Monday May 11th, 2026
The Independent @Independent@flipboard.com
Commencement speaker shocked by graduating class’s visceral reaction to AI
this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive.
when you’re inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn’t.
Jed Brown @jedbrown@hachyderm.io
It is truly heartwarming to watch the pro-oligarch/pro-AI bubble slam into the cold reality of an auditorium full of students booing their commencement keynote.
The schadenfreude at this bootlicker stammering is surpassed only by the sheer joy when the camera pans to the students.
Every university administrator needs to watch this clip of the University of Central Florida commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield.
Reddit thread, including Anto-bisbi31's comment
I was part of the class graduating. Mind you this happened during the ARTS AND HUMANITIES - School of communication and MEDIA ceremony. So majors like game design, film, and the arts in general, this majors feel a treat to find jobs due to AI, and we are taught to deal with this huge human disconnection, and how beneficial yet damaging it can become in our topics of study. It was a very out of touch and controversial topic to speak about. And let me also add that she started the speech talking about Jeff bezos and praising him.
The demise of the French ‘tabac’: How bar closures are fuelling Le Pen’s far right
Nathan Domon on European Correspondent: Close a bar, gain a far-right voter
Subtil described bar-tabacs as “third spaces”: places outside the home and workplace where people from different backgrounds mix. When those places disappear, people socialise within a narrower circle of like-minded friends and family. “That, over time, erodes the social fabric and weakens in-person ties,” he said.
Via Dave Rahardja @drahardja@sfba.social, though the original post he was quoting has blocked him or been removed or something.
This was all over a few days ago, and I figure I should at least put one story in the thread: Ars Technica: Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags
Reddit thread in /r/Petaluma in which a commenter offers an "AI"/LLM generated analysis of the city budget proposal, and I push back, gently pointing out that it's making claims that, in fact, are flat-out false.
OpenAI sued over ChatGPT’s alleged role in guiding FSU shooter
At one point, the lawsuit alleges, ChatGPT said that it’s much more likely for a shooting to gain national attention “if children are involved, even 2-3 victims can draw more attention.” Later, on the day of the shooting, the lawsuit says, Ikner asked about what “the legal process, sentencing, and incarceration outlook” would be.
Via Joshua Erlich @joshuaerlich.bsky.social:
we need a strict liability regime for AI. that’ll sort this stuff right out.
Manisha Sinha @profmsinha.bsky.social
Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”
Science Alert: Air Purifiers Could Boost Your Brain Function, Study Suggests
Participants 40 years or older with HEPA filtration completed Part B 12% significantly faster than participants who had sham filtration in the preceding month (54.0 versus 61.4 s, ratio of means = 0.88, p = 0.02). No significant reduction in completion time was observed for participants < 40 years old. Among older healthy adults, there was an improvement in cognition following one month of in-home HEPA filtration. Further research is needed on the short-term effects of air pollution among individuals with some level of cognitive impairment.
PsyPost: Brain scans reveal how people with autistic traits connect differently
People with similar levels of autistic traits show greater social attraction to one another, and their brains synchronize in unique ways during active conversation. A recent experiment published in Biological Psychiatry suggests that social difficulties related to autism might be a problem of mismatched communication styles rather than an inherent social deficit.
The "Results" section of the paper says:
Individuals with similar autistic traits reported higher interpersonal attraction when sharing consistent opinions. Neural analyses revealed context-dependent interbrain coupling patterns: During passive story listening, low-autistic-trait dyads exhibited higher intersubject correlation compared with high-autistic-trait dyads. In contrast, during active communication, low-autistic-trait dyads exhibited higher interbrain synchronization (IBS) in the right temporoparietal junction, while high- autistic-trait dyads showed higher IBS in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, suggesting distinct neural mechanisms underlying social interaction across autistic trait levels.
Rob Ricci @ricci@discuss.systems's thread on Utah datacenters, including the proposed 9GW Stratos Project, which seems to be slated for the Military Installation Development Authority Stratos Project Area as referenced by the Utah Governor's FAQ (PDF).
