Flutterby™! (short)

It's beginning to look a lot like Katie Porter.

Gil Duran in the Sacramento Bee: Yes, Xavier Becerra sued Trump. But here are some ugly truths about his record as AG (Via)

Democrats Say Rep. Eric Swalwell Personally Pitched His Political AI Startup to Lawmakers (Via)

Swalwell campaign imploding after new sexual assault allegation

Multiple people resigned in advance of a report that an ex-staffer accused him of sexual assault.

I don't remember seeing "international inc" as a superlative to that particular exclamation....

A MeFi thread about restoring scroll position, and then looking at the Lit JavaScript library has me wondering: Is there a web MVC framework that doesn't rely on breaking the user experience by writing the web page from code?

https://ask.metafilter.com/389...ll-position-not-a-solved-problem

Abandoned ill-fated attempts to prompt Gemini CLI to rewrite the CSS, made a few fixes by just learning the technology in the first place. Hopefully that broke less stuff this time around.

If there's one thing that attempting to use the Gemini CLI to code with has taught me, it's that there's really no substitute for learning the technology yourself and doing it right in the first place.

Tire dust as a major automobile pollutant has been mentioned too many times previously to link 'em all (well, okay, a previously smattering: 1, 2, 3, 4), KUOW: Every tire produces a chemical that kills coho salmon. Can scientists pump the brakes? adds the twist that a University of British Columbia study suggests that artificial turf fields use waste tire infill as a cushion. They propose additional filtering for new sports fields, but wonder what can be done to treat existing ones.

https://yesify.net

Enterprise-grade affirmations powered by cutting-edge agreement technology. Stop thinking. Start agreeing.

Linking to Psych Safety: The Vasa disaster, about the decision-making processes involved in the building of the Swedish warship that sank after sailing a kilometer and a half in 1628 (and which now has a museum). It's a good read, but MeFi user Aardvark Cheeselog

"That's a terrible idea, Your Majesty," said no shipwright to a king, ever.

which, not a novel idea, but it also made me think "said no DOT to a citizenry asking for more lanes, ever", etc.

Sean Conner: Some comments about my being called out by an LLM and other random links about LLMs

Her Name Was Nilufar Easmin. Trump posted her murder. He never said her name.

Via, which QT'd this skeet.

I wrote a kid's homework for them over on Reddit

My complaints center mostly around LLMs, with a slight diversion into generative AI for music and images:

My first complaint is just the quality of the output. I keep having... you know, the kinds of friends who DM you random whackadoodle Substack articles, only now they're DMing acres and acres of LLM generated slop and saying "this is so insightful" and it isn't. It's mediocre writing that often doesn't actually make sense. Really, when you use an LLM to generate prose it's doing the metaphorical equivalent of seven fingered humans, you're just not smart enough to see it.

The second complaint is the outsourcing of thinking. I mean, sure, you can make the argument that these things are analogous to calculators and you don't actually need to do arithmetic, but a lot of what I'm seeing is that people have stopped critically reading the output altogether. Or, if they're coding, they're losing the mental model of the code they're writing. Turning out stuff that appears to work, sure, but they're quickly dropping into delusions about what the LLM can and can't know, and they have no mental model for the code that's actually being generated.

Which, you know, is fine if you don't actually care how things work, but understanding how things work is how we figure out new and novel and interesting ways to use technologies, and that's not coming out of LLMs.

The third is how that ties into the anthropormophization of these things. The literature refers to this as "epistemia", but I see a lot of thinking that the LLM is thinking, and because of the "slot machine" payoff nature of these things that may be often enough to actually be really compelling, but then they use it for something where they get a grievously wrong answer, and the crater is pretty big. And because of well known issues of attention and operator fatigue, there's really no good way to outsource the kind of attention that's necessary to get good output from these things to humans. Use of them will bite you.

(Cue all of the cocky kids saying "skill issue". Dude, if that skill issue could be solved, C would be a safe programming language. Fuck all the way off with that argument.)

Then we get into the ethics of how these things are trained.

The theft of content. I don't even get that cranky about the huge percentage of traffic that's hitting my web servers from AI vendors and making it harder to have personal sites, the use of pirated materials, and remixing of intellectual properties in ways that individual humans would never get away with feels like a different set of rules. Anthropic and OpenAI pirated how many books? And they're getting a slap on the wrist, after huge efforts.

I'm old enough to remember when the record industry went after Napster users. If there were justice applied equally... well...

The power use, from local pollution to climate change to just electricity prices. If there were some sort of good coming out of it, sure, but, as pointed out up-thread, the LLMs are overhyped stupidity (every claim for success from these things has been a lie stemming from overtraining on test data or randomness), and the images are just stupid. Sure, they now mostly get the right number of fingers, but we're gonna burn down the planet for those aesthetics. Eeewww.

I'm the showdown between the Catholic Church and the current administration I can't believe I'm siding with... I mean... Holy shit, if you'd asked me pre this administration to name an evil institution responsible for so much suffering and abuse...

AI-Led Remediation Crisis Prompts HackerOne to Pause Bug Bounties

HackerOne Internet Bug Bounty changes.

Leading to Security Bug Bounty Program Paused Due to Loss of Funding

Via

Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social

here’s the “AI regulation” that I want: if anyone proposing utility for an AI tool utters the words “I could imagine…”, a big cartoony boxing glove on a spring needs to pop out of a box and punch them through a wall

Every time I think my voice is getting good, someone gives me a holy crap moment. Latest case is Charlie Puth making a reference to T Pain's auto tune technique, with no hardware...

https://switchedonpop.com/epis...ka-g3wnk-nrtag-fwsbl-tfsxc-szzhn https://www.berklee.edu/berkle...h-advice-switched-on-pop-podcast

Two really good ones today. That AI Great Leap Forward that I linked earlier, and Let’s talk about LLMs, talking about what software development really is, and a deep dive into how churning out code is not, in fact, going to give you an order of magnitude of productivity gain.

Via James Bennett @ubernostrum@infosec.exchange, the author

Edit: Lobste.rs summary by the author:

tl;dr

• Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet was correct.
• No Silver Bullet applies to LLMs the way it applied to other things, and empirical evidence on LLM coding impact sure seems to agree.
• You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature.
• If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.

The full post is me saying these things much more thoroughly and with citations.

Nature: Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.

Via

Hmmm... The Dell i7 8Gen hand me down laptop I've been using for Linux stuff is giving me flakey display, including keeping remnants of the previous display after a shutdown and restart (I didn't know they did that these days).

Sigh. I need work to turn around.

Of course, this Rust repo was last updated over 4 months ago. Why would I expect that it'd run on a modern Mac.

Guess this is gonna happen on a Linux machine.

A good start: John Deere to Pay $99 Million in Monumental Right-to- Repair Settlement

While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The article also reports that older used tractors ballooned in value as farmers sought out repairable devices.

Some checkboxes for a TOS: On the acceptance of GenAI — Joep Schuurkes

Preprint: AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance Grace Liu, Brian Christian, Tsvetomira Dumbalska, Michiel A. Bakker, Rachit Dubey

Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes).

Via.

The AI Great Leap Forward — Han Lee

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.

In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.

Same energy.

Duh: Analysis Finds That Google’s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

Postal Arbitrage. Using Amazon Prime to send messages more cheaply than a first class letter by gifting cheap items.

My neighborhood will hate you.