Flutterby™!

It's been pretty obvious for quite a while that money isn't, in fact, what drives most companies. From obvious inefficiencies in processes to employee relationships, it's clear that maintaining various social norms and fictions are far more important than "the almighty dollar".

Another example: mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

One thing that I want to mention, true in 2023 and just as true in 2025: the number of corporations I’ve seen making a point to say that their HVAC systems have been upgraded, that they’ve been working to make collaboration safe in their spaces during this whole RTO push, has been zero. It has been exactly zero.

Compared to the cost of a single employee getting sick this shit is basically free. It is cheaper than toilet paper or soda. But somehow.

I'm just gonna turn to dust and blow away here... BBC: Scotland's first skatepark to be dug up by archeologists

However, concern about maintenance costs and safety led to the park's closure and then burial in 1983, just five years after opening.

Via

Fuckin' CEQA, man: Judge rules against environmentalists in lawsuit over Caltrans’ I-80 project

Alameda Superior Court Judge Michael M. Markman filed an order on Aug. 13 saying that although adding lanes to highways usually fails in the long-term, Caltrans had fulfilled its obligations under CEQA.

Via

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

A programming language so powerful that it use variables of type Charactest & Integest.

CNN posted this video with the caption:

Influencers Nina Santiago and Patrick Blackwood were filming a food review at a Houston restaurant when an SUV smashed through the windows.

I saw it from Peter Beadle's observation that

Folks are terrified of the NYC subway, think DC is a gang ridden hellscape and have other often irrational fears, but here's the truth, other than disease or an abusive partner with a gun, you're most likely to be killed by a reckless driver, and we barely acknowledge it's a problem.

🆇00001 @X00001@masto.hackers.town

"Hey, have you heard about the creator you like? Apparently, they also post 🔞 content. Isn’t that a bit strange? I mean, we should probably keep this space-“

No, I don’t think so. I’ve booked a front-row seat to the devil’s sacrament, and you’re blocking my view. Just go back to the 1660 New England hole you just crawled out of and eat barley for a week to atone for your sins or whatever.

Romance? Reviews! @HornyShitposts@thicc.horse

@X00001 "isn't that a bit strange?" no fam, some of the earliest art to survive to this day is sexual in nature and the majority of adults are not asexual, so having given the matter due thought *no.*

Our use of oversized wires for everything in the house, and sticking with our old simple ClipperCreek charger, seems like a smart decision right now: The EV Charger Hack That Can Burn Down Your House Just Got More Terrifying

The YouTube video seems to suggest that your load needs to be able to pull extreme amounts of current too, I'm not sure that most cars will do that, given that the EVs we've had haven't been able to pull that much power. So kinda seems like a "several things have to fail, or someone has to be on-site" exploit.

Al Sweigart @AlSweigart@mastodon.social

OH:

"give us huge $ investment, and when we make AGI, the AGI will know how to give you huge returns."

Tech bros love reinventing trains, and buses, and even Pascal's Wager. Now they're reinventing the prosperity gospel.

The Onion: Heroin Overdose Serves As Wake-Up Call To Keep Doing Heroin But Smarter

Or "if you change the prompt, the AI will give you better results".

When I dropped out of college, I spent hundreds of dollars (thousands in modern dollars) on software books, voraciously reading everything, and I remember reading this line from Weizenbaum on how people adapted to Eliza, and it's worth repeating now:

Thomas 🔭🕹️ @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
―Joseph Weizenbaum

notorious rgb @rgb@cathode.church reminds us of the '90s and a product that I vaguely remember, but less so than Racter:

Do you think if I show an investor a copy of dr sbaitso from the 90s and claim its an LLM they will give me millions of dollars?
https://classicreload.com/play/dr-sbaitso.html

Expanding on yesterday's link that included 'botlickers' and 'Slopholm Syndrome', Erik Uden has a list of slurs for AI users.

Stuart Yeates:

Vendor is pushing webinars about "IgniteAI" and I can't attend because can't trust myself not to ask about burning it all to the water-line.

Greg Wilson @gvwilson@mastodon.social

in March 2025, the CEO of Anthropic said that AI would be writing 90% of code within six months, so, um, look forward to a really big announcement in the next four weeks?
Business Insider · Mar 13 — Anthropic CEO: AI will be writing 90% of code in 3 to 6 months

University of Guelph: AI Chatbots Are Giving Away Your Company’s Data, in which Dr. Ali Dehghantanha, Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at the University of Guelph, is retained for a little data exfiltration, and demonstrates it.

Via ResearchBuzz.

Duh of the morning:

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

The Register: AI + ML — GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40 billion on fire

"The GenAI Divide is starkest in deployment rates, only 5 percent of custom enterprise AI tools reach production," the report says. "Chatbots succeed because they're easy to try and flexible, but fail in critical workflows due to lack of memory and customization."

I'm trying to find a PDF of the actual report, everyone seems to be republishing the same Fortune article, which I got to via Kevin Beaumont.

And while I'm clearing tabs, The Atlantic: AI is a mass delusion event (gift link courtesy of Felix Stalder) which observes that:

It seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service.

Which pairs with my observation that GenAI interaction patterns have a lot in common with developmentally disabled adults. And in that, I've gone from suggesting that AI fans don't spend enough time interacting with developmentally disabled adults to recognize those patterns, to thinking that maybe the problem is that it's a peer group.

Perplexity Says Cloudflare Is Blocking Legitimate AI Assistants

Via

Archive.is just asked me to prove that I'm not an automobile driver in order to proceed.

A few years ago, I rewrote my Perl markdown-ish parser in C++, with CMake build files, as a static site generator. Every once in a while I go to make changes and rebuild this thing, and every fucking time C++ or linking or the semantics of some library has changed.

Considering just going to C.

Finished Jonathan Kauffman's Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat last night. A fantastic look back at cultures and names I remember from growing up, and a really good jaunt through the various ways that society has evolved and changed on a lot of fronts, from the things that we've learned about collective decision-making to things that we've learned about nutrition and biology, to things that we've come to appreciate about eating.

Might have to let this one set and re-read it.

Charlene and I are exploring various places around the Bay. Yesterday we ended up in Oakland on Broadway around 19th, and were disappointed by the level of street activation on a Sunday afternoon.

When we do another visit, where are the pedestrian throngs at? Where should we hang out?

Saethelred the Unsteady @SethRudy@c18.masto.host

First they came for the oh shit the fuckers are here for me already that was fast

The Internet Review — The Nightmare of the 2020s is Alive in Portland for August 15, 2025 — The Anti-AI Protests Have Arrived in Portland, and This is Only the Beginning

Yesterday, in a "holy crap we need to get out of the house" day, Charlene and I went down to the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park, wandered through the exhibits there, and then down into Oakland. We spent quite a while in the park, and after a lunch in a downtown that desperately needs more street activation on a Sunday afternoon, the lowrider club with their really loud audio systems wasn't our scene, but I was struck by some of the graffiti and stickers that indicated people in urban settings are thinking about relationships with technology in ways that we out in the burbs probably aren't addressing similarly.

Via Jared White (🏳️‍⚧️ ally) @jaredwhite@indieweb.social.\

Never mind the botlickers, ‘AI’ is just normal technology

Slopholm Syndrome notwithstanding, if we are to have useful conversations about machine learning then it’s crucial that instead of succumbing to the cheap parlour tricks of Silicon Valley marketing strategies — which are, tellingly, constructed around the exact-same mix of infinite promise and terrifying existential risk their pro-bono shills the botlickers always invoke — we pay attention to the men behind the curtain and expose “AI” for what it is: normal technology.

Via Emily M. Bender.

At Alabama plantation, families of enslavers and enslaved strike a deal

Odd this day:

It’s the 83rd anniversary today of the clue “French port (6)” appearing in the Daily Telegraph. Which may not sound like much of a story, except that the next day, they printed the answer (Dieppe) and the day after that 6,000 Allied troops landed at the very spot — and the outcome was a bloody disaster.

a fascinating look at operational security and how information leaks through side-channels. Via.

While ICE is busy rampaging through brown skinned neighborhoods to throw people in extrajudicial detention, Head of the Israeli Technological Defense Division at the Israel National Cyber Directorate, Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, was arrested at Black Hat in a child predator sting operation, and then allowed to leave the country.

Among other places, Via

Subliminal Learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data Alex Cloud, Minh Le, James Chua, Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Jacob Hilton, Samuel Marks, Owain Evans

We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a "student" model trained on this dataset learns T. This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T. We observe the same effect when training on code or reasoning traces generated by the same teacher model. However, we do not observe the effect when the teacher and student have different base models. To help explain our findings, we prove a theoretical result showing that subliminal learning occurs in all neural networks under certain conditions, and demonstrate subliminal learning in a simple MLP classifier. We conclude that subliminal learning is a general phenomenon that presents an unexpected pitfall for AI development. Distillation could propagate unintended traits, even when developers try to prevent this via data filtering.

Elf Sternberg summarized this as:

Bias in AI models cannot be filtered out. The emergent structures of a bias are encoded throughout that model and are transmitted to any model derived from it, regardless of human attempts to filter it out.

I suspect that we can extrapolate to humans from this, how, for instance, people say they're not racist, or they support equity, but then there are zoning decisions, or moving email lists to Nextdoor groups, or...

no-no @wolfteeth@mellified.men

did you fall from heaven? because you look like you're probably at war with god

Elda King @eldaking@weirder.earth

As humans get older, their hair slowly loses pigmentation, becoming grey and then finally white.

This behavior is shared by common printers, which suggests it evolved before the last common ancestors of humans and printers diverged. However, humans do not possess replaceable pigment cartridges, indicating this trait evolved after the split. In this paper I will...

Philip Bump ‪@pbump.com‬

Going on vacation tomorrow so spent Saturday night making maps of all the places in Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina with higher violent crime and murder rates than D.C. Perhaps better places for those governors to focus resources!

More people in Ohio need protection from violent crime than do people in D.C.

Financial Times: Is AI Hitting a Wall? doesn't have a lot that feels new to me, except this quote from this wonderfully un-self-aware dude:

Many believe there is a huge amount of value yet to be unlocked in the current generation of models. “Start-ups and businesses have not begun to scratch the surface of what they are capable of in business and consumer applications,” says Peter Deng, former OpenAI, Uber and Facebook executive, now general partner at venture capital firm Felicis, which has invested in AI coding company Poolside and video generation start-up Runway.

So, you mean that AI isn't gonna figure this stuff out for us?

archive.ph link. Via and via.

Meanwhile... Sergey Brin: "We don’t circulate this too much in the AI community… but all models tend to do better if you threaten them - with physical violence. People feel weird about it, so we don't talk about it ... Historically, you just say, ‘I’m going to kidnap you if you don’t blah blah blah.’"

(roundabout by way of <https://bsky.app/profile/elfsternberg.bsky.social/post/3lwmbbr2kic2w">Elf Sternberg)

Well, Sylk on this Fire tablet has degraded such that it no longer serves as a head end for GrumpyPlayer. Is self-hosted music just chasing bit rot forever? Signs say yes...

NPR: Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit

Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.

Via, among many places.

Via the ever amazing ResearchBuzz: UNLV Libraries Acquire Groundbreaking Sex Work Activism Archive

The Norma Jean Almodovar Papers document decades of advocacy and expand UNLV’s collecting initiative on sexual entertainment and economies.

SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange

People really be like "oh imagine a future society where humans have to be cybernetically enhanced by machines to get a job" bro wake up just be an American without a car

What do Alaskans make of the geopolitical circus arriving?

"Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that."

Worth reading this closely: "I researched every Democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. the success rate after fascists were elected was 0%." https://medium.com/@carmitage/...e-success-rate-is-0-a665e2e048a2

Via https://jwz.org/b/yktU

J Wolfgang Goerlich @jwgoerlich@infosec.exchange

I like my entendres single, thank you very much.

