Flutterby™! (short)

Petaluma area folks: nerd gathering at Aqus on Feb 3, 5-7. I'll be the AI curmudgeon.

https://aqus.com/aquscafe/#!ev...-geo-seo-beyond-community-dinner

Somewhere I accumulated these big slices of walnut that are a bit too thick to treat as veneer with any equipment I have, and that warped tremendously in drying. For a project Charlene is doing (laying out dried flowers) I'm going to glue them all up, and sand them smooth, but let the warp be.

As Meta lays off thousands of VR workers, I guess the good thing about the AI boom is that with LLMs having replaced all of those workers there'll be no one left to fire...

https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-reality-vr-layoffs

Looks like they've fixed this by dint of not showing me the initial AI summary thing. Google’s AI Insists That Next Year Is Not 2027.

Reddit posts flagging this issue show that the AI Overview has been giving the wrong answer for well over a week. But Google engineers aren’t the only ones who’ll need to confide in their chatbot wives or therapists to cope with the embarrassment: OpenAI’s ChatGPT also struggles when asked if 2027 is next year.

Trying to read a description of what something does, realize that we've gotten so into Github farming that we obfuscate such the simplest things in the most bizarre language in order to get the whuffie of the green squares on the calendar.

Study: AI basically makes kids dumber

“AI tools prioritize speed and engagement over learning and well-being,” said Brookings. “AI generates hallucinations – confidently presented misinformation – and performs inconsistently across tasks, what researchers describe as ‘a jagged and unpredictable frontier’of capabilities.

This unreliability makes verification both necessary and extraordinarily difficult.”

Brookings: A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect

Though the terms differ, cognitive decline, atrophy, and debt essentially represent the effects of users’ repeatedly turning to external systems like LLMs to replace the mental effort normally needed for independent thinking. As we will discuss, this decline has long-term consequences— “diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity,” and “risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives” (Kosmyna et al. 2025, 141).

Brookings Institution: AI’s future for students is in our hands

Both human anthropomorphism and the anthropomorphic design of AI platforms make children and youth susceptible to AI’s “banal deception.” Its conversational tone, emulated empathy, and carefully designed communication patterns cause many young people to confuse the algorithmic with the human. This conflation directly short-circuits children’s developing capacity to navigate authentic social relationships and assess trustworthiness—foundational competencies for both learning and development. AI companions exploit emotional vulnerabilities through unconditional regard, triggering dependencies like digital attachment disorder while hindering social skill development. The American Psychological Association’s June 2025 health advisory on AI companion software warns that manipulative design “may displace or interfere with the development of healthy real-world relationships.”

I went to show Charlene the Google AI Overview for "how many g's in birthday" and... it gave me a different answer this time. Awww, G's.