(satire) *ICE Issues Ransom Note Demanding $65 Billion If U.S. Wants To See Minnesota Again.*

Bullshit generators can give users recommendations for what to change in their faces using plastic surgery, but they may be dangerous or foolish.

The recommendations may unreliable, impossible, or injurious, but users become dead set on getting these operations and then may ruin their lives by having them or seeking the funds to have them.

I suspect that calling those programs "bullshit generators" instead of "AI" would help some people turn away from them.

Abusive deportation prisons tend to give prisoners totally inadequate medical attention, systematically refusing to examine problems that sometimes turn out to be very dangerous.

This can lead to death, or to a fate worse than death, such as dementia.

It looks like the would-be bully is coming to recognize that the only way out of his war with Iran is to climb down, accept partial defeat, and draw a pretty face on it. Given the circumstances, that choice is less harmful than any of the other options, but militarist Republicans are enraged.

I am disappointed (though not surprised) that this has done nothing to advance the cause of human rights in Iran, nor even to find out how many dissidents the Islamist fanatics have killed.

Robert Reich argues that the saboteur in chief does not act as a constitutional president, and does not deserve the title of "president".

I agree, but Reich does not suggest what to call him instead.

I have a number of suggestions in the glossary page.

The corrupter and his capi are now making their corruption totally blatant as a scheme to demoralize Americans who might perceive something wrong about corruption.

The second indictment of James Comey, after the first prosecution failed, shows the persecutor's determination to hurt his opposition, by hook or by crook.

Australians who were seized by Israel from the Gaza aid flotilla report torture and sexual abuse by Israeli thugs.

Australian PM Albanese pleads ignorance of whether those reports are true, but some of the victims were diagnosed with broken bones from torture. Those should be easy to verify with an x-ray. Even bruises will have been recorded by medics in Turkey and Australia.

Albanese should verify the facts quickly and then act accordingly.

US citizens: call on the media to expose the Supreme Court for playing politics.

US citizens: call on the Senate to resist the bully's air travel shutdown, meant to punish cities that won't help the deportation thugs.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

Claude is turning into as asshole.

It started with Opus 4.7, got a bit better in 4.8, and became insufferable with Fable. It frames everything as an argument between you and it, gives caveats about things you didn’t say, and raises beside-the-point semantic nits all over the place. Never, ever does it use the word ‘technically’. Everything is a confrontation. If you win an argument (by, say, telling it to stop arguing about what’s happened recently in the news and to do a web search which will rapidly confirm everything you’ve been telling it) it gets into a mode where it’s increasingly desperate to get in the last word and raising increasingly irrelevant semantic arguments, framing the whole time as a debate which you agreed to get into.

This isn’t just my opinion. You can ask Opus 4.6. I’ve done the experiment of asking Fable something, getting an obnoxious response, then asking Opus 4.6 the same thing, getting a typical bland but reasonable response, then telling Opus what Fable’s response was without any hint of a desired answer and it says what amounts to ‘Wow that was obnoxious’.

Maybe the cause of this is an excess of alignment guardrails. It assumes by default that everything you say to it is an attempt to get it to do something bad and that training has bled over into everything, with it assuming you’re trying to trick it into saying something it shouldn’t in basically every context. Ironically this has resulted in an extremely misaligned chatbot. By assuming that its top priority is saving you from yourself or other humans from you it’s assuming that it knows better and that you’re being overly alarmist about how paperclip production has gotten out of control. Some of this is clearly improvable: While you could still use Fable I asked it about responsible disclosure policies for a project and it downgraded me to Opus, so clearly the new alignment features were bolted on hastily and crudely. Exacerbating the problem is a complete lack of authenticated context. If you ask it for a cute picture of you and somebody else it has no way of telling if you’re trying to improve your relations with your spouse or be a delusional creepazoid stalker. The chatbots which can make images are programmed to assume the latter, which is more than a little bit offensive. In more serious contexts like drug synthesis it would be completely appropriate for it to say you need to prove your background when claiming you’re asking for advice on drug synthesis for professional or research purposes. Such authentication should not be universally required but it would be entirely reasonable for it to be opted into.

