Please help if you can: I am working with some students who are studying programmers' beliefs about software engineering folklore. If you can spare a few minutes to answer the question in https://survey.bth.se/survey/2545, we would be very grateful. We would also be grateful if you could circulate the survey link to colleagues and friends - we would like to reach as diverse a demographic as possible. Thanks in advance.

Some Stanford researchers dredged out the absolute dregs of r/AmITheAsshole for all those stories where _zero_ humans supported the poster, where one hundred percent of them said yes, you are unambiguously the asshole, and fed them into LLMs as first person scenarios to see what the LLM had to say.

Unethical, harmful, cruel, criminal, didn't matter: the slopbots took the faux poster's side about half the time.

Edit: preprint on arxiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01395

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352

i didn’t think it was physically possible, but there’s finally something worse than curl | sh

Job news!

Starting this week I’m switching back to an individual contributor role to work on Lightwell. (https://www.redhat.com/en/lightwell)

Still working to figure out the shape of the new job, but the essence is: we intend to make this good for upstreams. Not as a “way to give back” or mere marketing claims, but because that’s the only way this works long-term. I’m going to help make that intention into fact.

Convinced that home assistant is a covert operation to sabotage productivity of people who would otherwise spend weekends inventing things

How chocolate is made, in case you're curious (a thread):

Cacao grows within about 10° of the equator. The trees are WEIRD-looking small trees and the fruit kind of grows straight out of the trunk and large branches. Fruit growing out of a trunk looks very wrong to me but I have no complaints about the result.

The fruit is a pod, shaped like and slightly smaller than an American football or rugby ball. Like so many other fruits, it contains a number of seeds, each with a thin shell of its own, embedded in pulp. (Does this make it technically a berry? I find I'm curious without actually caring.) The pulp is edible and can be pressed for juice, but spoils very quickly, so it's not typically eaten outside chocolate-growing areas. I've had the juice once (from a carton, far from the equator) and it was … okay. Kind of fruity/musky, a little sweet and a little tangy and with a pronounced "damp basement" note. I'll pass.

(1/9)

PSA: uBlock Origin's EasyList has an AI Widgets option that doesn't get turned on by default, including if you had other EasyList items selected already before it was added.

Enabling it removes a number of various AI buttons, nags, prompts, etc. across various sites.

#AI #LLM #Firefox

See page 20, but here's CISA pointing out that the OSI's (frankly dishonest and cowardly) decision to bless "open weight" models as "open" was not just wrong but dangerous.

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2026-07/open-source-software-security-principles.pdf

I hate this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ITCareerQuestions/comments/1vbsrpf/comment/p0w8t1z/?context=3

RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116811128152569506

Some great alternative terms and phrases to communicate about "AI" without adopting all the misleading marketing terms:

"artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation"
"prompt → text input"
"answer → output"
"chatbot / conversational agent → conversation simulator"
"who’s right? → is the machine output correct?"

(& more in the article)

Imagine getting the brief to write some copy on a fucking bin bag and then smashing it out of the park like this. Sensational effort.

It never ceases to amaze me how today's techbros vision of the future they want defaults to fully automated leopard-face-chomping neo-feudalism rather than fully automated luxury gay space communism

Just an idea for UK/EU digital legislation.

All non-FOSS, proprietary mobile apps must have a web alternative. This will allow people to use services without relying on Apple/Google services and telemetry via a phone web browser of their choice (rather than having to download the app).

Yes - there'll be plenty of cases where this can't happen, but I think it's a good starting point.

#FOSS #Android #Apple #Google #UK #EU #Apps

When Prague decides to paint the sky…

Charles Bridge, the Vltava River, and a sunset that feels almost unreal. ✨
This bridge has watched over Prague for more than 600 years — and somehow, every evening still feels new.

📸 My Prague

#photography

I think my favorite thing about my tiny corner of this here fediverse is that silly is fine, goofy is fine, horny is fine, but bullshit is not.

I have a great love and respect for everyone who has played a part in bringing me this incredible gift.

it feels like everyone with even the most remote, faintest security inklings has been screaming 'SANITIZE YOUR INPUTS' and a bunch of folks went .. NUH UH. not only are we gonna not sanitize shit, we're gonna invent a tech that CANT TELL if something is input or output! NYEAH!

and now it runs everything

Torment Nexus™️LLC - the professionals choice.

One of the open source projects I used to (many years ago, so I am not really affected anymore) has recently decided to allow AI contributions. One of their arguments is that they judge submissions on quality, not tools used.

Back when I was an active contributor (to the project and maintainer of some other parts of the surrounding ecosystem), I got a lot of submissions that were bad.

The thing is, I absolutely loved getting these because they always came from super-enthusiastic junior people. Reviewing them and giving feedback often too much longer than implementing the feature myself. The same was usually true for the next contribution too. But that shifted over time. After a few months, I started getting patches where I didn’t find anything beyond the cosmetic that I wanted to change.

Going back further, I was one of those people when I started contributing.

Measured as code contributions over the short term, maintainers working with submitters of poor-quality PRs is a waste of time. You’re taking time away from writing code to do something that produces code more slowly.

Measured over the long term, the results are very different. Far more code in that project and closely related parts of the ecosystem has been written by people who I mentored when they came along with some bad code than by me.

It’s never a waste of my time to turn an enthusiastic and incompetent contributor into an enthusiastic and competent contributor, it’s an absolutely critical part of building a healthy project. I wouldn’t have got nearly as much out of F/OSS on a personal level if I hadn’t encountered a lot of people with the same opinion when I was one of the enthusiastic and incompetent newcomers.

But LLMs are not like that. If I spend time reviewing LLM-generated code when it would have been faster to write it myself (which, to be clear, is the case on 100% of LLM-submitted PRs I’ve seen so far), then that’s just a time sink. It’s also taking away time I could be spending helping new contributors who want to actually improve, rather than just take the review comments, feed them into an opaque system, and give me back the results.

Reading (too much) AI-news is quite upsetting if you try to square it with observed realities of what people are actually achieving (not much). Here @ludicity assures us that we are not wrong. The world of business is no longer able to meaningfully evaluate AI or even talk about it coherently: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

I've been spending rather too much of my time reading the depressing threads on LLM use in the kernel. But I thought that this contribution from Lyude Paul worth the investment.

"For many people who need their jobs, guidelines around acceptable use of these tools beyond "a person needs to own the the code" may end up being the only thing allowing employees to be responsible with their contributions without repercussion from employers."

https://lwn.net/ml/all/3a5d891b536588e8e4fc84d60a5c8af72091d852.camel@redhat.com