Flutterby™! (short)

Red Monk: AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers

AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. Just look at what happened last month. Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghostty implemented a zero-tolerance policy where submitting bad AI-generated code gets you permanently banned. Steve Ruiz, Founder of tldraw, announced he would auto-close all external pull requests. Meanwhile cURL, the humble command-line tool that quietly powers approximately everything on the internet, just shut down its bug bounty program. After six years and $86,000 in payouts, Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL, pulled the plug. The reason? An AI onslop (pun fully intended).

Via

The AI Dirty List — Ensuring those who choose to bathe in AI slop will never be washed clean.

Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence Steve Rathje, Meryl Ye, Laura K. Globig, Raunak M. Pillai, Victoria Oldemburgode Mello, Jay J. VanBavel (preprint)

Sycophantic chatbots’ impact on attitude extremity and certainty was driven by a one-sided presentation of facts, whereas their impact on enjoyment was driven by validation. Altogether, these results suggest that people’s preference for and blindness to sycophantic AI may risk creating AI “echochambers” that increase attitude extremity and overconfidence.

Via.

Realizing that the heel on my Xero running shoe has worn through too many times for the gasket material I've clumsily glued over some of the tread to solve, I'm wondering if there are any re-sole-able minimalist shoes for less than the $450 that the ultra-fashionable brands start at.

Work has me in a mood, so I went out on a walk looking for some hills, ended up going up Hayes Lane.

Futurism makes my day a little brighter: The Streets Are Saying Bitcoin Is Gonna Fall to $30,000.

Okay, really optimistic would be freakin' zero, but that's a good start.

Maybe a good thing that will come out of these "skills" files that the slop vendors are publishing is better documentation for humans.

A lot of useful quickstart guides in those repos, for projects and libraries that aren't as well documented in their own materials.

PC Gamer: Over 50% of game developers now think generative AI is bad for the industry, a dramatic increase from just 2 years ago: 'I'd rather quit the industry than use generative AI'

"Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it's safe to assume we've been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell," said a game design consultant in the US.

Via.

From Viss @Viss@mastodon.social's thread about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw that observes:

people are attaching this shit to their desktops and phones and their lives and somehow getting pearl-clutchy and surprised when it straps itself with nuclear warheads, dives into their bank accounts and detonates itself

and

i need to go look up that big "EA got sued because it got kids addicted to gambling" lawsuit because im pretty sure this is the same thing but for vibecoders

which then observes that:

oh my god, its the same fucking thing

With a link to Trulaw: EA Games Lawsuit for Video Game Addiction.

And, yes, it is exactly this, and, as further asserted in the thread, I strongly believe that it's both deliberate, and that evidence of that is the whole kerfluffle around ChatGPT 5 and how when they dialed down the sycophancy people revolted.

I mean, anyone who's spent time on this platform can tell ya this, but Tim Cook sold Apple's soul.

Via.

Matt Gemmell: The Fallen Apple. Via

École des Bro-Arts @aphyr@woof.group

I've been trying to teach my kids that they should stop wearing and listening to the same things everyone else does at school. It's OK to get wild haircuts, piece their noses, go thrash around at electro-punk shows.

After all...

Children should be scene and not herd.

Eeenteresting, too soon to know what this actually means, but: Windows Central: You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift

Details around how the company is going about this remain light, but sources say Copilot integrations like those found in Notepad and Paint are under review. This may result in Microsoft removing certain Copilot integrations from these apps, or at the very least removing the Copilot branding and pivoting to a more streamlined experience.

Pacific Antifascist Research Collective has "A thread of ICE and CBP sex offenders and credibly accused sex pasts." I think they mean pests, not pasts, but the rest of the point stands.

Salem (Oregon) Reporter: U.S. citizen injured by federal agents in Salem who demanded to see “papers,” union says

Service Employees International Union Local 503 said the woman, a union member, was driving to run errands when four agents stopped her on a Salem street. The agents identified themselves as federal law enforcement, according to the union’s statement.

‪David Leavitt‬ ‪@davidleavitt.bsky.social‬

Chappell Roan’s dress is like my sanity:

Barely hanging on.

Kate Compton‬ ‪@galaxykate.bsky.social‬

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test

Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)

Good tech.

Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)

Bad tech.

I was gonna tag this on the previous post about ClawdBot/MoltBot/OpenClaw, but, no, these exploits are new: Malicious MoltBot skills used to push password-stealing malware.

A report from community security portal OpenSourceMalware says that an ongoing large-scale campaign is using skills to spread info-stealing malware to OpenClaw users.

Yay! It is possible to prosecute these assholes! New body camera footage shows aftermath of ICE officer allegedly attacking activist near Chicago.

“Yeah, I was trying to grab his phone from out of his hand,” Saracco tells Brookfield police when asked about the allegations.

“He get physical with you at all?” the Brookfield officer asks in response.

“I mean he was actively resisting,” Saracco said. “He wouldn’t let me take his phone out of his hands.”

The perp is only up on misdemeanor charges, but the fucking gall of these people, thinking they can steal phones and pawn them for cash with impunity.

Via

Thinking about all of the developing nation workers in sweatshops who could have been setting up regular expressions for common idioms and phrases to accomplish tasks, like "play this album" and "navigate to this space", who instead were training LLMs.

Oh, this is fascinatingly exploitive: AV Club: Inside the hideous, exploitative, but still addictive world of vertical dramas. In China they're referred to as "duanju".

To feed that addiction, they’re going to pay through the nose. Vertical drama apps are built to obfuscate the sense</span> of how much you’re paying, with “coins” purchased in bulk, in amounts from hundreds to thousands. Individual episodes might cost upward of 60 coins per two-minute piece of footage—and given that each drama has 70 or more episodes, this means the viewer can easily spend $20 or $30 to watch 90 minutes of some of the cheapest slop imaginable. People are paying much more to watch Tricked Into Having My Ex-Husband’s Baby on their phones than it would cost to see Sinners< in IMAX.

Via Sensible Endowment.

100% on today's Timdle, despite guessing at HIMYM's initial pilot episode, and the relative ordering of 5 events in the last 3 decades.

https://www.timdle.com/daily

From back in December, but apropos because of Elon Musk's "data centers in spaaaace..." pump-n-dump: < href="https://www.physicsmatt.com/bl...the-dumbest-thing-ive-seen-this- week">Matthew R. Buckley, aka "Physics Matt": The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week:

To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, political power centers, and people who really should know better, but yet another demonstration of how people who built their economic empire on a claim of STEM-based rigor and quantitative genius either can’t do basic physics or know that no one out there who matters is going to call them on it.

Although, frankly, dropping a bunch of GPUs into a decaying low earth orbit is a way to point out how rapidly these things depreciate.

The Penguin of Evil @etchedpixels@mastodon.social

Whenever some politician or party apologist whines about having to stay on twitter because some of our potential voters are on twitter, remind them that probably even more of their potential voters are on pornhub but they are not active there.

geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

Heist movies always have a moment before they introduce a new specialist where the main character is like "I know a guy" because the real treasure they were stealing was the power of networking. In my 12-week course, you'll learn--

Erik Johannes Husom: Outsourcing thinking.

If language can indeed be a thought model, then pushing that facility over to machines has implications for the development of our own model.

Via Elf Sternberg who has a few more thoughts.

Saturday night, our Disney+ subscription had lapsed, and rather than resubscribe to anything we watched The Last Repair Shop, an hour long documentary on the people who run the Los Angeles school district instrument repair shop.

Went places I did not expect, gorgeously shot, uplifting. Recommended.