Flutterby™! (short)

Tuesday February 24th, 2026

POLITICO and the New York Times Laundering Pink Slime "News" Dan Lyke / comment 0

I wondered how the NYT could edit Trump's comments to make him sound coherent and like he was speaking in complete sentences, and yet record every "uhm" and "ah" in a quote pulled from the middle of a 90 minute AOC free-form Q&A. Spin Class Cass Study: I Caught POLITICO and the New York Times Laundering Pink Slime "News"

How the sexist backlash to AOC and Gretchen Whitmer at the Munich Security Conference led me to a scammy "local news" outlet pushing a coordinated right-wing narrative

Via

Monday February 23rd, 2026

I need you to be Agile because I keep changing my mind Dan Lyke / comment 0

Work Chronicles (comic) Agile Mind Games

OH In biz AIs don't have to be any Dan Lyke / comment 0

OH: "In biz AIs don't have to be any smarter, or able to appear smarter, than the folks making the purchasing decisions"

and: "an ai can appear to be an expert, to the person making hiring decisions."

How to write for AI Dan Lyke / comment 0

New style manual for "AI optimization" just dropped: Search Engine Land: 44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first third of content: Study

Growth Memo: The science of how AI pays attention

I analyzed 1.2 million search results to find out exactly how AI reads. The verdict? It’s a busy editor, not a patient student.

Via Research Buzz.

parishioners say they were ‘blindsided.’ Dan Lyke / comment 0

There's just so many of these floating across my world right now that it's hard to link to specific instances, and easier to just observe: CHOAM Nomsky‬ ‪@samthielman.com‬

Every news story is now “State Senator Randy Pervert (R-Springfield) was indicted on 8 counts of lewd behavior with a child under 12 and has been put on paid leave from his two jobs as Border Patrol liaison and youth pastor at First Presbyterian (PCA) where parishioners say they were ‘blindsided.’”

The means violates the 4th and 5th Dan Lyke / comment 0

Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos, Petitioner, v. Donald J. Trump, et al. Civil Action No. 2:26-cv-00066 (PDF)

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

Via

And Earth is in space Dan Lyke / comment 0

geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

A common theme in science fiction is that if you're in space, don't trust a corporation. And Earth is in space

OpenClaw deletes Meta director of AI Safety inbox Dan Lyke / comment 0

404 Media: Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox

Summer Yue, the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, a part of the company that is working on a hypothetical AI system that exceeds human intelligence, posted about the incident on X last night. Yue was experimenting with OpenClaw, an viral AI agent that can be empowered to perform certain tasks with little human supervision. OpenAI hired the creator of OpenClaw last week.

Peter Mandelson, then and now Dan Lyke / comment 0

‪Tara Calishain‬ ‪@researchbuzz.bsky.social‬

Stories like this hit different now

With a link to Peter Mandelson offers to help government with Brexit negotiations from June 2017:

Peter Mandelson has offered to serve on any cross-party commission to advise on Brexit – and backed former prime minister Sir John Major to chair the group.

While quoting ‪Kyle Griffin‬ ‪@kylegriffin1.bsky.social‬

Breaking Sky News:

Peter Mandelson has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

He was led out of his London home by police officers this afternoon.

Mandelson has faced allegations that he leaked market-sensitive information from Downing Street to Jeffrey Epstein.

Which links to Mandelson arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office:

The first set of files related to Peter Mandelson's appointment as the UK's ambassador to the US will be published in early March, it has been announced in the House of Commons.

Insurance Expert on Self-Driving Dan Lyke / comment 0

A few interesting tidbits in Bloomberg CityLab: An Insurance Expert Appraises the Safety Record of Self-Driving Cars

Are autonomous vehicles operated by companies like Waymo and Tesla making the streets safer? The insurance industry’s research arm is watching closely.

Some good observations about comparing contexts, and the difficulty of getting and analyzing good data. Via.

Two excellent dystopian fiction Dan Lyke / comment 0

Two excellent dystopian fiction podcasts that are having trouble delivering their last few episodes, Life with Althaar, and Metropolis, have me wondering if part of why they're stalled is just that the predicted current events so well that they're struggling to satirize the present.


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for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net. Last modified: Thu Mar 15 12:48:17 PST 2001