Flutterby™! (short)

Whoah! I've had them on a recurring donation for a little while, Petaluma Voice has launched... errr... hatched!

https://www.petalumavoice.org/petaluma-voice-hatches-today/

This whole thread: Gwen Snyder is uncivil ‪@gwensnyder.bsky.social‬

Spending a lot of time ripping out crab grass by hand so my clover can take root out back, and it has me meditating a lot on what it means to take out fascists.

We always used to say it was whack-a-mole, it wasn't.

Successful antifascism in a democracy is a practice of weeding

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose. On VF Corporation buying JanSport, The North Face, Eastpak, Kipling, Eagle Creek. Segmenting the market, making the low and mid range values crap to do value extraction from the brand.

WTF? Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 700%

I'm guessing it's one of those "people with an idea find a small cap company to take over the board of rather than go through the diligence to IPO" plays.

Welp, it just happened to me. Luckily, I had a backup. I've been trying to figure out if I'm being unduly harsh on LLM code generation, so I started asking Gemini CLI to build an app.

An app that accesses an existing database.

It's been an interesting process. I now understand how a lot of regressions are happening at work, it's super easy to have the LLM rewrite code that I didn't ask it to.

But you can see where this is going.

Luckily, I have a backup of the database.

What's most interesting to me is that, by the time it finally happened, I was actually angry. I typed

What the fuck? Why did you drop my old table?

before I realized that I was, in fact, anthropomorphizing the plausible sentence generator.

I even got lulled into a false sense of security because as the code generation proceeded it was doing things that added columns to the database schema and I figured I'd just fix that stuff up later in code.

Yesterday, I saved off Fi 🏳️‍⚧️ @munin@infosec.exchange

really wish that I had a more accessible way to explain "something that is right 90% of the time is vastly more dangerous than something that is wrong 90% of the time" to people.

Today I'm wondering how one might set up Gemini CLI to run in a container or chroot jail...

In response to Peter @peter@thepit.social

ChatGPT was released to the public four years ago and today i can't think of a single software feature or product that uses it that i would miss if it disappeared today.

Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love writes:

@peter @Binder I've been in ML/data science since 2018, formally, but worked with big data in a scientific sense since the mid 90s and one thing that keeps striking me like a thunderclap is how no LLM bro seems to be aware that while there have been refinements in the statistics and efficiencies of architecture, there hasn't been significant improvement in the fundamental outcomes of the statistics since probably 2019?

The lack of progress defies Moore's "law" and no one in the pro LLM space wants to even mention how "progress" has seemingly halted. Or was never happening in the first place.

There's a paper from a year ago (I'll dig the citation out of Computerphile's archives in a bit) that posits that any significant difference from feeding LLMs more content asks for an impossible amount of new ingested (stolen) information if the aim is to train a general LLM. In other words the method has already peaked.

It is just one paper. But to me it explains further AI development more as a profiteering Ponzi scheme and not actual Golden Age of Humanity and Computing.

The paper is No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance which, it looks like, I haven't linked to before.

Adële's blog: The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client

What I wanted was something in between: a client that runs in a plain browser, handles images properly, but does not require a JavaScript engine to display a list of posts. The API returns JSON; a server-side script can turn that JSON into HTML just fine. We have been doing that for 25 years.

So I built SmolFedi.

Think I'm gonna have to install and play around with this.

This is a really good read: Friday Archaeology: A Communist Apple II and Fourteen Years of Not Knowing What You’re Testing

I grew up using Правец (Pravetz) computers — forgive the Cyrillic, but we Bulgarians invented the alphabet, even though half the Slavic world claims the credit, and besides, it makes any noun look like classified military hardware. Every Bulgarian of a certain age used one. The Правец 82 was the machine in my school, with its yellow plastic case, black keyboard, red RESET key, and the unmistakable aura of a computer that had been reverse-engineered from a capitalist original by engineers who had never seen Cupertino and didn’t need to.

Science Based Medicine: No Pandemic Revisionism: Since They Won’t Remind You, Here’s What Drs. John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, Actually Said 6 Years Ago

"If you have a structure of the future where there's a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you're working on, that's great for society. It's actually not that good for your business."

Peter Thiel, as quoted in Karen Hao's book "Empire of AI"

When we made a YC application, there was a question: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

I'm reminded of this reading "Empire of AI".

I see it as an indication that YCombinator requires you to have fucked people over to qualify.

Turns out when autocorrect turns "Petaluma" into "proteins", the search isn't terribly useful.

Amusing AI slop in the wild. Facebook post from a page titled "African American/Black History" on Ray Charles says:

The students sent a telegram to Ray Charles's hotel room. They asked him not to play. Charles read that telegram and could have simply canceled. That would have been enough for most people, and most tellings of this story stop right there.

Emphasis mine. Uh. Yeah. Huh.