While the entire project area encompasses 40,000 acres, most of the acres will remain undeveloped. The different types of power generation contemplated for the data center have different footprints. For example, solar will require a larger footprint than natural gas. The actual data center footprint will be a fraction of the size of the MIDA project area.
So the 62.5 square miles isn't projected to be entirely building.
Utah used 34,688GWh in 2024, so assuming you could smooth out demand roughly 4GW continuous.
A good comprehensive What's Wrong with AI, Via, which includes the Hacker News link.
Because I'm gonna be faced with some text search stuff in the not too distant future: Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary
Sunday May 10th, 2026
Just to mark it: Got a Rowin Loop Station looper pedal for $20 off of AliExpress. Still playing with the "remove a loop layer" (double click), but click and hold to clear, click to record, mic in, into a powered speaker, and for the price it's amazing.
Apparently you can use USB to download audio.
Wanted a key for the garage door. Ace Hardware wanted $44.something for a key switch. AliExpress wanted $1.09 for an ignition lock.
Work has a domain name that's reminiscent of a hobbyist product. We gate downloads through a form that asks for a "why you're interested in our product" with lots of "we are not hobbyist project, or even like it" text.
The number of multi-paragraph messages talking about interest in said project...
triz of online @triz@normal.style
the number one thing that should give anyone pause in re ai for businesses is this:
alice sells widgets. bob has the magic do-anything box. bob wants to sell it to alice so she can save labour costs when designing, manufacturing, shipping and selling her widgets.
if the magic do-anything box even works,
why is bob not already using it to sell widgets and eat alice's absolutely fucking lunch?
Heard someone describe a facility as "ADHD compliant", and... they're wrong, in soooo many ways.
Saturday May 9th, 2026
Anyone know who's running PetalumaCivic(dot)org? It appears to have some pretty misleading AI generated slop, and I'm wondering what the motivations behind it are.
Facebook Marketplace rarely disappoints...
Friday May 8th, 2026
Yarbo - NAT In My Back Yard. On hacking the Yarbo robotic lawnmower, including the terrifying thing that the emergency stop button, and the release of that button, are routed through the internal MQTT system, accessible from the outside. I'm all for people being able to control their own devices, but when ya open that up to the world with bad security on an Internet connected device... yikes.
presentdad🙋🏻♂️ @lacroixboi@beige.party
you mess with the bull you get the horns. you mess with the goat you get the woodwinds. the horse has the string section and the rabbit is on percussion
Saving this point in the May 4th Petaluma City Council meeting so that when my city council member comes up for re-election I can gather all of my neighbors and have them watch this exchange and replace this guy with someone competent.
Trying to help and elderly friend with his iPhone, and holy shit Apple's standards have dropped. Apple apps/screens that pop the keyboard over the password and won't let me paste, inconsistent placement of "next" buttons and permissions stuff.
What happened to this company?
Thursday May 7th, 2026
We've gotten to the point where the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court no longer gives a shit that people know he's lying. Chief Justice John Roberts says Supreme Court is not political
His remarks to a conference of judges and lawyers from the 3rd U.S. Circuit in Pennsylvania came at a time of <span class="LinkEnhancement">low public confidence</span> in the court, and about a week after the court handed down a decision that hollowed out the Voting Rights Act.
The Register: Using AI to click around on a website burns 45x as many tokens as just using APIs. Which is completely unsurprising, and clicking around is also less deterministic, and what the fuck are we doing in a world where we're loosing random things on web sites rather than having computers communicate in deterministic defined ways with computers?
Wednesday May 6th, 2026
The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.
Coreutils are tools like rm, mv, mkdir, etc. Unlike binutils, this isn't a fertile ground for memory safety bugs. But, the rewrite was completed, and in the spirit of progress, Canonical decided to switch.
