Monday May 5th, 2025
Alex Riviere: The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind.
Editor’s Note: previous titles for this article have been added here for posterity.
Cassandrich @[email protected]
Hot take: the "I" in "AI" actually *is* "intelligence".
Not intelligence in the sense of carrying out reasoning processes enabling a being to meet its survival and welfare needs.
Intelligence in the CIA/nation-state "intelligence" gathering sense: amassing and organizing information about persons in a form in which it can be used to commit harm against them.
So apparently after the bozos in the current administration accidentally invited journalists into their war plans chats, they switched to a Signal fork called TeleMessage that subsequently got popped?
Seeing a lot more of this: Lukasz Olejnik @[email protected]
AI vulnerability/bug founds and reports is a huge problem. Curl has banned the use of AI-generated submissions via HackerOne because none of it made any sense, and is a waste of resources and time. "We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time" https://hackerone.com/reports/3125832
Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests
A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces. The findings, detailed in a working paper by economists from the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen, provide an early, large-scale empirical look at AI's transformative potential.
In "Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects," economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard focused specifically on the impact of AI chatbots across 11 occupations often considered vulnerable to automation, including accountants, software developers, and customer support specialists. Their analysis covered data from 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark.
More pulling from Careless People: Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
More pulling from Careless People: Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
Bloomberg: How a School in a Tiny, New York Town Beat ICE
Sackets Harbor demanded that Tom Homan return three children and their mother. Why did he cave?
So, uh, what about other woodwinds?
Sunday May 4th, 2025
At the Cool Petaluma Future Fest and there is one electric vehicle that is really turning heads.
At Luccheso Park for the Cool Petaluma Future Fest, and the geese with their little ones are giving us the serious side-eye.
Friday May 2nd, 2025
you don't need chatGPT i am perfectly capable of drinking a bottle of water and lying to you
Today in "sci fi people are supposed to be smarter than this, maybe the genre really is over?", World Con chair admits to using ChatGPT rather than search for info on panelists.
https://seattlein2025.org/2025...statement-from-worldcon-chair-2/
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/0...ion-vets-panelists-with-chatgpt/
Thursday May 1st, 2025
It's kinda terrifying that ya say something like "genocide is bad" and the trolls come out of the woodwork replying with "Israel is justified."
I assume that this is largely Russian psy-ops, but damn the world is weird.
In Adrianna Tan's "From Fintech to Fin Tech" talk at North Bay Python, she put up a slide which said:
DO NOT WANT
- Work on ads
- Work on weapons
- Abet genocides
- Make the world worse
- Use Microsoft Teams
making particular reference to Meta's involvement in the Myanmar genocides, but, of course the awful people said "this is anti-semitic", because any complaint about genocide is clearly about Palestine and "hey warfare is not genocide".
I've seen this locally too, where mentions of unhinged people harassing city staff and threatening people has been met with complaints of "the Petaluma Historic Advocates aren't unhinged".
So, yeah. People telling on themselves.
Judge restricts Border Patrol in California: ‘You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin’
The court also ordered the Border Patrol to document every stop and provide reports within 60 days. During oral arguments on Monday, the government attorney said doing so would be burdensome to Border Patrol agents. Judge Thurston rebuked the government, saying: “They have to make a report for every arrest, not sure what the burden is.”
According to sworn declarations filed in court by those detained, Border Patrol agents slashed tires, yanked people out of trucks, threw people to the ground, and called farmworkers “Mexican bitches.”
Let's repeat that for emphasis: "During oral arguments on Monday, the government attorney said doing so would be burdensome to Border Patrol agents."
Wow, the meme is in the air: Æ. @[email protected]
It is the year 2025 and “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” would actually be a pretty certain indicator that you’re talking to a human because an LLM would instead tell you that a bay is a body of water and therefore doesn’t have doors, although sometimes a pod of dolphins could be in it.