U.S. Department of Justice: Attorney General Pamela Bondi Directs Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty for Luigi Mangione.

CNN: Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart offered plea deal to avoid death penalty

The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.

Via Elf M. Sternberg ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ who observed:

For every developer who views software as craft there are a dozen who view it as a paycheck don't give a shit otherwise. If AI is a force multiplier, it's multiplying the impact of the "don't give a shit" developers much more than anyone else

Lots of good stuff to think on in this: Simpson Center: Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of "AI": The View from the Humanities, Emily M. Bender (YouTube video)

I've been trying to understand how to use the Gemini CLI to write non-trivial code. There's a lot of waiting for "Thinking..." for the better part of an hour for it to come back with something that... sometimes works? Maybe is good for fleshing out a very rough version of code, but it's clear that at some point I'm going to have to go back in and use specific language to actually get it right.

Which is reiterating my feeling that if we're using LLMs for fleshing out code, our real issue is that our environments and languages have failed us.

Meanwhile, for work, I'm also looking into the AI integration into Notion. Of course the first thing that Notion wants me to do is to install an app (hey, spyware!) that doesn't seem to actually have any features that you'd hope for from an app. No worries, telemetry is whatever, I'm glad that this thing can't go poking around in my filesystem.

At least not visibly.

But beyond the basic "Chatbot thinks I should be 'Settings', the App calls that 'Preferences'" language mismatch, it's giving me quite a bit of instructions that just don't work. And, I mean, hey, keeping documentation up with the app is always a challenge, but it really feels like someone has off-loaded the process that should be creating the documentation, to the chatbot.

Finished CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring last night. Read it on the suggestion of a friend. I forget the context in which it came up, but...

It makes a compelling case that the LAPD and DA's office told a story about what happened that wasn't consistent with the facts, and that there was a lot of bumbling between the LASD and the LAPD. It raised a lot of questions about why Manson and his entourage may have been treated very leniently before the murders by both law enforcement and the judiciary. It points out a whole lot of intersections between the CIA's MKUltra program and various aspects of the '60s counterculture that intersected with Mason and crowd.

What I don't know after reading this is how out of the norm these various connections are. We know from so many cases in the intervening years that the LAPD and the LASD as institutions have practices of altering crime scenes and reports to fit a DA's narrative, and that judges are wont to, say, give young women who are having their first interactions with the court a little leniency in hopes that they can straighten themselves out without punishment (since, let's be fair, that's the main remedy courts have).

We also know that various US federal agencies engage in some sketchy shit in terms of internal US policies, and what university research gets funded, and a lot of this stuff may have been cleaned up a bit in the intervening years, with IRBs and all.

And the book acknowledges all of this.

So, yeah, a good read in understanding how, for instance, "conservative" factions act to make sure that the counter-culture acts in the ways that they fear, in seeing a lot of how prosecutors and "law" enforcement act to reinforce their initial suspicions, in how so much of society is intertwined. I recommend it from that front.

But frustrating (and, again, the author acknowledges this) that in the end this is the tangled yarn of a connection board without a clear picture emerging. It's the tale of the decisions a society makes, without an overarching story.

Fascinating read, I'm glad I went through it, but still trying to figure out what it means.

OpenAI CRO Tells Staff Anthropic Inflates Run Rate by $8 Billion:

The compute section reads like a second front. OpenAI told its investors four days earlier that Anthropic is "operating on a meaningfully smaller curve," projecting 30 gigawatts of OpenAI capacity by 2030 against 7 to 8 gigawatts for Anthropic by end-2027. Today OpenAI runs roughly 1.9 gigawatts. Anthropic runs 1.4. "Even at the high end of that range, our ramp is materially ahead and widening," the investor memo read.

Gotta say that, on the one hand, I get it, on the other hand measuring success by energy consumed is kinda like measuring programmer productivity with lines of code written or AI tokens billed or something.

Car headed to strip club crashes into Avondale violin shop

“We also were able to recover seven cellphones, one of which was on and indicated that the party was traveling to Pin-Ups,” Bryant said.

Via Tara Calishain, who noted:

🎶 That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia 🎶

Remember those pictures of ChongLy Scott Thao, a U.S. citizen of Hmong ancestry, in a plaid blanket and blue shorts, and nothing else, being escorted through the snow by ICE thugs?

Ramsey County officials investigate alleged kidnapping of St. Paul man by federal officers

Fuck yeah. Take them down.

In linking to Politico: The whisper network that caught up to Eric Swalwell, David Dayen ‪@ddayen.bsky.social wrote:‬

Several important nuggets in here:

• Swalwell was rebuilding Newsom's inner circle; he was the establishment hope

• One lobbyist: "Were we willing to delude ourselves or not ask questions that should have been asked? 1000%"

• His campaign started sending cease-and-desists last year

Via