Flutterby™! (short)

Hypothesis, based on overheard conversation: The current fascination with "AI" answers is a function of the information sphere being so overrun by SEO crap.

Written for Facebook:

In previous years, I've written a little post to try to be a place to anchor all of the birthday wishes, get them in one place rather than a gazillion notifications. I didn't get there this year.

So. 58 orbits. This year feels a lot like recent ones.

Work is kind of in a holding pattern, the LLM frenzy is still going strong and the "AI" bubble is waiting to pop. I'm frustrated by it, it feels like the culmination of extractive business models and a sense that we should be building more addictive slot machines, because the gambling addicts really really like them.

Square dance calling is fun, and I'm coming home from nights calling energized, but my work on my voice is going in directions that extend beyond the calling, and I'm finding myself less intrigued by choreography puzzles. It's fun, but I'm wondering about other directions I might take my vocal skills now that I feel like I'm really developing them.

The community singing is fun. Would like to do more of that, but my calendar already has most nights blocked out.

The community work carries on. Petaluma Urban Chat is starting to really focus on some fantastic local committees that put on great forums, and Charlene is participating in some of those committees in her own right, not just an extension of me, which is fantastic. However, both Charlene and I are feeling a lot like Petaluma as a city may be hobbled from growing in the directions that we'd like the environment around us to become. We've both expressed a desire for a more walkable environment, a community that's actually serious about climate change and equity and inclusion, and we struggle with that. We've put a lot of effort into the house in ways that won't come back if we sell and move, and we love the community of friends we've got, but we also look at what other places are doing and wonder if we'd be better off there.

So, yeah, may this next year be a transition to a new path. Not sure what that means yet, but I'm hoping for more community building and a sense that my work is benefitting the world around me.

And more feeling of connection with people.

How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization.

Summarized by Jonathan Schofield @urlyman@mastodon.social

Propaganda phrases and their de-propagandised equivalents from Emily M Bender and Nanna Inie:

artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation

hybrid intelligence → augmented human intelligence

image recognition → image labeling

speech recognition → automatic transcription

the model shows bias → the model reflects bias

model mistakes → model errors

chatbots are good at … → chatbots are good for …

hallucination → undesirable output

AI Children's Books, Body Horror Edition, looking at the #1 category bestseller on Amazon: 100,000 Whys for Kids: A Full-Color Visual Encyclopedia of Big Questions, Clear Answers, Science, Space, Animals, Nature, History, Inventions, and How the World Works for Ages 6–13 (No link, because fuck that noise).

You know what's great about your birthday in the modern age? Dismissing all the fucking notifications from automated systems.

Big tech: Turning a celebration into an annoyance.

So many good points in this. Glyph: Adversarial Communication. On how the need for verification of AI/LLM output amplifies negative communication traits, and what that might mean.

Wow. I migrated away from Firefox several months ago, but thought a password didn't get imported into Vivaldi so I just fired it up...

The amount of non-responsive time it took me to get into my passwords was astounding. Whatever they're doing, it's not about performance.

Listened to the latest Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, and ... productivity is very difficult to measure in software development, so it's hard to be objective, but as I sit here trying to envision how a mythical AI might insert itself into your interactions, I'm reminded of how much I need to find other work, 'cause this ain't it.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/212...ware-the-20x-engineer-2026-05-11

DuckDuckGo, Unable to Resist the Pull of AI, Mistakenly Claims Trump Died of Rabies.

How exactly DuckDuckGo’s search results came to this conclusion is a bit convoluted, but a familiar enough concept at this juncture for anyone exposed to AI-powered search. It’s one part AI doing a bad job of aggregating information from multiple sources and hallucinating connections and, as Futurism notes, one part coordinated attack by anti-AI activists. JD Vance’s rabies-related death has become a favorite bit of Redditors on the subreddit r/poisonai, which aims to generate misinformation that gets fed uncritically into AI models. Seems they’ve succeeded at that goal.

Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town

Churches build three crosses out front in case Jesus has guests who need put up for the night.

Hat tip to Sean for forwarding on David Zipper @davidzipper@mastodon.social's gift link to his article Bloomberg City Lab: America’s Road Safety Blind Spot

Car crashes in parking lots and driveways don’t get counted in US traffic safety statistics. They may be more common — and deadly — than you think.

So, yeah, we force people to build these spaces via parking minimums, and then don't count their contribution to traffic violence... hmmm....

The article links to Kids and Car Safety's statement that:

Every week, at least 110 children are injured or killed because a driver could not see them while backing up or slowly pulling forward in parking lots and driveways. These predictable and preventable tragedies are called frontovers and backovers.

And The AAA suggesting that "Twenty percent of all collisions occur in parking lots..."

Softbank Group 2026 Shareholder's Meeting slides have the most unhinged "AI" generated "Golden Goose" slides. Presentation on Internet Archive.

Dev @dev@discuss.systems, MeFi thread.

This is leading to creativity. Jef Poskanzer @jef@mastodon.social

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “71 shiny eggs of gold
Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, an exhausted goose lies, whose frown,
and broken-down golden egg factory,
Tell that its investors did not value goose."

phooky suggests "Entitled Goose Game" (ref).

SnoopJ @SnoopJ@hachyderm.ioM.a<

ATTN #GooseValue posters:

There is a recording of Masayoshi SON presenting this slide deck, via a translator.

in quote tooting https://youtu.be/DtM0Cjb0dEU?t=3407

Bwahahaha! The Register: Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

Both the paper and the response are paywalled.

Nature: Matters Arising: On the robustness of topological gap detection via transport Henry F. Legg.

Nature: Matters Arising : Reply to: On the robustness of topological gap detection via transport Microsoft Quantum.

Via.