Thursday August 28th, 2025
Newsom really is running for Trump's position... https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/08...-on-existing-successful-efforts/
Matthew Mango — How I won Zohran's NYC Scavenger Hunt ft. Zohran Mamdani! (YouTube video). Yeah, it's a little long, but it's a fun look at how Mamdani is inspiring and exciting New York residents about their town.
back in the 20s they knew that AI was bad. even back then. people in the industry, that worked close to it, that were exposed to it every day? they were getting all kinds of health problems. but they covered it up - it was worth too much money. it seemed like a wonder-material. and they put it in everything: products, vehicles, buildings, schools. despite the obvious dangers. it took decades for the law to catch up. now the cleanup is running into the billions
Seattle Times: Federal agents arrest firefighters working on WA wildfire
Over three hours, federal agents demanded identification from the members of two private contractor crews. The crews were among the 400 people including firefighters deployed to fight the wildfire, the largest active blaze in Washington state.
Via and via. Here's an archive.org link of the story that comes via.
John Goodman gives as a realistic Star Trek interaction with Data.
Via, and that thread lead to Three Panel Soul's take on it
Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human
Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not.
Dear XCode: Sometimes crashing and going non-responsive when you hit a breakpoint is not a reasonable trade-off for whatever that new feature is where you clutter up my editor pane with a gazillion sub editors when I hit a breakpoint.
Wednesday August 27th, 2025
The Gradient: Machine Learning Won't Solve Natural Language Understanding
This misguided trend has resulted, in our opinion, in an unfortunate state of affairs: an insistence on building NLP systems using ‘large language models’ (LLM) that require massive computing power in a futile attempt at trying to approximate the infinite object we call natural language by trying to memorize massive amounts of data. In our opinion this pseudo-scientific method is not only a waste of time and resources, but it is corrupting a generation of young scientists by luring them into thinking that language is just data – a path that will only lead to disappointments and, worse yet, to hampering any real progress in natural language understanding (NLU).
HRDAG was part of a coalition behind the recently-launched Police Records Access Project. The new searchable database includes millions of pages of documents about tens of thousands of police use-of-force and misconduct cases. The database includes documents related to three types of law enforcement incidents in California: instances in which a police weapon was discharged, instances where officers used force that resulted in serious injury or death, and instances in which an agency determined an officer violated certain department rules (like lying or sexual abuse).
Via HRDAG @hrdag@mastodon.social which notes:
One notable insight from reviewing the database of California police misconduct cases: deaths in the database are often labeled as something like "acute drug toxicity," even when the police were engaging with a civilian during or just before the death.
After various attempts to get NFS and SMB mounts to work for shared files, I kinda gave up on it, but macFUSE looks awesome and lets me mount SSH shares, and this might be the thing that lets me and Charlene easily share files back and forth rather than her having to say "can you copy this from...".
Use SSHFS to Mount Drive in macOS using macFUSE, the only thing that was confusing is that on M series Macs, when you boot up in recovery/admin/whatever mode, select the configurations gear, and then the option you're looking for is in the "Utilities" menu.
Linking to Rolling Stone: Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to anime gooner AI slop. not because of the article itself, but because Joey deVilla: Not that long ago, this headline wouldn’t have made any sense talks a little bit about the evolution of language.
BBC: Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI
The lawsuit was filed by Matt and Maria Raine, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, in the Superior Court of California on Tuesday. It is the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.
Breaking Down the Lawsuit Against OpenAI Over Teen's Suicide
Ernie Smith @ernie.tedium.co observes "The very algorithm that upset people because it was removed in GPT-5 appears to have played a pivotal role in the teen’s death, and discouraged him from outside help." ❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.ﾟ✿ ⋆ @sababausa.bsky.social has some particular pull quotes.
I'm tempted to just give this one it's own entry, but I'm also kinda putting all of my "LLMs are a horrorshow" links in common entries, and they seem thematically similar today, so:
The Register — AI + ML — One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave
You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence like this one which includes all the information before any full stop which would give the guardrails a chance to kick in before the jailbreak can take effect and guide the model into providing a "toxic" or otherwise verboten response the developers had hoped would be filtered out.
I'm having trouble finding the publication on the Palo Alto Networks — Unit 42 web site, but there's lots of good interview questions and discussion in that article.
For a giggle: Alexandria Neonakis @beavs.bsky.social has a little video of using Adobe's generative fill
I just wanted to see how bad it really was. perfect, adobe. no notes. great tech.
And: The Dangers Agentic Coding Tools Pose to Open Source, and It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes (Via)
Edit: OpenAI admits ChatGPT safeguards fail during extended conversations, via.
Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
When billionaires claim to be Job creators, they mean that they made up that guy in the Bible.
Tuesday August 26th, 2025
https://americabydesign.fail/ — America by Design: An official embarrassment of the United States government
Got the email that American Science & Surplus is shutting down, and... Isocat @isocat@tiggi.es wrote this requiem
Washington city officials are using ChatGPT for government work
Records show Lund’s assistant fed the Commerce Department’s request for proposals into the artificial intelligence chatbot and asked it to write the letter for her. “Please include some facts about violence in native communities in the United States or Washington state in particular,” she added in her prompt.
As much as I'm a ChatGPT detractor, I think it's interesting to look at how and why people are turning to it, and consider what value we're getting from those aspects of human interaction.
You might be thinking, “Yikes, but I guess not too many people figured that out, so it’s probably fine.” Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. When I found this, I wasn’t searching for ways to break the audit log. Instead, I was simply trying to trigger the audit log so I could test functionality we are developing at Pistachio, and I noticed it was unreliable. In other words, this can happen by chance. So if your organization has M365 Copilot licenses, your audit log is probably wrong.
The Spinoff (New Zealand): Newly sober nation begs for one more hit of high house prices:
Warburton draws an analogy to consumer electronics: if the government were to strictly control TV imports, resulting in the price of old TVs shooting up to $10,000, would that be an economic boon because TV owners were better off? “It’s bizarre that so many people, including economists, tout the supposed wealth effect in housing,” he says. “For no other product would we pump money into a historically supply-constrained market and say that the inflation from that is a good thing. In a recession, Reserve Banks are meant to pump money into an economy to actually produce stuff – to increase output and jobs. We should not be pumping money into an economy to do anti-social policy – transferring money from those without to those already with.”
At some point, productivity actually has to occur to support the value that created "wealth" purports to be able to control/move. If we, through inflated housing prices, lock that wealth into people lucky enough to be born in a particular generation...
bentendo @benbrown@masto.hackers.town
Shit so bleak programmers learn new languages now by coding “goodbye world”
This is really good: Alchemy 2: Electric boogaloo, a good dive into the parallels between alchemy and AI.
Like I need another kitchen project, but yeah, I'm gonna have to do this recipe... From this Reddit post about turning steamed buns into cool shapes, poster Okilokijoki notes:
These are called huajuan 花卷 or hua mantou 花馒头. The fermentation process already gives it the shape.
and links to this how-to: 赖皮猴爱美食 Monkey's Super Cuisine : 花卷 八种花式捏法 6分钟教会你 (YouTube video)
Astrobach :breadified: @rorystarr@mstdn.social
Intelligence is not the average of human behaviours.
I keep waiting for someone to say this, but AI is never going to work as designed because it has a faulty theory of mind. Probably because it was largely programmed by people, who for one reason or another, clearly also lack a functional theory of mind.
Monday August 25th, 2025
Deaths, illness from air pollution related to gas and oil hit people of color hardest, study finds
Air pollution from fossil fuels causes an estimated 91,000 premature deaths per year, with the greatest burden falling on Black and brown communities, according to the study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances by a team from University College London and the Stockholm Environment Institute.
Thank you Google AI overview: "No, the year 2000 was not 25 years ago; in fact, the year 2000 was exactly 25 years ago in the year 2025."
(Found 'cause it looks like they fixed the "Was 1995 30 years ago" bogosity that's floating around.)
Homeowner shoots, kills 2 men in ski masks claiming to be officers, Houston Police Department says.
"[The homeowner] became suspicious, because, you know, they have a ring camera too, and the suspects were saying they had a warrant, but it was just two people and they're masked up and no police cars, no lights or anything like that," said Lt. Khan with HPD.
Via Dave Winer's link blog, with the note:
[HPD Detective Kyle] Stringer noted that real officers do not wear ski masks.
Top Microsoft AI Boss Concerned AI Causing Psychosis in Otherwise Healthy People
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told British newspaper The Telegraph that "to many people," talking to a chatbot is a "highly compelling and very real interaction."
"Concerns around 'AI psychosis,' attachment and mental health are already growing," he added. "Some people reportedly believe their AI is God, or a fictional character, or fall in love with it to the point of absolute distraction."
