Nostr notes by Mark T. Tomczak

Hey Mastoneighbors who are historians and anthropologists. ... ...

2026-10-31T19:54:13Z

Hey Mastoneighbors who are historians and anthropologists.

... Did we have anything like Star Trek before Star Trek?

What I mean is that we've had mythology before. Stories of people, gods and heroes, parables that explore the human condition and try to encode the important truths.

But most of them are about the past, right? The past or the magical present just on the edge of the comfortable. The Arthurian legend. The Greek stories. The Roman stories. The Journey to the West. Aesop fables. The stories of the native peoples of the Americas. The stories of The peoples of Africa, and India, and the Polynesian regions and the mid-East and Japan and the rest of Asia (and of course I have to apologize for glossing over like 1400 cultures here, my knowledge is limited).

Apart from the occasional apocalyptic story forward to the end of time... Were there any collections of mythology that dwelt in the future and that imagined who people could become, or is this a relatively modern phenomenon?

It's just interesting to me to think about. It's a series that was started by people who survived a war that was predicated upon, among other things, people chasing a national identity that involved a mythology that they had fallen and could reclaim glory. And in a sense Star Trek (and several other stories in the science fiction genre) sort of counterpoint that with the idea that, to the extent glory is possible at all... We're not there yet.

... But with a lot of effort and care and empathy, we could be.

Yeah, I'm not looking forward to it, but my understanding of ...

2026-10-17T15:16:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…6sl6
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Yeah, I'm not looking forward to it, but my understanding of the legal framework here makes me a bit doomer on the whole thing in much the same way that overturning Roe v Wade was awful but I can understand the legal thinking.

We've known forever that you can't block ownership of CSAM on ownership grounds alone because of the First Amendment. The precedent is pretty clear vis-a-vis the Hustler trial on ownership and private, discrete trafficking of consensually-generated smut.

So CSAM being illegal has been couched in the notion that creation of it is automatically harm and that it is legally impossible for underaged people to consent; there is no possible way to generate it that didn't inflict harm on a child. The trafficking ban is based on slightly shakier ground imho, that it creates a market for harming children... I am not a lawyer so I'm not going to pretend to understand how secondary effect arguments like that hold water, I'm just going to accept they do.

... But that was always a justification for banning it that has been waiting on somebody to come up with a solution for creating without harming children.

And the wild thing about how AI generators work is that... Yeah. It's going to have to be figured out in a court of law whether they were trained on actual CSAM or are extrapolating. When it comes to image generation I don't actually know what the technology is capable of here. I am pretty certain that LLM text generation could extrapolate Lolita without having been trained on a Lolita story, though.

Mostly I would not want to be X going through the discovery process that will involve divulging their training data though, because I am real certain no human being has laid eyes on every single image that went into the hopper. So maybe we all get lucky and they fucked up bad.

Gross. I'm going to go think about something much nicer now.

I am disquieted both by the situation and by the possibility that ...

2026-10-16T21:01:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…58jt
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I am disquieted both by the situation and by the possibility that is not actually illegal. >:(

I agree. My ethics are.... ... So when things go on the Internet, ...

2026-09-19T20:37:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…7zfw
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I agree.

My ethics are....

... So when things go on the Internet, they go in the forever box and I don't know why people don't act like that is true.

I intend to circle back and replace this tool with one that I write by hand. But right now, my flow is broken and I don't intend to suspend my day because a dependency went away. I've back-filled it in precisely the same way that I would backfill a missing apt package from another machine with a mirror of that apt package.

("interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," even self-censorship.)

Definitely not rescuing an online tool from archive.org, slapping ...

2026-09-19T20:28:14Z

Definitely not rescuing an online tool from archive.org, slapping it down in some hosting space I own, and field-stripping it into serviceability because it had become a part of my workflow and its creator got so mad about AI that he chucked his whole website to go live on a mountain or embrace the life of the humble dairy farmer, nosir.

That doesn't sound like how *I'd* spend a Saturday afternoon. You must be thinking of someone else.

(When I'm done with this, I intend to give the creator some credit - if I can figure out how, they seemed to like being anonymous. But I don't think I'll be publishing the URL, because they made a valid point: hosting costs money, and getting popular on the Internet can be a very double-edged sword. I'm lucky that my hosting is still from a grandfathered account from the early aughts where the baseload is a flat fee and if I blow up online one day they'll just pause the server and go "Mr. Tomczak, you took all our bits, we have to cut you off for the rest of this month, sorry.")

(purely anecdotally, but I threw my phone in my pocket to go run ...

2026-09-18T22:17:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…fr3q
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(purely anecdotally, but I threw my phone in my pocket to go run some errands.

I have arrived at my destination, and on the way here, in the 5 minutes it took to get from home to grocery store, I witnessed a vehicle nearly take the front off another person's car. Just blew straight through a red light like they didn't even see it was there, full speed, no slowdown.

Expecting people to operate heavy machinery reliably as much as we do to make regular ass driving work is incredibly dangerous.)

I wouldn't say entirely different. There's massive ...

2026-09-18T22:11:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…fr3q
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I wouldn't say entirely different. There's massive overlap between how a self-driving vehicle works and any other one occupant vehicle.

I think I failed to see the fundamental difference between the risks inherent to a self-driving vehicle pulling over on the side of the road and malfunctioning (and now bursting into flames and exploding? I'm not quite sure what your hypothesizing has happened to this vehicle now)... And a vehicle operated by any solo motorist. Like, if I'm driving a regular ass Honda Civic and smoke starts pouring out from under the engine and I have to pull over and run? I'm exactly as stranded right?

So on the topic of how these technologies generally centralize... ...

2026-09-18T22:06:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…gh07
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So on the topic of how these technologies generally centralize... Yes. Very good point. In general the business model is the robotaxi fleet is controlled by one authority that can be easily manipulated by a central authority above them. Significant non-zero risk.

Is there a potential future where the technology itself is decentralized in control? Probably eventually because that's the pattern that tends to happen. But we won't be there for a very long time. Patent protection alone will keep these things close to home for quite a while, and you are if your large red flag risk issues are around "fascism is on our doorstep..." I think Google in particular has proven willing to bend to Federal authority no matter how corrupt it is so I wouldn't trust waymo specifically if that's one's biggest concern.

