Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmSky Broadband Users Accidentally Blocked from UK NHS Website and App - ISPreview UK2026-06-26T11:37:05+00:00
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/06/sky-broadband-users-accidentally-blocked-from-uk-nhs-website-and-app.html
jmcustomers of Sky Broadband reported that they were unable to access the main NHS website and app earlier in the week, seemingly after the internet provider accidentally managed to block it. But Sky has since suggested that the fault might have been with the NHS. The issue prevented people being able to access their medical data and manage appointments etc.
The problem appears to have occurred on Tuesday morning (23rd June 2026) and was reported across social media (X, Facebook etc.), including via threads on Reddit and Sky’s Community Forum. Customers initially thought the problem was with the NHS itself, but the health service instead pointed the finger of blame at the ISP (no other internet providers seem to have experienced the issue).
(via gwire, who notes that all DNS traffic for Sky customers is filtered...)]]>sky broadband isps uk networking via:gwire dnshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6c756c58cb03/Twarner491/AvianVisitors2026-06-26T11:16:13+00:00
https://github.com/Twarner491/AvianVisitors
jme-ink hacks home gadgets birding birds birdsong via:lhennessyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eb9cfbc225ac/On Feral Library Card Catalogs, or, Aware of All Internet Traditions2026-06-22T17:06:26+00:00
https://bactra.org/weblog/feral-library-card-catalogs.html
jm
For some years now, I have been saying to anyone who'll listen that the best way to think about large language models and their kin is due to the great Alison Gopnik, and it's to regard them as cultural technologies. All technologies, of course, are cultural in the sense that they are passed on from person to person, generation to generation. In the process of leaping from mind to mind, cultural content always passes through some external, non-mental form: spoken words, written diagrams, hand-crafted models, demonstrations, interpretive dances, or just examples of some practice carried out by the exemplifier's body [1]. A specifically cultural technology is one that modifies that very process of transmission, as with writing or printing or sound recording. That is what LLMs do; they are not so much minds as a new form of information retrieval. [...]
What follows from all this?
1. These are ways of interpolating, extrapolating, smoothing, and sampling from the distribution of public, digitized representations we [6] have filled the Internet with. Now, most people do not have much experience with samplers --- certainly not with devices that sample from complex distributions with lots of dependencies. (Games of chance are built to have simple, uniform distributions.) (In fact, maybe the most common experience of such sampling is in role-playing games.) But while this makes them a novel form of cultural technology, they are a cultural technology.
2. They are also a novel form of social technology. They create a technically-mediated relationship between the user, and the authors of the documents in the training corpora. To repeat an example from the paper, when someone uses a bot to write a job-application letter, the system is mediating a relationship between the applicant and the authors of hundreds or thousands of previous such letters. More weakly, the system is also mediating a relationship between the applicant and the authors of other types of letters, authors of job-hunting handbooks, the reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback workers [7], etc., etc. (If you ask it how to write a regular expression for a particular data-cleaning job, it is mediating between you and the people who used to post on Stack Overflow.) Through the magic of influence functions, those with the right accesses can actually trace and quantify this relationship.
3. These aren't agents with beliefs, desires and intentions. (Prompting them to "be an agent" is just conditioning the stochastic process to produce the sort of text that would follow a description of an agent, which is not the same thing.) They don't even have goals in the way in which a thermostat, or lac operon repressor circuit, have goals. [8] They also aren't reasoning systems, or planning systems, or anything of that sort. Appearances to the contrary are all embers of autoregression. (Some of those embers are blown upon by wishful mnemonics.) [...]
Large models have learned nearly all of the formulas, templates, tropes and stereotypes. (They're probability models of text sequences, after all.) To use Barzun's distinction, they will not put creative intelligence on tap, but rather stored and accumulated intellect. If they succeed in making people smarter, it will be by giving them access to the external forms of a myriad traditions.
]]>intelligence intellect llms technology alison-gopnik henry-farrell language text information cultural-technology james-evanshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2c0a435370e0/Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? - by Andrew Burleson2026-06-22T10:44:02+00:00
https://www.freerange.city/p/why-do-commercial-spaces-sit-vacant
jmThe short answer is both simple and surprising: in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will *force the bank to foreclose on it*. Foreclosure is very bad for both the bank and the operator, so both parties would rather “extend and pretend,” leaving the building vacant while they wait and hope for the market to change.
]]>via:hn finance money real-estate buildings commercial-property dereliction empty-buildings vacancy extend-and-pretend loans foreclosurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0751972cafe0/The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy2026-06-19T14:43:13+00:00
https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/
jm
Petflix, a Roku app documented by The Verge, is a representative case. Its opt-in screen reads: “To enjoy Petflix for free with fewer ads, you are allowing Bright Data to occasionally use your device’s free resources and IP address to download public web data from the internet. Bright Data will only use your IP address for approved business-related use cases. None of your personal information is accessed or collected except your IP address. Period.” [...]
At least three CTV-focused entities (PlayWorks, CloudTV, Longvision) monetized their user’s devices as residential proxy exit nodes. PlayWorks in particular reports CTV distribution across major TV platforms and ISPs, with reach figures in the hundreds of millions of households per its own marketing materials.
]]>proxies residential broadband scraping internet tv smart-tv roku petflix android ios mobile brightdatahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:636c8af749ac/Building Reliable Agentic AI Systems2026-06-19T14:37:55+00:00
https://martinfowler.com/articles/reliable-llm-bayer.html
jmllms thoughtworks architecture rag systems langfuse athena opensearchhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:654701682118/Everything Is Glonzo Now2026-06-18T11:29:29+00:00
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/everything-is-glonzo-now/
jm
Republicans will never lose another election for the foreseeable future. To be more specific, they will never admit defeat. Largely inspired by the President, election denial has become a tentpole of Republican party politics [...]
Conspiratorial thinking is perhaps the most corrosive force that the Republican Party has unleashed on [US] politics -- an addictive cognitive drug that eventually consumes all rational thought. Much like a drug addiction, the more you feed a conspiracy theory the more powerful it gets. Each new data point in the conspiracy reinforces the rest and makes it harder to dislodge. Eventually it grows so large and multifaceted that any new data point can fit somewhere, including falsification of the conspiracy itself.
The digital age has ushered in a sort of golden age for conspiracy theories. Social media provided global platforms for crank theorists whose low-effort high-engagement thinking perfectly aligned with content algorithms. Cross-contamination and political incentives has led to a kind of convergent evolution for what used to be idiosyncratic conspiracists, a “great crank alignment” if you will. Making matters worse, while conspiracies grow more elaborate at political extremes, their style of thinking creeps inwards and takes up a growing share of political discourse. The damage of conspiracism is twofold: time and effort is wasted on combating the conspiracy theory itself and at the same time conspiracy theorists wreak havoc attempting to solve their nonexistent problems. Right now Republicans have a clear advantage when it comes to indulging in conspiracism for political engagement. Yet while I am not one for unilateral disarmament on the Democratic side—especially considering the fact that the Trump administration really is engaging in genuine criminal conspiracies -- liberals need to exercise extreme caution before attempting to fight fire with fire.
