Flutterby™!

Finally, a "Ken Paxton looking at what's in children's underwear" story I can get behind: Texas AG Paxton investigating Hanes, Fruit of the Loom over children's underwear materials.

Via Tara Calishain @researchbuzz.bsky.social who noted:

I bet if the Epstein files were released in full we'd learn all about all kinds of toxic things as they relate to children

McMaster University: As employers call workers back, research points to hybrid work

After examining 82 studies, McMaster economist Colin Mang found that hybrid work boosts productivity and hours worked, suggesting that employers should reconsider back-to-office mandates.

Does Working from Home Improve Employees’ Productivity? Empirical Evidence from a Meta- Analysis Colin F. Mang and Amar Anwar

Via.

Max Mautner: Driving 5 mph slower beats driving 5% less.

A deep dive into the safety impacts of driving less vs driving slower. Of course doing both is best.

Current listening/mood: Amy Ray - Didn't Know A Damned Thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alGmuzNvsXk

Since Blue Zones sucks up a lot of grant money in our town for ... outcomes? ... this seems very worth a link. Be sure to scroll down to the Ignobel acceptance speech in rhyme: Dr Saul Newman has uncovered the “secret” to living to 110.

“I'm being asked a lot about the Mediterranean diet at the moment. The Mediterranean diet came about when someone went to southern Italy and noticed a lot of centenarians on the books. Why are they on the books in southern Italy where people have relatively short lives, and not in northern Italy, where people actually have relatively long lives?”

Is it the minestrone soup?

“No, it's probably got a lot to do with bad record-keeping and the mafia. Because that's where pension fraud happens. In 1997, there were 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients found to be dead in Italy. And, to bring out an old cliche, that's the tip of the iceberg.”

Via and a quote toot of that.

I'm not going to defend who I was in my teens and twenties, I've evolved a lot since then, and I'm super appreciative of all of those who helped me grow past some of the attitudes I held in those eras. And memory is a malleable thing, we often create justifications in history for things that happen.

But as I think back to all of the reasons I dropped out of college, all of the reasons that I believe that academia is inherently and deeply abusive, I both question all of the "liberal arts will save us!" claims (the number of philosophy majors currently fucking up society is distinctly non-zero), and... well...

Anyway, college is in the news again.

Vogue: When Will Schools Ban Frats Once and for All?

Do frats, and the men who join them, have a monopoly on predatory behavior on campus? Absolutely not. But a 2007 study found that frat brothers are three times more likely to rape than other male students; and in a 2025 survey at Cornell University—where seven fraternity brothers have been accused of drugging and gang-raping a 20-year-old student (and sorority member herself) in 2024—roughly one in three women reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at the school.

Via.

Chris Hedges: Thoughts on the Mass Rape at Cornell University

You are admitted to these male enclaves by allowing yourself to be hazed, humiliated and stripped of your dignity. Hazing rituals weed out those with enough self- esteem and independence to stand up to the hierarchy. They ensure conformity and obedience. It is a filter. Fraternity “brothers” are self-selected. Those who have the strength to oppose public humiliation and that perpetuated on each new cycle of recruits, leave.

Via.

AI training of copyrighted material not fair use: Third Circuit (Via)

Plausible sentences are not advice: Teenager rescued from B.C.’s ‘Widowmaker’ after getting stranded using AI instructions.

Markey said the teenager rode the gondola up to Grouse Mountain at around 8 a.m., and asked Claude AI to plan a trip to Crown Mountain. The artificial intelligence tool sent him down the Crown Pass and up through Crater Slabs and Crown Couloir before his instructions led him off the trail route.

He continued on through difficult terrain, and eventually called for help from the base of Widowmaker Arete’s final headwall.

Via Count Melancholia @lillyh.bsky.social, who asks:

Is the company that makes "Claude" going to pay for all these rescue missions? How does one establish culpability in these cases?

Looking even more like that old "What did Watson & Crick discover? Rosalind Franklin's notes." line isn't a joke. Science: Exclusive: How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t

Watson’s slight took hold partly because Franklin’s lab notes, usually thorough and meticulous, say little about photograph 51. But in a paper published today in the Journal of the History of Biology, Sponsel and Sutton draw attention to the earlier image, photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”

Our household political giving this year is four figures. I consider myself progressive/liberal. I believe in restorative justice.

But if your platform suggests the death penalty for political SMS spam begging for more donations, sign me the fuck up.

So, anyway...

$ apfel "What’s the frequency Kenneth?"

Kenneth is the name of the character from the animated TV series "The Simpsons." His frequency is 1000 Hz, which corresponds to the frequency of a middle C note on the piano.

258 mile range small electric truck, actually shipping? (albeit in the UK) You have my attention: The Kia PV5 makes for a ridiculously cool dump truck.

RaShon Young to the state: Leave ‘Let Us Alone’ off Florida’s new driver license

Florida entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as a slave state. Its a href="https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/189087" >1838 Constitution declared that “the General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.” Moseley, a Jefferson County planter, was sworn in as the state’s first Governor that June, and the flag bearing “Let Us Alone” was unfurled at his inauguration. The Legislature never formally adopted it. The Senate objected to the motto, according to the Florida Historical Society.

But, never one to pass up an opportunity to do a racism, DeSantis pushed it on to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor vehicles. The announcement notes that:

The card also features the motto “Let Us Alone” from Florida’s first unofficial state flag, which was presented to Governor William D. Moseley upon his inauguration.

So, yeah, deliberately a callback to a racist fucker, a message so heinous that even those of the time noped the fuck out of it.

Via.

For work reasons I'm screwing around with Apple Intelligence, which led to fact checking a complete non-sequitur answer.

Anyway, "What's New Pussycat?" lost the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1966 to "The Shadow of Your Smile". Which says something about awards and longevity...

Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool

Note: That's a tool that removes Apple Intelligence, not a tool from Apple that does intelligence removal.

Via.

Warren Wells has tracked down DUI related fatality rates nin California Bay Area counties. It's just what you'd expect in wine country...

Human Emacs. As GNU decides what to do with LLM contributions, this is a project to, if necessary, fork to keep a clean version of Emacs.

Via

As the designated tech support person for a number of less tech savvy folks: Jesus Christ, Google, fix your shit.

(Suggestions that Apple may be any better will be laughed at.)

Look, I get the "LLMs are not alive" argument, so, yeah, on the one hand we can't torture AI, on the other hand if you find a kid systematically dismembering stuffed animals, maybe ya wanna check in and see if the home life is okay...

https://www.404media.co/someon...ed-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/

For all the times we've been through Bodega Bay, this is the first time we've been to the Nicholas Green Children's Bell Tower. Stopped in at Ren Brown's gallery and asked him how we could avoid the heat back at home for a little longer...

The thing about California beaches is that I'm always surprised by the size of the mussels...

Some of y'all advocate for touching grass, some for smoking grass, I'm over here pushing for ripping up grass and replacing it with native low water landscaping, and edibles.

The thing about whining about Signal user names on social media is that I now know that Apple's cmd-ctrl-space unicode search gives me the same icon for "radish" as for "turnip"... 🫜

Saving this off so I can find the graph again: Reddit /r/ClaudeAI: Open AI's internal benchmarks show GPT-6.1 Sol crushing Opus 5.5, with Anthropic struggling to keep up (if it isn't obvious, look at the label for the vertical axis).

Via.

If the Eric Lucan signs next to John Hanania and Alan LaPierre signs weren't enough, the news that he's trying to distance himself from the cryptobros pouring hundreds of thousands into his race against Jackie Elward seals it.

Go Jackie!

Friend used voice transcription to describe his shakshouka recipe to Facebook, posted about his "sex shoe shop", and...

Yeah, I'm putting that on the list of things to cook.

Ah, I see that the LLM-as-intelligence discussion has gotten to the '90s "can we have non-consensual fantasies in fiction and what does that say about the consumers?" level of discourse.

Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt

Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.

“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.

Via Calishat @researchbuzz:

Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.

Misleading Google AI instructions cause Kodiak woman to be cited for illegal snipe hunt

Writing in an affidavit attached to the citation, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Alex Wick said Weaver called troopers to self-report the violation.

“Christina stated that she Googled ‘Snipe season’ on her phone and that, according to Google, snipe season began on September 1st,” he wrote.

Via Calishat @researchbuzz:

Much respect to this lady. As soon as she realized Google AI's misinformation caused her to engage in an illegal hunt, she self-reported her error.

Futurism: It’s Looking Possible That Zuckerberg Is Accidentally Committing Corporate Suicide

"The largest misallocation of capital in history."

As Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com notes:

If #Meta dies we all win.

The Register: Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?*

* We are intentionally invoking Betteridge’s Law in the title of this story.

"People are complaining that we aren't respecting their choices. What we need to do to regain trust is move all their buttons around and waste lots of screen space with rounding" is a take that deserves punishment.

Via a bunch of places, but Chad McCullough. In that thread, Kevin Dominik Korte @kdkorte@fosstodon.org notes:

@chadmccullough See it positively: Every minute they spend on branding is a minute when they don't add AI or cloud sync features to the browser.

And Thomas Brand @Eggfreckles@mastodon.mit.edu puts it into perspective:

@chadmccullough Mozilla's business model is to maintain a viable and noteworthy alternative browser too small to threaten Chrome's monopoly. Otherwise they would lose their default search engine dollars from Google. A bold new look is just enough of a conversation starter to meet the mission statement.

If you want Firefox to be the alternative browser it was 20 years ago think again. That dream was paid away decades ago. Euthanasia by design.

A lot of you are scoffing at Meta's claim that $4B in Zuckerberg compensation and a bunch of data center build outs qualify for a "research tax credit", but seeing how far you can push the bullshit before people resort to violence is, legitimately, research...

https://itep.org/metas-outland...-tax-breaks-for-ai-data-centers/

Discussion in the office about an Anthropic rep pushing the idea of referring to the LLM as a teammate rather than a tool.

Which... uh... I think I've identified the "tool".

Clayton County transgender student blocked from homecoming queen race

Williams said homecoming court is different from the conversation surrounding athletics.

“For this there is no difference between me and any other girl that would be put on blast. There’s no competitive advantage; as a matter of fact, people are less likely to vote for me,” Williams said.

The school is claiming worry about eligibility for federal funds.

Well played, Ms. Riley Williams.

Via Erin in the Morning: Georgia School Blocks Trans Homecoming Queen, Citing Title IX.

Well shit: Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots:

“We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit,” the company noted in its announcement, where it also shared a March 2027 shutdown date for its public API.

Reddit said RSS support will cease on November 13.

Via.

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange

BREAKING: due to ongoing safety concerns, we decided not to release this account's latest toot. During testing, the toot scored dangerously high on insight and humor benchmarks. Following the completion of additional safety testing, we'll release a less insightful version of the toot

This may need to go in my "open regularly" folder: Captain ACAB — Collectively tracking the hidden costs of law enforcement.

And the Sonoma County Sheriff has paid out over $12.5M in the past decade, and none of that shows up here yet.

Joe Groff @joe@f.duriansoftware.com

we must separate the art from the artist. into the centrifuge you go

Sancho Panza's Thoughts — When did Google get so f-ing weird?

I've largely gone to Startpage as my search engine, but I've seen similar things, where search terms are taken as laments to be commiserated with rather than, you know, search.

I kinda feel like we're going through that period where Google retargeted itself from searching on the phrase to attempting to parse the phrase as a question, only... more surreal.

The observation is one I can get behind: Charlie Stross @cstross@wandering.shop

I long for a world wide web that goes back to basics: Markdown for text, JPEG or PNG for images, *no* Javascript or other client-side execution, designed to be writable by a human being with a simple text editor and no fucking interactive/dynamic bullshit. Make it as advertising hostile as possible. And above all keep it *small* (as in: a large, sprawling web site should fit on 16Mb USB stick).

In other words, web like it's 1996 again.

The replies indicate that most people cannot conceive of such a world.

Went down to Golden Gate Park today for Forever Grateful, which turned out to be a surprisingly impactful multimedia experience.

https://haightstreetart.org/pages/forevergrateful