I was just in a meeting where someone used a thing called Fathom to get an 'AI' summary of the meeting. Aside from some understandable typos arising from not understanding terms of art and replacing them with common English words, one of the key points that it concluded was that A was faster than B. It reached this conclusion because it missed one of the digits in the time for A. This completely inverted the key takeaway from one important section of the meeting.

Do not use plausible-nonsense generators for anything important.

I wish restaurants understood that the reason to have a vegetarian dish on your menu even if you don't cater to vegetarians is so that people can bring their friends with them to your restaurant. You're not losing the smaller vegetarian population, you're losing the larger "people who have vegetarian friends or family members" population.

Like FFS just add the token house salad would ya? We understand the deal.

I got a bunch more motion sensors and I've been putting them around the house so I can program Home Assistant to do stuff like turn off lights in rooms that aren't being used, turn on lights when we're going downstairs with hands full of laundry, obviously just flipping a switch is easy but in some rooms the switch is on the opposite side of the wall and if I put a button on the entry-side then I don't trip over the cat, telling the water heater to get hot before we shower, having a $10 smart plug tell me when my 80's washing machine has finished, having a button to make the lights go cosy, y'know just nice helpful stuff that I do because I like making the house better for my spouse and kid and as I was putting up all these motion sensors I was thinking,

man,

there's NOTHING in this program to detect when it's being used for evil

And like there really should be? Like someone could legit fucking torment their family with this, this could be used as a tool of manipulation and control and fostering the abusive sort of dependence

And then I think of how me and spouse are moving away from google and onto like self-hosted stuff, nextcloud and searxng and xmpp and shit like that, and I can't help but think, *know* really, that right now there's someone controlling their intimate partner with those same technologies, like something that's supposed to be liberating you from corporate-style General Abuse is being leveraged towards a form of very focused abuse against you specifically by someone on whom you depend

I don't think enough software devs spend enough time thinking about how their projects can be used to hurt people

Has anyone smarter than me written any long posts thinking about this and what we can do about it

from my link log —

Final analysis of 2025 Iberian blackout: electrical grid operating policies left Spain at risk.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/final-analysis-of-2025-iberian-blackout-policies-left-spain-at-risk/

saved 2026-03-26 https://dotat.at/:/SJW20.html

Incredibly specific job klaxon if you are:

🇬🇧 looking for a UK remote role
💻️ where you can use your programming and data skills
🛠️ and do some hardware hacking too
🐈‍⬛ also if you like cats, omg this is a weird cat tech job

https://careers.cats.org.uk/job/851046

(Cat Scientist - Emerging Welfare Technology at Cats Protection, £49k, apply by April 3)

#FediHire