Flutterby™!

I'm not sure I go in for the kinds of clothing abuse that results in "distressed" hoodies and jeans, do you have any that are just kinda mildly alert?

OMG, I can't believe I missed the Kickstarter for this! We may have to pick up a copy to play with our neighbors... Bay Area Regional Planner (the game)

Discovered via Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 ‪@josephpolitano.bsky.social‬ who posted a picture of the rules highlighting:

You can't upzone any squares in Marin

Bonus, this thread about the Highway 37 widening which contains this pull quote:

In testimony to the state Assembvly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, Marin County Supervisor and MTC Vice Chair Stephanie Moulton-Peters noted that two members of her staff who commute to San Rafael from Solano County lose up to 90 minutes a day to congestion. "This bill is urgent," said Moulton-Peters. "We've been working on this project for more than a decade... We shouldn't let another generation sit in traffic or let wetland restoration opportunities slip away."

(Emphasis in Robert Prinz's screen cap) I mean, ya could build some damned housing and work towards wetland restoration, but, no, you've gotta increase VMT and fuck the climate instead...

sam henri gold @samhenrigold@hachyderm.io

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge?

It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Source code and a downloadable app to try it yourself:
https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor

Went to Sebastopol to see The Last Class with a Q&A with the producer and director. It was an interesting musing on giving up an identity, but it left me unsettled with Robert Reich both as a political personality and as a teacher, which I don't think was the intent.

Up in Sebastopol to see The Last Class, stumbled upon a field with sculptures in it, including Mark Rivera's Habitat, a metal heart composed of houses.

I feel dirty, and it's a reminder to not trust anything on my WiFi network, but I have 4 cheap Etekcity wifi light switches in my workshop so that when I forget to turn off lights before I go in the house, I can do so from my phone.

Facebook is seeing people post "Hope you enjoyed your birthday!" on the virtual walls of people who passed away 6 months ago.

a Dumbing of Age commenter has gone deep on a recipe to recreate McDonald's chicken nuggets at home.

Donna Ladd: The Epstein Saga Is Not a Game. It’s About Protecting Women and Girls From Rape and Retribution.

Via Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ who notes:

One horror of child sexual abuse is that it preys on young people when they're trying to figure out how to trust the world. This makes "Pedocon Theory" compelling: the last thing conservatives want is mutual trust strong enough to inspire mutual aid.

The wall confronting large language models Peter V. Coveney, Sauro Succi

We argue that the very mechanism which fuels much of the learning power of LLMs, namely the ability to generate non-Gaussian output distributions from Gaussian input ones, might well be at the roots of their propensity to produce error pileup, ensuing information catastrophes and degenerative AI behaviour.

Via Elf Sternberg, who summarized this as:

That LLMs produce non-Gaussian output distributions from Gaussian inputs is the very mechanism that prevents LLMs from ever meeting the standards required of scientific inquiry.

I'm doing some video wrangling for a film fest, and needed a countdown timer on a green screen. Lots of "download this YouTube video", or you could go to https://www.flutterby.com/software/countdown/ , turn on your screen recorder, and click to start a 6 minute countdown timer.

Mike Judge: Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up (Via Lobste.rs).

Cecilia Tan has a thread about LLMs and how "yes" and "no" are semantically linked that mentions back in 2023, Mason City Iowa school district banning Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights because ChatGPT said it had non-existent sex scenes.

‪Asa Dotzler‬ ‪@asadotzler.com‬

Atlassian to buy The Browser Company for $610M in cash.

If you love Jira, just imagine what they can do for your browser.

Kevin Erdmann: The end of the American city.

Over the course of the 20th century, our city leaders decided they didn’t want cities any more. From 1890 to 1960, the population of New York City increased from 1.5 million to just under 8 million. After the downzoning, growth stopped. New York City has roughly the same population today that it did in 1960.

Love this graffiti image of Sam Altman saying "Please bro, we're so close to AGI, just $20,000,000,000 more, bro.", apparently by Lushsux.

1.3.6.1.4.1.61513 @xssfox@cloudisland.nz

Remember, if you say it with confidence, you can get away with saying "nine fives of availability" in presales meetings

I've been thinking about how belief in the corruption of institutions seems to go hand-in-hand with the willingness to corrupt institutions when one achieves power in them.

Comment at lunch about how nobody's as cynical as Russians.

And... in this current (AI/politics) doom loop, we're fucked.

Pro Publica: Trump Says America’s Oil Industry Is Cleaner Than Other Countries’. New Data Shows Massive Emissions From Texas Wells.

