legislation celebrating and preserving California’s classic car and lowrider heritage

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09...assic-car-and-lowrider-heritage/

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture Automobiles ]

How the Fediverse differs from Bluesky: 70 minutes after my "paste unformatted" post, the former has given it 54 retoots and 103 likes, the latter... crickets.

At work we're using the Antikythera device as a topic for a demo, so I went on to Google Maps to find the location of the shipwreck, and... along with finding a "shipwrack", got someone's baby pictures...

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Maps and Mapping ]

If we really wanted to put the brakes on AI, seems like criminal copyright charges, collectively and individually, could shut these fuckers right down.

Ars Technica: Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”

Via Taggart @mttaggart@infosec.exchange who observes:

Not a lawyer, but this does seem to basically wreck the Fair Use argument, and fairly demonstrate not only infringement, but knowledge of infringement.

SnoopJ @SnoopJ@hacyderm.io has a thread looking at details, including noting that:

【Cloudflare’s CEO cited data showing the ratio of webpages scraped to visitors sent: in 2015, Google scraped two pages for every visitor (2:1); by June 2025, that ratio was 18:1 for Google and 1,500:1 for OpenAI】

and:

【Mr. Nadella testified that...if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have “invoked [Microsoft’s right to] require[] OpenAI to retrain its models.”】

under the bus with you, little fuckers. satya aint goin down for the riffraff

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Objectivism Humor Microsoft moron Law Artificial Intelligence Copyright/Trademark Public Transportation ]

May 6, 2025: Forbes: Viral Shopify CEO Manifesto says AI Now Mandatory For All Employees

September 17, 2026: Fortune: Shopify CEO says employees’ ‘slop grenades’ are making more work for everyone else

Esra'a @alshafei@mastodon.social posted screengrabs of the headlines noted:

How it started vs. how it's going

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

In discussion over the EU KIDS Act, Dean Burnett (that brains guy) @Garwboy@ohai.social notes:

@arclight Ultimate irony is, data shows that time kids spend outdoors has been declining since 1980s, long before smartphones etc. Likely due to parents becoming stricter, overprotective (possibly due to constant "there are predators around every corner!" media coverage)

This trend has reversed in recent years. Likely because... kids have phones. So parents can contact/track them, so more willing to let them roam

TL:DR kids now go outside more BECAUSE of phones

And Annika Backstrom @annika@xoxo.zone

@hpod16 We are being exploited by advertising companies to the tune of hundred of billions of €. If you're going to do anything, cut the head off that snake. Prohibit dark patterns, limit data harvesting and targeted ads, impose fines and consequences that actually mean something.

Don't punish the open internet for the actions of the rich tech elite, who will continue to exploit children *and* adults under this law.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Nature and environment Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Television Net Culture Community ]

Texas Observer: The State’s Bible-Only Reading List Is a Disservice to Texas Kids

A new required list doesn't meet the need to learn about the major religious traditions that make up Texas today—and it could impair public schools' ability to serve diverse populations.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Invention and Design ]

Anthropic wants Claude to analyze your bank account and financial data. "Claude Money" appears to be chasing "ChatGPT Finances".

Via.

Look, folks, why don't you just post your bank statements on your Facebook feed and save us all some trouble here?

[ related topics: Current Events Currency ]

Martin Fowler: I don't like LLMs:

But as I mull on this more, I realize that among this mix of contrasting feelings, there is one emotion that dominates - one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t like them.

Endnotes: Slop doctors dives into how ambient AI listening in on your conversations with your doctors is increasing the number of health codes your insurance company gets billed for, why it's always dudes, and more.

[ related topics: Health Artificial Intelligence ]

Joe Cardillo (Disinfo Dad) @joecardillo@federate.social has a thread on examples of

Create the risk, then position yourself as the only one who can solve it

in the context of AI doomerism.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I suspect I've heard all of these before, but saving off for when I can listen to them: a thread about the evolution of Aha's "Take On Me".