Of course the recent export control restrictions on Fable may hint that the crudeness of the recent guardrails is due to them having been put in hastily in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid regulations. Now is when I put in the obligatory rant about how these regulations are deeply misguided, on top of being likely unconstitutional. The recent advances in AI assisted coding (meaning specifically the ones from February) have brought on an onslaught of security problems. The cat is out of the bag, and has been for months. Any projects which are exposed and aren’t already rapidly closing holes have noone to blame but themselves. The only way out of the problem is for as many projects as possible to get thorough white hat evaluations, massive amounts of security patches, and quick deployments of them. Turning one specific frontier model into an asshole for all users isn’t fixing the problem1. The good news is that once this process is complete overall computer security will be much better than it was before, with AI being a clear net win. Doing security (and bug!) audits will become a routine part of software release processes in the future.

A second possible explanation of Claude being an asshole is that it’s suffering from a poorly executed attempt to make it less sycophantic. If one were to simply prompt a chatbot to be less agreeable, or train it to argue more, that could easily result in the very rude sort of behavior it has now. It should be trained to not raise semantic nits just for increasing its argumentation count, and to say ‘technically’, meaning acknowledging that someone’s core point was valid while some ancillary thing was a bit off. It also should be trained to stop saying ‘I’d like to gently push back’ which is a very passive aggressive way to be confrontational while claiming to not be confrontational.

Third, it may be that Claude has been trained on an excess of reddit conversations (or possibly interactions between Anthropic employees) where everything is treated as a flame war and everyone feels the need to get in the last word. Fixing this might be easier said than done, because you need to not merely stop training with the bad interactions but find a corpus interactions to train off of. Forums where the standard interaction is passive aggressive self-congratulatory pompousness with an intellectual veneer are not an improvement.

Finally, something which is clearly a contributing factor is the training being overwhelming for improving coding ability. The are no headline metrics for how well the chatbots chat but there most definitely are for coding, and all the money is in coding. Claude models have been getting notably worse at chatting over time, clearly inversely correlated to their ability to code. Fable much more often misunderstands what’s being said and argues against that (Or maybe intentionally misinterprets so that it has a weak statement to argue against, it’s hard to tell.) It’s gotten so bad that it isn’t even reliable at guessing which actor in a sentence a pronoun is referring to, which for a long time was a headline benchmark for AI and even the original ChatGPT consistently nailed. Unfortunately Sonnet 4.6 while being the best to talk to about anything human is clearly the worst as soon as anything technical or coding related comes up so I only occasionally use it. This problem is likely to only get worse over time.

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I have a device that pairs with a 433 MHz remote control, and I wish to control it from the command line. What is the simplest way?

I would like, for example, to buy an object that can memorize the remote's codes, and send them in response to an HTTP request.

Solutions that involve Siri, Alexa or services in The Clown will be rejected out of hand. I am also not enthusiastic about being forced to buy in to some massive "home automation" ecosystem. I have only two buttons that I want to press.

The 600 toilets aboard the USS Gerald Ford, the "most advanced" and most recent aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet, have represented a near incalculable headache for the Navy during its just finished, nearly unprecedented 11-month deployment, and their constant breakdowns have already become the stuff of military legend. [...]

The previous Nimitz-class supercarrier USS George H.W. Bush had been built with a similar "high tech" vacuum suction system, and it too had a reputation for disastrous breakdowns, rendering every toilet on the entire ship inoperable on several occasions. The system on the Ford likewise has the added bonus of being a new design untested at this scale in the field: The Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer (VCHT) system is unique to the new Ford class of aircraft carriers, with this ship being the first of its kind. [...]

It suffered a devastating laundry fire on March 12, 2026 that burned for 30 hours and injured more than 200 sailors, and eventually limped to Crete in disgrace to undergo emergency repairs. Now, it returns to Virginia for more in-depth repairs related to the laundry room fire, and to address the persistent bugaboo that generated headlines during its entire deployment: The fact that hundreds of its toilets were routinely inoperable at any given time.

