Flutterby™! (short)

Thought: computer games are interfaces that make it deliberately difficult to achieve your goals.

If software is developed by people who enjoy computer games, that explains a lot about modern user interfaces. And libraries. And package managers.

"Art in the ability to convey that you're not alone. And if AI made it, it's saying you're alone." - M. Night Shyamalan, October 9, 2026 (Via)

The Observer: Women increasingly see AI for what it is: mansplaining on a global scale

Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It’s Almost Hard to Believe:

by CNBC’s Generation Labs asked over 1,000 US adults aged between 18 and 34 to share their thoughts on politics, AI, and the country’s economy.

Google’s AI pinned another man’s sex crime on a doctor, and a German court says Google must answer for it

Google’s AI search told users that an Aachen doctor had been convicted of a sex crime. The conviction belonged to a different man, and on September 24 the Aachen Regional Court banned Google from repeating it, ruling that the company answers for what its AI Mode says. It is the second German court this year to treat Google’s AI answers as Google’s own words, and the first ruling to say so has now been settled rather than tested on appeal.

Via Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io who has some commentary on the legal implications of "is this a transformative work, or not?"

Can't find it right now, but I thought I read something about how this could result in criminal penalties, not just civil ones, and I'm thinking "let's fucking go".

This is a fun 5 minutes of your time: Frederick Backman speaks to Simon & Schuster celeberating 100 years.

I mentioned the Character.ai bankruptcy previously. I didn't realize that they'd already had an acqui-hire round with Google, and.... Disney found a way to buy Character.AI without buying its lawsuits.

Via.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:p...alqi2kc7f4pww/post/3mxry4crjas2w

I don't know how I managed to go 27 years without seeing "the Straight story", but we watched it last night and damn I want more films like that (I'm reminded of "Spring Forward", in the same vein).

Anthropic’s proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1 billion in damages are on the line — proposal would effectively make the Commerce Department the only agency capable of stopping an AI model.

Anthropic is quietly lobbying for an AI safety bill that will allow the government to block an AI model’s release only if it poses a risk of causing $1 billion in damages or killing or injuring more than 50 people. According to Politico, an independent third party registered with the Department of Commerce would periodically evaluate the lab and its AI models. It also noted that the lab may pay the evaluators, but only if the payment does not affect their independence.

Via

Using the case of Angela Lipps, who was kidnapped from Tennessee by Fargo North Dakota police and held for five months, before being released without charges, based on facial recognition software, and under circumstances that would have been easily disproven with a modicum of police work (and is now suing), Jeffrey L. Vagle writing in the Stanford Law Review: AI Agnotology, Cognitive Surrender, and Policing Accountability is a fantastic dive into automation bias and policing, and is worth reading.

Via Shelley Powers @burningbird.net:

An outstanding piece.

'Machines have no legal or moral agency, but the confidence with which they’re programmed to respond to our queries, their remarkable ability to mimic human communication...can lead many to think otherwise.'

Reading a toot on "the great filter", and wondering if a big ol' Kessler Event that caused us to focus on terrestrial issues for a century or many is *actually* humanity's best path towards becoming starfaring...

Charlene's Google Pixel 7 phone is showing playback status of podcasts I'm listening to on my phone. I'm trying to figure out how to make this not happen, and...

Android is *deeply* unserious as a software product.

Member of a gay throuple posting about a "swimming with the otters" birthday gift and I have never been more surprised to see pictures of actual animals...

Exposing AdFection — How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware.

Targeted ads were used to de-anonymize users and deliver Candiru/"Integrity Labs" malware on to the phones of Al Jazeera reporters.

Ad blockers are security software.

Via, which is a response to a link to Israeli firm used ads to enable espionage, Canadian researchers say </a.

The Decoherence Trap

Via Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social

This is a very good point about AI development. If you use AI to "upgrade" your product piecemeal, the patterns it follows will not be YOUR patterns, they will not be the collectively understood patterns of the product, and the entire product will decohere.

Terence Tao Why are we even doing all this? is a look at the mathematical side of things.

A list of dumb phones.

Via.

Meta Ray Ban smart glasses found recording audio without wearer's consent

This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened to them across three Meta Ray-Bans and that they had the “Respond without Hey Meta” setting turned off. The person said the Meta AI app “saves audio recordings and text transcripts of these conversations in my conversation history.”

I could swear something like this happened before, but searching for Facebook or Meta and AI slop and advertising is ... not too productive.

Anyway, apparently Bookshop.org had an ad on Facebook, and Meta did some sort of generative AI munging of it. For a while, I've assumed that any ad on Facebook is a scam. This is a reminder to advertisers that putting your ad on a dodgy platforms next to cheap product rip-offs and outright lies will harm your brand.

In her thread on this, Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com observes:

I am rather baffled why anyone bothers spending money on Meta platform ads anyway, since any views may well be bots and any "engagement" numbers are basically made-up. They're a black box, like Amazon ads (or KU "page reads"), and there's no way of independently verifying anything.

reports that:

I went to disable this crap in our Shiraki Press ad account, and got served a popup *demanding a reason why*.