Saturday July 12th, 2025
Dept of "No Shit", # too high to count: AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds
Stanford Report: New study warns of risks in AI mental health tools
Haven't had an application where I needed to account for lens distortion and chromatic abberation and whatnot in a long time, but this is cool: Node Mill LensNode — DaVinci Resolve plugin for macOS and Windows
Fast, fun and accurate emulation of real-world lens characteristics.
Fully GPU powered, it's simple to use and quick to apply.
Get creative, get technical, and tinker as much as you want.
...a pleasant rascal @Nead@vivaldi.net
Please stop swallowing the AI pill. It is now officially a drug and unregulated.
United Farm Workers @ufw.bsky.social
UPDATE: we tragically can confirm that a farm worker has died of injuries they sustained as a result of yesterday’s immigration enforcement action.
As The Serfs (youtube.com/theserfstv) @theserfstv.bsky.social said:
If this was reported on in any other country headline would be like:
Masked Paramilitary Unit Unlawfully Slaughters Innocent Civilian As Authoritarian Crackdown Pushes Crumbling Empire Closer To Complete Dictatorship
Friday July 11th, 2025
Why "chain of custody" discussions and disclosure around evidence are super super important: Wired: Metadata Shows the FBI’s ‘Raw’ Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Was Likely Modified
There is no evidence the footage was deceptively manipulated, but ambiguities around how the video was processed may further fuel conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death.
Elisa Weber owns downtown bakery Della Fattoria, Nancy Leoni owns downtown culinary wares shop iLeoni, and Naomi Crawford owns downtown restaurant Lunchette and is an Argus-Courier food columnist.
I appreciate that, in the face of calls for boycotts and general hostility and abuse, these downtown business owners are willing to step forward.
Big challenge in today's Timdle for me was the timing of canning.
Got some jicama with the leaves still on it from Lola's, and... yeah, that's the way I'm buying jicama in the future. Love that I'm being exposed to not just new produce, but better versions of existing produce.
And now I need to learn Spanish to communicate with the cashiers.
Yowzers. I've been trying to buy through companies that have retail presences in my town. Petco really doesn't want my money. Their site doesn't work with Firefox, they list a product that may or may not be the one that I want, even the online version doesn't have it in stock...
Thursday July 10th, 2025
Look, I know that this week we've had three "once-in-a-lifetime" weather events, but with 8.2B people and a 73.5 year life expectancy, we should be experiencing over 300k "once-in-a-lifetime" events per day, right?
Okay, now I'm beginning to see some of the idioms that make Rust really cool: An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it (and Rust is here too).
In particular, the function that had the bug had 3 different sizes, a "logical" (user visible) size, a "physical" size (the size for the logical data after compression or other transforms) and the "allocated" size (physical plus metadata, checksums, etc), and got them confused.
The solution in Rust is to declare your types like struct PhysicalSize(u64); and use the .0 from them when you need the actual number, and... this is a really cool language feature and I need to write more Rust.
As AI adoption becomes more and more a religious behavior, including in/out group decisions based on professed belief, this Ask MeFi thread about ways to talk about AI with believers is fascinating and useful.
Wheee! Blocking Petaluma car violence advocates who came on to unrelated posts on my Facebook timeline with ad hominems. Way to convince me that I should roll over and leave Petaluma to the "real Petalumans", guys.
(I guess now that the hotel is in limbo they've gotta do *something* to feel heard.)
100%: Zeboyd Digital Entertainment @zeboydgames.bsky.social
If "AI" was as valuable as they say it is, they wouldn't be selling it to you. They'd be using it themselves in secret to make the next Minecraft, the next Avatar, the next Hello Kitty and then they'd sell that to you.
They're trying to sell you a sick goose, while pretending it lays golden eggs.
Which Iron Spike @ironspike.bsky.social quote posted with:
This is put so well.
There are absolutely parallels with cryptobros screaming at you about the impending death of fiat currency.
"Hyperinflation! Great Depression 2.0! Government collapse!!! Your stupid paper money will be worthless, soon! SOOOON!
...
Best to just give it all to me now!"
Zeboyd Digital Entertainment
Not exactly news, it's what ... everyone? ... well, a ton of people in my circles have been saying: Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
Core Result
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
The bait-and-switch has begun already. I'm kinda shocked. Pivot to AI: Cursor tries setting less money on fire — AI vibe coders outraged has the deets, basically the prices went up enough to make Cursor money (which is still a long way from making the actual language model folks money), including blowing off people who'd pre-paid for a year.
