Flutterby™! (short)

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/