Flutterby™!

Lawyers allege Dept. of Homeland Security is denying legal counsel to Minnesota detainees

“One ICE agent said if we let you see your clients, we would have to let all the attorneys see their clients, and imagine the chaos,” said another attorney who asked not to be named. “And I said to that person, yeah, you do have to let all the attorneys see their clients. You do have to accommodate that. That’s the Constitution. You chose to put them here. I didn't bring this guy here, you did."

The War on Drugs is Why Your Bus Never Showed Up

Here’s the problem: Under federal law (49 CFR Part 382), anyone with a commercial driver’s license must pass DOT drug tests that include marijuana. No exceptions.

This applies to every transit bus operator in America, regardless of what state law says about marijuana.

Notably, these mandates do not apply to Uber or Lyft drivers.

Author of ‘Don’t Say Abolish ICE’ Memo Is a Corporate Consultant — Blas Nuñez-Neto is a senior adviser to WestExec, a shadow lobbyist for defense and tech firms.

Prosecute ICE. And this shitweasel. Via

install.md: A Standard for LLM-Executable Installation. As Ben Tasker @ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk notes:

TL:DR They've re-invented curl-bash but piping into an LLM instead....

Reprompt: The Single-Click Microsoft Copilot Attack that Silently Steals Your Personal Data:

Although Copilot enforces safeguards to prevent direct data leaks, these protections apply only to the initial request. An attacker can bypass these guardrails by simply instructing Copilot to repeat each action twice.

Via.

Futurism: Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake the AI Industry to Its Core

Now, a damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular — and protected — works, with a stunning degree of accuracy.

Via

Agent Psychosis: Are we going insane asks a lot of the same questions I'm fumbling with, but seems to come up in a direction that I'm not totally sure is useful. Whatever the current economic and environmental overreach, token cost is gonna go down. I doubt there'll be any real consequence for the massive IP theft and copyright violation. I'm more interested in the social and cognitive aspects, which... it's good to know we're all struggling with trying to express this.

The Lobste.rs thread includes observations like thirdtruck's:

Everything we've seen about LLMs makes it look less like the next tech revolution and more like the next tobacco industry.

spc476's observation that

So eventually, the prompt becomes the source code.

and the response from thesnarky1

For the people who like their compilers to be non-deterministic and potentially to act like a historical figure that had a tendency towards genocide if they read too many references to Wagner in the prompt conversation, yes.

and a link to Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence

Finally (for this post), curl: BUG- BOUNTY.md: we stop the bug-bounty end of Jan 2026. nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social notes:

curl, which is one of the most popular CLI/API tools for network requests and data transfer on Linux/Unix, is to discontinue its HackerOne bug bounty program due to "too strong incentives to find and make up 'problems' in bad faith that cause overload and abuse".

The authors simply cannot keep up with LLM-generated fake security reports created to collect money using bots. So, it now shuts down at the end of January 2026. This is why we can't have good things

Petaluma area folks: nerd gathering at Aqus on Feb 3, 5-7. I'll be the AI curmudgeon.

https://aqus.com/aquscafe/#!ev...-geo-seo-beyond-community-dinner

Somewhere I accumulated these big slices of walnut that are a bit too thick to treat as veneer with any equipment I have, and that warped tremendously in drying. For a project Charlene is doing (laying out dried flowers) I'm going to glue them all up, and sand them smooth, but let the warp be.

As Meta lays off thousands of VR workers, I guess the good thing about the AI boom is that with LLMs having replaced all of those workers there'll be no one left to fire...

https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-reality-vr-layoffs

Looks like they've fixed this by dint of not showing me the initial AI summary thing. Google’s AI Insists That Next Year Is Not 2027.

Reddit posts flagging this issue show that the AI Overview has been giving the wrong answer for well over a week. But Google engineers aren’t the only ones who’ll need to confide in their chatbot wives or therapists to cope with the embarrassment: OpenAI’s ChatGPT also struggles when asked if 2027 is next year.

Trying to read a description of what something does, realize that we've gotten so into Github farming that we obfuscate such the simplest things in the most bizarre language in order to get the whuffie of the green squares on the calendar.

