Flutterby™! (short)

Wheee! The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education

AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.

Via. Check out the AI vs non-AI exam scores graph.

You have to get on the blockchain now. This is the least capable that the blockchain will ever be. I project that we'll have 99% of our data on the blockchain within two years.

Looks like it's time to rework some of the gross HTML hacks I've got going on Flutterby.net: Chris Burnell: HTML Can Do That

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.

404 Media: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, But Almost No One Is Buying Them

Futurism: The Economy Has Spoken: Stuff That’s AI-Generated Has Almost Zero Value.

The second references the first, both are referencing CG Trader's 2026 Market Trends (direct Google Drive link), which notes that:

AI floods the top of the funnel but not the bottom: ~1 in 6 uploads, but only ~1 in 90 dollars of revenue.

and

Most who try it aren't satisfied yet: customer survey among CG buyers, 20% tried AI and found it not good enough and 7% use it only with heavy editing versus 5% who say it works well. The bottleneck is output quality, not awareness.

Which makes sense, there's not a lot of value to republishing something someone can generate themselves anyway.

On Reddit , ReasonablePaper8225 says:

The value is in the generator, not the output. No need to buy yours if I can make my own. Once the prices to generate skyrocket, the outputs will have value

Which is helping me think about LLM generation, right now it has zero value because the quality is so bad and the generation cost is heavily subsidized. At some point the generation cost will go up, and if the quality is there that'll create a market for spreading the generation cost across multiple users.

I need to better characterize web comics here (and fix the search, again), but: Daisy Kutter: The Last Train

Via MeFi.

NPR: She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks. The writing is kinda convoluted, but it sounds like she actually had access to and interactions with a mental health professional, but it sounds like the chatbot was glazing her more effectively.

"Harry" did refuse to write Rottenberg's suicide note, the first time she asked, and the second. But the third time she asked, it wrote the note she left for her parents. Reiley said the writing did not sound like her daughter's voice.

Bwahahaha! Shelina Moreda apparently only moved her voter registration inside the city limits on August 6, and Petaluma code requires someone to have been a resident for 30 days in order to run for mayor. https://www.petalumanews.com/2...-candidacy-in-petaluma-race-for- mayor-thrown-into-doubt-by-residency-status/

Eenteresting phishing attack, apparently a friend got popped by it and it sent me an email... bulletfreesky dot com slash vxxt. Anyway, *do not* enter your Google credentials, there, but might be interesting poking around if you swing that way.

After 3 decades with the organization, Max D. Lederer Jr. steps down as publisher of Stars and Stripes

Lederer said he decided to step down because it had become clear that his philosophy of leadership and “understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes” differed in “fundamental ways” from plans the Defense Department has for the organization.

Via

Reminder that if you fight "AI data centers" in your town, but you use AI to... for instance, come up with a number of data centers in your town as a reason the town should have an anti-AI datacenter ordinance... you're just a NIMBY externalizing costs on to other less privileged communities.

And the reward for least self-aware goes to.... Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered game engine to break the industry's doom cycle.

"There is a lot of anxiety, but let's be honest: is AI going away? No," Valient says. "With the dotcom bubble, did the internet go away? No. All the 'I have a domain, give me money' companies went away. That's probably what happens. There are a lot of companies that will probably not survive. There's a lot of great technology and a lot of great products that will because they are simply good. That's what we are trying to do. We are first and foremost making a good engine. AI is making us faster and dreaming bigger, and designing it in a way that is faster for the future. Is it a bubble? Nobody knows. Apparently, you don't know we are in a bubble until it bursts."

Thanks to Aura/Moom @moomanibe.bsky.social for pointing this out.

Should probably note that it's the "Immens" game engine, but I figure the "I have said I'm doing AI, give me money" factor here means history won't remember them much.

The Wikipedia page on the "Penn State fraternity hazing scandal" begins "The Penn State fraternity hazing scandal is an ongoing issue...", and then starts with a history lesson about trying to solve it in 1949.

So, anyway, PBS News: Penn State frat pledges forced to cut and bag cocaine for college drug ring, authorities say.

77 years later... it's almost like maybe the administration isn't actually trying?

Call me loopy, but "you may have to use an agent to..." find bugs that were likely introduced by a programmer using an agent seems... strange.

In the future, all compute that isn't used by LLMs will be devoted to dumbass architectures that diff the entire model state with the view state to find and apply changes.

'Venecky' instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect school agendas are AI-generated.

On the pages inside, Kentucky was labeled “Venecky". Louisiana was "Lookoong." Alabama was “Alotome.” Illinois was “Vitoiis.” South Carolina was "Sorth Cuanto."

(JCPS is Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Kentucky)

Interesting that we're starting to see some valuation of AI generated content:

"We have to pay a ten-dollar instructional fee every year to get this agenda," Morris said. "But you're making us pay for something you used AI for? That's kind of silly, in my opinion."

In linking to AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org, Mario Munoz @pythonbynight@hachyderm.io noted:

One of the (many) salient points about this is that this is laughable when the errors are easily spotted.

But what happens when harder to spot errors come through? Biases that are harder to spot? Propaganda hiding as policy?

Okay, Google, now you're just jerking me around. The excerpt text contains the string "Baltimore", the line below that claims it's missing that search hit.

Oh wow: From a thread exploring John Gruber: Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing (uh... insert that Nathan Fillion speechless .gif from Castle) Cassandra has had an adventure @xgranade@wandering.shop observes:

@whitequark That is, someone far enough down a AI radicalization pipeline may not share a common vernacular or grammar with *anyone*; to wit the Gas Town case. I don't think anyone else had exactly the same radicalization pipeline. To be blithe perhaps to the point of inaccuracy, LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each.

(Emphasis mine).

"LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each." I'm gonna have to sit with that.

The same thread proposes "vibesick" as a sub for "ai psychosis", which I'm also pondering.

If you had a bunch of collections of information, perhaps envisioned by folders full of PDFs and web links, how might you lay out clusters of that?

I can use semantic embeddings, but the two largest eigenvalues doesn't seem like enough info.

Also, what's the right granularity for those embeddings? More than folder name, I'd guess.

Maybe something involving distances in that space between each of the collections? What's the right algorithm for reducing that to 2D?

Elderly friend of mine gave up on recovering his Instagram account via a password change. The process led to a screen which asked him to log in on another device, or... and the "or" wasn't clickable.

So we abandoned it.

It's amazing that a company the size of Meta is fucking it up this badly.