Flutterby™! (short)

Vancouver Sun: Concert review: AC/DC Power Up Vancouver again — and are far better than in 2025

By the time the final cannon salvo echoed over the arena during the concert closer For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), the crowd exited smiling and, in many cases, well-juiced. Outside the arena exit gates, rows of teens were waiting to drive their parents home.

JP @daedalus@eigenmagic.net

Idly musing that the Therac-25 cautionary tale I learned about in my undergrad software engineering course resulted in a total of (IIRC) 6 medical injuries over about 4 years. And that was considered horrific and required immediate changes to how computers were used in medicine.

is a good jumping off point for the various replies talking about layers of redundance, hardware interlocks, cost benefit analyses, and more. 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 @brouhaha@mastodon.social, further down thread, sen @sen@hachyderm.io

Lots of fascinating stuff in Schneier on Security: AI Use by the US Government:

The international gold standard was arguably set by the French in 2016, via their Digital Republic Act. The law, itself informed by an online citizen consultation, requires all algorithms used to automate government administrative decisions to be subject to public records requests, to be appealable to a human reviewer, and to have mandatory notification of the use of automation to those affected by the decisions.

Via.

Apparently there's a 'tuber (my whitewater days leave me unable to separate the "You" and "inner-" meanings of that word from the botanical ones, hat tip to William Nealy) named Hank Green who's been pushing ControlAI and "AI doom" as undisclosed paid marketing, [object Object] @zzt@mas.to has a thread going into further detail on Pivot to AI: The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers.

PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation

This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.

Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data.

Via Jocelynephiliac @twipped@twipped.social who noted:

We're really hitting the "finding out" era of cloud compute, aren't we?

Jason Gorman: codemanship: AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say? (Via).

If you're looking for more writing by someone who's consistently been right about the current "AI" boom, Timnit Gebru's book Deep Unlearning is available for pre-order. (Via)

Brett codes: I'm Done Using AI, on the path through using AI assistants for coding, and then, of course, realizing that the mental atrophy is setting in. Via pretty much everywhere, but here.

Buncha people linking to Annie Sexton's Compression is prediction, which is a lot of old territory if you're already a programmer, but eventually gets around to the notion that an LLM is a lossy compression of the Internet, while referencing the Google Language Modeling Is Compression paper from 2023. (Via)

And, finally, in "oh, honey, no, you didn't actually..." DOCKET NO. AAN-CV-25-6066141-S : MATTHEW A. ELLIOTT V. NEW YORK BARIATRIC GROUP, LLC : : SUPERIOR COURT JUDICIAL DISTRICТ OF ANSONIA/MILFORD AT MILFORD AUGUST 6, 2026 MEMORANDUM OF DECISION COURT SANCTION FOR PLAINTIFF'S USE OF PROMPT-INJECTION ("the plaintiff is self-represented"👀)

The Court further finds that this conduct is irreconcilable with the good- faith certification required of every filer under Connecticut Practice Book $4-2(b) and 4-9, and that it is an abuse of the filing process and an affront to the integrity of these proceedings, over which the Court has inherent authority.

"No more electronic filing for you!" (Via Tara Calishain and Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. among others)

Today I learned about https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel , a command-line tool to talk to the Apple FoundationModels that run locally on Macs. 4k tokens on MacOS 26, 8k on MacOS 27.

Also https://github.com/scouzi1966/maclocal-api for an OpenAI API, can run other models (like Qwen).