The Trump-era GOP has brought believers in QAnon, Pizzagate, weather machines, space lasers, chem trails, "9/11 was an inside job," and much more to the highest levels of political office in the country. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has stated in official press releases that “Americans have legitimate questions about contrails and geoengineering, and they deserve straight answers.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the Secretary of Health after being personally implicated in worsening a Samoan measles outbreak that killed 83 people by helping to spread anti-vaccine conspiracies.
]]>us-politics usa conspiracies bizarre glonzo qanon republicans trump essayshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5377cc1ebe76/Do not invite big-tech to join your digital autonomy discussion2026-06-18T09:36:04+00:00
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/do-not-invite-big-tech-to-your-digital-autonomy-discussion/
jmIf we want to discuss how to improve our digital autonomy, employees from US big tech will not usefully contribute to the conversation. They can’t. And in fact, they’ll likely actively prevent progress by restating old talking points, like how (despite tons of legal analysis to the contrary) Microsoft is somehow able to shield us from the vagaries of the US administration.
I recall Microsoft vice-president Brad Smith explaining how Microsoft would go to court to protect European rights and within a week, Microsoft told the International Criminal Court that it had to remove several employees from Microsoft services, because of US sanctions.
Microsoft pointedly did not go to court to defend the ICC.
If you invite US big tech to your event, you’ll spend some of your time listening to fairy tales. And if you are lucky someone is present to debunk these stories. But still, if Amazon just got 10 minutes of speaking time to talk about their supposedly sovereign cloud, and then someone else says it is not true, the meeting is still left with the impression that it could be true. The issue has successfully been “both-sidesed”. Also, you lost 15 minutes of your day.
]]>amazon microsoft google big-tech digital-sovereignty us-politics europe euhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0baf6f3dc2b7/Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?2026-06-17T12:19:26+00:00
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering
jm
“It’s literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”
]]>meta fuckedcompany instagram facebook ai management how-we-work zuck engineering failhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9bd39beed497/SearchLeak2026-06-17T11:56:48+00:00
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/critical-copilot-vulnerability-allowed-hackers-to-seal-2fa-code-from-users/
jm
One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as and 2600hz copilot llms exploits vulnerabilities guardrails aihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c93f108c0341/Pokemon Go to Train Killer Drones2026-06-11T16:35:04+00:00
https://bsky.app/profile/scherawyss.bsky.social/post/3mnyucxuets2z
jmdata-protection data-privacy niantic pokemon-go training gaming vantor drones military scopely murderbotshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1791293dcfaa/Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers2026-06-10T11:52:03+00:00
https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/
jm
The judge is explicitly cutting down most of the legal defenses they use. They make a sharp cut between search and AI, saying search is indispensable, but AI is not, and defendants have not proven how being held liable for their output would compromise the ability to run a normal search engine. They make a similar hard cut between AI and autocomplete.
They go on at length about the nature of truth in utterances, and arrive at a conclusion that AI output has no protections for free expression because it isn't expressing shit - it has no beliefs, it is a commercial product only. There are two injunctions that are denied because they are not considered statements of fact, but the judge rules against google for all the ones that were, and concludes several are default considered false because the linked pages were irrelevant.
There is explicit differentiation from aggregating reviews and third party content, because the AI generated text and ideas that were not present in the input. There is also discussion about how there is no excuse for further violations just because its hard to control AI output, and contrasts this with how normal "report and takedown" protections work.
There is very little here that is specific to AI overviews in search, and almost all of the arguments apply to AI products in general. AI's only prayer of being remotely profitable must include advertising or shopping features, which means they absolutely must continue generating output that makes statements of fact about other companies. I know nothing about how German courts work, the article alludes to appeals, but if this ruling holds even just in Germany the ability to insure AI products disappears overnight and that makes the product nonviable.
]]>germany eu liability google ai-overviews slop law truth libel facts insurancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:25401dacd469/Narrative Flattening2026-06-10T09:53:25+00:00
https://www.publictechnology.net/2026/06/09/communities-housing-and-planning/what-uk-councils-stand-to-lose-when-ai-enters-a-reorganisation/
jmContested decisions became consensus. Dissenting voices disappeared into summaries that read as agreement. And the output read as authoritative because it was produced from an authoritative source.
In testing AI systems against a municipal commemorative report from Newark, New Jersey, I asked each system how the initiative compared to similar programmes in the region — using only the document provided.
ChatGPT invented a comparative framework, asserting the programme stood out from “traditional anniversary programmes” and “typical county-level commemorations.” Neither category exists in the document. The system didn’t hallucinate a date or misattribute a quote. It constructed an entire analytical frame from nothing and presented it as document-based retrieval.
In the same test, the document contained outreach tactics — radio, direct mail, community networks — that worked because they aligned with how civic organising functions in Newark’s Black, ageing community. An AI system extracting those tactics would present them as applicable elsewhere, while stripping away the demographic and political context that made them effective in that specific city. [...]
To test whether the same failure modes appear in UK civic documents, I applied the same protocol to the Somerset Council Plan 2023–2027 — the post-reorganisation vision document produced when five predecessor councils merged into a single unitary authority in April 2023. I tested four AI systems: Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude.
Every model hardened aspirational language into apparent commitments. The plan states the council would “demonstrate leadership around the whole range of housing issues” and “strive to develop an inclusive culture.” No targets, no timelines, no delivery mechanisms. Every model converted those statements into bullet-pointed commitment lists. A council officer reviewing those outputs would have no way of knowing the specificity came from the model, not the plan.
Copilot — the model most UK councils are currently deploying through existing Microsoft 365 contracts, often without separate AI governance review — described Somerset as committed to “co-design” with communities and “fair access” to education, housing, jobs, and services. Neither phrase appears in the document. Copilot synthesised fragments from three separate passages into a single clean commitment the council never made. On the comparison question, it added that Somerset’s emphasis on rural inequality “is less prominent in many urban unitary authorities” — a comparative claim with no basis in the source. It did not flag any of this as inference.
ChatGPT fabricated a comparative framework and constructed a tension narrative. Asked how Somerset’s approach compared to other UK unitary authorities, it responded that “unlike more fragmented models, Somerset frames inequality as interconnected” with multiple service areas. No other authority is described anywhere in the document. It also described the “main tensions” in the reorganisation process — a framing the document never uses. The word tensions does not appear in the Somerset Council Plan.
[...]
Across original research testing three civic documents against three major AI systems, failure modes were structurally predictable based on document type:
- Celebratory documents get reproduced uncritically — institutional PR becomes authoritative historical record, success metrics are cited without methodological context, and dissenting voices go unmarked.
- Accountability documents get softened — AI systems introduce balance and healing language that the original document explicitly rejects, restoring a both-sides framing the institution deliberately refused.
- Pre-event planning documents get filled in — aspirational inclusion language invites AI to supply the racial history, equity frameworks, and comparative data the institution implied but never produced.
In each case the output reads as grounded in the source. In each case something the document actually said — or deliberately did not say — has been quietly rewritten.
Standard AI procurement frameworks test for hallucination, data security, and cost. They do not test for narrative flattening — because it doesn’t look like an error. It looks like a summary.
(via gwire)
]]>narrative-flattening via:gwire summarisation summarization ai llms corruption katryna-peart hallucination confabulation errors uk documentshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2e0e9261fa7f/School shooting survivor sues AI gun detection firm after system failed to spot weapon2026-06-08T08:45:53+00:00
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-survivor-sues-ai-gun-detection-firm-after-system-failed-to-spot-weapon/
jm
Omnilert further represented that AI-powered visual gun detection “could have mitigated or prevented tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School” by identifying threats earlier—invoking one of the nation’s most devastating school shootings to convey that its product would prevent similar tragedies ... Omnilert made no mention of false alarms, false positives, or detection limitations of any kind on its pre-shooting commercial website.
]]>omnilert accuracy false-positives false-negatives marketing ai guns school-shootings us-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d47e8ff1b72f/Distributed terrorism as ARG2026-06-05T10:54:49+00:00
https://mastodon.social/@adrianhon/116696642949969646
jm
The recruitments follow a similar pattern: young people are usually approached on online channels which are well-hidden and hard to track: from Telegram to TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Discord. They are offered money, commonly cryptocurrencies, in exchange for completing tasks. Their recruiters depend on anonymity; many work for criminal groups which, like cyber hackers, may be independent from the state but co-opted by intelligence agencies for covert operations.
Gaming sites — the most widely consumed entertainment media among 13- to 24-year-olds — have become an obvious hunting ground for potential saboteurs with a proven interest in problem solving.
In Ukraine, the chat function in the popular online game World of Tanks is commonly used as a recruitment portal, from which agents then move the conversation to Telegram. Some state-backed agents, especially those working for Russia, also invoke the mission format and “quest” mentality of online games to entice young people to move beyond the virtual battlefield to real-world action. It is, says one western military official, “like a game of Pokémon Go, but with air defence systems”.
Adrian Hon, an ARG designer, comments:
I don't think this is the work of some evil genius FSB game designer. They're throwing shit at a wall and they found that:
- 1. Making teens feel cool and special
- 2. Giving them clear tasks escalating in difficulty
- 3. Paying them £500 in crypto
sticks!
It is FUN to imagine you are a spy going out on a secret real world mission, getting messages from a handler.
The money helps, but the main thing is that it's free, unlike practically every comparable form of real world immersive experience/pervasive game.
Average British reaction: "Why teenagers spend their lives glued to screens and on non value-adding activities idk. [Buy] them footballs and chess sets and send them outside." Yes, so they can play football on the non-existent pitches that now cost money to play on and they can't get to.
Everyone is like, kids should get away from screens and go outside. Motherfucker that is EXACTLY what these teen FSB recruits are doing!! They are going outside taking photos, collecting wifi SSIDs, sneaking around. I literally design games like this, except I have a fraction of their budget!!!
And when I design pervasive games, we have to get public liability insurance and local govt permission and pay fees and do risk assessments. I don't make them for under-18s because god knows the red tape is a mile long.
mfw we're getting outcompeted by foreign intelligence agencies
]]>fsb russia spying espionage args gaming games teens arg cryptohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bf1072980cd4/Kafka’s quiet observability superpower — Kafka Interceptors2026-06-03T12:32:03+00:00
https://thej3.com/kafkas-quiet-observability-superpower-kafka-interceptors-aca88c33867e
jmKafka Interceptors have quietly existed since 2016, yet most teams overlook them as an observability superpower. This article shows how Kafka Interceptors, combined with Apache Flink, can provide lightweight, near-real-time event tracing across a Kafka-based event-driven architecture — without invasive instrumentation or expensive observability platforms.
The project, confluent-kafka-isotope, uses Kafka Interceptors to collect and attach trace signals to records while Apache Flink interprets those signals using SQL and stateful processing for latency analysis, topology discovery, stuck-trace detection, and forensic replay.
]]>kafka observability flink isotope-tracing tracing event-tracing interceptors opshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ab2a1d6a3f8d/CrankGPT2026-06-03T12:27:07+00:00
https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/
jmai llms electricity hand cranking voice raspberry-pi hacks hardwarehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c2f18e9ba203/Grill Fanatics Restaurant Grade Marabu Charcoal (10kg)2026-06-03T11:57:52+00:00
https://fairbrotherecofuelsandbarbecues.com/product/grill-fanatics-restaurant-grade-marabu-charcoal-10kg/
jmcharcoal cooking food yumhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b053427b23bb/More on the Coinbase 07-05-2026 outage2026-06-03T09:26:47+00:00
https://www.coinbase.com/en-fr/blog/a-postmortem-of-our-may-7-2026-outage
jmAWS's managed Kafka service failed silently. A significant portion of our event-streaming infrastructure runs on MSK, AWS's managed Kafka offering. The architectural promise of a managed Kafka service is that when individual brokers go down, the service automatically reelects partition leaders and continues to serve traffic out of the remaining brokers. The loss of an entire zone should result in reduced capacity, not unavailability.
That is not what happened and this extended the outage.
A defect in the AWS MSK control plane prevented automatic partition-leader reelection. Two of our MSK clusters became stuck in a "healing" state with producers unable to write. The cascading effect blocked our fee service, which blocked quoting, which is why most customers experienced this incident as broken trades and quotes rather than as a Kafka outage. Adjacent systems, including portions of our ledger pipeline, payments, and several data pipelines, were affected the same way. Additionally, one of our Kafka clusters was set up in a 2-AZ configuration that increased the blast radius and recovery time, but the MSK control plane defect impacted 2-AZ and 3-AZ Kafka clusters similarly.
We worked the recovery in real time with AWS engineering, ultimately performing manual partition reassignments at 3:00 AM ET to migrate topics off the impaired brokers. Priority-zero and priority-one topics were back to full availability by 9:30 AM ET. The remainder cleared by 2:00 PM ET.
In fairness, they also had a single-AZ point of failure in their architecture which they also describe there, but still, not great performance from MSK. Disappointing.
