Mastodawn

Tim Farley 5d ago

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Herzleid Apr 27

@tully 🎨 🖼️

@krelnik They also could have found you and recently looked at your profile. That often spawns the "New Friend Recommendation" feature.

Tim Farley Apr 13

Wow I know #Meta et.al. do some creepy stuff to find out about us. (Google "shadow profiles" if you doubt). But their Instagram app just did something truly weird. It just recommended to me a person who was a childhood friend OVER 50 YEARS AGO. I haven't lived there in 51 years. He no longer lives there either. He currently lives 5 hours by car away from me in a different state. We have had no contact since we were kids. We have NO friends in common. We have no common interests that I can see from his Instagram or Facebook. (In fact, based on some media accounts he follows I doubt we would be super friendly as adults). I literally only knew him because he lived like 8 houses away when I was a child and we went to the same neighborhood church. We just played with Tonka trucks and G.I. Joes together. Kind of dumbfounded at this. Is Meta buying former residence locations from data brokers and matching up people who lived in the same neighborhood as kids? A bit of a reach and really demonstrates how creepy their surveillance infrastructure is. #SurveillanceCapitalism

Lo and behold

Ruth — of systems & design Apr 9

“Each elimination looks rational in isolation. The second-order effects arrive six months later, and by then nobody connects the locust swarm to the dead sparrows.”

https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/

The AI Great Leap Forward

In 1958, Mao ordered every village to produce steel. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Today's top-down AI mandates are producing the same pattern: ba...

Han, Not Solo

Tim Farley Apr 1

AkaSci 🛰️Apr 1

This year's April Fool's Day science papers are coming online.

First, from our favorite astrophysicist @sundogplanets

1. Cow-culation: Reentry Impact Risk to Livestock in the Satellite Megaconstellation Era

... is launching more satellites into LEO every year.
This could intersect with NZ’s famously large population of livestock. We predict this will be an udder disaster for any cows that are hit, as they are squishy and moo-ve much more slowly than space debris.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29324
1/n

Tim Farley Mar 30

I sometimes try to use the Microsoft #Copilot that comes bundled with #Office365 now. All the training for this feature warn you thoroughly to double check answers and so on due to the hallucination problem. But its still frustrating as hell when you give it a simple task and it fails miserably.

I told it to look in our company's cloud file storage for a document that had my name "Tim Farley" in it along with a particular CVE number (also in quotes). I was looking for an old report where I had written up a particular vulnerability. It very quickly showed me a link to a document that I recognized as one of my reports, and offered "would you like to see the exact paragraph". I said sure, show me the exact paragraph.

It then wrote me 257 WORDS explaining how it had screwed up, and the CVE number I gave it is NOWHERE TO BE FOUND in that document. Included was some mumbo jumbo about how it uses parallel partial searches to do its work or some such. AND IT COMPLIMENTED ME on challenging its answer.

A ton has been written on how #AI might replace low-level jobs such as interns. But I swear to you if I had an intern who behaved like this, I would put them on a performance improvement plan!

How is this acceptable performance for a product that people pay a bunch of money for? Would you buy Excel if on the bottom of every page it said "HEY YOU BETTER CHECK ALL MY MATH BECAUSE I MIGHT HAVE SCREWED UP SOMETHING"?

#AIFAIL #PutAIonaPIP

Tim Farley Mar 29

Esther Schindler Mar 28

The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages. https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

I Decompiled the White House's New App

The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages.

Thereallo

Tim Farley Mar 10

Strange New Words (Adam)Mar 10

Another day, another disgusting development involving AI.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-spotify-enabling-massive-impersonation

#Music #Jazz #Tech #AI

Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of Famous Jazz Musicians?

How did trumpet legend Nat Adderley become a white guy playing with a three-handed bassist?

The Honest Broker

Tim Farley Mar 4

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Mar 4

Seems like the Future of Life Institute has succeeded in legitimizing themselves the same way Angela Saini outlined race scientists legitimized themselves through the academy (read her book Superior). I guess $700 MILLION DOLLARS in crypto money in one sitting gives you the resources to do that!

Everyone wants to sign their letters that they put out every few years.

Take a look at this manel which happened around their first letter 🙄 and ask yourself if you wanna be around these people.