Monday June 23rd, 2025
The homemade tortilla press is getting some pretty good results.
Sunday June 22nd, 2025
The chaser is Meta's AI completely missing the guillotine part of the heart-hole guillotine stained glass pendant.
The shot is Meta's "AI" offering to explain the heart-hole guillotine stained glass pendant.
Fixing Fair St at Douglas St #4
S McDowell at Cader Ln NB.Wide section 71.5" (grass overlaps concrete by a few inches) narrow is 3'9".
I'm out doing location scouting of bus stops for a little "good trouble", and I'm seeing parts of the city that I've only driven by in the past. I would love to know how many people actually visit this park. Walking half a mile along high speed roads to sit at this bench at a major intersection...
Pretty sure that using the LLM-based IDEs are playing a long game where eventually I don't check the output as carefully as I should, and all apps they create converge on a Rickroll.
The Beaverton: Canadians travelling to the US advised to not fucking do that
“Canadians are welcome in California. It’s perfectly safe to visit,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “Just so long as you take a few basic travel precautions, like travelling on a valid passport, teleporting over the border, moving undetected in the shadows in the dead of night, getting the telephone number of an immigration attorney tattooed to your upper thigh, saying a heartfelt goodbye to your pets and the people who love you, and appointing someone to water your plants just in case you disappear into a labyrinthian nightmare of an extrajudicial immigration enforcement system that no longer answers to judge nor common mercy.”
Nikita @kytta@polymaths.social
The street that my mum lives in is a one-way street, but wasn't marked as such on #Google Maps. This caused many drivers to drive the wrong way. I have tried to edit it on Google Maps (there is such functionality), but to no avail. No matter how often I submitted a change (with photos of street signs!), Google said "Sorry, we could not verify it".
Solution: Edit the street on #OpenStreetMap! A few months after I did this, Google seems to have stolen the data, as it regularly does, and now the street is correct in both datasets!
I was watching Aron Peterson (LinkedIn)'s look at Google Veo, eg Day 7, Day 9, commentary on someone else's car crash scene (via Pivot to AI), which made a good context for looking at this IRL imitation of AI video.
This isn’t about tools or productivity or acceleration. It’s about the illusion of progress. Because if that programmer-if that thing, that CREATURE-walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say "no blockers".
hikari 🌟 (falling into the sky) , @hikari
hi there.
on 2016-11-07 i was inspired to create this pair of diagrams, and posted them to my then twitter account. the tweet is long gone, but they must have struck a chord with some people, because the diagrams have long outlived it! i guess they're as relevant today as they were then.
so let me repost them here, in never-before-published high resolution.
if you care about copyright, you can attribute these with:
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;© 2016 hikari_no_yume, CC BY 4.0 (International)
and ideally, please link to this post's canonical url (begins with social.noyu.me), but i don't care that much
That said, we don't know the exact details of how Mattel will use OpenAI's products. But so far, it seems to be heading in a pretty predictable direction. Let's not kid ourselves here: of course Mattel is going to use AI to make a Barbie doll or what-have-you engage in full-blown conversations with your kid, or sell a Magic 8-ball that spouts even more meaningless but convincing-sounding drivel.
Proposed Legislation Would Prohibit Immigration Officials From Posing as Police (Via)
Under the bill, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection are barred from wearing clothing that bears the word police. State Rep. Mike Thompson, who co-authored the bill with Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-New York, said the goal of the legislation is to ease mistrust of local police among immigrant families.
Cato: 65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Convictions (Via)
Masked ICE agents swapping license plates in Bell Gardens, CA. Thread has various other video of the thuggery, including intimidating uninvolved people who were filming these dickheads.
Why the LA Dodgers stood up to ICE
That is no longer the case. On June 20, the Dodgers announced that they would give $1 million to families of immigrants “impacted by recent events in the region.” The team didn’t exactly denounce ICE, but the message was clear: It understood that it couldn’t work with the Trump administration and expect its fans to remain quiet.
