Flutterby™! (short)

Wow, the meme is in the air: Æ. @aesthr@wandering.shop

It is the year 2025 and “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” would actually be a pretty certain indicator that you’re talking to a human because an LLM would instead tell you that a bay is a body of water and therefore doesn’t have doors, although sometimes a pod of dolphins could be in it.

PyXL — Python running directly on a Zynq-7000 FPGA (Arty-Z7-20 dev board) at 100MHz

A GPIO roundtrip takes 480ns on PyXL vs. ~15,000ns on PyBoard (MicroPython).

Stephen Thomas @skwthomas

Me: Marx didn’t predict I’d use adderall to respond to texts haha

Scholar’s QT of page 651 of Capital:

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑟 𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑡s 𝑡𝑜 𝑎 𝐿𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑙 𝑐𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑇𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑠

Quinn Norton @quinn@social.circl.lu

People keep talking about AI and crypto coins as things that are popular and interesting. But Fentanyl is also popular and interesting, so y'all will need a better argument than that.

Thom, Antipope of Fedi @thomholwerda@exquisite.social

Exactly 80 years ago today, Hitler blew his own brains out and died, in what can only be considered the single best use of a bullet in human history.

Why is this not a recognised, official holiday?

Anil Dash @anildash@me.dm

A bunch of tech CEOs are talking about being “AI-first”, the latest in a series of CEO fads like “return to office”, “founder mode” and “pivot to full fascism”. This one’s weird, though, because it only makes sense if… none of their workers are great at their jobs.

"AI-first" is the new Return To Office

C++ coders: The way that LLVM exploits undefined behavior may be a little extreme.

Vibe coders: What if, and hear me out, we didn't even expect the same behavior from the same inputs?

I'm having trouble reading things like this as anything other than a desire for more undefined behavior in programming languages.

https://mashable.com/article/l...k-zuckerberg-ai-writes-meta-code

If 30% of code at Microsoft is being written in a language that doesn't reliably compile to the same output, doesn't have a formal spec or grammar, and only has indirect error checking, what does that say about the languages specific to programming that we've been using?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/2...osoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html

Reading Dennis Yi Tenen's "Literary Theory for Robots", talking about Athanasius Kircher's Mathematical Organ, and it's a good reminder to not dismiss shiny tech just because it is, but also to not let the well created wrapper convince us that there's more intelligence there than actually is.

What. The. Everloving. Fuck?

Lindsey Graham @LindseyGrahamSC

I was excited to hear that President Trump is open to the idea of being the next Pope. This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!

The first Pope-U.S. President combination has many upsides. Watching for white smoke…. Trump MMXXVIII!

Life with Althaar referring to "the human sexosipher Chuck Tingle" is the cross-over I didn't know that we needed.

Tried to write "order of magnitude", auto-corrupt suggested "order of manure". In the context (answers from LLMs on browser share vs ClouldFlare data), I'm not sure it was wrong.

Jay Kuo @jaykuo@universeodon.com

Overheard: “William Henry Harrison had a better first 100 days, and he spent 70 of them dead.”

theHigherGeometer @highergeometer@mathstodon.xyz

People are saying we should write jumble words to mess up the training of AIs; I say we should just write sentences like those of the length Jane Austen would write, that have such non-local structure and nested clauses that, what with the drift of attention and the window of tokens, the LLMs might start to emulate said sentences and then start to drift; one should also throw in even more semicolons (and, why not, nested parentheticals (and even em-dash-separated asides—who doesn't love author commentary—to pad out the length) for the additional context they give)—but of course, also trying to keep in mind the general readability of the flow of ideas: know your audience, after all; for me, I'm happy to just be typing into the void as a release-valve for my thoughts, even if none of you are still reading by this point; I would much rather write—and read!—read something like this than have to and and/or subtract all the additional nonsense words; even better would be Proustian nested clauses and inverted grammar, but that, unlike run-on sentences, does not come so easily, unlike (apparently) to 19th century German journalists (but of course in German one can split the verbs as far apart as one likes).

Or not.

Yawu Miller ‪@yawumiller.bsky.social‬

Mass. voters were told millionaires would leave the state in droves if the millionaires tax passed and revenue would decline. Two years later, there are more millionaires living here than ever and the state collected $2.2 billion from the surtax.

Institute for Policy Studies: New Data Shows Wealth Expands After Higher State Taxes on High-Income Earners, looking at how the surtax on large incomes has helped in Washington and Massachusetts, without slowing economic growth in those states.