Flutterby™! (short)
Wednesday August 19th, 2026
Lederer out at Stars & Stripes
Dan Lyke /
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After 3 decades with the organization, Max D. Lederer Jr. steps
down as publisher of Stars and Stripes
Lederer said he decided to step down because it had become clear that his
philosophy of leadership and understanding of the value and mission of Stars and
Stripes
differed in fundamental ways from plans the Defense Department has for the
organization.
Via
Reminder that if you fight AI data
Dan Lyke /
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Reminder that if you fight "AI data centers" in your town, but you use AI to... for instance, come up with a number of data centers in your town as a reason the town should have an anti-AI datacenter ordinance... you're just a NIMBY externalizing costs on to other less privileged communities.
Immens
Dan Lyke /
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And the reward for least self-aware goes to.... Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered
game engine to break the industry's doom cycle.
"There is a lot of anxiety, but let's be honest: is AI going away? No,"
Valient says. "With the dotcom bubble, did the internet go away? No. All the 'I have a
domain, give me money' companies went away. That's probably what happens. There are a lot
of companies that will probably not survive. There's a lot of great technology and a lot
of great products that will because they are simply good. That's what we are trying to do.
We are first and foremost making a good engine. AI is making us faster and dreaming
bigger, and designing it in a way that is faster for the future. Is it a bubble? Nobody
knows. Apparently, you don't know we are in a bubble until it bursts."
Thanks to Aura/Moom
@moomanibe.bsky.social for pointing this out.
Should probably note that it's the "Immens" game engine, but I figure the "I have said I'm
doing AI, give me money" factor here means history won't remember them much.
Tuesday August 18th, 2026
Penn State frat pledges packaging cocaine
Dan Lyke /
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Call me loopy
Dan Lyke /
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Call me loopy, but "you may have to use an agent to..." find bugs that were likely introduced by a programmer using an agent seems... strange.
In the future
Dan Lyke /
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In the future, all compute that isn't used by LLMs will be devoted to dumbass architectures that diff the entire model state with the view state to find and apply changes.
Education and AI
Dan Lyke /
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'Venecky' instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect
school agendas are AI-generated.
On the pages inside, Kentucky was labeled Venecky". Louisiana was "Lookoong."
Alabama was Alotome. Illinois was Vitoiis. South Carolina was "Sorth Cuanto."
(JCPS is Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Kentucky)
Interesting that we're starting to see some valuation of AI generated content:
"We have to pay a ten-dollar instructional fee every year to get this agenda,"
Morris said. "But you're making us pay for something you used AI for? That's kind of
silly, in my opinion."
In linking to AI6YR Ben
@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org, Mario Munoz
@pythonbynight@hachyderm.io noted:
One of the (many) salient points about this is that this is laughable
when the errors are easily spotted.
But what happens when harder to spot errors come through? Biases that
are harder to spot? Propaganda hiding as policy?
Okay
Dan Lyke /
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Okay, Google, now you're just jerking me around. The excerpt text contains the string "Baltimore", the line below that claims it's missing that search hit.
LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each.
Dan Lyke /
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Oh wow: From a thread exploring John Gruber: Anthropics Watermark Text
Adulteration in Claude
Is a Perversion of Writing (uh... insert that Nathan Fillion speechless .gif from
Castle) Cassandra has had an adventure
@xgranade@wandering.shop observes:
@whitequark That is, someone far enough down a AI radicalization pipeline may
not share a common vernacular or grammar with *anyone*; to wit the Gas Town case. I don't
think anyone else had exactly the same radicalization pipeline. To be blithe
perhaps to the point of inaccuracy, LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member
each.
(Emphasis mine).
"LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each." I'm gonna have to sit with
that.
The same thread proposes
"vibesick" as a sub for "ai psychosis", which I'm also pondering.
If you had a bunch of collections of
Dan Lyke /
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If you had a bunch of collections of information, perhaps envisioned by folders full of PDFs and web links, how might you lay out clusters of that?
I can use semantic embeddings, but the two largest eigenvalues doesn't seem like enough info.
Also, what's the right granularity for those embeddings? More than folder name, I'd guess.
Maybe something involving distances in that space between each of the collections? What's the right algorithm for reducing that to 2D?
Elderly friend of mine gave up on
Dan Lyke /
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Elderly friend of mine gave up on recovering his Instagram account via a password change. The process led to a screen which asked him to log in on another device, or... and the "or" wasn't clickable.
So we abandoned it.
It's amazing that a company the size of Meta is fucking it up this badly.
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Last modified: Thu Mar 15 12:48:17 PST 2001