Saturday April 26th, 2025
"I did not get this diagnosis because I want disability money or a therapy animal or a special star beside my name. Instead it has given me an opportunity to reexamine my life and my perception of myself."
https://researchbuzz.me/2025/0...ty-to-use-the-toilet-unassisted/
Friday April 25th, 2025
I'd like a little more bed, but looks perfect for grabbing lumber for my woodworking hobby or a load of bark for landscaping in the yard, definitely like the "just use your phone" for entertainment approach.
I think the question will be whether we'll have become a one car household by that point, in which case we'll trade the Bolt for it, or be a two car household and trade the '90s Ford Ranger for it.
Road & Track: The Slate Truck Is a Simple EV Pickup and SUV in One, for a Very Low Price
I was going to post yet another "Google's AI overview doing wacky bullshit", but then I saw this claim that "AI Overviews ... now has 1.5 billion users per month".
And, like, yes, it's all of us looking at how stupid it is, but let's stop giving this idiocy oxygen.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/2...ogl-q1-earnings-report-2025.html
Thursday April 24th, 2025
McSweeney's: A Disillusioned Urban Planning Glossary
Compiled while sitting through a three-hour public hearing and rethinking life choices.
Back in January of 2000, I observed that with the advent of search and "jump to" boxes on web pages, we were returning from the world of point and drool click to command-lines. So this seems pertinent: tante @tante@tldr.nettime.org
It is kinda funny. Terminal applications are always seen as too clunky and unwieldy for average non-nerds to use but that's exactly what chatbots are: Command line apps with unspecified parameters and outcomes.
In a link to the FBI IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center) Internet Crime Report 2024, Molly White @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io says
FBI: Americans aged 60 and older reported losing almost $3 billion to crypto fraud last year. In total, Americans reported being scammed out of around $9.3 billion via crypto, out of a total $16.6 billion in total reported Internet crime losses that year.
...and I kinda wonder if we're doing a disservice when we call out cryptocurrency based scams as such, because that implies that there are things about cryptocurrency that aren't awful and horrible.
We'll know we've achieved AI when the conversation includes "I'm sorry ..., I can't do that".
Can you imagine ChatGPT or Gemini telling you "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" rather than just spewing bullshit that sounds remotely plausible? Not happening.
Wednesday April 23rd, 2025
Where else are you gonna read about Boaty McBoatface, the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau, and a Kodak Instamatic Camera from the early 1960s set up in a waterproof housing with its shutter attached to a bait line? Camera set up to catch Loch Ness Monster discovered
The Redwood Rainbows had a tie dye party this weekend that we couldn't attend, but they had a bunch of dye left over, so we figured we'd use it up before it went totally bad. Then it soda ash didn't fully dissolve, so... We'll see what we got tomorrow.
Tuesday April 22nd, 2025
Ya say "wardriving" to kids these days, and they have *no idea* what you're talking about...
It's like they weren't even alive in the days when Linksys was the wireless provider of choice.
David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run
look, moore's law clearly states that AI line goes up and to the right forever and also i get a hot robot girlfriend who really loves me
Talia "Epistemic" Bhatt ♀︎♀︎ @taliabhatt.itch.io
So I can't help but notice that all this brouhaha about single sex spaces and trans exclusion from them is eliding the axiom underlying the panic.
Namely: taking the normalization of men's violence against women as a given that cannot be meaningfully ameliorated except through sex-segregation.
It appears that not all of us are becoming more hostile, but that the people who are get more exposure online, making the perception of hostility outsized.
Across eight studies, leveraging cross-national surveys and behavioral experiments (total N = 8,434), we test the mismatch hypothesis but only find evidence for limited selection effects. Instead, hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible online than offline.
DOI:10.1017/S0003055421000885
Via.
Monday April 21st, 2025
Is the fact that this request for an article about using LLMs to program has stalled loading waiting for the server indicative of anything?
Taggart @mttaggart@infosec.exchange
- const tantinople;
+ int stanbul;
NYT ran an article for Natal Conference, which had 200 attendees who think people need to have more babies. Buddy we had 1000 people from around the globe get together to do a unicycle con and yall didn't write about us
you have to take this group very seriously, they can do conventions that put up c-tier furry con numbers
Discussion is happening about upgrading the KBYG Zoom forum experience. I haven't had luck with getting Camo to feed my phone camera into Zoom. Suggestions (including hardware processes) for upgrade paths for real-time broadcast of in-person events.
