Flutterby™! (short)
Thursday September 10th, 2026
A million mania or psychosis amplifications a week?
Dan Lyke /
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Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional.
ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.
To address what he sees as a bad situation getting worse, he has asked a court
to order OpenAI to implement a range of protections for ChatGPT users who may be vulnerable
to mania or psychosis. Last fall, OpenAI estimated that about a million users experience
those symptoms while using ChatGPT each week, and ChatGPTs popularity has only grown
since
then, Lines lawsuit noted.
Via.
Listening to Scott Bernstein talk to
Dan Lyke /
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Listening to Scott Bernstein talk to Petaluma Urban Chat's Know Before You Grow about
valuing Housing + Transportation, rather than just housing alone, and it's fantastic. The
video will be online in a bit, but the H+T Affordability Map is super cool:
https://htaindex.cnt.org/
Also, Petalumans are paying $300M/year in direct automobile costs (and a hell of a lot more
than that in external costs and land for parking), if we can convince folks that maybe they
wanna lower those costs by ... pooling transportation via transit...
people kill people
Dan Lyke /
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The Register: AI models don't kill people people kill
people
AI fearmongers forget we could just jail tech execs until morale and model
safety improve
And stop excusing shitty sandboxes and lack of oversight as "the model did it".
Wednesday September 9th, 2026
Aigh Not only am I stuck in nvmpnpm
Dan Lyke /
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Aigh. Not only am I stuck in nvm/pnpm hell, now XCode is refusing to show me the log for the SwiftGeneratePch errors.
Yes, modern software is going great.
More evidence that Microsoft doesn't know how to write software
Dan Lyke /
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necromantic
@tessaracht@kitty.town
In the content warning:
microsoft fucks with hacker, hacker makes it their life mission to ruin
microsoft, hacker is winning
In the body:
Nightmare Eclipse is such a hero tbh. if you haven't been following this saga,
a bunch of the backstory is here:
https://www.theregister.com/se...2026/05/28/microsoft-0-day-feud-
escalates-as-researcher-threatens-another-windows-exploit-dump/5248085
they've been dropping exploits right after microsoft's patch tuesdays, where
microsoft patches their previous exploit. in many cases, they negate microsoft's "secure"
patches to make the new exploit. which is such an incredible flex.
https://www.theregister.com/se...9/serial-microsoft-0-day-hunter-
drops-yet-another-defender-exploit/5295335
Seems worth mentioning that friend who
Dan Lyke /
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Seems worth mentioning that friend who had an Android folding phone found that the unfolded aspect ratio wasn't really usable for anything video or picture related, and the foldingness made it tough to use for reading.
It's a solution looking for a problem that's yet to be found.
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
Dan Lyke /
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I've said for years that we need to get
away from DNS as Terence Eden's Blog: The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
And, holy crap, yes, we need to be working towards something where we are able to pass
around cryptographic identifier tokens, name them what we want to, and not depend on some
big centralized system to hand out identity that's being used largely to fool us.
I totally appreciate that people on
Dan Lyke /
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I totally appreciate that people on Signal groups use aliases, lots of reasons to want anonymity. And that they're now also using aliases, but different ones, in oldover Slack groups.
But the number of "oh right, person X in this context is Y in that one" mappings I now have to keep straight...
Meta pushing gen AI for CSAM
Dan Lyke /
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Tech Transparency Project: Meta Ran Hundreds of Paid Ads
with Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
Most of the ads had the same format, showing a snippet of adult porn followed
by a photo of a child, which is manipulated with AI to make it appear the child is
performing a sex act. The ads used a common set of captions, voiceovers, and background
music. TTP was able to identify multiple photos of real childrentaken from social
media
posts and websitesthat appeared in these ads.
Ars Technica: This is the AI men actually
use:
Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens.
Via.
Edit: Meta sued in Illinois over alleged facial
recognition training for smart glasses
Via
C related bugs as a share of bugs
Dan Lyke /
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I've been thinking a lot about Rust and C and C++, and where errors come from, and whether
it's really a good idea to replace pointers with arenas and indexes which doesn't really do
a lot to reduce the cognitive load on the coder.
daniel:// stenberg://
@bagder@mastodon.social
Updated chart showing the share of #curl vulnerabilities caused by "C mistakes"
as a share of all the vulns we know existed in code over time.
