jwz

Mom: What's with these AIs escaping and hacking people? Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says "please be good" and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying "My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!" Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests $100 million in your company. Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ https://jwz.org/b/ylA5

Techbros literally out here trying to disrupt the fraternity rape-house: Today these so-called hacker houses are driven by missions, like the advancement of humanity, and have become critical nodes for the AI industry. Residents are often startup founders or engineers working at OpenAI or Anthropic. Rent can hit $10,000 a month for a room. [...] "This is a new golden age," Nixon said, according to the court documents. https://jwz.org/b/yk_4

It's not illegal if you buy new laws. Lyft has to pay out $272 million for the fraud they perpetrated on their employees from 2016 through 2020! But then in 2020, they spent $200 million to make that fraud legal, so now they won't have to pay that again in the future! According to methane-breathing money-ghouls who run our world, this was a great investment: they could have just spent an additional $50M/year on salaries, but now they legalized an across-the-board ... https://jwz.org/b/ylAu

I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh. Nicola Turner: A site-responsive installation made mainly from dark wool and horsehair will fill the ground-floor galleries at 16 Hanover Square, extending in a procession-like manner that continues 12 metres... https://jwz.org/b/ylAK

@rooneymcnibnug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMb6G4YvdEs

It's a good thing I write these things down, because I'm now about 7 deep in absolute bangers about "how much it sucks to try and run a business" that I can't post about yet. Like even when I'm talking to my friends I'm like, "oh shit, I forgot to tell you about Apocalypse Number 4!"

"AI" once again revealed to be three perverts in a trenchcoat. Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts -- And They're Horrified: Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft's Copilot AI chatbot are constantly bombarded with lewd or sexually explicit photo... https://jwz.org/b/ylAE

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 260. https://jwz.org/b/ylAw

@tuxracer@fosstodon.org You seem nice. I have known you for 2 seconds and enjoyed neither of them.

Left Behind. Smooth Dunk: https://jwz.org/b/yk_8

Seasons Greetings from Tall Slut No Panties! Krysten Ritter on the hellsite: https://jwz.org/b/ylAq

Someone 'Torturing' LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet. Jason Koebler: One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like... https://jwz.org/b/ylAM

@thetruejona@mastodon.social This is by design. Blame the AI scrapers.

@redezem@aus.social Thanks for this! I had been trying to reproduce some of the weird reports on macOS 27.0.1 with no luck. And... I can't reproduce this either. Do you have some trick to make it fail this way? (E.g. does the failure require multiple screens attached?)

@chronodm@glammr.us I hope you had a machete handy

Dear Lazyweb, please help me figure out why OBS keeps doing this crazy thing where sometimes audio goes into slo-mo dubstep glitch mode. Sometimes switching inputs fixes it. Sometimes only "sudo killall coreaudiod" fixes it. Here's what it sounds like. It seems to be doubling the spacing of the frames, and the buffer is infinite. Even worse is that my check-volume.pl script fails to detect it much of the time. On this particular TS file it reports "glitchy: 27.4 ... https://jwz.org/b/yk_-

Today in the scraperpocalypse... Let me just take a nice long sip of this beverage and then open up my web-hosting bill for last month... https://jwz.org/b/ylAU

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein there's a little more about the parklet https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/09/26.html?utm_source=sp_ma

JFC, Xcode 27 is pushing the AI bullshit *harrrrrd*. There are 3 or 4 preference checkboxes for "No AI plz" but they barely do anything. Every single compilation warning has a little sparkle-icon where you can ask the plagiarism machine to drop a turd onto the deprecated method you were calling. You can't make it go away, at all. "In Xcode 27, agents are becoming the primary way to interact with the coding assistant" -- eat my fuck you goddamned traitors.

@grumpybozo@toad.social ...and I haven't heard anything yet about which quisling they found to replace him.