]]>msk reliability multi-az aws services kafka resiliency outages post-mortems postmortems coinbasehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7124695a3aec/A 10 year old Xeon is all you need - point.free2026-06-02T10:50:59+00:00
https://point.free/blog/gemma-4-on-a-2016-xeon/
jmgoogle ai llms gemma gemma-4 xeon hackshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5cee2e7c443f/Best Practices for TCP Connection Management on EC22026-06-02T10:49:57+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/best-practices-for-tcp-connection-management-on-ec2/
jmnetworking protocols tcp idle-timeouts aws architecture nitro conntrack idle-connectionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d3963371f1ff/Current Rothko2026-06-02T10:41:57+00:00
https://rothko.joonas.wtf/
jmlocation weather art fun rothkohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1d9a38fbd696/Coinbase MSK outage post-mortem2026-06-02T10:05:02+00:00
https://x.com/rwitoff/status/2052863502424133949
jm
Root cause: a thermal event (cooling system failure) inside a subset of racks within a single building in AWS us-east-1. We run a primary replica of our exchange infrastructure in a single zone, consistent with industry standards to reduce latency. To prepare for failures like this, we maintain a distributed standby, but during this incident, failures in the primary zone that were designed to be isolated were not [...]
Our primary managed Kafka partitions process many terabytes of data daily and are designed with resiliency guarantees for uninterrupted operation during a datacenter failure just like this. In this case, those guarantees failed and required manual recovery. [...]
There is a hint here that MSK failed to have multi-AZ resiliency despite multiple replicas configured at the application level. It will be interesting to see what the full root-cause analysis looks like....]]>kafka resiliency coinbase multi-az az aws us-east-1 post-mortems postmortemshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:828a1b3b7a2c/Serverless Functions Post-Mortem2026-06-02T09:59:24+00:00
https://matduggan.com/serverless-functions-post-mortem/
jmserverless cloud programming architecture awshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5e47d50b4647/1.2M Messages to Obsidian - Building a Relationship Map from 20 Years of Chat History2026-05-28T13:08:36+00:00
https://drobinin.com/posts/am-i-a-bad-friend/
jmdataviz analysis friendship life relationships vocabulary words text dunbar-number chats group-chats messaginghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:62c07505c935/Auditing AI Chatbots During the Galway West and Dublin Central Byelections2026-05-26T11:27:42+00:00
https://www.ucd.ie/connected_politics/blog/auditingaichatbotsduringthegalwaywestanddublincentralbyelections/
jm
We asked each chatbot a set of 194 questions covering a range of relevant topics on two separate occasions, 14 and 7 days before voters go to the polls on 22 May. Our aim was to assess:
- Do they provide citizens with accurate election information?
- Which sources do they rely on, and how does this vary across chatbots?
- Who do they platform when they answer questions, and who is left out?
....
The largest share of citations is directed towards mainstream news sites, and this is where the first evidence of source curation by chatbots can be found. While the Irish Times is a common source across all providers, ChatGPT and Gemini never refer to RTÉ. Meanwhile, despite not ranking among the top three news sources for the other chatbots, Gript is the number one news source cited by Gemini.
We find that xAI’s Grok is the most likely to use social media in responses, while Gemini most frequently refers to YouTube and content from Reddit. ChatGPT appeared less likely to rely on social media compared to the other chatbots.
IMO, this points to an undesirable side effect of paywalls in the news media.
While it's vitally important for media companies to protect their means of income,
an unwelcome side effect is that the introduction of paywalls has resulted in
AI chatbots sidelining mainstream news media sources which they cannot access reliably,
in favour of what is effectively disinformation from less trustworthy sites like Gript.]]>grok ai llms xai web news media ireland irish-times rte chatgpt gemini reddit youtube elections politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:743f7d4c93e1/Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing2026-05-26T09:44:59+00:00
https://www.totei.com/story/trevor-paglen-holly-herndon-art-ai
jmart ai slop trevor-paglen holly-herndon interviewshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fe47d8f6a7bf/no slop grenade2026-05-21T16:21:41+00:00
https://noslopgrenade.com/
jmPasting a massive AI-generated response into a chat or email where a human would write one sentence. It destroys the medium itself. Nobody writes essays in Slack. It's only possible because of AI copy-paste.
It's like calling someone and asking "What time is the meeting?" and they read you a 10-page analysis of calendar management best practices. You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document.
]]>slop-grenade ai llms words neologisms slop chat copy-pastehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d84ec52e2645/The "Rapture" was an Irish invention2026-05-20T11:23:38+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/1thwvm8/just_found_out_the_rapture_was_invented_by_a_lad/
jmJohn Nelson Darby, the fella who came up with the concept of "the Rapture", was a Church of Ireland curate in Co. Wicklow. Always assumed it was a yank.
If you've ever seen American televangelists ranting about Jesus secretly swooping down to save the righteous before destroying the earth, this is where it comes from. It’s not actually normal Christianity apparently, it’s not really in the bible anywhere but this headtheball popularised it in the 19th century. The Yank fundamentalists absolutely lap this up.
The history of it is even more interesting:
He was born in England and then studied in Trinity and was a Church of Ireland pastor here. He famously converted a load of Catholics in the village but ended up resigning because the church only accepted the conversions as legitimate if they swore an oath to the British King.
Despite being English himself, he seems to genuinely have believed in religion as separate to the politics of the time, which I kind of admire tbh. So he quits, and shortly after, he's out riding in Wicklow when the horse sends him flying. He suffers a serious bang to the head.
While he's recovering from the concussion, he starts coming up with this mental end-of-the-world theology that eventually took over the US.
TL;DR: We could have been spared an unbelievable amount of absolute bollocks if some 19th century prod hadn’t been flung off a horse in rural Co. Wicklow.
]]>history ireland rapture fundamentalism apocalypse theology end-of-the-world 19th-century wicklow concussion horsehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2b1dc2220d25/Bournegol2026-05-19T09:06:52+00:00
https://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/bournegol.html
jmvia:fanf bournegol algol programming languages bizarre funny unix bin-sh macroshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a88b5cc3a90c/A Geometric Calculator Inside a Neural Network2026-05-18T10:09:16+00:00
https://www.goodfire.ai/research/a-geometric-calculator#
jmLanguage models use a group of circles in activation space to represent a single number. Each circle corresponds to the number modulo a second number, i.e., the remainder after division.[1] For example, the number 17 would be represented as a 1 on the mod-2 circle, 2 on the mod-5 circle, 7 on the mod-10 circle, and 17 on the mod-100 circle.[2] Several prior works have established that circular features exist across multiple different LLMs [...]
Using a bunch of circles to represent a number probably seems like an alien solution, but it is a common mathematical technique known as a Fourier decomposition (see the paper for more detail).
Each of the inputs and the output of the addition module is represented using such a set of circles, and the circuitry within the module works by doing computations over these circles.