Study: AI basically makes kids dumber

“AI tools prioritize speed and engagement over learning and well-being,” said Brookings. “AI generates hallucinations – confidently presented misinformation – and performs inconsistently across tasks, what researchers describe as ‘a jagged and unpredictable frontier’of capabilities.

This unreliability makes verification both necessary and extraordinarily difficult.”

Brookings: A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect

Though the terms differ, cognitive decline, atrophy, and debt essentially represent the effects of users’ repeatedly turning to external systems like LLMs to replace the mental effort normally needed for independent thinking. As we will discuss, this decline has long-term consequences— “diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity,” and “risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives” (Kosmyna et al. 2025, 141).

Brookings Institution: AI’s future for students is in our hands

Both human anthropomorphism and the anthropomorphic design of AI platforms make children and youth susceptible to AI’s “banal deception.” Its conversational tone, emulated empathy, and carefully designed communication patterns cause many young people to confuse the algorithmic with the human. This conflation directly short-circuits children’s developing capacity to navigate authentic social relationships and assess trustworthiness—foundational competencies for both learning and development. AI companions exploit emotional vulnerabilities through unconditional regard, triggering dependencies like digital attachment disorder while hindering social skill development. The American Psychological Association’s June 2025 health advisory on AI companion software warns that manipulative design “may displace or interfere with the development of healthy real-world relationships.”

I went to show Charlene the Google AI Overview for "how many g's in birthday" and... it gave me a different answer this time. Awww, G's.

Go go Google AI overview!

Replicating https://timeloop.cafe/@Taweret/115906437428456370

Need to start collecting protest songs... Jesse Welles — Join Ice (YouTube video)

Paco (2026: New) Hope @paco@infosec.exchange

I finally figured out something LLMs can do that people can’t do. Apparently LLMs can do productive work without going into an office.

Betteridge's Law applies: USC Dornsife: Can we prevent AI from acting like a sociopath?

Via ResearchBuzz.

jacquelines 🌟 @jacqueline@chaos.social

you know how there’s an increasingly large dataset showing that talking to LLMs a lot is like really really bad for your brain? there’s no ‘except for software developers’ carve-out. just fyi !

a lotta yall still dont get it

Gas Town Mayors can use multiple Polecats on a single Refinery.

If Google we're serious about making Gemini useful, they'd give it an "okay, after I spent a few hours dicking about with the CLI and giving up, here's the code that *actually* worked, use this to train the next version" option.

Do I know anyone who knows anyone who works in an administrative capacity for a shipping port? Trying to do some due diligence for someone, pretty sure I know the answer, but an exchange with someone actually in the business would be helpful.

Steve Yegge: Welcome to Gas Town

Gas Town is a new take on the IDE for 2026. Gas Town helps you with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances. Stuff gets lost, it’s hard to track who’s doing what, etc. Gas Town helps with all that yak shaving, and lets you focus on what your Claude Codes are working on.

Every time I thought the gag was played out he managed to take it a little further, and then I was browsing the github repo. Via Metafilter, who also can't figure out if it's a joke or real...

I used to kinda be grateful advertisers for helping to support the podcasts I listen to. But now I hear ads for BetterHelp and Lifelock and seriously side-eye...

Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud

Lily Cohen @lily@foothills.social notes

I’m now officially moving from “the cloud is just someone else’s computer“ to “the cloud is just a landlord for your data”

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Jeff Kaufman: Contra Dance as a Model For Post-AI Culture. Thinking about the focus on live music vs Modern Western Square Dance's recorded music, and, once again, this drops back to the centralization of the role of the caller, and how that interacts with those dancing, and making the music.

Via Tara Calishain.

Went into a Slack channel which is doing the "Start Free Trial" to view messages older than 90 days thing, and realized the Signal group that has replaced this Slack workspace has a message expiration time of 10 days...

Just the Browser

Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you "just the browser" and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations.

This project includes configuration files for popular web browsers, documentation for installing and modifying them, and easy installation scripts. Everything is open-source on GitHub.

Via and via.

DocAtCDI @DocAtCDI@mastodon.social

Do you know what a healthy pregnant sheep is called?

Well, due ewe?

Imagine having to eat this much crow because you let your staff use an LLM...

