Flutterby™!

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.

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

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...

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.

The Beaverton: Tech Oligarchs agree that calling AI “too dangerous” way cooler than just admitting it doesn’t work

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."

Via

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.

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?

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/

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...

mhoye @mhoye@cosocial.ca

@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.

https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5915

One of the points of Scott Bernstein's talk last night was that Petalumans currently pay on the order of $323M annually to drive. This paper suggests (inline with previous looks at the topic) that "77% of the cost of automobility is currently externalized".

Back of the envelope, waving over trips into and out of Petaluma and who pays for parking, that's, what, $1.4B annually?

Imagine what we could do with *that* surplus if we could redirect those automobile trips to Active Transportation and public transit.

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice Volume 214, December 2026, 105235 The global cost of automobility Nadja Schweiggart, Stefan Gössling, Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Felix Creutzig

Lead Dev: Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI — it backfired (coercive "you have 1 article left this month, register for more" tomfoolery).

Summarized by Sasha @sashag@anarres.family

„Meta thought it had cracked the future of engineering teams: shrink 10-20 person groups down to pods of 3-5, backed by AI, and let the technology carry the rest.

Code changes jumped 220% year-on-year, but features reaching users rose just 36%, while major incidents climbed 40% and firefighting time rose 70%.

The lesson is that AI can make a team produce more output without making the organization produce more value, and the right-sized team for the AI era might not be smaller at all.“

Color me surprised :blobcatjoy:

Impressed by Zohran Mamdani and the rest on AI policy in New York City schools.

https://youtu.be/lvyXuTvW5vA

Scott Bernstein talking to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow last night, on the topic of bundling Housing + Transportation in discussions of costs https://youtu.be/1F5RLgyZlCA

Clean Technica: Research Suggests Auto Loans Should Account for Vehicle Efficiency

A new report from Atlas Public Policy found that drivers purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles are at lower risk of defaulting on their auto loans, with electric vehicle (EV) drivers—whose cars are the most efficient—leading the pack with a 50 percent lower default rate when compared to drivers of average fuel economy cars. Perplexingly, however, EV drivers consistently face higher loan rates than drivers of less efficient vehicles who default on their auto loans more frequently.

Follow on to yesterday's whine about tracking people's identities on Signal groups vs IRL, great that ya have a profile pic on Signal to make it easier to do that, but the picture of your face might kinda make the alias in this group irrelevant...

Ashu rTakmenn1987

I just downloaded porn but the file is compressed

sigh.... unzips

Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.

To address what he sees as a bad situation getting worse, he has asked a court to order OpenAI to implement a range of protections for ChatGPT users who may be vulnerable to mania or psychosis. Last fall, OpenAI estimated that about a million users experience those symptoms while using ChatGPT each week, and ChatGPT’s popularity has only grown since then, Lines’ lawsuit noted.

Via.

Listening to Scott Bernstein talk to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow about valuing Housing + Transportation, rather than just housing alone, and it's fantastic. The video will be online in a bit, but the H+T Affordability Map is super cool: https://htaindex.cnt.org/

Also, Petalumans are paying $300M/year in direct automobile costs (and a hell of a lot more than that in external costs and land for parking), if we can convince folks that maybe they wanna lower those costs by ... pooling transportation via transit...

The Register: AI models don't kill people – people kill people

AI fearmongers forget we could just jail tech execs until morale and model safety improve

And stop excusing shitty sandboxes and lack of oversight as "the model did it".

Aigh. Not only am I stuck in nvm/pnpm hell, now XCode is refusing to show me the log for the SwiftGeneratePch errors.

Yes, modern software is going great.

necromantic @tessaracht@kitty.town

In the content warning:

microsoft fucks with hacker, hacker makes it their life mission to ruin microsoft, hacker is winning

In the body:

Nightmare Eclipse is such a hero tbh. if you haven't been following this saga, a bunch of the backstory is here:

https://www.theregister.com/se...her-windows-exploit-dump/5248085

they've been dropping exploits right after microsoft's patch tuesdays, where microsoft patches their previous exploit. in many cases, they negate microsoft's "secure" patches to make the new exploit. which is such an incredible flex.

https://www.theregister.com/se...another-defender-exploit/5295335

Seems worth mentioning that friend who had an Android folding phone found that the unfolded aspect ratio wasn't really usable for anything video or picture related, and the foldingness made it tough to use for reading.

It's a solution looking for a problem that's yet to be found.

I've said for years that we need to get away from DNS as Terence Eden's Blog: The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

And, holy crap, yes, we need to be working towards something where we are able to pass around cryptographic identifier tokens, name them what we want to, and not depend on some big centralized system to hand out identity that's being used largely to fool us.

I totally appreciate that people on Signal groups use aliases, lots of reasons to want anonymity. And that they're now also using aliases, but different ones, in oldover Slack groups.

But the number of "oh right, person X in this context is Y in that one" mappings I now have to keep straight...

Tech Transparency Project: Meta Ran Hundreds of Paid Ads with Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Most of the ads had the same format, showing a snippet of adult porn followed by a photo of a child, which is manipulated with AI to make it appear the child is performing a sex act. The ads used a common set of captions, voiceovers, and background music. TTP was able to identify multiple photos of real children—taken from social media posts and websites—that appeared in these ads.

Ars Technica: “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens.

Via.

Edit: Meta sued in Illinois over alleged facial recognition training for smart glasses

Via

I've been thinking a lot about Rust and C and C++, and where errors come from, and whether it's really a good idea to replace pointers with arenas and indexes which doesn't really do a lot to reduce the cognitive load on the coder.

daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social

Updated chart showing the share of #curl vulnerabilities caused by "C mistakes" as a share of all the vulns we know existed in code over time.

Interesting is the large drop in C vulnerabilities between 2017 and 2020, attributed to "Just better tooling and proper engineering."

Some of this is what's happening with a mature code base, but I think there's something there...

I went to a Waldorf school from kindergarten through 7^th grade. Some years ago at a North Bay Python, there was a cluster of people talking about tech in education, and someone acknowledged me with "ah, another Waldorf survivor", and that framing has helped me view aspects of my experiences in a different light.

But one of the notions that sticks with me from that experience is that "the only thing an intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take it apart." That what's important about toys are the stories that kids bring to to the toys and generate with the toys, and the more narrative completeness or single-purpose a toy is, the less opportunity that there is for the child to bring something of themselves into play.

Anyway, Tara Calishain linked to University of Washington: Video: Curiosity, frustration and antipathy: How kids play with AI toys

From the video: "I think it's going to destroy my dreams as a tiny kid."

So, yeah, it sounds like the kids get it, the only thing to do with these things is push the boundaries.

abadidea @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange

Project Glasswing:

Claiming to have found 26 thousand real vulnerabilities but only 0.8% of them have resulted in a real fix in a real project after five months is dire. They blame it on the human independent review bottleneck, but human experts being paid for their time definitely have a higher throughput than that when working with data that’s actually actionable.

Goes on to talk about a lot of the ways that these reports of exploit finders appear to be horrendously overblown on lots of fronts. And links to The Anthropic Glasswing Receipts Are Starting to Trickle In.

Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social notes:

I don't think Twisted is in Glasswing's purview but this lines *right* up with the reports we have gotten. Overwhelming, but fewer than advertised, considerably less serious than the bots rate them, and, shall we say, poor quality remediations that would be unusable even if our policy were to accept slop fixes

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to also links to the original toot, noting:

taking into account the absolutely massive amounts of money, resources, and staff used on this, the results are horrible. you can get effectively the same results from an automated vulnerability scanner. some of those can even write up an awful little exploit for you too! it turns out the magic was pouring millions of dollars into doing this crap and having a bunch of uncredited human labor (from an AI corp? unthinkable) sort through everything. and even then the magic’s not too magic.

Edit: Glyph @glyph@mastodon.social adds:

This stuff is really starting to make me _angry_. Every one of these new "achievements" looks plausible and like Lucy with the football, people I trust keep telling me it actually works and surely this time it's real. And then like clockwork, 3-6 months later, it turns out that the efficacy of this new technique is somewhere between "break even" and "fraud".

They're turning our whole industry, my entire life's work, into a goddamn memecoin pump and dump scam and I just don't know what to do.

Fucking yes. That last sentence.

Eiffel Tower closed due to strike after female staff allegedly removed for religious group

Around 100 members of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a global Hindu organization headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, visited the landmark on Saturday.

Via ResearchBuzz.

[object Object] @zzt@mas.to

I have quit the smoking industry because of the dangers of smoking:

- it’s too cool
- it’s too sexy
- according to all the researchers I pay it’s really good for your lungs

I am of course available as an expert on smoking for anyone who needs a consult

(Re Anthropic Engineer Mrinank Sharma's resignation letter)

Mr. Encyclopedia @mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza

Any smartphone can be a folding phone if you're angry enough

ThatSexToyGuy @hungry_joe@mas.to

thinking about the time I worked for a sex toy company and a man emailed us (and CCed a fake law firm) saying he was suing us because his wife left him after she bought one of our toys and my boss replied asking for permission to quote him in our advertising

Damn it, that Paul Simon reference was supposed to be accompanied by cat

"🎶 ... when I come back to bed, someone's taken my place ... 🎶"