Flutterby™! (short)
Sunday February 15th, 2026
Ars publishes slop
Dan Lyke /
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So Ars Technica wrote a thing on the Scott Shambaugh: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (linked earlier), except
that they used an LLM and it synthesized quotes that didn't actually get said or written.
@mttaggart@infosec.exchange
has a thread on this with receipts and archive links.
From this
thread it appears that the slop publication was inadvertent from the editor's
perspective.
On a Claude-y day
Dan Lyke /
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datarama
@datarama@hachyderm.io
2010s: There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer.
2020s: There is no Claude, it's just someone else's code.
datarama
@datarama@hachyderm.io
2010s: Old Man Yells At Cloud
2020s: Old Man Yells At Claude
Cognitive Debt
Dan Lyke /
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A programmer's loss of identity. I guess I'm
lucky in that my association between mean and the Internet's notion of "programmer" kinda
diverged when /. got funding, but this is an
interesting meditation on how the general adoption of slop prompting as "programming" is
changing the identity of those of us who think that reasoning about systems is important.
Via Baldur Bjarnason
@baldur@toot.cafe
Meanwhile, Chris Dickinson
@isntitvacant@hachyderm.io linked to Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building
(PDF) (You may remember Naur as the "N" in BNF notation) in response to Simon Willison's
acknowledgement that LLMs separate him from the model building:
I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work,
which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about, eventually leading me to
lose the ability to make confident decisions about where to go next.
In linking to Margaret
Storey's How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive
Debt (which also links to the Naur piece).
In response to Simon's note,
Jed Brown @jedbrown@hachyderm.io wrote:
I believe the effect you describe becomes more insidious in larger projects,
with distributed developer communities and bespoke domain knowledge. Such conditions are
typical in research software/infrastructure (my domain), and the cost of recovering from
such debt will often be intractable under public funding models (very lean; deliverables
only for basic research, not maintenance and onboarding). Offloading to LLMs interferes not
just with the cognitive processes of the "author", but also that of maintainers and other
community members.
Unlike reports from ChatGPT
Dan Lyke /
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Unlike reports from ChatGPT, Google's "AI" seems smart enough to know that I'd have to drive my car to the car wash. Unless, of course, I was going to use a self-service bay.
First of all what did Oregon do to the
Dan Lyke /
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First of all, what did Oregon do to the person who named the "Oregon Grape" after it. Second, I now have Opinions about the landscape designer who recommended it.
It finally sprawled enough that Charlene said she wanted it out, and I suspect I'll be following runners all summer...
Saturday February 14th, 2026
We had a Cuisinart electric tea kettle
Dan Lyke /
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We had a Cuisinart electric tea kettle that we loved. It died. We replaced it with the same one, and that started making weird annoying noises(!).
Replaced that with a used Veken off of Facebook Marketplace, but various interface elements of that suck. So we're still looking.
Are there differences in reliability between a $50 kettle and a $200 one, or are they all just bling?
Saw someone talk about how AI lets them
Dan Lyke /
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Saw someone talk about how AI lets them do things that would take their IT department $500k to implement, and maybe it's time to concede that Agile has been a total disaster?
We know how to build good software. We choose not to.
Come with me if you want to live
Dan Lyke /
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Kit Bashir
@Unixbigot@aus.social
Come with me if you want to live
That old line.
I said, come
I KNOW. IM THINKING.
What, uh, why, I mean, your destiny
Siddown, kid
Theres no time
Youre a time traveler. They could have sent you back with plenty of time
to act, but they made it so youre rushed and disoriented. Sit.
I dont get it, youre in danger
The time war is a manufactured crisis. Keeps wages down, gives the
people an external threat to distract from the real villains
Prove it
I handed her a copy of So, youre a child soldier in a proxy war, then
tapped my earbud. Control, the tip was genuine, Ive got another one.
#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #Title_No_Time
Flutterby&tm;! is a trademark claimed by Dan Lyke for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.
Last modified: Thu Mar 15 12:48:17 PST 2001