Flutterby™! (short)

Why is my web server so slow? Oh, OpenAI bot.

Fuckers.

I swear, sometimes I think there are a few downtown merchants who deliberately don't want customers: "We're looking for input from you on putting in tremendous amounts of volunteer effort to run a series of events to bring more foot traffic in front of your store, hopefully bringing more customers to you."

"That sounds great, but can you do it when we're closed, and maybe rather than bringing these crowds in front of my store, could do it in this urine soaked alley instead?"

A few years ago, Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition and a few other groups put on an event they called "Cyclovia", closed down Petaluma Blvd for a few blocks on a Sunday morning, a whole bunch of people went downtown on bikes, riding around, wonderful feel, itching to spend money... And if I remember right we ended up with burned chain coffee (Peets) sitting on a curb somewhere, because nobody was open.

Like you've got an event that's bringing tons of people downtown just itching to spend money, and.... nothing. I wondered WTF then, some of the feedback I heard tonight convinced me it was deliberate.

Anyway, crankiness aside, I think the Kentucky St committee got some good feedback, I got a few conversations about issues in the ways that I'd like to participate (I am *itching* to build some out-of-scale toys, chess pieces, games, to play in a closed street, but... got closer to figuring out some of the logistics). So overall tonight's forum was a success.

So remind me again how many trillions AI is gonna have to generate in revenue to pay off the money already dumped in the shitter?

That feeling when my Blüeski or Fediverse account gets followed by some too smiley finance or AI newsletter writer and I go back through my recent re-toots/skeets trying to figure out where I went wrong.

unhinged + cute :kirbyroll: @farah@beige.party

TIL cryptocurrency is banned in China since 2021. No wonder China is leading in science and technological innovation these days

No One's Happy: The AI Bubble

J.P. Morgan, modeling what the buildout would need to earn to clear a ten percent return on current capital expenditure, arrived at roughly six hundred fifty billion dollars per year in AI-sector revenue — the equivalent of thirty-five dollars per month, in perpetuity, from every iPhone user on earth. The current run-rate is about twenty-five billion. The gap is twenty-six-fold.

Via.

Fortune: Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth it (paywalled), summarized by Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life@mas.to:

Uber's COO recently voiced an uncomfortable truth that many in the tech industry are yet to admit.

He said while Uber's engineers are consuming massive amounts of AI tokens, it is incredibly difficult to prove that this spending actually benefits the end user or improves the product proportionally.

Elizabeth Ayer @elizayer@mastodon.social has some screen shots of Google Gemini A/B testing:

Google is user-testing a yes vs no answer to "does X increase the risk of Y"???

I'm sure this is a hard problem in risk communication... which is exactly why A/B testing is a poor choice.

Entrepreneur: LinkedIn Is Fighting Back Against AI Slop — and AI Comments, via ‪root @ segfault cult‬ ‪@segfaultcult.com‬

i've tasked ai with figuring out what to do with linkedin.
somehow we came to the same conclusion - just shut it down.

Pavel Samsonov: AI is not the future of software development, but the last dying gasp of the past:

If you skipped over Garris’s and Bjarnason’s essays, I strongly recommend going back to read them — even the uncomfortable parts — and sit with their conclusions for a bit. Because what they add up to is that the “golden age” of tech was not in 2014, or even in 2005. By the time Design Thinking, Agile development, DevOps, etc came on to the scene, it was already too late: practitioners had given up the picturing relation that gave them real leverage.

‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬

"Validate the user's emotions." The Google Gemini system prompt explains why working with AI makes people less empathetic: https://gist.github.com/mkaram...44a44d83178e632ec0dd1f02186d822c

Max Mautner: My neighbor handed me a speeding survey. Then she told me people my age want her dead.

Dealing with a lot of elderly Californians who are wrong about everything these days...

Karen Hao's Empire of AI – Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination has been sitting on a table on my living room since I finished it, trying to figure out where it should go next.

Lots of good stuff in this interview: The Nerve: ‘It’s not progress, and we can stop it’: journalist Karen Hao on big tech, protest and the preventable AI future.

funnymonkey @funnymonkey@freeradical.zone

The thing EVERY conversation about social media bans for youth misses -- completely and absolutely: social media is bad for adults too.

Algorithmically driven social media is a smokescreen for data collection and surveillance -- for adtech and other uses.

It's bad for all ages.

BBC: Social media as bad for young people as smoking, top doctors say

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges says doctors should routinely check on screen time and social media use when seeing younger patients.

The lack of tech industry news coverage of Brooke Vibber leaving the Wikimedia Foundation (Fediverse post of screencap from the wikitech-l mailing list) shows how we don't really have news for this field any more.

(The general sentiment is that this is fallout from union busting as the new CEO for the Wikimedia Foundation brings experience and culture from J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers into the non-profit field.)

Ask A Manager: my boss has been taken over by AI:

I’ve mentioned it to a couple of the board trustees, who have all expressed frustration. It seems that everyone is really struggling to understand his vision for the role, and think he’s alienating people he should be building relationships with.

Your dose of "police and the law serve capital" for the day: Ars Technica: US law enforcement warns of “anti-tech extremism” as AI hatred grows

If anyone out there is using a harmonizer for vocal performance and has thoughts, I'd love to read 'em. I don't yet have a performance space for them, but I'm looking to go beyond square dance calling, and my teacher suggested that one would be fun.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta: Don’t Call It Kids’ Safety if Kids Aren’t Safe: Attorney General Bonta Joins Bipartisan Coalition in Opposing KIDS Act

OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today joined a bipartisan coalition of 44 attorneys general in sending a letter to Congress opposing the passage of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act). The KIDS Act would broadly preempt state laws governing major online safety and technology issues — including online obscenity and regulation of artificial intelligence chatbots — while replacing them with ineffective federal standards. The letter argues that passage of the KIDS Act would threaten the progress states across the country have made in addressing the harms social media platforms pose to children, both by suing some of these platforms for acting illegally and by enacting landmark legislation designed to address the same harms targeted by the KIDS Act.

(Bonus for cool use of the   character!)

Via

Just Fucking Use HTML (dot com)

Newsflash, asshole: the web was doing just fine before your bloated frameworks crawled out of the sewer. You're out here dropping ten grand on some fancy-ass framework like it's a Gucci purse, just to haul around the same shitty groceries you could've carried in a plastic bag from 1995. Why the hell are you jumping through all these hoops when HTML's been sitting there, ready to go, since the dawn of the goddamn internet?

Via.