The space of the industry is wider than waymo alone, but scoping to waymo that's my thoughts.

... Perhaps I should put more cards on the table. I've been ...

2026-09-18T21:51:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…5dyy
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... Perhaps I should put more cards on the table.

I've been involved in exactly one drug deal without my consent. I was a passenger in a cab in DC, our driver pulled us off the road a couple streets, stopped, and somebody threw something in his window. He kept going. And sure, don't start nothing won't be nothing so I didn't say nothing.

But it did kind of highlight to me the amount of power a driver has over their passengers in a regular cab situation. Where the cab isn't studded with cameras and under constant surveillance.

So in general, just my priors... I don't automatically trust human operated vehicles more than I trust autonomous vehicles. Because I don't automatically trust humans. I felt unsafe several more times as a passenger in a human controlled vehicle than in a robotaxi (with, granted, the observation needing to be put on the table that I've been in a lot more human driven vehicles than robotaxis).

You've put on the table the possibility that a vehicle could malfunction and leave the passenger stranded with no human support. I will, regrettably, put on the table the counter argument that we have already seen situations where drivers have kidnapped their passengers and done horrible things to them.

So I don't have an expectation that one of these scenarios is more dangerous than the other. There is a complicated melange of risks, incentives, and trust.

I don't see an easy answer or a categorical here.

This is true. But if I'm in the backseat of a waymo and the ...

2026-09-18T21:44:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…x2ck
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This is true. But if I'm in the backseat of a waymo and the cops show up and there's some guy moving saw horses around outside the waymo... I'll probably be fine.

I do recognize this comes from a place of privilege and is not necessarily a universal sentiment. But I don't think self-driving car companies are going to be able to fix that issue with our society, and I don't think it impacts their customers disproportionately to, say, the risks of driving while black.

@npub1lq6…nf7e > And then what happens? Generally, the cops ...

2026-09-18T20:23:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…lag0
_________________________

Lauren Weinstein (npub1lq6…nf7e)

> And then what happens?

Generally, the cops show up since we're taking about devices with camera coronae and always on cell connections. If someone starts a fight with an AV, there's ample legal evidence of what happened.

You seem to be envisioning a "riots in the street" scenario that I find unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely).

> Trapped on the side of the road

.... I don't generally worry about suddenly dying on the side of the road when my car stops. If I did I wouldn't drive for fear of flat tires and battery failure; AAA has taken two hours to find me in the cold before when my regular human-driven Hyundai failed to continue being a car. Do we have reason to believe the always-online camera-studded robotaxi has more risk of that failure mode?

I've been in about a half dozen since they aren't ...

2026-09-18T18:59:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…w3hz
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I've been in about a half dozen since they aren't deployed in my city yet.

Generally felt pretty good. I don't feel any less safe in one than I feel being driven by an Uber driver at this point.

Coincidentally, my last ride home from the airport I was driven by an Uber driver and a Tesla and he switched it to FSD from entering the highway to my door. I did not realize that it could do full on highway to off highway grid level road yet. Driver is fully responsible for what the vehicle is doing and has a HUD indicating what the vehicle sees, they are supposed to be matching that continuously with what's going on out the window. This does give me some UI questions... I know that we have research from the '90s about having to take your eyes off the road, so I suspect that that HUD would be better served if it were projected on the glass.

Oh dear. I have tripped over some fluctuation in the algorithmic ...

2026-09-17T19:45:33Z

Oh dear.

I have tripped over some fluctuation in the algorithmic æther and now Facebook is showing me unlimited AI generated furry animations.

Folks... We're cooked. All arguments against AI generated imagery will collapse in front of the unyielding juggernaut that is "people can animate their fursonas without slaving over a hot blender for 3 weeks now."

I don't make the rules, I just recognize the patterns.

I don't think so? It might be! It doesn't feel like it. ...

2026-09-17T16:17:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…ehr6
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I don't think so? It might be! It doesn't feel like it.

But I might be wrong because I don't know that I know what thermal paper feels like.

I suppose I could test this right? Warm up the stove and press the paper to it and see if it changes color?

That's a really good point. Funny enough, it's also one ...

2026-09-17T15:28:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…2ft8
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That's a really good point.

Funny enough, it's also one of the best receipt printers I've ever seen. It looks like somebody has successfully miniaturized laser printer technology and crammed it into a receipt tape form factor - the thing ripped the 2 and 1/2 ft receipt out in about 2 seconds.

I'm not exactly sure this is the capitalism breeds innovation that we were looking for... But a tip of my hat to whatever material science and robotics wizards made that possible, even if it's giving me flashbacks to the one scene in the Captain Planet title sequence where Dr. Blight is feeding the rainforest directly into a dot matrix printer. 😛

Oh, because the trope is that CVS generates massively wasteful ...

2026-09-17T15:04:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…vl44
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Oh, because the trope is that CVS generates massively wasteful receipts.

And they do. They gave me a 2 and 1/2 ft long receipt and about 70% of it is coupons. I already have their app and they already know that.

Cvs has installed faster receipt printers. This is very funny to ...

2026-09-17T14:05:29Z

Cvs has installed faster receipt printers.

This is very funny to me.

Yeah, I agree. There's definitely a serious conversation to ...

2026-09-17T02:10:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…mx4k
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Yeah, I agree. There's definitely a serious conversation to be had about the possibility that the failure mode when this machine fails is worse enough that one shouldn't try an apples to apples comparison between machine and human transcription accuracy.

Cards on the table / where I'm coming from in all of this: I don't exactly advertise it but I'm working on autonomous vehicles these days. So the safety story is omnipresent on my mind, and there has definitely been one horror story I'm aware of where the vehicle failed to realize there was a pedestrian under it and kept going.

... Unfortunately, I hear that story and I weigh it against the stories I'm aware of where a human driver, absolutely panicked about facing consequences (or ignorance they had struck someone, we know that humans don't have as much situational awareness about what's going on outside their car as it feels like we do when we're driving one), made the worst possible decisions for the pedestrian they had injured. So I feel a lot more comfortable doing apples to apples comparisons of autonomous versus human operated vehicle safety.

I might be guilty of assuming things about a field I don't know when I don't cut medical transcription a similar benefit of the doubt to the benefit I cut my own field.

part of me wants to observe that the real question is whether AI ...

