Flutterby™! (short)

The "Exciting USAA Advice Changes are Coming!" email may be the thing that drives my growing sense of unease fully into "find a new insurance company".

Used to be that we actually liked USAA. Is there an "actually like" insurance company of any sort any more? Preferably that eschews AI?

This is fascinating: Kathmandu Post: Inside Nepal’s fake rescue racket

Investigations reveal a vast network of trekking firms, helicopter operators, hospitals and agents staging fake evacuations, fabricating medical records and inflating bills to siphon millions from global insurers.

The tourists may be in on it, told by their guides that they can avoid a 2 week hike back from Everest base camp by saying they were sick, or may be scared into it by guides inducing psychosomatic symptoms of altitude sickness, or may be given Diamox (Acetazolamide) tablets (for altitude sickness) with excessive water to induce symptoms of altitude.

Tweaked the CSS. Please tell me if you notice anything egregious. Should work better on small screens now.

No, not the E&J Gallo wine brand, the email client.

Why is this so hard?

Hat tip to whoever's causing Reddit to send me password recovery emails. Guessing maybe it's my participation in /r/noai?

taco, bird/cat :verified420: @chirpbirb@meow.social

Content warning: open source software drama, nvim-treesitter

open source software developers are getting fed up and are finally recognizing that they can just fucking leave.

the owner of nvim-treesitter gets a really shitty comment from a user saying that the update to a required version broke their workflow

the owner replies saying "hey just pin what you need instead of mainlining it if you need this for an older version"

the shitty user replies back saying "go switch to something that doesn't require interacting with people"

the owner says "OK." and ARCHIVES THE REPO

https://github.com/nvim-treesi...nvim-treesitter/discussions/8627

like, holy shit, what a power move.

Maciej Ceglowski: The lunacy of Artemis:

Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can't even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It's as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.

Of course I mostly go back to: WTF are we doing with crewed exploration in the twenty fucking twenties. Not only is sending out robots cheaper, we learn a hell of a lot more. It's just propaganda dickwaving to put humans in harm's way.

Via.

Andrew Murphy: If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems. He mentions Eli Goldratt's The Goal, which, of course, I remember reading back in high school 'cause my Dad was in management consulting at the time.

From this Elizabeth Ayer @elizayer@mastodon.social thread, I quote tooted the second in that thread with:

I think we've got a whole lot of people building software who both have no experience with the actual users of that software, and have no conceptual model for what the software does internally.

Years of "Agile" and using writing software to prototype have destroyed our collective ability to engage with the processes that we used to use.

Maybe the LLM coding tools are getting better? daniel:// stenberg:// @bagder@mastodon.social

The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.

I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.

You've probably seen the stuff from the Artemis II mission about Bluetooth pairing issues and Microsoft Outlook ... well ... there's no way to put those words together without some sort of "clusterfuck" semantics. Anyway, Becca Royal- Gordon @beccadax@soincredibly.gay

Hot take: The Artemis livestream is a damning indictment of modern computing devices. It seems like half the radio chatter is troubleshooting email delivery problems, confusing user interfaces, or devices not booting or connecting. Literal astronauts with years of training can’t make our stuff work.

‪wendy cloudberry‬ ‪@wendycloudberry.com‬

Pine would never

Numerous social media folks are also making "Thunderbird" comments... I think this is a reminder that it's time for me to get back on Claws.

Paul Cantrell @inthehands@hachyderm.io thread on the ICE invasion of Minneapolis and the clarity that comes from realizing that no one is coming to save you.

Campus Computing Center of the United Nations University: The Echo Chamber in Your Pocket

Two landmark papers from MIT and Stanford now offer formal proof of what many suspected: sycophantic AI is not merely annoying. It is systematically eroding both our grip on reality and our capacity for moral repair.

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians Kartik Chandra, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Science: Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Sunny Yu, Dyllan Han, and Dan Jurafsky (preprint mentioned previously, a mention in the Stanford Report)

Via.

NPR: Penalties stack up as AI spreads through the legal system. Mostly stuff we've already seen, but it's good to see the mainstream catching up. Via.

Thread from ‪Bryan Culbertson 🥄‬ ‪@bryanculbertson.com‬ about normalizing self-driving car trips vs different factors, and comparing those to other modes, and pointing out that autonomous vehicles need are still 100x more dangerous than public transit modes.

Futurism reports that "Almost Half of US Data Centers That Were Supposed to Open This Year Slated to Be Canceled or Delayed"

Demand is low enough that you might actually have to get Iran to bomb your data center for the insurance money rather than claim you're gonna achieve "AGI" next year this time for sure really...

https://futurism.com/science-e...data-centers-construction-supply