Flutterby™! (short)

Some of y'all advocate for touching grass, some for smoking grass, I'm over here pushing for ripping up grass and replacing it with native low water landscaping, and edibles.

The thing about whining about Signal user names on social media is that I now know that Apple's cmd-ctrl-space unicode search gives me the same icon for "radish" as for "turnip"... 🫜

Saving this off so I can find the graph again: Reddit /r/ClaudeAI: Open AI's internal benchmarks show GPT-6.1 Sol crushing Opus 5.5, with Anthropic struggling to keep up (if it isn't obvious, look at the label for the vertical axis).

Via.

If the Eric Lucan signs next to John Hanania and Alan LaPierre signs weren't enough, the news that he's trying to distance himself from the cryptobros pouring hundreds of thousands into his race against Jackie Elward seals it.

Go Jackie!

Friend used voice transcription to describe his shakshouka recipe to Facebook, posted about his "sex shoe shop", and...

Yeah, I'm putting that on the list of things to cook.

Ah, I see that the LLM-as-intelligence discussion has gotten to the '90s "can we have non-consensual fantasies in fiction and what does that say about the consumers?" level of discourse.

Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt

Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.

“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.

Via Calishat @researchbuzz:

Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.

Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt

Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.

“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.

Via Calishat @researchbuzz:

Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.

Futurism: It’s Looking Possible That Zuckerberg Is Accidentally Committing Corporate Suicide

"The largest misallocation of capital in history."

As Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com notes:

If #Meta dies we all win.

The Register: Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?*

* We are intentionally invoking Betteridge’s Law in the title of this story.

"People are complaining that we aren't respecting their choices. What we need to do to regain trust is move all their buttons around and waste lots of screen space with rounding" is a take that deserves punishment.

Via a bunch of places, but Chad McCullough. In that thread, Kevin Dominik Korte @kdkorte@fosstodon.org notes:

@chadmccullough See it positively: Every minute they spend on branding is a minute when they don't add AI or cloud sync features to the browser.

And Thomas Brand @Eggfreckles@mastodon.mit.edu puts it into perspective:

@chadmccullough Mozilla's business model is to maintain a viable and noteworthy alternative browser too small to threaten Chrome's monopoly. Otherwise they would lose their default search engine dollars from Google. A bold new look is just enough of a conversation starter to meet the mission statement.

If you want Firefox to be the alternative browser it was 20 years ago think again. That dream was paid away decades ago. Euthanasia by design.

A lot of you are scoffing at Meta's claim that $4B in Zuckerberg compensation and a bunch of data center build outs qualify for a "research tax credit", but seeing how far you can push the bullshit before people resort to violence is, legitimately, research...

https://itep.org/metas-outland...-tax-breaks-for-ai-data-centers/

Discussion in the office about an Anthropic rep pushing the idea of referring to the LLM as a teammate rather than a tool.

Which... uh... I think I've identified the "tool".