More people should interact with developmentally disabled adults, it'd give perspective to that entirely committed to happily saying things that may or may not be completely false with charming earnestness thing that LLMs do.
Saturday June 21st, 2025
Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town
That Stevie Nicks song got a lot less magical when I moved here and found out white wing doves are just dusty pigeons.
Hang on a sec, lemme grab my random axe of kindness.
Friday June 20th, 2025
Solar Company Sues Google for Giving Damaging Information in AI Overviews
"This lawsuit is not just about defending our company's reputation; it's about standing up for fairness, truth, and accountability in the age of artificial intelligence," Nicholas Kasprowicz, general counsel for the solar company, Wolf River Electric, said in a statement.
Plaintiffs and defendants in copyright lawsuits over generative AI often make sweeping, opposing claims about the extent to which large language models (LLMs) have memorized plaintiffs' protected expression. Drawing on adversarial ML and copyright law, we show that these polarized positions dramatically oversimplify the relationship between memorization and copyright. To do so, we leverage a recent probabilistic extraction technique to extract pieces of the Books3 dataset from 13 open-weight LLMs. Through numerous experiments, we show that it's possible to extract substantial parts of at least some books from different LLMs. This is evidence that the LLMs have memorized the extracted text; this memorized content is copied inside the model parameters. But the results are complicated: the extent of memorization varies both by model and by book. With our specific experiments, we find that the largest LLMs don't memorize most books -- either in whole or in part. However, we also find that Llama 3.1 70B memorizes some books, like Harry Potter and 1984, almost entirely. We discuss why our results have significant implications for copyright cases, though not ones that unambiguously favor either side.
Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe
When people call LLMs “useless” they’re generally being kind as it’d be more accurate to call it harmful, dangerous, toxic, or risky.
It’s like calling white asbestos “useless”. Technically true in most western countries because you literally can’t use it, but it kind of elides the reason why
Thinking more about LLMs being compute analogous to calculators, except for arithmetic they're for language and thinking.
And how we react to the yutes who can't make change without a cash register to calculate it for them, and how this trend is going to go.
Jerry Kindall @kindall.bsky.social
For every book that gets banned, there are ten other books at least as subversive that the busybodies have never heard of. Those books could certainly use a boost. Let's get on that!
Thursday June 19th, 2025
Dr. Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social has a thread about "...that "chatgpt rots your brain" paper", which I'm taking to mean Your Brain on ChatGPT:... mentioned here and here
I am asking myself: what studies would *I* design to evaluate people's usage of LLMs in keeping with learning science and without neurohype?
And the ensuing thread is interesting, but also shows the issues with trying to quantify thinking about systems that programming as a discipline has long had.
But I think some of the notion of cognitive offloading explored in the thread is interesting as we explore if LLMs are analogous to calculators? Card files? Or slot machines?
Reg Braithwaite 🍓 @raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
While the bartender serves us our chaser, consider the slot machine business. Were there no regulations, slot machines would not be random. They would use sophisticated machine learning—AI of sorts—to determine when a player tires of losing and dole out the absolute minimum “win” to keep them playing.
Cameras, microphones and other sensors would monitor breathing, heartbeat, posture, facial expressions, everything.
We know this to be true: That’s how the computer game industry works.
Vibe coding consists of pulling handles in various ways hoping for a win in the form of the AI appearing to write the program you desire. The actual mechanism is opaque, so you keep pulling the handle hoping to learn what to do.
But inevitably, some VP of Growth will write an all-hands email ordering the company to optimize for number of pulls of the handle rather than for your profitable payoff.
Welcome back to the slots.
The authors of that Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task paper that I linked to a few days ago are managing the media exposure wonderfully, today it's Time: ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study. The juicy bits in this article start at "Post publication", including:
Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.
