Thursday October 9th, 2025
Yay. Migration of AllemandeLeft.com to Hetzner's Level 4 hosting complete, with the application of
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [L]
in the .htaccess file.
Next up, figure out how to get some of the edges of Flutterby.net on there.
Wednesday October 8th, 2025
The Register: Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth
AP: Is there an AI bubble? Financial institutions sound a warning
Bank of England: Financial Policy Committee Record – October 2025
On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI). This, when combined with increasing concentration within market indices, leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.
Eenteresting. Google Pixel 7 phone. CC app wants fingerprint enabled, so I flipped it upside down and used a non-standard finger, to force fallback to a code.
Latest Android update is doing more fingerprint recognition, I just flipped my thumb up the screen to start code entry, and it unlocked.
Hive mind: I have XLR line output. I need XLR mic input. How many dB do I need to attenuate?
Tuesday October 7th, 2025
Foiled by the release of the game Twister in today's Timdle...
New York City Bar Association: Unlawful Attacks on Venezuelan Vessels.
I mean, we seem to have moved on to a post-law/justice era, but some day when the reckoning comes, I'd like to see charges laid for these abuses too.
Oh, that's interesting. That assault on the apartment building in Chicago is looking more and more like an eviction proceeding. Destroy enough of the building that you drive out the residents, don't do so much damage that it can't be quickly and easily gentrified... Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children
The building was purchased by Wisconsin-based investor Trinity Flood in January 2020, according to Cook County records. On October 1, the day after the raid, a judge reviewed an emergency motion from Wells Fargo seeking to appoint Matthew Tarshis of Frontline Real Estate Partners as the property’s receiver.
"It's language input, so we don't need to codify those things, we just need to give the LLM the tools to..."
Uhhhh... Huh.
I have a couple of personal projects I'd like to hack together, but I'm kinda stuck because I want to move my own skills forward as I do it. Python is a fucking dependency and performance nightmare, ECMAScript involves package managers, Rust is "what if we made the code endlessly complex because you need to manually manage arenas", and I'm quickly back to choosing between C++ and Perl, and that's just solving my problem, not actually learning anything.
Unintentionally appropriate typo of the moment "YouRube".
Referring to the sorts of video links that distance acquaintances on social media DM.
You don't say? Attorney for woman shot by Border Patrol claims officer said 'Do something b----' before shooting
Body-camera video appears to contradict the government’s claim that Marimar Martinez, 30, drove toward officers before one of them opened fire at her late Saturday morning in Brighton Park, her attorney claimed. A judge ordered Martinez and a co-defendant released pending trial.
Also: "collateral arrests"? Kidnapping.
And as a Centrally Planned Economy comes into play (thinking particularly of soybeans and China, but lots of examples), we should be thinnking of the invasions of Chicago and Portland like the 1956 invasion of Hungary or '68 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Monday October 6th, 2025
A friend likened LLMs treating "any retrieved piece of information on a topic / triggered by a prompt as equally valuable and truthful, to the "normalize" feature of DAW software, wherein every sound in a track is adjusted to have equal amplitude, resulting in a bewildering, psychotic-seeming soundscape."
The language of the latter 2020s will be akin to drums of the 1980s, the equalizer kicked up high, every paragraph hitting with the intensity of the Phil Collins fill in "In The Air Tonight".
Man buys used Tesla only to discover it's banned from Supercharger network
A Tesla representative told him on the phone and later in an email that "the car is currently unsupported for supercharging and warranties are voided due to salvaged vehicle."
"I was told it was clean. The CARFAX said it was clean, and I trusted that," he said.
Danny O'B @danny@mastodon.spesh.com
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for ^G
Lili Saintcrow @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com
I do not want that stupid app.
It’s spyware-bloated, full of crap.
I want appliances that work,
without tattling to some techbro jerk.
I’m sick of “AI” garbage-spew,
Sick of silo’d platforms too.
To analog I shall return,
and wait for all this mess to burn.
Eeenteresting. Feels like this OpenAI/AMD deal could be the "AOL buys Time Warner" moment of the LLM bubble, maybe?
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/t...ip-supply-deal-openai-rcna235860
Watching Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Richard Stutton — Father of Reinforcement Learning things LLMs are a dead end (Transcript), and within the first 10 minutes we see Patel falling into the "reasoning" trap, and the "Math Olympiad" trap.
Oh, cool, and now we're getting into modes of learning, and they're talking about how formal schooling is different from how humans learn(!). "I don't think learning is about training, I think learning about learning, it's an active process."
"Why are you trying to distinguish humans? Humans are animals, what we have in common is much more interesting."
Lots of good stuff in here. I love his pushback against human exceptionalism, though I'm particularly primed to that because of my childhood experience with Anthroposophy.
Some "AI" generated video that shows "Sam Altman" shoplifting, interesting because it reiterates how chain of custody in evidence is gonna become much more important, but also because there's gotta be a bunch of Target surveillance footage in their training dataset. https://bsky.app/profile/abeba.bsky.social/post/3m2jmygnp4k2v
Thinking about how the tasks that people who praise AI as coding helpers are doing might be better served by more expressive (and indeed consistent) languages.
