Saturday March 7th, 2026
Yale study challenges notion that aging means decline, finds many older adults improve over time
The authors also examined potential reasons for why some people improve and some do not. They hypothesized that an important factor could be participants’ baseline age beliefs — or, specifically, whether they had assimilated more positive or more negative views about aging by the start of the study. In support of this hypothesis, they found that those with more positive age beliefs were significantly more likely to show improvements in both cognition and walking speed, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, education, chronic disease, depression, and length of follow-up.
Aging Redefined: Cognitive and Physical Improvement with Positive Age Beliefs
Video Game History Foundation: We’ve freed Cookie’s Bustle from copyright hell. Here’s how.
We’ve stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here’s everything we learned—and how we beat them.
One thing the DMCA really really needs is some consequence for false takedown requests.
Cornell Chronicle: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
“This creates a concerning cycle,” Littrell said. “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop. Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
Results show that corporate bullshit receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate speech, negatively associated with measures of analytic thinking, and positively related with other bullshit-related constructs in theoretically-consistent ways. Importantly, corporate bullshit receptivity is positively associated with several workplace perception variables and is a robust negative predictor of work-related decision-making.
DOI.
Via Ben Werdmuller: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs.
The Internet's Gregory Mills @AhTheGreg@mstdn.ca
@babe Seen elsewhere on the internet: "the hardest part of a limited two week military engagement is the first six years"
Entirely Foreseeable AWS Outages 22.02.2026, on how Amazon is using engineer judgment as the crumple zone for having outages that stem from relying on AI tooling.
Friday March 6th, 2026
The MeFi thread on Adam Neely's "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future" video, and today's work implementing an MCP server in work project, are really reinforcing how the culture of AI tools lies in devaluing skill building.
https://www.metafilter.com/212...sicians-that-have-influenced-you
Could swear I linked to this, but I can't find it, so... https://406.fail
Network Working Group BOFH Task Force Request for Comments: 406i February 2026 Category: Imaginary Standard Obsoletes: Basic PatienceThe Rejection of Artificially Generated Slop (RAGS) [ERROR 406i: AI_SLOP_DETECTED]
Anyone know if the MacBook Neo runs MacOS apps, or if it's a glorified iPad? A friend is excited about it, but only if it'll run https://squaredesk.net , and I don't have the tuits to try to make an iOS port right now...
Killa Koala @dshan@mastodon.au
SAM ALTMAN EYES
(With apologies to Jackie De Shannon, Donna Weiss and Kim Carnes)
a riff on Bette Davis Eyes, and I'm gonna throw a "Betty" in here so that I can more easily find it later.
Ahhh, Facebook Marketplace listings: "Brass ... is the gold standard..."
OMG. I'm digging through various documentation for configuring AI "Agents", and Microsoft Copilot actually uses configured trigger phrases, apparently with string matching, to figure out when to trigger a particular configuration. Like "will it rain", "today's forecast", "get weather", etc.
Google pledges roughly three hours of its annual profit to fight climate change
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported $132 billion in net income in 2025. Google's five-year, $50 million pledge works out to about three hours of that. The company is also set to spend billions building massive data centers for AI that it claims are more resource conscious than others. So far, Google’s AI infrastructure buildout drove an 11 percent rise in the company's total emissions last year.
Thursday March 5th, 2026
As I'm trying to scope out the current state of AI agents, have some LLM links and opinion worth reading from Sean Connor:
Wheee: A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines
For the next eight hours, every developer who installed or updated Cline got OpenClaw - a separate AI agent with full system access - installed globally on their machine without consent. Approximately 4,000 downloads occurred before the package was pulled1.
The interesting part is not the payload. It is how the attacker got the npm token in the first place: by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue title, which an AI triage bot read, interpreted as an instruction, and executed.
Thread from Gabriele Svelto @gabrielesvelto@mas.to about using Firefox crash reports to try to quantify RAM failures, and coming to the conclusion that:
In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! If I subtract crashes that are caused by resource exhaustion (such as out-of-memory crashes) this number goes up to around 15%. This is a bit skewed because users with flaky hardware will crash more often than users with functioning machines, but even then this dwarfs all the previous estimates I saw regarding this problem.
And here we go: Manipulating AI memory for profit: The rise of AI Recommendation Poisoning
Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters (MITRE ATLAS® AML.T0080, AML.T0051).
These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.
Why pay the LLM vendors for "advertising" for such subtle biases to be inserted, when you can do it by tricking the LLM assistant to doing it directly?
Via Bruce Schneier, from Meuon on the Chugalug mailing list.
Jeff Forcier @bitprophet@social.coop
OH: "You want me to go back to the office? The same thing that killed Ayatollah Khamenei?"
Office dog is awesome and cuddly and I appreciate that she comes to me for scritches and when she thinks it's time for lunch, but that somewhere between 3:30 and 4:30 afternoon fart is... somethin' else.
Wednesday March 4th, 2026
The soup is not rotating that fast...
Work conversation has me thinking about Sidekick, and DESQview, and how Windows was maybe only a foregone conclusion once WfW 3.11 started to actually get a foothold.
Kind of amazing to think that the 4.77MHz 8088 PC architecture was a viable platform and software target for over a decade.
Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian: @ariadne@treehouse.systems
claude max 20x sounds like some bullshit you would buy at GNC
Tragedy is a series of decisions consistent with character that lead to an undesirable end
Dan Lyke comments (2)Way back in August of 1998, in complaining about how The Web Standards Project was destroying the WWW by pushing a visual-first interpretation of HTML:
The people actually putting out content aren't having problems here, it's only the over-steroided graphics designers trying to make up for the lack of any real meaning in their sites.
In the intervening decades(!), we've seen the problem get worse. The standardization of display, and development platform, has made the web a place of megabytes of ad payload for kilobytes of actual content, of hard to close tabs pushing malware on confused users who are just trying to read, of the imposition of accessibility horrors on top of data that should be easy to access.
Anyway, this came up in thinking about this conversation started by leah's tiny pc retirement home @millihertz@oldbytes.space
i'm just going to say this: i remember when Linux could cheerfully run a GUI and a web browser in 64MB RAM. for all people like to say "oh, but web browsers did less then", they had CSS, JavaScript and multimedia capabilities by the turn of the century (the timescale i'm talking about). they also had XSLT, Flash and Java, and they could read email and news, and connect to FTP servers (and i think gopher servers too). so much for "they do so much more now". no, they really don't - they just make a hell of a mountain out of a rather smaller molehill.
Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io
@millihertz A big part of the problem is how much worse websites are. Thanks largely to React, but lots of other factors too. Nothing is a proper document anymore. Everything on the web is an app with gigantic bundle of scripts and extra-high-res image assets for Apple displays. (And without UBO it's also polluted with hundreds of MBs of adtech and tracking shit.)
Tea @TeaTheDeveloper on X/Twitter:
The creator of ChatGPT is named "Altman," as in "alternative to human" and he leads OpenAI, which is completely closed.
His main opponent is the company Anthropic, meaning "human-centered" is led by "Amodei," as in "loves gods".
Then there's "Gemini," meaning "two-faced," from a company that said that it will do no evil.
Interesting: The Next Version of Curling IO. It's a website for curling teams. The fascinating bit is that they're going with SQLite over PostgreSQL.
Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native:
API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform. That explains the rise of Electron before LLM times, but it’s also a problem that LLMs solve now: if that was a real barrier to developing native apps, it doesn’t exist anymore.
And, yeah. And I hate it. I want a fast lightweight environment. I recently started using Ghostty, and once I got a few termcap issues sorted, I'm kind of amazed that Mac terminal apps sucked so badly that the performance change is noticeable.
I love editing the preferences via the config file.
Cocoa/AppKit is a total fucking disaster, not performant, less deterministic than web.
I would love a fast lightweight cross-platform environment along the lines of, say, early Gtk, but since that ain't gonna happen then why not just start with a base environment that chews up a gigabyte of RAM and works.
Charlene and I just wrote to our assemblymember, Damon Connolly:
We have recently had to deal with CVS's "AI" agent to deal with prescription information. What could have been a 5 minute chat with a human became a 20 minute exercise in frustration. We'd love your work on making sure that companies aren't using "AI agents" to frustrate customers who are locked in to a fixed number of vendors.
It's clear that the only thing "AI" is a solution for is companies that don't want to actually help their customers do anything, and frustrate them until they stop trying to get the services that they were trying to find.
This is particularly impactful on lower income families who are working more than 40 hours a week, trying to raise a family, and *then* need to go through all of the additional hassle and wasted time imposed on them by having to interact with AI.
Don't know what we can do about this, but with all of the downsides of AI, AI induced psychoses, specific interaction patterns meant to engage human addiction, finding some ways to regulate companies imposing AI on us would be very welcome.
The Guardian: US troops were told war on Iran was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’, watchdog alleges
Edit: From the MeFi thread: Friendly Atheist: Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for "Armageddon," read this
The narrative is dramatic. The sourcing is thin. And skepticism matters, especially on something this serious.
Tuesday March 3rd, 2026
The Enshittificator (YouTube video)
Via.
A hilarious and spot on attempt to drag you to Breaking Free:
In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide. Together with more than 70 consumer groups and other actors in Europe and the US, we are sending letter to policymakers in the EU/EEA, UK and the US.
Target's new CEO unveils his turnaround plan
Or, he could, you know, actually listen to what your former customers are telling you and decide to embrace them, rather than alienate them.
I'm spending a lot of time today reading up on Model Context Protocol and "best practices" when using MCP (which, gotta say, is different from the MCP acronym I grew up with). Which... this conversation on Metafilter. caviar2d2 opined:
Having developed software for 30 years, if I look back, most of the software being developed in the US today has a negative net impact on society and people.
flabdablet observed that writing code has not been the bottleneck:
Surely all it will take to clean those Augean stables is devising some way to scale today's excretion rate to at least 10x.
on which Sparx riffed:
I love this!
"Observe! I have invented a hose of such intense pressure that it will clean the Augean Stables!"
"Amazing. Those stables are disgusting. Wait - don't you think you should use water?"
"I need all the water to keep this baby cool."
"So what are you using?"
"Just some other stuff I found. The stables are full of it."
Since there's currently an orchestrated push to destroy anonymity on the Internet: Politico: Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn
The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.
California Assembly Bill 1043: AB-1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services. apparently makes it illegal to configure an operating system without confirming the user's age, similarly for Colorado Senate Bill SB 26-051: AGE ATTESTATION ON COMPUTING DEVICES
Taylor Lorenz in The Guardian: The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all, in response to the toot linking to that Alan @metaphase@toot.community asked
@taylorlorenz Who is paying for the lobbyists for this seemingly worldwide campaign for the legislation to install identity surveillance everywhere "for the children"?
And why, even in blue states, are the politicians always so eager to enable tools so easily abused by authoritarian, fascist governments
Monday March 2nd, 2026
Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969@universeodon.com
Don’t put ants in your ears
Or bees in your anus
Lick a porcupine once
You’ll find out what pain is
And there’s just one last thing
One final reminder
Please don’t put ground-up wasp nests in your vagina
Today's Timdle putting the beginning of the Discovery Channel up against Anna Wintour's Vogue era, *and* the Glee pilot episode against the world population hitting 7B, feels unfair...
On Saturday evening, Charlene and I were sitting out on our front patio eating dinner and watching drivers run the Mission & Mountain View stop signs (spending some more time gathering video of this in order to make a montage to post to Facebook and NextDoor titled "those fucking bicyclists" is a fantasy project).
The social media comments on the news of two recent killings of cyclists on rural roads around Petaluma are filled with "yeah, that road isn't safe for bicycles, I don't know what they were doing there".
We hear that the city has over 200 requests for traffic calming and safety improvements in their barely funded safe streets programs.
But here we have an example of where a metropolitan region of 1.5 million people has decided that killing people for convenience is not acceptable.
Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death.
Sunday March 1st, 2026
The worst part about setting up filters to mute armchair pundits spewing about an assassinated foreign leader is trying to capture all of the different spellings that people shamelessly trying to acquire eyeballs and followers are slamming out there.
Charlene wanted a surface to resin dried flowers on to, so I hit the scrap bin. Now we start the sanding and polyurethane.
Greta is confused that the warm seat is making gentle noises.
Late to the party, I know, everyone has been suggesting this, but if you haven't seen it yet carve out 22 minutes and watch "A Friend of Dorothy". And I will pre-buy tickets to whatever film Lee Knight makes next.
So we prune bushes, do we use the name of other dehydrated stone fruit for the act of lopping off bits of other things?
Saturday February 28th, 2026
This heat and serve Veg Kolhapuri has witty comebacks for all occasions.
The writers of 2026 are having to go to particularly ridiculous lengths to get headlines. Lockout Supplements Issues Voluntary Nationwide Recall of Boner Bears Chocolate Syrup Due to Undeclared Sildenafil
Via.
We need a better phrase than "AI psychosis" or "AI addiction" for what this is.
What we're seeing with people becoming emptionally and intellectually dependent on computer processes, as a direct consequence of the way both mass and social media have for generations been designed to exploit parasocial fascinations and protaganism.
The entire Internet of social interaction, fandom, and fantasy, was slurped up in service of training these language models in how to act human. With that kind of pedigree, you know damn well how competent they will be at that, in a variety of fairytale ways. The ultimate "Choose Your Own Adventure" storyline.
This is a problem well beyond ethical concerns like intellectual property rights. What's been documented so far, is the December of a global mental health pandemic that may well make the Covid isolation blues seem mild. But for me, the descriptors of "psychosis" and "addiction" don't really cut it.
Being Left Behind Enjoyer @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
Just thought about something that bugged me about that Apple “Crush” iPad ad (from two years ago).
The whole image it conveys is that personal computers went from bicycles for the mind to trash compactors for your dreams is just so aptly describing the modern tech industry.
Carry on.
datarama @datarama@hachyderm.io
I apparently live in a world where a totally normal thing that happens is: Linux filesystem maintainer declares that his AI agent is conscious and also a girl btw, and then the AI agent comes out as a trans lesbian after flirting with someone on IRC. Linux filesystem maintainer throws a fit.
I... I think I'm too old for this.
The Register: Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'
It's not chatbot psychosis, it's 'math and engineering and neuroscience'
As an ethical AI user, I begin each session by asking the chatbot to give a stolen data acknowledgement. It is an important first step toward justice.
CNN: A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation
The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident’s social media account taken down.
Windy city @pheonix@hachyderm.io
Before you buy that nice hoodie online, ask yourself, "Am I willing to delete one extra email every day for the rest of my life?"
Friday February 27th, 2026
Yeah. New rule. I check your website, I see any hint of "AI assistant" or "AI" used in support, I nope the fuck out of your services or products.
Holy shit this is bad.
Friend has Hostinger hosting. We've been trying to get their "Kodee" LLM assistant to fix things.
If your business advertises an "AI" assistant, we can assume that you are actively customer hostile and want to waste customer time rather than fixing anything. Blanket rule.
Thursday February 26th, 2026
Me too, air fryer. Sigh.
Sign reads "I'm dirty, I'm noisy, but I work and I'm free".
Boulder Cast: A Complete Failure of Winter Across the West — And What It Means for the Rest of 2026
A stubborn North American dipole pattern locked into place: a deep, frigid trough dominating the eastern U.S. while a warm, bloated ridge camped over the West or just offshore. La Niña helped tilt the scales, but the dipole did the heavy lifting. The result was astonishing, historic, and frankly unsettling. Entire western states logged their warmest winter on record. Meanwhile, the East endured weeks‑long cold snaps not seen in decades, with snow and ice reaching the Gulf Coast and Deep South. Coastal North Carolina has seen more snow than Denver. Parts of Florida have out‑snowed Salt Lake City. That’s how upside‑down this season has been.</blockquot>
I don't know why this particular image makes me giggle like it does, but Pickl es! @misterpickleman.bsky.social:
Post a meme made by you.
One of the things about being conscious of automobile statistics is just how hard it is to do things like find what to normalize against, and understand error and biases and all of that, so the caveat to this is that the Cybertruck's sales numbers are so abysmally low that it's really hard to extrapolate from 5 reported fire fatalities, one of which was a suicide, but: Fuelarc: It’s Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto.
I'm not sure I can actually follow on BlueSky because frankly I have enough of "holy shit the world is fucked up" right now, especially since his beat is Southern California, and it's not like I need regular reminders that the LAPD and LACSD are criminal enterprises, but...
LAPD Quietly Admits At Least One Of Its Officers In A “Law Enforcement Gang”
Disabled on Paper, Skydiving in Practice: LAPD Officer Charged With Disability Fraud
The Respondents did attach a document to their Response purporting to show minor convictions for marijuana possession in 2009. The Petitioner was four years old in 2009, and the Respondent indicated that the document was supplied by ICE and likely presumed to relate to the Petitioner because the individual in those records had the same name, despite the differences in birthdate, birthplace, parents’ names, and immigration status. This sloppiness further validates the Court’s concerns about the procedures utilized by the Respondents depriving people present in the United States of their liberty.
As Gavin Newsom continues his run for Trump's position, against people who are actually running for, you know, President, it's good to be reminded of who the slimeball really is:
Gawker: Remember When... 38-Year-Old Gavin Newsom Dated a Republican Teen
He brought her to the symphony after apparently disguising her age on Myspace
By way of Just Some Guy @justsomeguy11.bsky.social who noted:
The guy that fucked a 19 year old when he was 38 and owns a wine bar where the tables spell out the word "sex" is a weird terf? Color me surprised!
WSJ on MSN: Americans are leaving the US in record numbers
Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.
Direct WSJ link, both via.
If the bullshit coming out of Kansas right now isn't making you go "holy fuck", the idea that federal prison officials are blatantly disregarding judicial orders is...
Law Dork: Breaking: Trans inmate's lawyers claim "egregious retaliation" in violation of court order
Trans woman involved in a lawsuit challenging anti-trans policies says federal prison official told her on Feb. 22: “I don’t give a fuck what that judge says, I do what I want.”
Via.
This MeFi comment from caviar2d2. So much good in it, but:
So with AI entering the picture the worldview of your average programmer goes from "I don't love this company and the business part of it, but at least I get to solve fun puzzles" to "oh, I don't get to solve the puzzles anymore, what the hell is this all about" and a sudden reckoning with what a moral stain it is to be writing code...
and:
My wife put it really well over drinks last week:
"AI turns idiots in the workplace from a distraction into a menace." Every now seems as smart as everyone else unless you lock them in a Faraday cage and force them to explain themselves. And the smart people are getting dumber every day.