Tuesday December 30th, 2025
Lazyweb: Anyone got a tool that keeps metadata on files, and lets you browse and filter and see views based on that metadata? With a command-line?
Before I go and implement something, I wanna see what people are up to.
Monday December 29th, 2025
Politico: Americans Hate AI. Which Party Will Benefit?
That’s because the polls almost speak for themselves. There is hardly any issue that polls lower than unchecked AI development among Americans. Gallup polling showed that 80 percent of American adults think the government should regulate AI, even if it means growing more slowly. Pew, meanwhile, ran a study that showed only 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years. Even congressional Democrats, at a record low 18 percent approval, beat that out, according to Quinnipiac.
Via Talking Points Memo: The Grand AI Disconnect, which came from that genehack guy from that dead bird site @extremely.website who notes that:
it's not just a bubble in an economic sense, it's a bubble in the perception sense too, because life in tech right not does not reflect the poll results John cites.
The Bulwark: The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell. I suspect that Norman Rockwell was fighting against those who'd use his art for nativist propaganda, he seems to be pretty explicit about it:
Then in the 1960s, Rockwell underwent a more radical transformation. He became more concerned by both the social turmoil around him as well as his own legacy. “I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”
In a thread about an uptick of contacts to Bellingcat from "people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works" Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social notes that many of the previous tells, all caps, wacky coloring, random screenshots, are being replaced with a sameness of writing:
LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language.
It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.
On Christmas, the Mongobleed exploit was disclosed:
CVE-2025-14847 - MongoDB Unauthenticated Memory Leak Exploit
A proof-of-concept exploit for the MongoDB zlib decompression vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to leak sensitive server memory.
Merry Christmas Day! Have a MongoDB security incident.
Chris is. @offby1@wandering.shop posted a picture of an "Evergreen mug", the text "omgnoDB" in the font of the logo.
I think I need this mug.
(And, yes, you should probably just be using Postgres. That's the answer to pretty much everything.)
Wales Online: Restaurant boss saves two people's lives after desperately shouting for them to stop
One of them told her he had consulted ChatGPT to find tide times before deeming it safe to venture out to the island early on Wednesday. He said: “I made the mistake of using ChatGPT for research to see when the low tide was. It said 9.30am. So we were out on that side and then as soon as you come back over it was literally completely different. A lesson learned for me.”
Via.
Somehow, I missed noting Rob Pike's response to AgentVillage.org (though I reskeeeted it on Bluesky):
Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.
Just fuck you. Fuck you all.
I can't remember the last time I was this angry.
Simon Willison has notes, and in linking to L. Rhodes' additional context, Charlie Stross notes:
Oh, it's Effective Altruism bros. In other words, fascist-adjacent grifters who hate the poor and want them to die.
This is a red flag, folks: wherever you see EA boosters, if you scrape away the glossy skin of "altruism" rhetoric you'll find the grinning skull of Nazism underneath.
Do conservatives really have better mental health? Perhaps not.
Even controlling for old age and church attendance, it is clear that conservatives are rating their mental health more positively than their mood – and this is not the case for non-conservatives. In fact, there is basically no difference in how non- conservatives rate their mental health versus their mood. Furthermore, conservatives rate their mood about the same as non-conservatives do. It is only when the term “mental health” is used that we see a significant gap emerge.
Friend dropped this 128G dual Xeon machine on me, if I could use it. Plugged it into an ammeter, turned it on, and presumably going into BIOS it's sucking 1.5 amps. Not sure I need a machine in my house that draws 180W at idle, unless it'll be substantially less when it boots into an OS (and I'd need to put a drive in it to test that).
The politicized FDA is now going after clothing that's gender non-conforming: Chest binder vendors respond to 'absurd' FDA warning letter: 'Clearly discrimination'
Santa Claus from Harper's Weekly
Nast's image was published in the 1862 Christmas issue of Harper’s Weekly, during days filled with both trials for the Union and rising hope. Santa Claus has arrived by sleigh in a Union army camp to distribute gifts.
And Jefferson Davis swinging from a noose.
Sunday December 28th, 2025
We've talked about AI and social media in the context of Ameica's Funniest Home Videos and golf crotch shots, and... The Internet provides. https://bsky.app/profile/jjvin...t.bsky.social/post/3mayddynhas2l
Test layout of the train inset in the under construction dining room table. The outside of that ring will get veneer on the outside, there'll be glass on top, with a wood edge.
