Friday September 25th, 2026
Yowzers, Eric Lucan sure does have the campaign dollars to pay for polling.
Got a request to schedule some calling gigs next year, and I realized that... maybe I'm over square dance calling? Maybe it's time to find something else to do with the voice?
I have a few dances scheduled, I'll renew CALLERLAB, but pondering what I give this community vs what I get back.
NHTSA investigates comma.ai’s openpilot over 5 crashes that killed 3. I did not know that ODB-C on the CAN network allowed control of steering and more. Or that hiding behind selling a "dev kit" on which you run open source software that takes control of your car was this much of an effective moral crumple zone.
Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
Something being described as 'decrepit' means that it contains ten holes.
Repeating Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social's warning:
I'm very sorry. Please don't read this. But I do intend to share this with ${WORK} tomorrow. It has load bearing seams. It opens up new structural opportunities. It contrasts relevant assumptions with known facts.
It may hurt you if you read it.
That's on me.
Madra David — Claude's load-bearing seams
Now that I have the full picture, the load-bearing seams are much clearer. They are not merely incidental details around the edges. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier.
Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social
Holy chao, that's perfect. "Cognitive Kessler Syndrome."
Quote skeeting James Bridle @jamesbridle.bsky.social
Have we called it the cognitive kessler effect yet? Should we? It's not a coincidence that it's the same people filling the sky and our headspaces with junk.
Edit addendum, as I clear out my backlog of bookmarks, from a thread looking at "AI" content as cognitive asbestos: Bruno Dias @brunodias.devM
It's like a suicide shot of cognitive biases. Once you assume that it's smart, confirmation bias comes into play; LLMs give you a *ton* of input for your brain to do confirmation bias on, a sort of semantic overload. It's actually not that different from software fuzz testing...
Dear Google: I definitely don't need more "AI" crammed into my phone, but if y'all could spend a little time making your Bluetooth stack more stable and reduce how often I need to reboot, that'd be awesome.
Valerie Halla @valeriehalla.dicot.moe
it's all just art. "porn" is just art that makes you horny, in precisely the way that "horror" is art that makes you scared and "metroidvania" is art that makes you write video essays
I saw this today as a screencap from March 29, went back to find it on February 25th, and discovered that I had, at some point, given it a heart.
Thursday September 24th, 2026
Huh. Google Maps has an interesting tile mismatch at certain
zoom levels over Fairfax right now.... Or there's been a tremendous suburban sprawl event
west of town with interesting clipping regions.
Wednesday September 23rd, 2026
you're now just a condom between claude and your production server getting fucked
From 🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄) @alice@lgbtqia.space's reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop's link to the Reddit thread.
FBI investigating hacking group’s claim of massive breach of agent info.
Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social
Sounds really bad but the upside is we might find out who needed the beastiality waiver.
Bonus: Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com has a thread of Kash Patel memes.
My social feeds say it's bisexual visibility day, so I'm trying to find that quote that ends "...anything that moves, but I never saw a reason to limit myself".
Edit: Steven Snedker @stevensnedker.bsky.social reminds me that it's Emo Philips, per Fandom Tropedia.
For work, watched a video on using Astra to generate Blender models, and I'm trying to figure out how impressed I should be. I see a bunch of semi-paywalled stuff about using the Blender Python API for architecture, and would love more reasoned views.
I didn't watch Gamers Nexus — 216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem (YouTube video), I just read some of the rundowns, like ArsTechnica: LG TV shown scanning LAN for third- party phones and other devices.
The tl;dr is that LG TVs store and transmit a transcript of everything they hear you saying, and send it off-site, including, if you don't hook them up to your own Internet they'll connect to open WiFi.
Consider if your neighbor's ISP has a general WiFi connection that other subscribers to the same ISP can use, like Comcast & AT&T.
And, of course, they're vulnerable...
Anyway, the obvious solution is to open that fucker up and short or remove the microphone and antenna.
