Flutterby™! (short)

Hmmm... The Dell i7 8Gen hand me down laptop I've been using for Linux stuff is giving me flakey display, including keeping remnants of the previous display after a shutdown and restart (I didn't know they did that these days).

Sigh. I need work to turn around.

Of course, this Rust repo was last updated over 4 months ago. Why would I expect that it'd run on a modern Mac.

Guess this is gonna happen on a Linux machine.

A good start: John Deere to Pay $99 Million in Monumental Right-to- Repair Settlement

While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The article also reports that older used tractors ballooned in value as farmers sought out repairable devices.

Some checkboxes for a TOS: On the acceptance of GenAI — Joep Schuurkes

Preprint: 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 (approximately 10 minutes).

Via.

The AI Great Leap Forward — Han Lee

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.

In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.

Same energy.

Duh: Analysis Finds That Google’s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

Postal Arbitrage. Using Amazon Prime to send messages more cheaply than a first class letter by gifting cheap items.

My neighborhood will hate you.

As the current administration speed runs a loss in a war it started, replaying Croesus and the Oracle of Delphi, and then starts lashing out at other institutions...

‪BeijingPalmer‬ ‪@beijingpalmer.bsky.social‬

I would simply threaten the Catholic Church with the power of the sword, a problem it has never previously confronted.

As the tech world bends over backwards to over-hype the Claud Mythos/Project Glasswing thing as too dangerous to be generally released, a little reminder that we've been here before...

ChatGPT in 2019: Slate: When Is Technology Too Dangerous to Release to the Public?

At some point, you'd think that there'd be some structure to get the LLM to execute some code to give an answer, rather than just continuing down the "but we can make it more plausible" sentence generator path.

Seems particularly relevant to that stuff about ChatGPT measuring the time it takes to run a mile that's floating around right now.

"The New York Times has had its moments of good journalism, but…"

Thinking a lot about slot machine analogies recently.

Was thinking about how some AI advocacy I've been reading recently sounds a lot like "I've got a system for beating slot machines", went Googling, and... yeah, this MGM article sounds totally like your average "how to use AI" influencer.

https://www.mgmresorts.com/en/...-win-at-video-slot-machines.html

Reddit r/answers asks "What made you finally decide to quit smoking for good?"

Pretty sure the smokers I've known weren't all that hung up on whether they were smoking for good or not.

Ars Technica reposting the Financial Times: Iran demands cryptocurrency toll from tankers passing through Strait of Hormuz

“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” Hosseini added.

AI Company Clones Musician’s Voice, Then Copyright-Strikes Her Own Songs.

“An entity called Timeless Sounds IR uploaded AI-generated versions of my songs to all major platforms,” Campbell explained in a video update to her followers. “And to do that, they fed YouTube videos of me to an AI engine that then mimicked my voice in playing.”

Timeless Sounds IR used a music distributor called Vydia, which then filed takedown notices against her.

Via.

More reason we need some real teeth for false DMCA takedown claims.

Unpopular opinion: Rust is the C of memory safe languages.

I'd really like a performant language that lets me not have all sorts of ugly boilerplate code when representing reasonable data structures.

Techdirt: The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI.

So to my friends and family members wondering why I haven’t built my own billion-dollar AI company: apparently the missing ingredient wasn’t AI — it was being willing to run a deepfake-powered spam operation selling potentially inert pills to desperate people. The AI just made the lying faster. And the New York Times made one guy appear respectable.

Arizona Right Watch ‪@azrww.bsky.social‬

During the anti-ICE school walkouts in January, a group of students in Chandler were targeted by an armed agitator. Turns out it was Phoenix PD Sergeant Dusten Mullen. He admitted his plan was to try to get purposely assaulted so the teenager protesters would all get arrested (it didn’t work).

Fox 10 Phoenix: ‘Let them all assault me’: Records show armed, off-duty Phoenix cop's plan at student anti-ICE walkout