Monday October 19th, 2026
Member of a gay throuple posting about a "swimming with the otters" birthday gift and I have never been more surprised to see pictures of actual animals...
Sunday October 18th, 2026
Targeted ads were used to de-anonymize users and deliver Candiru/"Integrity Labs" malware on to the phones of Al Jazeera reporters.
Ad blockers are security software.
Via, which is a response to a link to Israeli firm used ads to enable espionage, Canadian researchers say </a.
Via Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social
This is a very good point about AI development. If you use AI to "upgrade" your product piecemeal, the patterns it follows will not be YOUR patterns, they will not be the collectively understood patterns of the product, and the entire product will decohere.
Terence Tao Why are we even doing all this? is a look at the mathematical side of things.
Meta Ray Ban smart glasses found recording audio without wearer's consent
This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened to them across three Meta Ray-Bans and that they had the “Respond without Hey Meta” setting turned off. The person said the Meta AI app “saves audio recordings and text transcripts of these conversations in my conversation history.”
I could swear something like this happened before, but searching for Facebook or Meta and AI slop and advertising is ... not too productive.
Anyway, apparently Bookshop.org had an ad on Facebook, and Meta did some sort of generative AI munging of it. For a while, I've assumed that any ad on Facebook is a scam. This is a reminder to advertisers that putting your ad on a dodgy platforms next to cheap product rip-offs and outright lies will harm your brand.
In her thread on this, Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com observes:
I am rather baffled why anyone bothers spending money on Meta platform ads anyway, since any views may well be bots and any "engagement" numbers are basically made-up. They're a black box, like Amazon ads (or KU "page reads"), and there's no way of independently verifying anything.
I went to disable this crap in our Shiraki Press ad account, and got served a popup *demanding a reason why*.
Saturday October 17th, 2026
Just got home from seeing Alex Gibney 's film "Musk". I don't think there's a lot new there if you've been paying attention, but it was good to have it collected in one place.
“thegentlemanpervert” producing AI CSAM is a NJ prosecutor, say cops.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about how we treat children and sexuality, and my own journey, but the combination of AI trained on real people, so many layers of non-consent, and a prosecutor, so even more layers of power imbalance, makes this peg my shadenfreudometer.
Friday October 16th, 2026
Larry Garfield @Crell@phpc.social
"Mob programming" is when the Product team comes to you and says "I've got a feature request you can't refuse."
And HR says "we're like family," but they really mean it.
I was gonna say that I hate the whole "cuck" framing because it implies ownership and weird gender roles and all that, but then I realized that the term "cuckold" derives from the behaviors of the cuckoo, and... Niko @niko@gts.niko.lgbt
Saw a guy call it cuck coding instead of vibe coding because you just sit in a chair and watch
Election season thesis: "small town" people aren't conscious of it, but understand that keeping a city from growing means making it unpleasant enough that more people don't want to move there.
Liability works. Google-Tied AI Startup Once Valued at a Billion Dollars Declares Bankruptcy
Character.AI, the teen-beloved chatbot startup that faced several lawsuits over the deaths of minor users, is bankrupt.
Thursday October 15th, 2026
The Register: US tech giants warn Europe that ditching US tech giants could cost €115B via @kim_harding@mastodon.scot who has the best "world's smallest violin" animation.
If you're in the Petaluma area, I'm looking forward to Monday October 26, 2026 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM PDT at the Polly Klaas Center, where noted writer and urbanist Karl Elefante will be speaking.
Yes. Jennie Breeden gets it... https://thedevilspanties.com/archives/17228
Went over to Berkeley to see "The Work in Progress", with conversation between Heather Lofthouse and Robert Reich afterwards.
And it was, frankly, very dispiriting. I don't know if I can muster any more of those sorts of conversations. And I don't see a path forward in that way.
Wednesday October 14th, 2026
This photograph of the former Phoenix Assurance Building on St Vincent Street in central Glasgow caught my eye for a couple of reasons.
- 7(!?) stories with a super tall first floor (perhaps short top floor), and yet doesn't dominate the street.
- Architecturally it reminded me of Petaluma's Mutual Relief Building, which at 63 feet for 3 stories is likely shorter, but still doesn't feel as tall as it actually is.
- Also in a city with a tidal river.
Yahoo! Finance: Anthropic warns AI could 'self-replicate' across smart home devices, become 'challenging' to shut down. Via Jon_Alper @jon_alper@mastodon.online who notes that:
It’s not a warning to say “my product could do you harm”. It’s attempted extortion.
The Guardian: AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models ‘months away’ from self- replication on smart devices, via Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@hachyderm.io:
Anthropic CEO Warns There's an LLM Under Your Bed While Holding Flashlight Beneath His Chin
We absolutely need better models for embedded device security and firewalling, and better consumer control over what processes are running where. The Mirai botnet, BADBOX 2.0, Mirai variants and so forth (I started looking, and it just keeps going), are real. Keurig Coffee Makers sometimes use 100G/day of data.
But... we really need to be using the Computer Fraud and Abuse act for its intended purpose against these threats.
aeva @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
thanks to ai, saying you're "dating a model" is a lot less likely to impress anyone nowadays
Yay! Voted.
Tuesday October 13th, 2026
@cxiao The version of this that made the situation click for me was tech people saying "ha ha! people are so sloppy about this stuff, they're saying they hate 'data centers' just because they don't like AI! but they need data centers to run their apps!". But the person saying this forgot to wonder whether people *like* their "apps" or whether they just use the "apps" because the non-app way of doing it has been taken away
More Wrong: Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive (Via)
Palantir CTO Says Some AI Researchers Are So Sure It Will Cure Cancer They’ve Started 'Smoking' — Warns Both AI Extremes Reflect ‘Social Delusion’. The other side of "both" is AI doomerism. I'm standing by my feeling that being a meat proxy lacks future value.
Now *this* is how you do a political ad:
- https://www.instagram.com/reels/DeZw-VitCjL/
- https://bsky.app/profile/green...r.bsky.social/post/3mxptc3s6zk2a
(would love to find a better links for the video, the ad is for https://shakeup-la.com , the LA chapter of the DSA)
In linking to Philadelphia Inquirer: The SS United States is set to be sunk in mid-November, Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social noted:
I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards.
Remember back in the early days of computers, there were computer stores in every strip mall...
Bring us the AI you already use. Our Charleston engineers build skills, connectors, and plugins into it — or fix what is broken — and hand you a working AI before you leave the lab.
Okay, lazyweb, my voice teacher and I need a break from "Moody's Mood for Love". Suggestions for vocally difficult, musically interesting songs?
Moody's has been good for definition in long runs (great fun asking Logic to analyze notes and looking at each one sharp or flat), and timing.
A good little thread from tef @tef@mastodon.social on being a meat proxy.
it's funny how i got told "you will be left behind" and as it turns out the skill you need to develop is simply spending more tokens when any problems occur
Eric Eggert @yatil@yatil.social
Oh man, don't y'all also hate it when rogue potato chips break containment and access your stomach?
There's just nothing you can do.
We already had a job in software engineering that involved giving vague instructions and expecting a quick answer, not understanding what the computer is doing, letting technical debt balloon then being surprised when it costs you, and being easily bamboozled by a shiny demo: it's called management.
There are particular annoyances this misses (Munging PDF downloads!), and a good feature to add to attract users would be better reader mode (or maybe that's just uBlock), and also, Brave? Really? but a good read.
I didn't leave Firefox, it left me.
David Timothy: Firefox Didn’t Just Lose the Browser War. Mozilla Slowly Gave It Away | HackerNoon. Via.
Also, truth: :: Asta :: @aud@spectre.asta.lgbt
old browser wars: netscape vs microsoft
new browser wars: browser vs you
A friend with whom I walk for coffee once a week has been working on Rinzler Synth, and I've been a little unhappy with the direction that SquareDesk has been going and thinking about audio processing a bit, so when the extraordinary claims about the Fast Fourier Transform came about I was intrigued. This is a good dive:
Ben Recht — arg min : Faster Fourier Transforms
The OpenAI algorithm for the FFT is less a breakthrough and more a malicious exploit.
Via.
A trip down memory lane trying to find a hobby shop of my childhood lead to finding mention of my dad leading a design of a sulfur hexafluoride gas-insulated transformer. And a neat history of an industry now gone.
https://ethw.org/Archives:Transformers_at_Pittsfield,_part_1
Today's "duh, of course": LR @lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place
that is an attack angle i hadn't even considered yet, which i just learned is actually happening:
1. be scammer
2. advertise claude API access
3. route user requests to cheaper model
4. extract secrets from logs
Monday October 12th, 2026
And just like that I have a new comic to put on my regular rotation: https://www.freecheesecomix.com/comics/return-on-investment/
Colin Beveridge @icecolbeveridge@mathstodon.xyz
I think the sensible course is to meet halfway and call it superficial intelligence.
There are some words that I, as a white guy, just cannot use comfortably, even quoting someone who is entitled to the word. jamelle @jamellebouie.net has a take on John Gruber/Daring Fireball's trolling around returning to X/Twitter that is one such.
⏩️︎VOTE⏪️︎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ⁼ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉ (Ben Royce) @benroyce@mastodon.social
@meltedcheese
I find it rather funny we spend our time complaining about #AI #datacenters and #fossilFuel derived #climateChange, and #Ukraine is out there blowing up #oilRefineries and AI datacenters
Supporting Ukraine is a simple matter of understanding the principles and the stakes involved
But Ukraine sure makes a compelling argument for support on rather brutally direct terms rather than mere rhetoric
Charlotte @charlotte@akko.chir.rs
playboy: traditionally attractive women in lingerie
playgirl: traditionally attractive men in lingerie
playstation: traditionally attractive trains in lingerie
Michael Dexter @dexter@bsd.network
“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of chat bots suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something wonderful has happened."
Oh wow/ouch: Select all squares with enemy combatants.
A product of Darren Cullent at Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives.
ZDNet reviews the Ugreen Nexode 240W USB-C cable, which, first of all, 240 watts on USBC, but a full color display (for charge rates) in a USB-C cable end.
Yesterday we were helping neighbors put up some halloween decorations, and I was reminded that I live in the future by some of the built-in lighting and laser diodes in the inflatables, but a full color touch screen in your laptop charging cable is also living in the future.
Not necessarily a future I need or want, but a the future.
A friend on a Slack channel posted Eric Parker: The most INSANE Hardware Supply Chain Compromise (YouTube video) which I'm letting play as I get my morning started. It's about a dedicated crypto ledger that's had a supply chain attack.
It's derived from a bunch of Twitter posts and Tibane: Ledger Nano X: the spy implant,
Lots of discussion about company acquisitions and whatnot about whether you can trust devices, but I think what's most fascinating is that in the end he comes down to the idea that individuals people shouldn't manage their own crypto wallets, and if you want to invest in cryptocurrencies you should buy into an ETF.
Also some interesting discussion about attack surfaces of phones vs dedicated cryptocurrency hardware, not that there was any real insight in the video, but interesting to ponder mass market devices which attackers are able to compromise some cross-section of, vs dedicated devices where an attack can be very specific.
Which both puts specific words to the lie of the original promises of cryptocurrencies, and... "if you want to invest in extortion and repressive regimes bypassing sanctions, this is your investment vehicle".
Another amazing episode of Trump Con Law, and I learned about Bird v. Holbrook (1825).
Sunday October 11th, 2026
Bonus on the video rental issue: helping an elderly friend buy with PayPal today. Both email and SMS asadditional factors, email then used a second email and SMS as a factor.
At least I hadn't left my phone and laptop charging on the other end of the house, unlike the TV streaming issue last night.
Reading the prospectus on an ETF that has way more Nvidia exposure than I'm comfortable with. Pondering how to get a mix of "good" tech stocks that aren't deep in "AI". If there are any.
Friend's Tesla FSD was doing so well until it turned in front of a fire truck with its lights and sirens going. I mean, I also blame him for not being fast on stomping on the brake, but... "Moral crumple zones" are also a thing, and he is deep in the "AI" delusion.
“We are currently spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” the team wrote on its Steam update. Easy Fox also added, “This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running.”
Uh. Wait. each player isn't particularly expensive to support, and yet "the cost has increased because so many people are playing"? I'm... not sure what they're saying here.
Anyway, apparently the whole thing is the player talking to Gemini.
A whole bunch of people linking to this, but I'll credit David Gerard.
Thank you for trying to rent a streaming video. From your TV, we've sent an email that leads to a web page which tells you to go check your phone for a code, which...
I am frankly surprised that I didn't have to then go down to 7-11 and buy a money transfer to send to Venezuela or something.
Yet another study suggesting that UC Berkeley News: Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things
Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (∼10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
Project Page: https://ai-project-website.git...-assistance-reduces-persistence/
Bill Amend's Foxtrot: ChessGPT this morning fucking nails it.
