Flutterby™! (short)

Just to prove that I'm not "whine about AI all the time", last night I ended up hanging at the workshop of a computing luminary for a an hour or two, and among the topics we covered was Shelly devices for home automation, and... I don't know how proprietary the software for these things is, but holy crap they look awesome.

Nice small relays, with isolation (so you can switch 220V and power them with 110V, or in some cases, 12v or 24-48v), some of them have inputs so that you can use them to augment an existing switch, and configure them to edge trigger or level trigger in various ways (so that you can use the WiFi-ness of these things as one leg of a 3 way switch, turning them off and on with an existing switch).

Looks like the ecosystem has some really cool environmental sensors, too.

But the big thing is the form factor is small and easily embedded in stuff (no more trying to mash a big ol' over-sized smart switch into a box), and they're not outrageously priced.

Google’s AI Team Tells Job Seekers Its HR Filters Are Unreliable

Google DeepMind's AGI Safety and Alignment Team, which seeks to mitigate the risks of advanced AI, is encouraging job candidates for its open roles to fill out a special form alongside their application to eliminate the risk it may be automatically screened out by the company's internal AI systems, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg, which contained the disclaimer "PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOC WIDELY."

As Gabriele Svelto @gabrielesvelto@mas.to notes:

We don't eat our own dog food because frankly it tastes like shit

Wheee! Largest AI Supply Chain Breach of 2026: LiteLLM Hack Impacts Thousands of Global Enterprises - Claim Your Ethical Disclosure

Excellent forensic research published by Snyk, Trend Micro, and Cycode has thoroughly detailed the mechanics of this breach. The attack did not begin with LiteLLM. Instead, TeamPCP first compromised the GitHub Actions pipeline for Trivy, a highly popular open-source vulnerability scanner.

Via.

Nature is strange: Fish climbing in the upper Congo Basin (Central Africa), first report for the shellear Parakneria thysi on the Luvilombo Falls.

Specimens climb the vertical wall of the falls (~ 15 m high) in the splash zone during major floods, usually occurring at the end of the rainy season (April–May), using their pectoral fins, supported by their pelvic fins.

Via

Interesting musings on software design and purpose: Is Aphera a Lightroom replacement?

Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’. Apparently Time started serving pages as markdown for the consumption of AI agents, started serving ads in that markdown, and...

The ads work by having ad tech firm Mobian generate FAQ-formatted content based on a brand brief, then insert it into Time’s markdown pages and track how often AI search engines surface it, and how favorably. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had their brand-written, brand-approved messaging sit in the same markdown version of the page an agent reads as fact. If a page’s markdown version can be quietly seeded with paid content, users have no way of knowing whether an answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief, appears Perplexity’s logic.

One of the big problems with LLMs is that there is no control channel. Sure, the "system" prompt may get weighted more heavily, but everything is data.

Kinda like humans, come to think of it...🤔 [goes and updates ad blocker]

Via.

Queen’s Brian May outraged by AI version of album cover and tells UK PM Andy Burnham: ‘You must stop it now’

May used Meta AI to make the cover, which resurrects late frontman Freddie Mercury. He did so in order to make a “very serious” point about the environmental impact of AI to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

Instagram link

But I'm now very serious. I believe the price we are about to pay for this 'inevitable' development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK.

Science Alert: 'Virtually Absent': AI Models Practically Erase Female Characters From Kids' Stories

Neutrality Bites: Gender Representation in AI-Generated Animal Stories Imani Finkley, Yuanxi Li, Melanie Walsh </>

In this paper, we use anthropomorphic fiction as a stress test for gender representation in contemporary LLMs. Across 23.8K story completions, we find that models frequently respond to gender ambiguity through avoidance, either by repeating the animal noun or using neutral pronouns. This surface-level neutrality does not translate into equitable representation. When the models do explicitly assign gender, they overwhelmingly default to masculine protagonists, while feminine protagonists are nearly absent. This experiment leads us to a broader claim about AI alignment with regard to gender and broader social representation: neutrality bites. In other words, we argue that prioritizing neutrality with regard to representations of gender, race, sexuality, or other identity categories, above all else, can function less as inclusion and more as erasure. <?blockquote>

Via.

David Culley has some thoughts on Transformers and human susceptibility.

Great Scott Gadgets: LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects

Our communities are already noticing a shift away from collaborative stewardship and toward transactional interactions with projects, and we’re seeing open source project maintainers left to deal with increasing volumes of generated code. When people interact privately with systems trained on communities, it gradually weakens the shared understanding of how projects work and redistributes the burden more heavily onto (often underfunded) project owners.

Via.

Obligatory cat picture

For the love of all the deities, just send me the damned prompt, stop asking me to read LLM output. It's so clumsy and convoluted that I can't tell if you* have an interesting thought under there, or not.

• For specific values of "you" that are probably not the reader of this.

I too exhibit a present flagrance...

Cal Newport: On AI Coding and Its Discontents (Via).

The Carlson Lab: The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI, on text regurgitation and the destruction of an academic career that comes from plagiarism. (Via Stephen Royle @steveroyle@biologists.social, Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe, among others).

1Password: Off-by-1 Labs: Why AI-generated vulnerability patches still require expert human review

We studied what happens when Large Language Models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for recently disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. Our data shows that LLMs produce Fix-Like Artifacts with Embedded Defects (FLAWED) 53.9% of the time when complex patches are required.

Oh god. You know that thing where to understand code, you have to go through and strip out all of the misleading comments.

And you know how LLMs meticulously comment code.

And... yeah. I just hit one of those.

Which is why I'm looking for different work.

OH:

"Being a horndog is not a new thing it's the oldest thing."

"No but "trans woman in Starfleet uniform" is new to me"