Flutterby™! (short)

Called Capital One via their app, and between the accent of the representative and some of the procedures in verification, egads I hope that hasn't been backdoored, because there are totally places in those processes where this could be an account exploit.

Anthropic(!): How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills

We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.

In an effort to extract the most value from our month of Disney+, we watched The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile last night, and really enjoyed that movie.

And if someone wants to give me hours and hours of Brandi Carlile giving studio direction to music icons, I'm all in.

Gr8day @gr8day@mindly.social

Nine out of ten zoo dentists refuse to work on a Grizzly unless it has been given a strong anesthetic.

There's safety in numb bears.

Aaah, it's a good morning for the schadenfreude: Futurism: Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized

While Zairi is only the latest AI hound to bark about stolen prompts, she’s certainly not the first. Examples abound, as the Daily Dot pointed out back in December: consider a poster who railed about “prompt thieves in the AI art community,” or the “AI artist” who went on a tangent after someone aped his prompt “without knowing it’s mine.”

I am not one generally to watch a 27 minute video of someone talking about a Nature blog post, but this roast of a dude who became ChatGPT dependent is giving me all the schadenfreude warm fuzzies.

Angela Collier: this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain (YouTube video)

The massive self-own is Nature: When two years of academic work vanished with a single click

After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.

https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04064-7

I'm not getting a lot of solace from the headlines these days, but the news that the rumored Nvidia plan to dump $100B into OpenAI is collapsing brightens my day.

Reuters: Nvidia's plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI has stalled, WSJ reports

Thinking about Simon Willison's "Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw." and how many people I know with missing fingers... 404 Media: Silicon Valley’s Favorite New AI Agent Has Serious Security Flaws, on the obvious flaws in the whole Clawdbot/MoltBot/OpenClaw paradigm.

The latest Epstein files dump needs a trigger warning.

Meidas: DOJ Just DELETED This Document from the Epstein Files. We Saved It. which notes that it was restored, whence the link above.

Too much good stuff to find an appropriate pull paragraph: Eevee: The rise of Whatever

The machines are getting better at lying: Wiki Education: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.

Via

LAPD continues its long tradition of being a bunch of lawless thugs: LAPD won’t enforce ban on federal law enforcement officers wearing masks, chief says

Reading though the source code for https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw / MoltBot (formerly ClawdBot), and maybe the thing about specifying skills for these monstrosities is that we can actually get some good human-readable command-line tools and documentation.

Edit: Oh yeah, the Anthropic skills are totally handy "so you want to..." guides: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/

How AI Impacts Skill Formation Judy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin

Figure 6 shows that while using AI to complete our coding task did not significantly improve task completion time, the level of skill formation gained by completing the task, measured by our quiz, is significantly reduced (Cohen d=0.738, p=0.01). There is a 4.15 point difference between the means of the treatment and control groups. For a 27-point quiz, this translates into a 17% score difference or 2 grade points. Controlling for warm-up task time as a covariate, the treatment effect remains significant (Cohen’s d=0.725, p=0.016).

Via Lobste.rs

Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis" seems to be running about 110 BPM, which means it's probably possible to do a 126BPM version for a square dance singing call.

Guessing that's not gonna come from any of the traditional producers, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKSoxG1K7w

The 2020s just keep getting weirder and weirder: Man allegedly posed as FBI agent in apparent attempt to spring Luigi Mangione from prison

The problem of the future is gonna be all of the outdated documentation for Google products polluting the information space, making us think that it's still possible to use all of these deprecated features.