sailor_sega_saturn

Detective: "So Magic Eight Ball. I'm just gonna ask you outright. Were you the killer?"

Magic Eight Ball: "It is decidedly so."

Some Guy: "Oh my god."

It's bad for me too.

I'm trying to hang in there until I get some healthcare stuff taken care of over the next year or two but it is getting increasingly difficult. Most of the the good people at my job have been driven out, quit, or been poached by other (AI) companies.

By this point a majority of the programmers at my job (or at least the one's most active on the mailing lists) are LLM true believers who think that the end times are near. My management chain has explicitly said that LLM programming is required, and that a subsequent increase in "productivity" is expected with it. My department got renamed to something with "AI" in the name. I constantly field questions from people who want me to read a screen full of LLM nonsense, or who push back when I tell them something claiming that the chatbot said differently.

There's always some frantic push to adopt "MCP" or "Skills" or whatever the next fad will be without any guidance as to how or why. If I ignore this I get nastygrams from my manager.

And at my last doctor visit I had elevated blood pressure :)

I saw this headline:

Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers With Giant Data Centers, Huge Tech Labs, and Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof

And thought nothing in the body of the article could possibly top the headline. I was wrong:

Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago

he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm.

fireproof steel I-beams

a dedicated fire department

Journalists know that they don't have to cover every random crank on the internet right? I suppose it's my own fault for clicking on it.

Apropos of nothing, archive.is ddos-d a website and altered page snapshots as part of some sort of inscrutable net drama causing Wikipedia to stop using it.

So if anyone cares about such things here's a wayback machine link instead

That said: lmao. Where are all these billion dollar LLM-run Tamogotchi feeding startups hiding? Still in the strawberry counting phase of starting a business?

All I could think about is who has a microwave that beeps while it's still cooking?

Against all odds they found a worse future to pursue than forcing employees to strap VR goggles to their heads 40 hours a week, and have pivoted towards AI.

New AI legal filing sanctions just dropped: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca6.152857/gov.uscourts.ca6.152857.50.2.pdf

I don't have time to read over it completely yet, but here's a taste:

That briefing repeatedly misrepresented the record, cited non-existent cases, and cited cases for propositions of law that they did not even discuss, much less support. As explained below, Irion’s and Egli’s misconduct warrants the sanctions laid out in Section II.C.

If we included typos and other errors that are arguably, but not clearly, a misrepresentation or fake citation, we would be looking at far more misstatements of fact and law

Irion and Egli did not respond to these directives. Instead, they said the show cause order was “void on its face for failing to include a signature of an Article III judge,” was “motivated by harassment of the Respondent attorneys,” and “reflect[ed] illegal ex-parte [sic] communications within this Court.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1rrhzhc/doge_lead_in_deposition_details_how_he_emailed/

Behold: the Silicon Valley masters of opsec.

Last week 404 Media reported on some DOGE deposition videos.

The videos were since removed via court order, but are available on Internet Archive.

For anyone unfamiliar: this slots under TechTakes because DOGE is basically Elon Musk's army of naive fascist silicon valley tech-bros rampaging about the federal government with Chat-GPT, SQL, and unsecured thumb-drives.

This article is behind a paywall, but links to the following video snippets from the depositions:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVyhJT9jf4f/

For example here Justin Fox talks about deleting federal grants that he considered in-scope for an anti DEI executive order: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/

Q: "Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI"

A: "It's the gender based story 🤷 that's inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group 🙄."

Q: "It's inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?"

A: "The gender based. So, females 🤷 during the Holocaust."

He goes on to clarify that it's DEI because it focuses on Jewish women. Oh that's OK then!

There is a lot of video to work through but I know there is more ~~comedy gold~~ rage inducing punchable nazi snippets within.

There's only one thing that's advertised as not-waterproof that I'll risk using underwater and that's Casio wristwatches. "Water resist" is a huge understatement for them the things are indestructable.

(This comment sponsored by Casio)

Apparently this sort of machine learning training pitfall I learned about a decade go in an undergraduate level class that I was like halfway paying attention to in a party school is now evidence of the impending AI apocalypse.

The editor in chief has an apology: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ -- the commenters are not happy.

The reporter in question wrote an explanation here: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

The AI part of the explanation is about what you'd expect from an AI enthusiast caught with his hand in the cookie jar and trying to blame the danger-tools as much as he can. Though it also shows that he felt compelled to work during an acute covid infection, and yikes to that work life balance.