Wednesday April 30th, 2025
PyXL — Python running directly on a Zynq-7000 FPGA (Arty-Z7-20 dev board) at 100MHz
A GPIO roundtrip takes 480ns on PyXL vs. ~15,000ns on PyBoard (MicroPython).
Me: Marx didn’t predict I’d use adderall to respond to texts haha
Scholar’s QT of page 651 of Capital:
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑟 𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑡s 𝑡𝑜 𝑎 𝐿𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑙 𝑐𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑇𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑠
Quinn Norton @[email protected]
People keep talking about AI and crypto coins as things that are popular and interesting. But Fentanyl is also popular and interesting, so y'all will need a better argument than that.
Thom, Antipope of Fedi @[email protected]
Exactly 80 years ago today, Hitler blew his own brains out and died, in what can only be considered the single best use of a bullet in human history.
Why is this not a recognised, official holiday?
A bunch of tech CEOs are talking about being “AI-first”, the latest in a series of CEO fads like “return to office”, “founder mode” and “pivot to full fascism”. This one’s weird, though, because it only makes sense if… none of their workers are great at their jobs.
C++ coders: The way that LLVM exploits undefined behavior may be a little extreme.
Vibe coders: What if, and hear me out, we didn't even expect the same behavior from the same inputs?
I'm having trouble reading things like this as anything other than a desire for more undefined behavior in programming languages.
https://mashable.com/article/l...k-zuckerberg-ai-writes-meta-code
If 30% of code at Microsoft is being written in a language that doesn't reliably compile to the same output, doesn't have a formal spec or grammar, and only has indirect error checking, what does that say about the languages specific to programming that we've been using?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/2...osoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html
Reading Dennis Yi Tenen's "Literary Theory for Robots", talking about Athanasius Kircher's Mathematical Organ, and it's a good reminder to not dismiss shiny tech just because it is, but also to not let the well created wrapper convince us that there's more intelligence there than actually is.
What. The. Everloving. Fuck?
Lindsey Graham @LindseyGrahamSC
I was excited to hear that President Trump is open to the idea of being the next Pope. This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!
The first Pope-U.S. President combination has many upsides. Watching for white smoke…. Trump MMXXVIII!
Life with Althaar referring to "the human sexosipher Chuck Tingle" is the cross-over I didn't know that we needed.
Tried to write "order of magnitude", auto-corrupt suggested "order of manure". In the context (answers from LLMs on browser share vs ClouldFlare data), I'm not sure it was wrong.
Overheard: “William Henry Harrison had a better first 100 days, and he spent 70 of them dead.”
theHigherGeometer @[email protected]
People are saying we should write jumble words to mess up the training of AIs; I say we should just write sentences like those of the length Jane Austen would write, that have such non-local structure and nested clauses that, what with the drift of attention and the window of tokens, the LLMs might start to emulate said sentences and then start to drift; one should also throw in even more semicolons (and, why not, nested parentheticals (and even em-dash-separated asides—who doesn't love author commentary—to pad out the length) for the additional context they give)—but of course, also trying to keep in mind the general readability of the flow of ideas: know your audience, after all; for me, I'm happy to just be typing into the void as a release-valve for my thoughts, even if none of you are still reading by this point; I would much rather write—and read!—read something like this than have to and and/or subtract all the additional nonsense words; even better would be Proustian nested clauses and inverted grammar, but that, unlike run-on sentences, does not come so easily, unlike (apparently) to 19th century German journalists (but of course in German one can split the verbs as far apart as one likes).
Or not.
Yawu Miller @yawumiller.bsky.social
Mass. voters were told millionaires would leave the state in droves if the millionaires tax passed and revenue would decline. Two years later, there are more millionaires living here than ever and the state collected $2.2 billion from the surtax.
Institute for Policy Studies: New Data Shows Wealth Expands After Higher State Taxes on High-Income Earners, looking at how the surtax on large incomes has helped in Washington and Massachusetts, without slowing economic growth in those states.
