DataKnightmare

RE: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/117382397216266564 that’s why #NASA hired teams of #embroidery #knitting #beading #fiberArts experts who all so happened to be not just women but mostly Native American, African American and Latinas. they were nicknamed the Little Old Ladies and without them there would be no Apollo program. they won't even teach you in school that the LOLs were preceded by women who ―if they wanted a chance to enter college, a privilege only for men― they did so by being computers (mathematicians) for “real” scientists. 🧵…

Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police | TechSpot https://blog.quintarelli.it/2026/10/florida-woman-used-claude-as-a-diary-then-anthropic-reported-an-entry-to-police-techspot/

"When I first came up with the term [Software Engineering], no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware." #RIP #margarethamilton

AI people are starting to get tired and want AI to:

1. Check for clear mistakes
2. No First-Person Output
3. More Non-Natural-Language User Interfaces
4. Better Reproducibility

https://blog.glyph.im/2026/09/serious-ai-product.html

That’s a good start, dude. You are nearly ready to learn the UNIX command line.

#EU drops sponsorship of #disinformation conference at #Trump officials’ request 🖊️ Aisha Down in London, Joseph Gedeon in Washington and Jennifer Rankin in Brussels #Lithuania and #Canada were also pressured to withdraw, and days before #Disinfo2026, logos were wiped off website https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/07/trump-eu-disinformation-conference

burning down just one school and blocking entrance to ±400 others got #lyceens to get the goverment to expedite approval of 3,000 new teachers. of course they won't stop the #manifs and #blocages now. btw: the protests have spread to #Belgium #Italia. add the #housing #protests and the coming #generalStrike in #España, and we have the makings of a legendary Fall. » French government vows to boost teacher numbers in bid to ease school crisis https://www.france24.com/en/france/20261008-live-students-fourth-round-protests-education-funding-france #France #StudentProtests

“Of course it’s a #genocide. We would shoot at anyone, children and women too”. “Even if they didn’t pose any danger?” “Of course, none of them had any weapons! I think I saw an armed Palestinian only once, but we used to kill hundreds of them every day” “We were fine. We were happy. It was fun. It was like a videogame” “What do you mean? Killing was fun? Including children? Even if they weren’t armed? Whole families?” “There was a psychologist. We could talk to him if we needed. But we didn’t need it because we were fine” “Mine is an elite unity. We would identify the buildings to blow up while families were still in. We destroyed whole neighbourhoods. We destroyed the whole north of the Gaza strip because there should have been no houses to get back to. We set on fire memories, pictures, books, everything. We would fill up houses with gas and set them on fire, or we would gather all the pillows in the middle of the living room and set them on fire. Wool burns very well. In a minute the whole apartment was on fire. Mine was a unit made of left-wing youngsters. From Tel Aviv’s higher classes. We don’t hate the Arabs. We did it because it had to be done”. “The settlers, the crazy ones, those who believe in a crooked God and do strange things like not bathing or reproduce like rabbits: those perhaps hate the Arabs. But we progressive left-wing youngsters aren’t like that: we only did what we were told to do and then we’d smoke a cigarette or come back to have an aperitif together” “I asked my supervisor: ‘What do you think of what we’re doing here?’ He told me: ‘It’s right. You must just trust the system’” “We only do what the Israeli society tells us to do. If they tell us that Gaza must be wiped out, then we must wipe it out” “I went to Poland to visit concentration camps. I keep believing that Nazis were Nazis. But I don’t know what I am” Interviews to Israeli soldiers published in the NAZA documentary

I appreciated this chance to go on Bloomberg Tech, though it's always a bit odd to have a conversation with a reporter who is really interested in what's effectively a fictional story. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-10-06/bender-ai-s-existential-risk-is-fake-video

Tories: absolutely inept assclowns who can’t even manage a spreadsheet: "The error appears to have arisen because a tally of all the costs in a CCC spreadsheet from the document also included the row showing totals for each individual column, thus doubling it." Tories overstate net zero cost by nearly £500bn in apparent spreadsheet error: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/09/tories-overstate-net-zero-cost-500bn-spreadsheet-error

Just got a mass email from our bank that essentially says, "If you give your username and password to an AI agent, you're on your own." You've. Been. Warned. 🤣

The use of AI in UK asylum decision-making is a disaster. AI hallucinated a document that led to an asylum application being denied. Applicants aren't being informed that opaque AI tools are being used in their case, nor being given the opportunity to correct errors churned out by these opaque tools. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/28/home-office-used-ai-hallucinated-information-to-refuse-asylum-claim-judge-suggests#ai #asylum #immigration #migrants #homeoffice #ukpolitics #ukpol

L’AI nella PA. L’indagine realizzata da #FunzPub nell’ambito di ParteciPa mostra che il personale pubblico è interessato all’intelligenza artificiale nella PA e ne riconosce le potenzialità, ma le amministrazioni non sempre sono ancora organizzate. @economia Leggi https://smartworkersunion.it/erws

In other words: • An excellent fit makes the data practitioner obtain an inference engine that generalizes badly. • Similary, a living entity that only fits its environment may fail to degrade gracefully when the environment changes. • A social organisation that is optimised is not resilient.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/117390294462413805 Again: stop calling the malware “rogue.” These bots were designed, trained, prompted, and activated by humans at OpenAI. The fact that some of their behavior was unpredicted does not diminish OpenAI’s responsibility.

As someone who regularly helps elderly, low-vision, low-English-literacy & other folks who are struggling to understand them manage their phones (I know @jessamyn@glammr.us does this too), I cannot begin to explain to you the rage I feel at the designers & development organizations who foist these UI choices on a public not remotely equipped to navigate them. The controls are overwhelming, still. They’re couched in jargon, still. They’re hidden somewhere non-obvious, down the end of a four-node decision tree. Fifteen years after I left the industry things have only gotten worse. And the worst bit of all – as I always insisted then, based on my own extended observation – is that *users internalize the blame for their inability to comprehend the UI*. They wind up feeling stupid and incompetent. They wind up bewildered and scammed. They feel terrified to hit the wrong button, and then not be able to find it again. It’s so, so hard to watch. It breaks my heart, and it makes me furious.