Thursday September 18th, 2025
US releases Emmett Till investigation records ahead of 70th anniversary of his killing
The records can be viewed in the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection</span> on the National Archives and Records Administration website.
Variety: ABC Pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Indefinitely After Host’s Charlie Kirk Comments
In his monologue Monday night , Kimmel said that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points off Kirk’s murder. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, was shot and killed Sept. 10 at a debate at Utah Valley University. Three days later, authorities announced they had arrested the suspected shooter.
Some have fingered Nextar's network of ABC affiliates pulling the show, though FCC Chair Brendan Carr is involved.
Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone says that on November 6, 2024 he wrote: "I hate to say it but our canary is now Jimmy Kimmel. If anything happens to him in the next four years, we've hit full blown fascism and need to leave the mine immediately".
jwz @jwz@mastodon.social: "@mathowie "Then they came for the milquetoasts"".
Once again, fuck Apple's case insensitive filesystem.
Wednesday September 17th, 2025
Got an FB DM with a link to a pro-Kirk video, and I went off, but I have to wonder if I should have gone off and outed people who sent me things like this previously. A Joe Rogan ep that you wouldn't put on your timeline, but sent to me? Name and shame.
Because it seems like the purpose of these sorts of DMs is to feel you out to see if you might be an ally in hate, or get the sort of feedback that reinforces your in-group state, without taking broader social risk.
And we need to reinstate that broader social risk.
I've been chronically online for decades, Flutterby the blog has been published at this URL for 27 years, I've met wonderful people online, and continue to think that the net is a fantastic way to connect with people.
I've also become more and more aware of how my social interactions are mediated. It's not just ads that impact me, it's what other content I expose myself to, especially content that's intermixed in content from friends, or where I see a particular name/poster /identity often enough that I feel a parasocial relationship to them, and put their thoughts into the "friends" bucket.
It's easy to think that "oh, I'm aware of this, so I must be immune", but the entire field of marketing and advertising, and political science, now suggests that the self-inoculation can only go so far.
Anyway, more pondering on digital hygiene: Dhole Moments: Are You Under the Influence? The Tail That Wags The Dog
Let's make this a standard: Jim Meyer @purp@mastodon.social
I have just just heard the share dialog that pops up when you click the box- arrow share icon called "The Yeet Sheet" and it shall forever be this in my heart. :BlobhajTinyHeart:
Indictment of Tyler Robinson in the killing of Charlie Kirk.
A lot of people are reading things into the roommate relationship that... there are a lot of different things that people mean when they use the word "love".
Mostly this post is a place to tag commentary on it. Adam Cochran (Via).
Every once in a while I clean out my Apache server logs, mostly the issue is just log files growing and I've never bothered to set up rotation, but occasionally I'll notice the web server getting hammered by bots and decide to muck things up for them. Anyway: dangerousmeta! @dangerousmeta@mstdn.social
If your server's getting torqued, you may find this usefiul. For htaccess.
<RequireAll>
Require all granted
Require not host compute.hwclouds-dns.com
</RequireAll>This took me from 10 cpus being maxed out to 1 being leisurely exercised.
Faith Ekstrand @gfxstrand@treehouse.systems
Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why?
Did you guess AI?
...
The whole rant is good, and talks about a particular submittal of an LLM generated speed- up, but without the submitter understanding why the speed-up occurred, and a bunch of cruft that the person processing the merge request had to sort through. I've heard a bunch of people talking about using LLMs to learn things, and this is an example of people accomplishing things (maybe) without learning them.
That seems fraught.
Despite my support for an independent HTML rendering engine, the profusion of "You have to remember to turn all this crap off" features in @firefox.com, coupled with several long-standing bugs, sent me to Vivaldi.
Firefox Mobile is now sending me Marketing notifications.
Decision: confirmed.
SRL Publishing: Stolen by Meta.
“No part of this book shall be used in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence (AI) systems or technologies.” – a small statement in our copyright page of our books, completely ignored by LibGen and Meta.
Here we list our author’s work which have been plagiarised and stolen by LibGen and used by Meta to train its AI systems. You can support us, and more importantly our authors, by buying real, print copies direct from us so we can try and get our authors some indirect recompense.
Via.
5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan.
“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” said CEO Jeanine Wright, who was previously chief operating officer of podcasting company Wondery, which has recently had to reorganize under the changing podcast landscape.
My question to investors: What is it about Inception Point AI that users can't just get from Google's Notebook LM?
Letters of Note: Bertrand Russell to Sir Oswald Mosley 22 January, 1962
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell
Via leighelse{} @leighelse@mastodon.nz, among others.
I think it's the "Translate to English" on this YouTube "Ah ffs man" comment that really makes it shine.
The thing about reading your phone while walking in daylight is fuck any designer who thinks that low contrast design is a good idea.
Tuesday September 16th, 2025
I think it's the "Translate to English" on this YouTube "Ah ffs man" comment that really makes it shine.
Anybody else see their inclusion in the Charlie Kirk doxxing site as sort of a "blood on the doorposts"/Exodus 12:13 sort of thing?
For some reason, I keep loading these two pages from Wikipedia, and keep sighing, and closing the tabs again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...olved_with_the_French_Resistance
MAGA’s Doxing War Over Charlie Kirk Is Already Going Off the Rails
I just did a search for the "Charlie Kirk Data Foundation", got a URL that's serving invalid SSL, but... I switched to Vivaldi as my personal browserrecently 'cause Firefox's willingness to prioritize AI glitz over a browser that worked drove me off the platform. Vivaldi's default search engine is Startpage.com, and I've been tolerating it because, actually, with the way Google's been declining I'm no longer sure Google is the search leader.
Anyway, I'm more aware of the ads on Startpage, and boy howdy are the scammers trying to suck donation dollars off of Charlie Kirk curious people.
Monday September 15th, 2025
Loving the answers to Ask Metafilter: But HOW Is AI Going to Kill Us?, in which the questioner asks about an Eliezer Yudkowsky quote.
Discussion at work about Simon Willison's "research goblin" blog post, but... aside from identifying "The Blade", I've gotta admit that I think it'd be faster just to read the Wikipedia articles? It feels very much like excitement about a dancing bear.
English Language editorial in the Korean daily newspaper The Hankyoreh: Imperial tyranny, Korean humiliation:
This incident should prompt us in Korea to comprehensively reassess our investment projects in the US
Via.
I'd hate to live in North Korea, where you get punished for not mourning friends of the ruling party publicly and sincerely enough
Arne Brasseur @plexus@toot.cat
Well yes, soylent green is people, but you can't just apply existing homicide laws to a business like ours. The entire humans-as-nutritional-sludge industry would be out of business.
Because I know I'm gonna end up digging up these in the near future: Daily Kos: None of the last 31 political attacks was by anyone from 'the Left'. Not one. We can count them.
I think it's a sign of how cowed the American media is that we're getting pieces like "you have to understand, in Korean culture, it's considered very rude for someone to lock you in a brutal prison camp for a week for no reason." Like yeah, any free people would be offended by that?
Woozle Hypertwin @woozle@toot.cat
@RickiTarr Like the thing that happened with all the
bonobos(?)baboons where the alpha males hogged a pile of discarded food left by humans, but the food was bad and poisoned them and most or all of the alphas died and the tribe culture suddenly got a lot nicer and stayed that way?
Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons
Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986.
A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission
Reports exist of transmission of culture in nonhuman primates. We examine this in a troop of savanna baboons studied since 1978. During the mid-1980s, half of the males died from tuberculosis; because of circumstances of the outbreak, it was more aggressive males who died, leaving a cohort of atypically unaggressive survivors. A decade later, these behavioral patterns persisted. Males leave their natal troops at adolescence; by the mid-1990s, no males remained who had resided in the troop a decade before. Thus, critically, the troop's unique culture was being adopted by new males joining the troop. We describe (a) features of this culture in the behavior of males, including high rates of grooming and affiliation with females and a “relaxed” dominance hierarchy; (b) physiological measures suggesting less stress among low-ranking males; (c) models explaining transmission of this culture; and (d) data testing these models, centered around treatment of transfer males by resident females.
Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source
Did I grow up in a land of sissies? Perhaps, but I am not mentioning this to decide whether violence in the media and our ability to grow immune to it—as I also have over the years—is desirable, or not. I simply wish to draw attention to the cultural fissures in how violence is portrayed, how we teach conflict resolution, and whether harmony is valued over competitiveness. This is the problem with the human species. Somewhere in all of this resides a human nature, but it is molded and stretched into so many different directions that it is hard to say if we are naturally competitive or naturally community-builders.
Thinking about this dynamic of people who send sketch interviews and news stories via DM rather than posting them on their own feed.
Like: why did you think I, specifically, would be interested in this Joe Rogan interview or lecture by a Russian stooge or apologia for Charlie Kirk's Nazism?
Well huh. I currently use Namecheap as my registrar, but if they're getting acquired maybe it is time to just move everything to Hetzner.
More naked ladies (with picture)
More naked ladies
The amaryllis belladonna have been lasting a lot longer this year, but alone the road I've been ready to say that the naked ladies have lost their bloom. But in the shade
Sunday September 14th, 2025
Sunday in Petaluma
We use a Chromecast on a TV for a digital picture frame. Had gotten tired of the selection, turned it off, but took the effort this morning to go into Google Photos and Home apps to set up some new albums.
It is an example of how far we've come from designing for user experience, and caring about anything other than the upsell. An indictment of where computing has evolved to.
Today we learned that using lye as a cleaning agent is really fun, but if there's a screen that has a lot of grease on it and is galvanized in possible reactive metals: do it outside.
Saturday September 13th, 2025
Box of free books outside a house I'm walking by. See a non-fiction that might be interesting, look through the rest of the back, find Malcolm Gladwell books, realize that this association is not a recommendation, do not grab the book.
You probably already know that, for various reasons, Proton Mail is pretty sus. Here's a Fediverse post elaborating on that, and presenting a bunch of alternatives.
Whoah. Utah Governor says the quiet part out loud.
https://bsky.app/profile/blade...s.bsky.social/post/3lynpdyxhwc2o
Listening to the Kirk Hamilton interview with the Wailin' Jennie's; went straight from discussion about a moment that a song appears, which brought up thoughts about generative AI and artists like Gilhooly or Kincade using other artists to actually execute the craft, followed by a Petaluma shout-out.
Oh sheeee.... Church of Jeff @jeffowski@mastodon.world picture quotes x.com user @pappiness:
At least Charlie Kirk would be happy to know it was a qualified white man and not a DEI hire.
Work has been building up some demos, one of them involved some visualizations of timeline-esque data, and yesterday I got pointed at an outline of notable events from a recent startup, and built a little HTML tool to visualize it. I needed some "what if we had supporting data for this", so I did a bunch of searching around to find articles supporting what ChatGPT had given as the outline of the company, coerced that stuff into JSON, and dropped it into my little visualization.
So far so good.
The eventual notion is that this visualization inside our tool will have value with some strategic partnerships, but I thought "what about just plugging in an LLM back-end?". So I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro:
I am looking for a timeline of notable events in the history of the Intel Corporation. Examples are major product releases, new CEOs or changes in board, large funding rounds, other events which suggest a change in corporate direction. Use your search engine. Format your output as an array of JSON objects with the date of the event as "date", the "title" of the event, a "category" (one of "Funding", "Media", "Product", "Team"), a short "description", and then a short array list of "links" to articles describing or elaborating on this event, as "url", "title" of the publication or source, and a summary as "description".
