Flutterby™!

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.

The vendor, CulinarySolvent.com, says this is a quart of 100% ethanol, so this is roughly 1/3 zest. I've stopped zesting because we lent out our citrus juicer and I need to get it back, and I have too many peeled lemons at this point...

Just avoided posting a very demeaning observation about AI advocates who troll in /r/antiai... Please clap.

nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social

When devs spend $200 on a Claude plan, they consume about $5,000 in compute. That is right. It is heavy subsidization by Anthropic. Remember Google/Amazon/Nvidia/ Microsoft & others are funding Anthropic and they are buying back cloud services and GPUs from the same vendors. On the books, it seems Google, Amazon and Nvidia are all making profits via AI, but the reality is this is just circulating money with heavy subsidization hoping to trap retail, pension funds, Govt funds via IPO route.

And nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social

Somebody is going to ask the source for $200 & $5000 numbers etc, it is here

https://www.briefs.co/news/ube...t-on-claude-code-in-four-months/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...-to-war-for-ai-coding-dominance/ (numbers are here [ https://archive.is/MRdRN paywal free link ] )

Immigrants Approved for Citizenship ‘Plucked Out’ of Line Moments Before Pledging Allegiance: Report

As of Dec. 2, USCIS is halting all applications for immigrants from the 19 countries the Trump administration has deemed high-risk

Via

Trying to understand how people use SharePoint, which leads to lots of videos about Copilot in Microsoft products, and...

There appear to be a lot of people who think that clicking "summarize and draft a response" is going to be a valuable business contribution.

Some children are drawing on fake moustaches to bypass online age checks, report finds

A third of children in the UK have bypassed age verification gates, research from Internet Matters suggests

Internet Matters Online Safety Act Report May 2026 (PDF):

Mum of boy, 12 "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old."

Via

Hey, someone else is seeing the animism! Fi 🏳️‍⚧️ @munin@infosec.exchange

So, something that's been bugging the shit out of me?

These fucking assholes who let LLMs run rampant and delete prod?

They query the LLM for "why" it did that.

This is delusional behavior.

LLMs do not have a concept of 'why': they assemble a response based on a statistical sampling of likely continuations of the original prompt in their database.

LLMs do not have the ability to have motivation. It is a machine.

LLMs, further, function by instantiating a new runtime -for each query- that reads the prompt and any cache, if they exist, from prior sessions:

which means, fundamentally, "asking" the LLM to explain "why" "it" did a thing is thrice-divorced from reality:

It cannot have a why;
It cannot have a self to have motivations;
And the LLM you ask is not the one that did it, but is a new instance reading from its predecessors notes.

Treating it as tho it is an entity with continuity of existence is fucking delusional and I am fucking sick of pandering to this horseshit.

Touch some grass and get a fucking therapist.

(I thought I'd mentioned it more, but at least here)

Mariatta 🤦🏻‍♀️ @mariatta@fosstodon.org

That should be my next motto after "no spreadsheets".
"No copy pasting". Especially for data that is always changing. My calendar, my availability, conference budget. Share data straight from the source instead of copy pasting from one sheet to another.

Which, of course, also needs an update mechanism

Lina @lina@neuromatch.social

anybody got any anti-"ai" or luddite songs to share? I'd love to get a playlist going

boosts welcome

All of this: monkϵyborg 🦾🐵 @monkeyborg@triangletoot.party

All those people saying “I was skeptical of AI, until I tried Claude and I was amazed that it could tell me this and this and this” sound just like

“I was skeptical of psychics, but then Madame Fortuna told me something only my dead wife would know!”

Human perception has certain well-documented flaws that confidence men prey upon, and you are not immune from these

And yet it feels like there's something in code generation, as dangerous as it is.

Python By Night: North Bay Python 2026 Recap

Cramming AI into every orifice: ZD Net: Is Facebook adding Gen Z phrases to your shared posts? You're not alone, bestie. Here's what's happening.

Via.

Okay, Google Intelligence, I kinda get how you got there, but, uh, no.

Lots of stuff I'm struggling with in this, and I need to rewatch it:

North Bay Python: "What is Correct?" and is that even the right question any more? - Christopher Neugebauer - 2026 (YouTube video)

KDE is turning 30 this year!

KDE contributor Farid inspired us to take on the “30 for 30” challenge: for our 30th birthday, we are asking you to do something to help the environment and make the planet a nicer place to live in. Farid is planting 30 trees and we want you to come up with something similar.

Film you and your crew carrying out your effort and we will promote your project on social media.

Here are some more ideas:

• Rescue 30 computers (or more!) from ending up in a landfill
• Upcycle 30 phones with a free mobile operating system
• Clean up 30 hectares of woodland
• Convert 30 people to a free operating system
• Take 30 techbros to court so they stop building AI datacenters

Via.

dave @dthompson@toot.cat

all this talk about tokens this and tokens that. they turned my profession into chuck e cheese.