But do you know what coreutils are a fertile ground for? Race conditions around file creation, deletion, permission setting, and so on. The original code accounted for decades of hard-learned lessons in that space. The Rust rewrite did not:
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332
PS. I'm not dunking on Rust. It's just that... starting over from scratch has its hidden costs.
afreytes :noai: @afreytes@mastodon.gamedev.place
This is how you make me buy your candy bar in 2026 🤭 🤭 🤭
M. A. M. A. ✊ | Cadbury 5 Star India — Make A.I. Mediocre Again (YouTube ad)
David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run
what's Mark Karpeles of the Mt. Gox bitcoin disaster up to these days? He's trying to AI-launder code from ffmpeg and got caught https://github.com/OxideAV/oxideav-magicyuv/issues/3
arclight @arclight@oldbytes.space
More and more I feel that software is something that's inflicted on me rather than something I create or control that serves me.
And the rest of the thread, but/and then Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io
@arclight It sounds like the problem you're addressing is not "publicly distributing code" that might be dangerous, but the catastrophe of LPMs (language package managers) making unvetted code posted by any random author into something that's essentially part of the language's standard library.
with some more good points and, outside of that thread, Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io
I call this a hot take because it's not really nuanced or accurate.
But the idea is that both LLM codegen and LPMs are systems for assembling a bunch of unvetted code of dubious provenance from sources you don't want to be aware of to rapidly get something that "kinda works".
LLM is just taking it to a much further and more malicious degree that's hostile to the authors of the code you're ingesting as well.
Bruce Lawson @brucelawson@vivaldi.net:
People have asked me if @Vivaldi parks this on your machine. No, we don’t, because this “A.I.” is short for “Annoyingly Invasive”. We know it’s your machine, and you’d rather use storage space for music from The Cruellest Months/ Cheeky Girls, or selfies with your pet triceratops. Of course, you can visit any AI site you want in Vivaldi, but we won’t build it into our browser. There are plenty of data hoovers dressed up as browsers for that.
The Verge: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage
Yahoo Tech: Google Chrome Silently Installs a 4 GB AI Model On You Device – Without Your Consent (Via)
Tom's Hardware: Google Chrome 'silently' downloads 4GB AI model to your device without permission, report claims — researcher says practice may violate EU law, waste thousands of kilowatts of energy News (Via)
That Privacy Guy: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. (Via).
This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named
weights.bin. It lives inOptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re- downloads it.
Russell Keith-Magee @freakboy3742@cloudisland.nz
Thank you Google. I understand that you want Android developers to be active in their Play accounts. I understand that you sent me several email warnings about this. I was, however, quite busy.
But yesterday, I was able to find time to log in to my account. There were warning banners telling me my account might be closed due to inactivity.
And I was able to upload a new version of my app.
...and 10 hours later, you cancelled my developer account. Seriously?
Tuesday May 5th, 2026
Remember xroaches and similar? Bongo Cat + V-Pets Wayland Overlay
A cute Wayland overlay that shows an animated pets reacting to your keyboard input.
a.k.a. low-profile @Nead@vivaldi.net
@jcrabapple If I ever add this to my Linux desktop, it is clearly a cry for help. HOWEVER, installing this* on someone ELSE'S desktop should be viewed as fair game.
*Clippy
Google ads are malicious. Well, all ads are malicious, but, specifically: Homebrew users are accidentally downloading malware instead of the real app
I lay this on both Google, for prioritizing scamware over good search, and on Apple, for still, how many years later, having horrifically out of date system tools, and no actual package management strategy or system.
Debian packages have been a thing since 1993, RPM since 1997, and Apple still has... uh...
Via.
AliExpress package tracking shows customs complete in Los Angeles, off to Wenatchee WA, then to Spokane, so kinda sketch, but back to Sacramento a week ago, I was kinda getting hopeful...
Now they're reporting that it arrived in Waipahu (Hawaii?). Not installed this weekend, I'm guessing.
With the Pulitzer Prize nomination of Azeen Ghorayshi and Austin Mitchell of The New York Times, a lot of people are pointing out how horrible the reporting was. A good look in Assigned Media: “You Betrayed Us, Azeen”
A story on the allegations of former St. Louis gender clinic staffer Jamie Reed left parents who spoke with NYT reporter Azeen Ghorayshi crushed.
