Flutterby™! (short)

Free Steam demo runs up $1,000 daily AI bill and forces devs to take out bank loan — studio eyes local hardware models to escape cloud limits as cheaper automatic fallback AI models create problems, game uses AI to process your voice and build responses

“We are currently spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” the team wrote on its Steam update. Easy Fox also added, “This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running.”

Uh. Wait. each player isn't particularly expensive to support, and yet "the cost has increased because so many people are playing"? I'm... not sure what they're saying here.

Anyway, apparently the whole thing is the player talking to Gemini.

A whole bunch of people linking to this, but I'll credit David Gerard.

Thank you for trying to rent a streaming video. From your TV, we've sent an email that leads to a web page which tells you to go check your phone for a code, which...

I am frankly surprised that I didn't have to then go down to 7-11 and buy a money transfer to send to Venezuela or something.

Yet another study suggesting that UC Berkeley News: Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things

The paper: AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance Grace Liu, Brian Christian, Tsvetomira Dumbalska, Michiel A. Bakker, Rachit Dubey

Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (∼10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.

Project Page: https://ai-project-website.git...-assistance-reduces-persistence/

Bill Amend's Foxtrot: ChessGPT this morning fucking nails it.

https://foxtrot.com/2026/10/11/chessgpt/

I guess on BlueSky this is a skeet string? Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social

Quick story. My op-ed on how corporations that kept their DEI programs performed just as well financially was accepted & factchecked at TIME Magazine. Just needed "pro forma review by the legal department." Suddenly the piece is spiked

Why? Benioff owns TIME and wants to ingratiate himself to Trump

Piece came out at USAToday

Why? Because USAToday owners (Gannett) only own media companies, so they have an incentive to attract an audience & advertisers

Tech elites like Bezos, Ellisons, Musk, & Benioff use their media firm to cozy to Trump, not to make profit

USA Today: DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite.

The lesson is not that the Trump administration's threats are empty. It is that their effectiveness often depends less on whether they are carried out than on whether people believe they will be.

www.usatoday.com/story/opinio... 2/4 DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite. | Opinion Firms that kept DEI, whether due to executive decisions or shareholder pressure, performed as well in the stock market as those that rolled it back. www.usatoday.com

Back to BlueSky:

These different incentives from standalone media owners vs. "common owners" like Benioff is the subject of one of my working papers

which is Wealth Concentration, Corruption, and Democratic Backsliding: A Theory of Media and Common Ownership Jacob M. Grumbach„ September 4, 2026

He concludes:

This is why Musk doesn't mind that that Twitter revenue is down 59% (or Ellison w/ CBS). He's more than making up for that loss via Twitter's political effects-- ingratiating to Trump, fomenting racist panics, etc--which help SpaceX and xAI get favorable public contracts and regulatory treatment"

It also seems to be the end-game for "AI"/LLM investment: use these things as propaganda machines, get the regulatory capture necessary to make up for the fact that the investments are gonna crash.

After a long day hanging out at Petaluma Pride in the Petaluma Urban Chat booth, came home and crashed out to "Boys Go To Jupiter", an extremely low budget animated film that... reminded me a *lot* of "Repo Man" thematically. Very weird, but maybe just right for the evening.

I'm swamped in political text messages. At this point I've known who I'm going to be voting for for several weeks, and it's unlikely that yet another annoyance is gonna get me to change anything.

So do text messages do anything? Maybe increase turnout by a quarter of a percent. No indication who those people voted for.

Which raises the question: what are political consultants trying to accomplish?

https://news.northeastern.edu/.../text-messages-get-out-the-vote/

The Conversation: Is this the ‘mathocalypse’? Why OpenAI’s latest results dump has left mathematicians in shock

A senior colleague of mine found one of his favourite problems among those solved and attempted to read the accompanying paper. He told me it was so unintelligible that, had he received it as an editor at a mathematics journal, “it would have gone straight into the bin”.

Via.

Asaf Karagila: OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics

No, if this was an academic paper submitted to a journal, it should be issued a desk rejection for the quality. The onus is always on the author to conform and adhere to the communications level. Much like a paper written in Swedish would likely be rejected outright from the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, because the onus is on the authors to make it accessible for the readers.

Via.

The disconnect between human intelligible and computer intelligible (and, of course, if computer intelligible actually means something) is real, and Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs Alexander Bastounis, Fabian Circelli, Anders C. Hansen, that the LLM conversion of the math paper texts it generates into language for the Lean theorem prover isn't necessarily true to the text.

Unrelated, but cool: Reddit: I'm a 9th grader and I used Claude to prove a geometry conjecture: the rhombicosidodecahedron can't pass through a copy of itself. Paper: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert Jung, Gihyo (preprint)

Code: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert — computer-assisted proof

72-year-old man shoots off-duty ICE agent found asleep on Fresno lawn, agent arrested: PD

Sounds like the dude was drunk off his ass (which, hey, ICE agent named "David Gonzalez", probably has a lot of reasons to drown his sorrows in alcohol), but that's no reason to attack the people whose lawn he passed out on:

Police say the daughter tried to intervene to protect her father, and Gonzalez physically attacked her.

Fearing for their safety, officers say the 72-year-old man pulled out a gun and shot Gonzalez.

The woman's boyfriend, who is a police officer and was off-duty, came to the home and put Gonzalez in handcuffs.

Via

Anyway, with ICE goons shooting (and kidnapping) so many people, good to see the bad guy get that end of the gun.

He survived, and is hospitalized in critical condition.

I hate the design, but this is awesome writing and research: The people holding up the Internet.

Computers that we don't actually own and can re-image from scratch are a mistake: Android Phones Found With Malware Already Installed Before Purchase

BitDefender: The phone was compromised before the user turned it on: the rise of Midnight Mimosa

Counterfeit flagship devices are offered on a mainstream marketplace. Model names of this kind, such as S24 Ultra, S25 Ultra, S26 Ultra, appear in our insights as the model strings reported by low-cost MediaTek hardware.

Via.

CROW: classifier-routed organizatino of LLM wikis

(Gonna have to make an "LLM wiki" topic here shortly)