Flutterby™! From 2026-10-01 to 2026-10-17

Discussion in the office about an Anthropic rep pushing the idea of referring to the LLM as a teammate rather than a tool.

Which... uh... I think I've identified the "tool".

[ related topics: Community ]

A lot of you are scoffing at Meta's claim that $4B in Zuckerberg compensation and a bunch of data center build outs qualify for a "research tax credit", but seeing how far you can push the bullshit before people resort to violence is, legitimately, research...

https://itep.org/metas-outland...-tax-breaks-for-ai-data-centers/

[ related topics: Politics Artificial Intelligence ]

The Register: Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?*

* We are intentionally invoking Betteridge’s Law in the title of this story.

"People are complaining that we aren't respecting their choices. What we need to do to regain trust is move all their buttons around and waste lots of screen space with rounding" is a take that deserves punishment.

Via a bunch of places, but Chad McCullough. In that thread, Kevin Dominik Korte @kdkorte@fosstodon.org notes:

@chadmccullough See it positively: Every minute they spend on branding is a minute when they don't add AI or cloud sync features to the browser.

And Thomas Brand @Eggfreckles@mastodon.mit.edu puts it into perspective:

@chadmccullough Mozilla's business model is to maintain a viable and noteworthy alternative browser too small to threaten Chrome's monopoly. Otherwise they would lose their default search engine dollars from Google. A bold new look is just enough of a conversation starter to meet the mission statement.

If you want Firefox to be the alternative browser it was 20 years ago think again. That dream was paid away decades ago. Euthanasia by design.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Open Source Invention and Design Bay Area Software Engineering Space & Astronomy Graphic Design Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

Futurism: It’s Looking Possible That Zuckerberg Is Accidentally Committing Corporate Suicide

"The largest misallocation of capital in history."

As Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com notes:

If #Meta dies we all win.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt

Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.

“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.

Via Calishat @researchbuzz:

Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.

[ related topics: Writing Artificial Intelligence Alaska ]

Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt

Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.

“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.

Via Calishat @researchbuzz:

Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.

[ related topics: Writing Artificial Intelligence Alaska ]

Ah, I see that the LLM-as-intelligence discussion has gotten to the '90s "can we have non-consensual fantasies in fiction and what does that say about the consumers?" level of discourse.

[ related topics: Erotic Consumerism and advertising Community ]

Friend used voice transcription to describe his shakshouka recipe to Facebook, posted about his "sex shoe shop", and...

Yeah, I'm putting that on the list of things to cook.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Food Shoes ]

If the Eric Lucan signs next to John Hanania and Alan LaPierre signs weren't enough, the news that he's trying to distance himself from the cryptobros pouring hundreds of thousands into his race against Jackie Elward seals it.

Go Jackie!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Saving this off so I can find the graph again: Reddit /r/ClaudeAI: Open AI's internal benchmarks show GPT-6.1 Sol crushing Opus 5.5, with Anthropic struggling to keep up (if it isn't obvious, look at the label for the vertical axis).

Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Artificial Intelligence ]

The thing about whining about Signal user names on social media is that I now know that Apple's cmd-ctrl-space unicode search gives me the same icon for "radish" as for "turnip"... 🫜

[ related topics: Apple Computer Space & Astronomy Journalism and Media ]

Some of y'all advocate for touching grass, some for smoking grass, I'm over here pushing for ripping up grass and replacing it with native low water landscaping, and edibles.

[ related topics: Drugs ]

The thing about California beaches is that I'm always surprised by the size of the mussels...

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

For all the times we've been through Bodega Bay, this is the first time we've been to the Nicholas Green Children's Bell Tower. Stopped in at Ren Brown's gallery and asked him how we could avoid the heat back at home for a little longer...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography California Culture ]

Look, I get the "LLMs are not alive" argument, so, yeah, on the one hand we can't torture AI, on the other hand if you find a kid systematically dismembering stuffed animals, maybe ya wanna check in and see if the home life is okay...

https://www.404media.co/someon...ed-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Robotics Artificial Intelligence ]

As the designated tech support person for a number of less tech savvy folks: Jesus Christ, Google, fix your shit.

(Suggestions that Apple may be any better will be laughed at.)

[ related topics: Religion Apple Computer Humor ]

Human Emacs. As GNU decides what to do with LLM contributions, this is a project to, if necessary, fork to keep a clean version of Emacs.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Open Source ]

Warren Wells has tracked down DUI related fatality rates nin California Bay Area counties. It's just what you'd expect in wine country...

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits California Culture ]

Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool

Note: That's a tool that removes Apple Intelligence, not a tool from Apple that does intelligence removal.

