Flutterby™! (short)

Harvard Business Review — Generative AI: Don’t Let AI Slop Muck Up Your Company’s Processes

If you're out of free reads, Futurism: Companies That Embraced AI Are Now Rotting Away in a Very Specific Way is a take on that article.

Via

Somehow, back in my interest in film years, I'd managed to skip Jean Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless. We watched it last night, and it felt kind-of of its time socially, but there were things that kept making me go "wow", the use of the camera as active observer, the intimacy of the indoor shots, the breadth and messiness of the outdoor shots which still made every moment count, cuts which felt way more modern.

The subtitles and French made it challenging, and the social aspects of "of its time" left me feeling like I'd watched something of historical importance, but not particularly relevant to modernity.

We watched it as a prelude to watching Nouvelle Vague. As the "Fin" faded from the screen I did a quick search and realized it was on Netflix, which we'd accidentally gotten subscribed to when Charlene went to watch an older episode of The Way Home and Google misdirected her, and our subscription ended... today, as it turns out.

So, back to back, we watched Richard Linklater's comedy/drama about the making of Breathless. Also in black and white, and in French, with subtitles, and...

Nouvelle Vague is genius. The casting worked amazingly well. The film tells enough in action and leaves enough space for the subtitles to work. It carries the frenetic improvised feel of Breathless while being clear that the entire film had to be meticulously plotted and planned to tell exactly that story with, I assume, an amazing amount of effects and set work, especially given the budget.

Much like Breathless, the film both is and isn't about its primary plot, and it lets those personal evolutions be told through small beats.

Anyway, we loved it.

I'm listening to the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's "Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas", and... ad blocking is a start, but I need to be doing more to control the external impacts on me.

https://rangedtouch.com/2022/0...1/43-schull-addiction-by-design/

A good reminder, as we disproportionately enforce laws in order to create modern slavery: Jermaine Fowler: Everyone Reads the First Line of the Juneteenth Order. Never the Second.

I'm putting the Animista On-Demand CSS Animations tool here because I'm afraid at some point it may be useful.

I mean, I don't ever want it to be useful. I want my web sites to work in Lynx, but here we are, in 2026.

Jason Scheirer — A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career.

Via this little remembrance of 4GLs and CASE tools and whatnot. Apropos of AI/LLMs.

In The Weights is a web site that attempts to score how well LLMs know your name. I have a score of 575. Via Tara Calishain (406), who should, by rights, score way higher than me owing to, you know, all the books she's written, and the fact that she's been blogging a similar length of time, and Anthropic stole all of her books, and...

How AI Impacts Skill FormationJudy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin

Summarized by Elf Sternberg as

"Users who used Claude to learn basic concepts around a program implementation project averaged 72% on a quiz of knowledge retention afterward. Those who Claude for code generation scored only 31%."

A voice inside my head: The psychological and behavioral consequences of auditory technologies Alicea Lieberman, Juliana Schroeder, On Amir

Five experiments demonstrate that because headphones localize sound inside a listener’s head (i.e., in-head localization, the sensation that the sound is originating from within one’s own head), they increase listeners’ felt closeness to the communicators of a message. Consequently, listeners perceive the communicators as warmer, feel and behave more empathically toward them, and are more persuaded by them.

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Aspirational Clownmaxxing and Joey's cadillac todo list, on giving LLMs creative writing around a ToDo list app and seeing what they come up with. I initially closed this tab, but then read lake's fantastic lobste.rs comment:

What the LLM responds with might be mildly amusing the first time, especially at first, but if you've seen one of those outputs, you've seen them all. They tend to follow the same formula, regardless of the prompted style, and will always its most cliché, unsubtle elements. I would sometimes see glimmers of something good, but they were drowned out by the overall, well, slop, and clearly not there because of some latent creativity, but as a stochastic accident.

Dan Davies — Tokenalysys and John Henry looks at Ed Zitron's note on OpenAI losses:

Today, I can exclusively report, based on audited financial documents viewed by this publication that have been independently verified by the Financial Times, that OpenAI lost around $38.5 billion in 2025, as well as other crucial details about the financial condition of the company.

and notes that:

And, of course, this is just for coding – the idea of making material use of AI for general management and governance is several generations of R&D, plus several multiples more token use intensity. It seems to me that we are quite a lot of unknowable technical advances (in model design, renewable energy availability, quite possibly orbital data centres) away from anything like this being possible. And that there is a very difficult business strategy problem of getting there, because the AI companies now have to manage their pricing to walk the tightrope between growth and cash burn.

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Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe

Current “AI” from my perspective is less like a technological breakthrough—“the genie is out of the bottle”—and more a research fusion reactor: no matter how much energy and money you throw at the thing, nothing changes the fact that it costs more energy than it produces

All that scaling it up accomplishes is waste. LLM true believers are effectively arguing their tech accomplishes free energy when the costs mean it’s effectively the opposite

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Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein.

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Holy shit it's time to accelerate the migration away from Gmail.