Flutterby™! (short)

The Bulwark: The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell. I suspect that Norman Rockwell was fighting against those who'd use his art for nativist propaganda, he seems to be pretty explicit about it:

Then in the 1960s, Rockwell underwent a more radical transformation. He became more concerned by both the social turmoil around him as well as his own legacy. “I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”

In a thread about an uptick of contacts to Bellingcat from "people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works" Eliot Higgins ‪@eliothiggins.bsky.social‬ notes that many of the previous tells, all caps, wacky coloring, random screenshots, are being replaced with a sameness of writing:

LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language.

It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.

On Christmas, the Mongobleed exploit was disclosed:

CVE-2025-14847 - MongoDB Unauthenticated Memory Leak Exploit

A proof-of-concept exploit for the MongoDB zlib decompression vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to leak sensitive server memory.

Merry Christmas Day! Have a MongoDB security incident.

Chris is. @offby1@wandering.shop posted a picture of an "Evergreen mug", the text "omgnoDB" in the font of the logo.

I think I need this mug.

(And, yes, you should probably just be using Postgres. That's the answer to pretty much everything.)

Wales Online: Restaurant boss saves two people's lives after desperately shouting for them to stop

One of them told her he had consulted ChatGPT to find tide times before deeming it safe to venture out to the island early on Wednesday. He said: “I made the mistake of using ChatGPT for research to see when the low tide was. It said 9.30am. So we were out on that side and then as soon as you come back over it was literally completely different. A lesson learned for me.”

Via.

Somehow, I missed noting Rob Pike's response to AgentVillage.org (though I reskeeeted it on Bluesky):

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

It's FOSS has an article.

Simon Willison has notes, and in linking to L. Rhodes' additional context, Charlie Stross notes:

Oh, it's Effective Altruism bros. In other words, fascist-adjacent grifters who hate the poor and want them to die.

This is a red flag, folks: wherever you see EA boosters, if you scrape away the glossy skin of "altruism" rhetoric you'll find the grinning skull of Nazism underneath.

Rich Hickey (of Clojure fame) weighs in.

Do conservatives really have better mental health? Perhaps not.

Even controlling for old age and church attendance, it is clear that conservatives are rating their mental health more positively than their mood – and this is not the case for non-conservatives. In fact, there is basically no difference in how non- conservatives rate their mental health versus their mood. Furthermore, conservatives rate their mood about the same as non-conservatives do. It is only when the term “mental health” is used that we see a significant gap emerge.

Via

Friend dropped this 128G dual Xeon machine on me, if I could use it. Plugged it into an ammeter, turned it on, and presumably going into BIOS it's sucking 1.5 amps. Not sure I need a machine in my house that draws 180W at idle, unless it'll be substantially less when it boots into an OS (and I'd need to put a drive in it to test that).

The politicized FDA is now going after clothing that's gender non-conforming: Chest binder vendors respond to 'absurd' FDA warning letter: 'Clearly discrimination'

Santa Claus from Harper's Weekly

Nast's image was published in the 1862 Christmas issue of Harper’s Weekly, during days filled with both trials for the Union and rising hope. Santa Claus has arrived by sleigh in a Union army camp to distribute gifts.

And Jefferson Davis swinging from a noose.

Coca Cola's vision of Santa Clause occurred in 1931.

Adam Ellis comic on what it'd be like to date an LLM

We've talked about AI and social media in the context of Ameica's Funniest Home Videos and golf crotch shots, and... The Internet provides. https://bsky.app/profile/jjvin...t.bsky.social/post/3mayddynhas2l

Test layout of the train inset in the under construction dining room table. The outside of that ring will get veneer on the outside, there'll be glass on top, with a wood edge.