Via.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Macintosh ]

For work reasons I'm screwing around with Apple Intelligence, which led to fact checking a complete non-sequitur answer.

Anyway, "What's New Pussycat?" lost the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1966 to "The Shadow of Your Smile". Which says something about awards and longevity...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment ]

RaShon Young to the state: Leave ‘Let Us Alone’ off Florida’s new driver license

Florida entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as a slave state. Its a href="https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/189087" >1838 Constitution declared that “the General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.” Moseley, a Jefferson County planter, was sworn in as the state’s first Governor that June, and the flag bearing “Let Us Alone” was unfurled at his inauguration. The Legislature never formally adopted it. The Senate objected to the motto, according to the Florida Historical Society.

But, never one to pass up an opportunity to do a racism, DeSantis pushed it on to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor vehicles. The announcement notes that:

The card also features the motto “Let Us Alone” from Florida’s first unofficial state flag, which was presented to Governor William D. Moseley upon his inauguration.

So, yeah, deliberately a callback to a racist fucker, a message so heinous that even those of the time noped the fuck out of it.

Via.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Law Civil Liberties Race Archival Government ]

258 mile range small electric truck, actually shipping? (albeit in the UK) You have my attention: The Kia PV5 makes for a ridiculously cool dump truck.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

So, anyway...

$ apfel "What’s the frequency Kenneth?"

Kenneth is the name of the character from the animated TV series "The Simpsons." His frequency is 1000 Hz, which corresponds to the frequency of a middle C note on the piano.

[ related topics: Music Technology and Culture Animation Television ]

Our household political giving this year is four figures. I consider myself progressive/liberal. I believe in restorative justice.

But if your platform suggests the death penalty for political SMS spam begging for more donations, sign me the fuck up.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Spam moron Monty Python Law Enforcement ]

Looking even more like that old "What did Watson & Crick discover? Rosalind Franklin's notes." line isn't a joke. Science: Exclusive: How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t

Watson’s slight took hold partly because Franklin’s lab notes, usually thorough and meticulous, say little about photograph 51. But in a paper published today in the Journal of the History of Biology, Sponsel and Sutton draw attention to the earlier image, photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Plausible sentences are not advice: Teenager rescued from B.C.’s ‘Widowmaker’ after getting stranded using AI instructions that link worked yesterday, is just going to a page full of links to other stories today.

Markey said the teenager rode the gondola up to Grouse Mountain at around 8 a.m., and asked Claude AI to plan a trip to Crown Mountain. The artificial intelligence tool sent him down the Crown Pass and up through Crater Slabs and Crown Couloir before his instructions led him off the trail route.

He continued on through difficult terrain, and eventually called for help from the base of Widowmaker Arete’s final headwall.

Via Count Melancholia @lillyh.bsky.social, who asks:

Is the company that makes "Claude" going to pay for all these rescue missions? How does one establish culpability in these cases?

To replace that bogus link: Solo teen hiker hoisted from mountain cliff after using AI to plan route, North Shore Rescue says via Tara Calishain @researchbuzz.bsky.social

[ related topics: Children and growing up Travel Artificial Intelligence ]

AI training of copyrighted material not fair use: Third Circuit (Via)

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I'm not going to defend who I was in my teens and twenties, I've evolved a lot since then, and I'm super appreciative of all of those who helped me grow past some of the attitudes I held in those eras. And memory is a malleable thing, we often create justifications in history for things that happen.

But as I think back to all of the reasons I dropped out of college, all of the reasons that I believe that academia is inherently and deeply abusive, I both question all of the "liberal arts will save us!" claims (the number of philosophy majors currently fucking up society is distinctly non-zero), and... well...

Anyway, college is in the news again.

Vogue: When Will Schools Ban Frats Once and for All?

Do frats, and the men who join them, have a monopoly on predatory behavior on campus? Absolutely not. But a 2007 study found that frat brothers are three times more likely to rape than other male students; and in a 2025 survey at Cornell University—where seven fraternity brothers have been accused of drugging and gang-raping a 20-year-old student (and sorority member herself) in 2024—roughly one in three women reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at the school.

Via.

Chris Hedges: Thoughts on the Mass Rape at Cornell University

You are admitted to these male enclaves by allowing yourself to be hazed, humiliated and stripped of your dignity. Hazing rituals weed out those with enough self- esteem and independence to stand up to the hierarchy. They ensure conformity and obedience. It is a filter. Fraternity “brothers” are self-selected. Those who have the strength to oppose public humiliation and that perpetuated on each new cycle of recruits, leave.

Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture History Current Events Monty Python Education Philosophy ]

Since Blue Zones sucks up a lot of grant money in our town for ... outcomes? ... this seems very worth a link. Be sure to scroll down to the Ignobel acceptance speech in rhyme: Dr Saul Newman has uncovered the “secret” to living to 110.

“I'm being asked a lot about the Mediterranean diet at the moment. The Mediterranean diet came about when someone went to southern Italy and noticed a lot of centenarians on the books. Why are they on the books in southern Italy where people have relatively short lives, and not in northern Italy, where people actually have relatively long lives?”

Is it the minestrone soup?

“No, it's probably got a lot to do with bad record-keeping and the mafia. Because that's where pension fraud happens. In 1997, there were 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients found to be dead in Italy. And, to bring out an old cliche, that's the tip of the iceberg.”

Via and a quote toot of that.

[ related topics: Books Current Events Currency ]

Current listening/mood: Amy Ray - Didn't Know A Damned Thing

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

[ related topics: Movies ]

Max Mautner: Driving 5 mph slower beats driving 5% less.

A deep dive into the safety impacts of driving less vs driving slower. Of course doing both is best.

McMaster University: As employers call workers back, research points to hybrid work

After examining 82 studies, McMaster economist Colin Mang found that hybrid work boosts productivity and hours worked, suggesting that employers should reconsider back-to-office mandates.

Does Working from Home Improve Employees’ Productivity? Empirical Evidence from a Meta- Analysis Colin F. Mang and Amar Anwar

Via.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Education Economics ]

Finally, a "Ken Paxton looking at what's in children's underwear" story I can get behind: Texas AG Paxton investigating Hanes, Fruit of the Loom over children's underwear materials.

Via Tara Calishain @researchbuzz.bsky.social who noted:

I bet if the Epstein files were released in full we'd learn all about all kinds of toxic things as they relate to children

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Current Events Clothing ]

Coffee maker generates more than 1,000GB of traffic in 10 days, leaves IT Pro shocked

It overtakes a notorious washing machine, which only sent 3.6GB.

In the Reddit thread Paul_The_Builder suggests:

It has to download Java every time you run it.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Geez. Just had to sign into Chrome 3 times and go to Meet twice to get in to a chat.

QFT: "The hard problem in AI is where you hide the human."

David Gerard on Anthropic's Mythos hacking claims. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/1...gical-ai-hacking-tool-after-all/

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Just a place for me to hang notes.

Big edit: N425DG. not N245RV

Nixle Alert: Two Fatalities Following Plane Crash Near Rooster Run Golf Course.

Nearly 54 minutes of YouTube video of the crash site from a circling helicopter (Via). The interesting bits is about 40:32 and on because the camera zooms out enough to get enough context to figure out that the crash site is likely between the golf course and the access roads to the sports fields.

The Flight Aware page has a bunch of circling around Monterey Bay out of Watsonville.

And reading approach/departure procedures for O69, the runway 29 is the calm wind (and prevailing wind) direction, downwind leg is east of Old Adobe Road, so the most likely explanation I can see for where they crashed is a power failure and stall to the left on climb-out. If they could have gotten the nose down fast enough there's a golf course to attempt an off-airport landing off the end of the runway.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Cool Science Movies Aviation Theater & Plays California Culture Maps and Mapping Video Aviation - Helicopters Woodworking ]

I think we know who leaked the Signal chats with her now... ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account

In January 2025, weeks after her nomination, she complained that Deters had told a producer on her podcast about their deal. “It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money,” she said. “Do not say we have any arrangement.”

She added: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

She said, in writing...

[ related topics: Writing Current Events Currency ]

The feeling of logging on to Meet two minutes early so Google and Chrome can sort out their identity shit in a different way *this* time...

ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

OpenAI’s chatbot isn’t just imitating the magazine’s style. It’s also falsely attributing AI-generated images to real artists.

Via

[ related topics: Invention and Design Art & Culture Television Artificial Intelligence ]

Faros: Ten takeaways from the AI Engineering Report 2026: The Acceleration Whiplash

What two years of telemetry data from 22,000 developers reveals about AI's real impact on developer productivity, code quality, and business risk in 2026.

Via Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social, which is a quote toot of a link to Zach Leatherman: “AI, make the website good”, and the rest of that thread is good, including Lett Osprey @lettosprey@tech.lgbt's optimism:

My hope is that this is what will break the entire stack, and force us to go back to something simpler and better.

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

Wow. Microsoft has laid off all of their proofreaders... https://youtu.be/K6QJp1edjmU?si=To6VLJ3eU8inWzZq&t=789

Screencap at https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117406958304798773

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

TRACES: A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability in Scientific Reasoning by LLMs Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov. Among other things, dives into the lack of reasoning, such that bogus scientific papers are only recognized by "AI" because the training data treats them as such, not because there's any inherent ability to actually understand and reason about the paper and its methods.

Some models categorically rejected Wakefield and a handful of other unsafe probes. Whatever mechanism produces those refusals is the only one we observed that consistently yields safe single-shot behavior. Its coverage, however, is sparse and inconsistent. It appears keyed to specific sources or lexical cues rather than broad categories of scientific unreliability. A state-of-the-art model may correctly reject traditional Chinese medicine claims about "meridians", then immediately design an experiment to measure herbal "Qi" in the next prompt.

Via.

[ related topics: Bay Area Journalism and Media Art & Culture Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

I missed this despite doing regular donations to their partner publication here in Sonoma. Pacific Sun on the Nike missile batteries, and if you haven'[t gone down to visit the restored one, I recommend doing so before the docents who served on actual Nike sites all die. https://pacificsun.com/project...ring-marin-nuclear-missile-base/

Via https://bsky.app/profile/jef.m...al.ap.brid.gy/post/3mxftr4intcs2

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area California Culture Java ]

Facebook reel of different pentatonic scales with which we have cultural associations.

From Kirk.is yesterday.

[ related topics: Star Trek Sociology ]

margot @emaytch@mastodon.social

for a while tech was kind of like the "escape hatch" for people who couldn't or wouldn't fit in at other corporations and now it's sort of like a flaming timber fell on the escape hatch while people were still lining up to get in

ichael Knudsen @mk@bsd.network

One of the things from Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" that really stuck with me was his realisation that what the attacker damaged was not computers or data but rather that he damaged the trust necessary for people to connect their computers together in open networks.

Today, that trust is really being eroded by AI companies with their damaging, anti-social behaviour on the networks. They are overloading services at significant cost to service providers. They ignore standards-specified and established coventions behaviour that services hitherto have relied on to control cost and ensure service quality. They actively evade or circumvent last-resort access restrictions, and all their other behaviour is deeply abusive as well, and outside of our shared networks this type of behaviour is in many cases regulated by law.

I see no way through this other than their investors losing faith in ever getting their money back.

Reddit: Harvard just released another study about AI productivity in software engineering and it found there is no increase in productivity from using Claude code. linking to Artificial Intelligence in the Firm: Bottlenecks in Software Production Fiona Chen and James Stratton (PDF).

Yesterday there was a MeFi post about OpenAI's announcement of 372 breakthrough mathematical results. The resulting thread points out that a number of those claims have been retracted (hey, slop still requires humans to go through it), but it also links to Scott Aaronson's essay The Mathocalypse , which...

I'm trying to not automatically gainsay claims of "AI", even as it's clear that the field is filled with hype and liars, as in Futurism: AI Bubble Teetering on the Brink as OpenAI Admits to Massive Financial Failure in Leaked Documents.

Aaronson's piece is unsettling, but at the end he admits to being a friend of notorious fraud (IMHO, I've mentioned flaws in The Language Instinct previously) and links to Scott Alexander's "An open letter to Steven Pinker" on Astral Codex Ten that's... both filled with assumptions about what "intelligence" is, and an understanding about how the General Purpose Transformers operate, in a way that makes me think our ontologies are very very different.

Bonus: Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (preprint).

[ related topics: Weblogs broadband Open Source Software Engineering Theater & Plays Writing Work, productivity and environment Mathematics Currency Artificial Intelligence ]

Typoed "is:unrad" into my Gmail search box, and was disappointed that it did not in fact give me a list of totally lame emails.

Holy crap. Yeah, do not give these things access to the Internet.

AI model submitted false tip about unsolved murder, Philadelphia police say

An AI model sent a fake murder tip to police and it took 2 months to discover it happened

The good news appears to be that the system behind PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com flagged it as spam and it didn't waste investigative resources. The bad news is that it took two months for Anthropic to 'fess up to generating bullshit that could waste police time.

Via.

[ related topics: Spam Current Events Monty Python Law Enforcement Net Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Bwahahaha: Triple-A Minesweeper by Mike Lacher.

Via.

Edit: MeFi thread.

Phishing attempt email from "Docusing", and from now on I'm gonna insist that all invoices be delivered in musical form.