Tuesday April 29th, 2025
Being excited about "AI" in 2025 is like watching someone pull a rabbit from a collapsible top hat and envisioning feeding humanity with endless hasenpfeffer.
mms :runbsd: :emacs: :c64: @[email protected]
Is the term "buzz coding" already coined? If not, I'd like to coin it.
Basically vibe coding, but instead of using a llm you're drinking. The result is the same - new code that no one understands. But more fun!
The History Blog: New Vindolanda dig, new Vindolanda phallus
Spring is in the air, daffodils are in bloom, the new dig season at the Roman fort of Vindolanda has just begun and they’ve already found a phallus. It is very small and made of jet who inky blackness . It is pierced through the testicles so it could be worn as a pendant. The through hole is small, so the cord or chain it hung from was thin and likely broke.
Via.
In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.
I just want a place to make some notes.
David Gerard @[email protected] characterized this as
... warrants a goose chasing him going "WHAT CERTAIN POLITICAL VIEWS MOTHERFUCKER"
One of the founders of the Fosstodon instance, Mike Stone writes "Do What You Love".
The other founder, Kev Quirk writes "My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama".
Monday April 28th, 2025
BBC: How Aldrich Ames became the US's most damaging double agent.
So far. I have suspicions about the history that'll be written about this era.
Thinking about file metadata for various things, and needed to put down a note here. To get the source URL from downloaded files in Firefox:
SELECT url,title FROM moz_places WHERE id IN (SELECT place_id FROM moz_historyvisits WHERE visit_type = 7);</blokquote>Probably need to copy places.sqlite before querying it with SQLite, 'cause Firefox locks it while it's open.
On MacOS, the file is in /Users/danlyke/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/places.sqlite.
Sometimes it seems like we're putting more effort into figuring out how to get the best output from LLMs than we are into figuring out how to get the best output from humans.
I'm not sure I hold with these romantic characters holding up the story line... They need to kiss or get off the plot.
My neighborhood is like a third of the way to "The Italian Job"
Sunday April 27th, 2025
Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social
Seeing a lot of pro-/anti-AI arguments so, to settle this, I've taken all your posts without consent or payment and crammed them into an inefficient statistical model that spits out post variations which should be treated as gospel unless they're wrong in which case I warned you it makes mistakes.🙏
North Bay Python, enjoying @[email protected]'s comparison of Python to excavators, and making Python smaller and simplar, and running over a good half of the reason why I've felt like every time I started a project in Python I've regretted not using C++ (the other half involves compile-time type checking).
#NBPy
Catherynne M. Valente @[email protected]
I’m going to say this slowly.
If Andrew Tate & his ilk were right about ANYTHING they’d have no audience.
Guys would listen briefly, apply advice, & be WAY too busy with their new gfs, side-pieces, & high income hustles to bother tuning in.
It’s the Tinder principle: if you’re happy, they lose a customer.
Their business model is your unending misery.
"The Tinder principle" seems to apply to a whole lot of things, and it's reinforcing my feeling (that keeps getting shot down) that we need some new open protocols and formats for connecting with each other in more structured-data ways, without the pressures of externalities and advertising and Google for discovery.
I mean, on the one hand, yes, brandishing firearms bad, on the other hand, I'd be hard-pressed to vote for a conviction:
"... to investigate a report of a man brandishing a firearm towards a door-to-door salesperson. The initial reporting party told the communications center that a homeowner was in possession of a firearm and was actively chasing the salesperson."
I get it.
Look, I try to shop local, I try to support the people doing business in my city, but if you list yourself on https://www.publicsquare.com/ I'm gonna make an effort to avoid doing business with you. No matter how convenient your establishment is.
"Glandweed", huh? Pretty among the lupines, though, along the road over the hill at Ries Ranch, where North Bay Python is held. #NBPy
Hidden Layer: Novel Universal Bypass for All Major LLMs — The Policy Puppetry Prompt Injection Technique. Format it like a configuration file, if that doesn't work then write your query out in l33tsp3@k.