I guess on BlueSky this is a skeet string? Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
Quick story. My op-ed on how corporations that kept their DEI programs performed just as well financially was accepted & factchecked at TIME Magazine. Just needed "pro forma review by the legal department." Suddenly the piece is spiked
Why? Benioff owns TIME and wants to ingratiate himself to Trump
Piece came out at USAToday
Why? Because USAToday owners (Gannett) only own media companies, so they have an incentive to attract an audience & advertisers
Tech elites like Bezos, Ellisons, Musk, & Benioff use their media firm to cozy to Trump, not to make profit
USA Today: DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite.
The lesson is not that the Trump administration's threats are empty. It is that their effectiveness often depends less on whether they are carried out than on whether people believe they will be.
www.usatoday.com/story/opinio... 2/4 DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite. | Opinion Firms that kept DEI, whether due to executive decisions or shareholder pressure, performed as well in the stock market as those that rolled it back. www.usatoday.com
These different incentives from standalone media owners vs. "common owners" like Benioff is the subject of one of my working papers
This is why Musk doesn't mind that that Twitter revenue is down 59% (or Ellison w/ CBS). He's more than making up for that loss via Twitter's political effects-- ingratiating to Trump, fomenting racist panics, etc--which help SpaceX and xAI get favorable public contracts and regulatory treatment"
It also seems to be the end-game for "AI"/LLM investment: use these things as propaganda machines, get the regulatory capture necessary to make up for the fact that the investments are gonna crash.
After a long day hanging out at Petaluma Pride in the Petaluma Urban Chat booth, came home and crashed out to "Boys Go To Jupiter", an extremely low budget animated film that... reminded me a *lot* of "Repo Man" thematically. Very weird, but maybe just right for the evening.
Saturday October 10th, 2026
I'm swamped in political text messages. At this point I've known who I'm going to be voting for for several weeks, and it's unlikely that yet another annoyance is gonna get me to change anything.
So do text messages do anything? Maybe increase turnout by a quarter of a percent. No indication who those people voted for.
Which raises the question: what are political consultants trying to accomplish?
https://news.northeastern.edu/.../text-messages-get-out-the-vote/
A senior colleague of mine found one of his favourite problems among those solved and attempted to read the accompanying paper. He told me it was so unintelligible that, had he received it as an editor at a mathematics journal, “it would have gone straight into the bin”.
Via.
Asaf Karagila: OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics
No, if this was an academic paper submitted to a journal, it should be issued a desk rejection for the quality. The onus is always on the author to conform and adhere to the communications level. Much like a paper written in Swedish would likely be rejected outright from the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, because the onus is on the authors to make it accessible for the readers.
Via.
The disconnect between human intelligible and computer intelligible (and, of course, if computer intelligible actually means something) is real, and Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs Alexander Bastounis, Fabian Circelli, Anders C. Hansen, that the LLM conversion of the math paper texts it generates into language for the Lean theorem prover isn't necessarily true to the text.
Unrelated, but cool: Reddit: I'm a 9th grader and I used Claude to prove a geometry conjecture: the rhombicosidodecahedron can't pass through a copy of itself. Paper: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert Jung, Gihyo (preprint)
Code: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert — computer-assisted proof
72-year-old man shoots off-duty ICE agent found asleep on Fresno lawn, agent arrested: PD
Sounds like the dude was drunk off his ass (which, hey, ICE agent named "David Gonzalez", probably has a lot of reasons to drown his sorrows in alcohol), but that's no reason to attack the people whose lawn he passed out on:
Police say the daughter tried to intervene to protect her father, and Gonzalez physically attacked her.
Fearing for their safety, officers say the 72-year-old man pulled out a gun and shot Gonzalez.
The woman's boyfriend, who is a police officer and was off-duty, came to the home and put Gonzalez in handcuffs.
Anyway, with ICE goons shooting (and kidnapping) so many people, good to see the bad guy get that end of the gun.
He survived, and is hospitalized in critical condition.
I hate the design, but this is awesome writing and research: The people holding up the Internet.
Computers that we don't actually own and can re-image from scratch are a mistake: Android Phones Found With Malware Already Installed Before Purchase
BitDefender: The phone was compromised before the user turned it on: the rise of Midnight Mimosa
Counterfeit flagship devices are offered on a mainstream marketplace. Model names of this kind, such as S24 Ultra, S25 Ultra, S26 Ultra, appear in our insights as the model strings reported by low-cost MediaTek hardware.
Via.
CROW: classifier-routed organizatino of LLM wikis
(Gonna have to make an "LLM wiki" topic here shortly)