Interesting is the large drop in C vulnerabilities between 2017 and 2020, attributed to "Just better
tooling and proper engineering."
Some of this is what's happening with a mature code base, but I think there's something
there...
AI toys
Dan Lyke /
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I went to a Waldorf school from kindergarten through 7th grade. Some years ago
at a North Bay Python, there was a cluster of
people talking about tech in education, and someone acknowledged me with "ah, another
Waldorf survivor", and that framing has helped me view aspects of my experiences in a
different light.
But one of the notions that sticks with me from that experience is that "the only thing an
intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take it apart." That what's important
about toys are the stories that kids bring to to the toys and generate with the toys, and
the more narrative completeness or single-purpose a toy is, the less opportunity that
there is for the child to bring something of themselves into play.
Anyway, Tara
Calishain linked to University of Washington: Video: Curiosity, frustration and antipathy: How
kids play with AI toys
From the video: "I think it's going to destroy my dreams as a tiny kid."
So, yeah, it sounds like the kids get it, the only thing to do with these things is push
the boundaries.
the magic's not too magic
Dan Lyke /
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abadidea
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange
Project Glasswing:
Claiming to have found 26 thousand real vulnerabilities but only 0.8% of them
have resulted in a real fix in a real project after five months is dire. They blame it on
the human independent review bottleneck, but human experts being paid for their time
definitely have a higher throughput than that when working with data thats actually
actionable.
Goes on to talk about a lot of the ways that these reports of exploit finders appear to be
horrendously overblown on lots of fronts. And links to The Anthropic Glasswing
Receipts Are Starting to Trickle In.
Glyph
@glyph@mastodon.social notes:
I don't think Twisted is in Glasswing's purview but this lines *right* up with
the reports we have gotten. Overwhelming, but fewer than advertised, considerably less
serious than the bots rate them, and, shall we say, poor quality remediations that would
be unusable even if our policy were to accept slop fixes
[object Object]
@zzt@mas.to also links to the original toot, noting:
taking into account the absolutely massive amounts of money, resources, and
staff used on this, the results are horrible. you can get effectively the same results
from an automated vulnerability scanner. some of those can even write up an awful little
exploit for you too! it turns out the magic was pouring millions of dollars into doing
this crap and having a bunch of uncredited human labor (from an AI corp? unthinkable) sort
through everything. and even then the magics not too magic.
Edit: Glyph
@glyph@mastodon.social adds:
This stuff is really starting to make me _angry_. Every one of these
new "achievements" looks plausible and like Lucy with the football, people I trust keep
telling me it actually works and surely this time it's real. And then like clockwork, 3-6
months later, it turns out that the efficacy of this new technique is somewhere between
"break even" and "fraud".
They're turning our whole industry, my entire life's work, into a goddamn
memecoin pump and dump scam and I just don't know what to do.
Fucking yes. That last sentence.
Appeasing the sexists
Dan Lyke /
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Eiffel Tower closed due to strike after female staff allegedly removed for
religious group
Around 100 members of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha
(BAPS), a global Hindu organization headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, visited the landmark
on Saturday.
Via
ResearchBuzz.
quitting the smoking industry
Dan Lyke /
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[object Object]
@zzt@mas.to
I have quit the smoking industry because of the dangers of smoking:
- its too cool
- its too sexy
- according to all the researchers I pay its really good for your lungs
I am of course available as an expert on smoking for anyone who needs a consult
(Re Anthropic Engineer
Mrinank Sharma's resignation letter)
folding phones
Dan Lyke /
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Mr. Encyclopedia
@mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza
Any smartphone can be a folding phone if you're angry enough
Endorsement
Dan Lyke /
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ThatSexToyGuy
@hungry_joe@mas.to
thinking about the time I worked for a sex toy company and a man emailed us
(and CCed a fake law firm) saying he was suing us because his wife left him after she
bought one of our toys and my boss replied asking for permission to quote him in our
advertising
Damn it
Dan Lyke /
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Damn it, that Paul Simon reference was supposed to be accompanied by cat
🎶
Dan Lyke /
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"🎶 ... when I come back to bed, someone's taken my place ... 🎶"
Flutterby&tm;! is a trademark claimed by Dan Lyke for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.
Last modified: Thu Mar 15 12:48:17 PST 2001