Flutterby™! (short)

Today's candidate for "should be banned forever from the Internet": areascode(dot)us.

Via a Reddit poster with the 669 area code noting "I feel so offended by this map". https://www.reddit.com/r/bayar.../i_feel_so_offended_by_this_map/

Max Mautner: A stop sign for $1,000. On telling the city of San Mateo about an unsafe corner, updating them with additional collision information, thinking about the ethics of pushing a project like this up in the queue when there are so many unsafe intersections in San Mateo, and holding a neighborhood party to celebrate.

CNN: Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say. Apparently they were close to intercepting a Chinese ship in the Middle East because the plausible sentence generator told someone it was "...transporting components of a nuclear weapons program."

Hopefully those responsible for this idiocy will be impeached soon.

Extremely optimistically, they'll also be prosecuted.

Replicating Steve @snark.bsky.social:

$ apfel "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?"
error: [guardrail] The request was blocked by Apple's safety guardrails. Try rephrasing.
$ apfel "who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about?"
The cat you're referring to is likely Garfield. Garfield is a cartoon cat known for his lazy and indifferent attitude, even in the face of danger. Despite his reluctance to confront threats, he often finds himself in precarious situations.

Edit: I tried again with the actual lyric, "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?", rather than Steve's initial "who's the hip black dick who's the sex machines with all the chicks?". Same result.

I suspect I've heard all of these before, but saving off for when I can listen to them: a thread about the evolution of Aha's "Take On Me".

Joe Cardillo (Disinfo Dad) @joecardillo@federate.social has a thread on examples of

Create the risk, then position yourself as the only one who can solve it

in the context of AI doomerism.

Endnotes: Slop doctors dives into how ambient AI listening in on your conversations with your doctors is increasing the number of health codes your insurance company gets billed for, why it's always dudes, and more.

Martin Fowler: I don't like LLMs:

But as I mull on this more, I realize that among this mix of contrasting feelings, there is one emotion that dominates - one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t like them.

Anthropic wants Claude to analyze your bank account and financial data. "Claude Money" appears to be chasing "ChatGPT Finances".

Via.

Look, folks, why don't you just post your bank statements on your Facebook feed and save us all some trouble here?

Texas Observer: The State’s Bible-Only Reading List Is a Disservice to Texas Kids

A new required list doesn't meet the need to learn about the major religious traditions that make up Texas today—and it could impair public schools' ability to serve diverse populations.

In discussion over the EU KIDS Act, Dean Burnett (that brains guy) @Garwboy@ohai.social notes:

@arclight Ultimate irony is, data shows that time kids spend outdoors has been declining since 1980s, long before smartphones etc. Likely due to parents becoming stricter, overprotective (possibly due to constant "there are predators around every corner!" media coverage)

This trend has reversed in recent years. Likely because... kids have phones. So parents can contact/track them, so more willing to let them roam

TL:DR kids now go outside more BECAUSE of phones

And Annika Backstrom @annika@xoxo.zone

@hpod16 We are being exploited by advertising companies to the tune of hundred of billions of €. If you're going to do anything, cut the head off that snake. Prohibit dark patterns, limit data harvesting and targeted ads, impose fines and consequences that actually mean something.

Don't punish the open internet for the actions of the rich tech elite, who will continue to exploit children *and* adults under this law.

May 6, 2025: Forbes: Viral Shopify CEO Manifesto says AI Now Mandatory For All Employees

September 17, 2026: Fortune: Shopify CEO says employees’ ‘slop grenades’ are making more work for everyone else

Esra'a @alshafei@mastodon.social posted screengrabs of the headlines noted:

How it started vs. how it's going

If we really wanted to put the brakes on AI, seems like criminal copyright charges, collectively and individually, could shut these fuckers right down.

Ars Technica: Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”

Via Taggart @mttaggart@infosec.exchange who observes:

Not a lawyer, but this does seem to basically wreck the Fair Use argument, and fairly demonstrate not only infringement, but knowledge of infringement.

SnoopJ @SnoopJ@hacyderm.io has a thread looking at details, including noting that:

【Cloudflare’s CEO cited data showing the ratio of webpages scraped to visitors sent: in 2015, Google scraped two pages for every visitor (2:1); by June 2025, that ratio was 18:1 for Google and 1,500:1 for OpenAI】

and:

【Mr. Nadella testified that...if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have “invoked [Microsoft’s right to] require[] OpenAI to retrain its models.”】

under the bus with you, little fuckers. satya aint goin down for the riffraff