Provided a few more details and some example JSON. Got back an answer that's... not too bad. The dates I've spot-checked are close (the days of the month are not correct, and sometimes zero, the months and years seem plausible). The events it listed could be thought of as notable.
Of the few I've checked, the links it's provided as supporting evidence are either 404, or to articles that are not, in fact, supporting evidence.
There are sub-categories of radical right wing nationalist that I am currently unfamiliar with, but I'm making note of this Bluesky thread about the "Groyper Army" and the feud between Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk.
Diggit Magazine: Charlie Kirk's Culture War, Groypers, Nickers and Q&A- trolling
Since mid-October, Charlie Kirk’s Culture War tour has been increasingly haunted by the Groyper Q&A-trolls, who use the Q&A section to frame Kirk as a cuck.
Edit: Vanity Fair: Groypers, Helldivers 2, Furries: What Do the Messages Left by Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer Actually Mean? (Via).
Friday September 12th, 2025
The DEI boycotts are working: Target was hoping for a back-to-school sales bump that never came. Foot traffic is still down for the 7th month in a row
February 2024: Trump Ally Charlie Kirk Suggests Children Should Watch Public Executions
https://www.newsweek.com/charl...enalty-public-executions-1873073
Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers
We are the world's first AI alignment alignment center, working to subsume the countless other AI centers, institutes, labs, initiatives and forums into one final AI center singularity.
OMG. Laughing out loud at Figure 1 on the "Read our mission" page.
Thursday September 11th, 2025
The thing I remember most about 9/11, is how in the intervening years the United States capitulated to pretty much all of the goals that the hijackers and killers had, and how we've become what they hoped to make us.
We could have stood firm for freedom and liberty and equality, but we folded.
As Gavin Newsom says "The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work", your reminder that Kirk called for someone to "bail out" David DePape, who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. https://www.rollingstone.com/p...paul-pelosi-attacker-1234621493/
The things one finds when poking through HTTP logs. Sole mention of an IP address in 3 months is attempt to GET /.git/config . What were you looking for, random Amazon EC2 instance?
BrianKrebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
There's very little chance Experian's service will successfully alert you to your identity being hijacked *before* it happens, but in the unlikely event that they do you're unlikely to notice because of the 27 other marketing emails they sent you the same week.
Wednesday September 10th, 2025
Charlie Kirk shot in the neck. It's unclear if the attacker thought maybe he was smuggling drugs, or a migrant, but with precedent towards extrajudicial executions in the administration he's supported I find it hard to get up in arms over this.
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2025/09/10/charlie-kirk-shot/
Kirk: “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty”
Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment
Kirk's comments come about one week after three children and three adults were killed at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.
(hat tip to Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social)
Kirk is seen speaking into a handheld microphone while sitting under a white tent emblazoned with the slogans “The American Comeback” and “Prove Me Wrong”
Charlie Kirk: "I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage"
Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social
When a right-wing man murdered Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, progressives asked MAGA to tone down the rhetoric to prevent more violence. Within hours of Kirk’s murder, motive still unknown, the right is demanding that the government wage a campaign of violence against their enemies.
Which came from the Metafilter thread.
Huh. Today I learned about #:~:text=blablabla highlighting in URLs, which seems to be supported by most of the major browsers.
You remember when everyone (including AI firms) claimed that "Hallucinations" would soon be solved and I got so much shit for arguing that they are a structural property of LLMs?
Now OpenAI releases a paper stating the same and just gets to move on (with all its sycophants).
Really fucking annoys me.
Re OpenAI: Why language models hallucinate
Our new research paper argues that language models hallucinate because standard training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty.
