Flutterby™! (short)

Honestly, this makes sense: Programmers who proclaim themselves expert are generally crappy programmers, so if you tell an LLM that it's supposed to be an expert programmer, of course it's gonna generate worse code. The Register: Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

In a pre-print paper titled "Expert Personas Improve LLM Alignment but Damage Accuracy: Bootstrapping Intent-Based Persona Routing with PRISM," researchers affiliated with the University of Southern California (USC) find that persona-based prompting is task-dependent – which they say explains the mixed results.

Via.

Oregon attorney slapped with record fine after citing case law hallucinated by AI

The Oregon Court of Appeals issued a $10,000 fine to Bill Ghiorso, a Salem-based civil attorney, after determining he signed his name to a legal brief containing 15 bogus citations and nine quotes “that had been contrived from thin air.”

The article mentions a previous slap on the wrist ($2k) against Portland civil attorney Gabriel A. Watson.

The one thing that "AI" is making painfully clear is just how many places people could leave the "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text in place and not lose any functionality from their company web pages.

Just read "coprocessor" in the sense of that other word that starts with "copro...", "coprophagia".

In case you wondered the mindset I've been swimming in.

Hate to link to something that requires registration to read, but this one pull quote is too juicy. The Chronicle of Higher Education: Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried. — The Georgetown computer scientist on resisting the temptation to automate hard thought.

We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness. There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that email from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee that strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.

There are some other interesting thoughts in there that reinforce my opinion that formal education is, by design, abusive, and actual learning is at best a byproduct. But at least he gets this bit right.

Via.

So it kinda seems like we now need to, at a minimum, do Node, Python, and Rust development in a container environment that doesn't have access to anything but the absolute minimum that it needs to operate...

Which also solves the package version problem.

Fediverse thread from @peter@thepit.social on a supply chain attack on the LiteLLM Python package.

lol oh my god i feel **so fucking smug** right now, it's incredible. my whole body is tingling.

Apparently this is a vibe coded package that provides a switch between LLM API back-ends.

The Hacker News discussion.

emily pathetic 🫀 🪚 ‪@incision.site‬

we support the writer's barely disguised fetish in a climate where adults on social media are mortified at the idea of consuming something that made someone horny

‪Alicia Pendragon‬ ‪@aliciapendragon.bsky.social‬

Puritanism is cringe and fascistic.

H-Neurons: On the Existence, Impact, and Origin of Hallucination-Associated Neurons in LLMs Cheng Gao, Huimin Chen, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyi Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun. On trying to identify the particular places where LLMs are made susceptible to "when did you stop beating your wife?" or "what color are cat feathers, red or pink?" style "hallucinations".

Tyler McBrien ‪@tylermcbrien.com‬

The Singularity is upon us: Apple's AI summarized a text message that read "I'm still down to clown if you are" to.... "clown event still possible."

Via.

Hmmm... Interesting. https://keytrace.dev/ appears to be yet another attempt to own the social graph. I'm getting strong keybase.io or ... heck, I don't even remember all of the other ones I've seen.

Anyway, seems worth noting that it's a thing that happened.

The FCC Just Banned the Sale of New Wi-Fi Router Models Made Outside US.

I strongly suspect this means that TR-069 got expanded to include US intelligence agencies.

The FCC page.

Psychology Today: Epistemic Injustice: The Great Gaslighting of Autistic Lives

Via and via, in linking to the latter post Manuèle Ducret @Filambulle@mastodon.social observed:

Instead of empathy deficit, autistic people demonstrate a broader moral concern, extending fairness beyond their tribes. Where researchers had assumed impairment, they found autistic people applying moral principles more consistently—even to strangers, even when costly. In a world increasingly damaged by in-group bias, this isn't a deficit; it's a collective-level fail-safe feature.

2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) DUETCS: Code Style Transfer through Generation and Retrieval Binger Chen, Ziawasch Abedjan. The measure of success includes:

Computational accuracy (A_C): the percentage of programs that can be compiled and produce the same output as the ground truth reference when given the same input.

which... uh.... ✧✦Catherine✦✧ @whitequark@treehouse.systems notes

i'm at a loss of words after reading a paper about reformatting code using an ML model that has a measured statistical quantity A_c which says how often the reformatted code behaves the same as the original

the "ideal" (their choice of words) case is 64.2%

Which... explains so much about modern software. Couple of interesting additional notes from the thread.