I guess Pat Gelsinger's prayer and fasting didn't work? Intel’s CEO, Lip-Bu Tan: ‘We are not in the top 10’ of leading chip companies.
Opinion: If they go off chasing Nvidia, when the AI crash happens it's gonna be really really bad for them.
The experiments on my blog with providing automatic Wayback Machine links have me thinking about archives and ways to manage resources. Because we can't continue to trust the cloud and centralization to the Internet Archive folks, and we need to be building knowledge structures that augment our recall and access outside of the SEO/AI slop that's flooding search engines.
Because I'm pretty sure we're gonna want this for Charlene's Intel MacBook Air shortly: Linux on Intel MacBook Air
Vanity Fair: “Wow, This Is So Gay”: An Oral History of But I’m a Cheerleader. Wow, I forgot that I saw this movie twice in the theater.
Seeing a lot of "We have to learn how to use AI", which... Brad L. @reyjrar@hachyderm.io
I'm witnessing professionals spending hours to engineer prompts for Copilot to do basic things like find a line in a file that has a string in it, or figure out who committed most frequently to a sub-path in a repository, or generate boiler plate code for classes.. None of these things require #AI. `grep`, `git log..`, and editor snippets have existed for a long time. They are quick. They are EXACT. They are FREE. They do not boil the oceans. They do not displace the workforce. They are more efficient and productive.
Learn the tools of your trade. If all you're doing is using AI, that means AI can and will replace you.
At the request of a reader, I've added a new feature. On the upper right of Flutterby pages, there's now an "Add Wayback Links" checkbox. If you check it, you'll get a little Internet Archive icon that's a link at the end of external links, to take you to the Wayback Machine for that link. It sets a little cookie (hopefully). Might be some wonkiness on it remembering the state and rendering from the state.
Additional ideas coming, I should probably try to get a notion of when the entry happened into the link, maybe I'll turn it on automagically for older links...
aei :neofox_upside_down: @aei@pleroma.envs.net
apple thought wirth's law was about to be beaten and they couldn't have that so they announced liquid glass, not to cripple their own devices, the iphone can handle rendering all that stuff, but to make every uncreative web developer and dumbheaded manager steal their designs and end up producing more webgl/svg/javascript nonsense as if modern commercial tech websites aren't utter garbage
Wednesday July 9th, 2025
So that whine about build systems stems from my working on getting SquareDesk running on Linux again. Since I had it running, Mike Pogue has gone and added a bunch of audio processing stuff using JUCE, which is great, except that when I did a cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=~/local/ I got a deep tree that requires additional include stuff for the header files, and I haven't figured out where the freakin' library is to tell the .pro file where to find it. So more digging.
Meanwhile, my neighbor is taking video of people running the new stop sign at Mission and Mountain View, and even with motion detection it takes a while to go back through the video and figure out where the video of the egregious offenders is, so I should write something that uses ffmpeg to decode to a raster, and either use the magic of OpenCV or, more likely, because the camera angles are such that detection is gonna be kinda weird, just watch two rectangles for changes above a threshold and output a timestamp when one triggers in close proximity to the other.
It has been a long time since I looked at alternate architectures for anything other than cost (eg: embedded), I haven't even done a lot of thinking about massively parallel stuff since my memory of RenderMan's shader language fell out of cache, but I'm finding Gray-in-Young: A Generational Garbage Collection for Processing-in-Memory's description of the UPMEM architecture (now owned by Qualcomm) fascinating.
A 32 bit RISC core with 24 hardware threads dispatched at least 11 cycles apart (which has some interesting saturation/full-utilization implications) with
... a 64-KB scratch pad memory (SPM), a 64-MB DRAM, and a 24-KB instruction memory.
So some really interesting system constraints...
Wow can Apple's "field editor" mechanism lead to some really strange bizarre behaviors... Just. Wow.
(In other news, I think I've finally managed a refresh to make it not disappear text in the NSTextField it was leaving, and by forcing a copy of its string, make it not duplicate text across fields.)
Gizmodo wins the headline: Polymarket Odds Favor ‘Nobody’ for the Next CEO of X, the Nazi Propaganda App
Linda Yaccarino announced she’s stepping down as the CEO of X on Wednesday morning, prompting X owner Elon Musk to respond with a terse “thank you for your contributions.” And while it comes just a day after Grok decided to go full Nazi, reporting from both NBC News and the New York Times suggests Yaccarino’s departure had already been in the works last week. Whatever the reason behind Yaccarino’s decision, the company needs a new CEO. And Polymarket is already taking bets.
Whoah. Great Blue Heron in Penry Park!
People talking about pushing more philosophy classes in college like Macaskill and Singer and Ord and Torres and so so many more aren't all part of that discipline within academia.
Ben Rosen @benrosen.bsky.social
1977: why would the bartender in star wars even care if some robots with artificial intelligence came into his bar
2025: ohhh ok
Twitter AI Grok Can’t Correctly Identify Movies (And It’s a Problem). What's most intriguing about this is how it makes up bullshit stories about how images are allegedly from one movie or another.
Okay, I kinda get why I have to go edit the fucking policy files every time I install ImageMagick to let me do anything at all with PDFs, but this bullshit is why I believe in jury nullification: #3242087 Arbitrary File Read via file:// Protocol in cURL. At least the official response is:
Per project policy for transparency, we want all reports disclosed and made public.
Listening to Wolf 359, I'm up around episode 35, and wow there's some uncomfortable memories of work dynamics under which I did some amazing work, and which I never want to be a part of ever again.
Ahrefs Study Finds No Evidence Google Penalizes AI Content
Ahrefs: AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (600,000 Pages Analyzed)
So, uh, yeah, Google either doesn't know or doesn't care. Which, frankly, we knew from SEO: Google chose to keep raising the content farm recipe sites to the fore.
Or Ahrefs' detector is b0rk3d, either is a possibility.
Stolen from mad scientist rizz🔞🎨 @labfreaker.bsky.social
The Urbanist: Governor Signs Washington’s First-in-the-Nation Shared Streets Law
You might be surprised to learn it is illegal for a city in Washington State to set a speed limit lower than 20 miles per hour, but it’s true. The top speed of many e-bikes is essentially the minimum speed limit for cars on any public street. However, starting on July 27th, that will change. Under Senate Bill 5595, signed on Saturday by Governor Bob Ferguson, Washington cities will have the legal authority to create a new type of street that features much lower speed limits and puts pedestrians first.
QFT: "There's a certain symmetry in build/automation systems being miserable. They are, after all, software used to make more software."
Sigh. It is a truth universally acknowledged that every framework creator will reimplement Make and linking, poorly.
In this case I'm porting a Qt app that uses Juce for audio processing.
Pre-ordering Carter Lavin's "If You Want To Win You've Got To Fight", because I've run into him in some circles and see what he's doing on the ground, and think I've got some lessons to learn from him.
https://islandpress.org/books/if-you-want-win-youve-got-fight
Tuesday July 8th, 2025
Melancholic Mediocrity @LibertyForward1@beige.party
"pardon me but do you have any grey poop on?"
"Why no, I changed my clothes after I left the aviary."
The results were striking. We found that ChatGPT made executives significantly more optimistic in their forecasts while peer discussions tended to encourage caution. Additionally, we found that the executives armed with ChatGPT made worse predictions, based on actual stock figures, than they had before they consulted the tool. In this article we share what we did, what we found, what explains it, and why it matters for any leader integrating AI into their decision-making process.
Via.
Two weeks of Wayback. Wayback is an X11 compatibility layer on top of the Wayland display system.
Candidate, kin marked dead on Mass. Dem database, seemingly by his rival, state Rep. Puppolo
WILBRAHAM — The man [Michael Lachenmeyer] set to run against state Rep. Angelo Puppolo, D-Springfield, claimed last week the incumbent marked him “deceased” on his party’s campaign-building website.
Kieron Gillen @kierongillen.bsky.social
I’m petrified about today’s science news. Genetically modifying crabs to have cheetah genes? This could go sideways fast.
How could this go wrong? Wired: People Are Using AI Chatbots to Guide Their Psychedelic Trips
Trey had struggled with alcoholism for 15 years, eventually drinking heavily each night before quitting in December. But staying sober was a struggle for the 36-year-old first responder from Atlanta, who did not wish to use his real name due to professional concerns.
Then he discovered Alterd, an AI-powered journaling app that invites users to “explore new dimensions” geared towards psychedelics and cannabis consumers, meditators, and alcohol drinkers. In April, using the app as a tripsitter—a term for someone who soberly watches over another while they trip on psychedelics to provide reassurance and support—he took a huge dose of 700 micrograms of LSD. (A typical recreational dose is considered to be 100 micrograms.)