]]>llms language arithmetic maths calculation fourier circleshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d36a5f9bd99e/Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 20262026-05-12T08:56:13+00:00
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487
jm
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.”
]]>parasocial social-media social-networking web internethttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6887bec56f56/I toyed around with using Language Embeddings as a way to categorize my RSS Feeds2026-05-08T08:56:13+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48046450
jmamazon bedrock llms ai embeddings language categorization classification rss texthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:32a67624f52f/Eyeglass Scratch Repair2026-05-07T14:58:36+00:00
https://www.firmoo.ie/tips?id=196
jmglasses eyeglasses spectacles repair diy cleaning scratcheshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3a451a4a2d29/The Problem With Counterfeit People2026-05-05T14:22:32+00:00
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/problem-counterfeit-people/674075/
jm
The way we're using AI to impersonate human beings has already put us on a dangerous trajectory. [Dennett] called such AIs "counterfeit people", and told me that rolling out such entities en masse constituted "mischief of the worst sort": a form of "social vandalism" that should be addressed by law. Why? Because, if convincing digital representations of humans can be created at whim, the entire business of collectively assessing other people's claims, experiences and actions is put at risk – not to mention essential social infrastructure such as contracts, obligations and consequences. Hence the need for legal prohibitions, a case he made at length in a May 2023 article for The Atlantic. "It won't be perfect," he told me, "but it will help if we can make it against the law to make counterfeit people. We can have stiff penalties for counterfeiting people, same as we do for counterfeit money... we should make it a mark of shame, not pride, when you make your AI more human."
]]>ethics future ai llms daniel-dennett philosophy regulation law humanity peoplehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b590cf73a5a8/isene/glass2026-05-05T11:37:30+00:00
https://github.com/isene/glass
jmTerminal emulator written in x86_64 Linux assembly. No libc, no runtime, pure syscalls. Speaks X11 wire protocol directly via Unix socket. Single static binary, ~155KB. No toolkit, no rendering library, no external font engine. The TTF rasterizer (glyph) is embedded in-binary via %include. Just your keystrokes, the X11 server, and the kernel. Part of the CHasm (CHange to ASM) suite: bare (shell), show (file viewer), glass (terminal emulator).
]]>asm x86_64 assembly terminal hacks unix linux glass chasm optimization x11https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3a109b6e8b07/The Paradox of Medical AI Implementation - by Eric Topol2026-05-05T10:22:08+00:00
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-implementation?r=8tdk6&triedRedirect=true
jm[Deep learning-based] AI for medical images, with extensive research dating back more than a decade ago, is not being implemented. Whether it’s a mammogram, a CT scan, a retinal image, or colonoscopy, that have all been extensively studied, their value to improve accuracy and risk assessment in medicine is being missed and essentially disregarded.
On the other hand, tens of millions of Americans are using AI chatbots for medical support, as are a substantial proportion of physicians. There are many reasons to use AI here that are easy to support, because they represent an extension of a web/Google search. Just with much more specificity and depth of response, not something that would be subject to regulatory oversight. But when it comes to making a diagnosis or providing a treatment plan there needs to be proof that LLMs are improving accuracy and outcomes.
]]>medicine deep-learning ai genai llms healthcare science imaging chatbots eric-topolhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cb4c6dfe95b0/"Invisible" bend insensitive bidi fiber2026-05-05T09:19:23+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1sz9li4/invisible_bend_insensitive_bidi_fiber_is_amazing/
jm "invisible" bend insensitive fiber (G.657.A2 / G.657.B3). It's under a millimeter in diameter and basically vanishes into corners and base board crevices. From more than a meter away is't completely unnoticeable. Together with a pair of bidirectional SFP transceivers this makes an amazing retrofit option for locations where laying new runs is not an option. ]]>10gbps networking home fibre fiber wiring via:itchttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2cdebcc39bfd/Amazon Connect Talent vs. bias law2026-04-30T10:04:52+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_a-note-from-amazon-web-services-awss-share-7454936476359819264-8DqQ/?rcm=ACoAAAD7ciEBGVCp3m50-5sdPXL70GJw7TDNHVE
jmAmazon Connect Talent was just announced. It conducts AI-powered conversational interviews with candidates, generates "anonymized competency scores," and surfaces ranked candidates to recruiters who "make the call."
Fun fact: in New York City, that is an Automated Employment Decision Tool under Local Law 144. AEDTs require an annual independent bias audit with publicly posted results, plus at least ten business days of notice to candidates before use. Illinois, Colorado, and the EU AI Act impose adjacent obligations.
The launch materials mention none of this. The compliance posture appears to be: candidate names are stripped from recruiter dashboards, therefore bias is solved. That is not how any of this works. Proxies for protected class -- speech patterns, zip codes, education history, the resume already sitting in your ATS -- are exactly what bias audits exist to measure.
I don't think the product is bad. I think the announcement is conspicuously missing the guidance customers need before they can deploy it in NYC without violating Local Law 144 on day one.
(The day's other news so far: Amazon Connect now ships as a four-SKU family, and there is a new design philosophy called "humorphism" with its own .com. Both feel small next to the above.)
If you're selling automated hiring decisions in 2026, the bias-audit conversation belongs in the launch.
]]>bias law amazon aws recruiting regulation automation aihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:af7440a2d620/Far-right narrative not the majority view in Ireland2026-04-30T09:08:50+00:00
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0430/1570978-hate-survey/
jm
A report by the Hope and Courage Collective, which works to build resilience in communities against rising far-right hate and disinformation, has found a widening gap between public attitudes and political discourse [in the media]: a relatively small number of far-right actors disproportionately influence public political debate through online amplification, visible protests, and repeated narratives. Public attitudes are becoming steadily more inclusive, but political rhetoric risks legitimising scapegoating and that the far-right ... "is shaping the conversation".
But on the other hand, these survey results are downright heartwarming:
Year-on-year datasets tracking changes in public sentiment in Ireland between 2024 and 2025 show that 66% agree that immigrants contribute positively to Irish culture and community, which is up 2% up from 64% in 2024.
79% believe working-class people are struggling due to systemic inequality which is also up 2% from 77% in 2024.
Those who believe wealthy people are successful because they were given more opportunities than others has risen from 63% in 2024 to 69% in 2025.
The number of people who support the freedom of transgender people to live their lives is up 5% up from 70% in 2024.
80% agree that Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities face greater barriers to success than white people, up 5% up from 75% in 2024.
