Wednesday July 22nd, 2026
You know what I love about Node package managers? They manage to take what could be clean code that runs nicely in different environments, and makes sure that that code will only run on very specific systems with their dependencies configured *just so*.
Nina Jankowicz: I Got Trapped in the AI Ouroboros
A foreign news outlet fabricated a quote from me. LLMs have already picked it up.
Tuesday July 21st, 2026
Sorry I missed this: Doctor M. Popular: Chuck Tingle at the Internet Archive in SF.
ICE is lying about body cams. These documents prove it.
Not only did ICE not purchase the body cams “as soon as they had funding,” but ICE had not purchased the body cams at the time of Homan’s statements, according to government contracting documents unearthed by Popular Information. On July 17 and July 20 — days after the Homan interview — a division of ICE, the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs</span> , issued two <span>delivery</span> orders for $30.9 million of body cams.
I do a lot of dunking on LLMs and "AI" image generation, but I'm not against machine learning generally and think throwing lots of compute at problems can be really cool. How To Train a Generative Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop With 6GB of VRAM.
Saved off for later, and for you organic chemistry nerds: Roche Biochemical Pathways posters.
Olivia Guest writes about "Entryism" in AI and cognition arguments.
Via.
Oooh: Asset forfeiture reaches the Supreme Court: Supreme Court to hear from Alaskan bush pilot whose plane was confiscated over a six- pack of beer.
In 2012, now 82 year old pilot Kenneth Jouppi flew some passengers into the town of Beaver Alaska, which is dry. One of them had 3 cases of beer in their luggage, Beaver is a dry town, the state has been going after his Cessna.
The writing we use, the very substrate of our culture, is the result of a process older than we can comprehend. Who are we to decide that process is finished? That the time of invention and human input is done, and every letter created from now on should be a remix of what came before?
Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’
"The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in… If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two."
Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies
From divination and horoscopes and from ELIZA to present-day large language models, I document how people have been thinking with things, outsourcing judgement, and making sense of interactively presented non-sense. Following the lead of Lucy Suchman to “slow down discourses of the ‘smart’ machines”, I consider the interactional foundations of our engagement with technologies of language. I make the case that the fluid output, fine-tuned overconfidence, and interactive design of these computational artefacts conspire to exploit our interpretive processes and interactional infrastructure, rendering them irresistible to lay people and researchers alike.
Semgrep: You Can't Reverse Engineer Your Way Out of the AI Supply Chain Problem. The pitch is for "trusted third parties", which, great, spend some money on that, but horse and barn and all.
Restaurant in Major Trouble After Posting AI Pictures of “Its Food” links to SFGate: San Francisco restaurant gets angry backlash for AI menu images and Reddit: Yum, slop. The place is called Grind & Unwind, proprietors AJ and Lyndsey Lozano, no links 'cause they're not gonna be around long enough to matter.
Via A. Rivera who introduced me to the term "cogsucker".
I Watched a 55-Year-Old Law Break the AI Hiring Industry — And It Was Overdue, on how the lawsuit against Eightfold AI rests on the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970:
The legal theory in Kistler v. Eightfold is elegant: if Eightfold generates match scores based on harvested data, and those scores are used by employers to filter candidates, then Eightfold is functioning as a consumer reporting agency. Full stop. And every candidate it scored was entitled to disclosure, access, and dispute rights that they never received.
Via.
Monday July 20th, 2026
I could swear that at some point I ran across an economic analysis of Petaluma's auto mall and its net benefits/costs to the city, but I cannot find it. Anyone got a lead?
Sunday July 19th, 2026
I propose that when NIMBYs complain about "insufficient outreach" for a project that pretty much everyone within 25 miles knew was happening for at least 5 years, that we deliver announcements of new projects within a similar radius by kicking down their doors and delivering notice in their bedrooms.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/a...rafael-housing-boom-22339216.php
Working on an English Walnut picture frame, wood harvested from a friend's yard...
Friday July 17th, 2026
So, (()=>{...;})(), we meet again!
The urge to scream "that's not how music licensing works at all!" at a piece of fiction using song ownership as a plot point...
I wanna see a pedestrian and transit first city, and I'm pretty sure that the only way for that to happen in the US is something like California Forever, so I'm bummed that they lost the shipyard deal to Texas, but Trump era war spending also seems like a shakey foundation.
https://sfist.com/2026/07/16/c...rnia-forever-loses-shipbuilding/
I've been trying to get out early and go up the steps on the hill in the local new subdivision.
I can't run up it in one shot yet, have to stop and rest, so it's kinda... Stops and stairs
Samir Talwar: LLMs can't program, in which the author reports from a two day workshop on "spec driven programming".
Via.
Ashley Brouillette told a reporter that she wanted to speak publicly because she had previously reported concerns to his superiors in the military about David Brouillette’s mental health. She said he was abusive in their relationship.
And that he called her and asked her to lie to cover him...
Thursday July 16th, 2026
In which an essayist talks about how LLM usage is destroying their staff's morale, while cluelessly using image generation to illustrate said lament: Stackademic: My Best Senior Engineer Quit Last Month. Her Exit Interview Was Scheduled for Forty Minutes. The Last Five Changed How I Run My Team.
She said: “I haven’t built anything in eight months. I’ve spent eight months reading things a machine wrote, trying to find the bug it was too confident to see. I’m not an engineer here anymore. I’m a verification layer for an agent. I didn’t spend ten years getting good at this to become the thing that stands between a model and the incident it’s about to cause. I’m tired in a way that has nothing to do with hours.”
