Saturday May 2nd, 2026
The vendor, CulinarySolvent.com, says this is a quart of 100% ethanol, so this is roughly 1/3 zest. I've stopped zesting because we lent out our citrus juicer and I need to get it back, and I have too many peeled lemons at this point...
Just avoided posting a very demeaning observation about AI advocates who troll in /r/antiai... Please clap.
Friday May 1st, 2026
nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social
When devs spend $200 on a Claude plan, they consume about $5,000 in compute. That is right. It is heavy subsidization by Anthropic. Remember Google/Amazon/Nvidia/ Microsoft & others are funding Anthropic and they are buying back cloud services and GPUs from the same vendors. On the books, it seems Google, Amazon and Nvidia are all making profits via AI, but the reality is this is just circulating money with heavy subsidization hoping to trap retail, pension funds, Govt funds via IPO route.
And nixCraft 🐧 @nixCraft@mastodon.social
Somebody is going to ask the source for $200 & $5000 numbers etc, it is here
https://www.briefs.co/news/ube...t-on-claude-code-in-four-months/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/a...-to-war-for-ai-coding-dominance/ (numbers are here [ https://archive.is/MRdRN paywal free link ] )
Immigrants Approved for Citizenship ‘Plucked Out’ of Line Moments Before Pledging Allegiance: Report
As of Dec. 2, USCIS is halting all applications for immigrants from the 19 countries the Trump administration has deemed high-risk
Trying to understand how people use SharePoint, which leads to lots of videos about Copilot in Microsoft products, and...
There appear to be a lot of people who think that clicking "summarize and draft a response" is going to be a valuable business contribution.
Some children are drawing on fake moustaches to bypass online age checks, report finds
A third of children in the UK have bypassed age verification gates, research from Internet Matters suggests
Internet Matters Online Safety Act Report May 2026 (PDF):
Mum of boy, 12 "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old."
Hey, someone else is seeing the animism! Fi 🏳️⚧️ @munin@infosec.exchange
So, something that's been bugging the shit out of me?
These fucking assholes who let LLMs run rampant and delete prod?
They query the LLM for "why" it did that.
This is delusional behavior.
LLMs do not have a concept of 'why': they assemble a response based on a statistical sampling of likely continuations of the original prompt in their database.
LLMs do not have the ability to have motivation. It is a machine.
LLMs, further, function by instantiating a new runtime -for each query- that reads the prompt and any cache, if they exist, from prior sessions:
which means, fundamentally, "asking" the LLM to explain "why" "it" did a thing is thrice-divorced from reality:
It cannot have a why;
It cannot have a self to have motivations;
And the LLM you ask is not the one that did it, but is a new instance reading from its predecessors notes.Treating it as tho it is an entity with continuity of existence is fucking delusional and I am fucking sick of pandering to this horseshit.
Touch some grass and get a fucking therapist.
(I thought I'd mentioned it more, but at least here)
Mariatta 🤦🏻♀️ @mariatta@fosstodon.org
That should be my next motto after "no spreadsheets".
"No copy pasting". Especially for data that is always changing. My calendar, my availability, conference budget. Share data straight from the source instead of copy pasting from one sheet to another.
Which, of course, also needs an update mechanism
anybody got any anti-"ai" or luddite songs to share? I'd love to get a playlist going
boosts welcome
All of this: monkϵyborg 🦾🐵 @monkeyborg@triangletoot.party
All those people saying “I was skeptical of AI, until I tried Claude and I was amazed that it could tell me this and this and this” sound just like
“I was skeptical of psychics, but then Madame Fortuna told me something only my dead wife would know!”
Human perception has certain well-documented flaws that confidence men prey upon, and you are not immune from these
And yet it feels like there's something in code generation, as dangerous as it is.
Cramming AI into every orifice: ZD Net: Is Facebook adding Gen Z phrases to your shared posts? You're not alone, bestie. Here's what's happening.
Via.
Okay, Google Intelligence, I kinda get how you got there, but, uh, no.
Wednesday April 29th, 2026
Lots of stuff I'm struggling with in this, and I need to rewatch it:
KDE contributor Farid inspired us to take on the “30 for 30” challenge: for our 30th birthday, we are asking you to do something to help the environment and make the planet a nicer place to live in. Farid is planting 30 trees and we want you to come up with something similar.
Film you and your crew carrying out your effort and we will promote your project on social media.
Here are some more ideas:
- Rescue 30 computers (or more!) from ending up in a landfill
- Upcycle 30 phones with a free mobile operating system
- Clean up 30 hectares of woodland
- Convert 30 people to a free operating system
- Take 30 techbros to court so they stop building AI datacenters
Via.
all this talk about tokens this and tokens that. they turned my profession into chuck e cheese.