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Wednesday June 18th, 2025
So, yeah, you probably saw the exchange shared around the socials yesterday, but... Futurism: "Mansplaining Audacity": President of Signal Watches in Bemusement as Random Man Explains Her Company's AI Strategy to Her
"So yes, I do think I have a better insight than the president of the company."
but the thing is ... especially as I play more and more with "AI" and have more conversations with people who think these LLMs have lots of value, is that this is the behavior that the AI vendors have been rewarded for displaying. This dude is displaying value as his community has rewarded it.
Petition to help the opposition proofread spelling....
This discussion about Google Gemini 2.5 giving a wrong answer with some arithmetic is interesting, especially in discussions about trying it multiple times, and how sometimes it'll use an actual calculator and get the correct answer, and how sometimes it'll say it used a calculator and still give incorrect answers.
Via.
I've just started passing the "okay, you can use external tools" flag to various LLM APIs (I'm using an abstraction layer written by a coworker), and this sense of what it tells us what it's doing vs what it's actually doing, or not doing, is only gonna get worse.
I'm on the Grocery Outlet specials email list, and sometimes reading the item titles gives me giggles. This week's entrant: "Applaws Tuna Crab Wet Cat". I mean, I can figure out what it is, but...
DTrasler Writing @Dtraslerwriting@mastodon.social
When the AI techbros are finally hauled up on charges and asked if they are guilty, their only options for reply should be "yes" or "maybe later".
Nothing new, but it's good to see the tech press catching on: Ed Bott on ZD Net: Your favorite AI chatbot is full of lies
So if Petaluma PD can't find a way to prosecute this dude, does that mean we as pedestrians get to use deadly force against motorists who infringe on. Our spaces? I'm about ready to go *off* on red light runners at Kentucky and Washington...
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay...tween-no-kings-protesters-truck/
Sitting here thinking about how, in order to fix my scanner, I tried several Ubuntu ftpd packages, and eventually ended up fixing the proftpd config so it didn't crash on attempted start.
And how these things used to just work. And what we've given up for all of this "flexibility".
Bluesky thread about the AltNPS accounts, with some interesting comparisons to QAnon.
Swear I'd quoted something like this before, but I can't find it. Anyway, the notion could use reinforcement. calcifer @calcifer@masto.hackers.town
It’s only vibe coding if you’re working on teledildonics devices.
Otherwise it’s just sparkling incompetence.
Tuesday June 17th, 2025
Tim Marchman @timmarchman.bsky.social
Having a bit of a hard time with the concept that if a guy in a police uniform who has a police vehicle shows up I should lock the doors and call 911, but if a guy in a ski mask with an hGH gut appears to be kidnapping my neighbor, I shouldn’t ask who he is if I don’t want federal charges.
Ryanair boss was wary about Boeings
“We had planes being delivered and when we get them back to Dublin we find spanners and tools under the floorboards,” O’Leary told The Times in his boardroom. “What the factory in Seattle needs is someone overseeing the production line. At the moment it’s just salesmen.”
Yikes!
Saw a bunch of links to this article: Vox: What broke teenage romance?, but didn't really follow up because I figured I kinda knew what it said. And, to be fair, I think I did, but I think there's something to take from Elf Sternberg's comment:
This article reminds me of a conversation I had with my kids. They claim that so many kids identify as queer these days not because they want to date their own gender, but because the queer community gives them a vocabulary that's not steeped in patriarchy and misogyny.
Trying to reconcile my feeling that computers are like calculators, and we should learn to use them as such, and LLMs are like automated religious experiences. Prompts are like prayers, bad output is "you're asking wrong" or "the Lord works in mysterious ways".
The hard part about working with AI believers is trying to come up with prompts that give outputs that don't look totally stupid so that I can say "yeah, here's the process you wanted me to AI-ify".
I think this may be related to me reading fairly fast, that I've yet to have a "summary" or analysis of text come out of an LLM that was generated faster than I read, and in any way a meaningful representation of what I think the salient points of the document were.