Reddit /r/texas — We have floods all the time and small town politics
COMMISSIONER MOSER: I think -- I think this and that's what the committee is going to look at and how to do it. I think the going in position is that we don't need to change anything, and is there a need to improve what we have. And if there's a need to improve how much is improved. And what the options for doing that and what it would cost. And I think the first thing to do is say why change anything. It worked this long and maybe we don't need to do a thing. And then it gets into the thing we talk about earlier today, and that's risk mitigation. And you know there's still people drowned and you know --
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: And I hope you ask the question like who are we notifying, or who are we trying to get the message to? Are they these crazy people from Houston that build homes right down on the water?
Basically, if you're not a local in the phone tree, they don't give a shit.
Via Dreamboat Annie @soulwithoutaking.bsky.social who notes:
They really do explicitly say—several times—that they are specifically not interested in warning "the crazy people", the people from Houston that build houses right on the river, the people they don't know, the people who aren't part of the phone tree: they explicitly don't want those people warned.
Monday July 7th, 2025
Two "is it satire or not?"
The Onion: Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident. The article is full of "haha only serious".
The Hard Times: Infant Annihilator Change Name to Avoid Association with Israel. The English-American deathcore band now has an opportunity to... uh... huh.
Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists. The Soundslice sheet music scanner folks were getting weird requests because ChatGPT was generating its own tablature format, so they made it understand that format.
Everyone talking about how LLMs let them whip up apps super quickly, but that nobody understands and that are filled with security holes: We already had that. It was called Perl.
two and a half decades ago, I was part of a team writing a "web scale" distributed database that was going to handle a staggering single digit number number of millions of requests per day (tens of requests per second). Over the years, I've wondered about all of these web frameworks that integrate a server into the web application, that make some data persistence issues easier, but require a sh*load of RAM and complexity in configuring reverse proxies and all sorts of other stuff.
So when I recently looked at my logs and discovered that, on my couple of euros a month cheap host, serving pages from PostgreSQL via Perl invoked with FastCGI, a single IP address was getting served 30 pages a second, and that the site was serving a hell of a lot more than that, I kinda had some of my "meh, web apps don't need to be that complex" vibes confirmed
Anyway: Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin.
Stop over-engineering shit that doesn't need to be overengineered.
NPR: Here's a timeline of the catastrophic Texas floods.
Quick action by Texas summer camp led to timely evacuations ahead of flood
Despite an absence of warning by local authorities, [Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly] camp officials acted quickly on their own, relocating about 70 children and adults staying overnight in a building near the river. With the kids safe, camp leaders including President and CEO Tim Huchton were able to avoid the catastrophe that hit at least one other camp near Hunt, where the 500-acre Mo-Ranch is located.
Via Mike Ely @bluesky.taupehat.com, who noted:
This is why you never wait for an official warning or order. If things look bad, go. Worst outcome of that is a little inconvenience if nothing ends up happening. Far better than the alternative. Same with the fires we have here.
ADD / XOR / ROL — A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. Statements such as "an AI agent could become an insider threat so it needs monitoring" are simultaneously unsurprising (you have a randomized sequence generator fed into your shell, literally anything can happen!) and baffling (you talk as if you believe the dice you play with had a mind of their own and could decide to conspire against you).
Of course that view is carefully curated by a continuous barrage of articles about how the AIs are plotting against us or will consider blackmail or whatever. (Via)
Futurism: Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes — Oopsie. is a riff and rewrite of BBC: 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'
Is Warner worried about the impact of AI, if – as expected – it rapidly improves?
"Yes and no," she says. "While it seems like a quick and inexpensive option, AI rarely takes into account unique brand identity, target demographics, or conversion-focused design. As a result, much of the output looks generic and can actually damage the brand's reputation or effectiveness."
This is really good: The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history.
Via.
Nikkei Asia: 'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers
Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries -- including Japan, South Korea and China -- contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found.
(Via)
Careful what's in your code editor, the "can you trust that random package" comes to AI editor plugins: Malware in Open VSX: These Vibes Are Off.
I looked at a single extension Solidity Language by "SolidityAI" (namespace
solidityai.solidity). Analysis of Open VSX-based extensions was just added to Secure Annex, so I looked it up. Immediately, I saw a URLhxxps://angelic[.]su/files/1.txt.
(Via)
GremLLM, a Python object that hallucinates method implementations for you:
A slight upgrade to the Gremlins in your code, we hereby present GREMLLM. This utility class can be used for a variety of purposes. Uhm. Also please don't use this and if you do please tell me because WOW. Or maybe don't tell me. Or do.