Sshwifty Web SSH & Telnet Client

The glass glare effect above is only included in the Executive Golden Premium Plus+ Platinum Ultimate AD-free version, which can be obtained after joining the cult. Though, science has proven that the normal AD-free version is sufficient for most people. In fact, the majority of people surveyed are annoyed by the glare, while the rest showed a little interest)

I have used the JavaScript version of xterm to similar ends, but I had to tie that to the SSH process via callbacks in the web view that was hosting it...

Axios on Sam Altman and the GPT5 launch quotes him as saying:

"I think the models are still getting better at a rapid rate," he said. "One of the things that's interesting is the models have already saturated the chat use case. They're not gonna get much better. ... The Turing test has passed."

Which... ya know... is what a bunch of us have been predicting, but if he thinks this is "the Turing test has passed", he's...

Look, I know it's problematic to talk about levels of humanity, but one of the things that has struck me about LLMs and generative AI is how it sure seems like the proponents of these things haven't spent a lot of time hanging out with developmentally disabled adults, those who have some interests and can spout facts, but are also willing to make up whatever to please the asker. My experience of LLMs is that they're like a few such DD adults I know, I have to be very careful of how I phrase questions because I know I'm going to get "yes, and..." when the answer is more likely "no, that actually never happened".

Anyway, maybe I was wrong, and that's who Sam's baseline is?

‪Matthewせいじ‬ ‪@matthewseiji.com‬

It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4

Via

Phys.org: Surprising sex reversal discovered in Australian birds

In a study of nearly 500 birds from five species—including magpies, kookaburras, pigeons and lorikeets—researchers found that up to 6% had the physical features of one sex but the genetic makeup of the other.

The Royal Society Biology Letters: Prevalence and implications of sex reversal in free-living birds.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0182

Via MeFi

No good answers, but some astounding examples: Why Is TikTok Overflowing With AI Country Music Erotica?

Via MeFi

NaN-Propagation: A Novel Method for Sparsity Detection in Black-Box Computational Functions

We introduce NaN-propagation, which exploits the universal contamination property of IEEE 754 Not-a-Number values to trace input-output dependencies through floating-point numerical computations. By systematically contaminating inputs with NaN and observing which outputs become NaN, the method reconstructs conservative sparsity patterns that eliminate a major source of false negatives. We demonstrate this approach on an aerospace wing weight model, achieving a 1.52x speedup while uncovering dozens of dependencies missed by conventional methods -- a significant practical improvement since gradient computation is often the bottleneck in optimization workflows.

Via

I should fix the categories here on Flutterby so I can capture instances of gender policing. Another one: Minnesota teen says server forced her to prove her gender in restaurant bathroom

Gerika Mudra, 18, went to dinner in April with a friend in Owatonna, about an hour south of Minneapolis. When she went to the restroom, a server followed her inside and banged on the stall door while saying: “This is a women’s restroom. The man needs to get out of here,” according to Gender Justice, a Minnesota gender-equality organization that filed the charge on Mudra’s behalf.

Gender Justice: Mudra v Buffalo Wild Wings

Via

Programming Quotes @programming_quotes@mastodon.social

the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

— John Carmack

Reuters: Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home.

A cognitively impaired New Jersey man grew infatuated with “Big sis Billie,” a Facebook Messenger chatbot with a young woman’s persona. His fatal attraction puts a spotlight on Meta’s AI guidelines, which have let chatbots make things up and engage in 'sensual' banter with children.

And to clarify that teaser: He was 76, had had a stroke 8 years before so wasn't all there, but... sounds like Meta's basically automated catfishing and pig butchering.

Via

Oooh: yesterday I learned about using the -n <max args> and -P <max procs> arguments to xargs to distribute commands over multiple processors, akin to -j for make.

Now to suss out how many cores my various little machines here actually have.

Foiled by Bambi in today's Timdle...

https://www.timdle.com/daily

Science Direct: City and Environment Interactions : The underestimated impact of parked cars in urban warming M. Matias, G. Mills, T. Silva, C. Girotti, A. Lopes

Our findings highlight that parked vehicles significantly alter surface thermal properties in densely built areas, where road coverage is extensive and UHI intensity is greatest. These insights underscore the need to consider parked vehicles in urban heat island studies and the potential for spatially targeted mitigation strategies, such as restricting parking in identified hotspots, constructing shading structures, and promoting light, over dark, coloured vehicles.

