Flutterby™! (short)
Thursday May 21st, 2026
Wish Mastodon had a show me this
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Wish Mastodon had a "show me this user's posts without RTs" option. It's sometimes hard to tell if a new follower is just content farming, or there's actually a person adding value to the web there.
Though I suppose that if it's hard to tell, then I have my answer.
The AI has come
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Sean Conner: The AI has come for my
code.
Seriously, Github needs a dismiss with prejudice button. Now!
Wednesday May 20th, 2026
Fixing that AI Generated Content Lacks
Dan Lyke /
comment 2
Fixing that "AI Generated Content Lacks Soul" image.
Oh dear Facebook Offering an LLM
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Oh, dear, Facebook. Offering an LLM summary of a Chuck Tingle post to tell me "Why AI Generated Content
Lacks Soul" sure is... a thing.
If I still believed that companies needed to provide value in order to thrive I'd suggest
you short your Meta stock, but I'm too cynical for that.
The Onion, 20 years ahead of its time again
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
bike lanes don't harm business
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Chicago Streetsblog: New CDOT report finds that while bike lanes
improved safety, they didnt harm businesses, and may help make corridors more
economically
resilient
The new CDOT Economic Impacts of Bike Lanes Study
examined six
Chicago corridors where bike lanes were installed and compared them to nearby
control
corridors without bike lanes. While the report stops short of claiming bike lanes directly
caused economic growth, it repeatedly found that bike lane corridors performed similarly
to
or in several cases better than their comparison corridors on measures like
employment,
commercial vacancy, sales tax revenue recovery, and property values.
Via
The market anticipates Trump
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Some amazing data visualization in this post: The
Conversation: The market moves before Trump posts
Hundreds of millions of dollars are changing hands, but can we call it insider trading?
Because I saw Calishat
@researchbuzz@researchbuzz.masto.host's response to this post.
brownfield development
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Nick
@Nickiquote@mstdn.social
Bond villain has developed a device that will destroy the planet. The British
government sends James Bond to offer him tax incentives to build the device on brownfield
land in the East Midlands.
OUI
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
I'm reading Medium: UX Collective: The rise of the Orchestrated User Interface (OUI).
It's paywalled, I don't particularly think it's worth clicking through, but I find this
interesting:
In the OUI era, we must now become gardeners.
We plant the seeds (user goals), set the boundaries (guardrails), and nurture
the system as it grows (reinforcement learning). We are designing systems that learn from
the user, becoming more accurate and personalized over time.
Because all I can think of is the Spanish speaking guy with the old beater pickup truck,
bed filled with assorted tools, doing my neighbor's landscaping... Or, maybe, we can aspire
to be the Oliver Mellors of the situation...
Also see that previous
entry about using LLMs for analysis reinforcing cultural stereotypes, I suspect that
the systems are shaping the user far more than learning from the users.
Cultural stereotypes as data
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Adam
Kucharski: Real signals or artificial stereotypes? In which the author creates 2,000
survey responses, copies them labeling one set "US" and another set "UK", and sees how
Copilot thinks the responses differed.
Via
A response to Pirate Wires
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
Chad M. Topaz: Receipts are
receipts — A response to Pirate Wires on Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Via
Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, who quote skeeted Chad Topaz Queer
DEI Race Traitor @chadtopaz.bsky.social describing the post as:
So, @tressiemcphd.bsky.social writes a brilliant (as usual) op-ed about genAI
and some tech bro attempts to ridicule it. The guy, Mike Solana, is probably not worth my
time but it seems he's gay and as a Gay, I am unduly annoyed by evil gays. Also, I'm bored.
So here's my debunking of this guy.
Random security incidents
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
VT AI Economic Taskforce
Dan Lyke /
comment 0
There is so much wrong with this.... A new body
will recommend how state government and Vermont businesses could adopt AI. I mean,
obviously, there's starting with the flawed premise:
Through an executive order, Gov. Phil Scott
created the Vermont Artificial Intelligence Economic Taskforce on Monday. And first on its
agenda, the body must present up to five recommendations within 90 days for how state
government could adopt AI to better serve the public. The group will also work to educate
state leaders on how they could apply AI to their work.
But then we get to idiocy like this:
Given AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT that prove powerful off the shelf,
Lunderville said the technology could be a leveler for small companies. For example, he
pointed to small manufacturers using AI to draft requests for proposals, which could cut a
20-hour process down to five hours.
Sooooo... what Neal Lunderville, CEO of Vermont Gas and "...experience holding multiple
Cabinet-level positions in Vermont", is telling me is that off-loading the RFP process to
a third party that everyone else is using is going to give small companies a competitive
advantage?
A "leveler" perhaps in that what's obviously an overly cumbersome RFP process is gonna
turn into a die roll.
Flutterby&tm;! is a trademark claimed by Dan Lyke for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.
Last modified: Thu Mar 15 12:48:17 PST 2001