Good breakdown of "whole word" and phonics method vs "three-cuing" and "Meaning/Sentence/Visual" (MSV) and "whole language" method, and how a predictive/contextual approach to teaching reading may have set us up for the whole "LLMs are so smart" current situation.
Monday May 4th, 2026
Coyote Media: How Did An AI-Generated Mural Wind Up in This Vallejo Alley? Even the sign printer who did the vinyl got caught up in the fiasco:
"I wish I could,” he said. “But two months ago I listened to AI when it was instructing me on changing out my email server. It spoke to me so reassuringly, and then gave me a command that I followed, that deleted all my old emails from forever ago. Gone. All my history."
Yellow - Coldplay (Transgender Duet With My Past Self) By Dylan And The Moon (YouTube video).
Via Faith, Purple haired feminist 🧋 @faithisleaping@anarres.family who notes:
Okay, this might be the coolest thing I’ve seen all week. It’s a trans guy singing with his past self.
And it's a damned good cover.
Nanoraptor @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social
Angsty pretentious teenage me writing a dream journal near christmas 1987 shows up as 95-100% AI generated, by detectors offering to sell me services to re-generate my text with AI more humanised so it passes as not AI.
It hurts to think about — even more than reading 16 year old me.
That post has a bunch of the examples as image And Nanoraptor @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social
Another detector said it is NOT AI! but that detector also claimed a story written literally that moment in chatgpt was also 0% AI.
Interesting thread, with receipts, asserting that the US automakers failure to deliver EVs is Trump's fault
Frontier AI Models Are Doing Something Absolutely Bizarre When Asked to Diagnose Medical X-Rays
As detailed in a new, yet-to-be-peer- reviewed paper, a team of researchers at Stanford University found that frontier AI models readily generated “detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided.”
Via.
These simulations show that candidates using the same LLM as the evaluator are 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted than equally qualified applicants submitting human- written resumes, with the largest disadvantages observed in business-related fields such as sales and accounting. We further demonstrate that this bias can be reduced by more than 50% through simple interventions targeting LLMs' self-recognition capabilities. These findings highlight an emerging but previously overlooked risk in AI-assisted decision making and call for expanded frameworks of AI fairness that address not only demographic-based disparities, but also biases in AI-AI interactions.
Alt comics page readers will recognize the name: Nicole Hollander, creator of the "Sylvia" comic strip which ran from 1980 to 2012, has passed away.
On 26 March 2012, 'Sylvia' was discontinued completely. Hollander established a now-defunct personal blog to repost old comics and post new ones. Apart from her own opinions and work, she also offered room for articles and cartoons by younger artists. Her blog received the title Bad Girl Chats. Hollander quipped: "You have to be careful when you type in the URL, because you may get a porn site" (which ironically enough it became after Hollander's site was discontinued).
Via.
NPR: AI music is flooding streaming platforms. But listeners like it less and less. I have a notoriously bad track record at predicting the future, but it seems like Generative AI music is gonna be micro-targeted at the creator, and everyone else is either going to generate their own, or find an artist who's genuinely creating something new and different.
And prompting is not enough of an input to consistently get good results.
Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion.
Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. But even if he had not moved rightward in his senesence, when you consider Dawkins’s scientific views about what minds are and how they function, seeing him flirting with a chatbot is completely expected.
Edit: Background includes British scientists don't like Richard Dawkins, finds study that didn't even ask questions about Richard Dawkins
The investigation into science's public image didn't even ask about the atheist professor, but it got an answer anyway
Neighbor moved to the other side of town a few years ago. Yesterday called me up and asked if I could help him fix his kid's scooter.
So he came over, and I texted another neighbor, and we had an awesome "guys hang out and drill holes in metal and bullshit" afternoon, and I need more of that.
Sunday May 3rd, 2026
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.
Saturday May 2nd, 2026
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.