I'm capturing handheld mics through the sound system via a Behringer U-PHORIA UMC202HD, so I think this is about better video (camera recommendations? multi-camera?), and how to manage it.
Al Sweigart @AlSweigart@mastodon.social
I heard about people using ChatGPT to write their regular expressions based on their English description.
After spending all morning working with LLMs and regular expressions: DEAR LORD DO NOT DO THIS.
Your politeness could be costly for OpenAI
“I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.”
It was a seemingly random question posed by a user on X (formerly Twitter), but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped in to reply that typing those words has added up to “tens of millions of dollars well spent — you never know.”
OpenAI spends millions to process polite phrases such as "Thank You" and "Please" with ChatGPT
Sam Altman acknowledges this and reports that ChatGPT costs the company tens of millions of dollars just generating responses to these prompts. Taken another way, recent report suggests that even a short three-word "You are welcome" response from an LLM uses up roughly 40-50 milliliters of water.
If only external costs were included in your queries or something...
In the OpenAI community forums user EricGT notes:
If a prompt is not working, then adding “Please” might help. This was much more effective with the earlier ChatGPT and other AI models but less so now, but still something to keep on the list of options.
And then asks for "helpful and with practical objective advise(sic)" which... "if a prompt is not working add 'please'" seems like pretty close to the "it can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong" joke.
Anyway, I probably noted back in April that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that 99% of all electricity will be used to power "superintelligent" AI. With that in mind... MeFi: And the Largest Industrial Polluter in Memphis Is... (Drumroll) is a link to MuskWatch: Musk accused of polluting impoverished community with illegal gas turbines
In an April 9 letterto the health department of Shelby County, Tennessee, SELC says that xAI's 35 gas turbines were "all constructed and operating unlawfully without any air permit in Southwest Memphis." According to SELC, the 35 gas turbines emit "between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) per year, making the facility likely the largest industrial emitter of NOx in Memphis." It is currently producing more nitrogen oxides than the Memphis International Airport (1,077 tons), the Draslovka chemical plant (743 tons), the Valero oil refinery (342 tons).
And Sebastian Deterding @codingconduct@hci.social
LLMs put a trust tax on so many interactions.
Doing uni admissions interviews now and find myself suspecting that some candidates put my questions into an LLM and read off responses, presumably to also help with language issues.
Do we now need to conduct all interviewing in person or just give up?
Using ~/.ssh/authorized keys to decide what the incoming connection can do, like making it so that a given connection can just rsync down.
Something in the air... Rick Gualtieri @rickgualtieri.bsky.social
So, reading between the lines, the Pope basically decided he would rather die than meet with JD Vance.
We get it, Pope Francis. Trust me, we do.
Soatok Dreamseeker @soatok@furry.engineer
Pope Francis met with JD Vance and then literally fucking died of cringe.
Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone (accompanied by a picture)
this meeting could have been a (leaked) signal chat
Newsthump: Pope loses will to live after meeting JD Vance
A White House spokesperson told us, “This President is all about creating jobs for Americans, and just hours after a visit from the Vice President, we find yet another top global job has become available.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social
I find it pretty interesting that US Vice President keeps referring to the late Pope as "Francis" instead of Jorge Mario Bergoglio – I thought James Donald Bowman had pretty strong opinions on birthnames. 🤔
Sunday April 20th, 2025
Happy Bicycle Day and 4/20 Eve, y'all!
Fun day with the quadricycle at the Petaluma Butter and Egg Days parade, in it with the Safe Streets Coalition folks, and then hanging out with Sean and friends at LivXplore.
Saturday April 19th, 2025
OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models hallucinate more.
In its technical report for o3 and o4-mini, OpenAI writes that “more research is needed” to understand why hallucinations are getting worse as it scales up reasoning models. O3 and o4-mini perform better in some areas, including tasks related to coding and math. But because they “make more claims overall,” they’re often led to make “more accurate claims as well as more inaccurate/hallucinated claims,” per the report.
It's interesting that we're using terms like "reasoning" in conjunction with machines "hallucinating". Like, when I see a person on the street ranting at the sky I am not thinking of their behavior as connected to "reasoning".
A careful read of this article is also demonstrating all of the ways in which OpenAI has managed to define success for itself...
Friday April 18th, 2025
Docks are filling up for the parade tomorrow...
Interesting to watch Slack social groups migrating to Signal...
