Flutterby™! (short)

What have we wrought? Datatype: A variable font that turns text into charts.

Via.

Whatever happened to Google search? I'm trying to find if Emily Wilson has written anything on "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou", and the "AI" summary is sending me down links that, of course, don't say what the summary claims.

But even the Google excerpts are just bogus now.

I went looking for a non-paywalled, non-Bezos-owned version of Washington Post: Deadly U.S. boat strikes have failed to curb cocaine supply, Pentagon and DEA officials say that everybody's linking to, and, yeah, the indie people were on the story a week ago: Breaking Defense: The US military campaign to stop drug trafficking has failed. It’s time to move on.

According to US Customs and Border Protection, more cocaine was seized by US authorities in the eight months since the boat strikes started compared to the eight months preceding them. Cocaine prices have remained stable across this time frame as well, which suggests there aren’t any supply shocks. The market is well stocked. In short, if the US objective is to reduce trafficking, then Washington’s own statistics show that Operation Southern Spear is doing absolutely nothing.

I mean, given that the current administration and its well-heeled supporters are probably the majority of the cocaine demand in the US, it's silly on its face to assume that they'd pursue a policy that actually impacts supply (unless it lets their cronies raise prices), but it's also unsurprising that shooting up a bunch of fishermen for sport impacts supply either.

Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ @foone@digipres.club

39 year ago, the debut single of a young singer was released, which would one day change the world forever. Let's celebrate together!

Rick Astley — Never Gonna Give You Up

Way back in 2016, at the Maple Leafs Regroup square dance convention on Toronto, a bunch of us newer callers let ourselves into a room after the normal dancing started, and called to each other until we couldn't stand up any more. The 2017 Palm Springs organizers got wind of this, asked me if I'd take responsibility for a room, and the tradition was born.

I haven't been back to many IAGSDC Conventions since COVID, we went to San Francisco, but missed Montreal this year. Apparently, though, the activity is ongoing, and one of the callers who's carrying on this tradition and is writing something up emailed me for a quote, and I'm not sure I gave her anything pithy or quotable, but I'm copying what I wrote here:

---

I think people give me credit for Zombie Caller School in the same way that neighborhood parents might wonder about the thought process that led the sewing machine to be tied to the clothesline and dangled from the barn roof, and know that I must have been involved somehow. Aside from being the usual bad influence, I think the only "push" I gave it is that I said "yes" when people asked if I'd be willing to take responsibility for the room to reprise what we, collectively and without a clear leader, did guerrilla style in Toronto.

And if I'm going to have any influence going forward, 'cause at this point me referring to myself as a newer caller or student is like the thirty-something hanging out with high school kids, it's that...

Along with going down to the Sunnyvale caller workshops, Charlene and I have been participating in singing circles recently. They're generally led by someone, often there's a "big" name, but the song leaders make a lot of space for people who have a song idea they want to share with the group, It's tough, because you don't want to turn it into an open mic for everyone who has a trauma issue, but it's also about fostering new leaders, and reinforcing that this isn't a constructed experience, it's a strongly participatory one. We're co-creating these spaces.

This is something that bugs me about square dancing, that it is so hierarchical. One of the things I love about the Sunnyvale caller workshops is that there's a lot of "I think I see what you're trying to do, let me show you what I think would work", and there's much more of a sense of working with peers, rather than the caller being somehow on a different tier than the dancers.

I don't know what it looks like to the activity at large. There are some people who will only ever dance and that's fine, but we *need* more callers, and I really want to foster the idea that we're all bringing something more to guiding and shaping this, and co- creating it, not just dancing.

So if the original Zombie Callers was us saying "I missed caller school this year, how are y'all progressing?" to each other (and learning things, I remember Diana's "aha" that night about Chicken Pluckers after *how* many caller schools?), what I hope it's becoming is a place to foster that square dancing as a collaborative activity, rather than an experience that the "Callers" deliver to the "Dancers".