My ear buds: "I dunno, man, I may have heard of your phone, once..."
My car: "Oh, hey, I realize you turned off the audio but I dug through your phone and found the raunchiest erotic podcast, your passengers are gonna listen to that now."
Friend from way back is reinventing as a digital artist, went through the NFT phase, and is referencing Pepe the Frog because "Pepe is a very popular in the Web3 space".
Yikes, and it's amazing how the bubbles of what's acceptable surround us.
Wednesday July 15th, 2026
JFC. Mindgard: Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left
This isn't even a prompt injection attack. Open a repo in Cursor that contains a "git.exe" file, Cursor runs it.
This disclosure goes beyond a single executable named git.exe to the place of trust in software. AI companies routinely ask users to grant unprecedented levels of access to code, repositories, terminals, secrets, and workflows that increasingly blur the line between suggestion and action.
The industry narrative is that these systems deserve trust because they increase productivity, but history has taught us time and again that trust should not be granted because something is useful. It should be earned through behavior. That behavior is reflected in how a company responds to security reports, communicates with affected users, and prioritizes remediation.
Via lobste.rs, which both raises the possibility that this might be an intentional backdoor given how long it's gone unpatched, and also has some speculation about LLM attitudes and philosophies around command vs data channels, and the unwillingness (or inability to conceptualize) separating the two.
Methods: We examined associations between the position in a time zone and age-standardized county-level incidence rates for total cancers combined and 23 specific cancers by gender using the data of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (2000–2012), including four million cancer diagnoses in white residents of 607 counties in 11 U.S. states. Log-linear regression was conducted, adjusting for latitude, poverty, cigarette smoking, and state. Bonferroni-corrected P values were used as the significance criteria.
Results: Risk increased from east to west within a time zone for total and for many specific cancers, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia (both genders) and cancers of the stomach, liver, prostate, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in men and cancers of the esophagus, colorectum, lung, breast, and corpus uteri in women.
https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-16-1029
Via, which thread also had Journal of Health Economics: Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders
What if we ban computers from using kids instead?
Is there a way to generate a large corpus of bad code in a variety of languages? Right now my web site is serving zip bombs to overly aggressive bots, but I'm thinking LLM poisoning needs to evolve...
Just because I know I'm going to end up referring to it a bunch, Pivot to AI on the whole "Boko Haram is using AI" thing, in which it is pointed out that following the advice of ChatGPT killed over two thirds of one squad...
When you can't find the information on Startpage, use Google, and it makes up bullshit.
I mean, at least I knew to verify, which confirmed why I couldn't find it on Startpage...
I know some people make sure to celebrate non-binary day, but I could go either way.
Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne@treehouse.systems
apropos to nothing, i've discovered that gpt-5.6-sol can generate arbitrary raw x86-64 bytecode streams
...:
given that: why have source code at all?
prompt2exeasks an OpenAI model for a validated JSON shellcode manifest and wraps the returned bytes in a target-native executable container. It uses the Responses API directly through Python's standard library, so it has no package dependencies.
Because what could possibly go wrong?
Tuesday July 14th, 2026
Went down to the Marin Civic Center for the "Surf, Skate, Street" exhibit, and discovered a collage and acrylic artist I wish I'd had a chance to meet, "Dickens 44": https://www.dickens44.com/
"extra-marital" means even more marital, right?
I'm glad the guerilla action I'm involved in is one where, when I get the Signal distress message at 8:55, I can brag about the completion of the operation by quarter after ten on the socials.
Bolts replaced. Bench thievery hopefully averted.
Monday July 13th, 2026
You know what I really really love? When an Ubuntu upgrade changes the packages that various commands live in and I have to do a whole lot of `apt install ...` to get my system working again.
I think it really is time to switch to one of the BSDs.
Eros Blog quotes a TikTok video by Josie Marcellino:
If you’re of the belief that becoming a mattress actress [porn performer] at 18 is predatory and a bad idea because you’re still not fully formed and you don’t know what you’re doing to yourself, you do have to believe the same thing about getting married and having children at 18.
I've been having a lot of thoughts in the past few about consent and misogyny and such, and... yeah.
Oh, this is really cool, and unintuitive to how I've been using processors lately (but I'd really like to be back in that space): Quadrupling code performance with a "useless" if.
Apologies for posting slop, but a coworker was typing at ChatGPT on a topic, and it
generated this map, and... the more you compare this to actual maps of The Netherlands, the
worse it gets.
Imagine a few more years of people ingesting confidently wrong but plausible bullshit like this.
Wibble.
Please write your software in such a way that I'm not using screen grab to pull the logo and then Google image search to try to figure out what app that's got startup hooks into my machine is asking me to log in...
Good morning from 400 steps into my morning routine on the Petaluma Quarry Heights
staircase. Image fixed.
Good morning from 400 steps into my morning routine on the Petaluma Quarry Heights staircase.
Sunday July 12th, 2026
Futurism: CEO Pleads With AI Industry to Stop Charging So Much to Replace Human Labor
During the segment [on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street"], the chief executive argued that the cost to use large language models (LLMs) has to drop by 20 percent by 2027 — and 90 percent by 2028 — for the tech to be useful to enterprises.
Ugh. "Enhanced" photos, in this case from a Huawei camera mistaking a plane for a bird: Original posting, Dave Rahardja's link.
Holy crap, the size of the Sunnyvale (square dance) Caller's workshop today. We walked in to what I expected, the regulars are getting pretty good, but by afternoon we had enough dancers to split the groups, and work with the newest callers separately. Square dancing might be a thing again.