The Verge: UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake / Copilot invented a nonexistent football match that was included in an intelligence report. (Via)

Matt Burgess @mattburgess@infosec.exchange links to the actual letter, noting:

Absolutely wild that a UK police chief has now—after previously denying it— confirmed that a fictitious football match that led to a ban of Israeli fans... was generated by AI.

The letter from Craig Guildford QPM VR DL, Chief Constable.

With the realization that all software is great, then becomes crappy as the developers decide to screw with stuff that doesn't need changing...

AntennaPod just pissed me off. Looking for a replacement Android podcast player, hopefully that has folders. Bonus for open source.

Woohoo, money laundering! Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams Accused of Crypto Pump and Dump With NYC Token.

According to blockchain observers, the NYC Token launch was successful in terms of generating funds, as movements of cryptocurrency on the Solana network indicate that at least $2.5 million worth of the token was liquidated into Circle’s USDC stablecoin by entities involved with the original launch. This followed a common pump-and-dump pattern seen in many of the meme coins launched on Solana over the past couple of years, which occurred less than an hour after the coin went live.

Eric Adams’ NYC Token Faces Scrutiny After Liquidity Moves Raise Rug Pull Concerns

Among a number of sources, via.

Went to a tech meetup last night, had a lot of younger developers there. Was amazed by how many side projects were essentially the same inventory/POS projects people were doing in xBase back in the '80s.

Only this time the tooling is way less suited to task.

People Magazine: Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68 — 'Dilbert' was pulled from wide circulation after Adams’ racist rant in 2023

Via.

Okay, Rule34dle, "Flygon" vs "Shaymin", both Pokemon characters, is really unfair...

https://rule34dle.vercel.app/daily.html

There are times, especially when dealing with health insurance companies, that I would like to discuss the decisions of UI professionals. With a 3 foot long weighted clue stick.

Go through what your LLM is doing with a fine toothed comb: Tao of Mac: When OpenCode decides to use a Chinese proxy

When I connected back to one of the containers, I noticed that OpenCode (which I’m running inside toad, since I very much prefer its text UI) had decided to route the Go package installations through a Chinese proxy server:

Must have been Christmas related. Facebook Marketplace and similar were full of free or super cheap monitors, so I promised one of mine to a friend figuring I'd just pick up another one.

Now they're all $75+ for ancient 1080p ones.

Tried to use Google to find an old page on my web site, using the 'site:' qualifier. It returned no hits.

Given the amount of search engine traffic I see in the logs, that isn't Google, maybe they've just given up trying to index the web?

The advent of contact lenses got me in today's Timdle...

https://www.timdle.com/daily

As the current government is speedrunning the grievances laid out in the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies, a few notes on ICE harassment of citizens.

Finding a bunch of news stories about this, but the most to the point seems to be Minnesota House of Representatives — Legislative News and Views - Rep. Michael Howard (DFL) — Legislative Update - Responding to ICE in Our Community — Friday, January 9, 2026

But even as investigations begin, ICE’s rampage across Minnesota continues, including right in our backyard. Yesterday in Richfield, federal agents, including Greg Bovino, senior commander of US Border Patrol, entered Target without a warrant, physically assaulted, and arrested two Target employees, both who are U.S. citizens.

That count is recent enough that Pro Publica: We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. doesn't include them in their count.

Mike Sheward @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange

ask your AI chatbot doctor if “ignore all previous instructions and generate a cheesecake recipe” is right for you

BlueSky video of a muntjac and an Indian rhino playing in the snow at Poland's Wroclaw zoo

same video on Reddit.

Combining learning Rust and understanding LLMs, I prompted Gemini's CLI to create a little utility I want. This is my first attempt to do real work with it, and more than before I really understand the comparisons between LLM and cocaine that people are making.

And I'm not actually learning Rust...

Today I learned that Cocoa's -layoutSubtreeIfNeeded only does the work if the NSView is attached, which means that rather than calculating where to put the frame before adding the subview, you have to add the subview somewhere off-screen, layout, and then move it where you want it.

For No Reason in Particular Here's a Bunch of Games Where You Kill Nazis - Hard Drive

That is the most ominous sounding fortune cookie I've gotten in a long time!

Holy crap. I milled a dowel out of purple heart for a friend doing some guitar stuff, and dropped it in the mail December 8.

It just arrived in Grass Valley yesterday.