Flutterby™! (short)

Felicitas Pojtinger 🌅 @pojntfx@mastodon.social

The fight against root-based remote attestation and mandatory code signing with vendor-provided keys are the defining software freedom issues of our time. Nothing else even comes close

NPR: World Cup bike lane sparks fury from Mexico City sex workers

Before, the sex workers stood right on the street, and their clients could slow down, they could loop, they could negotiate. Now, in parts of Tlalpan, the sex workers are separated from the street by the bike lane and in some cases even huge concrete planters.

Via Momentum Mag.

Because so so many people have been linking to it, and I've got a gift code: New York Times: The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week, Adam GrantMarissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott. The money paragraph:

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

Sometimes it's hard to tell until I get deeply into a community, but I'm gonna get really obnoxious about judging communities by how core people in those spaces advertise their events and wares.

Meanwhile, I've actually become a pretty good Modern Western Square Dance caller, and I'm wondering why.

JavaScript was a mistake.

JavaScript was a generation-scale mistake.

I don't do streaming music, but if I did, this closes the deal: Variety: Tidal to Label AI-Generated Music, Ban Royalties from AI Song Streams

Tidal AI Policy.

highly praised and little read @hannah@posts.rat.pictures

Each broom agent can spawn additional, autonomous broom agents, each with their own pails. This allows apprentices to accelerate monotonous water-fetching tasks and save their time and energy for more interesting and useful work

Futurism: AI Companies Are Learning an Ironic Lesson as the People They Pay to Improve Their Chatbots Are Just Feeding AI Slop Into Them

"If these companies want quality data, then they should offer quality contracts."

Via, and Via.

Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly

‘We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers,’ says automaker

Via.

Codex SQLite feedback logs can write ~640 TB/year and rapidly consume SSD endurance #28224 . Via.

Thomas Fuchs @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

So to summarize, AI will cause personal computers to cost ten thousand dollars, all applications will be forever be frozen to about 2025 design and implementation (because that’s what vibe coding outputs), power to run the computer will be twice the price and also you need to sign in with your passport to start your computer in the first place.

Explain to me again how this is progress?

Garrett Gilchrist‬ ‪@garrettgilchrist.bsky.social‬

NANCY PELOSI: We must find the next generation of Democratic leadership. Young, charismatic and exciting candidates who can energize the party. People that voters love because they're not 80 years old and sold out to big capital.

CHUCK SCHUMER (behind sniper rifle): Found one

PELOSI: Take the shot

StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction (Preprint) Jenna Russell, Rishanth Rajendhran, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer, John Wieting

A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity (e.g., flashbacks, nonlinear structure). Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.

Via LinkedIn: The Shape of Enshittification: Books That No Longer Get Read, An Internet That No Longer Gets Surfed, & The End of Social Media As We Know It..., which is a pitch piece for Return to Real: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything by Ryan Levesque, but which suffers from LinkedIn-ness so deeply that I can't tell if it's AI generated...

I saw the video in which Weiner was badgered out of the Trans Pride March (an event he's attended for 22 years, since its inception), didn't think it needed amplifying, and I'm a fan of Scott Weiner's legislative accomplishments, but I think this is a useful perspective:

Assigned Media: Scott Wiener’s Viral Harassment is What Left Antisemitism Looks Like

Andy Wingo @wingo@mastodon.social

an't help getting astrology × audiophile vibes from llm enthusiasts: "oh no honey you can't use opus 4.8, it's so nerfed, try glm-5.2 or the codex 5.5, they have a warm gemini sound, very well rounded on details and tone. but don't use google's gemini models, they are really leos, they have good treble response but you can't trust their mid-range"

People around me vibe coding has taught me that all of those ridiculous tests that checked every stupid arithmetic operator are actually necessary and useful.