Flutterby™! (short)

A question of particular interest to me because family lore tells of my mother's father's father, a grain dealer at the end of the horse and carriage era, who was gifted with Prohibition, and who managed to piss it all away.

Anyway: a stinky ox 🐂 @llamasoft_ox@toot.wales

Having lived with an actual pony for a while, now whenever I see My Little Pony I can't help but wonder where the ABSOLUTELY PRODIGIOUS AMOUNT OF POOP such a population would inevitably create ends up. They must have a super advanced sanitation/sewerage system in Ponyville, although we never see any visible evidence of its infrastructure.

(And it can't be the first time I've used that subject line on a Flutterby blog post.)

Whoopsie. Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies.

"A code issue is allowing items in the sent items and draft folders to be picked up by Copilot even though confidential labels are set in place," Microsoft added.

Getting LLMs to repeat hogwash for fun:

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes

I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled "The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs". Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn't exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission, including Drew Harwell at the Washington Post and Nicky Woolf, who co-hosts my podcast. (Want to hear more about this story? Check out tomorrow's episode of The Interface, the BBC's new tech podcast.)

Via Thomas Germain (the author) on Bluesky.

Nature: The political effects of X’s feed algorithm Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

Via

Happy Ash Wednesday to those who celebrate. This Is My Boomstick! - Army of Darkness (2/10) Movie CLIP (1992) HD (YouTube video)

PC Gamer: Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in 'AI slop' code contributions: 'I don't know how long we can keep it up'

Rémi Verschelde ‪@akien.bsky.social‬'s BlueSky thread.

Via.

Minnesota Star Tribute: Renee Good memorial site in south Minneapolis doused in gasoline — Damage from a burning pile of wood was minimal but police are investigating.

As Lupita Nihongo‬ ‪@otsumamiboy.bsky.social‬ notes

This is the kind of thing white supremacists have been doing to Emmett Till’s memorial for decades.

It’s wild to see them do this to a white woman who the entire world saw extrajudicially murdered.

Just playing with analogies: If the personal computer is the bicycle for the mind, GenAI is, perhaps, the automobile for the mind?

With all of the negative externalities and social implications that that implies.

Arxiv Computer Science > Computers and Society: The Rise of AI Search: Implications for Information Markets and Human Judgement at Scale Sinan Aral, Haiwen Li, Rui Zuo

Our results also show AI search surfaces significantly fewer long tail information sources, lower response variety, and significantly more low credibility and right- and center-leaning information sources, compared to traditional search, impacting the economic incentives to produce new information, market concentration in information production, and human judgment and decision-making at scale. The social and economic implications of these rapid changes in our information ecosystem necessitate a global debate about corporate and governmental policy related to AI search.

Via.

@nash@labrynth.social made a little image that I'm gonna recreate in HTML:

	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic
Good	Creating	Crafting	Cobbling Together
Neutral	Constructing	Inveting	Fashioning
Evil	Devising	Developing	Concocting

A lot of discussion out there about how to create a culture of quality in a world filled with AI slop, especially in Open Source.

Some random links:

Joan Westenberg: The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

I don't mean you need a certificate to write Python. I mean something closer to what the Debian project has done with its Web of Trust model for decades: existing trusted contributors vouch for new ones. Your vouching carries weight proportional to your own standing. If you vouch for someone who turns out to be a spam vector, that costs you something. The system works because it makes reputation legible without making it bureaucratic.

@Daojoan on the Fediverse, lobste.rs.

Jared White on the Fediverse proposing an end to anonymous contributions, with pushback from David Gerard citing the awfulness of real name policies.

Something Positive on AI and Valetine's Day and virtual relationships

Work thinking about the nature of tools has me thinking on tools which augment human intelligence, which help us conceptualize and think better, and tools which supplant human ability.

It's a continuum, but there's only so much information that can be put in and gotten out via a chat...

So much good stuff in this. Even more impressive that she's talking off the cuff. Rep. AOC Speaks at TU Berlin on The Future of U.S. Politics (YouTube video). Around 1:07:30 in response to an audience question:

One of the critiques that we have of capitalism is that it is its goal is isolation and one of the last frontiers that they want to commodify is human relationship and connection. They don't want your friend to drive you to the airport because they want you to give money to an Uber. They don't want you to care for your friend's children because they all of these things the fragmenting of community is where you can make money. And so when we defy that uh in small acts like driving your friend to the airport uh or in larger acts like what coming out and buying a vest and putting it on and blowing a whistle when they saw an ICE agent. All of this scaffolds on one another. Especially in a moment where right-wing populace populism is ascendant, it preys on communities not being in connection with one another. You can build suspicion of your immigrant neighbors or of your queer friend at school if people don't have those relationships. And one of actually the good news is that the fastest way that you can diffuse movements like that is actually building those social ties because then when you know these horrible caricatures are said in public, people say, "Wait a second, no, I know my friend that's like this and they're they aren't like that." And so it it is the kind of stuff that often gets taken for granted, but when you do it day in and day out, it becomes really important building blocks for safety in numbers.

Tech-Cowboy in Reddit r/ExperiencedDevs: An AI CEO finally said something honest

Dax Raad from anoma.ly might be the only CEO speaking honestly about AI right now. His most recent take:

“everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code

here's what things actually look like

- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping

- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life

- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend

- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon

- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real

- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills”