Flutterby™! (short)

https://americabydesign.fail/ — America by Design: An official embarrassment of the United States government

Got the email that American Science & Surplus is shutting down, and... Isocat @isocat@tiggi.es wrote this requiem

Washington city officials are using ChatGPT for government work

Records show Lund’s assistant fed the Commerce Department’s request for proposals into the artificial intelligence chatbot and asked it to write the letter for her. “Please include some facts about violence in native communities in the United States or Washington state in particular,” she added in her prompt.

As much as I'm a ChatGPT detractor, I think it's interesting to look at how and why people are turning to it, and consider what value we're getting from those aspects of human interaction.

Cooilot broke your audit log

You might be thinking, “Yikes, but I guess not too many people figured that out, so it’s probably fine.” Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. When I found this, I wasn’t searching for ways to break the audit log. Instead, I was simply trying to trigger the audit log so I could test functionality we are developing at Pistachio, and I noticed it was unreliable. In other words, this can happen by chance. So if your organization has M365 Copilot licenses, your audit log is probably wrong.

The Spinoff (New Zealand): Newly sober nation begs for one more hit of high house prices:

Warburton draws an analogy to consumer electronics: if the government were to strictly control TV imports, resulting in the price of old TVs shooting up to $10,000, would that be an economic boon because TV owners were better off? “It’s bizarre that so many people, including economists, tout the supposed wealth effect in housing,” he says. “For no other product would we pump money into a historically supply-constrained market and say that the inflation from that is a good thing. In a recession, Reserve Banks are meant to pump money into an economy to actually produce stuff – to increase output and jobs. We should not be pumping money into an economy to do anti-social policy – transferring money from those without to those already with.”

At some point, productivity actually has to occur to support the value that created "wealth" purports to be able to control/move. If we, through inflated housing prices, lock that wealth into people lucky enough to be born in a particular generation...

Via

bentendo @benbrown@masto.hackers.town

Shit so bleak programmers learn new languages now by coding “goodbye world”

This is really good: Alchemy 2: Electric boogaloo, a good dive into the parallels between alchemy and AI.

Via

Like I need another kitchen project, but yeah, I'm gonna have to do this recipe... From this Reddit post about turning steamed buns into cool shapes, poster Okilokijoki notes:

These are called huajuan 花卷 or hua mantou 花馒头. The fermentation process already gives it the shape.

and links to this how-to: 赖皮猴爱美食 Monkey's Super Cuisine : 花卷 八种花式捏法 6分钟教会你 (YouTube video)

Astrobach :breadified: @rorystarr@mstdn.social

Intelligence is not the average of human behaviours.

I keep waiting for someone to say this, but AI is never going to work as designed because it has a faulty theory of mind. Probably because it was largely programmed by people, who for one reason or another, clearly also lack a functional theory of mind.

Deaths, illness from air pollution related to gas and oil hit people of color hardest, study finds

Air pollution from fossil fuels causes an estimated 91,000 premature deaths per year, with the greatest burden falling on Black and brown communities, according to the study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances by a team from University College London and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Via, LA Times paywall link

Thank you Google AI overview: "No, the year 2000 was not 25 years ago; in fact, the year 2000 was exactly 25 years ago in the year 2025."

(Found 'cause it looks like they fixed the "Was 1995 30 years ago" bogosity that's floating around.)

Homeowner shoots, kills 2 men in ski masks claiming to be officers, Houston Police Department says.

"[The homeowner] became suspicious, because, you know, they have a ring camera too, and the suspects were saying they had a warrant, but it was just two people and they're masked up and no police cars, no lights or anything like that," said Lt. Khan with HPD.

Via Dave Winer's link blog, with the note:

[HPD Detective Kyle] Stringer noted that real officers do not wear ski masks.

Top Microsoft AI Boss Concerned AI Causing Psychosis in Otherwise Healthy People

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told British newspaper The Telegraph that "to many people," talking to a chatbot is a "highly compelling and very real interaction."

"Concerns around 'AI psychosis,' attachment and mental health are already growing," he added. "Some people reportedly believe their AI is God, or a fictional character, or fall in love with it to the point of absolute distraction."

Via Ian Rogers, who asks "Is this a bad thing? It sounds like a bad thing.". Ian also linked to A young woman’s final exchange with an AI chatbot

‘This Was Trauma by Simulation’: ChatGPT Users File Disturbing Mental Health Complaints — Gizmodo obtained consumer complaints to FTC through a FOIA request. Via the author, Matt Novak, who has a few more excerpts there.

