Flutterby™! (short)

Trying to see if I've fixed the picture for Good evening from Petaluma

Edit: aand it didn't work.

Good summary: Esther Weidauer: Why I resist generative AI.

Via

Good evening from Petaluma

edit: I think systemd has broken my image uploading. Fuuuuuu.

‘Put the posters in charge’: Inside the Democrats’ secret strategy to flood the internet with clips.

But it also decided to take a more behind-the-scenes approach. The DNC’s toxic brand among some audiences was hampering the reach of its posts. In early 2025, the organization relaunched its rapid response online efforts under a new brand, @FactPostNews, an account intentionally designed to look like an independent news aggregator, not a messaging arm of the party.

Chat, is it bad when you tank your brand and reputation so hard that a random unknown source is perceived as more reliable?

Via

Terry Pratchett's Study in 1:12 scale. Interleaved English and Danish descriptions, datarama @datarama@hachyderm.io's thread explains that they're the same in both languages.

khm @khm@hj.9fs.net

I don't know who originated the "biggest threat to nvidia continues to be chinese models" joke but I want to congratulate them on a job well done

Neil Brown @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk

If the CEO of NVIDIA has had multiple affairs with officers of far eastern intelligence services, is this an example of Chinese five spies?

Sin of empathy 🕷️🧂🌈🫙⚖️ @trabern@mas.to

So today as toney tech bros are engaged in self-examination of the national security ramifications of their side pieces, the important thing to keep in mind is…..

THAT IS EXACTLY HOW EPSTEIN WORKED.
THAT IS EXACTLY WHO EPSTEIN COMPROMISED.

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange

When we talk about industry-standard security, please understand that the industry standard is 4

Calishat @researchbuzz

Sometimes it's good to sit and try to gently wrap your head around something.

Thinking about the research and science and testing and activism and discovery and plain old WORK of fighting HIV to the point where bathhouses are coming back to San Francisco

Bay Area Reporter: SF planning body OKs permits for gay bathhouse Sanctum Baths

I mean, to be fair I walked by Steamworks in Berkeley back in the 2000/2001 era, it's kinda always been there, but I see the the gains made with PrEP, and with cultural changes, and I'm blown away.

I mean... not that kind of "blown"...

SlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content Jochen Madler. Building on StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction:

The signal characterizes and attributes: AI posts share a tidy, self-announcing shape, 68.6% are attributed to the correct source against a 16.7% chance rate, and human posts occupy rare structural configurations. All effects replicate StoryScope’s, consistent in direction and at least as large in magnitude. We release pipeline, instrument, prompts, code, and aggregate artifacts.

Via.

Terminal 2 Shell

CVE ID pending · also tracked as "TermGeddon"

A critical flaw present in every operating system since 1971 allows anyone who opens a terminal to obtain a fully interactive shell. Instantly. With no authentication beyond the one they already did.

Coding Agents Copy Your Secrets to a Hidden File. Thousands Are on GitHub. tl;dr: when you say "yes, and don't ask again" to Claude, that's getting written to .claude/settings.local.json and .claude/settings.json, and people are committing these files to public repos, and those commands often contain keys.

Although, as people have pointed out, if your organization incentivizes LLM use, that's good reason to leak your keys.

Via.

Amusing stop doing ... [computer science] they have played us for absolute fools meme on character encoding.

Andrew Lewis Workshop @LewisWorkshop@mastodon.online sells suggestive engineering signs.

James Baillie @JubalBarca@scholar.social has a thread about the AI slop in Terra Tempora and "ways that this events-and-civilisations model distorts our understanding of the past more than supporting it."

It's hard to miss the ways that LLMs and generative AI are subtly altering our understanding of the world, making it into a narrative that's very much defined by the training, and that supports a specific world view.

I suspect that MissConstrue @MissConstrue@mefi.social is quote tweeting this, though I'm still getting a "post pending" from that.

Denver Post: Crypto foundation demanded employees endorse suicide pledge, then fired leaders who objected, Colorado lawsuit alleges. The foundation is The Ethereum Foundation:

Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.

Yeah, this shit is totally "take your two months severance".

Via.

Thread about the Moche people of Peru using electro-chemical gold plating 100-500CE, as opposed to the Romans using Mercury for gold plating.

Yeah, this is pretty awesome: THE GODAWAN | Return of The Great Indian Bustard | Stopmotion Film with BTS | Studio Eeksaurus (YouTube video).

Via Calishat @researchbuzz who notes:

OUTSTANDING. If you have 6 minutes and 43 seconds (the animation itself is about half that) I can't recommend this enough. A masterpiece of stop motion made from ceramics.

Morbid thought based on a Reddit moderation/strike on a reply I wrote: What if drivers think of "White Bicycle"s not as a memorial to a life lost, but as a monument to and celebration of automobile supremacy?

Watched "The American Society of Magical Negroes" last night. We both had kind of a "huh, I expected more" response, and then about half an hour later Charlene said "I think I have to watch that again so we can talk about it more deeply". And I'm game to.

So, yeah, recommended.

Huh: Dan Moynihan had a gift link to the NYT article on Jensen Huang having an "intimate relationship" with Alice Huang, who'd been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security:

"Nvidia officials have said that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not unusual or unexpected” and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with any of Nvidia’s many customers."

So how many customer reps *has* he been fucking?

https://bsky.app/profile/donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3mztiqfcq522n