Flutterby™! (short)

And here we go: Manipulating AI memory for profit: The rise of AI Recommendation Poisoning

Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters (MITRE ATLAS® AML.T0080, AML.T0051).

These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.

Why pay the LLM vendors for "advertising" for such subtle biases to be inserted, when you can do it by tricking the LLM assistant to doing it directly?

Via Bruce Schneier, from Meuon on the Chugalug mailing list.

Jeff Forcier @bitprophet@social.coop

OH: "You want me to go back to the office? The same thing that killed Ayatollah Khamenei?"

Office dog is awesome and cuddly and I appreciate that she comes to me for scritches and when she thinks it's time for lunch, but that somewhere between 3:30 and 4:30 afternoon fart is... somethin' else.

The soup is not rotating that fast...

Work conversation has me thinking about Sidekick, and DESQview, and how Windows was maybe only a foregone conclusion once WfW 3.11 started to actually get a foothold.

Kind of amazing to think that the 4.77MHz 8088 PC architecture was a viable platform and software target for over a decade.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian: @ariadne@treehouse.systems

claude max 20x sounds like some bullshit you would buy at GNC

Way back in August of 1998, in complaining about how The Web Standards Project was destroying the WWW by pushing a visual-first interpretation of HTML:

The people actually putting out content aren't having problems here, it's only the over-steroided graphics designers trying to make up for the lack of any real meaning in their sites.

In the intervening decades(!), we've seen the problem get worse. The standardization of display, and development platform, has made the web a place of megabytes of ad payload for kilobytes of actual content, of hard to close tabs pushing malware on confused users who are just trying to read, of the imposition of accessibility horrors on top of data that should be easy to access.

Anyway, this came up in thinking about this conversation started by leah's tiny pc retirement home @millihertz@oldbytes.space

i'm just going to say this: i remember when Linux could cheerfully run a GUI and a web browser in 64MB RAM. for all people like to say "oh, but web browsers did less then", they had CSS, JavaScript and multimedia capabilities by the turn of the century (the timescale i'm talking about). they also had XSLT, Flash and Java, and they could read email and news, and connect to FTP servers (and i think gopher servers too). so much for "they do so much more now". no, they really don't - they just make a hell of a mountain out of a rather smaller molehill.

Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io

@millihertz A big part of the problem is how much worse websites are. Thanks largely to React, but lots of other factors too. Nothing is a proper document anymore. Everything on the web is an app with gigantic bundle of scripts and extra-high-res image assets for Apple displays. (And without UBO it's also polluted with hundreds of MBs of adtech and tracking shit.)

Tea @TeaTheDeveloper on X/Twitter:

The creator of ChatGPT is named "Altman," as in "alternative to human" and he leads OpenAI, which is completely closed.

His main opponent is the company Anthropic, meaning "human-centered" is led by "Amodei," as in "loves gods".

Then there's "Gemini," meaning "two-faced," from a company that said that it will do no evil.

Via

Interesting: The Next Version of Curling IO. It's a website for curling teams. The fascinating bit is that they're going with SQLite over PostgreSQL.

Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native:

API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform. That explains the rise of Electron before LLM times, but it’s also a problem that LLMs solve now: if that was a real barrier to developing native apps, it doesn’t exist anymore.

Via Lobste.rs.

And, yeah. And I hate it. I want a fast lightweight environment. I recently started using Ghostty, and once I got a few termcap issues sorted, I'm kind of amazed that Mac terminal apps sucked so badly that the performance change is noticeable.

I love editing the preferences via the config file.

Cocoa/AppKit is a total fucking disaster, not performant, less deterministic than web.

I would love a fast lightweight cross-platform environment along the lines of, say, early Gtk, but since that ain't gonna happen then why not just start with a base environment that chews up a gigabyte of RAM and works.

Charlene and I just wrote to our assemblymember, Damon Connolly:

We have recently had to deal with CVS's "AI" agent to deal with prescription information. What could have been a 5 minute chat with a human became a 20 minute exercise in frustration. We'd love your work on making sure that companies aren't using "AI agents" to frustrate customers who are locked in to a fixed number of vendors.

It's clear that the only thing "AI" is a solution for is companies that don't want to actually help their customers do anything, and frustrate them until they stop trying to get the services that they were trying to find.

This is particularly impactful on lower income families who are working more than 40 hours a week, trying to raise a family, and *then* need to go through all of the additional hassle and wasted time imposed on them by having to interact with AI.

Don't know what we can do about this, but with all of the downsides of AI, AI induced psychoses, specific interaction patterns meant to engage human addiction, finding some ways to regulate companies imposing AI on us would be very welcome.

MRFF (Military Religious Freedom Foundation> Inundated with Complaints of Gleeful Commanders Telling Troops Iran War is “Part of God’s Divine Plan” to Usher in the Return of Jesus Christ

The Guardian: US troops were told war on Iran was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’, watchdog alleges

Jonathan Larsen on Substack

Edit: From the MeFi thread: Friendly Atheist: Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for "Armageddon," read this

The narrative is dramatic. The sourcing is thin. And skepticism matters, especially on something this serious.