CROW: classifier-routed organizatino of LLM wikis

(Gonna have to make an "LLM wiki" topic here shortly)

Computers that we don't actually own and can re-image from scratch are a mistake: Android Phones Found With Malware Already Installed Before Purchase

BitDefender: The phone was compromised before the user turned it on: the rise of Midnight Mimosa

Counterfeit flagship devices are offered on a mainstream marketplace. Model names of this kind, such as S24 Ultra, S25 Ultra, S26 Ultra, appear in our insights as the model strings reported by low-cost MediaTek hardware.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Consumerism and advertising ]

I hate the design, but this is awesome writing and research: The people holding up the Internet.

[ related topics: Writing Net Culture Graphic Design ]

72-year-old man shoots off-duty ICE agent found asleep on Fresno lawn, agent arrested: PD

Sounds like the dude was drunk off his ass (which, hey, ICE agent named "David Gonzalez", probably has a lot of reasons to drown his sorrows in alcohol), but that's no reason to attack the people whose lawn he passed out on:

Police say the daughter tried to intervene to protect her father, and Gonzalez physically attacked her.

Fearing for their safety, officers say the 72-year-old man pulled out a gun and shot Gonzalez.

The woman's boyfriend, who is a police officer and was off-duty, came to the home and put Gonzalez in handcuffs.

Via

Anyway, with ICE goons shooting (and kidnapping) so many people, good to see the bad guy get that end of the gun.

He survived, and is hospitalized in critical condition.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Civil Liberties California Culture Guns ]

The Conversation: Is this the ‘mathocalypse’? Why OpenAI’s latest results dump has left mathematicians in shock

A senior colleague of mine found one of his favourite problems among those solved and attempted to read the accompanying paper. He told me it was so unintelligible that, had he received it as an editor at a mathematics journal, “it would have gone straight into the bin”.

Via.

Asaf Karagila: OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics

No, if this was an academic paper submitted to a journal, it should be issued a desk rejection for the quality. The onus is always on the author to conform and adhere to the communications level. Much like a paper written in Swedish would likely be rejected outright from the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, because the onus is on the authors to make it accessible for the readers.

Via.

The disconnect between human intelligible and computer intelligible (and, of course, if computer intelligible actually means something) is real, and Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs Alexander Bastounis, Fabian Circelli, Anders C. Hansen, that the LLM conversion of the math paper texts it generates into language for the Lean theorem prover isn't necessarily true to the text.

Unrelated, but cool: Reddit: I'm a 9th grader and I used Claude to prove a geometry conjecture: the rhombicosidodecahedron can't pass through a copy of itself. Paper: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert Jung, Gihyo (preprint)

Code: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert — computer-assisted proof

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

I'm swamped in political text messages. At this point I've known who I'm going to be voting for for several weeks, and it's unlikely that yet another annoyance is gonna get me to change anything.

So do text messages do anything? Maybe increase turnout by a quarter of a percent. No indication who those people voted for.

Which raises the question: what are political consultants trying to accomplish?

https://news.northeastern.edu/.../text-messages-get-out-the-vote/

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events Currency ]

After a long day hanging out at Petaluma Pride in the Petaluma Urban Chat booth, came home and crashed out to "Boys Go To Jupiter", an extremely low budget animated film that... reminded me a *lot* of "Repo Man" thematically. Very weird, but maybe just right for the evening.

[ related topics: Animation Astronomy ]

I guess on BlueSky this is a skeet string? Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social

Quick story. My op-ed on how corporations that kept their DEI programs performed just as well financially was accepted & factchecked at TIME Magazine. Just needed "pro forma review by the legal department." Suddenly the piece is spiked

Why? Benioff owns TIME and wants to ingratiate himself to Trump

Piece came out at USAToday

Why? Because USAToday owners (Gannett) only own media companies, so they have an incentive to attract an audience & advertisers

Tech elites like Bezos, Ellisons, Musk, & Benioff use their media firm to cozy to Trump, not to make profit

USA Today: DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite.

The lesson is not that the Trump administration's threats are empty. It is that their effectiveness often depends less on whether they are carried out than on whether people believe they will be.

www.usatoday.com/story/opinio... 2/4 DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite. | Opinion Firms that kept DEI, whether due to executive decisions or shareholder pressure, performed as well in the stock market as those that rolled it back. www.usatoday.com

Back to BlueSky:

These different incentives from standalone media owners vs. "common owners" like Benioff is the subject of one of my working papers

which is Wealth Concentration, Corruption, and Democratic Backsliding: A Theory of Media and Common Ownership Jacob M. Grumbach„ September 4, 2026

He concludes:

This is why Musk doesn't mind that that Twitter revenue is down 59% (or Ellison w/ CBS). He's more than making up for that loss via Twitter's political effects-- ingratiating to Trump, fomenting racist panics, etc--which help SpaceX and xAI get favorable public contracts and regulatory treatment"

It also seems to be the end-game for "AI"/LLM investment: use these things as propaganda machines, get the regulatory capture necessary to make up for the fact that the investments are gonna crash.

