Flutterby™! (short)

Dan Davies — Tokenalysys and John Henry looks at Ed Zitron's note on OpenAI losses:

Today, I can exclusively report, based on audited financial documents viewed by this publication that have been independently verified by the Financial Times, that OpenAI lost around $38.5 billion in 2025, as well as other crucial details about the financial condition of the company.

and notes that:

And, of course, this is just for coding – the idea of making material use of AI for general management and governance is several generations of R&D, plus several multiples more token use intensity. It seems to me that we are quite a lot of unknowable technical advances (in model design, renewable energy availability, quite possibly orbital data centres) away from anything like this being possible. And that there is a very difficult business strategy problem of getting there, because the AI companies now have to manage their pricing to walk the tightrope between growth and cash burn.

Via.

Baldur Bjarnason @baldur@toot.cafe

Current “AI” from my perspective is less like a technological breakthrough—“the genie is out of the bottle”—and more a research fusion reactor: no matter how much energy and money you throw at the thing, nothing changes the fact that it costs more energy than it produces

All that scaling it up accomplishes is waste. LLM true believers are effectively arguing their tech accomplishes free energy when the costs mean it’s effectively the opposite

Via.

Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein.

Via.

Holy shit it's time to accelerate the migration away from Gmail.

Elvira's Real Life Story about coming out, now a Graphic Novel by Cassandra Peterson, David Avallone and Mariano Benitez-Chapo from Dynamite

Craigslist posting for our Endless Pool https://sfbay.craigslist.org/n...ate-90s-swim-spa/7941846475.html

Ethan Marcotte: All tomorrow’s parties.

On what repair to the generational damage inflicted by AI might look like.

Can we skip to "what will happen next" sooner?

Xi Iaso: I hate compilers. On the challenges of reproducible builds and Web Assembly.

The Lobste.rs thread.

A Smart Bear: Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization.

Andrew Nesbitt: Open Source vs The Invisible Hand

The Vacancy Project has some media coverage in Petaluma Voice, including mention of next week's meeting! https://www.petalumavoice.org/fenced-lots-and-empty-storefronts/

‪Naomi Alderman‬ ‪@naomialderman.bsky.social‬

My main worry is that we’re banning social media for kids but not AI. So you can’t speak to real people online anymore, kids, but you sure can talk to your fake artificial friend who weirdly loves to talk about taking your own life!

A couple of Blüskï threads to read this morning:

Coleen Murphy ‪@ctmurphy1.bsky.social ‬

one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband

Quoting Mel Andrews ‪@bayesianboy.bsky.social‬

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Which references Who Gets Cited? Gender- and Majority-Bias in LLM-Driven Reference Selection Jiangen He.

Lots of stuff there, including how Google's AI search is totally fucking up ORCiD references.

Be careful about using Adobe products to generate or edit your PDFs : Comics Beat: Adobe quietly injects AI content into user’s files, hikes prices

Evil Hat Productions, a TTRPG and board game company, announced on Bluesky that the latest PDF files for their Umdaar game had injected autogenerated AI alt text, without warning. Other users are reporting that not only does alt text generate for undefined images, it also overwrites previously existing alt text.

Via.

My old house server died, so looking for a cheap replacement I grabbed a pair of Optiplex 7050s off of the Sonoma County surplus auction, for about what the RAM in them would cost at retail (Moved the RAM from my old server into one of them, gonna put it in the other one).

Of course it doesn't really have room for all the drives I need to put in it, so I have an external enclosure coming...

https://www.publicsurplus.com/sms/list/current?orgid=173161

Penny Arcade on the news that Xbox Game Studios Head Craig Duncan & Chief of Staff Louise O'Connor leave Microsoft:

Ultimately, it's based on something like a religious belief: that wealthy companies have discerned some proprietary, secret knowledge about how the world works, and they should be allowed to do whatever the eff they want, when what usually happens is that they know somebody who knows somebody, got a firm grip on the teat of public money, or are psychopaths playing a game made by psychopaths for the benefit of psychopaths. Business is how psychopaths fuck.

Fuck yeah!: Millions of Copyrighted Songs Were Fed to AI Music Generators – Now There’s Proof

Atlantic databases name 21 million tracks fed to Suno and rivals as Sony, UMG, and Warner seek $150,000 per song in damages

Go get 'em, lawyers!