Flutterby™! (short)

AI Media House: Uber Let AI Write the Code. It Blew the Budget

Uber exhausted its annual budget for AI coding tools within the first months of 2026 as internal adoption scaled faster than expected, according to a report by The Information.

Via

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.