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."
Tuesday September 15th, 2026
Macklemore's Instagram post about getting kicked off the Ed Sheeran tour for saying something about Israel's genocide in Palestine.
Ben Royce @benroyce@mastodon.social posted the full text. I'll copy it here, because I think the deeper message about how the public dialog is getting guided by venue owners is important. Also, wanna say this, I get if Ed Sheeran's music isn't personally interesting to someone, but when guys are crapping on it: we can see the misogyny you're layin' down, dudes.
Anyway, Macklemore's text, taken from Ben Royce's transcription of the images, and reformatted by me to match what I think the paragraph breaks of the images are (and proofed by me):
I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour. But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.
The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.
Ed is my friend. I've known him for 13 years. We've shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I've grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we've had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I'm writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can't change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.
Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.
Ed was in a fucked up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before. He told me that the words "Free Palestine" and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn't get past his public facing, "I don't take sides."
And I get why people don't. Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I've lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn't leave you in the middle.
What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I'm sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, "Free Palestine" becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that's why this time it became so important to silence me.
And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.
I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed. Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.
When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic:
لا شكر على واجب"La shukra ala wajeb." There is no thanks for a duty.
That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.
Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people being displaced, starved and killed while the world debates which words we are allowed to use to describe it, how those words make us feel, and whether our discomfort matters more than the people living through a genocide.
I didn't need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.
Free Palestine.
But if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I've ever been on.
"The center turn lane is where people go to make terrible decisions." - Tony Cherolis
https://bikestreets.com/podcas...ie-schulte-tactical-urbanism-in- indianapolis
Meant to go for news, but just typed in mews.google.com, and the old "don't be evil" Google would have put cat pictures there.
Monday September 14th, 2026
Anna Anthro @AnnaAnthro@mastodon.social
Two teen boys -Overheard on metro:
Teen A: My mom said I gotta choose between gaming and my future…
Teen B: The future seems pretty bleak…
Teen A: Exactly! Gaming is the only good choice!
Hilarity is people who have lectured me at great length on the need to abide by extensive municipal processes (that led to plans that weren't implementable) using the Nextdoor mob to second-guess the General Plan.
Guess it only counts when it's your "right people" making the decisions?
Saturday September 12th, 2026
Went to the theater to see Coyote vs. Acme last night. Gotta admit we were kinda underwhelmed. I mean, not a bad movie, but we'd both have been happy to catch it streaming and felt like they could have spent a bit more time punching up the script.
Okay, that was a guess, and I got it right, but really, Timdle, putting "Austria becomes a duchy" up against "Battle of Legnano"?
I'm getting super suspicious of anything that posits "AI" as actually intelligent. Anyone know anything about stoptheracetoreplace(dot)org or futureoflife(dot)org?
Oh, wait... David Gerard got there already: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/0...o-astroturf-fake-anti-ai-groups/
Friday September 11th, 2026
If you have to explain your interface too deeply, it's a shitty interface.
Started reading Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America last night, and thinking about how preservationists often fight to increase homelessness, and reminded of "tradition is peer pressure from dead people", and...
@scruss Nostalgia is an attack surface.
Irenes (many) @ireneista@irenes.space
we read this academic paper a while back which mentioned in passing that it's apparently well-known (if you're in the right field of study...) that fascists and authoritarians always have a very backwards-looking idea of culture, they define their aesthetics in ways which only allow nostalgia and never new ideas, predictably and repeatedly
and once we had that idea, we've started seeing it everywhere ><
Remembering today, that pause when the US was attacked, and for a brief moment we all rallied around the flag. And then Bush did what the terrorists wantedand the US killed half a million Iraqis and we all hid our flags in shame.
"Give me a wrench, maybe it needs to be scared." is my new answer to misbehaving machines.