Flutterby™! (short)

One of the points of Scott Bernstein's talk last night was that Petalumans currently pay on the order of $323M annually to drive. This paper suggests (inline with previous looks at the topic) that "77% of the cost of automobility is currently externalized".

Back of the envelope, waving over trips into and out of Petaluma and who pays for parking, that's, what, $1.4B annually?

Imagine what we could do with *that* surplus if we could redirect those automobile trips to Active Transportation and public transit.

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice Volume 214, December 2026, 105235 The global cost of automobility Nadja Schweiggart, Stefan Gössling, Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Felix Creutzig

Lead Dev: Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI — it backfired (coercive "you have 1 article left this month, register for more" tomfoolery).

Summarized by Sasha @sashag@anarres.family

„Meta thought it had cracked the future of engineering teams: shrink 10-20 person groups down to pods of 3-5, backed by AI, and let the technology carry the rest.

Code changes jumped 220% year-on-year, but features reaching users rose just 36%, while major incidents climbed 40% and firefighting time rose 70%.

The lesson is that AI can make a team produce more output without making the organization produce more value, and the right-sized team for the AI era might not be smaller at all.“

Color me surprised :blobcatjoy:

Impressed by Zohran Mamdani and the rest on AI policy in New York City schools.

https://youtu.be/lvyXuTvW5vA

Scott Bernstein talking to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow last night, on the topic of bundling Housing + Transportation in discussions of costs https://youtu.be/1F5RLgyZlCA

Clean Technica: Research Suggests Auto Loans Should Account for Vehicle Efficiency

A new report from Atlas Public Policy found that drivers purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles are at lower risk of defaulting on their auto loans, with electric vehicle (EV) drivers—whose cars are the most efficient—leading the pack with a 50 percent lower default rate when compared to drivers of average fuel economy cars. Perplexingly, however, EV drivers consistently face higher loan rates than drivers of less efficient vehicles who default on their auto loans more frequently.

Follow on to yesterday's whine about tracking people's identities on Signal groups vs IRL, great that ya have a profile pic on Signal to make it easier to do that, but the picture of your face might kinda make the alias in this group irrelevant...

Ashu rTakmenn1987

I just downloaded porn but the file is compressed

sigh.... unzips

Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

To address what he sees as a bad situation getting worse, he has asked a court to order OpenAI to implement a range of protections for ChatGPT users who may be vulnerable to mania or psychosis. Last fall, OpenAI estimated that about a million users experience those symptoms while using ChatGPT each week, and ChatGPT’s popularity has only grown since then, Lines’ lawsuit noted.

Via.

Listening to Scott Bernstein talk to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow about valuing Housing + Transportation, rather than just housing alone, and it's fantastic. The video will be online in a bit, but the H+T Affordability Map is super cool: https://htaindex.cnt.org/

Also, Petalumans are paying $300M/year in direct automobile costs (and a hell of a lot more than that in external costs and land for parking), if we can convince folks that maybe they wanna lower those costs by ... pooling transportation via transit...

The Register: AI models don't kill people – people kill people

AI fearmongers forget we could just jail tech execs until morale and model safety improve

And stop excusing shitty sandboxes and lack of oversight as "the model did it".

Aigh. Not only am I stuck in nvm/pnpm hell, now XCode is refusing to show me the log for the SwiftGeneratePch errors.

Yes, modern software is going great.

necromantic @tessaracht@kitty.town

In the content warning:

microsoft fucks with hacker, hacker makes it their life mission to ruin microsoft, hacker is winning

In the body:

Nightmare Eclipse is such a hero tbh. if you haven't been following this saga, a bunch of the backstory is here:

https://www.theregister.com/se...her-windows-exploit-dump/5248085

they've been dropping exploits right after microsoft's patch tuesdays, where microsoft patches their previous exploit. in many cases, they negate microsoft's "secure" patches to make the new exploit. which is such an incredible flex.

https://www.theregister.com/se...another-defender-exploit/5295335

Seems worth mentioning that friend who had an Android folding phone found that the unfolded aspect ratio wasn't really usable for anything video or picture related, and the foldingness made it tough to use for reading.

It's a solution looking for a problem that's yet to be found.

I've said for years that we need to get away from DNS as Terence Eden's Blog: The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

And, holy crap, yes, we need to be working towards something where we are able to pass around cryptographic identifier tokens, name them what we want to, and not depend on some big centralized system to hand out identity that's being used largely to fool us.

I totally appreciate that people on Signal groups use aliases, lots of reasons to want anonymity. And that they're now also using aliases, but different ones, in oldover Slack groups.