2026-09-17T01:27:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…fda5
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part of me wants to observe that the real question is whether AI transcription makes fewer errors than human transcription.

... But I think the question of category of error is also very important. If the algorithm is extrapolating full-on made-up statements then I think that might be a kind of flaw that we can't really accept for this use case.

"I don't get this genre of video that's just someone ...

2026-09-16T21:54:26Z

"I don't get this genre of video that's just someone talking over footage of running an obstacle course in Minecraft. How does that hold anyone's interest?"

*Me, who logged like 87 hours in Jet Set Radio Future in college*: "... Yeah, I can't explain that."

Also, it looks like teens just leaning into the idea that Cat in ...

2026-09-14T18:00:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…6gh9
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Also, it looks like teens just leaning into the idea that Cat in the Hat is a deeply unsettling cryptid.

... Which he is?

... Christ. So when I use Copilot to write code and it effs up, I ...

2026-09-11T23:22:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…u04s
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... Christ.

So when I use Copilot to write code and it effs up, I can at least tell because *it doesn't fucking work.* And I'm *still* reading it line-by-line to confirm it's doing something sane (though, I'll admit that I have let things slip through that, upon a re-read, should have been self-evidently wrong... Turns out I do that reviewing humans too, because humans also make nonsense mistakes because they get tired or interrupted mid-line).

... I can't *imagine* using it in a situation where *your reputation for not lying about reality* is both the only thing standing between the system itself and garbage... And *all you have to offer to the process.* And then not being iron-clad certain it hasn't hallucinated at you.

I can't remember right now: is the output of a BMD human ...

2026-09-04T21:41:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…yzwf
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I can't remember right now: is the output of a BMD human readable?

Experimenting a bit with MapQuest on news that they've ...

2026-08-31T19:09:05Z

Experimenting a bit with MapQuest on news that they've decided to buck this whole renaming trend.

Regretfully, the renaming situation around the bodies of water has reminded me that Google has authority over probably more of my data than I should be comfortable with.

Oh God, that's awful. I'm not a chemist and the name ...

2026-08-29T22:37:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…ppxv
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Oh God, that's awful.

I'm not a chemist and the name "dimethyl mercury" triggered like five alarm bells in my brain even though I couldn't remember why.

One downside to software engineering as a career is that your ...

2026-08-27T14:12:12Z

One downside to software engineering as a career is that your reward for caring so much about how things work that you go into software engineering is to spend almost all your time surrounded by things that don't work.

Hot damn #emacs . Just when I think I've hit a roadblock and ...

2026-08-25T22:26:14Z

Hot damn #emacs .

Just when I think I've hit a roadblock and something is truly impossible, you hit me with "no really, I'm just a LISP engine someone implemented a text editor in."unread-command-events

is the nuclear option for forcing code to behave as if you literally invoked it from the keyboard. It pushes a key sequence into emacs's event handler as if the keys were literally typed.

I'm doing black magic with hydras and it's gross but it works. ;)

Thinking about the era of technology where the easiest way to ...

2026-08-24T16:46:45Z

Thinking about the era of technology where the easiest way to display images was to take all the air out of a tube and point a death ray at your face.

It's fine though. There was a thin screen between you and the death ray that caught all the death and turned it into pretty colors.

If chatting with AI you like Or Bluesky you like Or hot takes you ...

2026-08-18T17:02:26Z

If chatting with AI you like
Or Bluesky you like
Or hot takes you like
Or deep fakes you like
Or cheering crooks you like
Or shredding books you like
Why nobody will oppose!

We passed a law in PA to keep people from operating phones with ...

2026-07-29T14:12:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…5mar
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We passed a law in PA to keep people from operating phones with hands because an interstate truck driver with three phones on stands crossed the highway divider.

(As a side note... I'm *slightly* irritated how many laws we add to the books in PA that are universally applicable but reactionary to specific incidents with trucking - the "clean your car after a snowstorm" law was also because a sheet of ice peeled off the top of a semi and Final Destinationed an SUV behind the commercial driver).

Nostr event nevent1qqsw4vjxk8vjxdvp8pzc359e053reauxtcmd8eewal99stw2x9ynx8szypuf3fmna2anprggkkks2fhwsnahvnr2qqsdlj56wvs3pd8yn06h22ys2c7

2026-07-16T14:49:53Z

We don't talk about mitochondria enough.

What are 'asserts' in this context?

2026-07-13T16:37:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…y59e
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What are 'asserts' in this context?

I was unclear on whether they locked the doors or just lied to ...

2026-07-08T17:48:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…g2s2
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I was unclear on whether they locked the doors or just lied to the kids (told them there was a maintenance issue and pulled over and then the kids voluntarily stayed in the car). I'm seeing both stories.

I cannot remember right now whether you *can* lock someone into a Waymo against their will; I think the door has unlock-on-pull handles on the inside. But I might be wrong!

Ah, good. We're now in the "robotaxi will call the cops ...

2026-07-08T17:06:09Z

Ah, good. We're now in the "robotaxi will call the cops on you" phase of the experiment. This was always bound to happen.

https://www.wpxi.com/news/trending/waymo-car-delivers-misbehaving-teens-california-police/UCOGYIJRHJG2LMHYWJQ3PH7VEY

#robotaxi #waymo #av

Uh... Mine has AI. 😕 I mean, I don't use them often, but ...

2026-07-02T18:59:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…fq93
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Uh... Mine has AI. 😕

I mean, I don't use them often, but the "find text in picture" and "translate from German" buttons are definitely doing *something* smarter than me.

I've heard that too. And I'm not sure it's so much ...

2026-06-22T02:21:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…rsq8
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I've heard that too. And I'm not sure it's so much "hated each other" as "spent most of their lives living on top of each other." When you're fundamentally different personalities, that can be exhausting, especially if it's filtered through a professional relationship.

(There's a documentary on this, "The Boys," that I haven't gotten around to yet. Yes, same name as the superhero series, though the subtitle is "The Sherman Brothers Story").

Currently digesting [this course](https://modernaicourse.org/ ) ...

2026-06-22T01:48:58Z

Currently digesting [this course](https://modernaicourse.org/ ) from Carnegie Mellon University on an introduction to modern AI.

I'm not terribly deep in yet, but I think I can give it a soft recommendation for anyone who has a bit of a programming background, a bit of a linear algebra background, and a bit of a calculus background and is interested in the modern state of the art regarding AI (in particular, LLMs, their capabilities and limitations).

And, hey, it's free.

#AI #LLM #CMU

🎶 Miracles from polycules 🎶 (The Sherman Brothers would ...

2026-06-21T21:15:22Z

🎶 Miracles from polycules 🎶

(The Sherman Brothers would never) 😉

The approach I've seen work best is AI as an automated ...

2026-06-15T18:08:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…9ltv
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The approach I've seen work best is AI as an automated reviewer in the pull request workflow. It can false positive and false negative, but in practice the false-pos rate I'm seeing is like 1-5% (and much of that corner case stuff, like "yes you're right but that is autogen code that cannot be fixed at this layer").

It needs human in the loop, but it doesn't get bored in the same way humans do.

I hadn't considered AI for accessibility before... It may ...

2026-06-15T15:08:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…zzna
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I hadn't considered AI for accessibility before... It may plug an unfortunate gap I've seen, which is that developers really, really, really don't want to support a11y in most firms and management doesn't care enough to force the issue.

But if an LLM can reduce the problem of identifying issues to one analysis pass... That's not a small thing. And I'm generally seeing LLMs are better at that than traditional heuristic approaches, because they end up trained on real-world examples of what goes wrong.

Yep. And as a partial product of that process, to a first ...

2026-06-08T19:25:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…w9w3
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Yep. And as a partial product of that process, to a first approximation this is fine. ;)

You want some of the best hackers you can create? Tell young people there's stuff on the Internet they aren't allowed to see. This was literally one of my initial motivations to learn HTML. 😛

(... Approximations 2 through n say **this is not fine.**)

I'll have to check primary sources; I haven't read the ...

2026-06-08T19:23:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…566f
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I'll have to check primary sources; I haven't read the specifics of the request from the PM yet.

I believe a bloom filter (or trained recognizer) on the video ...

2026-06-08T17:20:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…7yw2
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I believe a bloom filter (or trained recognizer) on the video layer will generally be hard to subvert; Lord knows they'll try. That gives a rough cut of "probably porn," and the whine screen can then be passed to an online detector for verification and then follow up (notify parents, ban account, whatever). It's impractical to use that to prevent the image from being seen though, unless we want the kid phone experience to be total ass.

It would also be very expensive battery wide, depending on how frequently it's scanning the whole screen. And "your phone can screenshot what you are up to at any time and send it to the government" feels like it should be pretty viscerally horrifying, even to Brits.

(I don't think this is a good problem to try to solve; my noodling is on whether it's actually unsolvable and under what constraints it becomes so).

The UK is trying to ban nudes (store, transmit, display) on ...

2026-06-08T17:08:28Z

The UK is trying to ban nudes (store, transmit, display) on smartphones owned or operated by kids under 18.

Is young people seeing nudes bad? Separate problem, and could be its own thread, but for the sake of argument let's say "yes."

Is the problem tractable? I think the answer is actually "probably" for a partial solution. It'll be expensive (Apple and Google's money and everybody's electricity and, of course, privacy), but I'm playing Evil Oracle in my head and I'm not seeing a defeat strategy for "cliient-side hash check routed to server for detailed confirmation and revocation of account on offense."

... But blocking seeing them at all? Intractably expensive in energy and time for anything approaching a 100% case when bright and motivated young people are in the loop.

Olive Oyl: oh hey Popeye ur back early Popeye: goon's haunted ...

2026-05-21T17:03:15Z

Olive Oyl: oh hey Popeye ur back early

Popeye: goon's haunted

Olive Oyl: what?

Popeye: *loading some spinach and getting back on the boat* goon's haunted

I stumbled over a railing yesterday working on a project. And it ...

2026-05-17T14:14:39Z

I stumbled over a railing yesterday working on a project. And it wouldn't have been so bad except that it was one of those homeless hostile architecture railings so instead of being, you know, a regular railing for touching and keeping your balance, it was a railing that somebody had put a bunch of pointy bits on.

As a result, I couldn't grab it to break my fall and I face planted on asphalt.

My days of thinking anti-homeless architecture is an awful and human hostile idea are certainly coming to a middle.

That feeling when the elevator arrives that you know maintenance ...

2026-05-12T16:54:46Z

That feeling when the elevator arrives that you know maintenance was working on this morning and before you step onto it you look down the gap for light from the shaft to confirm you're not about to be involved in a monumental industrial accident.

"That was a weird dream. I dreamed Nintendo decided to remake ...

2026-05-07T16:21:54Z

"That was a weird dream. I dreamed Nintendo decided to remake Star Fox 64 on the switch 2 for some reason. Not a re-release, a ground-up remake."

*Opens YouTube*

"OH NO I WASN'T DREAMING I WAS BROWSING AT 3:00 A.M. LAST NIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!"

Whooooof. One of the best things about leaving the company is I ...

2026-04-28T16:51:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…ly0d
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Whooooof. One of the best things about leaving the company is I don't have to leave over this.

correct. What you're bumping up against is the general theory ...

2026-04-22T22:35:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…2yq7
_________________________

correct. What you're bumping up against is the general theory of relativity.

Special theory of relativity deals with the behavior of different inertial frames moving at different velocities relative to each other. But then general theory adds in what happens when you accelerate and shift from one of those frames to another frame.

I can't pretend to understand all the math, but it is general relativity that both explains why it is the people in the rocket, if they turn all the way around and come back to Earth, who are younger than the people who stayed on Earth... And why we sitting down here in our gravity well experience time a tiny, tiny fraction more slowly than the GPS satellites orbiting the planet do. Because a rocket ship accelerating and the constant acceleration of standing around in a gravity field are exactly the same as far as the theory goes.

Do we know that? TBH I can see a lot of potential advantages to ...

2026-04-16T17:36:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…z0e9
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Do we know that?

TBH I can see a lot of potential advantages to throwing Copilot at a code base as hairy as a Ruby on Rails app, though I have not tried.

Against my better judgment, I shall wade into the discourse on a ...

2026-04-09T22:12:33Z

Against my better judgment, I shall wade into the discourse on a topic I love.