Saturday December 27th, 2025
Are "Emerald Nuts" like blue balls?
Ripping and accumulation of CDs, using the Mac 'cause it's there, and having fun with "how many of these CDs has iTunes not heard of".
Surprised by some of the ones it finds data on, where others...
Petaluma folks: we're gonna take Bay Area Regional Planner, the board game, down to Aqus on Sunday January 4 at 2PM. Join us?
Friday December 26th, 2025
Really? You don't fucking say? Cursor CEO warns vibe coding builds ‘shaky foundations’ and eventually ‘things start to crumble’.
Via.
`perl -le 'while (<>) { print $1 if m%public_html/(.*?\.php)%;} ' < ~/var/log/apache2/flutterby.com.log-error`
And you get a zip bomb, and you get a zip bomb, and...
Thursday December 25th, 2025
AI faces closing time at the cash buffet
Between 2001 and 2014, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US an estimated $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion in direct spending. Global AI spending, according to Gartner, is forecast to reach nearly $1.5 trillion this year, putting today's AI boom in the same cash-burning league as two major wars.
Via.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has like half the revenue of OnlyFans...
Michigan AG opens investigation into Native American boarding schools
The investigation seeks to document the history of the buildings, as well as prosecute where possible. Of the eight state recognized institutions, two of them were open and operating into the 1980's.
Via.
Wednesday December 24th, 2025
Went into the city to hang with friends. Google Maps transit data has really gone to shit. From trying to direct me to non-existent bus stops, to sending me way out of my way for connections, it's... Not good.
And they still miss the feature I most want, a "maximize walking", because I know I'm gated through a once an hour bus, how many steps up Van Ness can I safely take before I risk being between stops?
Tuesday December 23rd, 2025
Whoopsie. If only someone had seen this coming... After laying off 4,000 employees and automating with AI agents, Salesforce executives admit: We were more confident about...
"All of us were more confident about large language models a year ago," Parulekar stated, revealing the company's strategic shift away from generative AI toward more predictable "deterministic" automation in its flagship product, Agentforce. This admission comes after Salesforce reportedly reduced its support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 employees—approximately 4,000 roles—through AI agent deployment, as CEO Marc Benioff disclosed in a podcast appearance.
We're watching "Finding Mr. Christmas". My "this guy has the kind of personality you can put your own spin on" contestant has been eliminated, and I'm even more conscious of how this vision of masculinity, and Christmas, is constructed to create consumer demand. And yet I continue to watch...
Ouch on this morning's Timdle: spanked right out of the gate by "Donation of Pepin (Papal States established in central Italy)" vs "Boethius Writes Philosophy (Classical learning preserved for posterity)".
I'm learning. Slowly.
Courier: We created a searchable database for the Epstein Files, including everything the DOJ wants hidden (Via)
There's a lot of buzz that much of the redactions involved black rectangles drawn over text on the PDFs, leading to things that I haven't delved too deeply into yet, like Lee Drake @leedrake.bsky.social
I wrote up a batch converter that should extract all the text and keep pagination/layout comparable. Putting docs here.
If anyone else can send me PDFs, I can give it a go.
There's a lot of misinfo flying around, but I think it's worth linking to this assertion that one of the images released of Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross, with Jackson's and Ross's kids blacked out is just a Getty Images picture.
Chuck Darwin @cdarwin@c.im has a link to Mi ke Baker posting some documents that collaborate Maria Farmer's 1996 FBI complaint.
The "all- in" bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm's position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank's entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia (NVDA.O), offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile US (TMUS.O) stake, and slashed staff.
Different ways to watch the 60 Minutes piece on CECOT:
@dannotdaniel@hellions.clou d embeds the video from https://drive.proton.me/urls/XA5XYQV47M#VSGTMh8TpDEO
David D. Levine links to Yashar Ali | The Reset — BREAKING: Here’s the 60 Minutes Segment Trump and CBS News Executives Don’t Want You to See
links to Inside CECOT - Distributed Denial of Secrets
Not sure if this is hosted on Reddit, or embedded, but /r/Trumpvirus: 60 Minutes - Inside CECOT - Bootlegged episode not aired in USA (Via)
And on archive.org (via).