But the number of "oh right, person X in this context is Y in that one" mappings I now have to keep straight...

Tech Transparency Project: Meta Ran Hundreds of Paid Ads with Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Most of the ads had the same format, showing a snippet of adult porn followed by a photo of a child, which is manipulated with AI to make it appear the child is performing a sex act. The ads used a common set of captions, voiceovers, and background music. TTP was able to identify multiple photos of real children—taken from social media posts and websites—that appeared in these ads.

Ars Technica: “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens.

Via.

Edit: Meta sued in Illinois over alleged facial recognition training for smart glasses

Via

I've been thinking a lot about Rust and C and C++, and where errors come from, and whether it's really a good idea to replace pointers with arenas and indexes which doesn't really do a lot to reduce the cognitive load on the coder.

daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social

Updated chart showing the share of #curl vulnerabilities caused by "C mistakes" as a share of all the vulns we know existed in code over time.

Interesting is the large drop in C vulnerabilities between 2017 and 2020, attributed to "Just better tooling and proper engineering."

Some of this is what's happening with a mature code base, but I think there's something there...

I went to a Waldorf school from kindergarten through 7^th grade. Some years ago at a North Bay Python, there was a cluster of people talking about tech in education, and someone acknowledged me with "ah, another Waldorf survivor", and that framing has helped me view aspects of my experiences in a different light.

But one of the notions that sticks with me from that experience is that "the only thing an intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take it apart." That what's important about toys are the stories that kids bring to to the toys and generate with the toys, and the more narrative completeness or single-purpose a toy is, the less opportunity that there is for the child to bring something of themselves into play.

Anyway, Tara Calishain linked to University of Washington: Video: Curiosity, frustration and antipathy: How kids play with AI toys

From the video: "I think it's going to destroy my dreams as a tiny kid."

So, yeah, it sounds like the kids get it, the only thing to do with these things is push the boundaries.

abadidea @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange

Project Glasswing:

Claiming to have found 26 thousand real vulnerabilities but only 0.8% of them have resulted in a real fix in a real project after five months is dire. They blame it on the human independent review bottleneck, but human experts being paid for their time definitely have a higher throughput than that when working with data that’s actually actionable.

Goes on to talk about a lot of the ways that these reports of exploit finders appear to be horrendously overblown on lots of fronts. And links to The Anthropic Glasswing Receipts Are Starting to Trickle In.

Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social notes:

I don't think Twisted is in Glasswing's purview but this lines *right* up with the reports we have gotten. Overwhelming, but fewer than advertised, considerably less serious than the bots rate them, and, shall we say, poor quality remediations that would be unusable even if our policy were to accept slop fixes

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to also links to the original toot, noting:

taking into account the absolutely massive amounts of money, resources, and staff used on this, the results are horrible. you can get effectively the same results from an automated vulnerability scanner. some of those can even write up an awful little exploit for you too! it turns out the magic was pouring millions of dollars into doing this crap and having a bunch of uncredited human labor (from an AI corp? unthinkable) sort through everything. and even then the magic’s not too magic.

Edit: Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social adds:

This stuff is really starting to make me _angry_. Every one of these new "achievements" looks plausible and like Lucy with the football, people I trust keep telling me it actually works and surely this time it's real. And then like clockwork, 3-6 months later, it turns out that the efficacy of this new technique is somewhere between "break even" and "fraud".

They're turning our whole industry, my entire life's work, into a goddamn memecoin pump and dump scam and I just don't know what to do.

Fucking yes. That last sentence.

Eiffel Tower closed due to strike after female staff allegedly removed for religious group

Around 100 members of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a global Hindu organization headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, visited the landmark on Saturday.

Via ResearchBuzz.

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to

I have quit the smoking industry because of the dangers of smoking:

- it’s too cool
- it’s too sexy
- according to all the researchers I pay it’s really good for your lungs

I am of course available as an expert on smoking for anyone who needs a consult

(Re Anthropic Engineer Mrinank Sharma's resignation letter)

Mr. Encyclopedia @mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza

Any smartphone can be a folding phone if you're angry enough

ThatSexToyGuy @hungry_joe@mas.to

thinking about the time I worked for a sex toy company and a man emailed us (and CCed a fake law firm) saying he was suing us because his wife left him after she bought one of our toys and my boss replied asking for permission to quote him in our advertising

Damn it, that Paul Simon reference was supposed to be accompanied by cat

"🎶 ... when I come back to bed, someone's taken my place ... 🎶"