The office is abuzz this morning with a demo of some YouTuber doing the Google Workspace "shove my documents at Gemini, get a 'morning zoo' style podcast back out", and I'm thinking about why I'm willing to listen to some of the more ensemble episodes of Switched On Pop and not that. Although, of course, there are any number of podcasts that are a few people talking about a topic that I'm deeply interested in that I switch off from because the speakers just aren't that insightful, and I think maybe there's some insight and intention there that I don't hear in the auto-generated podcasts? Or maybe I'm biasing myself?
Anyway, I continue to struggle with the "this is crap" and "maybe the market thrives on crap" vibes that fill so much of my world today.
Turns out that if volunteer labor (me) got compensated at all, the thousand or three bucks that the big film festival organization wanted for media wrangling is a fucking bargain.
Next year we're doing this differently...
In other news, who knew that freakin' pnpm wanted so much cache space?
Matthew Haughey @mathowie@xoxo.zone
When Trump got into office in 2017 I remember a historian focused on fascism said to watch for times where the leaders told you not to believe what you could plainly see with your own eyes.
At first I thought, maybe in ye old days that wouldn’t fly in our modern times, right?
This Epstein birthday card thing reminds me of the 2017 warnings.
Plain as day to anyone looking but the response is that’s fake or not his signature.
Jim Flanagan @jimfl@hachyderm.io
@mathowie I am almost convinced this is a major driver behind the push to make genAI ubiquitous. Once everyone has direct experience with genAI, it then becomes a plausible deniability machine
·
"God never gives you more than you can handle" is survivorship bias. People who got more than they could handle are dead.
miss ana vee :vheart_fuck_yes: @ana@starlite.rodeo
just like to point out that ouija boards are cheap, have very little environmental impact, predate chatgpt by over 100 years, and are just as capable at telling you what you'd like to hear
they may be harder to use at first but with a little dedication most people should have no trouble getting the results they want
Tuesday September 9th, 2025
Tesla changes meaning of ‘Full Self-Driving’, gives up on promise of autonomy. Among other things, also looks like it's gonna be a dodge to shovel more money at Musk.
Tesla (TSLA) sees US market share of electric car sales drop to new lows
Ben @franzferdinand2.bsky.social
I remember someone saying that's how you know AI can never truly be a writer. If you tell AI to stop using em dashes, it'll stop. If you tell a writer to stop using em dashes they'll tell you to fuck yourself and that you can pry them from their cold, dead fingers.
Dr. Damien P. Williams Wants A Better Sociotechnical Paradigm @wolvendamien.bsky.social
LLM responses which do not reflect consensus reality & facts are produced via the Same Process which generate responses which *Do* broadly conform to consensus reality & facts.
The Same Processes.
The Same Ones.
"Hallucination" is just a word to distance yourself from the outputs you don't like.
Modern Diplomacy — Finance — Gemini AI Predicts Best Meme Coins to Buy in Q3: Dogwifhat, Fartcoin, Snorter (Via).
JP @jplebreton@mastodon.social
@mhoye being 100% right about VR, then crypto, then NFTs, then the metaverse, then LLMs doesn't feel good. it feels like being the sole adult in a peewee football match. just pitiful. we could be living in a world that is solving real problems.
Andrei Drăgănescu — How “Be the Dumbest in the Room” Makes Everyone Dumber
Don’t aim to be the dumbest person in the room. Aim to be the most prepared.
Preparedness respects your colleagues’ time, amplifies their expertise, and makes collaboration richer. You can still learn — but without turning every meeting into a school day and every co-worker into your tutor.
Oh, I like this distinction: clew on Metafilter:
I find this distinction useful: if a group isn’t multigenerational it isn’t a culture, whether main or sub; it’s a scene. Scenes are much more common but they don’t often last long.
Ooooh (rubs fingers together in anticipation): Anthropic Judge Rejects $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement
In an order docketed the evening before the hearing, Alsup said he was “disappointed” that the parties left “important questions” for the future, including a list of works covered by the deal and the processes for notifying potential class members. Those “critical choices” will need to be made before preliminary approval can be granted, he said.