I mean, normally I'm ready to dunk on both Meta and LLMs, but in this case I think humiliating AI users might be just fine with me. 404 Media: Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI
Dave Zaffrann @dzaffrann.bsky.social
This is continued journalistic malpractice from the @startribune.com normalizing a violent white male suspect. He owned a private security company called Praetorian Guard, traveled overseas to preach against abortion and LGBTQ+ people, and attended a bible college that preaches "violent prayer."
Suspect showed few signs of political extremism before lawmaker shootings
Monday June 16th, 2025
For reasons of updates, our Brother printer was no longer able to ftp scans to the home server, so I had to reinstall and reconfigure an ftp server.
I really miss the days when this just involved enabling it, and not choosing which modules and figuring out which package actually runs and how...
Bellingcat: Have LLMs Finally Mastered Geolocation?
To assess how LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral and xAI compare today, we ran 500 geolocation tests, with 20 models each analysing the same set of 25 images.
Turns out some of the GPT's are pretty good at playing Geoguessr.
Pro Publica: Federal Monitor Slams NYPD Unit Whose Aggressive Policing ProPublica Exposed
What Happened: A monitor appointed by a federal court has found that a New York City Police Department unit has been unjustly stopping and searching New Yorkers, almost all of them Black and Hispanic men. The report on the NYPD’s Community Response Team echoes a recent ProPublica investigation that found the unit, championed by Mayor Eric Adams, has been ridden with abuses.
I mean, we know that Eric Adams security detail provided the "heavies" for a crypto related kidnapping, so it's not super surprising that these fuckers are abusive.
Oh Google.
(Search inspired by this different but similar result: https://kolektiva.social/@BigTittyBimbo/114664527024450640 )
LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.
Via Gernot Wagner @gwagner@fediscience.org:
To write is to think. Using ChatGPT to write leads to..."cognitive debt", which might be one of the better euphemism for somewhat less polite words.
Small n, not yet peer-reviewed, etc https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Sunday June 15th, 2025
Just add humans: Oxford medical study underscores the missing link in chatbot testing
A paper by researchers at the University of Oxford found that while LLMs could correctly identify relevant conditions 94.9% of the time when directly presented with test scenarios, human participants using LLMs to diagnose the same scenarios identified the correct conditions less than 34.5% of the time.
Perhaps even more notably, patients using LLMs performed even worse than a control group that was merely instructed to diagnose themselves using “any methods they would typically employ at home.” The group left to their own devices was 76% more likely to identify the correct conditions than the group assisted by LLMs.
Because of my mom's various theories over the years, I'm kinda familiar with this, but it's good to have an overview. NPR: Ancient miasma theory may help explain Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vaccine moves, but Ars Technica: RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory really gets more nuanced on miasma theory vs terrain theory.
I think the good news about this whole era is that people I know who were all-in on homeopathy are now going "wait a minute", and my own thinking has evolved from "maybe the raw milk I grew up on wasn't all that bad, it sure tasted better" to "yeah, not worth it."
Joshua Conkel @joshuaconkel.bsky.social
We should make June 14th No Kings Day permanently.
Thread on event planning and yesterday's Victory Day Trump Birthday parade
So yesterday, reports are that Oakland PD worked with the crowds in the protests to keep them civil, and the LAPD and LASD exchanged fire like the warring gangs they are, and blamed it on the protesters.
Guess Oakland learned something from The Riders that LA hasn't yet.
Wait, the attempt to replicate the USSR Victory Day parades sponsored by cryptocurrency? So like literally brought to us by North Korea?
I'm trying to do some stuff with steel scavenged from an old bed frame. It is absolutely tearing my drill bits up, but I got through, and then couldn't get the bolt in the hole. I remeasured, everything should fit, then I looked at the leading 3/8" of my drill bit, and ...
I'm trying to do some stuff with steel scavenged from an old bed frame. It is absolutely tearing my drill bits up, but I got through, and then couldn't get the bolt in the hole. I remeasured, everything should fit, then I looked at the leading 3/8" of my drill bit, and ...
Saturday June 14th, 2025
No Kings rally in downtown Petaluma, we've just gotten past E At, looks like it extends up along D St to at least 5th