Flutterby™! (short)

Searching for stuff on the TV show The Way Home last night, and the word salad that Google's AI Overview provided was... something.

I'm becoming more selective about publishing slop, even to laugh at it, but it feels like when we inadvertently uncover this stuff we need to note it, as a reminder.

I remember one of B.F. Skinner's books ending with "Now, let us see what man can do with man".

If the continuum from A/B testing ads to LLMs and AI psychosis is the leverage of automated exploits of unconscious human behaviors, I think...

... I think we're discovering what that means.

Racket MN: What's the deal with Paul Bunyan? From the subject of ribald tales in logger camps to a mascot to sell lumber to...

University of Wisconsin professor Kasey Keeler describes this as settler nostalgia, a process by which settlers to an area create an imagined past of the region to which they can connect. If Paul Bunyan, a white settler himself, created the rivers and lakes that white settlers now vacation in, then it follows that the land was made for them. How could Ojibwe or Dakota people have lived for hundreds or thousands of years in a landscape that was custom built by a giant lumberjack and a blue ox?

When I type this out, it feels obvious: Multi-layered AI agents (OpenClaw, etc) are an attempt by an industry that's constantly flailing at trying to automate processes they don't understand to automate their own bad processes.

Bwahahaha: anthropics / claude-code — [CRITICAL] Subagent spawning and subagent pattern bugs trigger infinite recursion, infinite token usage, grossly inefficient token usage, and lost accumulated subagent work. #68619

Multiple regressions compound into a catastrophic token burn scenario. Subagents recursively spawn child agents 50+ levels deep, ignoring CLAUDE_CODE_FORK_SUBAGENT=0. Permission denials trigger further agent spawning instead of stopping. Agents fetch individual files from GitHub repos via HTTP (one WebFetch or curl per file, each with a full prompt and context payload) instead of cloning locally. Subagent permissions do not propagate to the user for approval. And if the user interrupts any of this, all intermediate work from every agent in the tree is lost. The entire token spend goes in the garbage.

In the observed case: 1.2M+ tokens consumed in ~30 minutes on a task that should have been git clone + find . -name '*.sol'. The recursive agent tree was still growing when observed.

From Reddit, by way of jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny@neuromatch.social quoting Peter @peter@thepit.social.

Reading through a document on implementing A2UI:

To see why a format matters here, think about how a composer ships their work. They don't hand musicians a recording: they hand them sheet music. The same score plays on a piano, an orchestra, or a synthesizer; each instrument interprets the notation through its own voice.

"each instrument interprets the notation..." 👀

Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues

Same story at Yahoo.

‪maia arson crimew 🏴‬ ‪@crimew.gay‬

SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members?

I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.

Via ‪Chest er Christmas‬ ‪@imemptyplshalp.bsky.social‬

Oh of fucking course Larry Summers, Sam Harris, and Stephen Pinker are on here. The unholy Trinity of people considered smart despite being wrong about literally everything they've ever written.

But, yeah, it's got strong overlap with the Epstein files list, and has all the hallmarks of being a vibe-coded React thing. Of course the list of names hardcoded in source could be a red herring of some sort...

Edit: AmyFou 🕊️ @amyfou@lingo.lol, and Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town.

jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny@neuromatch.social

only amateurs "pay for tokens," i'm out here using the free models, aka putting a prompt in any issue in any github repository and labeling it with "good first issue" and waiting for the people with full-auto openclaw agents to randomly open pull requests against it

Commodore Callback flip phone: Welcome to the Internot. A Sailfish based flip-phone that doesn't run social media apps, by design.

Via so many places, but 1, 2, 3, 4.

Interview with FFMPEG enthusiast (YouTube video). From the comments:

You know that FFMPEG supports h265 hardware accelerated encoding with Radeon cards on Linux? I mean I couldn't get it to work but FFMPEG supports it.

Very dry, very droll. Via.

I kinda hate "accent", because it's anthropomorphizing, but Model Tell: Every AI writes with an accent is interesting, as is the ensuing MeFi thread. Especially the model generation similarities.

aeva @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place

you ever think about how buildings also kinda function as population density bar graphs