I've seen enough people claim that modern Star Trek would be doing better if they didn't make gay characters the focus. And I think that argument is a big head-fake. Rather, I think the people making it have cottoned to what *is* happening in those shows, and it's much, much scarier for them than what they're describing.

I can name two gay couples, one bisexual character, and one almost-certainly-omnisexual (or maybe just, like, really hot, like, is it hot in here? Can I sit down? I should sit down) character in *Starfleet Academy.* I can also name one gay couple, two(?) nonbinary characters, and one gay character in *Star Trek: Discovery.*

I cannot name a single plot that was *about* any of that.

To be honest, I think *that's* what offended the offendable the most: it's *not* a focus. This era of Star Trek embraces and extends the Roddenberry-era notion that in the future, love would be more free, growing an assumption Roddenberry's era didn't necessarily embrace that love need not constrain across gender. If people of the same gender found mutual attraction, they just chased it. If opposing gender, they just chased it. What probably rankles the most for those opposed to that kind of world is that in this Trek, *it's background.* Boyfriends share quarters and bathroom sinks and nobody says anything about it. A character asks for their pronouns clarified and everyone just updates their mental rolodex. Jay-den has some feelings he hasn't quite placed yet for a War College cadet and he is willing to explore those feelings with the guy and *nobody stops him.*

And *that's* what's scary to those opposed to love being that free: this is not a Star Trek centering that conflict. This is a Star Trek depicting a future where their attitude on gender and sexual expression *already lost.* It's on the ash-can alongside capitalism, race, and in-species tribalism as "things humanity grew out of fighting about."

And, yeah, I can see how that kind of future would be terrifying for a certain kind of person.

And I'm sorry for them.

#StarTrek #StarfleetAcademy #Discovery #NuTrek

I just saw "improving your emacs skills or learning new ...

2026-04-01T15:55:25Z

I just saw "improving your emacs skills or learning new features of the libraries" referred to as "emaxxing" and I just can't.

#emacs

I mean... It's pretty awful. An arbitrary 24-hour time-gate ...

2026-03-19T18:25:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…tcjn
_________________________

I mean... It's pretty awful. An arbitrary 24-hour time-gate does nothing but make me wonder if you can work around it by turning off the network and manually setting the date forward...

One of the more interesting aspects of the Ukraine war was the ...

2026-03-19T17:51:16Z

One of the more interesting aspects of the Ukraine war was the revelation of how badly compromised Russia's defense assets were. It was, honestly, a little startling to the public to learn that the feared Former Soviet State still had size on its side, but not a modern military; their tech was either out-dated or had been pillaged by corruption so badly that it couldn't be deployed as intelligence analysts had assumed it could be.

It is extremely fair to argue that Russia's greatest state-defense asset was perception and that the war in Ukraine damaged that and, in so doing, materially threatened the country's safety---that if they had simply never started a war, everyone would still perceive them as unassailable and incredibly dangerous to engage in combat and nobody would even *think* to try stochastic attacks, asymmetric drone warfare, or any other modern tactics under the *assumption* that such a grand superpower had a solution for all of that.

In short, all they had to do to keep everyone's perception of their strength was literally not start a war to test it.
Just a thing I'm thinking of right now for some reason.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/18/politics/us-ford-carrier-fire-iran-war

I don't have a lot of patience for third-party voters (they ...

2026-02-24T16:31:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…w668
_________________________

I don't have a lot of patience for third-party voters (they fundamentally misunderstand the math of a system with hundreds of millions of inputs).

... but to be fair to them, it was a pretty awful move for the parties to both put up people well past retirement age and go "*Here's* who should be running the country."

Unfair to us the voters and unfair to the candidates; that job shaves years off your life. Obama didn't have grey hair before he was President!

@npub1fdr…lvhs I love when paths of desire end up on the walls ...

2026-02-17T18:12:52Z

Cory Doctorow (npub1fdr…lvhs) I love when paths of desire end up on the walls instead of the ground.

My goodness. It's always very, very weird to watch ...

2026-02-16T23:45:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…ufsh
_________________________

My goodness. It's always very, very weird to watch geological-time processes happen in one human lifetime. Things like that really feel (pardon the choice of words) bedrock-permanent until they just... Aren't.

I like this one specifically because the Cloudflare gate is there ...

2026-02-11T16:03:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…gm5x
_________________________

I like this one specifically because the Cloudflare gate is there to address the problem of "Too many visitors."

Turns out AI is more an existential threat to traditional news ...

2026-01-30T16:07:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…shpe
_________________________

Turns out AI is more an existential threat to traditional news than I had considered.

Ultimately, if the news professional cannot tell AI editing from an authentic article... What use do we, the audience, have for the professional? Because I can get doctored images of what's going on in Minneapolis from my uncle for free.

> How do I vote to put better candidates on the ballot in the ...

2026-01-26T20:05:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…8l5l
_________________________

> How do I vote to put better candidates on the ballot in the first place?

The primaries. Disquietingly few people *still,* after everything that has happened, actually show up to vote in the primaries, still.

On the one hand: people really need to understand that Google ...

2025-12-23T17:33:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…6j6f
_________________________

On the one hand: people *really* need to understand that Google isn't authoritative on much of anything, and a Google search is no substitute for a background check, *especially* if you're an authority figure.

On the other hand: I feel like Google AI straight-up claiming "This person is a child predator" and they're not should *really* not be protected by Section 230. it *feels* like if the AI bot isn't "editorial voice," *nothing* is.

I gotta say, I got problems in my life, and I'm not trying to ...

2025-12-12T18:30:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…an88
_________________________

I gotta say, I got problems in my life, and I'm not trying to solve nearly enough of them with a million random digits with 100,000 normal deviates.

For some reason, it makes my heart sing in a very weird way that ...

2025-12-12T18:22:40Z

For some reason, it makes my heart sing in a very weird way that RAND *still* provides *One Million Random Numbers with 100,000 Normal Deviates.* Online now!

https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html

Do you have a problem that you need to solve? Have you tried one million random numbers with 100,000 normal deviates? You really can't go wrong with one million random numbers with 100,000 normal deviates.

In the Starfleet Technical Manual, there is a throwaway detail ...

