Flutterby™! (short)

Penny Arcade: Cyberbullies:

I spent the weekend going through my mom's feed with her, trying to exist in the world their daemons operate. They keep sending her stuff that makes her sad: lonely abandoned moms, no-contact kids, mournful poetry, and a lot of it is AI. And because it tugs at a silent fear, she watches them and they give her more and more of it. I was like, Mom. Look at the fingers on this steering wheel, how these two are webbed, like a duck's foot. She told me that these words were from a mother's heart.

One hesitates to "give it to them," but there is something that these machines are adept at - the manufacture of utterly bespoke hells. Sam Altman, Hellsmith.

Whee! Context Collapse, Part 3 - AI Worming through Word

The reported scenario is:

• Malicious instructions hidden in an externally shared document could make Copilot alter drafted or edited documents in Word and propagate the attack to new documents.

Via Microsoft confirms an AI worm is propagating through Copilot and other MS apps, Via.

Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics

Amazon has several internal reports that show how AI is causing the company to overspend on various projects. The Financial Times reports that the cost overruns reached $1.8 million, and that is just for one project. These mistakes used to be “trivially cheap,” but AI models made them “catastrophically expensive,” especially as token spending drastically increased with the deployment of AI agents.

Now this, friends, is some quality attention to detail. The Lynx(dot)com unsubscribe page has... placeholder menu stuff that doesn't do anything dangling in it?

Microsoft Q4 2026 earnings call transcript.

We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models, including the latest from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, as well as our own MAI family. Since the start of the year, we have seen 5x increase in the number of customers building with models from multiple providers.

Via Reddit /r/BetterOffline: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agrees that LLMs are a commodity and other notes from MSFT earnings call. Which also notes:

In other words, Microsoft tweaked an accounting assumption to shift data center leases from 15 to 25 years which means those are now treated as annual expense, not upfront capex. The cash flow doesn't change at all but the market saw lower capex and decided that yes, this was good. Note to the future: if anyone is reading this in 2051, please go check if those data centers are still running.

Surprising absolutely no one: OpenAI Appears to Be Missing Its Sales Goals by a Vast Margin

That massive gulf was observed in a new analysis from marketing consulting firm Emarketer, first flagged by AdWeek, which found OpenAI is on pace to undershoot its own five-year ad revenue projections by a whopping 90 percent. In fact, Emarketer’s take is even more devastating than that: it estimates the entire addressable market for chatbot advertising — the maximum amount of money up for grabs overall — at $5.4 billion

Another conversation which... the AI psychosis is real, and I can't push back too hard without getting a reaction, but I am astounded at how much money is apparently being spent in the hopes that inserting LLMs into something will be more cost effective than simple tweaks to process.

Well, last night at about 6:30, a mile and a half or so south of the Kastania Rd exit on 101, the sunroof on our 2022 Bolt EUV shattered and rained glass down on us.

Oh this is great. Along with Gmail's spam filtering getting suddenly way worse, Brian Krebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange reports that the new "AI" assistant in Gmail is adding falling for crypto scam phishing links to "todo" lists.

Meta’s Reality Labs lost over $4.6 billion in second quarter.

Or, Josh Sternberg @joshsternberg.com

CRUX OF ZUCK'S BUCKS IN FLUX AS AI PRODUCT SUCKS

Holy crap. Apple signing keys, and the management structure and user interface around them.

That is all.