Flutterby™! (short)

I subscribed to Wired (sometime within the past year) 'cause they had a cheap offer and there was an article I thought it worth reading, so this morning's email has a link to Google Shakes Up Its Browser Agent Team Amid OpenClaw Craze. I was looking for a non-subscription link to paste into the company Slack, and found Times of India — Google is shaking up its AI team, and the reason is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's newest obsession which has some interesting speculation about the AI powered browser market, and why Google might be abandoning Project Mariner:

In practice, the numbers were underwhelming. Perplexity's Comet browser agent peaked at 2.8 million weekly active users last December. OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent has since slipped below 1 million—negligible against the hundreds of millions who use ChatGPT just to chat. The category never found its mass-market moment.

Meanwhile, the semi-autonomous bots that are filling that product category instead are wreaking havoc on the world: EnshittifAIcation.

Rewarding confidence over actual competence is a bug humanity has always had. It has produced disasters throughout history, it is producing disasters now, and not only in the tech world.

That latter one via Lobste.rs.

Megan Wachspress: A Fuller Statement About My Bluesky Posts

The fuller version of ‪Megan Wachspress‬ ‪@meganwachspress.bsky.social‬

If he's going to get a national profile on the strength of a younger woman's campaign, I'm going to come out and say it: during his short-lived tenure as a math professor, Biss had an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his undergraduate students. I was that student.

about NPR: A race for a safe blue seat tests how far left Democrats want new leaders to go that includes coverage of Evanston Illinois mayor Daniel Biss in the run for the state's 9th congressional district.

New psychology research reveals the cognitive cost of smartphone notifications.

The researchers found that a single notification slowed down a participant’s cognitive processing for approximately seven seconds. The delay happened across all groups but was most pronounced in the personal-notification group. This pattern suggests that distraction is driven by a combination of the visual pop-up, learned associations with the phone, and the personal meaning of the alert.

Computers in Human Behavior: Attention hijacked: How social media notifications disrupt cognitive processing

Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines / We’re seeing Verge headlines rewritten by Google AI.

It's paywalled. I got to it via this post from nilay patel ‪@reckless.bsky.social‬. I think you can get the gist from the headlines and the above the subscribe button, but The Verge has actually been doing some worthwhile reporting of late.

Reddit post about using AI images and negative impact on the brand.

https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/s/FrwKSqflSW

Via https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116262153401762539

"You don't dance to get to the end of the... to get to the other side of the room. That's not why we dance, we dance to go around in a circle." Jacob Collier in the Switched on Pop interview.

https://youtu.be/Jhr_te4tVjQ

In twenty fucking twenty six, someone is "trusting [LLMs] were accurate"? Mediahaus (publisher of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent) suspends senior journalist for using fabricated quotes produced by AI

Peter Vandermeersch said he relied on summaries produced by LLMs, ‘trusting they were accurate’.

But it's clear that he still doesn't get it. His mea culpa on Substack:

Even I—with all my years of experience and knowledge—fell into the trap of hallucinations. I summarised reports using AI tools and worked from those summaries, trusting they were accurate. In doing so, I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases. In some cases, it reflected my interpretation of their words. That was not just careless—it was wrong.

Emphasis is mine, because, no, even if the LLM tells you it's a paraphrase, we know damned well that LLMs do not summarize, at best they elide.

Via.

Spam from Levi's with the subject line "Get the leg opening inspired by cowboys", and frankly, dudes, if I'm gonna spread my legs I don't need cowboys for inspiration...

Mostly.

A good read on working to avoid self-censorship under regimes which don't outright ban dissent, but build systems that make people complicit in their own silence. No Free Labor for Authoritarians: Censorship and Dissent in Singapore by Kirsten Han

Technically, activists and dissidents like me aren’t harassed in Singapore. According to the government, we’re the ones who force the state’s hand: by organizing illegal assemblies (as defined by legislation introduced by the ruling People’s Action Party), by publishing “false statements of fact” online (as determined by government ministers), by wanting to mount “misleading” exhibitions (as evaluated by state regulators). Electric fences have been erected around the pen of public discourse; if activists wander up to the boundaries and get electrocuted, can the state really be accused of harassment and oppression? Technically speaking?

Via

Tina, demon child of the stars @TransTina@translunar.academy

I don’t see the gay of Hormuz causing any trouble

Interesting take: Wired: COBOL is the asbestos of programming languages. I don't think it's super necessary to read the article, because the author summarized it really nicely on the Fediverse: Zeb Larson @zeblarson@hcommons.social

I published this for Wired today and I'm really happy with it. You might think that I have a categorical dislike of COBOL, but actually I don't. I think instead that it's really important to think carefully about the computing systems you build, because changing them can be *really* painful. I wrote this thinking in no small part about vibe- coding and how we'll be stuck with systems that nobody really understands, and if they get large enough they will be incredibly difficult to unravel.

That thing about "the value of your code is how easy it is to modify it" is landing pretty hard these days. And with LLM assisted coding, I kinda feel like we're in some of the same spaces as large Perl codebases, yes, you can argue that it's quick and easy to just re- implement it, but if you're working with something that deeply encodes decades of contractual meaning then what goes on around that code, how you keep the history, how you verify that your best customer isn't suddenly gonna be super pissed off (or, worse, pissed off a year later after they figure out that you started billing them wrong), there's a whole lot of process that needs to get wrapped around that that's super expensive to unpack.

A bunch of random links to celebrate Afroman wins in lawsuit from Ohio deputies over music videos: ‘We did it America … freedom of speech!’

• Afroman — Lemon Pound Cake
• Afroman - Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera
• Afroman — Will You Help Me Repair My Door.
• Instagram of testimony about if he'll stop talking about cops who raided his home.
• Afroman — Randy Walters is a Son of a Bitch, leading to
• Instagram of Afroman's lawyer cross-examining Randy Walters, one of the plaintiffs.
• Jury gives verdict in Afroman trial, the Judge reads the verdict at 6:45. Via.

Some links from Defector's post, which requires creating an account, by way of ‪Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò‬ ‪@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social‬

I would like to personally award Afroman the Bluesky Medal of Valor for Exemplary Service in Bringing Back Shame

Previously Flutterby January 6, 2023, and March 24, 2023.

Went to a talk on the pre-Spanish indigenous presence in Petaluma, and it left me uneasy. Like "these peoples 20 miles apart north-south had completely different languages and yet roamed 40 miles east-west" conflated with a "peacefully in harmony with nature and each other" vibe.

And now I'm side-tracked from my other interests for readings on "noble savage" mythologies and trying to better understand why this sort of discourse makes me so uneasy.