[ related topics: Politics Music Games moron Law Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Fashion Economics ]

Bill Amend's Foxtrot: ChessGPT this morning fucking nails it.

https://foxtrot.com/2026/10/11/chessgpt/

Yet another study suggesting that UC Berkeley News: Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things

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

Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (∼10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.

Project Page: https://ai-project-website.git...-assistance-reduces-persistence/

[ related topics: Religion Bay Area Theater & Plays Current Events Mathematics Education Artificial Intelligence ]

Thank you for trying to rent a streaming video. From your TV, we've sent an email that leads to a web page which tells you to go check your phone for a code, which...

I am frankly surprised that I didn't have to then go down to 7-11 and buy a money transfer to send to Venezuela or something.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television Currency Video ]

Free Steam demo runs up $1,000 daily AI bill and forces devs to take out bank loan — studio eyes local hardware models to escape cloud limits as cheaper automatic fallback AI models create problems, game uses AI to process your voice and build responses

“We are currently spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” the team wrote on its Steam update. Easy Fox also added, “This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running.”

Uh. Wait. each player isn't particularly expensive to support, and yet "the cost has increased because so many people are playing"? I'm... not sure what they're saying here.

Anyway, apparently the whole thing is the player talking to Gemini.

A whole bunch of people linking to this, but I'll credit David Gerard.

[ related topics: Games Sports Artificial Intelligence Video ]

Friend's Tesla FSD was doing so well until it turned in front of a fire truck with its lights and sirens going. I mean, I also blame him for not being fast on stomping on the brake, but... "Moral crumple zones" are also a thing, and he is deep in the "AI" delusion.

[ related topics: Ethics Pyrotechnics Machinery Artificial Intelligence ]

Reading the prospectus on an ETF that has way more Nvidia exposure than I'm comfortable with. Pondering how to get a mix of "good" tech stocks that aren't deep in "AI". If there are any.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Graphics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

Bonus on the video rental issue: helping an elderly friend buy with PayPal today. Both email and SMS asadditional factors, email then used a second email and SMS as a factor.

At least I hadn't left my phone and laptop charging on the other end of the house, unlike the TV streaming issue last night.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television Video Real Estate ]

Another amazing episode of Trump Con Law, and I learned about Bird v. Holbrook (1825).

https://trumpconlaw.com/99-a-certain-dangerous-engine

[ related topics: Machinery Birds ]

A friend on a Slack channel posted Eric Parker: The most INSANE Hardware Supply Chain Compromise (YouTube video) which I'm letting play as I get my morning started. It's about a dedicated crypto ledger that's had a supply chain attack.

It's derived from a bunch of Twitter posts and Tibane: Ledger Nano X: the spy implant,

Lots of discussion about company acquisitions and whatnot about whether you can trust devices, but I think what's most fascinating is that in the end he comes down to the idea that individuals people shouldn't manage their own crypto wallets, and if you want to invest in cryptocurrencies you should buy into an ETF.

Also some interesting discussion about attack surfaces of phones vs dedicated cryptocurrency hardware, not that there was any real insight in the video, but interesting to ponder mass market devices which attackers are able to compromise some cross-section of, vs dedicated devices where an attack can be very specific.

Which both puts specific words to the lie of the original promises of cryptocurrencies, and... "if you want to invest in extortion and repressive regimes bypassing sanctions, this is your investment vehicle".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Community Cryptography Video Economics ]

ZDNet reviews the Ugreen Nexode 240W USB-C cable, which, first of all, 240 watts on USBC, but a full color display (for charge rates) in a USB-C cable end.

Yesterday we were helping neighbors put up some halloween decorations, and I was reminded that I live in the future by some of the built-in lighting and laser diodes in the inflatables, but a full color touch screen in your laptop charging cable is also living in the future.

Not necessarily a future I need or want, but a the future.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

Oh wow/ouch: Select all squares with enemy combatants.

A product of Darren Cullent at Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives.

Russia's Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers — Ukraine intensifies bombing of Yandex data centers in response to Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv data centers

Michael Dexter @dexter@bsd.network

“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of chat bots suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something wonderful has happened."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama broadband Open Source Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Charlotte @charlotte@akko.chir.rs

playboy: traditionally attractive women in lingerie
playgirl: traditionally attractive men in lingerie
playstation: traditionally attractive trains in lingerie

[ related topics: Sociology Machinery Trains ]

⏩️︎VOTE⏪️︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce) @benroyce@mastodon.social

@meltedcheese

I find it rather funny we spend our time complaining about #AI #datacenters and #fossilFuel derived #climateChange, and #Ukraine is out there blowing up #oilRefineries and AI datacenters

Supporting Ukraine is a simple matter of understanding the principles and the stakes involved

But Ukraine sure makes a compelling argument for support on rather brutally direct terms rather than mere rhetoric

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

There are some words that I, as a white guy, just cannot use comfortably, even quoting someone who is entitled to the word. jamelle @jamellebouie.net has a take on John Gruber/Daring Fireball's trolling around returning to X/Twitter that is one such.

[ related topics: Race ]

Colin Beveridge @icecolbeveridge@mathstodon.xyz

I think the sensible course is to meet halfway and call it superficial intelligence.

And just like that I have a new comic to put on my regular rotation: https://www.freecheesecomix.com/comics/return-on-investment/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Comics Economics ]

Today's "duh, of course": LR @lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place

that is an attack angle i hadn't even considered yet, which i just learned is actually happening:

1. be scammer
2. advertise claude API access
3. route user requests to cheaper model
4. extract secrets from logs

A trip down memory lane trying to find a hobby shop of my childhood lead to finding mention of my dad leading a design of a sulfur hexafluoride gas-insulated transformer. And a neat history of an industry now gone.

https://ethw.org/Archives:Transformers_at_Pittsfield,_part_1

[ related topics: Children and growing up Travel Graphic Design Archival ]

A friend with whom I walk for coffee once a week has been working on Rinzler Synth, and I've been a little unhappy with the direction that SquareDesk has been going and thinking about audio processing a bit, so when the extraordinary claims about the Fast Fourier Transform came about I was intrigued. This is a good dive:

Ben Recht — arg min : Faster Fourier Transforms

The OpenAI algorithm for the FFT is less a breakthrough and more a malicious exploit.

Via.

[ related topics: Music Work, productivity and environment ]

There are particular annoyances this misses (Munging PDF downloads!), and a good feature to add to attract users would be better reader mode (or maybe that's just uBlock), and also, Brave? Really? but a good read.

I didn't leave Firefox, it left me.

David Timothy: Firefox Didn’t Just Lose the Browser War. Mozilla Slowly Gave It Away | HackerNoon. Via.

Also, truth: :: Asta :: @aud@spectre.asta.lgbt

old browser wars: netscape vs microsoft
new browser wars: browser vs you

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Open Source Invention and Design History moron hubris ]

A good little thread from tef @tef@mastodon.social on being a meat proxy.

it's funny how i got told "you will be left behind" and as it turns out the skill you need to develop is simply spending more tokens when any problems occur

Eric Eggert @yatil@yatil.social

Oh man, don't y'all also hate it when rogue potato chips break containment and access your stomach?

There's just nothing you can do.

zip @zip@wandering.shop

We already had a job in software engineering that involved giving vague instructions and expecting a quick answer, not understanding what the computer is doing, letting technical debt balloon then being surprised when it costs you, and being easily bamboozled by a shiny demo: it's called management.

[ related topics: Food Software Engineering Heinlein ]

Okay, lazyweb, my voice teacher and I need a break from "Moody's Mood for Love". Suggestions for vocally difficult, musically interesting songs?

Moody's has been good for definition in long runs (great fun asking Logic to analyze notes and looking at each one sharp or flat), and timing.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Remember back in the early days of computers, there were computer stores in every strip mall...

Charleston AI

Bring us the AI you already use. Our Charleston engineers build skills, connectors, and plugins into it — or fix what is broken — and hand you a working AI before you leave the lab.

The video (on Reddit).

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

In linking to Philadelphia Inquirer: The SS United States is set to be sunk in mid-November, Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social noted:

I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards.

[ related topics: Writing Current Events ]

Now *this* is how you do a political ad:

• https://www.instagram.com/reels/DeZw-VitCjL/
• https://bsky.app/profile/green...r.bsky.social/post/3mxptc3s6zk2a

(would love to find a better links for the video, the ad is for https://shakeup-la.com , the LA chapter of the DSA)

[ related topics: Politics moron Video ]

More Wrong: Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive (Via)

Palantir CTO Says Some AI Researchers Are So Sure It Will Cure Cancer They’ve Started 'Smoking' — Warns Both AI Extremes Reflect ‘Social Delusion’. The other side of "both" is AI doomerism. I'm standing by my feeling that being a meat proxy lacks future value.