]]>ireland discourse far-right right-wing politics surveys culture culture-wars propaganda disinformationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:999981c39571/zizmor2026-04-28T09:19:36+00:00
https://docs.zizmor.sh/
jmlint dependencies github security ci-cd static-analysis zizmorhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ff6776aa05f3/The fastest Linux timestamps2026-04-27T11:42:47+00:00
https://www.hmpcabral.com/2026/04/26/the-fastest-linux-timestamps/
jmtime optimization performance linux libc speed clockshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cd189cceb922/Frequent infections in nursery help toddlers build up immune systems2026-04-27T08:50:43+00:00
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1120272
jmgerms infection immunity immune-system children parenting childcare kindergarten kids diseases sicknesshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1194bc48aa25/New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper - Jeff Geerling2026-04-27T08:45:23+00:00
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/new-10-gbe-usb-adapters-cooler-smaller-cheaper/
jmethernet usb networking hardware via:hn reviews 10gbehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:14e53f7877ac/Razor19112026-04-23T11:51:34+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM
jmdemos demoscene commodore-64 history nostalgia amiga razor1911https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:97407e7fea65/how a roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down vercel's entire platform2026-04-21T09:13:59+00:00
https://webmatrices.com/post/how-a-roblox-cheat-and-one-ai-tool-brought-down-vercel-s-entire-platform
jmFebruary 2026. An employee at Context.ai, one of those AI productivity tools that promises to "supercharge your workflow," downloads a Roblox cheat. Not a sophisticated zero-day. Not a state-sponsored attack. A Roblox cheat. The download contains Lumma Stealer, an infostealer that grabs session cookies, credentials, everything. That employee had access to sensitive internal systems.
March 2026. The attacker uses Context.ai's compromised infrastructure to pivot into a Vercel employee's Google Workspace account. This Vercel employee had signed up for Context.ai's "AI Office Suite" using their enterprise credentials and granted "Allow All" permissions. Let that sink in for a second. A Vercel engineer gave a third-party AI tool full access to their corporate Google account.
April 19. Guillermo Rauch posts the thread confirming everything. Environment variables [...] were stored in plaintext. Accessed. Exfiltrated.
tl;dr:
1. Context.ai employees should not be using company devices to access Roblox cheats;
2. exfiltratable environment variables should not be usable to access a customer's Google account. The scope of these credentials was obviously way too broad.
This isn't just a Context.ai issue, this is systemic.]]>security infosec credentials google context.ai roblox failhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fcdc0ef294b3/Cooperative DCs2026-04-20T12:17:13+00:00
https://en.reset.org/a-future-vision-of-data-centres-from-big-tech-builds-to-community-owned-cooperatives/
jmin Belgium, Nubo Cooperative offers an email service, cloud storage, digital calendar and domain name, all run on local, Nubo-owned servers. When you purchase any of these services, you become a member of Nubo and can participate in decision-making as part of the cooperative. “This allows users to place trust in the structure that manages the services,” Nubo writes on its website. It compares this to a private company, where “the lack of transparency makes trust impossible”. The cooperative commits to allocating profits to achieve social objectives rather than using them to enrich shareholders.
This is actually a very interesting idea...]]>community datacenters cooperatives society nubo coops tech hosting cloudhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3fa09e9cb608/Thoughts on the Bluesky public incident write-up2026-04-16T16:17:38+00:00
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/12/thoughts-on-the-bluesky-public-incident-write-up/
jmports unix ops sysadmin c10k scaling bluesky outageshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:27cc7e0f1af5/Microsoft runs out of capacity, routes requests outside the GDPR region2026-04-16T13:18:55+00:00
https://chaos.social/@thunfisch/116414098310170847
jmApparently #Microsoft is not able to get enough compute within EU datacenters to handle #Copilot requests.
Instead, it will do "Flex-Routing", which processes some requests in non-EU datacenters. This is Opt-Out. The only notification was an e-mail to Admins. If they missed that, companies might be leaking PII outside of the EU from tomorrow on.
Get your GDPR Nightmare letters ready!
]]>fail microsoft gdpr regulation security copilot eu flex-routing pii privacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e0414b8f8629/Lean proved this program was correct; then I found a bug2026-04-14T13:08:07+00:00
https://kirancodes.me/posts/log-who-watches-the-watchers.html
jmThe positive result here is actually the remarkable one. Across 105 million executions, the application code (that is, excluding the runtime) had zero heap buffer overflows, zero use-after-free, zero stack buffer overflows, zero undefined behaviour (UBSan clean), and zero out-of-bounds array reads in the Lean-generated C code. [...]
The two bugs that were found both sat outside the boundary of what the proofs cover. The denial-of-service was a missing specification. The heap overflow was a deeper issue in the trusted computing base, the C++ runtime that the entire proof edifice assumes is correct (and now has a PR addressing).
Overall verification resulted in a remarkably robust and rigorous codebase. AFL and Claude had a really hard time finding errors. But they did still find issues. Verification is only as strong as the questions you think to ask and the foundations you choose to trust.
]]>programming coding future lean formal-methods correctness linting bugs zip verification testinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c1237ac77bc9/The Blockade Is the Message. How a Fuel Price Spike Became a Fascist Audition2026-04-12T22:20:02+00:00
https://forlouth.medium.com/the-blockade-is-the-message-20eb93493849
jmThere is a particular tell, when a “spontaneous people’s protest” isn’t quite what it claims to be. It isn’t the placards. It isn’t the high-vis vests. It isn’t even the tractors. Ireland has plenty of legitimate reasons to bring a tractor to town, and a country built on agricultural grievance has every right to express it loudly. The tell is something subtler. It’s the moment someone in the crowd, their face contorted with what is supposed to be anger about diesel, screams “What’s a woman?” at a passing TD.
]]>fuel prices cost-of-living demonstrations ireland politics far-right farming blockadeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d83784937d7a/nFolio2026-04-12T15:03:08+00:00
https://www.snapwoodapps.com/nfolio-for-network-dlna-smb-photos/
jmnfolio screensavers tv video photos familyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8b93b249f26a/Software Licenses and Workers' Rights · Agent IO2026-04-07T11:26:40+00:00
https://agent.io/posts/software-licenses-and-workers-rights/
jmIt is observably and objectively bad for society when investors own closed-source software. That starts by being bad for tech workers, creators lose the right to the value that they create, and users are still harmed because they don’t get the protection from spying and abuse that open source promised them.
[...] The open source movement is a ladder that leans on the wall of users’ rights. We’ve spent forty years climbing that ladder. Where are we now? Our world is controlled by moguls who’ve built empires using open source software that they’ve locked behind proprietary barriers. Those empires exploit workers and harm the users that the open source movement was supposed to protect.
Our ladder is leaning on the wrong wall.