University of British Columbia: Are you addicted to your AI chatbot? It might be by design
AI chatbots can grant almost any request—a celebrity in love with you, a research assistant, a book character sprung to life—instantly and with little effort. New research presented at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems suggests that this genie-like quality is fuelling AI addiction, and that chatbot design could be partly to blame.
Lobste.rs this morning:
* Ghostty leaving github (comments) * Github banned me for no understandable reason (comments) * Before GitHub (comments) * From GitHub to Codeberg/Forgejo (comments) * Ditching GitHub (comments) * An update on GitHub availability (comments) * Github Actions is the weakest link (comments)
Woman’s Talkspace therapy app sessions exposed in court
Don't fucking trust pyschotherapy apps. Holy shit.
Tuesday April 28th, 2026
that genehack guy from that dead bird site @extremely.website
Current status: wondering what percentage of my GenAI skeptisim is grounded in having lived thru the Matt’s Script Archive phase of the “this lets everybody code” era.
This post was made blank.
Wow. So this weekend at North Bay Python, the Apify folks were doing a "try out our API, win something". I'd had a glass of wine, so I fired up my phone, did a few queries to enter myself in the raffle, and carried on.
I'm not sure what I did that's ongoing, but just got the "you hit your $100 intro bonus API cost" email.
So clearly there was something I didn't understand. Another entry in the "I'm scared of cloud billing" bucket.
My talk on Modern Western Square Dancing at North Bay Python this weekend is live...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJVvaz8eFwA
#NBPy
pubes with poop on em @poopypubes@jorts.horse
Me: it's not OK to stan any side of a war
Iran: *bombs an Oracle data center
Me: *biting knuckles, squirming*
ni cole4fox -> GPN @nicole4fox@datastream.cortexvoid.net
"I'm down for whatever as long as it doesn't increase shareholder value"
After years and years of tolerating it, I finally fixed an issue with how the Flutterby formatter handles <br> tags. Actually, not so much how it handles it as with how modern browsers handle </br> tags.
Anyway, in the process I willy-nilly changed the doctype. Holler if you see anything stupid, or if I regressed utf-8 handling again, or something.
Monday April 27th, 2026
Kinda thinking LLM coding is like playing with live grenades. I mean, sure, you're bored, they're something to juggle, and hot damn, did you see that behind the back under the leg combo, why are you backing away, this is really cool?
Via Peter @peter@thepit.social who observes:
That thread also has the original Twitter thread.
Also, if an LLM does nuke your data, please, for the love of all that's holy, do not ask the plausible sentence generator why it deleted your data. It does not "know". It doesn't matter how frustrated and angry you are. It just exposes that you are suffering from epistemia (mentioned previously).
Extremely simple little music player display, in Rust. MacBook Pro M2. The egui library is costing me 8.22ms per update (measured over 1k updates).
I'm offended by how inefficient this is. Is there a Rust GUI library that's actually practical, or that does minimal repaint/refreshes?
NowWeAreAllTom @tom@labyrinth.social
please join me in condemning the appalling bloodshed. we need a much more secure and refrigerated solution for the storage of blood. a shed is insufficient
Fox 35: VIDEO: Truck runs over 250K Lamborghini in parking lot
By way of ReindeR Rustema @rrustema020@mastodon.nl
@notjustbikes about SUVs that are too dangerous.
In Orlando a lady in a huge monster truck drove her machine on top of a Lamborghini sports car in the parking lot of Crunch Fitness. Because she couldn't see the car.
Not fake, confirmed by journalists. https://www.nu.nl/325970/video...peperdure-lamborghini-in-vs.html
Another angle: https://youtu.be/mR1ojA5tlSs?si=zT_HHZ
Wolf SSL: Why C Remains the Gold Standard for Cryptographic Software. Lots of good stuff in here, including:
Side-channel resistance is difficult in any language.
What is true: as abstractions obscure execution behavior, side-channel properties become harder to reason about and harder to verify at scale. Rust provides tools to mitigate this—but using them extensively means abandoning most safety abstractions, bringing the problem space back toward C.
The issue is not impossibility—it’s verifiability without abstraction collapse.
Mario Munoz has put the text of his Sunday morning talk at North Bay Python online. I'm waiting for the recording to experience it again, but it was exactly the Sunday morning angry sermon I needed: https://pythonbynight.com/talks/empathy
Jeff Baker @jwbee.bsky.social
AI has already taken my software job, not in the sense that I don't have one, but in the sense that I now hate the job and most of the other people.
"The laser pointer does not own you." - @baconandcoconut@freeradical.zone
#NBPy
"Technology only helps if your successor understands it." - Philip James
#NBPy
"Technology is here to serve people, not the other way around." - Philip James
Not a "to serve man" reference.
#NBPy
If you believe that the best part of a conference is the hallway track, this year's North Bay Python feels like that. The conversations and presentations feel like the sort of thought provoking topics I want from a conference.
#NBPy
Sunday April 26th, 2026
"The impact of a system is what we continue to allow." - amanda casari
#NBPy
Joelle Maslak's talk "What Feminist Theory & Praxis Says About Internet Networking" has me thinking about "the cost of crossing boundaries" not just between process isolation or network locations, but also social boundaries.
#NBPy
This talk by @kattni@kattstodon.com is reminding me how much my model of how human behavior changes has evolved over the course of my life. I don't know if that's a general change in society or in the community I surround myself with, but I hope it's the former.
I appreciate the insights.
#NBPy
Mario Munoz @pythonbynight@hachyderm.io "An Economy of Empathy" talk is definitely one I'm going to go back through and listen to with Charlene, and is the righteous sermon I needed this morning.
#NBPy
Repeat of yesterday's picture, now with more sky texture. You should be at North Bay Python.
#NBPy
Continuing my exploration of finding a lightweight cross-platform widget set for Rust, and it's reinforcing my feeling that software development has become completely unserious.
"Debrief" implies that there is also "deboxer".
And what other types of furniture samples are there besides stool?
Saturday April 25th, 2026
Fantastic talk from Christopher Neugebauer to open North Bay Python: ""What is Correct?" and is that even the right question any more?"
I'm gonna have to rewatch this to let the lessons sink in.
#NBPy
You could be somewhere else, or you could be at North Bay Python this weekend.
An organization I'm involved with is running up against email providers fighting with MailChimp tracking links. It's unclear at what level of payment MailChimp stops adding that stuff.
Suggestions for migrating away, including alternate vendors and procedures, welcomed.
Friday April 24th, 2026
While nobody knows how many of these illegal electric bicycles are on the road, the percentage might be quite high. Counts of electric two-wheelers parked at a dozen northern California middle and high schools found that almost 90% may not meet the standards for legal electric bicycles. Some of these devices have as much as eight times more power than legal limits.
While I'm finding cool stuff in Rust: Pest
pest is a general purpose parser written in Rust with a focus on accessibility, correctness, and performance. It uses parsing expression grammars (or PEG) as input, which are similar in spirit to regular expressions, but which offer the enhanced expressivity needed to parse complex languages.
Looking at Rust GUI libraries, and I guess we just assume that compute is cheap enough that for every tick of the song playback slider/transport, we're willing to re-render all of the text and tables in the window as well now?
(I'm headed towards Relm/gtk4, which also gives me the hives. Sigh.)
Waymo Is Not In The ‘Vision Zero’ Toolbox: Data
Waymo has told advocates that expecting it to respect bike lanes is “too high a bar” because customers expect to be dropped off in them, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition.
“People always point out that unlike human driven cars, the AVs stop at lights and obey the speed limit. However, they are really only as good and effective and safe as they are programmed to be,” White said. “Waymos pull over into bike lanes all the time for pickups and drop-offs and that’s neither legal nor safe but the companies say that is a normal practice and that’s what customers expect.”
Last June, a cyclist in San Francisco sued the Google-owned company after she was seriously injured when one of the brand’s driverless taxis stopped in a cycle lane and a passenger opened its back door, striking the cyclist and causing her to smash into another Waymo car that was also illegally blocking the bike path.
Got a Nixle alert to avoid Petaluma Boulevard South at Mountain View Ave so of course we had to walk down and see. Not sure how this happened, but I think the wheels side is supposed to stay down
Thursday April 23rd, 2026
Ah, yes, when you have to use QuickTime Player to screen record XCode to catch the stack trace before XCode shits itself...
maxine 🇵🇸 @maxine@hachyderm.io
Consider the following: rust rewrites of projects like coreutils exist purely to remove copyleft licensing. The supposed security and performance gains are irrelevant, and while memory safety is important, logic bugs don’t suddenly cease to exist just because it was written in Rust.
So I'm fleshing out this app with Cosmic/Iced, and... is there a cross-platform widget set for Rust that's lighter weight and not so "rerender everything when the data model changes" based?
Preferably with a reasonable table control that has in-place editing, and cropping of columns with variable length (so a cell with long data in a column that fills doesn't overrun the next column)?
These results suggest that an increased tendency toward mobile phone short video addiction could negatively impact self-control and diminish executive control within the realm of attentional functions. This study sheds light on the adverse consequences stemming from short video consumption and underscores the importance of developing interventions to mitigate short video addiction.
I'm... skeptical of EEG studies and results, and the "this is an addiction" opener, but wanted to find a place to refer back to this.
Via.
Wednesday April 22nd, 2026
Jaimie's Erotica @Jaimieserotica@kinkycats.org
Now that Apple have announced a new CEO is due to arrive soon, I wonder if they'll be deliberately slowing Tim Cook down with a view to completely bricking him when the new one arrives?
Pondering Rust's fascination with f32 types. I remember being concerned about memory usage and floats vs doubles in the late '90s, but in the intervening decades I thought we'd kinda agreed that unless there's lots of them, doubles were faster. Am I just the wrong level of old?
The Conversation: It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect is a look at Social Development: Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses Reveal no Gender Difference in Neonatal Social Perception
Existing evidence supports a possible maturational difference but not a specific social advantage for girls at birth. While more research and better reporting are needed, the present findings challenge the claim that girls are innately more socially perceptive than boys.
Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social summarized this as:
The evidence is pretty clear: boys will be boys is a myth. Kids are sociable creatures. We TEACH boys to be monsters and to hate girls. We TEACH boys to interpret puberty as an alienation from girls.
But it's also further confusion in my own search for identity, thinking about how much of who I was that I regret being in my 20s is a function of neuro-divergence vs my Waldorf school experiences.
Financial Times (subscriber only) Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’.
Bloomberg Law: Sullivan & Cromwell Apologizes to Judge for AI Hallucinations.
Dietderich said he also apologized to lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner who alerted him to the errors. Matthew Schwartz, Boies Schiller’s chair, is counsel to Chen, according to a court document.
Some "what goes around here", Boies Schiller Flexner's John Kucera was in the hotseat last year for AI slop in a case against the Church of Scientology.
Alerted to this by Indefinitely Extended Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social
TFW Sullivan & Cromwell charges you $1200 an hour for a Yale graduate to ask grok “is this argument sus”
doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.017 PMCID: PMC9376337 PMID: 35989135
I'm learning Rust, and wow am I feeling the "docs are not written for humans" thing right now. And nor are forum responses. A lot of "I'm so smart, mark that particular example up this way", not a lot of "here's how to structure your code out of this mess".
Walking to work a little early this morning. Tons of kids biking on the sidewalk. Paint bike lanes really don't protect anyone, do they?
Beyond Code Snippets: Benchmarking LLMs on Repository-Level Question Answering March 2026
Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate two widely used LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) under both direct prompting and agentic configurations. We compare baseline performance with retrieval-augmented generation methods that leverage file-level retrieval and graph-based representations of structural dependencies. Our results show that LLMs achieve moderate accuracy at baseline, with performance improving when structural signals are incorporated. Nonetheless, overall accuracy remains limited for repository- scale comprehension. The analysis reveals that high scores often result from verbatim reproduction of Stack Overflow answers rather than genuine reasoning.
Update from "nobody thinks they're the villain in their own story" to "anybody who thinks they're the hero in their own story is probably the villain."
I've eventually, after looking at situations like Spade Cooley, come around to the fact that it's not bad to support the estate of people who've done horrific things, if the estate is paying into funds which help the victims. I can "separate the art from the artist" when the art is helping mitigate some of the damage.
I've also come around (and there's history on Flutterby, eg, of me being dismissive) to understanding that Michael Jackson was one hell of a singer, and, the product of a very fucked up childhood, and product of a very fucked up society in how we, collectively, handled his celebrity.
So I've been kinda looking forward to the upcoming Michael Jackson movie.
But I'm also well aware that... there's some problematic shit here. And somehow I missed this headline from January of last year, that Michael Jackson Biopic Needs Major Reshoots After Discovery of Past Legal Agreement with Molestation Accuser: Report.
More recently, Inside the ‘Michael’ Overhaul: $15 Million Reshoots, Removing Child Abuse Allegations and What’s in Store for Sequels which names the accuser whose lawyer made sure that there was to be no mention of said accuser in future films. Decades ago.
(Still) An(gr)i Bundel @anibundel.bsky.social observed:
I feel like not enough reviewers know they had to remake the entire final third of the Michael Jackson movie because it falsely exonerated him, and it turned out the kid’s lawyer foresaw that shit in the 1990s and made sure to include a clause that the estate could never ever do that on film.
(Still) An(gr)i Bundel @anibundel.bsky.social
Note I said “remake.” As in, the Jackson estate apparently had *no idea* they had signed something 25 years ago that prevented them from ever defaming the kid until the movie was basically finished.
I can't imagine that the estate's legal team somehow dropped this. I would think that the screenwriters would have been working with these settlement agreements all the way through.