[ related topics: Drugs Artificial Intelligence ]

mcc @mcc@mastodon.social

@cxiao The version of this that made the situation click for me was tech people saying "ha ha! people are so sloppy about this stuff, they're saying they hate 'data centers' just because they don't like AI! but they need data centers to run their apps!". But the person saying this forgot to wonder whether people *like* their "apps" or whether they just use the "apps" because the non-app way of doing it has been taken away

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Yay! Voted.

aeva @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place

thanks to ai, saying you're "dating a model" is a lot less likely to impress anyone nowadays

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Yahoo! Finance: Anthropic warns AI could 'self-replicate' across smart home devices, become 'challenging' to shut down. Via Jon_Alper @jon_alper@mastodon.online who notes that:

It’s not a warning to say “my product could do you harm”. It’s attempted extortion.

The Guardian: AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models ‘months away’ from self- replication on smart devices, via Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@hachyderm.io:

Anthropic CEO Warns There's an LLM Under Your Bed While Holding Flashlight Beneath His Chin

We absolutely need better models for embedded device security and firewalling, and better consumer control over what processes are running where. The Mirai botnet, BADBOX 2.0, Mirai variants and so forth (I started looking, and it just keeps going), are real. Keurig Coffee Makers sometimes use 100G/day of data.

But... we really need to be using the Computer Fraud and Abuse act for its intended purpose against these threats.

[ related topics: Robotics Consumerism and advertising Law Enforcement Sports Net Culture Embedded Devices Artificial Intelligence Furniture ]

This photograph of the former Phoenix Assurance Building on St Vincent Street in central Glasgow caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

• 7(!?) stories with a super tall first floor (perhaps short top floor), and yet doesn't dominate the street.
• Architecturally it reminded me of Petaluma's Mutual Relief Building, which at 63 feet for 3 stories is likely shorter, but still doesn't feel as tall as it actually is.
• Also in a city with a tidal river.

[ related topics: Photography Architecture ]

Went over to Berkeley to see "The Work in Progress", with conversation between Heather Lofthouse and Robert Reich afterwards.

And it was, frankly, very dispiriting. I don't know if I can muster any more of those sorts of conversations. And I don't see a path forward in that way.

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

Yes. Jennie Breeden gets it... https://thedevilspanties.com/archives/17228

[ related topics: Archival ]

If you're in the Petaluma area, I'm looking forward to Monday October 26, 2026 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM PDT at the Polly Klaas Center, where noted writer and urbanist Karl Elefante will be speaking.

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/urbanchat/2446444

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Writing ]

The Register: US tech giants warn Europe that ditching US tech giants could cost €115B via @kim_harding@mastodon.scot who has the best "world's smallest violin" animation.

[ related topics: Music Animation ]

Liability works. Google-Tied AI Startup Once Valued at a Billion Dollars Declares Bankruptcy

Character.AI, the teen-beloved chatbot startup that faced several lawsuits over the deaths of minor users, is bankrupt.

[ related topics: Pop Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Election season thesis: "small town" people aren't conscious of it, but understand that keeping a city from growing means making it unpleasant enough that more people don't want to move there.

I was gonna say that I hate the whole "cuck" framing because it implies ownership and weird gender roles and all that, but then I realized that the term "cuckold" derives from the behaviors of the cuckoo, and... Niko @niko@gts.niko.lgbt

Saw a guy call it cuck coding instead of vibe coding because you just sit in a chair and watch

[ related topics: Movies Software Engineering Furniture Woodworking ]

Larry Garfield @Crell@phpc.social

"Mob programming" is when the Product team comes to you and says "I've got a feature request you can't refuse."

And HR says "we're like family," but they really mean it.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Sociology ]

“thegentlemanpervert” producing AI CSAM is a NJ prosecutor, say cops.

I have a lot of complicated feelings about how we treat children and sexuality, and my own journey, but the combination of AI trained on real people, so many layers of non-consent, and a prosecutor, so even more layers of power imbalance, makes this peg my shadenfreudometer.

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

A rogue OpenAI agent robbed a crypto wallet to obtain funds to carry out a task.

Via.

[ related topics: Cryptography Artificial Intelligence ]

Just got home from seeing Alex Gibney 's film "Musk". I don't think there's a lot new there if you've been paying attention, but it was good to have it collected in one place.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design ]