Psychology Today: The Emerging Problem of "AI Psychosis". Via.

Derek Thompson: The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists

Lyle Solla-Yates @Lyle@cville.online

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management I recognize I am very old and the world is radically different today, but I cut my teeth late in the quality revolution when there was a consensus that businesses competed by providing the best customer experience possible so that it would be unthinkable to drop them, not based on AI spend. I find this market very upsetting and I look forward to the crash. #quality #AIBubble

Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don't Exist

Here's why: because you'd annoy the hell out of the restaurant. Just ask the beleaguered owners of the Montana eatery Stefanina's Wentzville, who are begging their customers to stop using Google's infamously shambolic AI Overviews to check up on its specials, First Alert 4 reports.

"Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website," the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post. "Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees."

Via

Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code

“One of the most surprising findings was a significant shift in developer preferences for AI compared to previous years, while most developers use AI, they like it less and trust it less this year,” Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst for Market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow, told VentureBeat. “This response is surprising because with all of the investment in and focus on AI in tech news, I would expect that the trust would grow as the technology gets better.”

Via

Victoria Song: AI doesn't belong in journaling (subscription, ya can get the gist from the headline and the first paragraph). From here by way of here.

localghost: This website is for humans.

I'd much rather people read the whole thing, take it in, digest it and have opinions right back at me. I love it when people connect with what I’m writing (and sometimes they email me to tell me that, which is really delightful).

Via

Top AI models fail spectacularly when faced with slightly altered medical questions

Artificial intelligence systems often perform impressively on standardized medical exams—but new research suggests these test scores may be misleading. A study published in JAMA Network Open indicates that large language models, or LLMs, might not actually “reason” through clinical questions. Instead, they seem to rely heavily on recognizing familiar answer patterns. When those patterns were slightly altered, the models’ performance dropped significantly—sometimes by more than half.

You don't fucking say. Really? Via

Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says. Via.

The Onion: Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI

David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run

the devil has plenty of advocates already and they're much better paid

Cheryl Rofer @cherylrofer.bsky.social

Prompt engineering is knowing the correct answer and trying to get the chatbot to produce it.

Via

Lauren Weinstein @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org

My sense is that Big Tech is increasingly realizing that they've bought into a gigantic fail with LLM generative AI systems, but they don't dare admit it because they realize they could instantly tank the stock market and their own firms. So they just keep playing along as if everything is great, and desperately hope that something will happen to save them before they roll right off the cliff and straight into Hell, dragging the rest of us along too. Though they don't care about that last part.

Jeffrey Harlan @Harlander@writing.exchange

I'm dying here. Just had a customer come in, asking where his drink was. We never got any mobile orders for him.

"I asked ChatGPT to order it for me and it said I could pick it up."

Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io

I want us to be at the point where "Were you exposed to AI brainrot in the workplace? You may be entitled to compensation" ads by lawyers are filling all the top ad slots.

improper ideologue @thedansimonson@lingo.lol

OpenAI is gonna get desperate and the “innovation” is gonna be to insert advertising into the model, to the point where you can’t tell it’s advertising.

That’s how we get to “it’s what plants crave.”

Brave: Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet, in which the Brave browser folks create a Reddit prompt injection that causes the Comet browser to log into Gmail and send the login one time password to the malicious Reddit user.

Archive.org link by way of David Gerard who observes:

I am annoyed this was found by Brave, who can fuck off, but due credit...

Guardio: “Scamlexity” — We Put Agentic AI Browsers to the Test - They Clicked, They Paid, They Failed.

We built and tested three scenarios, from a fake Walmart store and a real in-the-wild Wells Fargo phishing site to PromptFix - our AI-era take on the ClickFix scam that hides prompt injection inside a fake captcha to directly take control of a victim’s AI Agent. The results reveal an attack surface far wider than anything we’ve faced before, where breaking one AI model could mean compromising millions of users simultaneously.

Via Kevin Beaumont and Bruce Sterling and Baldur Bjarnason and ByteVagabond ‪@bytevagabond.com‬

Wired and Business Insider remove ‘AI-written’ freelance articles — Index on Censorship believes article it published by 'Margaux Blanchard' was generated by AI.

Wired and Business Insider Accidentally Published AI-Generated Slop Articles by Seemingly Fake Journalist The internet is drowning in AI slop.

Wired's placeholder for the article: A Note From WIRED Leadership

Business Insider's apparent apologia wants a subscription.

Via a bunch of places, but Cecilia Tan in particular.