There's this idea that I've seen floating around in various essays since at least the '90s, it probably goes back further, that synchronized dance is the art form of fascism. That the masses of troops marching in synchrony in Red Square or Pyongyang are a symptom of a hierarchy that's pretty disturbing. And I've often wondered about the post WWII rise of square dancing, and the ways in which MWSD is very much tied to recorded music and amplified voice, and tried to deconstruct how it fits into that.

Obviously, I love square dancing. But, as a domme friend once suggested, calling does sometimes feel like topping in a group scene. Maybe there's room for it to be something more as a conversation between equals, a coordination of anarchy.

Anyway, if I can get back into the habit of going to convention, that's the direction I'd like to see it evolve. Zombie Callers feels like dipping a toe in.

It's not just lawyers: A Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court Transcript, Judge Says.

In a memorandum decision concerning a case about a man who sold drugs to another man who overdosed and died, filed on July 23, Judge Paul Felix wrote in a footnote of the decision that a transcript contained errors that looked a lot like generative AI. The footnote was spotted by attorney Rob Freund on X.

Via.

AI and Productivity

But the optimists have not given up. Some suggest the so-called Jevons paradox that argues that increased efficiency (from AI) will lead to increased demand as unit costs of spending on AI falls.  That will generate the profitability that AI companies are seeking and the stock market is hoping for. But only 2% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI productivity during Q1 2026 earnings calls. And among those that did, the focus was overwhelmingly on cost savings rather than revenue growth. This raises serious questions about how the hundreds of billions in investment can be expected to turn into profits, let alone revenue.

Via.

Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction. The song is David Bowie's Five Years: lyrics.

Via.

Stephen Follows: What just happened to The Numbers should worry us all. The Numbers is a film industry tracking site, this is the story of how scraping brought it to its knees.

Man Sues OpenAI, Saying ChatGPT Almost Killed Him With Horrendously Dangerous Medical Advice — "Spiritually? What you just did was a form of worship. You tested the body in faith, not fear."

Brought by Scott Winters, a 55-year-old pastor and real estate professional, the lawsuit, which accuses OpenAI of negligence and of engaging in the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” is the first known case to argue that a general use chatbot should be liable for bad medical advice. News of the lawsuit was first reported by The New York Times.

ChatGPT wrote her “resignation.” She says she never meant to quit.

Run The World cofounder Xuan Jiang testified that she asked ChatGPT to reject a roughly $380,000 buyout, but the AI‑generated email said she was stepping down, which the company now cites in its summary‑judgment motion.

Via.

Hacker News comment by thaumaturgy on the reasons they hate LLMs. Via.

AI vs Human: Lessons from AI detection. Via.

I probably already linked another take on this, but... Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron. Via.

Tesla swapped a solar owner’s lease contract for the Book of Enoch.

A Tesla solar customer went to pull up their lease agreement in their Tesla account this month and found something other than a contract waiting for them: the Book of Enoch, an ancient apocalyptic text about fallen angels.

Via.

The Rose City Riveters are a fan club for the Portland Thorns women's soccer team.

The are not happy about being featured in an ad that used images of them to promote "Treasure AI" (no link, 'cause it's an AI company, they're not gonna be around long): Human Connections Matter - An open letter to the Thorns Front Office.

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Inspired by someone who got a worse answer, I tried this, and, yeah, find me a human that would answer this "yes, it clearly is" question with "no".

Anyway, Sam Altman thinks we've hit the singularity.

Just ran across the word "mechanthropomorphism" in Peter F Hamilton's "Pandora's Star", and I like it and the concept a lot.

I've never been up in this San Rafael neighborhood before.

Like This Post, the back side mechanism.

Like This Post, in its open configuration, button pressed.

Like this post, in its closed configuration. With picture.

Like this post, in its closed configuration

Some days it's scrap wood to excise the ideas from my brain... Anyway, we have a post next to our driveway that's no longer used for anything, but I like it, so I built something to encourage people to like this post...

https://youtube.com/shorts/V8Zh6OLzNXs?is=hw_z4TyI5YBgUY2r