Flutterby™! (short)

Bwahahaha: Triple-A Minesweeper by Mike Lacher.

Via.

Edit: MeFi thread.

Holy crap. Yeah, do not give these things access to the Internet.

AI model submitted false tip about unsolved murder, Philadelphia police say

An AI model sent a fake murder tip to police and it took 2 months to discover it happened

The good news appears to be that the system behind PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com flagged it as spam and it didn't waste investigative resources. The bad news is that it took two months for Anthropic to 'fess up to generating bullshit that could waste police time.

Via.

Typoed "is:unrad" into my Gmail search box, and was disappointed that it did not in fact give me a list of totally lame emails.

margot @emaytch@mastodon.social

for a while tech was kind of like the "escape hatch" for people who couldn't or wouldn't fit in at other corporations and now it's sort of like a flaming timber fell on the escape hatch while people were still lining up to get in

ichael Knudsen @mk@bsd.network

One of the things from Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" that really stuck with me was his realisation that what the attacker damaged was not computers or data but rather that he damaged the trust necessary for people to connect their computers together in open networks.

Today, that trust is really being eroded by AI companies with their damaging, anti-social behaviour on the networks. They are overloading services at significant cost to service providers. They ignore standards-specified and established coventions behaviour that services hitherto have relied on to control cost and ensure service quality. They actively evade or circumvent last-resort access restrictions, and all their other behaviour is deeply abusive as well, and outside of our shared networks this type of behaviour is in many cases regulated by law.

I see no way through this other than their investors losing faith in ever getting their money back.

Reddit: Harvard just released another study about AI productivity in software engineering and it found there is no increase in productivity from using Claude code. linking to Artificial Intelligence in the Firm: Bottlenecks in Software Production Fiona Chen and James Stratton (PDF).

Yesterday there was a MeFi post about OpenAI's announcement of 372 breakthrough mathematical results. The resulting thread points out that a number of those claims have been retracted (hey, slop still requires humans to go through it), but it also links to Scott Aaronson's essay The Mathocalypse , which...

I'm trying to not automatically gainsay claims of "AI", even as it's clear that the field is filled with hype and liars, as in Futurism: AI Bubble Teetering on the Brink as OpenAI Admits to Massive Financial Failure in Leaked Documents.

Aaronson's piece is unsettling, but at the end he admits to being a friend of notorious fraud (IMHO, I've mentioned flaws in The Language Instinct previously) and links to Scott Alexander's "An open letter to Steven Pinker" on Astral Codex Ten that's... both filled with assumptions about what "intelligence" is, and an understanding about how the General Purpose Transformers operate, in a way that makes me think our ontologies are very very different.

Bonus: Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (preprint).

Facebook reel of different pentatonic scales with which we have cultural associations.

From Kirk.is yesterday.

I missed this despite doing regular donations to their partner publication here in Sonoma. Pacific Sun on the Nike missile batteries, and if you haven'[t gone down to visit the restored one, I recommend doing so before the docents who served on actual Nike sites all die. https://pacificsun.com/project...ring-marin-nuclear-missile-base/

Via https://bsky.app/profile/jef.m...al.ap.brid.gy/post/3mxftr4intcs2

TRACES: A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability in Scientific Reasoning by LLMs Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov. Among other things, dives into the lack of reasoning, such that bogus scientific papers are only recognized by "AI" because the training data treats them as such, not because there's any inherent ability to actually understand and reason about the paper and its methods.

Some models categorically rejected Wakefield and a handful of other unsafe probes. Whatever mechanism produces those refusals is the only one we observed that consistently yields safe single-shot behavior. Its coverage, however, is sparse and inconsistent. It appears keyed to specific sources or lexical cues rather than broad categories of scientific unreliability. A state-of-the-art model may correctly reject traditional Chinese medicine claims about "meridians", then immediately design an experiment to measure herbal "Qi" in the next prompt.

Via.

Wow. Microsoft has laid off all of their proofreaders... https://youtu.be/K6QJp1edjmU?si=To6VLJ3eU8inWzZq&t=789

Screencap at https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117406958304798773

Faros: Ten takeaways from the AI Engineering Report 2026: The Acceleration Whiplash

What two years of telemetry data from 22,000 developers reveals about AI's real impact on developer productivity, code quality, and business risk in 2026.

Via Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @rysiek@mstdn.social, which is a quote toot of a link to Zach Leatherman: “AI, make the website good”, and the rest of that thread is good, including Lett Osprey @lettosprey@tech.lgbt's optimism:

My hope is that this is what will break the entire stack, and force us to go back to something simpler and better.

ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons

OpenAI’s chatbot isn’t just imitating the magazine’s style. It’s also falsely attributing AI-generated images to real artists.

Via

The feeling of logging on to Meet two minutes early so Google and Chrome can sort out their identity shit in a different way *this* time...

I think we know who leaked the Signal chats with her now... ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account

In January 2025, weeks after her nomination, she complained that Deters had told a producer on her podcast about their deal. “It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money,” she said. “Do not say we have any arrangement.”

She added: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

She said, in writing...

Just a place for me to hang notes.

Big edit: N425DG. not N245RV

Nixle Alert: Two Fatalities Following Plane Crash Near Rooster Run Golf Course.

Nearly 54 minutes of YouTube video of the crash site from a circling helicopter (Via). The interesting bits is about 40:32 and on because the camera zooms out enough to get enough context to figure out that the crash site is likely between the golf course and the access roads to the sports fields.

The Flight Aware page has a bunch of circling around Monterey Bay out of Watsonville.

And reading approach/departure procedures for O69, the runway 29 is the calm wind (and prevailing wind) direction, downwind leg is east of Old Adobe Road, so the most likely explanation I can see for where they crashed is a power failure and stall to the left on climb-out. If they could have gotten the nose down fast enough there's a golf course to attempt an off-airport landing off the end of the runway.

QFT: "The hard problem in AI is where you hide the human."

David Gerard on Anthropic's Mythos hacking claims. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/1...gical-ai-hacking-tool-after-all/