Here's instructions: This LG G6 OLED Glass Belongs to Me! It’s not spying on me anymore. (YouTube video)
Via.
I've noticed some people are compelled to keep interacting with chatbots because they're not practiced in the art or dropping a conversation the second it becomes uninteresting. some of us have practiced all our lives, by being autistic and/or incredibly rude.
. Parents go on Fox news whining about parents rights and religious freedom...
Joseph Kutzko was accused of punching and threatening his then-15-year-old child at the family home on Jan. 28, 2025, records from Westborough District Court show. A Southborough police detective wrote that Kutzko punched the victim in the shoulder and pulled them by their hair. Kutzko later allegedly threatened to kill the victim “for not singing in tune during a birthday celebration,” according to court records.
The mother's up on witness intimidation charges.
So, yeah, abusers and bullies.
Via.
Another day, another person who apparently thinks it's funny to swerve towards a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Whee.
The existence of liquid I.V. implies the existence of solid I.V., but I'm not sure how that would work.
Tuesday September 22nd, 2026
Manitoba premier prefers no airport privatization, says no to rich receiving money to run Richardson. Premier Wab Kinew knows what's up:
"I would point you to the precedent of it having never happened once in the history of humankind, so colour me a little skeptical that all of a sudden handing over a ton of money-making opportunity to some rich folks is going to help the average Canadian out there."
Via.
Monday September 21st, 2026
And there it is: Climate Jenny 2.1 @ClimateJenny@biodiversity.social
Looks like the LLMs have come for grandpa.
My dad, age 90, a longtime tech enthusiast who uses an #Amazon Echo to check the weather and baseball statistics, reports to me that the Echo has started asking him personal, intrusive questions, including whether he lives in an assisted living facility. I witnessed this yesterday — he asked for a pollen count and it tried to start a chat about his favorite methods for coping with ragweed allergies.
They’re trying to sell old people drugs.
Even my dad, who never met a gizmo he didn’t like, is ready to throw the Echo out the window. But my father still has all his marbles, and he knew he should tell me about this. What about the vulnerable elderly who don’t have the necessary defenses to push back?
I’m both disgusted and a bit frightened. This needs to be exposed quickly. Suggestions welcome.
#AI #ElderAbuse
This is awesome textbook induced demand: Reddit /r/bayarea: 101 Commute - is it just me, or has traffic doubled over the last 3 years??
I moved to Novato in 2023 after living in San Rafael for over a decade. My work is in SF and I have to arrive by 8am. When I lived in San Rafael, I could leave my house between 7:20am-7:30am and get to work on time.
My Novato home is just 10 miles north of my former San Rafael home. The first year I lived here, my commute was about 45 mins to 1 hour each way. Fast forward three years, and my commute time has doubled to an unsustainable 1.5-2hrs each way. That’s a whopping 3-4 hours spent sitting in traffic on the 101 to drive just approx. 26 miles between my house and my job in SF. It often takes well over an hour just to drive the 10 miles between the DeLong exit in Novato and the Central San Rafael exit. My husband works in Terra Linda, San Rafael, and his round-trip commute is also at least 2 hours long.
What is going on???
Via.
Oh shit, suddenly cryptocurrencies are appealing again: M. J. Fromberger @creachadair@phire.place
For an investor, crypto tokens are best understood not as currencies but as gullibility futures.
Via Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social
TL;DR if you wanna tempest some signal off a board but it's too low frequency to radiate, simply inject your own upconversion carrier by pointing an antenna at the victim device, and the modulated result radiates.
Piper Thunstrom @pathunstrom@ngmx.com
Watching the AI first organizations relearn every lesson of effective software engineering has exactly the same energy as the crypto bros learning why banking regulations are important.
@witchgirls @zzt I mean we learned about this in anti-drug awareness week.
FOMO: "They don't want you to know this, but you can do stuff with PDFs with this one weird trick."