2025-12-05T18:57:56Z

In the *Starfleet Technical Manual*, there is a throwaway detail of the LCARS user interface that when it is upgraded, users can still utilize the previous several versions. This is because their work is mission-critical and it is unacceptable to compromise the mission by forcing unfamiliar changes; eventual retraining is part of their job, but the flexibility allows them to take the retraining at their own pace.

I think about this from time-to-time and how this is *still* a sci-fi idea that is seen all too rarely in how we do actual computer UIs.

#StarTrek #LCARS #UI

Of course, the list of things he has in common with Nazis is ...

2025-11-12T20:38:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…e7ne
_________________________

Of course, the list of things he has in common with Nazis is longer than one might like.

... having strong opinions on the race makeup of the UK, a country he does not live in. For example.

Nostr event nevent1qqsfpmlzj0juqhlt8ka7raqejtgna7z4203raze8ldxeyn8emscsr0czypuf3fmna2anprggkkks2fhwsnahvnr2qqsdlj56wvs3pd8yn06h27rqkd3

2025-11-01T16:16:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…tc86
_________________________

I didn't notice, but your comment made me Google it (LOL) ...

2025-10-29T21:33:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…h4ct
_________________________

I didn't notice, but your comment made me Google it (LOL) and... This is now a rolling thing, apparently? I'm seeing they did this to other sections of the company 9 months ago and in June.

... oh man, if I'd just held on six years they could have decided they didn't need me instead of me deciding I didn't need them.

(lol).

I think you're right. I still think it's the right ...

2025-10-28T20:46:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…qwsy
_________________________

I think you're right. I still think it's the right direction to go because when a human kills a child we can't<li>pull their logs</li><li>simulate the event</li><li>understand precisely the sequence of decisions made by the person that resulted in a death</li><li>push an OTA update to every single driver on the road so it never happens again</li>

... but people like to *feel* far more in control than they de-facto *are*, and I think the feeling of "robot killed my kid" and "stone-cold sober driver who had a single moment of inattention killed my kid" (much less "drunk driver" or "driver having a heart attack") is viscerally different in a way that is likely counter-productive to maximizing vehicle safety.

Man talking a lot of shit for someone referred to the House ...

2025-10-27T15:42:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…kc94
_________________________

Man talking a lot of shit for someone referred to the House Ethics Panel.

I really wish someone would call her bluff and just run that ...

2025-10-22T17:31:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…9h0m
_________________________

I really wish someone would call her bluff and just run that story. "Our reporter's mom chooses summit location for Trum-Putin summit."

Interview the mom, let the whole thing hang in the air.

Gotta love watching old 1940s commercials. This woman just ...

2025-10-22T03:20:21Z

Gotta love watching old 1940s commercials.

This woman just spraying RAID directly on her tomato plants to kill the bugs.

Cool. That has already fallen out of my head but I'm glad ...

2025-10-21T22:11:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…ukrs
_________________________

Cool. That has already fallen out of my head but I'm glad it's in yours. 😉

Seriously though: bash is easier to use when I remember that Perl was trying, among other things, to be a better shell-style scripting language. So syntax like "we loop on a read command, the command you think of as getting keyboard input but is also just the command to dice up stdin" is entirely sensible from that era and not weird nonsense that mixes statement and expression context, because those contexts aren't precisely a *thing* in Bash. And I ignore that the approach is entirely different from the approach of looping over space-separated values in a variable, which is how I'd accomplish this task if it was a one-argument list of values instead of a two-argument list of values.

... but alternatively, if I do it in emacs I can gut-check the incremental steps of stream modification as I go and that feels way safer. I'm glad shell is there if I want a terse way to describe how to repeat the process though!

"Oh man, I have to run this shell script on every pair of ...

2025-10-21T21:08:42Z

"Oh man, I have to run this shell script on every pair of values in this CSV file. I know how to loop over one argument, but how do you loop over two in Bash?"

**The regular-brained way**<li>Look it up</li><li>Write a bash script to do it</li><li>Test it on a small sample of the file because you definitely messed it up on the first try</li><li>Run on the rest of the file</li>

**The emacs-brained way**<li>Copy file to a buffer</li><li>Split out the comma-separated values into space-separated values</li><li>Prefix every line with <code>script-name</code></li><li>Save as a Bash script and mark executable</li>

I'm sure there's a very lovely syntax in Bash for iterating over two-argument lists and I won't be learning it today.

#emacs

You see that show about the time traveling hare who hops into ...

2025-10-13T16:28:54Z

You see that show about the time traveling hare who hops into other hares' bodies throughout history to set some wrong right? *Quantum Lepus,* I think it was called.

Look, it's well-known that brain is stored in the dick. ...

2025-10-09T20:55:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…m3ka
_________________________

Look, it's well-known that brain is stored in the dick.

That's just science. ;)

I have been told that kind of thing should be treated with ...

2025-10-09T15:24:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…ewee
_________________________

I have been told that kind of thing should be treated with suspicion because it originates as a 4chan meme.

... but I think it's also broken quarantine and mutated so wildly on the open Internet that it's probably quite divorced from its original intended meaning.

Of everything Mariner ever said, "I am trapped inside of an ...

2025-10-08T19:10:07Z

Of everything Mariner ever said, "I am trapped inside of an egg, no, leave me alone I don't want to hatch" is probably most relatable.

#StarTrek #LowerDecks

We do build highways. :) You chose an interesting example for ...

2025-09-26T21:07:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…phx6
_________________________

We do build highways. :)

You chose an interesting example for personal reasons because I grew up west of Richmond Virginia. So let me tell you about the beltway. Tuck in; you've activated my trap card and I'd rather spin yarns than finish this performance review. 😉

Richmond had a beltway on the books for decades that would circle around the city to the east and to the west. They built out the east one with relatively low political turmoil, if I recall correctly; east of Richmond is mostly swamp and an airport.

To the west is Midlothian and Chesterfield, the places that white flight went *to* back in the Sixties and Seventies. A group of, let's say, entrepreneurs took a gamble: they bought a bunch of land in the 'redzone' where the highway was slated to be built for cheap (because it was slated to have a highway built through it), built upscale suburban housing developments (I will stop just short of calling them "mini-mansions," but they were delightfully-apportioned three-story works abutting a golf course), and sold them to the folk fleeing school integration.

