Notices by Steven D. Brewer 🏳️‍⚧️ (stevendbrewer@wandering.shop)

@kevingranade @benpate @davidgerard @rakoo @jdp23 @scottjenson @thisismissem And let people see you punching the Nazis, over and over again. Nothing is more welcoming to ordinary people than seeing Nazis get punched. Nazis need to know they're going to get punched for the rest of us to feel safe.

@cwebber @jenniferplusplus

A shadow fell over the city and the sky turned dark.
"Gryphons!" yelled a knight.
Everyone looked up to see dozens of gryphons circling overhead.
"It's a whole #flock!" yelled one.
"It's called a 'flight'!" yelled another.
"I'm pretty sure the correct term is 'wing'," said a third.
"You're all wrong," said a fourth. "Everyone knows they're called a 'pride'."
"Wasn't 'pride' last month?" said yet another, who hadn't been paying attention.
"Look out!" yelled the Captain. "Here they come!" #wss366

If you hadn't put together just how the US got the planning so wrong for the misguided war with Iran, it was because they used AI. https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-ai-psychosis-sycophancy-rlhf/

I took a #trans flag to the #NoKings rally in Amherst. #WesternMass

Is ffmpreg trending yet?

Exactly as I predicted… AIs are routinely being compromised to not act in your interest. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/manipulating-ai-summarization-features.html

No. Stop saying shit like this. AIs can't "betray" people.

@dillyd I've filled found rum bottles with sea glass and chaney (pieces of broken china found in the surf) to make gifts for friends to remind them of our trips to the islands.

The ducks were in front of the Post Office this morning. Boxer dog provided for scale. #DucksOfMastodon

RE: https://wandering.shop/@stevendbrewer/115329216408871436

For people just now visiting #TheForkiverse, here's a post I wrote recently to help newcomers think about how to get started with Mastodon.

@dalias @X00001 As an author, that distinction is something I struggle with. I go to extraordinary lengths to avoid AI. And when I submit a manuscript, I certify that my manuscript was created without AI. But, no matter how I struggle to avoid it, its creeping in under everything I do.

@dalias @X00001 I'm talking about the names of streets, where the parks and major buildings are, the surrounding topography and landmarks, etc. When I took Remote Sensing back in the day, an orthomap (an orthogonally corrected airphoto with map elements overlaid) was hundreds of dollars for a single quad. It's an unbelievable miracle that you can now trivially easily inspect orthomaps for the whole earth. But it has embedded AI. So my question still stands: Does that count as using AI?

@X00001 The problem is that it's getting harder and harder to avoid AI because it's getting shoehorned into everything, everywhere. If you use Google Maps to research a setting, you used AI. Does that count? https://stevendbrewer.com/sloppy-writing/

An infuriating fluff piece about Anthropic using an LLM to run a vending machine at the WSJ (via @jacobsberg.bsky.social). The journalist uncritically accepted statements from the Anthropic flack like, "They maybe don't have the most sophisticated understanding…" No, no, no! LLMs don't "understand" anything. Pretending as though they do should be recognized as a category error with these systems. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84e34?st=V2XjZM&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

@Broadfork I told my wife that Tanuki-chan loves leaf piles.

"Oh, good," she said. "I'm glad she's gotten to play in leaf piles."

"Play?" I said. "Oh, no. She just loves to pee on them."

@Broadfork Tanuki-chan's favorite thing is probably drinking from the hose. #DogsOfMastodon

I took a picture of Tanuki-chan. But she didn't like it, so she barked at me. And then jumped on me. #DogsOfMastodon

@jonny Although tenure-system faculty don't have to fear being fired, they live in constant fear of the loss of funding. Because their entire enterprise is dependent on soft money, even a small gap in funding results in professional death — at least in the life sciences. If you lose your funding, you lose all your staff and can't purchase supplies to continue your research. And probably can't come back from that. This has contributed to a head-down conservative approach to any kind of activism.

@evan Can I write it in PHP as long as I call the python library somehow?