Flutterby™! (short)

Data center that vowed to avoid Colorado River water is now suing for 260 million gallons per year

KPBS reported that Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing has gone to court to secure 260 million gallons of water per year from the Imperial Irrigation District — about 750,000 gallons a day — for a planned artificial intelligence complex in the desert.

AP: Staggering amounts of fentanyl hit streets as the DEA watched and took no action, records show

“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David Howell told AP in a series of interviews in New Mexico. “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100% got people killed.”

Along with all of those billboards that, so far as I can tell, were designed to make fentanyl sound as cool as possible...

Yale Livable City Lab: Drawn Apart:

This paper disentangles the two by examining the role of garden city design (GCD), the dominant suburban planning paradigm for US suburbs in the twentieth century, characterized by winding streets, cul-de-sacs and hierarchical road networks. I construct a composite measure of GCD from street layouts and block configurations for over 60,000 neighbourhoods. I then estimate its effects on greenhouse gas emissions, social isolation and sedentary behaviour using ordinary least squares, propensity score matching and an instrumental-variable strategy that exploits historical waves in GCD adoption. GCD substantially worsens all three outcomes.

Hypothesis, based on overheard conversation: The current fascination with "AI" answers is a function of the information sphere being so overrun by SEO crap.

Written for Facebook:

In previous years, I've written a little post to try to be a place to anchor all of the birthday wishes, get them in one place rather than a gazillion notifications. I didn't get there this year.

So. 58 orbits. This year feels a lot like recent ones.

Work is kind of in a holding pattern, the LLM frenzy is still going strong and the "AI" bubble is waiting to pop. I'm frustrated by it, it feels like the culmination of extractive business models and a sense that we should be building more addictive slot machines, because the gambling addicts really really like them.

Square dance calling is fun, and I'm coming home from nights calling energized, but my work on my voice is going in directions that extend beyond the calling, and I'm finding myself less intrigued by choreography puzzles. It's fun, but I'm wondering about other directions I might take my vocal skills now that I feel like I'm really developing them.

The community singing is fun. Would like to do more of that, but my calendar already has most nights blocked out.

The community work carries on. Petaluma Urban Chat is starting to really focus on some fantastic local committees that put on great forums, and Charlene is participating in some of those committees in her own right, not just an extension of me, which is fantastic. However, both Charlene and I are feeling a lot like Petaluma as a city may be hobbled from growing in the directions that we'd like the environment around us to become. We've both expressed a desire for a more walkable environment, a community that's actually serious about climate change and equity and inclusion, and we struggle with that. We've put a lot of effort into the house in ways that won't come back if we sell and move, and we love the community of friends we've got, but we also look at what other places are doing and wonder if we'd be better off there.

So, yeah, may this next year be a transition to a new path. Not sure what that means yet, but I'm hoping for more community building and a sense that my work is benefitting the world around me.

And more feeling of connection with people.

How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization.

Summarized by Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social

Propaganda phrases and their de-propagandised equivalents from Emily M Bender and Nanna Inie:

artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation

hybrid intelligence → augmented human intelligence

image recognition → image labeling

speech recognition → automatic transcription

the model shows bias → the model reflects bias

model mistakes → model errors

chatbots are good at … → chatbots are good for …

hallucination → undesirable output

AI Children's Books, Body Horror Edition, looking at the #1 category bestseller on Amazon: 100,000 Whys for Kids: A Full-Color Visual Encyclopedia of Big Questions, Clear Answers, Science, Space, Animals, Nature, History, Inventions, and How the World Works for Ages 6–13 (No link, because fuck that noise).

You know what's great about your birthday in the modern age? Dismissing all the fucking notifications from automated systems.

Big tech: Turning a celebration into an annoyance.

So many good points in this. Glyph: Adversarial Communication. On how the need for verification of AI/LLM output amplifies negative communication traits, and what that might mean.

Wow. I migrated away from Firefox several months ago, but thought a password didn't get imported into Vivaldi so I just fired it up...

The amount of non-responsive time it took me to get into my passwords was astounding. Whatever they're doing, it's not about performance.

Listened to the latest Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, and ... productivity is very difficult to measure in software development, so it's hard to be objective, but as I sit here trying to envision how a mythical AI might insert itself into your interactions, I'm reminded of how much I need to find other work, 'cause this ain't it.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/212...ware-the-20x-engineer-2026-05-11