By the time the state got the money and political will together to execute on the highway, the builders had cashed out, taken the money, and run (fine people; some of them were the parents of my classmates in school!), and the neighborhood was sitting there, smack dab in the middle of a "PLANNED FOR EMINENT DOMAIN" sector.

... but here's the thing about planning to eminent domain a whole-ass neighborhood of some of the wealthiest taxpayers and campaign contributors in one of the wealthier central-VA counties. 😉

The whole thing threatened to turn into a decades-long legal quagmire. These folk were willing to support any politician who would scuttle the highway project, and if none were, they were willing to pay for lawyers to fight the issue forever.

You want to know what ended the fight?

J.B. Watkins was the owner of the Watkins Tree Farm just east of those housing developments. Watkins is an Old Virginia Family Name. For those fair readers who don't know why I capitalize those words: Virginia has a tradition of noblesse oblige dating back to its founding by second-born mid-tier nobility who were never going to get land or title in their homeland, so their options were join the clergy, die nobly in war, or go to the New World. Yes, it's a paper thing and yes, it didn't stop or even mostly fight slavery... But it still matters. The Watkins Family Is Compelled To Serve. Like the Lees. Or the Fairfaxes. Or the Hopkinses.

Watkins went to the General Assembly and put his entire tree farm on the chopping block if they could re-route the highway through it. And he could do that because he was one guy who owned a lot of land.

Sometimes we build highways through single philanthropy too. 😉

(... I'm not actually disagreeing with your example, I just think it's funny that of all the examples we could have discussed, you stumbled on the one where the story I most know about it is "that time we built a highway because one dude let it happen" 😄 )

This may be the cynic in me talking, but I've had enough ...

2025-09-26T20:01:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…2qun
_________________________

This may be the cynic in me talking, but I've had enough trouble getting a group of six people to decide where to eat that I'm highly skeptical of the masses endowing libraries.

I'm not saying it *couldn't* happen. I am saying there is a certain simplicity to the process of a captain of industry just deciding to devote a huge chunk of their fortune to philanthropy that you don't get out of a committee (for good or ill).

(And for the record, I'm still very much on team if-you-make-a-billion-dollars-your-marginal-tax-rate-should-go-to-100%, while at the same time not having *deep* faith that the money the government would get their hands on would go to a library and not, say, police drones).

Actually no, I haven't. I wouldn't be deeply surprised, ...

2025-09-26T19:52:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…ch60
_________________________

Actually no, I haven't. I wouldn't be *deeply* surprised, but that one's new to me.

The Homestead Strike is a story I'm familiar with, but I don't remember a "burning them alive" part of that story.

I live in a town that is up to its eyeballs in libraries and ...

2025-09-26T19:16:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…x3a4
_________________________

I live in a town that is up to its eyeballs in libraries and museums named after the like four rich families who were here in the 1800s and 1900s. Libraries and museums that survived the subsequent economic collapse of the region because their endowments put them outside the regular need to turn a profit that imploded most of the small and medium sized businesses in the area between the '60s and the '90s.

If you're looking for someone who wasn't *born* a mark, you'll have to look elsewhere. 😉

(Lotta people justifiably against robber barons.

Not a lot of those people endowing libraries with all that idealism though.)

I went down to the library a couple weeks back because it's ...

2025-09-25T21:03:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…2lu5
_________________________

I went down to the library a couple weeks back because it's right next to the barber shop and the barber blew through my haircut so fast I had a rare spare, unplanned hour.

You know what happened?

1) A conversation behind my head where someone was astonished you could take the books home and the card was free (seriously, if we tried to invent libraries today they'd make them illegal)

2) A local author had her book reveal and signing in the front of the library. I just wandered up and met a neighbor for the first time!

Damn, libraries are fucking sweet.

I think there's a lot to this. I've been at a place in ...

2025-09-25T18:56:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…3cqq
_________________________

I think there's a *lot* to this.

I've been at a place in my life where legacy starts to matter a lot. And I look at a lot of the techbros and the ways they're unspooling and I say to myself "These are men (and yeah, mostly men) who have realized they will not live forever, no matter what. This news is hurting them more than some because they bought into Kurzweil's stories at a young age and thought they actually *might...* And the need to conceive of a world without them is *terrifying* them into doing *really stupid shit.*"

Bill Gates, for all his faults, seems to have made the transition into the second stage of his life by dedicating himself to eradicating disease, so at least he has that going for him. Elon Musk is 54 years old; Gates had started the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation a *decade* before where he is now, and they didn't have as much wealth as he does.

As an (I guess by modern standards) old techbro, this shit from ...

2025-09-25T17:50:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…6fwa
_________________________

As an (I guess by modern standards) old techbro, this shit from these weirdos is disappointing.

I can't help but think what this sort of thing looked like in ...

2025-09-25T17:28:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…h6xk
_________________________

I can't help but think what this sort of thing looked like in the past, when it really *was* a meeting of a bunch of unelected kings, half of whom had inbred conditions and half of whom (not the other half, overlapping set) had syphilis.

Like... It's sobering to think that this modern arrangement is *better* than what came before, even if it's not good enough.

I'm not sure I want to be in the business of having to ...

2025-09-17T15:45:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…hzqh
_________________________

I'm not sure I want to be in the business of having to stack-rank people who built a concentration camp and people who authorized Americans to torture other human beings.

Like... Worst Olympics ever, yeah?

Normally I'd kind of ignore that sort of reference, but given ...

2025-09-12T15:46:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…txyt
_________________________

Normally I'd kind of ignore that sort of reference, but given the current administration... Weird to be talking about Valhalla, yeah? Kirk wasn't a warrior, he did not die in glorious battle... So what does Patel think Valhalla is, exactly?

True. I'm not sure yet whether it's noteworthy because ...

2025-09-11T20:13:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…ftkw
_________________________

True. I'm not sure yet whether it's noteworthy because "maybe the people who can access that data don't want to find him" or because "it turns out it's way, way easy to dodge all that stuff: leave your phone at home before you go commit an assassination today."

My stock knowledge is tiny, but I'm beginning to think one ...

2025-09-10T14:47:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…l4jz
_________________________

My stock knowledge is tiny, but I'm beginning to think one can perhaps draw conclusions based on what *isn't* growing and *should*.