... is a Python library that automatically generates code on-the-fly using OpenAI's API. When you try to import a module or function that doesn't exist, AutoGenLib creates it for you based on a high-level description of what you need.
From the thread, Kevin Marks described this as:
Throwing two by fours at the table saw from across the room and hoping for furniture?
And Charles @charles.capps.me wrote:
WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?!
This is somewhere between amazingly cool and a war crime.
Home from a fun weekend at Hitchike Across The Galaxy, the 42nd convention of the International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs (IAGSDC) with about 900 of our closest friends. We dressed relatively conservatively for the banquet this year.
Saturday July 5th, 2025
At IAGSDC: Two A2 mirror tips dancing to Geo Jedlicka. And I think that, except for Swap Around and the Right And Left Grand, those have been the smoothest squares I've danced with so far.
Friday July 4th, 2025
"I need you people to pay attention or the Fire Marshall is gonna kick us out."
At the Gay (square dance) Callers Association annual meeting, someone was praising Allan Hurst's efforts in pulling students into caller school, described him as "good at recruiting", and... uh... cough.
Thursday July 3rd, 2025
Holy shit. With the state of public transit payments, it's a freaking wonder anyone rides. I am hanging so much trouble with the fucking Clipper app today, and don't really want to wait for the 67 people ahead of me in the phone queue. #ClipperCard
I realize I'm ragging on LLMs a lot this morning, and I want to make it clear that it's mostly because I used Gemini for programming yesterday.
And, sure, I now understand the Google Sheets runtime way way better than I did thanks to following all of those dead-ends that I wouldn't have thought to pursue otherwise, but...
It reinforces the notion that I've heard several times recently that "AI" programming assistants work better when you believe in them.
Why is left as an exercise...
Giving up programming because of the advent of LLMs is like giving up woodworking because Harbor Freight introduced a line of guard-less radial arm saws.
This morning's "holy shit, I hope you fuckers are condemned to eternity trying to accomplish the most basic tasks with your IT workflows, but that's too harsh to wish on anyone" go out to the Marriott Bonvoy and ClipperCard Android apps and email processes.
The "Flowmaster is muh heritage, complaining about exhaust noise is hate speech" crowd seems to have gone to "'slow down' signs are a distraction, making me pay attention to stop signs is bad for safety."
(Statements only slightly exaggerated for effect.)
Pretty sure "Assault" here means "didn't manage to dodge an officer's fist". TechDirt: Assaults On ICE Officers Are Up 700%… Which Just Means There Have Been 69 More Assaults Than Last Year
Wednesday July 2nd, 2025
Wow. So I installed the Gemini CLI on my work computer, 'cause work is all in on this stuff, and asked it for some help with Google stuff, 'cause their documentation does not match their tools, and... I am not sure what additional information beyond my prompt is being sent, but the responses indicate that this is a *fantastic* way to leak data to Google, and if you care about keeping anything on your machine from Google you should carefully understand what, beyond the prompt, it's sending.
You know what I fucking love? When the Google documentation for writing Sheets custom functions doesn't match what buttons the Apps Script editor is showing me. That's what I fucking love.
Slack just popped this threat to "Unlock AI for 50% off" in a group that's been migrating to Signal. Which... if their goal is to kick the people who'd set up free social spaces off, this is useful.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, group admins are fighting the Meta spam bot pretty hard.
According to Gartner, many agents are fiction without the science. "Many vendors are contributing to the hype by engaging in 'agent washing' – the rebranding of existing products, such as AI assistants, robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots, without substantial agentic capabilities," the firm says. "Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real."
Which, if course, duh, but mostly this is about TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks
We build a self-contained environment with internal web sites and data that mimics a small software company environment, and create a variety of tasks that may be performed by workers in such a company. We test baseline agents powered by both closed API-based and open-weights language models (LMs), and find that the most competitive agent can complete 30% of tasks autonomously. This paints a nuanced picture on task automation with LM agents--in a setting simulating a real workplace, a good portion of simpler tasks could be solved autonomously, but more difficult long-horizon tasks are still beyond the reach of current systems. We release code, data, environment, and experiments on this https URL.
Ya know, I don't so much mind that there are thousands of requests for non-existent .php files in my blog web server logs, it's that they come from so many different IP addresses.
Honestly, people, either I have an unsecured wp-login.php or I don't, and the first person who gets there is gonna patch the hole. It's wasted effort.