Notices by Dave Rahardja (drahardja@sfba.social)

Watching the #Artemis splashdown live stream, and what a difference it is to see and hear people with expertise who KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY ARE DOING.

It’s FUCKING DEPRESSING that we have given this country over to a bunch of people who are so incompetent they can’t put on their shoes on their own.

I don’t think a prolonged general strike is going to happen in the US, and I’ll tell you why: the social safety net doesn’t exist, and people are broke.

43% of USians cannot afford an unexpected $1000 bill¹. The median household spends 33% of their income on rent². The median household has $8k in savings³. Most people will lose their health insurance if they don’t show up to work.

How many of these people can sustain a general strike during which they will not get paid?

…

¹ https://www.usnews.com/banking/articles/2026-financial-wellness-survey

² https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-do-households-spend-on-rent/country/united-states/

³ https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/savings-account-average-balance/#how-much-does-the-average-household-have-in-savings

One thing Trump did today was to show the world that the US truly stands completely, utterly alone in the world. Not a single ally remains.

It’s fascinating to me to learn that most of the far side of the #moon to date has been so poorly photographed, if at all.

So it’s also fascinating to me that #Artemis2 was launched during a full moon, where most of the far side would still be shrouded in darkness.

I know the mission had been delayed multiple times, but I wish they’d launch during a new moon, so we get some well-lit images of the other other side.

@randahl It’s not CNN, but #YouTube doing this. I’ve seen this happen to a LOT of YouTube Shorts. I’ll see a short in which the people are talking in a weird, unnatural way, and I dig in and discover they’ve auto-translated it from Portuguese or something.

The insidious thing is that they don’t INDICATE anywhere that they’ve done this. This leads people to misattribute the audio to the original poster.

I really, REALLY hate this “feature”. It’s offensive. It puts words into the mouths of people who never said them, and lies by omission about it.

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116324463517531876

“The contradiction at the heart of the Oracle story is stark. The company posted a 95% jump in net income last quarter, reaching $6.13 billion, and its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted future revenue, stood at $523 billion, up 433% year over year.

This is not a company in revenue distress. It is a company making a capital-intensive bet on AI infrastructure that its current balance sheet cannot comfortably sustain, and eliminating tens of thousands of employees to close the gap.”

One thing that continues to grate on my conscience about #AI is how artists and writers consistently feel that the technology has STOLEN from them. We all know that web scraping is (and should be) a perfectly legal and acceptable use, because preventing it also prevents all sorts of beneficial behaviors—the Internet Archive wouldn’t be able to exist, for one thing.

But yet, the very nature of AI takes scraped content and regurgitates it as a pink-slime extrusion that it feeds back into the web. And to creators, that just FEELS WRONG; it feels like stolen valor, it feels like exploitation.

And it’s something I can’t (and shouldn’t) shake from my mind each time I see something made by AI. Just because something is LEGAL doesn’t mean it isn’t ABUSIVE and UNETHICAL. Scolding people who complain about AI by telling them that web scraping is good, actually, doesn’t address the main complaint: that somehow, these AI assholes have EXPLOITED A COMMON GOOD and we can’t quite figure out how to stop it.

“A Dutch court has ordered X and its AI chatbot Grok to immediately stop generating non-consensual sexualized imagery and child pornographic material in the Netherlands, imposing a penalty of €100,000 per day on each defendant for non-compliance.”

Good.

#fuckElon #ai #slop

https://www.techpolicy.press/dutch-court-orders-x-grok-to-stop-aigenerated-sexual-abuse-content/

I saw a post recently wherein someone used LLM tools to analyze someone else’s software, which eventually led them to a conclusion that was essentially completely wrong. Not only that, the LLM drew conclusions about the *authors* behind the code that were borderline character assassination. Nevertheless, this person posted this output as though it were some kind of deep insight.

These LLM outputs are not independent thoughts. The LLM probably ingested hints of (maybe unconscious) biases in the user’s prompts within its context window, and regurgitated something that confirmed those biases. The user was pleased that their biases were confirmed (Independently! By an impartial LLM!), and they posted the output, maybe as vindication of their insight.

These models’ sycophancy can be subtle. They don’t have to state “You’re absolutely right!” to blow smoke up your ass. Sometimes they seem to confirm your preconceived notion after they supposedly “evaluate” information “independently”.

#ai

I suspect LLMs reinforce the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Experts who query LLMs about their fields of expertise will *quickly* realize how wrong their output can be, how quick they are to confabulate, and how eager they are to confirm one’s biases. Sometimes, replying “No, that’s wrong, try again” can cause an LLM to generate a completely different—and often opposite—answer to the same query, which makes no sense if the LLM had *actually* worked out an independently coherent answer.

Asking an LLM to comment about a subject you know nothing about—or worse, know a little bit about—is a psychologically dangerous activity. Not only will it confirm your biases, it will do so in a way that *appears* to be objective and independent, using fallacies that lie just beyond your ability to discern. At best, you will be misled. At worst, you will begin spiraling down a path of conspiracy thinking.

Be extremely suspicious of answers that are especially satisfying; you might have just gaslit yourself.

#ai

Remember, LLMs are trained by humans who reward the models for creating output that “meet their expectations”. This kind of training cannot help but reward output that please the user, regardless of accuracy. Even if the most blatant sycophancy is explicitly addressed during training, *subtle* sycophancy is likely impossible to avoid, because they are indistinguishable from “meeting expectations” to human trainers.

#ai

If your answer to anyone who doesn’t like something that an open source project is doing is “then fork it yourself”, you’re a piece of shit.

First, not everyone who uses #FOSS is a coder. This is a feature, not a bug. Second, not everyone who is a coder is a maintainer, and they shouldn’t have to be to have their voices heard. Third, when someone is intentionally worsening a project, and you harass the people complaining about it, you are reinforcing a power imbalance in favor of the abuser.

Check your privilege. YOU, a rich person with technical skills and time to spare, may be willing to bear the cost of forking a popular project, but others can’t. Think beyond your selfish self.

@mattwilcox@mstdn.socia GFM renders inline HTML entities in markdown docs as HTML entities. https://github.github.com/gfm/#entity-and-numeric-character-references

RE: https://mastodon.social/@randahl/116248355762185053

They stole a year of her life, with no credible charges filed.

RE: https://mastodon.ie/@EugeneMcParland/116243155230032310

Good.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@cslinuxboy/116225578585237555

This is not “normal”. Skilled and productive people falling heads over heels over a word predictor and thinking it’s sentient is not normal. This is not the kind of effects that normal automation tools do. This is WEIRD and NOT NORMAL.

Something strange is happening here. This “tool” is modifying well-adjusted human brains in a strange (and I think destructive) way, and we’re seeing it happen to some prominent person every week. How many people are being taken in that we don’t even hear about?

#ai

@Independent @blogdiva @tech-news-Independent Still chuckling at how Facebook renamed itself Meta because it was so sure about the Metaverse.

Now they’re super sure about AI.

More on the #IranWar from Sen. Chris Murphy:

“It’s crystal clear now that Trump has lost control of this war. He badly misjudged Iran’s ability to retaliate. The region is on fire.”

Thread here:

#kakistocracy

https://tbsky.app/profile/chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3mh22exlc3c2o

2025 Q4 GDP growth revised to 0.7% down from 1.4%.

Curious how much it is if you took out AI data center spending.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/13/fourth-quarter-gdp-revised-down-to-just-0point7percent-growth-january-core-inflation-was-3point1percent.html

Welp

#endlessWar #illegalWar #IranWar #kakistocracy

https://xcancel.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/2031531835453309125