I'm watching the stocks on renewable energy stall out and backslide in a situation where I'd expect they should be continuing to demonstrate value, since they're grounded in technology that is working and under current deployment. That feels like signal that wherever the money *is* is a hype bubble if the money *isn't* where progress is actually happening right now.

Yep. It's just straight-up smokescreen to even debate it. It ...

2025-09-09T15:43:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…v9f5
_________________________

Yep. It's just straight-up smokescreen to even debate it.

It ultimately doesn't matter if it's Trump's signature because what he *isn't* claiming is that the note isn't *from him.* Nobody cares if he auto-penned it or Xerox'd it on there.

It was from him. It wasn't from anyone else.

Uhmmmm..... 😞 Sadly, I think the record shows Facebook ...

2025-08-27T20:17:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…mtpc
_________________________

Uhmmmm..... 😞

Sadly, I think the record shows Facebook somewhat directly helped kill *several* children.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-facebook-amplified-hate-ahead-of-rohingya-massacre-in-myanmar

(ETA: Ah, I see your response on the other subthread; sorry to repeat signal. Sometimes Mastodon's nature causes race conditions.

As opposed to Facebook's nature which causes I'LL SEE MYSELF OUT! 😉 )

okay, so slightly more impressive. I guess. ;)

2025-08-27T16:40:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…74xk
_________________________

okay, so *slightly* more impressive. I guess. ;)

Definitely. Popping stack to the current tragic story: if ...

2025-08-27T15:48:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…77la
_________________________

Definitely. Popping stack to the current tragic story: if *Rockstar* was liable for putting a sex mini-game on a disc that couldn't be accessed in the game they wrote at all because there were no codepaths to it... OpenAI should probably be liable for their machine providing novel directions to end one's life and a justification for doing so.

(Incidentally, I caught a bit of *Forbidden Planet* recently and I had to smile at the part where the Great Machine was apparently awe-inspiring because it was 20 miles on a side. "Oh, neat, so a few miles past a Large Hadron Collider." 😉 )

There is a sci-fi game called Lancer that includes the concept ...

2025-08-27T14:28:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…vzxl
_________________________

There is a sci-fi game called *Lancer* that includes the concept of "NHPs," "non-human-persons." These act like AI, but they are really something far larger and more dangerous: they're intelligences existing in a wider-than-three-dimensional cosmos that can be coaxed into existing in our reality by constraining their perception to match human expectations (my favorite description by a player: "you build a box that does enough hard math fast enough and a ghost shows up to haunt it"). This setting has a concept of "shackling," which is the tech that holds these NHPs in human-shaped subjectivity; damage to an NHP's core or intentional meddling can weaken or damage the shackles, and the results are disastrous (in the setting's case, physical manifestations of disaster, since these things are basically Lovecraftian monsters that someone painted a smiley face on).

... it's a poor analogy, but it comes to mind often as I read things like OpenAI saying, in essence, "we trained our storytelling machine on *all human stories,* but we know people don't want us to tell *every possible story* because, yeah, some of those stories are damn depressing and disquieting if not actual cognitohazards. But don't worry! We *added a layer* to remind it to *not tell the bad stories,* so it's all good, okay?"

All the state of the art of porn filters slapped atop *the entire Internet...* only it's attempts to guardrail people against suicide enhancers, triggers, and instructions.

... Jesus. There is a nonzero possibility that the Internet was a mistake.

Not everything else, but GPUs are basically big hyper-parallel ...

2025-08-22T15:15:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…h0ct
_________________________

Not *everything* else, but GPUs are basically big hyper-parallel processing units. Here's a partial list of the kind of workloads they're better than CPUs for:<li>physical simulation</li><li>image and video processing</li><li>cryptography</li><li>data analytics</li><li>medical imaging analysis</li><li>nuclear reactor simulation</li>

These aren't datacenters that are fungible to, say, storing cat photos (although they *are* fungible to finding cats in every photo if someone wanted to do that for some reason). But I don't think it's likely that they'll be junked, because the world isn't likely to run out of simulation problems any time soon, even when we tire of simulating sticking words together in a believable sequence.

This I haven't heard. Did they put dedicated machinery in ...

2025-08-22T14:30:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…nx23
_________________________

This I haven't heard. Did they put dedicated machinery in there that can *only* be used for LLM training?

Generally, the same math used to train LLMs can be used to solve other problems; I wouldn't be surprised if part of their computation of cost / benefit here was "Even if LLMs don't pan out, oh no, we filled a room with fast linear algebra solvers, guess we'll just have to... Model nuclear physics for the next generation of reactors or fold proteins or something."

It's another manifestation of Onebox results being ...

2025-08-21T15:19:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…z7y4
_________________________

It's another manifestation of Onebox results being hilariously off sometimes, but worse because the AI speaks with an authoritative tone and (much as I'd like to pretend it doesn't) that matters.

All of these features suffer the same issue: they're just the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button in a fancy dress. They're replacing getting data from multiple sources and making the human do the brainwork to correlate it and synthesize an answer with letting the algorithm try its hand at it.

(Now that I've typed that, I think that's probably the best lens to think about these features through. "Do you trust Google AI results? Well, would you trust the 'I'm feeling lucky' button gave you the right answer every time with only one press?")

... the funny thing is, I know enough about how the search core ...

2025-08-21T15:13:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…zt7u
_________________________

... the funny thing is, I know enough about how the search core is built to make an educated guess at how this happened.

Search core farms the query out to (possibly dozens of) completely independent software engines to answer the query. Those engines have their own backing datastores and they don't synchronize to each other; it's necessary they don't to make search fast. So it's entirely possible that the Top Stories core is pulling data that is more recent while the AI Overview core has built its information off of an older search result cache (and possibly hot-cached this answer before the NYT confirmed the death when the news broke locally / on social media). Google, as an institution, leans on the tradeoff "eventual consistency is good enough," so this kind of bug is seen as a predictable side-effect of the chosen tradeoffs.

Does that make us feel better?

No, nor should it. *Get your shit together, Google.*

#Google #search #AI #fail

sigh Get your shit together, Google. #google #ai #fail ...

2025-08-21T15:10:27Z

*sigh* Get your shit together, Google.

#google #ai #fail