Flutterby™! (short)

AI-generated podcasts: Synthetic intimacy and cultural mistranslation in audio overviews from Google’s NotebookLM Jill Walker Rettberg

I find that although NotebookLM appears to create a customised podcast just for you, it is in fact applying a very particular template to all the podcasts. NotebookLM translates (and mistranslates) sources into Standard American English both linguistically and culturally. I argue that NotebookLM’s abstracted model podcast genre is a holdover from the 20th century idea of a shared public sphere, in contrast to the multiple public spheres that are nurtured by human podcasts.

Via

Worst People Imaginable Freak Out Over Racist Plantation Game As Valve Watches From The Sidelines

As Chris Trottier @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org summarizes:

Plantation Simulator was advertised as a game in which you could buy and abuse black slaves. This isn’t that notable. There’s lots of edgelord games out there made for and by terrible people.

What is notable is that, two hours after it was launched—outside Steam’s refund window—the dev issued a patch that turned all the slaves white.

This upset a lot of awful people who bought the game with the expectation that they could enslave black people only to realize they could no longer do this. They were now stuck with white slaves. The whole thing was a rug pull.

As of May 24, the dev has since removed the game from Steam, claiming he’s said everything he wanted to say.

But before it was removed, this game had overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam. But not because it was racist. No, it was because racists could no longer live out their fantasy.

But it gets better. From the Kotaku article:

A further update not long after changed the whipping animation to a string of hearts, put bikinis on the slave characters, and updated the mature content description to, “In this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies.” Since that update, the user reviews have entirely flip-flopped, with a cascade of negative reviews complaining now about a lack of diversity and a deceptive product. Again, most of these reviews have an hour or less playtime, and basically all of them include racist remarks.

Miami Herald: Exclusive: The Palm Beach cop who Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t stop.

It's largely a puff piece about Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, with some speculation that Epstein had a mole in the police department or the DA's department, but there's some reminders in there about how this is a class and collaborator thing.

Via your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 @blogdiva@mastodon.social, including gift code.

‪Dayv‬ ‪@dayv.wtf‬

"Pronoun police"? Please. The proper term is the gendermes.

Cutting-Edge Pizza Analytics @decay@todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com

The primary purpose of age verification mechanisms is to facilitate child abuse and we shouldn't beat around the bush about that. People who push it whine about porn but if you actually drill down what they're really mad about is their kids being able to find out that queer people exist or that socialist theory is available

I had a couple of posts saved off that linked to the video of this, then I dropped them 'cause when am I gonna watch that, and now I can't find 'em, but... the notes: N K Jemisin: Text of my Grand Master speech:

There is value in tradition, until it becomes a chain wrapped around a child. To people who feel that there is a threat to tradition, anything is better than growth, even death.

That's a balance I'm definitely struggling with, but I sure appreciate Jemisin's take.

Whoopsie. The Blight Reaches Microsoft: 73 Repos Disabled in 105 Seconds

GitHub disabled 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations — the entire Azure Functions org, the whole Durable Task family, and a row of AI sample apps — in a 105-second sweep on June 5. The recompromised durabletask package sits at the center, and the fingerprints point at the open-sourced Miasma worm.

Via Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social, that thread pointed to this thread which mentions a bunch of forked repos also getting blocked.

Speculation that this is related to the Miasma breach. Also notes about an "internal technical issue".

Anyway, do I need to go find a Satya Nadella AI quote for this, or can we just pretend I did?

Wacky. Google's "turn Android into a desktop platform" to follow-up on Chromebooks is apparently called "ALOS" or "Aluminium OS", and aluminium-os(dot)com is on the top of the search results, but appears to be an ad farming, and possibly even malware redirecting (I didn't click on anything after the "spam you with notifications" popup), site?

While your local PD is crowing about the arrests they've made because of Flock cameras, it's worth thinking about one-way technology... Ars Technica: Man jailed for a month despite Flock showing he was 5 miles from crime scene... Which is a slightly different story than A Flock license plate reader linked a San Diego man to a violent crime. He was five miles away, making me think that maybe Ars is using AI summarization or AI headline writing or something?

Anyway, yeah...

The victim said he recognized Parra. “I know, because the jacket and the beard. The skin color,” reads the police report.

Emphasis mine.

Tyler Jagt in The Chronicle of Higher Education: My Students Can’t Read — The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near- infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

If you don't want to wrangle a login/subscription. Via.

LibreOffice: An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement

In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010.

These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty.

Electrek: Carvana’s bet on Slate is ACTUALLY a bet on itself, as the future of automotive retail.

If you're intrigued by thinking about story structure, I really enjoyed Uncanny Magazine: The Protagonist Problem by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton

In talking about the BoingBoing link to Vadim Drobinin: Am I a Bad Friend? , an observation of something I've felt, from ‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

It was at one party that I ran into a couple of friends I hadn't seen in a few weeks, and after a round of "How ya doin?" we ran out of things to talk about because we were so on-line we KNEW what was going on in their broader lives.

Elf M. Sternberg ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

We didn't have the gaps that took time to fill, that justified talking to each other, that justified spending time together.

Maybe the rise of TTRPGs and the like is a way to create a context for being together and trading synthetic experiences since the real experiences we used to trade are gone.

Short little video of an easter egg in the Lego Batman game that's awesome for those of us of a certain age. Via.

Edit: Fediverse post and thread, including BASIC source code and Browser based Commodore 64 emulator.

Arkansas state trooper resigns after wife files 'white supremacist' messages in divorce records

In a court filing, Alana requested sole custody of the children, with Michael given visitation rights so long as he completes a parenting course "in order to limit the hatred and prejudice that he has towards people."

The comments from the Arkansas State Police rep are extremely telling. Yikes.

Via.

Good read on why conversations with LLMs aren't protected as attorney-client privilege: Elizabeth X Guo writing in the Harvard Law Review re United States v. Heppner.

The Heppner court assumed sub silentio that Claude was more like a non- attorney human than a tool. One might reasonably question that assumption. On the very same day of Judge Rakoff’s oral decision, the district court for the Eastern District of Michigan (in a civil case concerning work-product protection for a pro se litigant’s ChatGPT- generated materials) emphasized that “ChatGPT (and other generative AI programs) are tools, not persons” and represent “a litigant’s internal mental impressions reformatted though software.”