Flutterby™! (short)

Well, that was unexpected. I just sold a "traffic congestion drives positive outcomes" T-shirt (after how many years of it just sitting there after I ordered one for me...).

https://www.teepublic.com/t-sh...gestion-drives-positive-outcomes

For the moment I've abandoned Firefox, though I do still have Waterfox on various machines. But this seems super useful: Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io

TIL in Firefox about:config:

widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled = false
widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.thumb-size = 1
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 4
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 16

Gets you scrollbars that are actually visible and clickable with the mouse.

PsyArXiv preprint: AI advice suppresses people’s willingness to say “I don’t know”, even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized

Merely having access to AI nearly eliminated participants’ willingness to suspend judgment, and this held whether the advice was actively requested or simply displayed. Consequently, participants answered more questions but were correct about a third as often as when AI was unavailable—yet their confidence nearly doubled. Incentivizing accuracy and penalizing inaccuracy led participants to seek and follow AI advice less, answer more accurately, and suspend judgment more often, though still far less than when AI was unavailable. As AI suggestions grow ubiquitous and unsolicited, they may not simply affect answer accuracy; they may even alter the metacognitive threshold at which people decide whether they know enough to answer.

From The Register: Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something.

Capraro said that he believes this is an issue that needs to be dealt with at a societal level through AI literacy and education policy initiatives. "Of course model providers should try to help, but I would imagine that the incentives are not very much aligned," he said. "A much more promising approach would be at the educational level."

Ah, that pesky "alignment" problem...

Via.

I've had The Next Web: Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron tab open for a day or two now, haven't posted it here because... well... I didn't take the time to dig into it, and anyone who's been following Ed Zitron knows the balance sheets are hinky, but today it seems to have gotten around to Tom's Hardware: AI tech companies have ‘hidden debt’ worth around $1.65 trillion, report claims — amount is 122% of debt reflected on the balance sheets of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Anyway, AMD is selling Anthropic AI servers while investing up to $5B in Anthropic.

I mean, it's not quite Miniscribe shipping bricks, but...

Dan Cornell @danielcornell@mastodon.social

So if today's hype cycle is to be believed, some OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face

Cool. Cool

I'm just curious - which OpenAI execs are going to have their lives ruined and go to jail for this?

Asking for Aaron Swartz

In other news, the judge approved the Anthropic $1.5B slap on the wrist.

Edit: Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io

Propaganda: "Our AI is so advanced it can escape sandbox containment!"

Reality: "Our AI spits out such shit sandboxing patterns that they don't actually do anything, and since our employees just blindly use what it gives them, there was no meaningful 'sandbox escape' needed."

Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose

One buyout firm quietly collected Pyrex, Corelle, Instant Pot, and Oneida. Farberware is a name on a 200-year lease. And the pans still worth buying.

One thing I hadn't been aware of is just how much of the anti-Teflon/PFAS stuff was inter- brand warfare.

(I use cast iron where stickiness is an issue)

Facebook don't ask me to post "Happy Birthday" on the profiles of dead people challenge.

I almost gave up on the https://anticrastination.fyi podcast because the dysfunction was like far too many meetings I've been in recently, as much as it tried to be over the top it just felt like documentary.

But somewhere around stair 500 this morning it clicked with me.

Ah, yes, it's great that we forked that repository so that you could make changes while my system continued to just run.

So, uh, why is my system needing attention this morning?

Good morning, Petaluma!

(The Dairyman's Feed silos tower over the Petaluma River with the sprawl of Petaluma laid out around it. Everything illuminated by the very first rays of sunlight, in sharp chiaroscuro.)

The thing about listening to podcast ads is, aside from scammy privacy invading online therapy companies, LinkedIn bragging how their users are particularly ad-susceptible.

You know what I love about Node package managers? They manage to take what could be clean code that runs nicely in different environments, and makes sure that that code will only run on very specific systems with their dependencies configured *just so*.

Nina Jankowicz: I Got Trapped in the AI Ouroboros

A foreign news outlet fabricated a quote from me. LLMs have already picked it up.

Via