Sunday October 5th, 2025
Yet another LinkedIn message for the Boardsi scam reminds me of how much we've lost with the destruction of email. We used to have strong filtering. On systems we controlled. With the ability to do automated send and receive.
Yesterday I went to a Catholic funeral, my first time attending a service in that sect. This morning I walk by St Vincent de Paul and there are food vendors and the churros truck has "come to sin" painted in the side, and... I'm tempted.
Saw a "Hoonigan" sticker on a Prius. Still trying to unpack that.
Over to Vallejo today for Steve Meyers' funeral, and ran across a number of Android update issues while setting in-car entertainment, and...
I will be glad when we get Personal Computing back. This "everything is in service of selling cloud services that dictate your media consumption" things sucks.
Saturday October 4th, 2025
Seeing a number of posts claiming as fact details about the second autopsy of Trey Reed that have not actually been released.
Speculation and misinformation do not serve us.
/news/crime/second-autopsy-on-trey-reed-not-yet-released-new-cause-of-death-claims-spread-online/ar-AA1NOM3k
Friday October 3rd, 2025
Every once in a while, Cory Doctorow really nails a phrase. The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh.
AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations
Saved off here because I've been writing this same sentiment in a few places recently. In this latest case, a friend who commented that "AI" spending was gonna be $400B this year.
So depending on how you allocate money to what, LLMs have sucked up $1.5-2T since 2018. Current revenues are, very roughly, about $60B/year, at huge operating losses. If we figure that investment should have, I dunno, call it 5% return? So even without making up for lost time, after 7 years ya kinda think there'd need to be $75-100B in profit, not just revenue.
And, sure, it's a moon shot, Kennedy gave his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech September of '62, Apollo 11 landed July of '69 (oh, look, 7 years), but the whole LLM approach feels very much like it's running out of steam.
And AI hardware depreciates like no other purchase, and it's gonna be hard to re-purpose data centers for something useful.
Sure, there's a lot of really cool stuff coming out of neural net research, some of the stuff that's happening in image recognition is extremely cool, but... The crash is gonna suuuuuuuck. Like the US in the 1890s in the levels of suck.
I need to make a browser plug-in so that I can just type in the bill identifier (eg: SB 79, SB 59, SB 418, SB 497, AB 82, and AB 1084) and it sets me up for a "pro" comment with the appropriate pulldown selection and all from https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/
Not sure how we're gonna get this genie back in the bottle. Back in 2022, Nature Machine Intelligence: Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery (subscription only, sigh) pointed out that you could take the models being used for drug discovery and ask them for negative outcomes, and get nasty neurotoxins.
Science: Made to order bioweapon? AI-designed toxins slip through safety checks used by companies selling genes. You can mail order them!
Automatic, private, open-source face redaction web app, using the YOLOV5 neural network object detection framework in the web browser.
Thursday October 2nd, 2025
Just in case you missed it, though I'm sure this is gonna become commonplace.
ICE agents raid South Shore apartments; Trump says Chicago could become military training ground
Doesn't seem to be any notion of a warrant. Kinda seems like the landlord was looking for an excuse to redevelop.
What in the incel ick? Tyler Cowen — My Favorite Actress Is Not Human is subtitled:
Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That’s because she’s AI.
Emphasis mine. Eeeew.
No, really, eeeeeew.
If you want a few pleasant moments on a charming small planet with a look that, to me, evokes Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, delivering messages and exploring the lives of the people who live there, may I recommend https://messenger.abeto.co
Oh cool, looks like MacOS 26.0.1 fixed the 26.0.0 USB throughput issue that was hosing frame rate on my external webcam.
Yeah, I had no clue about the founding of the Gupta Empire in today's Timdle...
‘Emergency’ World Naked Bike Ride planned in Portland
e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online
this is basically portland's version of a haka
I'm experimenting. AllemandeLeft.com is now hosted on Hetzner's Level 4 hosting, which I *thought* gave me additional domains, but is maybe just subdomains? Might drop back to Level 1
It's not on my Flutterby.com server.
This is mostly an experiment to see if I can have them do mail hosting.
I have for years thought nothing of the Apple warning that pops up for browsers sometimes, allow Chrome (or whatever) to discover devices on local networks.
I'm developing an app that uses MacOS WKWebView. First time I saw that permissions request was when loading Facebook. What's it looking for?
Wednesday October 1st, 2025
Just forcing an update.
Just forcing an update.
Incidents like this lead to me learning things about my backups. Think I'm kinda recovered. Probably lost a few one-off images. The separator looks like it needs fixing.
There are some changes to the CMS code that I apparently lost some of. Vivaldi is downloading my index file (everything else is viewing it fine).
Welp, I inadvertantly did an rm -rf, holler if anything seems obviously missing from here, searching for my backups now...
I'm looking at Hetzner's shared webhosting product (and would like to recommend it
to a few other people), both for static web hosting and for email, but apparently it's not
possible to host a .com or .net domain there, even if you have DNS with another provider?
Anyone figured this out?
Edit: Never mind, figured it out.
