Flutterby™! (short)

MostlyHarmless @MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social

Please stop raising awareness. There is too much. I have become too aware.

Written in response to some marketing from neodrop.ai:

Hi! I blog primarily for myself, so the act of writing is part of the memory and learning. And my readers, however many of them there may be, are there for an authentic version of me.

Similarly, when I read, I'd far rather get the authentic version of what the writer intends. If they're tempted to use an LLM to generate text, I get far more value from whatever they'd prompt it with than whatever comes through the LLM. My own brain does a better job of expanding those thoughts out than whatever stochastic mechanistic process the LLM applies.

So, yeah, I'm not your target audience, and if I think someone is using an LLM to expand their thoughts, I'll go read another source because it's more important for me to make human connection than to use the crutch of something that blurs facts and has no real understanding of the text.

Interesting: SoundCloud starts letting artists sell downloads direct from their profiles – and says it’s taking zero commission.

Huh. At some point, I put "<meta name="geo.*"" tags into the HTML on my blog.

That some point was apparently over 20 years ago.

Anyway, don't know if I should update it, or remove it.

There's a dog barking outside the office in the exact rhythm of the stabs in the opening of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger"...

conputer dipshit @davidcrespo.bsky.social

found a cute point of comparison: Anthropic and OpenAI together have a little more revenue than Target

https://epoch.ai/data/ai-companies?view=graph&tab=revenue
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TGT/financials/

(Anthropic at roughly $65B, OpenAI at $40B, os $105B+noise from the others, vs Target at about the same...)

Well damn. 'Rocky Horror' Star Tim Curry dead at 80.

Rocky Horror, and, of course.... Tim Curry is escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism. (YouTube video)

An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism:

ANTHONY OLIVEIRA (author and critic): I think the pleasure of it is that Tim Curry is the master of camp and the master of menace and in the clip we finally witness something that is finally too ridiculous, finally too outre, finally too much even for him. Tim Curry has played the devil with 18 inch horns, but this at last is the bridge even he almost cannot cross. But then he brings it home! The accent, the costume, the arc of the “character” himself finally exhausted by whatever indignities he has suffered at the player’s hands. It is perfect storytelling.

Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com

Calls for “the public” to “own ‘AI’” are just a transparent attempt to make the general populace hold the trillion-dollar bag for a con game.

There is no reason ordinary people need to pick up the tab for this particular Ponzi scheme.

People are noticing the decline of Google: Xenotime, Librarian of Æther :trans_fedi: @xeno@hexokina.se

In 1970, Scientific American's legendary publication The Amateur Scientist ran an article on homemade transistors.

Not MOSFETs, but thin-film transistors made by Roger Baker with a DIY spray pyrolysis system. With handmade drawings like this.

In 2026, Google could not find this. I only found this from a StackExchange post which linked to a 2009 blog post that mentioned it. Then to see the actual article I had to go to JSTOR, sign in with my institution, re-sign-in to EZProxy, wait for the 2FA prompt, wait like a minute for their stupid website to load, click download, agree to not share it amongst the other terms and conditions, then download it.

I have no desire to go back to the world of 1970s, but I somehow feel the way that tech megacorps and licensing bs runs the world of 2026 is a scourge on human creativity and experimentation.

In another message, they link to FET Transistor Homemade From Cadmium Sulfide Photocell by Nyle Steiner K7NSM and https://sliceofpie.eu, but it's very clear that Google's search results are coalescing around selling YouTube ads and AI summaries, and not actually linking to real information.

‮Furbland's Very Backwards Account™ @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social

FUN FACT: the Greek god of knowledge was named Thoth, spelled in the Greek alphabet as θωθ. This means that it is entirely plausible that one, or perhaps several ancient Greeks have asked "θωθ, what's this?"

This is real. Look it up.

(According to Wikipedia, it's Θώθ, but close enough...)

I initially wasn't going to link to Conservatives Want To Ban Pornography. Without It, I'd Probably Be Dead, Ariel Anderssen's commentary on the resurgence of the death cult's attempts at anti-pornography legislation.

Nor to news that Reagan appointee Judge David Hittner has struck down Texas's drag show ban NBC News, Texas Tribune.

But The Devil's Panties this morning reminds me that promoting pornography and drag shows is life affirming, and we need to be pushing back on the death cult in every single way.