Flutterby™! (short)

The urge to scream "that's not how music licensing works at all!" at a piece of fiction using song ownership as a plot point...

I wanna see a pedestrian and transit first city, and I'm pretty sure that the only way for that to happen in the US is something like California Forever, so I'm bummed that they lost the shipyard deal to Texas, but Trump era war spending also seems like a shakey foundation.

https://sfist.com/2026/07/16/c...rnia-forever-loses-shipbuilding/

I've been trying to get out early and go up the steps on the hill in the local new subdivision.

I can't run up it in one shot yet, have to stop and rest, so it's kinda... Stops and stairs

Samir Talwar: LLMs can't program, in which the author reports from a two day workshop on "spec driven programming".

Via.

ICE agent who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford identified as former Maine law enforcement officer.

Ashley Brouillette told a reporter that she wanted to speak publicly because she had previously reported concerns to his superiors in the military about David Brouillette’s mental health. She said he was abusive in their relationship.

And that he called her and asked her to lie to cover him...

Via

In which an essayist talks about how LLM usage is destroying their staff's morale, while cluelessly using image generation to illustrate said lament: Stackademic: My Best Senior Engineer Quit Last Month. Her Exit Interview Was Scheduled for Forty Minutes. The Last Five Changed How I Run My Team.

She said: “I haven’t built anything in eight months. I’ve spent eight months reading things a machine wrote, trying to find the bug it was too confident to see. I’m not an engineer here anymore. I’m a verification layer for an agent. I didn’t spend ten years getting good at this to become the thing that stands between a model and the incident it’s about to cause. I’m tired in a way that has nothing to do with hours.”

Via

My ear buds: "I dunno, man, I may have heard of your phone, once..."

My car: "Oh, hey, I realize you turned off the audio but I dug through your phone and found the raunchiest erotic podcast, your passengers are gonna listen to that now."

Friend from way back is reinventing as a digital artist, went through the NFT phase, and is referencing Pepe the Frog because "Pepe is a very popular in the Web3 space".

Yikes, and it's amazing how the bubbles of what's acceptable surround us.