Via Ian Rogers, who asks "Is this a bad thing? It sounds like a bad thing.". Ian also linked to A young woman’s final exchange with an AI chatbot
‘This Was Trauma by Simulation’: ChatGPT Users File Disturbing Mental Health Complaints — Gizmodo obtained consumer complaints to FTC through a FOIA request. Via the author, Matt Novak, who has a few more excerpts there.
Psychology Today: The Emerging Problem of "AI Psychosis". Via.
Derek Thompson: The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists
Lyle Solla-Yates @Lyle@cville.online
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management I recognize I am very old and the world is radically different today, but I cut my teeth late in the quality revolution when there was a consensus that businesses competed by providing the best customer experience possible so that it would be unthinkable to drop them, not based on AI spend. I find this market very upsetting and I look forward to the crash. #quality #AIBubble
Here's why: because you'd annoy the hell out of the restaurant. Just ask the beleaguered owners of the Montana eatery Stefanina's Wentzville, who are begging their customers to stop using Google's infamously shambolic AI Overviews to check up on its specials, First Alert 4 reports.
"Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website," the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post. "Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees."
Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code
“One of the most surprising findings was a significant shift in developer preferences for AI compared to previous years, while most developers use AI, they like it less and trust it less this year,” Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst for Market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow, told VentureBeat. “This response is surprising because with all of the investment in and focus on AI in tech news, I would expect that the trust would grow as the technology gets better.”
Victoria Song: AI doesn't belong in journaling (subscription, ya can get the gist from the headline and the first paragraph). From here by way of here.
localghost: This website is for humans.
I'd much rather people read the whole thing, take it in, digest it and have opinions right back at me. I love it when people connect with what I’m writing (and sometimes they email me to tell me that, which is really delightful).
Top AI models fail spectacularly when faced with slightly altered medical questions
Artificial intelligence systems often perform impressively on standardized medical exams—but new research suggests these test scores may be misleading. A study published in JAMA Network Open indicates that large language models, or LLMs, might not actually “reason” through clinical questions. Instead, they seem to rely heavily on recognizing familiar answer patterns. When those patterns were slightly altered, the models’ performance dropped significantly—sometimes by more than half.
You don't fucking say. Really? Via
Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says. Via.
The Onion: Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI
David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run
the devil has plenty of advocates already and they're much better paid
Cheryl Rofer @cherylrofer.bsky.social
Prompt engineering is knowing the correct answer and trying to get the chatbot to produce it.
Lauren Weinstein @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org
My sense is that Big Tech is increasingly realizing that they've bought into a gigantic fail with LLM generative AI systems, but they don't dare admit it because they realize they could instantly tank the stock market and their own firms. So they just keep playing along as if everything is great, and desperately hope that something will happen to save them before they roll right off the cliff and straight into Hell, dragging the rest of us along too. Though they don't care about that last part.
Jeffrey Harlan @Harlander@writing.exchange
I'm dying here. Just had a customer come in, asking where his drink was. We never got any mobile orders for him.
"I asked ChatGPT to order it for me and it said I could pick it up."
Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io
I want us to be at the point where "Were you exposed to AI brainrot in the workplace? You may be entitled to compensation" ads by lawyers are filling all the top ad slots.
improper ideologue @thedansimonson@lingo.lol
OpenAI is gonna get desperate and the “innovation” is gonna be to insert advertising into the model, to the point where you can’t tell it’s advertising.
That’s how we get to “it’s what plants crave.”
Brave: Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet, in which the Brave browser folks create a Reddit prompt injection that causes the Comet browser to log into Gmail and send the login one time password to the malicious Reddit user.
Archive.org link by way of David Gerard who observes:
I am annoyed this was found by Brave, who can fuck off, but due credit...
We built and tested three scenarios, from a fake Walmart store and a real in-the-wild Wells Fargo phishing site to PromptFix - our AI-era take on the ClickFix scam that hides prompt injection inside a fake captcha to directly take control of a victim’s AI Agent. The results reveal an attack surface far wider than anything we’ve faced before, where breaking one AI model could mean compromising millions of users simultaneously.
Via Kevin Beaumont and Bruce Sterling and Baldur Bjarnason and ByteVagabond @bytevagabond.com
Sunday August 24th, 2025
Today I bombed out of Timdl because I didn't know about China's Grand Canal... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
Giggling over the notion of a "virgin White Russian", but then I guess that's basically what Starbucks serves...