As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond
The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.
Via.
As far as I'm concerned, the only legal definition of a woman should be:
When Shania Twain says, "let's go girls", do you go? If so, girl.
Kelly McBride at NPR: How does NPR cover peaceful protests when the only news is the protest?
"Not Very Compelling": How NPR Dismissed the Largest Protests of 2025
McBride's position essentially argues that mass protests only become newsworthy when they turn violent or disruptive. She writes that “once a protest movement results in conflict or property damage, NPR journalists covering the protests will often note the exception.” This creates a perverse incentive: want coverage? Create conflict.
I am a banana @secretasianman@types.pl
You telling me these costs are denser than 1g/cm^3?
Large Heydon Collider @heydon@front-end.social
"This AI output is highly inaccurate."
"Nah, you're just prompting it wrong."
"How do I go about prompting it the right way?"
"You really need to know the subject you're asking about. Then you can help it avoid making mistakes."
"If I know the subject deeply myself, why am I asking an AI about it?"
"It helps to train the AI."
Private chat with friends who work in public health talking about Trump initiatives in the FDA and CDC, and how there's lots of indication that nobody in the current administration understands how things already happen there.
And I'm seeing lots of parallels between that and the Nextdoor mobs.
Company apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproar:
On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named "Sam" told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.
Seems like maybe this started with an over-zealous anti-fraud or security measure, but LLM based support agent misrepresenting this blew it up. As Reddit user BrokenToasterOven says:
I literally just cancelled my sub and moved to AUGMENT CODE.
I was dumping like $700/wk into Cursor through work, and now we're purging it completely.
Which, ya know, maybe that user walks it back, maybe they don't, maybe they've already found the other product that they like, but this is a liability...
They are all very nerdy. So they deserve a spot on my nerd blog. But they are also very arty, so they deserve to be on my Love Nonsense blog as well. I chose to write about my clocks on Love Nonsense, so here’s a summary of all the clock posts I wrote over there.
Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs.
The LLM bits of it seem superfluous, but it's interesting to see how people are playing with this stuff. There was a discussion on Facebook yesterday about making a thing that you could tell "I loaned X to Y" and such, be pretty easy to do if you had a device that could listen for an attention phrase, record 'til some amount of silence or something, then you could just transcribe and feed through an LLM with a system prompt to output such requests in database update-able form.
Sixty percent of freight containers or shippers have been canceled. Our whole industry has stopped ordering products from China due to the 145% tariffs.
and
These products will not be on the shelves because our industry and millions of small businesses have simply stopped ordering. We'll run out of inventory in the next 60 days.
Mack Trucks announces layoffs at Lehigh Valley plant, blames tariffs
“Heavy-duty truck orders continue to be negatively affected by market uncertainty about freight rates and demand, possible regulatory changes, and the impact of tariffs,” spokesperson Kimberly Pupillo said.
Both via this BlueSky thread.
NPR: A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data from the NLRB. Always hard to tell what's a newsletter writer trying to pimp up mainstream recording, but this thread with screenshots from the testimony that say:
In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB's systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia, started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating.
and that MFA got turned off.
Meanwhile, cyber professional @permadeath.com writes: "i am going to Lose My Fucking Mind if the seed crystal for an antifascist general strike ends up being david fucking brooks": NYT: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
Thursday April 17th, 2025
So April 19th is "Bicycle Day", and Tara 🕷️ @tarajdactyl@anarres.family
someone at work just said something about "folks taking time off ahead of the holiday weekend" and i thought "wow, i wouldn't expect her to recognize 4/20 as a holiday"
... it's Easter. she means Easter.
Seeing a tour early bird special with "those who've already booked have had their balance adjusted", and now I'm wondering how many of those folks are stumbling!
On remapping Ctrl-c : "I can't imagine a reason that I would ever do this though".
That's because Julia is a *good person* who would never mess with, say, their coworkers who left a terminal unsecured. Or something. Hypothetically.
JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social
The most underrated cognitive bias: we intuitively understand that complex systems can't be controlled, yet demand that politicians promise to control them. Democracy then selects for the most convincing liars.
Gavin Logan @tamewhale@mastodon.social
Looking at a tech conference that is "focused on sustainability" and will "heavily feature AI". Which is like being "focused on agriculture" and "heavily featuring locusts".
People talk about time travel to eliminate Hitler, and Nextdoor is right there...