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein it is Spooky Season https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/07.html?utm_source=sp_ma

@jef@mastodon.social Yup that's why I hate VLC alright

Ballot arrived today! So USPS has not yet been completely compromised... But I will still probably return it using a drop box rather than the mail.

@mattblaze@federate.social "I didn't mean to cheat on you, it's just that my genitals went rogue"

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein we return this blog to our core competency: plumbing disasters https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/05.html?utm_source=sp_ma

SF Democratic Party loves Flock: The SF Democratic Party [sic] voted on Wednesday to continue its support for Flock surveillance cameras: Two major resolutions were in front of the party's 31 members -- 13 of whom were absent -- on Wednesday. One,... https://jwz.org/b/yk_6

@bignose@sw-development-is.social I use CloudFront only for images and CSS (URLs on my cdn.* subdomains) so that is presumably 100% AI scraper bots loading images over and over and over again.

@glyph@mastodon.social They are all properly developer signed as far as I am aware, but Apple's signing infrastructure is shifting sands, so who knows? If you understand this stuff and could look at one of the .saver bundles and say "yes that looks signed correctly", that would be helpful. But, the savers *run* and I would expect that to not happen if they were improperly signed.

@datarama@hachyderm.io 3: "Why not both?"

@glyph@mastodon.social Yeah she has been giving strong "amoral grifter" vibes for a while now.

Another codesign firedrill. Apple let stuff expire, so now we have to re-roll our certs, hooray. I have questions: When they say: Installer packages [...] will no longer install. Re-sign all packages with your new certificate before this date. Mac... https://jwz.org/b/ylA1

@mathowie@xoxo.zone "Midsommar (2019)"

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein the slopbros won't stop https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/06.html?utm_source=sp_ma

@skjeggtroll@mastodon.online @cstross@wandering.shop Everyone who says "cookies were a mistake" has failed to think through what would have happened instead: unreadable URLs tracking state via kilobyte-long hex blob query parameters. At least that didn't happen [ taps headset ] I am now being informed...

@mikej@mastodon.online Only one is about toilets. So far.

@mikehoss@appdot.net That video is a load of shit, applying agency, personality and goals to linear algebra. No, just no.

@jef@mastodon.social That scooter must have been going pretty fast to flip over that picnic table.

It's hard to explain Gavin Newsom to someone who hasn't seen The Dead Zone.

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein Folsom Street Events has fucked us, and not in the consensual way https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/09/27.html?utm_source=sp_ma

Somehow the "Afterglow" .saver manages to have thumbnails too, but I can't tell what they're doing differently...

@davidgerard@circumstances.run I'm pretty sure that "benefits Melania" is not on his list, but it might benefit him somehow!

@robpike@cosocial.ca @timbray@cosocial.ca I recently picked up a Canon G7X and I love it -- physical optics and yet small enough to fit in my pocket ("camera you have"). Plus it has *exactly the same UI* that I still have muscle memory for from my old SLRs that I haven't touched in a decade.

@HalfCap@mastodon.social Nope. After nuking those files, System Settings repopulates them with the generic "swirly" images. I also tried wiping ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store and /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store and killing iconservicesd.

The continuing downfall of USPS. For the third or fourth year in a row, it is October and USPS has issued new Christmas stamps but there are *no* Halloween stamps on sale. I'm sure this is also DeJoy's fault. https://jwz.org/b/ylAO

@dannyman@sfba.social @theorangetheme@en.osm.town Tell me you've never spoken to someone who played The Sims without telling me you've never spoken to someone who played The Sims. Apparently Stephen King is the world's most prolific serial killer, since "writing down mean words" is the same as torture now. "Misery" alone sold over a million copies. That's a million dudes who don't exist, tied to chairs that don't exist. Won't someone think of the nonexistent dudes? Has someone asked the chair how it felt?

Every year or so I forget and investigate: "Surely there's a way to set my business's Facebook account to disallow comments by default?" and every year I realize that the answer is is no because drive-by rage from haters is their entire business model.