Flutterby™! (short)

A Scottish Post: The New Election Threat: Disinformation Inside the Answer. Via.

Looks like the source of this is from: Demos: Electoral Hallucinations: Safeguarding UK elections in the world of LLMs and AI chatbots

Our snapshot testing on March 27th 2026 found that - across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Grok, and Replika - just over a third (34.1%) of responses to questions about the Scottish elections contained factual errors (109 of 320 total responses). To break down these inaccurate responses, 8.75% (28 of 320) were entirely inaccurate and 25.3% were partly accurate but with errors (81 of 320). Partly factual responses could be particularly misleading as their errors were sometimes much harder to spot.

Lynn Cavanah: A brief history of the establishment of international standard pitch a=440 hertz (PDF)

Via this Reddit thread on tuning your guitar at 432 vs 440.

We see this a lot in arguments about

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 ‪@maxdubler.com‬

The Lead Paint Theory of Anti Gentrification holds that activists can prevent displacement and preserve housing affordability by preserving neighborhood disamenities and blocking investment in quality of life improvements like parks, bike lanes, and libraries. It does not work.

is quoting Sam Gould ‪@form67.bsky.social‬

I attended an urban infrastructure panel where a UC Berkeley professor argued that libraries were gentrification. I am really struggling to see how this is different from a Republican position of denying knowledge, tools, and technology to low income, disadvantaged neighborhoods.

And has a screenshot of a tweet from X user @AllisonB916 “rent controller OG”:

Taking down freeways in some situations would open the community to gentrification—what protects the community is the damn freeway.

I noted that Audiveris has some sketchy malware/crypto/whatever scammer campted out on the .com, Bartosz Golaszewski points out that someone is doing similar to libgiopod.

Via.

Paddy Duke @paddyduke@mastodon.social

@aral From “Think outside the box!” to “The box will now handle all the thinking for you. Please insert a coin into the box.”

The PrimeTime: I Think They Are Lying To You (YouTube video) is... well... nothing you don't already know, and it's video form, but it showed up in a Slack channel this morning, and it's about Boris Cherny of Anthropic bragging about how he doesn't even prompt Claude any more, he just... something... and code comes out, contrasting that with how long it's taking Anthropic to release fixes to obvious and horrible Claude Code usability issues. So maybe coding is a solved problem, but debugging isn't?

In reading through Mike Bowler: The case for real collaboration I realized that I don't think I've ever worked on a team large enough to do "pair programming" in the manner that it was originally envisioned.

But it's worth a read through.

Snort: Sam Wilkinson: Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated.

Australian Privacy Commissioner orders American Express Australia Limited to compensate complainant following interference in privacy. It takes a couple of clicks to get to the actual report, but it's summarized by Dissent Doe :cupofcoffee: @PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange (who also links to a paywalled news report):

American Express ordered to fix security gaps after a customer complained about improper employee access.

It seems that a customer reported a privacy concern and fought AmEx for 4 years to get them to implement stronger access controls or monitoring of employee access to data.

Now, the AU govt has ordered AmEx to rectify security flaws in five of its data systems to guard against “insider threats” and to restrict employee access to specific customer information to protect vulnerable and high-profile customers.

From reading through the report, this was a stalking/domestic abuse violation, and AmEx didn't even have access logging, and lacked policy for any sort of reaction to stalking.

Thought we'd found a place for this final SFBABC.org bench, went and talked with someone tending the space and discovered that they were delicately managing relationships with the two property owners, and didn't want to introduce a bench to that.

So we're back to the two playgrounds that feel kinda like a slap in the face of Parks & Rec, or finding another space. Anyone in Petaluma got suggestions for a public space that could use a bench?

If anybody in the North SF Bay area is interested in a late 1990a era Endless Pool (with some modern upgrades), hit me up before I write the whole Craigslist posting. It won't be cheap to move, but for the right DIYer with a plan it might be cool.

AI's healthcare side hustle: inflating your bill

TL;DR: You might have expected AI to cut healthcare costs, whether it’s by reducing paperwork, automating the doctor’s notes, or thinning out hospital staff. But a new 60-page PwC report suggests the reverse: So far, one of its most widespread uses is making medical bills bigger. It’s an example of how AI isn’t only good at making tasks more efficient—it’s also very good at finding more granular ways to boost a sector’s bottom line.

Tay @tay@transfem.social

How to make good open source project:
- plaster pride flags everywhere (keeps bigots away)
- swear constantly (keeps ai away)
- sex (keeps corporations away)

Good read: Banning noise will be a disaster for statistical data products, on a new order from the US Office of Privacy and Open Government: Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products which says (in section 5, policy):

3. Any use of noise infusion is inconsistent with the Department’s policies.

The article points out two things: first, that this is likely a disaster for privacy of individuals whose data are aggregated in those sets, of course, but also that this makes analysis across this boundary difficult.

Via