I have a Markdown-ish static site generator that has heritage to code I wrote in 1998 to convert email to web sites, I use Emacs for text editing, and I'm playing with Obsidian, and wondering what people do about paragraph breaks vs line breaks.

Lots of <br/> is funky, and yet...

Working as designed: The 19th: Age verification on porn sites is putting queer adult industry workers at risk

Via.

Ah, the joys of finding a kindred spirit on the Mac/XCode development path. From https://apple.stackexchange.co...m-hijacking-my-file-associations Mark Anderson writes:

"The best workaround I've found is to never install the sodding GUI. Use `xcode-select --install` in terminal"

It is always a delicate dance between using lldb from the command-line, or dealing with XCode.

The news from 2023 that Nearly Half of Dog Owners Are Hesitant to Vaccinate Their Pets is making the rounds again, including concerns about impacts on cognitive health on pets.

In a particularly striking finding, the study found that 37 percent of all dog owners believed vaccines could cause their pets to develop cognitive problems, such as "canine/feline autism."

Kingfisher & Wombat ‪@tkingfisher.com‬

I am calm. I am breathing deeply through my nose. I am counting to ten. I…

WHAT, ARE YOU AFRAID YOUR DOG WILL INFODUMP TO YOU ABOUT THE FUCKING BALL?!?

a lso GossiTheDog on the Fediverse.

David Gerard reminded us of a quote from a two year ago entry on Attack of the Fifty Foot Blockchain (the blog not the book, though I recommend the book):

“Current AI feels like something out of a Philip K Dick story because it answers a question very few people were asking: What if a computer was stupid?” — Maple Cocaine

Rest of World: Meta is letting scams run rampant on its platforms in Singapore

After a 50% increase in scams in 2023, Singapore authorities say Meta isn’t doing enough to stop the explosion in fraud.

Via Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io who notes that:

Singapore is already covered with signs like 'if 'women' online are promising you naked photos in return for gift cards / credits, it is a SCAM'

And the fraud situation is getting worse because of Meta

But, I mean, if you look at any of the ads running on Facebook ya realize that this isn't exactly a Singapore or catfishing limited phenomenon. Meta is a company built on exploiting human weaknesses in order to facilitate scammy commerce and advertising.

So much in Violet Blue's Threat Model: Cybersecurity: September 2, 2025, but the batshit story of Rudy Giuliani and the automobile collision that... well... I mean, you've heard the story, but putting all of the details in the context that this dude used to be the guy who was gonna "solve cybersecurity".

Society is broken.

Peter @peter@thepit.social

as with blockchain, generative AI is not going away because there **is** one very important thing it is extremely useful for, and that is fraud.

L⁂Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

"People who use AI at work feel that they're more productive" is an argument I've been seeing in various forms lately, which, as a recommendation, is not far removed from "people on cocaine at parties feel that they're more interesting."

via Leafy Greens @leafygreens@meow.social, to which David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run replied:

@leafygreens @denisbloodnok @EndorNim cocaine isn't going to take your job, someone using cocaine is going to take your job

Journeys In Film @JourneysInFilm@hcommons.social

What we're reading:

"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white, a new study shows."

We know that educators are bombarded with (VC-funded) hype about AI tools as magical solutions. Please don't take these claims at face value and do your own due diligence. 1/4

Re Chalk Beat: AI teacher tools display racial bias when generating student behavior plans, study finds — By Norah Rami

Vivaldi email users: Do the filters allow you to export or pipe to an external file? As I configure my new working environment, I'm trying to decide between Claws-mail on my Linux laptop, or Vivaldi, and the whole "integrated calendering and an actual business model" thing is endearing.

Tommy Davidson on square dancing (YouTube video)

Just to log it somewhere: Firefox's bullshit has finally gotten to me, and given the raving of Vivaldi users, and their AI comments, I've installed Vivaldi on my usual devices as a replacement.

Bleeding Cool: Police Called On Artist Accused Of Selling A.I. Art At Dragon Con

... A vendor exhibiting under the name Oriana Gerez at Dragon Con in Atlanta this weekend, at booth A10, was asked to pack up their table, with police present, after they were accused of selling A.I. artwork as if it were their own.

Fellow vendor at Dragon Con, Dane of Monkey Minion, a particular favourite of Bleeding Cool EIC Kaitlyn Booth, posted the aftermath at the show the day after… shared here with permission. You can get a better shot of the packing up in RJ Palmer's photos. But this has been filling Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram and X since the weekend.

Bluesky thread with graphs from New England Journal of Medicine Feburary 4, 2021: Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine (Moderna) and New England Journal of Medicine December 31, 2020: Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine (Pfizer/BioNTech), actual graphs of XKCD 2400: Statistics

CHristoph Heilig: GPT-5 Is a Terrible Storyteller – And That's an AI Safety Problem, coming up with the theory that OpenAI is using LLMs to evaluate outputs in training, and like a high school English student writing the sorts of florid prose that they think their teacher is going to like, there's a feedback loop:

Do you remember the researchers that hid prompt-style instructions (e.g., in white or tiny text) inside arXiv drafts to make LLM-assisted reviewers output only positive evaluations and avoid mentioning negatives? It's almost as if GPT-5 accomplished something similar – to invent a kind of secret language that allows it to communicate with LLMs in a way that they will like GPT-5's stories even when they are utter nonsense.

Via Futurism

Gizmodo: Connecticut Man’s Case Believed to Be First Murder-Suicide Associated With AI Psychosis

A case of murder-suicide in Connecticut earlier this month is being identified as potentially the first homicide fueled by a mentally disturbed person’s use of generative artificial intelligence, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.

Police in Greenwich, Connecticut, found Stein-Erik Soelberg, a 56-year-old tech industry veteran, and his 83-year-old mother, both dead in the home where they lived together on Aug. 5, according to the Greenwich Police Department. Soelberg killed his mother and then himself after suffering from untreated mental illness that was apparently made worse by his interactions with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to the Journal.

My (anti-vax) mom's coming to visit in a month and a half, so I'm starting to queue up Covid stuff again. Ischemic stroke after COVID-19 vaccination: A self-controlled case series analysis

Highlights

• Using the robust SCCS method, vaccination was unrelated to ischemic stroke.
• Using standard SCCS, however, COVID-19 vaccination was related to incident ischemic stroke.
• No sex differences were found.

Via.

Oh wait, this is the picture I meant to upload earlier

In Google's defense, Bangkok Thai Express was apparently sold and rebranded, but more reasons the AI summary, in this case two(?!), is bullshit.

Over on LinkedIn, Johannes Ernst posted Crazy Stupid Tech: Cloudflare’s CEO wants to save the web from AI’s oligarchs. Here’s why his plan isn’t crazy. Lots of good stuff in there, but this bit:

With the Perplexity thing what’s crazy is that because we’re blocking them from being able to get access to the content, they’re now going to Trade Desk and pulling down the summary of the headline and a summary of the content and writing it as if People magazine, or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal actually wrote it.

So we're seeing a trend towards less and less information in headlines (gotta get that click), and this strategy seems like LLM users are gonna see misinformation on a scale that Fox and NewsMax users can only hint at.

Smallest router I had is underpowered and the base wouldn't hold height even with a hose clamp strapped around it, so the edges of my inlay holes suck, but the fixed counter top with the two part finish is curing and looks way better than creeping black mold...

Dry fitting the sink in the countertop. Now to remove it and roll on the Stone Coat...

Pew: How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost Housing Option — The intertwined history of single-room occupancy and homelessness in the U.S.

Oooh: If you were using the &udm=14 trick to disable the Google AI overviews, a Redditor has a list of the udm parameters and says 56 is the cleanest one.

Friend sent me this cool article about Cynthia "Plaster Caster" Albritton. I mentioned exhibit in SF in 2002 and got to that exhibit, linked to a Salon article about her back in 2000, and marked her passing in 2022.

The polyurethane I used on this counter sucked, so I'm sanding it all off, inlaying some Ip� around the sink to replace the damaged wood, then gonna finish it with rolled on 2 part Stone Coat.

Shout out to all of my friends who lived in Tennessee in the '80s and '90s and could have seen this coming without exhuming the body for autopsy... Sheriff Buford Pusser implicated in his wife's murder.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/fame...licated-wifes/story?id=125126955

Smoke alarms are perhaps a necessary evil, but the first brand to give me a remote "I'm cooking, damn it, leave me the fuck alone" button will get a bunch of brand loyalty.

I still have my "Man of Rubber" dry bag from my years guiding and paddling on the Ocoee, so of course I had to get Gary's memoir.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FM8BRYDM

Foiled by contact lenses in today's Timdl.

It has been a long time since I switched primary browser, and I have liked that Firefox is the independent rendering engine, but it's getting harder to justify sticking with it.

Any others I should check out besides Vivaldi?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/22/firefox_142/