Flutterby™! (short)

I'm being judged

Yale study challenges notion that aging means decline, finds many older adults improve over time

The authors also examined potential reasons for why some people improve and some do not. They hypothesized that an important factor could be participants’ baseline age beliefs — or, specifically, whether they had assimilated more positive or more negative views about aging by the start of the study. In support of this hypothesis, they found that those with more positive age beliefs were significantly more likely to show improvements in both cognition and walking speed, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, education, chronic disease, depression, and length of follow-up.

Aging Redefined: Cognitive and Physical Improvement with Positive Age Beliefs

DOI

Via

Video Game History Foundation: We’ve freed Cookie’s Bustle from copyright hell. Here’s how.

We’ve stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here’s everything we learned—and how we beat them.

One thing the DMCA really really needs is some consequence for false takedown requests.

Cornell Chronicle: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

“This creates a concerning cycle,” Littrell said. “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop. Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”

Personality and Individual Differences: The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes

Results show that corporate bullshit receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate speech, negatively associated with measures of analytic thinking, and positively related with other bullshit-related constructs in theoretically-consistent ways. Importantly, corporate bullshit receptivity is positively associated with several workplace perception variables and is a robust negative predictor of work-related decision-making.

DOI.

Via Ben Werdmuller: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs.

The Internet's Gregory Mills @AhTheGreg@mstdn.ca

@babe Seen elsewhere on the internet: "the hardest part of a limited two week military engagement is the first six years"

Entirely Foreseeable AWS Outages 22.02.2026, on how Amazon is using engineer judgment as the crumple zone for having outages that stem from relying on AI tooling.

Via

The MeFi thread on Adam Neely's "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future" video, and today's work implementing an MCP server in work project, are really reinforcing how the culture of AI tools lies in devaluing skill building.

https://www.metafilter.com/212...sicians-that-have-influenced-you

Could swear I linked to this, but I can't find it, so... https://406.fail

Network Working Group                                BOFH Task Force
Request for Comments: 406i                             February 2026
Category: Imaginary Standard
Obsoletes: Basic Patience

     
         The Rejection of Artificially Generated Slop (RAGS)
                   [ERROR 406i: AI_SLOP_DETECTED]

Anyone know if the MacBook Neo runs MacOS apps, or if it's a glorified iPad? A friend is excited about it, but only if it'll run https://squaredesk.net , and I don't have the tuits to try to make an iOS port right now...

Killa Koala @dshan@mastodon.au

SAM ALTMAN EYES

(With apologies to Jackie De Shannon, Donna Weiss and Kim Carnes)

a riff on Bette Davis Eyes, and I'm gonna throw a "Betty" in here so that I can more easily find it later.

Ahhh, Facebook Marketplace listings: "Brass ... is the gold standard..."

OMG. I'm digging through various documentation for configuring AI "Agents", and Microsoft Copilot actually uses configured trigger phrases, apparently with string matching, to figure out when to trigger a particular configuration. Like "will it rain", "today's forecast", "get weather", etc.

Google pledges roughly three hours of its annual profit to fight climate change

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported $132 billion in net income in 2025. Google's five-year, $50 million pledge works out to about three hours of that. The company is also set to spend billions building massive data centers for AI that it claims are more resource conscious than others. So far, Google’s AI infrastructure buildout drove an 11 percent rise in the company's total emissions last year.