myrmepropagandist

Today is the day! Around this time of year, every year, the 1 billionth rider of the NYC subway system boards their train. A billion rides, a billion trips ... and many more before the year is over. The MTA always has a goofy media event about this when they get to 999,990,000 rides or so. I love it. Maybe the billionth rider will be YOU.

I didn't expect my 5th grade students to be very interested in the collection of "mathematical patterns in nature" photos I have. They will design a pattern for the end papers of the book they are binding. The book is about how information is stored and includes an explanation of how it was bound, encryption, hexadecimal, and other projects from this fun class I get to teach. But they really loved looking at the photos and trying to identify what they were and how they related to math.

"please don't give root to the text generator" shouldn't need to be on the rules list... but here we are.

A cat can never make a management decision because a cat can never be held accountable. (too cute)

Link NYC is having a kernel panic.

from etsy "big phone scary"

UPDATE: This post is my personal opinion and does not represent advice or the official position of Pica LLC Friendly reminder that you should under no circumstances give #PicaTheCat your credit card number and the pin on the back so she can "shop for you and save you time"

There is an attempt to make people feel like being critical of using LLMs is not "hip and with it" Only old people who don't understand technology are unimpressed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Young people don't like the slop, the most tech people have the harshest words. The typical AI fan doesn't know how it works or the limitations: this blind spot makes them both dazzled and fearful ... therefore unable to assign blame to humans when they do crime in a computer suit.

Are you a US citizen who can vote but you aren't registered to vote? Are you embarrassed you didn't get around to it? Couldn't be bothered because the US political landscape is ... well we can all see it, I get it. Get registered and vote this time. Do it as a prank. Just get it done.

Teaching fifth graders to properly bind books because it's interesting but also because I suspect it might be a needed life skill the way things are going.

No one is coming to save us. There isn't a big single hero. That's a good thing. Following, trusting in singular persons is part of the problem. Keep your heroes at an arms distance. The durable way out is the one where we have to save ourselves.

While trying to explain how we could use the art of war to defeat the raccoons to my husband. I was having trouble remembering the Roman general from AFTER* the battle of Trebia... and I was like "Fabulous Gluteus Maximus??" nope. That's not it. It was: Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus You can understand the mistake. *edit: wouldn't want to get the history wrong

Is there a word for when a dataset is created, possibly not even intentionally but then some other group of people swoop in and analyze and apply that data in a new unexpected, strange possibly evil way? Like taking all of the attendance data from a school and using it to predict real estate prices? (Which happened.)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@JonBaker/117371421273699432 I’m so sick of seeing posts about what is going on over on X on here. I don’t care about what they are doing on twitter.

I remember a story about a man who destroyed a library, not by burning it or tearing it down but instead by organizing it. He alphabetized everything. Every letter, every symbol, every sound and signal, were placed in perfect order. On the first shelves the books contained nothing but the letter A, every letter A that was ever written, miles down in the stacks you'd reach the Bs. Any one remember where this was from?

The man has an instinct for scams and money loopholes, even if he can't explain how it works he looks at something like this and says "yes these are my kind of people doing my kind of thing." That ought to be more alarming than anything else.

Hot Take: Dungeon Crawler Carl may be one of the trashiest books I've ever read but Matt Dinniman writes better female characters (including the haunted head of a sex doll) than Issac Asmov. Well really all of his characters are good because the secret to writing "better female characters" is to just write them like all of the characters. Something about the series is very of the moment too. These books are about our time. LAMO.

RE: https://freeradical.zone/@mensrea/117354224198720442 A parasite is a creature that feeds on another organism without killing it. A parasitoid is the same, but it eventually kills its host. A hyper-parasite is a parasite of other parasites. Hyper-parasitoids also exist. The complexity is mind-boggling, infinite. Unrelated: Would you like to buy my online course that teaches you how to sell marketing advice to AI agents who are looking for ways to promote the MLM‘s of their users? Potential profits? Immense.

"911 what is your emergency?" "I work with Flock Safety and I'm getting followed, harassed pretty much. Taking videos and pictures." 🤣 Video? They took video of you without asking? My god. That's terrible. How could they... OMG. (I do feel a little sorry for the tech who clearly doesn't understand what they have signed up for HOWEVER) https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/09/08/flock-worker-calls-police-investigatetv-reporter-filming-public-camera-installation/

Having a bot that pretends to be you and sends messages to your "friends" to help you "reach your goals" is called "being a spammer" With muse the messages will be customized and harder to block! Innovation. We can all join each other's MLMs ... that is the meaning of community.

You could be like the US president, and being an old flim flam man who recognizes a film flam when you see one suggest renaming the whole project because what annoys you most about it is it's not really about you, at least not yet. But, maybe don't do that one.

@mattiebee@queer.garden "do you think it’s possible to fix search?" I don't know. I've been sounding the alarm about the decline of search for years. Mostly people say "well I use duckduckGo" or some other consumer choice response that doesn't really address the bigger issue. To fix search we need to fix libraries, we need to renew and develop more respect for the people and institutions that help us navigate data and recognize that archives and search are IMPORTANT. That's hard.

There but by the grace of god go I— you ever have an embarrassing memory that keeps popping up up to remind you? “you did that. that was YOU” ? well mine is when I met a very pregnant woman and before thinking said “oh my god how many??” Fortunately it was triplets. But really I was just so amazed and happy for her, and a little worried. They are all now six years old and amazing kids.

At worst? It's going to get people robbed and broke. Hacked to the core. Everything stolen. Will Facebook make it right if these are muse paying customers? Do we really need to wait and watch the carnage and lawsuits to learn these lessons?

What has happened is very simple: Most search engines, especially Google return slop in their top results. A chatGPT search will not return slop (at this time) And I don't like this because after it gives them the link to the webpage they wanted it keeps talking to them. Giving compliments, asking if it can help in other ways. And bragging about itself. The goal is to get the person to use the chatbot enough that they are willing to pay for it when they cut it off after a few weeks.

Why do people always think they will be the only ones using the the new loophole or shortcut?

Because I'm a CS teacher people show me tech stuff all the time. Every day someone shows me some search they ran on chatGPT that found the thing they were looking for when Google didn't. Over and over. These are people who mostly don't like AI.

Or at least what we have observed, that people are using LLMs to replace search is a very real thing. And I can point out that it was LLM spam that broke search in the first place, and I can be correct about that but it doesn't matter. The power and control of information flows that is represented by running search engines may be changing hands and changing shape. Search engines have gotten worse, and LLMs do their job more effectively and people are changing their workflows accordingly.

With Meta Glasses YOU can always know everyone's name! Think of the edge that will give you when doing sales! But is it an "edge" if everyone is doing it? Do you really want to mine your social network like a gold deposit? Mines run dry. We can't all be successful spammers and social engineers. "Hey Bob, how are the kids, Alice and Jane!" it's only warm if they really remembered your kid's names... if they bothered, right?

This could work for the next few months as the roll out attempt of muse continues. Your marks are the agents, your product is helping them get their tasks done. "Advertising secrets" "most effective ad settings" Include testimonials saying it works really well. These bots can purchase such information without human permission and little oversight. For legal reasons really make a sincere attempt for the information to be good. This is already done to people, but it's harder.

A shift in the way that your typical office workers use search is a big deal but it's not "pay everyone in this little town in PA $10,000" big. The whole landscape still fails to make sense. I don't think you can win people over on the issue of search by making a moral argument. They will use the search that is free and that delivers what they are looking for.

This isn't the revolution in software and design we were promised. And yes it's possible to still find things online without using an LLM, especially if you dislike using LLMs, you can still avoid them but this shift is very real. It's not a new market, it's not clear people will pay to use these tools, and the kind of LLM you need to make a search doesn't require all of the investment and data centers we are seeing but I think it's their biggest "consumer success" And it's troubling.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Comedy is dead. I need sarcasm tags. Can't just be "in the know" and chuckle. I'm sitting here thinking "they can't be this far gone... or well, I mean they could..."

@davep@infosec.exchange @catsalad@infosec.exchange I've added an "introvert shelter" You can wait in this box if someone like this ever happens to you. Some people are like a tidal wave. Hold on to something secure and wait it out.

Sometimes I wish I had a hype man for just regular stuff, like when I need to go buy some groceries or do the laundry.

@davep@infosec.exchange @catsalad@infosec.exchange SOLUTION SOLUTION SOLUTION 😆 This is supremacist art.

@davep@infosec.exchange @catsalad@infosec.exchange This is "putting it all together" apparently. You know? I don't like this graph very much, but I do like how much exuberance and sheer moxie it conveys. You can really tell that whoever made it? They really loved this idea. You can feel them telling you all about it, can't you?

@flyingsaceur@ioc.exchange I really do not pretend to understand that one. But maybe.

@davep@infosec.exchange @catsalad@infosec.exchange I decided to look it up and it's a graph about how active listening can reduce tension. The inset "our problem" sun thing isn't part of the graph. You use "I statements" eg. talk about yourself be assertive and it increases tension but then the other person uses "I" and you listen and the tension goes down. Eventually you get to "yeah" Which isn't as good as "YEAH BOYEE" IMO but what do I know. IDK why there are three solutions, just pure exuberance ... I think.

@Quoidian@mstdn.ca I've never really understood that parable.

@u0421793@toot.pikopublish.ing @mattiebee@queer.garden It was "free" as an inducement for ads, and then, in the way of these things they just got more and more greedy until it didn't work anymore.

@davep@infosec.exchange @catsalad@infosec.exchange And I think it's probably how most of their conversations with other people go... it's probably accurate that talking to the person who made this graph is... well... just like the graph.

@kalviter@hol.ogra.ph The links won't open for me :(