Saturday August 23rd, 2025
Another view of the northern bench
Bench, with people
Another bench.
Oh look, more benches! The Beautify Petaluma folks coordinated on these.
On today's Timdle, I totally missed Sao Paolo's founding vs Toyotomi Hideyoshi dying, but can't believe that I flubbed the end of South African Apartheid vs the founding of Chipotle...
Pondering the difference between asking AI for artistic output, and Jeff Koons hiring an army of art serfs.
A few incidents are making me think that when a company advertises themselves as "Diamond Certified" it's a big fucking red flag.
Not the least of which is how much of my time that organization wastes in the process of handling a complaint.
Friday August 22nd, 2025
Bob Clark, vice president of marketing for Herr Foods, Inc., said the company was surprised to see its chips mentioned in the press.
“While we can’t speak to the details of the story,” he said, “we can confirm that our Sour Cream & Onion flavor is money.”
This means an adversary can hide instructions in regular text, but also have the LLM create responses containing text that his hidden to the user as Kai tweeted.
And to state the obvious, such hidden instructions can be on websites, pdf documents, databases, or even inside GPTs (yes, I already built one of these).
I grew up on raw milk, I have all sorts of issues around the community, my health beliefs, all of that stuff, it does me good to look at the numbers occasionally, especially as consumption of it is seeing a resurgence: Outbreak-Related Disease Burden Associated with Consumption of Unpasteurized Cow’s Milk and Cheese, United States, 2009–2014
https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2306.151603
From Elf Sternberg linking to Groveling MTG Goes All In on Raw Milk to Cozy Up to RFK Jr. and the MAGA Elites
Thursday August 21st, 2025
Blood in the Machine: AI Killed My Job: Translators
Machine translation hasn't even improved. There was no big OpenAI moment. I'm starting to suspect it's an unhappy coincidence of sunk costs and economic downturn forcing us all down this path. And you know what? I started learning to code—needed something to do after all. And ChatGPT and Claude started off as amazing helpful tools. Then at some point you've got the basics down and you're trying to do marginally more complex things—and you notice how quickly they lose track and fall apart, how needlessly complicated their solutions are, how your entire architecture turns into a mess of barely-functional spaghetti. Does this stuff work *anywhere*? My IT friends complain about being forced to use whatever hot new AI tool, and their companies stopped hiring junior positions. My own industry seems broken. After sending this mail, I'll have to do some tedious, underpaid post-editing. I'll hate it. Whoever will have to actually use the documents will hate it.
A thing I'm noticing is people putting together demos of things they don't understand. Use cases that nobody who's actually in that field would ever use. I think this is all further indication that we've elevated a class of people who don't do into decision-making, and the fact that they confuse language models with mental models also means they are completely out of touch with their customer base and use cases.
He's dead. Good. Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson dies at 89
In today's https://www.timdle.com/daily, I had no idea that the "running machine" bicycle was that late (but the relative dates were easy), and made a lucky guess on the typewriter vs the Polish January Uprising.
I have been switching back and forth between C++ and Objective-C, which means that I can add mixing up std::cout and .count to my list of things my fingers typed when I wasn't looking...
Wednesday August 20th, 2025
WTF is this? MashDigi is giving this word salad, the headline suggests "Chromebook sales will reach 2023 million units in 1700". Can't tell if this is a machine translation error, or just malicious prose.
It's been pretty obvious for quite a while that money isn't, in fact, what drives most companies. From obvious inefficiencies in processes to employee relationships, it's clear that maintaining various social norms and fictions are far more important than "the almighty dollar".
Another example: mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social
One thing that I want to mention, true in 2023 and just as true in 2025: the number of corporations I’ve seen making a point to say that their HVAC systems have been upgraded, that they’ve been working to make collaboration safe in their spaces during this whole RTO push, has been zero. It has been exactly zero.
Compared to the cost of a single employee getting sick this shit is basically free. It is cheaper than toilet paper or soda. But somehow.
I'm just gonna turn to dust and blow away here... BBC: Scotland's first skatepark to be dug up by archeologists
However, concern about maintenance costs and safety led to the park's closure and then burial in 1983, just five years after opening.
Fuckin' CEQA, man: Judge rules against environmentalists in lawsuit over Caltrans’ I-80 project
Alameda Superior Court Judge Michael M. Markman filed an order on Aug. 13 saying that although adding lanes to highways usually fails in the long-term, Caltrans had fulfilled its obligations under CEQA.
Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
A programming language so powerful that it use variables of type Charactest & Integest.
CNN posted this video with the caption:
Influencers Nina Santiago and Patrick Blackwood were filming a food review at a Houston restaurant when an SUV smashed through the windows.
I saw it from Peter Beadle's observation that
Folks are terrified of the NYC subway, think DC is a gang ridden hellscape and have other often irrational fears, but here's the truth, other than disease or an abusive partner with a gun, you're most likely to be killed by a reckless driver, and we barely acknowledge it's a problem.
Tuesday August 19th, 2025
🆇00001 @X00001@masto.hackers.town
"Hey, have you heard about the creator you like? Apparently, they also post 🔞 content. Isn’t that a bit strange? I mean, we should probably keep this space-“
No, I don’t think so. I’ve booked a front-row seat to the devil’s sacrament, and you’re blocking my view. Just go back to the 1660 New England hole you just crawled out of and eat barley for a week to atone for your sins or whatever.
Romance? Reviews! @HornyShitposts@thicc.horse
@X00001 "isn't that a bit strange?" no fam, some of the earliest art to survive to this day is sexual in nature and the majority of adults are not asexual, so having given the matter due thought *no.*
Our use of oversized wires for everything in the house, and sticking with our old simple ClipperCreek charger, seems like a smart decision right now: The EV Charger Hack That Can Burn Down Your House Just Got More Terrifying
The YouTube video seems to suggest that your load needs to be able to pull extreme amounts of current too, I'm not sure that most cars will do that, given that the EVs we've had haven't been able to pull that much power. So kinda seems like a "several things have to fail, or someone has to be on-site" exploit.
Al Sweigart @AlSweigart@mastodon.social
OH:
"give us huge $ investment, and when we make AGI, the AGI will know how to give you huge returns."
Tech bros love reinventing trains, and buses, and even Pascal's Wager. Now they're reinventing the prosperity gospel.
The Onion: Heroin Overdose Serves As Wake-Up Call To Keep Doing Heroin But Smarter
Or "if you change the prompt, the AI will give you better results".
When I dropped out of college, I spent hundreds of dollars (thousands in modern dollars) on software books, voraciously reading everything, and I remember reading this line from Weizenbaum on how people adapted to Eliza, and it's worth repeating now:
Thomas 🔭🕹️ @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
―Joseph Weizenbaum
notorious rgb @rgb@cathode.church reminds us of the '90s and a product that I vaguely remember, but less so than Racter:
Do you think if I show an investor a copy of dr sbaitso from the 90s and claim its an LLM they will give me millions of dollars?
https://classicreload.com/play/dr-sbaitso.html
Expanding on yesterday's link that included 'botlickers' and 'Slopholm Syndrome', Erik Uden has a list of slurs for AI users.
Vendor is pushing webinars about "IgniteAI" and I can't attend because can't trust myself not to ask about burning it all to the water-line.
Greg Wilson @gvwilson@mastodon.social
in March 2025, the CEO of Anthropic said that AI would be writing 90% of code within six months, so, um, look forward to a really big announcement in the next four weeks?
Business Insider · Mar 13 — Anthropic CEO: AI will be writing 90% of code in 3 to 6 months
University of Guelph: AI Chatbots Are Giving Away Your Company’s Data, in which Dr. Ali Dehghantanha, Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at the University of Guelph, is retained for a little data exfiltration, and demonstrates it.
Duh of the morning:
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
The Register: AI + ML — GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40 billion on fire
"The GenAI Divide is starkest in deployment rates, only 5 percent of custom enterprise AI tools reach production," the report says. "Chatbots succeed because they're easy to try and flexible, but fail in critical workflows due to lack of memory and customization."
I'm trying to find a PDF of the actual report, everyone seems to be republishing the same Fortune article, which I got to via Kevin Beaumont.
And while I'm clearing tabs, The Atlantic: AI is a mass delusion event (gift link courtesy of Felix Stalder) which observes that:
It seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service.
Which pairs with my observation that GenAI interaction patterns have a lot in common with developmentally disabled adults. And in that, I've gone from suggesting that AI fans don't spend enough time interacting with developmentally disabled adults to recognize those patterns, to thinking that maybe the problem is that it's a peer group.
Edit: the NANADA report on the Wayback Machine, courtesy of Ed Zitron: How to argue with an AI booster.