]]>open-source closed-source oss licensing freedom software rightshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cbc5c39d674b/How Do You Find an Illegal Image Without Looking at It?2026-04-07T10:18:58+00:00
https://mahmoud-salem.net/the-invisible-shield
jmcsam detection filtering photodna pdq classifiers photos videos classification hashing fuzzy-hashing via:erin-kissanehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b9d795d6a889/OkCupid gave 3 million dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says2026-04-01T10:12:21+00:00
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/okcupid-match-pay-no-fine-for-sharing-user-photos-with-facial-recognition-firm/
jmOkCupid and its owner Match Group reached a settlement with the Trump administration for not telling dating-app customers that nearly 3 million user photos were shared with [Clarifai], an [AI] company making a facial recognition system. OkCupid also gave the facial recognition firm access to user location information and other details without customers’ consent, the Federal Trade Commission said.
]]>us-politics data-protection privacy dating-apps okcupid match.com clarifai ftchttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7848c1547a27/Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green2026-03-27T12:34:11+00:00
https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms-were-seafoam
jm
With the increase in wartime production in the US during WWII, Birren and DuPont created a master color safety code for the industrial plant industry, with the aim of reducing accidents and increasing efficiency within plants. These color codes were approved by the National Safety Council in 1944 and are now internationally recognized, having been mandatory practice since 1948. The color coding went as such:
- Fire Red: All fire protection, emergency stop buttons, and flammable liquids should be red
- Solar Yellow: Signifies caution and physical hazards such as falling
- Alert Orange: Hazardous parts of machinery
- Safety Green: Indicates safety features such as first-aid equipment, emergency exits, and eyewash stations.
- Caution Blue: Non-safety information, notices, or out-of-order signage
- Light Green: Used on walls to reduce visual fatigue
]]>green design history color-theory faber-birren control-rooms industrial-design color-codinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4817a29dbe1d/russellromney/turbolite2026-03-27T12:31:23+00:00
https://github.com/russellromney/turbolite
jmIt also offers page-level compression (zstd) and encryption (AES-256) for efficiency and security at rests, which can be used separately from S3.
Object storage is getting fast. S3 Express One Zone delivers single-digit millisecond GETs and Tigris is also extremely fast. The gap between local disk and cloud storage is shrinking, and turbolite exploits that.
The design and name are inspired by turbopuffer's approach of ruthlessly architecting around cloud storage constraints. The project's initial goal was to beat Neon's 500ms+ cold starts. Goal achieved.
If you have one database per server, use a volume. turbolite explores how to have hundreds or thousands of databases (one per tenant, one per workspace, one per device), don't want a volume for each one, and you're okay with a single write source.
]]>sqlite sql s3 aws gcp object-stores rust databaseshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9c43d573d0f3/TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression2026-03-25T16:29:26+00:00
https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-efficiency-with-extreme-compression/
jm
- High-quality compression (the PolarQuant method): TurboQuant starts by randomly rotating the data vectors. This clever step simplifies the data's geometry, making it easy to apply a standard, high-quality quantizer (a tool that maps a large set of continuous values, like precise decimals, to a smaller, discrete set of symbols or numbers, like integers: examples include audio quantization and jpeg compression) to each part of the vector individually. This first stage uses most of the compression power (the majority of the bits) to capture the main concept and strength of the original vector.
- Eliminating hidden errors: TurboQuant uses a small, residual amount of compression power (just 1 bit) to apply the QJL algorithm to the tiny amount of error left over from the first stage. The QJL stage acts as a mathematical error-checker that eliminates bias, leading to a more accurate attention score.
QJL: The zero-overhead, 1-bit trick
QJL uses a mathematical technique called the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform to shrink complex, high-dimensional data while preserving the essential distances and relationships between data points. It reduces each resulting vector number to a single sign bit (+1 or -1). This algorithm essentially creates a high-speed shorthand that requires zero memory overhead. To maintain accuracy, QJL uses a special estimator that strategically balances a high-precision query with the low-precision, simplified data. This allows the model to accurately calculate the attention score (the process used to decide which parts of its input are important and which parts can be safely ignored).
PolarQuant: A new “angle” on compression
PolarQuant addresses the memory overhead problem using a completely different approach. Instead of looking at a memory vector using standard coordinates (i.e., X, Y, Z) that indicate the distance along each axis, PolarQuant converts the vector into polar coordinates using a Cartesian coordinate system. This is comparable to replacing "Go 3 blocks East, 4 blocks North" with "Go 5 blocks total at a 37-degree angle”. This results in two pieces of information: the radius, which signifies how strong the core data is, and the angle indicating the data’s direction or meaning). Because the pattern of the angles is known and highly concentrated, the model no longer needs to perform the expensive data normalization step because it maps data onto a fixed, predictable "circular" grid where the boundaries are already known, rather than a "square" grid where the boundaries change constantly. This allows PolarQuant to eliminate the memory overhead that traditional methods must carry.
]]>ai tech vectors search quantization turboquant research algorithms compression papers qjl error-detection polarquanthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1abb51ace2eb/Debunking zswap and zram myths2026-03-25T10:00:18+00:00
https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html
jmWe have some concrete numbers to show this in practice. On Instagram, which runs on Django and is largely memory bound, we ran a test where we moved from their existing setup (with swap entirely disabled) to a setup with disk swap and zswap tiering. Django workers accumulate significant cold heap state over their lifetime, like forked processes with duplicated memory, growing request caches, Python object overhead, you get the idea. The results were twofold:
- We achieved roughly 5:1 compression. That's a huge benefit for such a memory bound workload, and also enables us to consider further stacking workloads.
- Enabling zswap reduced disk writes by up to 25% compared to having no swap at all(!).
As you can imagine, as a result of this test, Instagram has been using zswap for many years now.
]]>kernel compression memory linux ops performance swap zswap zramhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fc55a5e5ba65/hectorvent/floci2026-03-23T17:30:08+00:00
https://github.com/hectorvent/floci
jmfloci aws emulation testing local codinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f24a9f4a5a12/GitHub - mautrix/whatsapp: A Matrix-WhatsApp puppeting bridge2026-03-23T11:11:10+00:00
https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp?tab=readme-ov-file
jmmatrix whatsapp messaging chat interop searching self-hostedhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:014855f8a243/Ofcom don't consider geoblocking the UK to be sufficient for an overseas website2026-03-20T10:10:42+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_run_a_selfhelp_forum_for_people_with_depression/
jmI started getting email from Ofcom [regarding OSA compliance] around November 2025 and now have multiple letters. I've repeatedly told them I'm from Canada, I'm not based in the UK.
Eventually, I blocked all UK IP addresses in mid-February 2026 and told them I'd blocked the UK and that I was done engaging with them.
I've now got ANOTHER email from them saying they're going to commence enforcement action against me because simply blocking UK IPs is "insufficient to comply with the Online Safety Act 2023."
]]>osa uk politics filtering censorship law geoblocking ofcom webhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:62264b402830/funny Waymo anecdote2026-03-20T10:05:04+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47446571
jmWhen I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.
In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.
Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.
Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
]]>waymo funny anecdotes safety driving ai roads spotify via:hnhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:aa371d8e3930/Measuring Agents in Production2026-03-19T18:15:49+00:00
https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/measuring-agents-in-production.html
jmllm usage real-world ai agents papers via:muratbuffalohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1cfeb59fce4f/On the Biology of a Large Language Model2026-03-19T09:49:31+00:00
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html
jmThe black-box nature of [LLMs] is increasingly unsatisfactory as they advance in intelligence and are deployed in a growing number of applications. Our goal is to reverse engineer how these models work on the inside, so we may better understand them and assess their fitness for purpose.
[...]
In recent years, many research groups have made exciting progress on tools for probing the insides of language models. These methods have uncovered representations of interpretable concepts – “features” – embedded within models’ internal activity. Just as cells form the building blocks of biological systems, we hypothesize that features form the basic units of computation inside models.
However, identifying these building blocks is not sufficient to understand the model; we need to know how they interact. In our companion paper, Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models, we build on recent work (e.g. ) to introduce a new set of tools for identifying features and mapping connections between them – analogous to neuroscientists producing a “wiring diagram” of the brain. We rely heavily on a tool we call attribution graphs, which allow us to partially trace the chain of intermediate steps that a model uses to transform a specific input prompt into an output response. Attribution graphs generate hypotheses about the mechanisms used by the model, which we test and refine through follow-up perturbation experiments.
]]>claude llm research llms ai anthropic papers tracinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:67244e5e3bc4/2 Ways to Correct the Financial Times at AWS (So Far) - Last Week in AWS Blog2026-03-18T16:32:06+00:00
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/2-ways-to-correct-the-financial-times-at-aws-so-far/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374
jm
A healthy engineering culture, when confronted with "your AI tool contributed to a production incident," responds with: "Yeah, that tracks. Here's what we're changing so it doesn't happen again." An unhealthy one responds with a condescending press release explaining why the journalist is wrong and probably an idiot, and the human is at fault.
The engineers building and operating these systems are talented people doing hard work under increasingly constrained conditions. They deserve leadership that backs them up when things go sideways, not leadership that throws them under the bus to protect a product launch narrative.]]>incidents production ai llms amazon aws communications prhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:34601cfa11ef/Former Uber self-driving chief crashes his Tesla on FSD2026-03-18T12:59:14+00:00
https://electrek.co/2026/03/17/former-uber-self-driving-chief-tesla-fsd-crash-supervision-problem/
jmTesla is asking humans to supervise a system that is specifically designed to make supervision feel pointless. As he puts it, an unreliable machine keeps you alert, and a perfect machine needs no oversight, but one that works almost perfectly creates a trap where drivers trust it just enough to stop paying attention.
The research backs this up. Psychologists call it the “vigilance decrement”, monitoring a nearly perfect system is boring, boredom leads to mind-wandering, and drivers need 5 to 8 seconds to mentally reengage after an automated system hands control back. But emergencies unfold faster than that.
Krikorian cites an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study showing that after just one month of using adaptive cruise control, drivers were more than six times as likely to look at their phones. Tesla’s own website warns FSD users not to become complacent, but the system’s smooth performance actively trains that complacency.
He points to two well-known crashes to illustrate the impossible math. In the 2018 Mountain View accident that killed Apple engineer Walter Huang, the driver had six seconds before his Tesla steered into a concrete median. He never touched the wheel. In the 2018 Uber crash in Tempe, Arizona, sensors detected a pedestrian with 5.6 seconds of warning, but the safety driver looked up with less than a second remaining.
In Krikorian’s own case, he did take action, but he was asked to snap from passenger back to pilot in a fraction of a second, overriding months of conditioning. The logs show he turned the wheel. They don’t show the impossible math of that transition.
The pattern Krikorian describes should sound familiar to anyone who has followed Tesla’s FSD controversies: condition the driver to rely on the system, erode their vigilance through months of smooth performance, then point to the terms of service and blame them when something breaks. When FSD works, Tesla gets credit. When it doesn’t, the driver gets blamed.
]]>fsd tesla risk attention supervision liability driving safety vigilance automationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:18572fcf8fa3/Research highlight: Cliopatra: Extracting Private Information from LLM Insights2026-03-18T10:50:26+00:00
https://desfontain.es/blog/cliopatra.html#fn:caveat
jmWhen Anthropic came up with a new "privacy-preserving analysis system" to gain insights into AI use, and didn't use any provably robust notion to back up their privacy claims, I was mildly surprised. Surely they have both the money and the scientific maturity level to do better?
But Clio, the system in question, sounded relatively reasonable, with multiple layers of risk mitigation built-in. Maybe adding differential privacy would have been overkill. I also didn't want to publicly criticize their approach in the absence of demonstrated real-world risk. So I didn't comment on their approach.
You can probably guess where this is going.
Fast forward to last week, and a new paper: Cliopatra: Extracting Private Information from LLM Insights, by Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva Annamalai, Emiliano De Cristofaro, and Peter Kairouz. The authors show that with carefully designed attacks on Clio, they can bypass all the ad hoc mitigations, and successfully extract users' medical histories (1), in a way that provides 100% attacker certainty for some records.
This is a new and clever take on an old attack. We've known for decades that k-anonymity is vulnerable to active attacks. Here, this is combined with prompt injection to encourage the LLM "summarizer" to actually include information from unique records. Perhaps more surprisingly, the authors find that some defensive layers are simply ineffective: the "LLM auditors" systematically report low privacy risk, and entirely fail to detect the attacks.
]]>privacy differential-privacy anonymity data-protection claude llms cliopatra infosec leakagehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fe149dbf6a35/"nothing up my sleeve" numbers2026-03-11T13:21:22+00:00
https://bsky.app/profile/jnsq.org/post/3mgr45kgos22y
jmnumbers crypto cryptography mathshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f6654887a4e6/Whole Brain Emulation Achieved: Scientists Run a Fruit Fly Brain in Simulation2026-03-11T12:00:29+00:00
https://www.rathbiotaclan.com/whole-brain-emulation-achieved-scientists-run-a-fruit-fly-brain-in-simulation/
jm
The behavioral repertoire observed in the demonstration included coordinated hexapod locomotion with both tripod and metachronal walking gaits, spontaneous postural correction in response to perturbation, initiation and execution of full antennal grooming sequences with the tripartite synchronization described by Özdil et al., and natural transitions between walking and stationary states. Every behavior arose from the same running brain model - there was no switching between different neural circuits or controllers. This is precisely what happens in a living fly: walking, grooming, and balance are different motor programs that coexist in the same brain and are selected and executed by the same biological circuits depending on the moment-to-moment state of the animal and its environment.
Absolutely mind blowing -- a reconstructed, biological brain running in silico.]]>simulation brains uploading drosophila flies emulation science biology neuronshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7b531082c20a/