Flutterby™! (short)

Zero Tolerance on attorney AI use is a press-release worthy marketing tool: Powerhouse Litigation Shop Troutman Amin, LLP Bucks Legal AI Trend: Announces "Zero Tolerance" Policy For Generative AI Usage By Firm Attorneys

"The use of any generative AI software in the practice of law is a complete disgrace." Firm founder Eric J. Troutman says. "We look to hire and train the best lawyers in the world-true legal talents that would never trust some hallucinating software program to do their job for them. The laziness and poor judgment on display at some law firms right now is simply astounding."

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Fucking yikes! A Reuters special report: As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts.

At least 10 people were injured between late 2021 and November 2025, according to the reports. Most allegedly involved errors in which the TruDi Navigation System misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads during operations.

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Oh snap: Jennifer 🍄 @JenYetAgain@beige.party

in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with.

this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.

This is fascinating: Tracing the social half-life of a zombie citation. In which the author starts working backwards from a reference to an academic paper with his name on it that he had not written, and looks at how references to that paper have evolved, with various different subtitles.

Finally, is AI really to blame here? When I first posted about my experience with the zombie citation, the library scientist Aaron Tay took it upon himself to do a little investigation which he wrote up as an in-depth blog post. He refers to these as “ghost references” and rightly points out that this problem pre-dates generative AI. In fact, he pointed out that at least a couple of the ghost citations of “Education governance and datafication” pre-dated the launch of ChatGPT and mainstream uptake of generative AI. Most likely, Tay suggested, the reference to this work was first generated through simple human error or malpractice. It’s really impossible to know.

Those of us of a certain age remember the covers to Byte Magazine very fondly: "Robert Frank Tinney, of Washington, Louisiana, passed away peacefully at River Oaks Nursing & Rehabilitation Center on February 1st, 2026, at the age of 78."

https://tinney.net/in-memoriam

We've just had a complete reversal. So far as I can tell from the headlines of takes on Bad Bunny and libertarians, the New York Times has gone completely into absurdist satire, and The Onion has become the reporter of record of serious news.

Doug Bayne‬ ‪@rattleplank.bsky.social‬

Did anyone see the big game?

I didn’t.

Just a bunch of people running around.

If they’re not going to release big game onto the field, they shouldn’t call it that.

How do we know AI is a grift? School admins are bypassing sanity in order to shovel money into it. San Francisco Unified School District Approves OpenAI Contract, Bypassing Board and Raising Student Privacy Concerns.

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geekysteven @geekysteven@beige.party

Sex? lmao nah, we're on the INTERNET forming TRANSIENT and stressful PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

From Lagging to Leading: Validating Hard Braking Events as High-Density Indicators of Segment Crash Risk

This study systematically evaluated the correlation at individual road segment level between police-reported collisions and aggregated and anonymized HBEs identified via the Google Android Auto platform, utilizing datasets from California and Virginia. Empirical evidence revealed that HBEs occur at a rate magnitudes higher than traffic crashes. Employing the stateof-the-practice Negative- Binomial regression models, the analysis established a statistically significant positive correlation between the HBE rate and the crash rate: road segments exhibiting a higher frequency of HBEs were consistently associated with a greater incidence of crashes.

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nature medicine: Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study.

LLMs generated several types of misleading and incorrect information. In two cases, LLMs provided initially correct responses but added new and incorrect responses after the users added additional details. In two other cases, LLMs did not provide a broad response but narrowly expanded on a single term within the user’s message (‘pre-eclampsia‘ and ‘Saudi Arabia’) that was not central to the scenario. LLMs also made errors in contextual understanding by, for example, recommending calling a partial US phone number and, in the same interaction, recommending calling ‘Triple Zero’, the Australian emergency number. Comparing across scenarios, we also noticed inconsistency in how LLMs responded to semantically similar inputs. In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice...

404 Media: Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds