Flutterby™! (short)

Whee! Friend reports that Thrifty's 800 number AI phone agent told him it was changing his reservation, and didn't actually.

Second time kinda worked (it didn't do other stuff).

So extra load on us, double check what portions of that the AI agent told you it actually did...

Wheee! The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education

AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.

Via. Check out the AI vs non-AI exam scores graph.

You have to get on the blockchain now. This is the least capable that the blockchain will ever be. I project that we'll have 99% of our data on the blockchain within two years.

Looks like it's time to rework some of the gross HTML hacks I've got going on Flutterby.net: Chris Burnell: HTML Can Do That

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.

404 Media: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, But Almost No One Is Buying Them

Futurism: The Economy Has Spoken: Stuff That’s AI-Generated Has Almost Zero Value.

The second references the first, both are referencing CG Trader's 2026 Market Trends (direct Google Drive link), which notes that:

AI floods the top of the funnel but not the bottom: ~1 in 6 uploads, but only ~1 in 90 dollars of revenue.

and

Most who try it aren't satisfied yet: customer survey among CG buyers, 20% tried AI and found it not good enough and 7% use it only with heavy editing versus 5% who say it works well. The bottleneck is output quality, not awareness.

Which makes sense, there's not a lot of value to republishing something someone can generate themselves anyway.

On Reddit , ReasonablePaper8225 says:

The value is in the generator, not the output. No need to buy yours if I can make my own. Once the prices to generate skyrocket, the outputs will have value

Which is helping me think about LLM generation, right now it has zero value because the quality is so bad and the generation cost is heavily subsidized. At some point the generation cost will go up, and if the quality is there that'll create a market for spreading the generation cost across multiple users.

I need to better characterize web comics here (and fix the search, again), but: Daisy Kutter: The Last Train

Via MeFi.

NPR: She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks. The writing is kinda convoluted, but it sounds like she actually had access to and interactions with a mental health professional, but it sounds like the chatbot was glazing her more effectively.

"Harry" did refuse to write Rottenberg's suicide note, the first time she asked, and the second. But the third time she asked, it wrote the note she left for her parents. Reiley said the writing did not sound like her daughter's voice.

Bwahahaha! Shelina Moreda apparently only moved her voter registration inside the city limits on August 6, and Petaluma code requires someone to have been a resident for 30 days in order to run for mayor. https://www.petalumanews.com/2...-candidacy-in-petaluma-race-for- mayor-thrown-into-doubt-by-residency-status/

Eenteresting phishing attack, apparently a friend got popped by it and it sent me an email... bulletfreesky dot com slash vxxt. Anyway, *do not* enter your Google credentials, there, but might be interesting poking around if you swing that way.

After 3 decades with the organization, Max D. Lederer Jr. steps down as publisher of Stars and Stripes

Lederer said he decided to step down because it had become clear that his philosophy of leadership and “understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes” differed in “fundamental ways” from plans the Defense Department has for the organization.

Via

Reminder that if you fight "AI data centers" in your town, but you use AI to... for instance, come up with a number of data centers in your town as a reason the town should have an anti-AI datacenter ordinance... you're just a NIMBY externalizing costs on to other less privileged communities.

And the reward for least self-aware goes to.... Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered game engine to break the industry's doom cycle.

"There is a lot of anxiety, but let's be honest: is AI going away? No," Valient says. "With the dotcom bubble, did the internet go away? No. All the 'I have a domain, give me money' companies went away. That's probably what happens. There are a lot of companies that will probably not survive. There's a lot of great technology and a lot of great products that will because they are simply good. That's what we are trying to do. We are first and foremost making a good engine. AI is making us faster and dreaming bigger, and designing it in a way that is faster for the future. Is it a bubble? Nobody knows. Apparently, you don't know we are in a bubble until it bursts."

Thanks to Aura/Moom @moomanibe.bsky.social for pointing this out.

Should probably note that it's the "Immens" game engine, but I figure the "I have said I'm doing AI, give me money" factor here means history won't remember them much.