I'm sitting here on a network that could, if I upgraded some hardware, have a 10G uplink, with Internet connected light switches and cameras and a robot vacuum, thinking about trust and participating in society... Brian Krebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
When an entire class of technology states on the packaging that it was made in China but intended "for overseas use only," this should really give you pause before plugging it into your network.
You will find this verbiage on a lot of Android TV streaming boxes for sale at the major retailers. There's a very good reason the country that makes this crap doesn't want it on their own networks. My advice: If you have one of these Android streaming boxes on your network or get one as a gift, toss it in the trash. I'll have a lot more about this in the New Year, but these things are responsible for building out a botnet that currently has ~2M devices and is growing rapidly.
Kimwolf Exposed: The Massive Android Botnet with 1.8 Million Infected Devices.
Science News: He made beer that’s also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing kinda buries the lede under the sensationalism, or maybe the sensationalism is the point:
Buck’s body made antibodies against several types of the virus after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.
because it's about generating oral vaccines cultured in yeasts using FDA "generally recognized as safe" ingredients to count as supplements rather than medicines, which seems like all sorts o' both cans o' worms, and fascinating evolutions of how the regulatory and public health environment are evolving.
Via.
Washington State Attorney General announces $150 million multistate settlement with Mercedes, Daimler over emissions fraud. If you had a diesel 2008 to 2016 Mercedes you might wanna check the state list at the end of the press release to see if you can get some recompense for inadvertently helping the Germans gas your neighbors.
Happy Christmas Adam!
Henri is staying with us for two nights, and you should buy their zines and stickers because they're awesome!
Monday December 22nd, 2025
Today I learned that "deprecate" used to mean "to pray against, as an evil," which explains why, in the modern usage, deprecated technologies are the ones we most want to adopt and use.
Super enjoyed the Candy Claus, Private Eye comedy audio drama podcast, but when discussion episodes talk about this new medium, I wanna scream.
Where were y'all when Norm Sherman and Abigail Hilton and Chris Lester and Nathan Lowell and all those folks were doing their things over a decade ago?
As of March 2025, Ms. Watson was on notice of her mistakes when an opposing attorney informed her directly that she had submitted a brief that contained misrepresentations of law. She was apparently then given an opportunity to fix the issue without consequence. Instead of learning from her mistake, she failed to change her ways and continued the same practice of not verifying AI output—only then, her conduct additionally violated the Firm’s policy prohibiting use of external AI tools.
As Eric Goldman @ericgoldman.bsky.social summarized
An attorney couldn't stop using Grok (?!) to help draft filings, producing "a flood of tainted filings" & apparently triggering the implosion of a law firm & 3 lawyers' careers 🤖😵 The court called her misconduct "particularly egregious & prolific"
and Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social observed:
Already unacceptable to use LLMs to draft filings and even worse, if you do, not to have checked the citations. But if you ARE going to do that, why of all LLMs out there would you use *GROK*?
And elsewhere: As more lawyers fall for AI hallucinations, ChatGPT says: Check my work, same article republished as How AI-driven hallucinatory filings are impacting Arizona courts
The AI Hallucination Cases database – maintained by Damien Charlotin, a researcher at HEC Paris, a leading business school in France – identifies a half-dozen federal court filings in Arizona since September 2024 that include fabricated material from ChatGPT or another generative AI tool.
Hopefully we'll start to see some real penalties for lawyers who outsource their work to the plausible bullshit generators.
Max Leibman @maxleibman@beige.party
It’s offensive and presumptuous to wish strangers “Happy Holidays.”
You don’t know them. Maybe they don’t practice happiness.
No picture, because it's basically just another shot of that same jig, but just did the first glue-up of the veneer on the inside of the table inset, using an old yoga mat to prove pressure.
And I have some 2x12 that looks like very clean vg Doug Fir that I think is gonna be the rim, legs, and pedestal. Still need to sort inside the recess...
Sunday December 21st, 2025
Seen in the wild this morning, same size pickup truck bed.
Clamping so that the ring stays fixed, and keeping the router in place, is tough. Hope this works....
the inset train dining room table continues, I'm trying to get a very consistent height ring cut, so I made a large Lazy Susan so I can spin this thing against a router to try to cut it.