Flutterby™! (short)

Monday May 4th, 2026

Trump admin and EVs Dan Lyke / comment 0

Interesting thread, with receipts, asserting that the US automakers failure to deliver EVs is Trump's fault

Plausible diagnosis generator doesn't need images to diagnose Dan Lyke / comment 0

Frontier AI Models Are Doing Something Absolutely Bizarre When Asked to Diagnose Medical X-Rays

As detailed in a new, yet-to-be-peer- reviewed paper, a team of researchers at Stanford University found that frontier AI models readily generated “detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided.”

Via.

LLMs prefer resumes written by itself Dan Lyke / comment 0

AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights Jiannan Xu, Gujie Li, Jane Yi Jiang

These simulations show that candidates using the same LLM as the evaluator are 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted than equally qualified applicants submitting human- written resumes, with the largest disadvantages observed in business-related fields such as sales and accounting. We further demonstrate that this bias can be reduced by more than 50% through simple interventions targeting LLMs' self-recognition capabilities. These findings highlight an emerging but previously overlooked risk in AI-assisted decision making and call for expanded frameworks of AI fairness that address not only demographic-based disparities, but also biases in AI-AI interactions.

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RIP Nicole Hollander Dan Lyke / comment 0

Alt comics page readers will recognize the name: Nicole Hollander, creator of the "Sylvia" comic strip which ran from 1980 to 2012, has passed away.

On 26 March 2012, 'Sylvia' was discontinued completely. Hollander established a now-defunct personal blog to repost old comics and post new ones. Apart from her own opinions and work, she also offered room for articles and cartoons by younger artists. Her blog received the title Bad Girl Chats. Hollander quipped: "You have to be careful when you type in the URL, because you may get a porn site" (which ironically enough it became after Hollander's site was discontinued).

Via.

AI music flood Dan Lyke / comment 0

NPR: AI music is flooding streaming platforms. But listeners like it less and less. I have a notoriously bad track record at predicting the future, but it seems like Generative AI music is gonna be micro-targeted at the creator, and everyone else is either going to generate their own, or find an artist who's genuinely creating something new and different.

And prompting is not enough of an input to consistently get good results.

the Claude Delusion Dan Lyke / comment 0

Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion.

Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. But even if he had not moved rightward in his senesence, when you consider Dawkins’s scientific views about what minds are and how they function, seeing him flirting with a chatbot is completely expected.

Edit: Background includes British scientists don't like Richard Dawkins, finds study that didn't even ask questions about Richard Dawkins

The investigation into science's public image didn't even ask about the atheist professor, but it got an answer anyway

Via

Neighbor moved to the other side of Dan Lyke / comment 0

Neighbor moved to the other side of town a few years ago. Yesterday called me up and asked if I could help him fix his kid's scooter.

So he came over, and I texted another neighbor, and we had an awesome "guys hang out and drill holes in metal and bullshit" afternoon, and I need more of that.

Sunday May 3rd, 2026

friend borrowed our electric citrus Dan Lyke / comment 0

A friend borrowed our electric citrus juicer, and has not yet returned it, so I just did half a gallon of lemon juice by hand with a clamshell juicer.

The phrase "easy peasy lemon squeezy" is hogwash.


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