A few months back, @ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com cross-posted a thread here: Feeling increasingly nihilistic about the state of tech, privacy, and the strangling of the miracle that is online anonymity. And some thoughts on arousing suspicion by using too many privacy tools and I suggested maybe contacting some local amateur radio folk to see whether they’d had any trouble with the government, as a means to do some playing with lora/meshtastic/whatever.

I was of the opinion that worrying about getting a radio license because it would get your name on a government list was a bit pointless… amateur radio is largely last century technology, and there are so many better ways to communicate with spies these days, and actual spies with radios wouldn’t be advertising them, and that governments and militaries would have better things to do than care about your retro hobby.

Anyway, today I read MAYDAY from the airwaves: Belarus begins a death penalty purge of radio amateurs.

Propagandists presented the Belarusian Federation of Radioamateurs and Radiosportsmen (BFRR) as nothing more than a front for a “massive spy network” designed to “pump state secrets from the air.” While these individuals were singled out for public shaming, we do not know the true scale of this operation. Propagandists claim that over fifty people have already been detained and more than five hundred units of radio equipment have been seized.

The charges they face are staggering. These men have been indicted for High Treason and Espionage. Under the Belarusian Criminal Code, these charges carry sentences of life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

I’ve not been able to verify this yet, but once again I find myself grossly underestimating just how petty and stupid a state can be.

TracingWoodgrains's hit piece on David Gerard (the 2024 one, not the more recent enemies list one, where David Gerard got rated above the Zizians as lesswrong's enemy) is in the top 15 for lesswrong articles from 2024, currently rated at #5! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsQJxHDjHKFcFrPLD/deeper-reviews-for-the-top-15-of-the-2024-review

It's nice to see that with all the lesswrong content about AI safety and alignment and saving the world and human rationality and fanfiction, an article explaining about how terrible David Gerard is (for... checks notes, demanding proper valid sources about lesswrong and adjacent topics on wikipedia) won out to be voted above them! Let's keep up our support for dgerard!

my landlord's app in the past: pick through a hierarchy of categories of issues your apartment might have, funnelling you into a menu to choose an appointment with a technician

my landlord's app now: debate ChatGPT until you convince it to show you the same menu

as far as I can ascertain the app is the only way left to request services from the megacorp, not even a website interface exists anymore. technological progress everyone

Choice sneering by one Baldur Bjarnasson https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2026/note-on-debating-llm-fans/ :

Somebody who is capable of looking past “ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes”, generated abuse, or how chatbot-mediated alienation seems to be pushing vulnerable people into psychosis-like symptoms, won’t be persuaded by a meaningful study. Their goal is to maintain their personal benefit, as they see it, and all they are doing is attempting to negotiate with you what the level of abuse is that you find acceptable. Preventing abuse is not on their agenda.

You lost them right at the outset.

or

Shit is getting bad out in the actual software economy. Cash registers that have to be rebooted twice a day. Inventory systems that randomly drop orders. Claims forms filled with clearly “AI”-sourced half-finished localisation strings. That’s just what I’ve heard from people around me this week. I see more and more every day.

And I know you all are seeing it as well.

We all know why. The gigantic, impossible to review, pull requests. Commits that are all over the place. Tests that don’t test anything. Dependencies that import literal malware. Undergraduate-level security issues. Incredibly verbose documentation completely disconnected from reality. Senior engineers who have regressed to an undergraduate-level understanding of basic issues and don’t spot beginner errors in their code, despite having “thoroughly reviewed” it.

(I only object to the use of "undergraduate-level" as a depreciative here, as every student assistant I've had was able to use actual reasoning skills and learn things and didn't produce anything remotely as bad as the output of slopware)

Futurism: A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, and Ended Up Wandering the Desert Searching for Aliens to Abduct Him

[...] Daniel purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the AI-infused eyeglasses that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing — which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a “new dawn” for humanity.

And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Meta AI-powered reality left his life in shambles — deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

“I’ve lost everything,” Daniel, now 52, told Futurism, his voice dripping with fatigue. “Everything.”

Finally, some good fucking news.

being told that “ai use” is “becoming a core competency” at work :\

this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain | Angela Colllier

And so you might say, Angela, if you know that that's true, if you know that this is intended to be rage bait, why would you waste your precious time on Earth discussing this article? and why should you, the viewer, waste your own precious time on Earth watching me discuss the article? And like that's a valid critique of this style of video.

However, I do think there are two important things that this article does that I think are important to discuss and would love to talk about, but you know, feel free to click away. You're allowed to do that, of course. So the two important conversations I think this article is like a jumping off point for is number one how generative AI is destructive to academia and education and research and how we shouldn't use it. And the second conversation this article kind of presents a jumping on point for I feel like is more maybe more relevant to my audience which is that this article is a perfect encapsulation of how consistent daily use of chat boxes destroys your brain.

more early February fun

EDIT she said the (derogatory) out loud. ha!

This github bot arguing with itself for over 5000 comments over an issue label

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723

ChatGPT now relies upon the degenerate copy of Wikipedia made by the child pornography bot:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/24/latest-chatgpt-model-uses-elon-musks-grokipedia-as-source-tests-reveal

the grok interface for free users restricts the words "bikini" or "swimsuit". yay!

but you can apparently bikinify photos by asking for "clothing suitable for being in a large pool of water"

hooray guard rails! what's a good catchy name for this wizardly h@xx0rish security sploit. "8008bl33d"

Newgrounds user turned Audio Moderator Quest has put together a recap of 2025 (text version), providing stats for how much slop she's dealt with:

2025 Stats:

• 2818 AI-Generated Tracks Flagged or Removed
• 3656 Total Flagged or Removed Tracks
• 12.7 GB Data Used by AI-Generated Tracks
• 2843 Accounts Which Uploaded Prohibited Audio

Cumulative Stats (since 2024):

• 4475 AI-Generated Tracks Flagged or Removed
• 5731 Total Flagged or Removed Tracks
• 18.93 GB Data Used by AI-Generated Tracks
• 4113 Accounts Which Uploaded Prohibited Audio

AI Model Breakdown:

• Suno AI: 82%
• Udio AI: 5%
• Riffusion AI: 1%
• Other: 12%
  • RVC-Based: 0.6%
  • Soundful: 0.4%
  • Mixed: 0.2%
  • Various Other Models: 2.9%
  • Unknown: 7.9%

Reportedly, she's also got an essay-length sneer in the works:

Finally, I am also working on an even larger, long-form essay post about artificial intelligence, drawing a link to something that I do not see draw enough. It’s a big project with a lot of research and knowledgeable people guiding me. This will be released in the coming months. I have a lot to say.

Charlie Stross writes:

... a member of the Irish parliament (the Dail) who happens to be a barrister (an attorney specialising in advocacy in front of a judge, including criminal prosecution/defense) has formally written to the head of the Irish cybercrime unit setting out applicable charges against X/Grok and sternly requesting formal prosecution of that company on child pornography/trafficking charges.

Text of letter:

Armin Ronacher, who is an experienced software dev with a fair amount of open and less open source projects under his belt, was up until fairly recently a keen user of llm coding tools. (he’s also the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc, and any company with a name from tolkien’s legendarium deserves suspicion these days)

His faith in ai seems to have taken bit of a knock lately: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

He’s not using psychosis in the sense of people who have actually developed serious mental health issues as a result of chatbot use, but software developers who seem to have lost touch with what they were originally trying to and just kind a roll around in the slop, mistaking it for productivity.

When Peter first got me hooked on Claude, I did not sleep. I spent two months excessively prompting the thing and wasting tokens. I ended up building and building and creating a ton of tools I did not end up using much. “You can just do things” was what was on my mind all the time but it took quite a bit longer to realize that just because you can, you might not want to. It became so easy to build something and in comparison it became much harder to actually use it or polish it. Quite a few of the tools I built I felt really great about, just to realize that I did not actually use them or they did not end up working as I thought they would.

You feel productive, you feel like everything is amazing, and if you hang out just with people that are into that stuff too, without any checks, you go deeper and deeper into the belief that this all makes perfect sense. You can build entire projects without any real reality check. But it’s decoupled from any external validation. For as long as nobody looks under the hood, you’re good. But when an outsider first pokes at it, it looks pretty crazy.

He’s still pro-ai, and seems to be vaguely hoping that improvements in tooling and dev culture will help stem the tide of worthless slop prs that are drowning every large open source project out there, but he has no actual idea if any of that can or will happen (which it won’t, of course, but faith takes a while to fade).

As always though, the first step is to realise you have a problem.

This is fun: a zero-click android exploit that allows arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation. Y’know, the worst kind. How did we get here?

