Flutterby™! (short)

To Damon Connolly:

I am writing to express my displeasure at your "aye" vote on "AB-1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services."

As the details leak out about how nakedly this bill was legislative value capture by Meta, it feels very clear that the negative impacts here were both something that your staffers should have caught, and that you should have taken a principled stand against.

Especially when large companies are spending billions of dollars to install similar legislation in several states at once, this is the sort of thing we call on our electeds to notice and to call out.,

I'm disappointed.

As I'm debugging why some combination of TypeScript and Mithril got broken (not that I'm *cough* pointing any fingers at AI users who've been in this code), I'm really wondering who this abstraction is supposed to serve.

I've been liking that GhosTTY is a terminal without all of the bullshit that accompanies other MacOS terminals, but I can't figure out how to turn off font shaping, and that's super annoying.

Edit: Aha!

font-feature = -liga
font-feature = -calt

Boy howdy, one of the criteria for my next jobs is definitely "must not use Gusto for payroll and benefits".

On a Slack channel I'm on, someone today described a horrorshow of a nightmare of Juju, Charms, Kubernetes, and ... to host some static sites, and it was another harsh reminder of how we've added layers of wankery and egoboo and abstraction over bullshit that doesn't need to be abstracted. So I'm super primed to stand up and cheer for this:

The Slow Death of the Power User

This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.

And this isn't about computing and development so much as it is the use of the system, and I think we can go back further than phones and tablets for computing, right to Steve Jobs' desire that the Mac be a "toaster" level of computing, but, yes, all of this.

Via MeFi.

I have been watching the age verification laws push through, and wondering who's the force behind it. This moderated Reddit post, visible on Archive.org, with data on Github, points the finger strongly at Meta.

Foiled in today's Timdle by the Glee series finale. I have never felt so straight.

https://www.timdle.com/daily

GIMP: The Movie (2026) | Official Trailer | Starring Pork Johnson (YouTube video)

I am fascinated by Target's full-court press to suddenly proclaim that bigotry is back "in", and the willingness of so many press outlets to republish their press release as though it wasn't just stenography.

Morning walk to work brightened.

Not even cross-eyed geese like looking at their bills.

AI absolutist notes of the morning:

Libre Solutions Network: We will come to regret our every use of AI.

Artemis @artemis@dice.camp

I suppose if you are being pressured to use AI at work, one thing you could do is send HR articles/studies on AI psychosis & ask "does [company name] accept liability for any mental harm that may occur from AI use?"

Before you touch any of the AI tools they want you to use, ask them to put in writing that the company is aware of the concerns about mental harm from AI use but is asking you to use it anyway. Ask to put a note in your employee file saying that you objected to using it.

Mario Munuz Fediverse thread about how the stories about the future of AI make no sense, but lemme see if I can figure out a story that does make sense: Investors were initially sold on the notion of a singularity sort of event that would lead to a single vendor owning the space. That's no longer a story that works (at least for people like me), but the remnants and sunk costs are enough that that's how everyone is approaching future spending.

Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop

"We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter..." -- Sam Altman

https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/2032012809433723158

There you go, there it is. Yup.

tante @tante@tldr.nettime.org quote tooted this with:

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

iso 3166-2 joke

When USians talk about the Fatherland, they mean Pennsylvania; when they talk about the Motherland, that's Massachusetts.

Trump wants a war on cartels. Mexico's president says he should start by combatting guns and addiction

"If the flow of illegal weapons from the United States into Mexico were stopped, these groups wouldn't have access to this type of high-powered weaponry to carry out their criminal activities," President Claudia Sheinabum said at her daily news conference, citing a statistic from the U.S. Department of Justice that 75% of guns used by criminal groups in Mexico were smuggled from the United States.

ellie @ellie@social.lol

The key words "🥺", "👉🏻👈🏻", "😖", ":3", and "><" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Taggart @mttaggart@infosec.exchange

"If you want to improve the model's output, you can write skill files with more specific instructions!"

"Oh wow so like a file that tells the computer to do exactly what you want?"

"Yep!"

"You're never gonna believe this."

And while I'm bitching about Keynote and Zoom, dear Google Drive, yes, I just uploaded this video and you have not yet built a degraded version to show people, but have you considered that I might want to share it?

Who the fuck designs this software?

Similar to my complaint about Keynote, why the fuck would Zoom think that when I share my second screen what I really want is for the main interface to fragment and move all my controls around?

JP @jplebreton@mastodon.social

the school bombing is so vividly colossally evil it's hard to even talk about, but i think when we look back on this period in history it'll be clear that the iconic use case for LLMs in policy was to enable fascists to cancel a random museum in North Carolina's $350k HVAC replacement grant on the basis that it was "DEI".

SnoopJ @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io

@jplebreton I'm always drawn back to the 2021 story of a white supremacist "AI" company that fleeced Utah taxpayers with a technology that straight-up did not exist in any form.

Venture Beat from 2021: Government audit of AI with ties to white supremacy finds no AI

Predates the craze for LLMs by a bit, but I think about this pretty much every time I am reminded that Evolv and other such scams exist. Dime a dozen, I'm sure.

Related to this note about "punch up, not down", and systems sabotage: When you finally reach a human, be really nice to them about filing a complaint about how the AI agent wasted your time. The customer rep is on your side on this, and likely loves having more ammo to tell to the dipshits managing them that customers fucking hate interacting with time wasting processes.

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@afreytes/116216814396531128

There's two types of people on a group chat: Those who, when the request is to keep this group for event announcements only, shut the fuck up; and those who start new discussion threads talking about what they did or like.

Yes, Keynote, the thing I want you to do in "Play" mode is *definitely* take over *both* screens and block me from alt-tab. There's no reason at all I'd want to access, say, other applications or notes on my laptop screen while playing the presentation on the projector.

Fuckers.