Flutterby™! (short)

I mean, yes, Open AI has two and a half times the revenue of OnlyFans, and projects that it will have similar numbers of paying subscribers by... Checks notes... 2030...

Sarah J. Jackson‬ ‪@sjjphd.bsky.social‬

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

Claudio Nastruzzi in The Register: Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and "blood" reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.

Abraham Lincoln's letter to Henry L. Pierce declining an invitation to speak in Boston at a birthday celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson (that may have been intended to be read at the event):

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

Via.

Think Academy Education Briefs: Sweden Education Shift: From Digital Learning to Pen and Paper.

I'm taken back to those conversations in the '90s where school board members, and administrators, were talking about "we need tech in the classroom!", and teachers, and sane people, were saying "what's the curriculum need?"

Especially as we've learned how students process pencil and paper note taking differently from typed note taking. And, heck, I'm still learning how I react differently to ebooks (on a multi-purpose device) vs paper books.

via Bruce Sterling

bob @bob@feed.hella.cheap

if the LLM-generated content is adding value then distributions of users/viewers/readers should be getting heavier tailed. are they? so far I've only seen people talking about number of books/apps/etc published which is unrelated to value

I suspect there's not a lot of value for the LLM wielder who's trying to push their material out to the wider world. If you want LLM generated content, you chat with the chatbot yourself and get a personalized experience. No real value to someone else talking with the chatbot.

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Today in InfoSec Job Security News:

I was looking into an obvious ../.. vulnerability introduced into a major web framework today, and it was committed by username Claude on GitHub. Vibe coded, basically.

So I started looking through Claude commits on GitHub, there’s over 2m of them and it’s about 5% of all open source code this month.

https://github.com/search?q=au...ype=commits&s=author-date&o=desc

As I looked through the code I saw the same class of vulns being introduced over, and over, again - several a minute.

Interesting video about using a nibbler for cutting sheet metal, including building a nibbler table (like a router table), and using templates to get accurate repeatable cuts with the technique. No Laser Cutter? No Plasma Cutter? No Problem! Accurately cut sheet metal with low cost tools! By Rebecca Valentine.

I have lost a couple of the disks for the bottoms of some tart tins, and have been trying to figure out how to cut replacements. Need to get a nibbler and find some stainless steel sheet.