We find that MBA students implement substantially more unequal earnings distributions than the average American, regardless of whether inequality stems from luck or merit. Their redistributive choices are also highly responsive to efficiency costs, with an effect that is an order of magnitude larger than that found in representative U.S. samples. Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population.
Via.
Okay, this is kinda interesting. Grant Gould @nonnihil@hachyderm.io posted that his company is looking for an educational non- profit or school to take a donation of UR-3 robot arms.
So I type "UR-3 robot arm" into Vivaldi's address bar, it takes me to the Startpage search, which has as its top sponsored link Vention.io selling them for $33,011.
I wonder if Google gives me different results, so I hit there, and the top sponsored result is the same link, but titled "Universal Robots UR3e - $38,363 USD".
Huh. Anyway, clicking through gives me the same $33k.
The actual product page appears to be Universal Robots UR3e. It's got a 3kg payload. It looks like the stock version doesn't have a gripper.
It's great that companies like Physical Intelligence (π), are training robots to fold laundry, but it's gonna be a while before I shell out for two of these, plus hands, on a mobile base, to fold my underwear.
I mean, you don't actually own your phone, especially with Google going after F- Droid, but they're also scanning your content for nudity. Google's Android System SafetyCore scans your photos for 'sensitive content' - how to disable it
I like this framing: Liz Dye: SCOTUS Blessed "Kavanaugh Stops." Will They Also Give Thumbs Up To "Roberts Residencies?" Maybe Barrett Bookings? Alito Arrests? Gorsuch Guest Passes?
On September 8, the Supreme Court effectively legalized racial profiling. Naturally, they did it on the shadow docket, in a one-paragraph order <span> in which five of the six conservative justices voted to stay a trial judge’s order “pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” So far, so blahblahblah. But Justice Kavanaugh, likely stinging from criticism of the Supreme Court’s unexplained shadow docket rulings, took it upon himself to explain that the conservative justices are very definitely greenlighting racial profiling
Via which quote skeeted P. Andrew Torrez @andrewtorrez.bsky.social.
Moment of hesitation while I tried to figure out if the Macarena craze happened before or after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, but 100% on today's Timdle!
Wow. Saw that there were two hang gliding related fatalities at Lookout Mountain Flight Park, near Chattanooga, today. Went to look for news, not much out there, but Startpage's news tab has more info right now than Google's.
The tide of search may be shifting.
Tuesday September 30th, 2025
Rather than the awful tree-layered GUI experience that is QT's MaintenanceTool.app, it sure would be nice if there were a command-line "install whatever your name for the module identified by 'webenginewidgets' is" tool.
Sometimes it takes a great cover to pull me in to a long read. This one is worth it.
Trump has pardons and tanks.... What do you have?
Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,
Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.
Together, We the People of the United States -- you and me -- have our magnificent Constitution.
Here's how that works out in a specific case --
https://storage.courtlistener....82460/gov.uscourts.mad.282460.26 1.0.pdf
Judge Young is on fire:
"And there’s the issue of masks. This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by Öztürk’s captors for maskingup and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. ICE goes masked for a single reason - - to terrorize Americans into quiescence."
Oh, good, pulling the open source project i work on I see that someone has added the QT "webenginewidgets" component.
Now I have to figure out WTF that's called in the Qt Maintenance Tool.
This is why I love software development. Not.
Local climate & active transportation activist has just discovered AI, and the cognitive dissonance is great with this one.
NBC, August 26, 2025: The CDC quietly scaled back a surveillance program for foodborne illnesses
CDC, September 26, 2025: Listeria Outbreak Linked to Prepared Meals
Frozen meals from Walmart and Trader Joe's leave 4 dead and 19 hospitalized
The CDC is warning consumers to check their fridges as two ready-to-eat pasta meals sold at Walmart, Kroger, and Trader Joe's locations nationwide have been recalled due to Listeria contamination.
Via Emma Evans @trance.bsky.social and rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social
I mentioned that Firefox's AI/make the system harder to configure/don't fix bugs thing drove me away, and the thing I miss about that rendering engine is "show selection source".
The Chromium-based ones don't seem to do this, just "inspect".
Nextdoor post saying "I've got some excellent news to share with my neighbors!! I've gotten clearance from my doctor to drive again! I'm going to take it real slow and only go to nearby places at first until my confidence grows."
And on the one hand, I'm glad for her, on the other hand I'm scared to walk now.
Geoffrey Huntley — i ran Claude in a loop for three months, and it created a genz programming language called cursed. It cost him $14k (via).
Code at https://cursed-lang.org/ https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed
$14k of LLM compute plus, of course, whatever prompting time and babysitting he had to do. Obviously that may get cheaper, although that cost to him likely includes massive subsidies from the Anthropic investors (why, yes, I do have the latest Where's Your Ed At open in another tab), but/and: I wonder what that taught him about language development, about parsing and data structures and whatnot.
I wonder how long it took Urban Müller to write the first version of Brainfuck.zCu
A common theme in AI skepticism is "why aren't the tech press pushing back or asking questions?"
Looking at some of the bullshit coming out of the NYT lately on all sorts of fronts, I'd say the problem isn't limited to the tech press.