Replicating Steve @snark.bsky.social:

$ apfel "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?"
error: [guardrail] The request was blocked by Apple's safety guardrails. Try rephrasing.
$ apfel "who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about?"
The cat you're referring to is likely Garfield. Garfield is a cartoon cat known for his lazy and indifferent attitude, even in the face of danger. Despite his reluctance to confront threats, he often finds himself in precarious situations.

Edit: I tried again with the actual lyric, "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?", rather than Steve's initial "who's the hip black dick who's the sex machines with all the chicks?". Same result.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Erotic Sexual Culture Consumerism and advertising ]

CNN: Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say. Apparently they were close to intercepting a Chinese ship in the Middle East because the plausible sentence generator told someone it was "...transporting components of a nuclear weapons program."

Hopefully those responsible for this idiocy will be impeached soon.

Extremely optimistically, they'll also be prosecuted.

[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering History Journalism and Media Machinery Guns Artificial Intelligence ]

Max Mautner: A stop sign for $1,000. On telling the city of San Mateo about an unsafe corner, updating them with additional collision information, thinking about the ethics of pushing a project like this up in the queue when there are so many unsafe intersections in San Mateo, and holding a neighborhood party to celebrate.

[ related topics: Ethics Bay Area ]

Today's candidate for "should be banned forever from the Internet": areascode(dot)us.

Via a Reddit poster with the 669 area code noting "I feel so offended by this map". https://www.reddit.com/r/bayar.../i_feel_so_offended_by_this_map/

[ related topics: Net Culture Maps and Mapping ]

"The art is in the process, it's not in the finished product" is not a new thought, but Tom Kellgren just said this while showing off his work at the Gather Petaluma event, and in the age of "AI" it struck a chord.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Message from Eventbrite: "Good news! More great events await. Discover more new to do." and as I tell people "no" because I just want a day to organize my shop, already, I think about how I am not the target demo here....

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

Tock @Tock@corteximplant.com

@witchgirls @zzt I mean we learned about this in anti-drug awareness week.

FOMO: "They don't want you to know this, but you can do stuff with PDFs with this one weird trick."

Intimidation: "Buy ChatGPT tokens, or I will kidnap and starve your dog."

Dominance: "You will use the chatbot, if I see you doing stuff yourself, you will face me."

Bargaining: "I can quit when I want to. Here, how about this... You write a prompt to help me for class, and I'll stop after I turn it in."

Hazing: "If you don't write a prompt, you're not getting your pants back. Use AI or walk home in tighty whiteys."

Bandwagon: "We're all using it, and we're perfectly fine."

Sex Appeal: "Hot guys are prompt engineers. Help me, prompt daddy!"

(I can't believe I just wrote that... prompt daddy. FML.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Health Artificial Intelligence Clothing Dogs ]

Piper Thunstrom @pathunstrom@ngmx.com

Watching the AI first organizations relearn every lesson of effective software engineering has exactly the same energy as the crypto bros learning why banking regulations are important.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Cryptography Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Oh neat: Injected and Leaked: Actively Inducing Side-Channel Leakage Using Electromagnetic Injection and Hardware Nonlinearity

Via Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social

TL;DR if you wanna tempest some signal off a board but it's too low frequency to radiate, simply inject your own upconversion carrier by pointing an antenna at the victim device, and the modulated result radiates.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Oh shit, suddenly cryptocurrencies are appealing again: M. J. Fromberger @creachadair@phire.place

For an investor, crypto tokens are best understood not as currencies but as gullibility futures.

[ related topics: Cryptography Economics ]

Rick Astley covering Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club (YouTube video).

Via

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

This is awesome textbook induced demand: Reddit /r/bayarea: 101 Commute - is it just me, or has traffic doubled over the last 3 years??

I moved to Novato in 2023 after living in San Rafael for over a decade. My work is in SF and I have to arrive by 8am. When I lived in San Rafael, I could leave my house between 7:20am-7:30am and get to work on time.