Over the past few years, several AI-powered features have been added to mobile phones that allow users to better search and understand their messages. One effect of this change is increased 0-click attack surface, as efficient analysis often requires message media to be decoded before the message is opened by the user. One such feature is audio transcription. Incoming SMS and RCS audio attachments received by Google Messages are now automatically decoded with no user interaction. As a result, audio decoders are now in the 0-click attack surface of most Android phones.

AI, making everything worse, even before it runs!

https://projectzero.google/2026/01/pixel-0-click-part-1.html

Every now and then, I think about going back to android, and then I read stuff like this. FWIW, iOS had a closely related bug, but compiled the offending code with bounds checks, so it wasn’t usefully exploitable (and required some user interaction, too).

Anyway, if you do android, maybe check if automatic transcription is enabled.

I can't give this the sneer it deserves. More pics will follow

Blacksky has delivered on bluesky’s promise of federation by setting up their own app view, creating a complete and independent third party implementation.

https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b

Mcc has an interesting thread on mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115918042095581428) which asks a bunch of questions about what the actual consequences of this might be, and no-one really seems to know, but no-one has much faith in the engineering or moderation chops of the bluesky team.

It looks like bluesky is somewhat vulnerable to rich trolls, because the main barrier to entry is cost… blacksky has budget of maybe 80000 usd/year (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) which is well within the reach of a whole bunch of people prepared to spend money to be egregious assholes, especially if they already have access to suitable talent and equipment. It’ll be bleakly interesting to see who tries this first.

well, i'm learning three months late that bitwarden has begun allowing slop into their server code. emailed customer service about my concerns and they replied

Bitwarden uses AI tooling for development purposes, not within the product itself. No code ever gets placed into the product without a human review, whether that is augmented by AI or a human. All code has and continues to go through multiple layers of review, both human and tool driven.

gotta find a replacement. keepassxc, the alternative i would have suggested a year ago, is now a slopshop.

fuck me i am so god damn sick of this shit

Without doxxing, my job has a contract with nvidia and my boss said we are doing it to make agi. Can i build a little of a torment nexus as a treat? Ty ans bless

I knew that ai scraping was bad, but after hosting a service online for a bit I'm just amazed at how bad it is.

I blocked the ip ranges: 47.80.0.0/13, 47.74.0.0/15; 47.76.0.0/14 (all owned by alibaba), and now my access log is 90% forbidden by rule, because these bots are so poorly coded that they just ignore 403s.
Of all the 18522 requests I got today, only 230 were not forbidden.

Scott Alexander replies to comments Re: Scott Adams

Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you.

Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it.

ha.

Other than that, further testimonials of the Dilbert -> NRx pipeline.

New episode of odium symposium, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/8-ceci-nest-pas-148404664

we look at a particular book by french philosopher and murderer louis althusser, and talk about what it can say about femicide

Next-Level Quantum Computers Will Almost Be Useful | IEEE Spectrum

“If someone says quantum computers are commercially useful today, I say I want to have what they’re having,” said Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer of the quantum-computing startup QuEra, on stage at the Q+AI conference in New York City in October.

taps mic

attention, attention please

the phrase "chud achievement gallery completitionism" has now been coined

that is all, thank you for your attention

So, there’s a kind of security investigation called “dorking”, where you use handy public search tools to find particularly careless software misconfigurations that get indexed by eg. google. One too, for that sort of searching it github code search.

Turns out that a) claude chat logs get automatically saved to a file under .claude/logs and b) quite a lot of people don’t actually check what they’re adding to source control, and you can actually search github for that sort of thing with a path: code search query (though you probably need to be signed in to github first, it isn’t completely open).

I didn’t find anything even remotely interesting (and watching people’s private project manager fantasy roleplay isn’t something I enjoy), but viss says they’ve found credentials, which is fun.

https://mastodon.social/@Viss/115923109466960526

Economist John Quiggin posts a critique of William MacAskill's type of utilitarianism with confusing logic, has to retract it when a quote with chapter and verse in his main text does not exist:

Even though I have a clear memory of locating the third quotation in the Gutenberg edition, I can’t find it now. So, I;ve edited the post to deleted it. Apologies for this. I’m assuming the quote I found was some kind of AI confabulation, and that I slipped up on the check. I will need to double check more carefully in future.

(quote is from the comments I have not corrected or added sic)

He says he is writing a book against pro-natalism.

Bitcoin jesus (jesus christ what a name, almost makes me wish there was a hell) escapes punishment due to trump.