Leveraging a novel combination of an internally developed policy technique and roleplaying, we are able to bypass model alignment and produce outputs that are in clear violation of AI safety policies: CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear), mass violence, self-harm and system prompt leakage.
Peter Hartley @[email protected]
Suddenly struck me that the next generation of computer scientists will need it explained to them what a "Travelling Salesman" is, and why on earth it isn't called the "Amazon Van Problem".
Margaret Fero @[email protected]
Julia sets mark the boundary between convergent and divergent functions, and LLMs often dance around the edge of that boundary. Because we train bots to align to our preferences, the concept of "digital sycophancy" has emerged; they flatter you and reinforce what you say, often increasing loneliness and causing hallucinations to spread quickly. - Madeleine at #nbpy
If the prosecutors blow the Luigi Mangione case because of misconduct like eavesdropping on attorney calls, I will laugh and laugh and laugh...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u...rder-stalking-charges-rcna202974
Jason Gorman @[email protected]
Being a software professional at the moment's a bit like being a doctor in a time when every hospital administrator believes the X--Ray specs they advertise in the back of newspapers actually work.
This conjunction of toots arrived on my stream and I'm going to be processing it all day...
AnarchoNinaAnalyzes @[email protected]
“Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Pro-trans satire, mention of sex assault
I’m okay with cis women using the women’s bathroom with me. I recognize they can’t help their biology, and are more likely to be a victim of sexual assault than a victimizer.
If you visit CERN today they’re giving away neutrinos, free of charge
Shannon Prickett @[email protected]
The force constraining my Terminal Veracity is err friction.
Random Geek @[email protected]
Just described model-generated code as "instant technical debt" and I have to make sure not to use that in a job interview.
Saturday April 26th, 2025
Theresa O’Connor @[email protected]
Somebody who engages in logging is a lumberjack. But somebody who engages in blogging is just a blogger. What a missed opportunity.
North Bay Python: Maddy Muscari talking about ethics washing in AI, "real ethics is praxis, it's loud, it's messy, it's people first". So far this feels in-line with my belief that we need to be framing AI primarily in adversarial terms. #NBPy
North Bay Python: Watching @[email protected] shoehorn Perl idioms into Python with decorators is making me wish we had more fun languages that thought better about performance while balancing what with safety. #NBPy
"I care about what happens to people when computers happen to them." —Adrianna Tan @[email protected] at North Bay Python #NBPy
At North Bay Python listening to @[email protected] talk about Fintech to fin tech, and the comparison of the current Silicon Valley environment to the the sardine over-fishing of the Monterey Bay gives me hope. #NBPy
Ended up driving the 3 miles to North Bay Python this morning because of logistics, but wasn't sure where to park so walking over the hill, and glad to get the morning with lupine. #NBPy
Thinking about, back in the 1900s at a tech gathering in Marin, asking a school board member who was talking passionately about bringing technology into the classroom about the curriculum need that was driving his fervor.
Aside from typing, I'd bet every skill that was taught in those labs is now obsolete. Every piece of software now completely different.
This is a post about "AI" in schools.
"I did not get this diagnosis because I want disability money or a therapy animal or a special star beside my name. Instead it has given me an opportunity to reexamine my life and my perception of myself."
https://researchbuzz.me/2025/0...ty-to-use-the-toilet-unassisted/
Friday April 25th, 2025
I'd like a little more bed, but looks perfect for grabbing lumber for my woodworking hobby or a load of bark for landscaping in the yard, definitely like the "just use your phone" for entertainment approach.
I think the question will be whether we'll have become a one car household by that point, in which case we'll trade the Bolt for it, or be a two car household and trade the '90s Ford Ranger for it.
Road & Track: The Slate Truck Is a Simple EV Pickup and SUV in One, for a Very Low Price
I was going to post yet another "Google's AI overview doing wacky bullshit", but then I saw this claim that "AI Overviews ... now has 1.5 billion users per month".
And, like, yes, it's all of us looking at how stupid it is, but let's stop giving this idiocy oxygen.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/2...ogl-q1-earnings-report-2025.html