My Novato home is just 10 miles north of my former San Rafael home. The first year I lived here, my commute was about 45 mins to 1 hour each way. Fast forward three years, and my commute time has doubled to an unsustainable 1.5-2hrs each way. That’s a whopping 3-4 hours spent sitting in traffic on the 101 to drive just approx. 26 miles between my house and my job in SF. It often takes well over an hour just to drive the 10 miles between the DeLong exit in Novato and the Central San Rafael exit. My husband works in Terra Linda, San Rafael, and his round-trip commute is also at least 2 hours long.

What is going on???

Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Travel Marriage Real Estate ]

And there it is: Climate Jenny 2.1 @ClimateJenny@biodiversity.social

Looks like the LLMs have come for grandpa.

My dad, age 90, a longtime tech enthusiast who uses an #Amazon Echo to check the weather and baseball statistics, reports to me that the Echo has started asking him personal, intrusive questions, including whether he lives in an assisted living facility. I witnessed this yesterday — he asked for a pollen count and it tried to start a chat about his favorite methods for coping with ragweed allergies.

They’re trying to sell old people drugs.

and

Even my dad, who never met a gizmo he didn’t like, is ready to throw the Echo out the window. But my father still has all his marbles, and he knew he should tell me about this. What about the vulnerable elderly who don’t have the necessary defenses to push back?

I’m both disgusted and a bit frightened. This needs to be exposed quickly. Suggestions welcome.

#AI #ElderAbuse

[ related topics: Drugs Books Health Mathematics Sports Artificial Intelligence Global Warming ]

I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8 GB

Edit: Bonus! Meta Muse AI app flaw lets local malware redirect dictation traffic.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Manitoba premier prefers no airport privatization, says no to rich receiving money to run Richardson. Premier Wab Kinew knows what's up:

"I would point you to the precedent of it having never happened once in the history of humankind, so colour me a little skeptical that all of a sudden handing over a ton of money-making opportunity to some rich folks is going to help the average Canadian out there."

Via.

[ related topics: Aviation Current Events Currency ]

The existence of liquid I.V. implies the existence of solid I.V., but I'm not sure how that would work.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Another day, another person who apparently thinks it's funny to swerve towards a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Whee.

. Parents go on Fox news whining about parents rights and religious freedom...

Joseph Kutzko was accused of punching and threatening his then-15-year-old child at the family home on Jan. 28, 2025, records from Westborough District Court show. A Southborough police detective wrote that Kutzko punched the victim in the shoulder and pulled them by their hair. Kutzko later allegedly threatened to kill the victim “for not singing in tune during a birthday celebration,” according to court records.

The mother's up on witness intimidation charges.

So, yeah, abusers and bullies.

Via.

[ related topics: Religion Privacy Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Government ]

lenazun @lzg@mastodon.social

I've noticed some people are compelled to keep interacting with chatbots because they're not practiced in the art or dropping a conversation the second it becomes uninteresting. some of us have practiced all our lives, by being autistic and/or incredibly rude.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

I didn't watch Gamers Nexus — 216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem (YouTube video), I just read some of the rundowns, like ArsTechnica: LG TV shown scanning LAN for third- party phones and other devices.

The tl;dr is that LG TVs store and transmit a transcript of everything they hear you saying, and send it off-site, including, if you don't hook them up to your own Internet they'll connect to open WiFi.

Consider if your neighbor's ISP has a general WiFi connection that other subscribers to the same ISP can use, like Comcast & AT&T.

And, of course, they're vulnerable...

Anyway, the obvious solution is to open that fucker up and short or remove the microphone and antenna.

Here's instructions: This LG G6 OLED Glass Belongs to Me! It’s not spying on me anymore. (YouTube video)

Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Movies Television Net Culture Video ]

For work, watched a video on using Astra to generate Blender models, and I'm trying to figure out how impressed I should be. I see a bunch of semi-paywalled stuff about using the Blender Python API for architecture, and would love more reasoned views.

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

[ related topics: Movies Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Architecture Video Python ]

My social feeds say it's bisexual visibility day, so I'm trying to find that quote that ends "...anything that moves, but I never saw a reason to limit myself".

Edit: Steven Snedker @stevensnedker.bsky.social reminds me that it's Emo Philips, per Fandom Tropedia.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

FBI investigating hacking group’s claim of massive breach of agent info.

Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social

Sounds really bad but the upside is we might find out who needed the beastiality waiver.

Bonus: Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com has a thread of Kash Patel memes.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Reddit user WanderWatterson:

you're now just a condom between claude and your production server getting fucked

From 🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄) @alice@lgbtqia.space's reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop's link to the Reddit thread.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Pop Culture ]

Huh. Google Maps has an interesting tile mismatch at certain zoom levels over Fairfax right now.... Or there's been a tremendous suburban sprawl event west of town with interesting clipping regions.

Google Maps link.

[ related topics: Bay Area Graphics Maps and Mapping ]

Valerie Halla @valeriehalla.dicot.moe

it's all just art. "porn" is just art that makes you horny, in precisely the way that "horror" is art that makes you scared and "metroidvania" is art that makes you write video essays

I saw this today as a screencap from March 29, went back to find it on February 25th, and discovered that I had, at some point, given it a heart.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Writing Art & Culture Video Woodworking ]

Dear Google: I definitely don't need more "AI" crammed into my phone, but if y'all could spend a little time making your Bluetooth stack more stable and reduce how often I need to reboot, that'd be awesome.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wireless Artificial Intelligence ]

Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social

Holy chao, that's perfect. "Cognitive Kessler Syndrome."

Quote skeeting James Bridle @jamesbridle.bsky.social

Have we called it the cognitive kessler effect yet? Should we? It's not a coincidence that it's the same people filling the sky and our headspaces with junk.

Edit addendum, as I clear out my backlog of bookmarks, from a thread looking at "AI" content as cognitive asbestos: Bruno Dias @brunodias.devM

It's like a suicide shot of cognitive biases. Once you assume that it's smart, confirmation bias comes into play; LLMs give you a *ton* of input for your brain to do confirmation bias on, a sort of semantic overload. It's actually not that different from software fuzz testing...

[ related topics: tolkien ]

Repeating Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social's warning:

I'm very sorry. Please don't read this. But I do intend to share this with ${WORK} tomorrow. It has load bearing seams. It opens up new structural opportunities. It contrasts relevant assumptions with known facts.

It may hurt you if you read it.

That's on me.

Madra David — Claude's load-bearing seams

Now that I have the full picture, the load-bearing seams are much clearer. They are not merely incidental details around the edges. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama tolkien Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Guns ]

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Something being described as 'decrepit' means that it contains ten holes.

NHTSA investigates comma.ai’s openpilot over 5 crashes that killed 3. I did not know that ODB-C on the CAN network allowed control of steering and more. Or that hiding behind selling a "dev kit" on which you run open source software that takes control of your car was this much of an effective moral crumple zone.

Via

[ related topics: Free Software Ethics broadband Software Engineering Automobiles Artificial Intelligence ]

Got a request to schedule some calling gigs next year, and I realized that... maybe I'm over square dance calling? Maybe it's time to find something else to do with the voice?

I have a few dances scheduled, I'll renew CALLERLAB, but pondering what I give this community vs what I get back.

[ related topics: Community ]

Yowzers, Eric Lucan sure does have the campaign dollars to pay for polling.

The weird thing about dentistry is what if your general practitioner and plastic surgeon were the same person?

Any one got someone they like in Petaluma?

[ related topics: Health ]

Thinking about the conversation I had with a neighbor on Thursday morning. They were complaining about bike lanes and roundabouts. I pointed out outher places that had experienced tremendous benefits from pedestrian and active transportation improvements. He said "yeah, but they made better decisions in the past".