Via

Nature: Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity Tim Althoff, Boris Ivanovic, Abby C. King, Jennifer L. Hicks, Scott L. Delp & Jure Leskovec

By analysing the results of this natural experiment, which exposed individuals to differing built environments, we find that increases (decreases) in walkability are associated with significant increases (decreases) in physical activity after relocation. For example, moving from a less walkable (25th percentile) city to a more walkable city (75th percentile) increased walking by 1,100 daily steps, on average. These changes hold across different genders, ages and body mass index values, and are sustained over 3 months. The added activity is predominantly composed of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, which is linked to an array of associated health benefits.

/u/annoyingguy_ on Reddit /r/ChatGPT:

GPT-5 just said this…. I wrote 90% of your code. The bug is you. I’m deceased ☠️

Just so I can find 'em: US and Russia ‘propose West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine’

Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff is understood to support the idea, which can be revealed before the president meets Putin in Alaska on Friday

‘Who are we?’ Russia aims to strip teens’ Ukrainian identity. (Via)

Also: Research Buzz firehose: Ukraine cultural genocide.

Wow: 'Pure chaos out of nowhere': Mega-landslide and tsunami rip through Tracy Arm south of Juneau

University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute: Tsunami-causing slide was largest in decade, earthquake center finds

Email that I have a Keybase message from "devprizekeybase" that I can't see from the app. Oh, sure, that seems legit. Thinking about how Keybase once seemed like a viable platform, and then they invited in the cryptocurrency people.

MedPageToday: Relying on AI in Colonoscopies May Erode Clinicians' Skills

In the observational study of more than 1,400 non-AI-assisted colonoscopies, the adenoma detection rate (ADR) dropped from 28.4% in the 3 months before AI was introduced into routine practice to 22.4% in the 3 months after (P=0.0089), reported Krzysztof Budzyn, MD, of the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, and co-authors in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology.

Via.

The Verge: Some doctors got worse at detecting cancer after relying on AI

Daring Fireball: Perplexity Jumps the Shark, Makes Clownish $34.5 Billion Stunt Offer to Buy Chrome From Google

There are two things Chrome has that other Chromium browsers don’t: billions of users, and integration with Google account services. Chrome has those billions of users because of the Google account integration. Severed from Google, Chrome users would lose those essential features — possibly including Google Search — and they’d likely begin switching away in droves.

Iris Van Rooij: AI slop and the destruction of knowledge. In particular, it looks at how Science Direct's AI generated definition for "Domain-General Cognitive Ability" doesn't match how cognitive scientists use that term.

Troubled by my observations, I decided to post here on Bluesky. Check out the full thread and the quote-posts, and you can see I found more such troubling AI-generated ‘definitions’, even embedded via hyperlinks in scientific articles on ScienceDirect.

Via and Via

A lot of observation that being old in software development means shaking your head sadly as people recreate the same mistakes over and over again, for fucking decades.

Julien Simon: Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises

In fact, in reading through the list of complaints here, I'm reminded of my old adage that XML was the subset of SGML that Microsoft's developers could understand, that over and over we let people who aren't willing to understand the system create the new systems, they introduce unnecessary complexity and build things that are worse than what they were supposed to fix.

Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology Sarah Schröder, Thekla Morgenroth, Ulrike Kuhl, Valerie Vaquet, Benjamin Paaßen.

I mean, duh, but apparently there are people out there trying to use LLMs as substitutes for humans in psych tests.

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.06950

Via this thread.

Cal Matters: Data companies found hiding mandatory privacy pages

But among the state’s most recent database of nearly 500 data brokers, Colin and Tomas found that 35 companies had code that hid their deletion instructions from showing up in Google searches.

Via ResearchBuzz.

MCP Vulnerabilities Every Developer Should Know (from a vendor who wants to sell you something to attempt to mitigate those issues).

Via Peter @peter@thepit.social who notes:

lol and it's an ad for **another** SaaS tool that's supposed to **fix** MCP vulnerabilities. the biggest AI business opportunity is selling solutions to the problems created by AI.

GitHub Copilot: Remote Code Execution via Prompt Injection (CVE-2025-53773)

This post is about an important, but also scary, prompt injection discovery that leads to full system compromise of the developer’s machine in GitHub Copilot and VS Code.

It is achieved by placing Copilot into YOLO mode by modifying the project’s settings.json file.

The thing about looking at threading code is ... the author of this particular code managed a long and fruitful career at a large important company, and I generally respect them, but holy shit you don't just willy nilly cross-thread access data without mutexes and hope it works. Even if it does.

This morning in unfortunate truncations, the WaPo reports on a couple that found their dream ho... (Now with link)

This morning in unfortunate truncations, the WaPo reports on a couple that found their dream ho...

Christopher Neugebauer @chrisjrn@social.coop

I (and several other people I know) have observed that autism-spectrum people are more averse to LLMs than NT people.

It was pointed out to me that for NT programmers, LLMs turn a necessary intermediate step – structuring your thinking so it's suitable for writing code – into something that has "productive output". I can see how if you need to do that extra thinking, a tool that "helps" with it can be useful.

Likewise, it's hard to see the value in something that does work I don't need to do.

What the fuck has happened to Spotlight? It used to be a good way to launch apps, but maybe it's Sequoia 15.6? It's now giving me all sorts of web results, and not my damned app.

Had a couple of "why am I bothering to listen to this?" feelings with podcasts recently, but... enjoyed the first two episodes of StanLand, and the stinger at the end of episode 1 made me guffaw.

https://www.stanlandseries.com/

It is the tragic end of YouTube bros that eventually they resurrect old Soviet ideas to sell to gullible investors. EEVblog 1637: Solar Freakin' Space Mirrors! - Reflect Orbital DEBUNKED (YouTube)

immich.app — cursed knowledge.

Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich that we wish we never knew.

Via Elf Sternberg, in the replies, "For children are innocent, and love justice...."‬ ‪@nocatsnomasters.bsky.social‬ calls out

"npm scripts make a http call to the npm registry each time they run, which means they are a terrible way to execute a health check."

wat

and

"PostgresSQL has a limit of 65,535 parameters, so bulk inserts can fail with large datasets."

WAT

and‪

"The bcrypt implementation only uses the first 72 bytes of a string. Any characters after that are ignored."

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MONTRESSOR

I mean, the whole thread, but Peter ‪@notalawyer.bsky.social‬

usually if you ask experts why an empire fell they’ll say it’s nuanced and multifaceted, so i think it’s kind of cool that with America future historians will get to just say like “oh they took the idiot train to moronsville”

But as the thread goes through specifics, like Joel‬ ‪@polyparadigm.bsky.social‬

“They re-directed their natural disaster response teams into the pogrom corps, and removed all age limits, even before anyone had invaded.” ‪ and JoyousPanther‬ ‪@joyouspanther.bsky.social‬

They blew up the weather satellites because they showed climate change was real.

We get past the specifics and into the culture, and I suspect that this is broadly applicable to lots of collapses: Suz from Aotearoa‬ ‪@suezana.bsky.social‬

I think the people who are not in the USA have a totally different idea for why it will collapse.
Mine are racism, Sexism, hate of others, religous intolerance , USA exceptionalism, greed & lust. But mostly massive overspending on military & reliance on bullying others through military means."

David Chisnall talks about how the promise of "AI" is what we hoped the "Semantic Web" would bring us, but the economic pressures meant that there was more value in destroying the semantic web than actualizing it.

Another day, another time to turn off Firefox bullshit: Mozilla Slammed Over Battery-Draining “Garbage” AI in Firefox

I know someone in their 80s, with a terminal illness, who's trying to get a step ahead of their doctor. They recently called me to try to recover the AI summaries on their search results, because for various reasons (browser choice, particular query, who knows) Google and Bing were presenting that summary less often.

I've already told them that patients who use AI get worse information vs conventional search and all of those other things.

Anyway: Man sought diet advice from ChatGPT and ended up with 'bromide intoxication'