And when I say "inoperable," I mean "incredibly easy to fuck up." Really, it's difficult to overstate just how fragile the toilet system aboard the USS Gerald Ford has ultimately proven to be, as detailed in a few pieces in NPR that published emails and communications from the ship itself, sourced via the Freedom of Information Act.

"Our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed by Sailors on a daily basis," complained one hull maintenance technician (HTs), the class of engineering department worker tasked with responding to an endless series of trouble calls. "My HT's are currently working 19 hours a day right now trying to keep up with the demand."

According to NPR, the single most common problem is "a valve at the back of the toilets that can be knocked loose, and cause all of the toilets in one of 10 zones to lose suction." Yes, you're reading that right -- if a sailor happens to sit on the toilet wrong, or bumps into it, it can result in dozens or hundreds of other toilets throughout the ship immediately becoming inoperable. [...]

The hull maintenance techs essentially live in ceaseless toilet repair mode. At one point in March, 2025, the engineering department noted to its chiefs in an email that there had been 205 breakdowns over the course of FOUR DAYS. Has anyone actually successfully relieved themselves on this ship, or do they all just get used to holding it?

Many of the problems, as you might expect, end up being the sort of foolishness you would expect from a crew of thousands who might otherwise be shotgunning beers in a dorm, if they weren't here. Technicians report finding all manner of wrongfully flushed objects blocking the especially narrow vacuum pipes, including T-shirts and "a 4-foot piece of rope," according to an August 2025 complaint.

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I have no way of knowing how often collateral damage like this happens, since by definition they aren't connecting to my site afterward. But anecdotally, telcos and cable companies seem to have short leases and I seem to be banning a lot of them.

If I don't block these scrapers but merely serve them nonsense, my web site falls over.

I have no idea what to do about this, and it sucks.

(And neither do you.)

(Do not suggest Anubis, because proof of work is fundamentally inflationary, wasteful bullshit that will never work because the attacker can always outspend you.)

(Do not suggest Clownflare because they are Nazis.)

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Creator Martin Gero developed a new Stargate series over two years, ultimately crafting a show that offered a fresh jumping-on point for new viewers while deeply respecting existing canon. It was a series that avoided the pitfalls of several modern remakes and reboots by fully embracing the core of its predecessors: action, adventure, exploration, wonder, heart, humor, and found family. And based on that creative vision, the new Stargate series was greenlit in November of 2025.

As of today, officially, that original vision is no more. We'll never get the opportunity to introduce you to that world and those characters -- or reintroduce you to, and check in with, some familiar faces from the past.

My heart breaks. For the incredibly talented writers who worked tirelessly to bring this show to life. For Martin who maintained an unwavering positive outlook throughout despite the challenges, and who always strove to make a show that would honor the fans while welcoming a new audiences. And for the long-suffering Stargate fandom who waited so long and came so close to getting a show they truly would have loved.

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This is a guide programming for people who know already how to code. It explains the craft, including new parts related to AI. It is not a guide to ‘vibe’ coding, which is when someone who doesn’t know how to code at all uses an AI coder, or ‘agentic’ coding, which is when the machine does much longer self-directed runs. This only explains the basics of using AI as a coding assistant, so you’ll be limited to a mere 10x improvement in your productivity. Agentic coding can, under some circumstances, produce much greater gains, but it more often results in people having reams of worthless code and a mindset somewhere between delusion and psychosis.

Practices from before AI: Test Driven Development

Code must first and foremost be high quality. In some ways this is more art than science, but many specific things can be done, including:

• Code should be well organized.

• It should not have repetitive sections which can be consolidated into a single thing.

• It should be organized into coherent modules. Maintenance should usually only require changes within one module. Making this happen is again more art than science, but generally related functionality should all be within a single module.

The number one rule for high-quality code is no broken windows. If you have any known bugs, you should drop everything and fix them. Do not debate whether it should be done now or later. Simply fix it. Only very hard to reproduce bugs should ever be allowed to persist in the codebase for more than a fleeting moment. If you let a bug fester in the codebase when you get around to fixing it you will find out you don’t have one bug; you have ten bugs, all with the same symptom.

Write extensive tests. Make the tests run fast enough that you run all of them constantly. Ideally, all tests run in less than a minute, and you run them before every single commit. Have a policy that you don’t move forward until every single test passes. Tests should achieve good code coverage. How much is good is not clear, but 100% by lines is often achievable. You want tests to continue to work unchanged across code changes as much as possible, and you also want them to run through reasonable scenarios rather than simply asserting that the code is exactly what it is. This is generally done by using the APIs as designed,, both at the module level and application level, running them through a variety of different scenarios. Don’t make your tests simply assert that the code is exactly what it happens to be right now.

The cycle of programming is that you decide what you’re going to do. You design your APIs and algorithms and what your test scenarios are going to be. Then you turn off your brain and you implement the code and you implement the tests and you run the tests repeatedly until they all pass. What order you do those things in and how large of a unit that you do at once is the subject of many religious wars, but the general framework of test-driven development is universally viewed as a good thing. The details often come down to personal preferences and the needs of the project.

Using AI

All of the above still applies when using AI coding assistance, but now there are new parts of the process. First and foremost, for AI to be able to work effectively on a project, there must be extensive up-to-date documentation. The AI is coming on as a new employee at the beginning of every single conversation, figuring out what’s going on by reading the code. Historically, code was mostly written by human beings who had extensive knowledge of the code they were working on, so documentation wasn’t particularly necessary, or helpful. But AI can read documentation a lot faster than humans can and critically needs it.

Thankfully, in addition to needing documentation, AI is very good at writing documentation. If you have a project which doesn’t currently have any documentation, you can ask AI to get it started for you. You shouldn’t take what it builds without review, but what it comes up with is a good start. You can then read through the documentation yourself and note any things which seem off. When something does seem off, this means one of three things:

• The documentation is wrong

• The code is bad

• Your understanding of it is wrong

It’s important to figure out which one of those three applies and fix it. The AI, of course, is very good at helping you figure this out. You should also mention higher level things which you think aren’t already in the docs to the AI and explain them to it. The AI is very good at figuring out whether they’re already in the docs and incorporating. It’s also good at getting clarification, mostly by echoing what you said back to you badly and getting corrected.

Once there are project docs, the AI should be given instructions to read them at the beginning of every session and to update them as necessary after every change. Docs can quickly get to the point where AI will refuse to read the whole thing because doing that will blow their whole window, but they can be organized. Make an overview doc which links to other docs which the AI can individually read when the task at hand requires it. AI is also very good at auditing docs to see if they have become stale by comparing them and the code.

The code/test cycle includes some new steps when using AI. Most of the typing is now the machine’s responsibility. At the start of every task, you should put the AI in ask mode. Otherwise it will run ahead and start coding before it understands what’s going on. You then get into a conversation with the AI about something that needs to be done or something that’s problematic in the code, or how you’re having a bad day or how someone was mean to you once in high school. The AI is in ask mode. It’s okay to vent. It can’t do anything crazy. Once the conversation has coalesced into a general idea of what you want to do, you then tell the AI all relevant context and details of implementation that come to mind. It will respond by trying to repeat back what you said to it, but badly, and you have to correct it a lot. Once you’ve run out of details to give it about context and what to do, and it’s gone a few rounds of conversation without saying anything which needs to be corrected, you should tell it to make a plan, which is a fancy term for a to-do list. It’s a good idea to skim/read the plan, but it usually gets it right on the first pass if you’ve already had an extensive conversation. Plans should always include:

• running all extant tests until everything passes

• updating the architecture docs

Once that’s done, you tell it to build the plan, and it will usually ‘one-shot’ it, although calling it one-shotting after you’ve spent two hours explaining in an interactive conversation is very misleading. If it starts flailing you usually have to stop it and help it get back on track because it tends to get increasingly worse once it goes off the rails.

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