University of British Columbia: Are you addicted to your AI chatbot? It might be by design

AI chatbots can grant almost any request—a celebrity in love with you, a research assistant, a book character sprung to life—instantly and with little effort. New research presented at the  2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems suggests that this genie-like quality is fuelling AI addiction, and that chatbot design could be partly to blame.

Via ResearchBuzz

Feminist Hacking: MaKING Printed Circuit Boards with Wild Clay

Via Tom's Hardware: Hacktivists share a guide on making working electronics PCBs made from natural clay with prehistoric technique — ethical hardware tutorial explains how to find clay, stamp 3D printed circuits, paint traces, and fire tablets

Via Calishat @researchbuzz

Lobste.rs this morning:

* Ghostty leaving github (comments) * Github banned me for no understandable reason (comments) * Before GitHub (comments) * From GitHub to Codeberg/Forgejo (comments) * Ditching GitHub (comments) * An update on GitHub availability (comments) * Github Actions is the weakest link (comments)

Woman’s Talkspace therapy app sessions exposed in court

Don't fucking trust pyschotherapy apps. Holy shit.

Via, MeFi thread.

that genehack guy from that dead bird site ‪@extremely.website‬

Current status: wondering what percentage of my GenAI skeptisim is grounded in having lived thru the Matt’s Script Archive phase of the “this lets everybody code” era.

This post was made blank.

Wow. So this weekend at North Bay Python, the Apify folks were doing a "try out our API, win something". I'd had a glass of wine, so I fired up my phone, did a few queries to enter myself in the raffle, and carried on.

I'm not sure what I did that's ongoing, but just got the "you hit your $100 intro bonus API cost" email.

So clearly there was something I didn't understand. Another entry in the "I'm scared of cloud billing" bucket.

My talk on Modern Western Square Dancing at North Bay Python this weekend is live...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJVvaz8eFwA

#NBPy

pubes with poop on em @poopypubes@jorts.horse

Me: it's not OK to stan any side of a war
Iran: *bombs an Oracle data center
Me: *biting knuckles, squirming*

ni cole4fox -> GPN @nicole4fox@datastream.cortexvoid.net

"I'm down for whatever as long as it doesn't increase shareholder value"

After years and years of tolerating it, I finally fixed an issue with how the Flutterby formatter handles <br> tags. Actually, not so much how it handles it as with how modern browsers handle </br> tags.

Anyway, in the process I willy-nilly changed the doctype. Holler if you see anything stupid, or if I regressed utf-8 handling again, or something.

Kinda thinking LLM coding is like playing with live grenades. I mean, sure, you're bored, they're something to juggle, and hot damn, did you see that behind the back under the leg combo, why are you backing away, this is really cool?

Anyway, Tom's Hardware: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue

Via Peter @peter@thepit.social who observes:

That thread also has the original Twitter thread.

Also, if an LLM does nuke your data, please, for the love of all that's holy, do not ask the plausible sentence generator why it deleted your data. It does not "know". It doesn't matter how frustrated and angry you are. It just exposes that you are suffering from epistemia (mentioned previously).

Extremely simple little music player display, in Rust. MacBook Pro M2. The egui library is costing me 8.22ms per update (measured over 1k updates).

I'm offended by how inefficient this is. Is there a Rust GUI library that's actually practical, or that does minimal repaint/refreshes?

NowWeAreAllTom @tom@labyrinth.social

please join me in condemning the appalling bloodshed. we need a much more secure and refrigerated solution for the storage of blood. a shed is insufficient

Fox 35: VIDEO: Truck runs over 250K Lamborghini in parking lot

By way of ReindeR Rustema @rrustema020@mastodon.nl

@notjustbikes about SUVs that are too dangerous.

In Orlando a lady in a huge monster truck drove her machine on top of a Lamborghini sports car in the parking lot of Crunch Fitness. Because she couldn't see the car.

Not fake, confirmed by journalists. https://www.nu.nl/325970/video...peperdure-lamborghini-in-vs.html

Another angle: https://youtu.be/mR1ojA5tlSs?si=zT_HHZ

Wolf SSL: Why C Remains the Gold Standard for Cryptographic Software. Lots of good stuff in here, including:

Side-channel resistance is difficult in any language.

What is true: as abstractions obscure execution behavior, side-channel properties become harder to reason about and harder to verify at scale. Rust provides tools to mitigate this—but using them extensively means abandoning most safety abstractions, bringing the problem space back toward C.

The issue is not impossibility—it’s verifiability without abstraction collapse.

Mario Munoz has put the text of his Sunday morning talk at North Bay Python online. I'm waiting for the recording to experience it again, but it was exactly the Sunday morning angry sermon I needed: https://pythonbynight.com/talks/empathy

Via his Fediverse post

Wow. Archive.org has Byte Magazine online now. Via.

‪Jeff Baker‬ ‪@jwbee.bsky.social‬

AI has already taken my software job, not in the sense that I don't have one, but in the sense that I now hate the job and most of the other people.

"The laser pointer does not own you." - @baconandcoconut@freeradical.zone

#NBPy

"Technology only helps if your successor understands it." - Philip James

#NBPy

"Technology is here to serve people, not the other way around." - Philip James

Not a "to serve man" reference.

#NBPy

If you believe that the best part of a conference is the hallway track, this year's North Bay Python feels like that. The conversations and presentations feel like the sort of thought provoking topics I want from a conference.

#NBPy

"The impact of a system is what we continue to allow." - amanda casari

#NBPy

Joelle Maslak's talk "What Feminist Theory & Praxis Says About Internet Networking" has me thinking about "the cost of crossing boundaries" not just between process isolation or network locations, but also social boundaries.

#NBPy

This talk by @kattni@kattstodon.com is reminding me how much my model of how human behavior changes has evolved over the course of my life. I don't know if that's a general change in society or in the community I surround myself with, but I hope it's the former.

I appreciate the insights.

#NBPy

Mario Munoz @pythonbynight@hachyderm.io "An Economy of Empathy" talk is definitely one I'm going to go back through and listen to with Charlene, and is the righteous sermon I needed this morning.

#NBPy

Repeat of yesterday's picture, now with more sky texture. You should be at North Bay Python.

#NBPy

Continuing my exploration of finding a lightweight cross-platform widget set for Rust, and it's reinforcing my feeling that software development has become completely unserious.

"Debrief" implies that there is also "deboxer".

And what other types of furniture samples are there besides stool?

Fantastic talk from Christopher Neugebauer to open North Bay Python: ""What is Correct?" and is that even the right question any more?"

I'm gonna have to rewatch this to let the lessons sink in.

#NBPy

You could be somewhere else, or you could be at North Bay Python this weekend.

An organization I'm involved with is running up against email providers fighting with MailChimp tracking links. It's unclear at what level of payment MailChimp stops adding that stuff.

Suggestions for migrating away, including alternate vendors and procedures, welcomed.

Minetta Transportation Institute — MTI Electric Bicycle Safety Study Identifies Illegal, Over-Powered Devices as Key Problem

While nobody knows how many of these illegal electric bicycles are on the road, the percentage might be quite high. Counts of electric two-wheelers parked at a dozen northern California middle and high schools found that almost 90% may not meet the standards for legal electric bicycles. Some of these devices have as much as eight times more power than legal limits.

While I'm finding cool stuff in Rust: Pest

pest is a general purpose parser written in Rust with a focus on accessibility, correctness, and performance. It uses parsing expression grammars (or PEG) as input, which are similar in spirit to regular expressions, but which offer the enhanced expressivity needed to parse complex languages.

Looking at Rust GUI libraries, and I guess we just assume that compute is cheap enough that for every tick of the song playback slider/transport, we're willing to re-render all of the text and tables in the window as well now?

(I'm headed towards Relm/gtk4, which also gives me the hives. Sigh.)

Waymo Is Not In The ‘Vision Zero’ Toolbox: Data

Waymo has told advocates that expecting it to respect bike lanes is “too high a bar” because customers expect to be dropped off in them, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition.

“People always point out that unlike human driven cars, the AVs stop at lights and obey the speed limit. However, they are really only as good and effective and safe as they are programmed to be,” White said. “Waymos pull over into bike lanes all the time for pickups and drop-offs and that’s neither legal nor safe but the companies say that is a normal practice and that’s what customers expect.”

Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar” – because customers want to be dropped off in them, autonomous vehicle firm Waymo tells cyclists

Last June, a cyclist in San Francisco sued the Google-owned company after she was seriously injured when one of the brand’s driverless taxis stopped in a cycle lane and a passenger opened its back door, striking the cyclist and causing her to smash into another Waymo car that was also illegally blocking the bike path.

Got a Nixle alert to avoid Petaluma Boulevard South at Mountain View Ave so of course we had to walk down and see. Not sure how this happened, but I think the wheels side is supposed to stay down

Ah, yes, when you have to use QuickTime Player to screen record XCode to catch the stack trace before XCode shits itself...

maxine 🇵🇸 @maxine@hachyderm.io

Consider the following: rust rewrites of projects like coreutils exist purely to remove copyleft licensing. The supposed security and performance gains are irrelevant, and while memory safety is important, logic bugs don’t suddenly cease to exist just because it was written in Rust.

Phoronix: Ubuntu Rust Coreutils Audit Revealed 113 Issues, Ubuntu 26.10 Aims For "100% Rust Coreutils"

So I'm fleshing out this app with Cosmic/Iced, and... is there a cross-platform widget set for Rust that's lighter weight and not so "rerender everything when the data model changes" based?

Preferably with a reasonable table control that has in-place editing, and cropping of columns with variable length (so a cell with long data in a column that fills doesn't overrun the next column)?

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: Mobile phone short video use negatively impacts attention functions: an EEG study

These results suggest that an increased tendency toward mobile phone short video addiction could negatively impact self-control and diminish executive control within the realm of attentional functions. This study sheds light on the adverse consequences stemming from short video consumption and underscores the importance of developing interventions to mitigate short video addiction.

I'm... skeptical of EEG studies and results, and the "this is an addiction" opener, but wanted to find a place to refer back to this.

Via.