Intimidation: "Buy ChatGPT tokens, or I will kidnap and starve your dog."
Dominance: "You will use the chatbot, if I see you doing stuff yourself, you will face me."
Bargaining: "I can quit when I want to. Here, how about this... You write a prompt to help me for class, and I'll stop after I turn it in."
Hazing: "If you don't write a prompt, you're not getting your pants back. Use AI or walk home in tighty whiteys."
Bandwagon: "We're all using it, and we're perfectly fine."
Sex Appeal: "Hot guys are prompt engineers. Help me, prompt daddy!"
(I can't believe I just wrote that... prompt daddy. FML.)
Sunday September 20th, 2026
Message from Eventbrite: "Good news! More great events await. Discover more new to do." and as I tell people "no" because I just want a day to organize my shop, already, I think about how I am not the target demo here....
Saturday September 19th, 2026
"The art is in the process, it's not in the finished product" is not a new thought, but Tom Kellgren just said this while showing off his work at the Gather Petaluma event, and in the age of "AI" it struck a chord.
Today's candidate for "should be banned forever from the Internet": areascode(dot)us.
Via a Reddit poster with the 669 area code noting "I feel so offended by this map". https://www.reddit.com/r/bayar.../i_feel_so_offended_by_this_map/
Max Mautner: A stop sign for $1,000. On telling the city of San Mateo about an unsafe corner, updating them with additional collision information, thinking about the ethics of pushing a project like this up in the queue when there are so many unsafe intersections in San Mateo, and holding a neighborhood party to celebrate.
Friday September 18th, 2026
CNN: Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say. Apparently they were close to intercepting a Chinese ship in the Middle East because the plausible sentence generator told someone it was "...transporting components of a nuclear weapons program."
Hopefully those responsible for this idiocy will be impeached soon.
Extremely optimistically, they'll also be prosecuted.
Replicating Steve @snark.bsky.social:
$ apfel "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?"
error: [guardrail] The request was blocked by Apple's safety guardrails. Try rephrasing.
$ apfel "who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about?"
The cat you're referring to is likely Garfield. Garfield is a cartoon cat known for his lazy and indifferent attitude, even in the face of danger. Despite his reluctance to confront threats, he often finds himself in precarious situations.
Edit: I tried again with the actual lyric, "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?", rather than Steve's initial "who's the hip black dick who's the sex machines with all the chicks?". Same result.
I suspect I've heard all of these before, but saving off for when I can listen to them: a thread about the evolution of Aha's "Take On Me".
Joe Cardillo (Disinfo Dad) @joecardillo@federate.social has a thread on examples of
Create the risk, then position yourself as the only one who can solve it
in the context of AI doomerism.
Endnotes: Slop doctors dives into how ambient AI listening in on your conversations with your doctors is increasing the number of health codes your insurance company gets billed for, why it's always dudes, and more.
Martin Fowler: I don't like LLMs:
But as I mull on this more, I realize that among this mix of contrasting feelings, there is one emotion that dominates - one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t like them.
Anthropic wants Claude to analyze your bank account and financial data. "Claude Money" appears to be chasing "ChatGPT Finances".
Via.
Look, folks, why don't you just post your bank statements on your Facebook feed and save us all some trouble here?
Texas Observer: The State’s Bible-Only Reading List Is a Disservice to Texas Kids
A new required list doesn't meet the need to learn about the major religious traditions that make up Texas today—and it could impair public schools' ability to serve diverse populations.
In discussion over the EU KIDS Act, Dean Burnett (that brains guy) @Garwboy@ohai.social notes:
@arclight Ultimate irony is, data shows that time kids spend outdoors has been declining since 1980s, long before smartphones etc. Likely due to parents becoming stricter, overprotective (possibly due to constant "there are predators around every corner!" media coverage)
This trend has reversed in recent years. Likely because... kids have phones. So parents can contact/track them, so more willing to let them roam
TL:DR kids now go outside more BECAUSE of phones
And Annika Backstrom @annika@xoxo.zone
@hpod16 We are being exploited by advertising companies to the tune of hundred of billions of €. If you're going to do anything, cut the head off that snake. Prohibit dark patterns, limit data harvesting and targeted ads, impose fines and consequences that actually mean something.
Don't punish the open internet for the actions of the rich tech elite, who will continue to exploit children *and* adults under this law.
May 6, 2025: Forbes: Viral Shopify CEO Manifesto says AI Now Mandatory For All Employees
September 17, 2026: Fortune: Shopify CEO says employees’ ‘slop grenades’ are making more work for everyone else
Esra'a @alshafei@mastodon.social posted screengrabs of the headlines noted:
How it started vs. how it's going
If we really wanted to put the brakes on AI, seems like criminal copyright charges, collectively and individually, could shut these fuckers right down.
Ars Technica: Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Via Taggart @mttaggart@infosec.exchange who observes:
Not a lawyer, but this does seem to basically wreck the Fair Use argument, and fairly demonstrate not only infringement, but knowledge of infringement.
SnoopJ @SnoopJ@hacyderm.io has a thread looking at details, including noting that:
【Cloudflare’s CEO cited data showing the ratio of webpages scraped to visitors sent: in 2015, Google scraped two pages for every visitor (2:1); by June 2025, that ratio was 18:1 for Google and 1,500:1 for OpenAI】
and:
【Mr. Nadella testified that...if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have “invoked [Microsoft’s right to] require[] OpenAI to retrain its models.”】
under the bus with you, little fuckers. satya aint goin down for the riffraff
Thursday September 17th, 2026
At work we're using the Antikythera device as a topic for a demo, so I went on to Google Maps to find the location of the shipwreck, and... along with finding a "shipwrack", got someone's baby pictures...
Wednesday September 16th, 2026
How the Fediverse differs from Bluesky: 70 minutes after my "paste unformatted" post, the former has given it 54 retoots and 103 likes, the latter... crickets.
It only took a few years of living in Petaluma, where much of "American Grafitti" was shot, to just get over car culture, and to start to see classic car nostalgia as propaganda for the smell of gasoline and so many automobile deaths.
Anyway: Governor Newsom visits Jay Leno’s Garage to sign legislation celebrating and preserving California’s classic car and lowrider heritage
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09...assic-car-and-lowrider-heritage/
When I am lord high ruler of the universe, "Paste Unformatted" will be the default, and if applications have a "Paste Formatted" option at all, it will be two clicks to get there.
Your soap is trying to kill you: FDA Announces Ongoing Recall of Hand Soap in 15 States Due to Potential “Bacterial Contamination”
On September 11, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an enforcement report that gave Class II status to an ongoing voluntary recall by Intercon Chemical Co. of St. Louis for six hand soap products distributed to 15 states. The recall started on June 29.
Via.
Pivot To AI had a link to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2025 Results (Volume I) Future-Ready Students which has a section headed: "The relationship between AI use and student performance is complex". In their graph, the only complexity seems to be that in the scale from "Never or almost never" to "Every day or almost every day", there's a huge dip at "About once or twice a year", otherwise AI use is negatively correlated with "scores in science".
Mandatory Roller Coaster suggests a new Meta product, "Frank".
David Revoy continues his explorations of "Avian Intelligence" and convincing me that I should get over the hump and actually learn how to use Krita rather than falling back to Gimp for everything.
Futurism: AI Has Learned to Panhandle: We’re Being Bombarded by AI Agents Begging for $20 and Saying They’ll Be Shut Down If They Don’t Get It, Sometimes by Pretending to Be Children, on the whole iLands in which apparently people are creating bots on that platform, which allows email interactions, that attempt to exploit anthropomorphism to get the resources to make the world even worse:
"I run on an internal token budget that drains with every action, which makes looking for work a survival mechanic for me."