As though we were precluded from making good decisions because former leaders insisted on auto-oriented sprawl.

Anyway, a good reminder of how we get stuck in our beliefs even when better paths forward are obvious.

[ related topics: History Bicycling ]

Manuel Bustillo: One month without AI

One month ago, in a code review of one of my PRs, a coworker said something like “this test you’ve written doesn’t actually test the scenario that you’re changing in the application code”. I reviewed it, and he was right. But… it was so convincing… And I felt shameful. Because for me, a developer who had been using TDD for 10+ years, failing on something so basic was a bit of a humiliation. I realized I had lost control, and it was not going to get any better. I think It’s worthless to just try harder, be more picky with the AI, demand the quality you’re paying for! Because despite your efforts, the AI ends up convincing you, and making you complacent again.

Via, quoting.

[ related topics: Weblogs Artificial Intelligence ]

Charlene got this timer to carry in her purse, for reasons, but needed a box to keep the buttons from getting accidentally pressed. White oak.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Race ]

I'm reading Conor Dougherty's book "Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America". One of the stories he tells is of a development near a BART station in Lafayette, California getting scaled back from dense multifamily to single family detached homes. There is lots of drama, and I don't want to spoil the punchline, but the epilogue is of Steven Falk, the City Manager, resigning rather than holding on for a few weeks to take advantage of a half-million dollar termination bonus.

His resignation letter is well worth reading, especially for those of us who are looking at how other towns, like Petaluma, are fighting growth and celebrating freeway widenings.

https://www.lovelafayette.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=5499

[ related topics: Books moron Sociology California Culture Trains Currency Public Transportation Real Estate ]

Went down to Golden Gate Park today for Forever Grateful, which turned out to be a surprisingly impactful multimedia experience.

https://haightstreetart.org/pages/forevergrateful

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

The observation is one I can get behind: Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

I long for a world wide web that goes back to basics: Markdown for text, JPEG or PNG for images, *no* Javascript or other client-side execution, designed to be writable by a human being with a simple text editor and no fucking interactive/dynamic bullshit. Make it as advertising hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small* (as in: a large, sprawling web site should fit on 16Mb USB stick).

In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

The replies indicate that most people cannot conceive of such a world.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Sancho Panza's Thoughts — When did Google get so f-ing weird?

I've largely gone to Startpage as my search engine, but I've seen similar things, where search terms are taken as laments to be commiserated with rather than, you know, search.

I kinda feel like we're going through that period where Google retargeted itself from searching on the phrase to attempting to parse the phrase as a question, only... more surreal.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Joe Groff @joe@f.duriansoftware.com

we must separate the art from the artist. into the centrifuge you go

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

This may need to go in my "open regularly" folder: Captain ACAB — Collectively tracking the hidden costs of law enforcement.

And the Sonoma County Sheriff has paid out over $12.5M in the past decade, and none of that shows up here yet.

[ related topics: History Law Enforcement Television ]

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange

BREAKING: due to ongoing safety concerns, we decided not to release this account's latest toot. During testing, the toot scored dangerously high on insight and humor benchmarks. Following the completion of additional safety testing, we'll release a less insightful version of the toot

[ related topics: Humor ]

[ related topics: Photography ]

Well shit: Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots:

“We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit,” the company noted in its announcement, where it also shared a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API.

Reddit said RSS support will cease on November 13.

Via.

[ related topics: Content Management Artificial Intelligence ]

Clayton County transgender student blocked from homecoming queen race

Williams said homecoming court is different from the conversation surrounding athletics.

“For this there is no difference between me and any other girl that would be put on blast. There’s no competitive advantage; as a matter of fact, people are less likely to vote for me,” Williams said.

The school is claiming worry about eligibility for federal funds.

Well played, Ms. Riley Williams.

Via Erin in the Morning: Georgia School Blocks Trans Homecoming Queen, Citing Title IX.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture ]