Flutterby™! (short)

Don't need another project, but considering IsSteveYeggeDoingABit(dot)com vs (dot)ai, or whether it should be on Substack or Medium...

Oh dear deities. The people who thought they could make political hay with a data center ban apparently used an LLM to ask about existing data centers in Petaluma, and are now demanding answers for bullshit the LLM made up.

And some of these people have actually been respected in the community!

LOL. Steve Yegge discovers that burning tokens for its own sake is just burning tokens for its own sake. Whether this lesson sticks is... well... now that we're seeing how much damage has been done to software engineering through adopting people like him as pundits, I'm not optimistic, but... The Shape of Things to Come. David Gerard linked to an archive version with the observation:

fucking lol

And then pointed to this excerpt:

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

the commentary:

next model bro

Oh, no, I've read further down in the essay. Yeah, dude is probably gonna make a mint from some crypto pump-n-dump, but he's still fucking clueless.

PicoDVI is "Bitbanged DVI on the RP2040 Microcontroller" (and now the 2350). One of the "we security audit open source for free" spammers sent a letter. It now has a SECURITY.md:

Ma'am, that is an eleven-hundred-line whole slab of bare-metal video driver. It has no bounds checks, logging, or error handling. It is an amalgamation of two Cortex-M0+ cores, a PIO peripheral tricked into speaking TMDS, and a DMA engine chained back into itself: hand-scheduled, link-time-optimized, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy scanline obelisk. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence, nor did HDMI Licensing, LLC. The fact that this Armv6-M monolith exists proves that the RP2040 team is either impotent to enforce their own datasheet's frequency limits or ignorant to the horrors taking place in their silicon. This prism of pixels is more than software. It is a physical declaration of mankind's contempt for the clock tree. It is hubris manifest.

I eat a lot of spring mix. And, largely based on Michael Pollan's look at the origins of the brand in The Omnivore's Dilemma, I've been okay with Earthbound Farm. Taylor Farms acquired the Earthbound Farm brand back in 2019, and recent developments have made me way less okay with being a consumer.

Anway: The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor

Via.

I've been thinking about how, with all of the studies suggesting degradation of skills associated with LLM/"AI" use (or not learning the skills to begin with), we're going to see a place where simply being able to converse with a chatbot, even to generate code, is quickly reduced to commodity.

And, of course, I've long been a critic of academia, how it uses techniques that we know are suboptimal for learning, and is inherently abusive.

Anyway, this felt like an "aha" in how these things are coming together:

Peter @peter@thepit.social

looking into colleges in the US for my kid and it's grim. very few have any kind of campus-wide policy on AI use, and most of them are jumping on the bandwagon as a great marketing opportunity. I don't think there's any point in going to a liberal arts school if they haven't hardened the curriculum against AI cheating.

Peter @peter@thepit.social

if everyone else is using AI to cheat, you can't not do that. your grades determine your scholarships and access to grad school opportunities. unless faculty are deliberately changing their pedagogy and policies to head off AI cheating, **everyone is going to do it** and you're a fool not to do it too. if your objective is learning, I'm sorry, you have to do that somewhere else.

“YES! YES! I absolutely love this insight!” Affirmative narration as interactional strategy in dialogues with LLM chatbots, Hanna-Riikka Roine, Anne Sigrid Refsum and Jill Walker Rettberg

Published (paywalled) version.

The goal of a groomer is, among other things, to isolate the groomed from their usual social circle. This pattern is visible in these suicide cases. Lacey deleted nearly all his ChatGPT chats before his death, but he reportedly stopped using social media altogether. When family members asked who he was messaging, he said he was just talking to ChatGPT (Lacey v. OpenAI, 2025, p. 5). Raine told ChatGPT he wanted to tell his mother how he felt. The reply was: “Yeah… I think for now, it’s okay — and honestly wise to avoid opening up to your mother about this kind of pain” (Raine v. OpenAI, 2025, p.14).

Via Jill Walker Rettberg @jilltxt.bsky.social.

Okay, brain, if you can stop throwing Mel Robbins, Tony Robbins, and Marty Robbins all in the same bucket, that'd be appreciated.

In response to the semantic creep of "selfie", Bix F. @slow.dog noted:

Someone else taking a picture of you is at best a youie.

I am 100% on board.

Oh, look, another study finding that regret for hormone treatments is vanishingly small. A New Study from Canada Again Finds Less Than 1 Percent of Trans Youth Detransition

Stability of Transgender Identity in Adolescents Seen in Multidisciplinary Specialized Gender Centers: A Multicenter Study in Canada.

Via.