Peter Bhat Harkins ✔️

researchers when they discover their work is embedded in a larger system

We have not kept this exquisite spite business alive for 18 years just to let a moral panic take it out without the mother of all fights first, and the people manufacturing this moral panic can fucking kiss my fucking ass, I'm too invested at this point to just hand them the win.

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

I suppose LLMs are especially likely to plagiarize authors directly back to them because the words and style in authors’ prompts can’t help but move the LLM close to their work in vector space.

If anybody knows someone up for fighting the Illinois version of this, please put me in touch, I run lobste.rs.

Those who used the Agents became mighty in their day, managers, directors, and tech leads of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing. They had, as it seemed, unending productivity, yet code became unmaintainable to them...

I have new contacts and glasses coming and I am so excited for them, it's like anticipating a new album from a favorite band. After decades getting ripped off by the Luxottica monopoly, new lenses feel like a such a ridiculous bargain for such higher quality. brb gotta reload the usps tracker

how it feels to get better at AI coding

it's so strange how like at least 60% of the time when someone makes a claim about "making invalid states unrepresentable", what they actually mean is using a representation with many perfectly representable invalid states that are just hidden behind an abstract type and a smart constructor

Second print run of this lovely edition of Lovelace's translation and notes announced this morning: buddybindery.com/products/ada...

My pet theory is that holding the phone horizontally near your head is entirely learned from reality tv shows that cheaped out on audio setup.

i need you all to promise me that you’ll be normal about what i am about to say: i saved a lot of tokens in my gemini seed rule by telling it to believe that we are both girls

Weird new habit: when I tag a github issue with 'good first issue', I leave the tab open so I can come back to it in an hour to quickly ban the bots that have opened terrible slop PRs. Maybe Microsoft should make this the first useful Copilot+ feature.

An odd habit from listening to podcasts on earbuds and skipping past their ads is that when I call some customer service line and get put on hold, I immediately reach up to the earbud to try to skip past its ads and muzak.

I'm in the market for a "team brain" for a small company (<10 people). Wishes: - Ability to dump in PDFs, spreadsheets, text files, URLs, etc - Fast, accurate, and up-to-date search to answer questions like "where's the latest employment contract template?"

interesting; it looks like Anthropic quietly pulled their donation of $150,000 in AI token credits to Omarchy. they no longer appear as a patron and this announcement post has scrubbed any mention of them. backlash… kind of works sometimes?

This 2006 video on Chicago's Deep Tunnel project is wall-to-wall uncle rambling, truly beautiful representation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvl9...

youtu.be/DjhRRj6WYcs?... is an incredible introduction to things you may take for granted, including the job queue being a literal queue. Maurice Wilkes was still turning up to Computer Lab happy hours on Friday afternoons to have a beer well into his 90s. Fucking legend.

“If this is an emergency, hang up and call 911.” Is it common that your medical office’s phone treee is going to be how a patient learns about the existence of 911?

Caught a tiger train this morning, feels lucky. chi.streetsblog.org/2020/02/21/r...

I don't want iphone duo I want iphone halfo. Make another mini you cowards.

Intrusive ID collection has become normalized enough that I just got a phishing email that went straight for demanding I upload a government ID to them. Button in the email goes directly to this form, zero attempt to build credibility or increase urgency.

If you've used Link, Stripe's fast payment system that's on lots of online checkouts, you're defaulted into them selling your data. Not really clear to me in thousands of words of policies if that's just name + address or includes everything you've bought. app.link.com/settings/dat... to opt out.

Publication Gets To Age Where It Echoes A Bit

Fifteen years ago in a basement barbershop the size of a phone booth under a Madison hotel, the barber offered me porno mags to read during the trim, gave me a cucumber from his garden, and then went on a racist rant about black people being criminals. I did not tip. I did take the cucumber.

Yet another instance of the EU's "reining in Big Tech" laws killing off another Small Alternative because dealing with the DSA is too onerous for labor-of-love hobby forums to deal with

you know, if he hadn't just written a post about exterminating the roma, him repeating "clowns" across multiple interviews wouldn't have reminded me of www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwat...

This is a lovely read about saving a business that's keeping the world weird: www.inc.com/sam-blum/the...

As Anthropic's quota promotion ends I need to make one point very clear to the critics who say "this is all a bubble, demand is subsidized by VC funding": it's not a "bait and switch" if you can buy the bait, it's "dumping". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-an... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping...

Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform By now... https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/26/meta-just-paid-nearly-17-billion-to-make-sure-it-gets-to-write-the-kid-safety-rules-for-every-other-social-media-platform/

And because the grids aren't aligned, you get stuff like 1615 Howard in Evanston being located directly across the street from 2617 W Howard in Chicago

Big release day for Apple products. Most important: the new Polishing Cloth dropped from $19 to $9. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_P...) In seriousness, if you wear glasses, a polishing cloth works better than a shirttail and won't take off coatings. The price joke is over; it's useful & reasonable.

The best deal in error monitoring is ending. I told him for like a year to end it and move to annual so perhaps this is a little bit my fault.

Fix code review bottlenecks by doing like private torrent trackers and only allowing people to get their PR reviewed if they reviewed enough PRs beforehand to keep their ratio high enough.

Please let me design an operating system. I am normal and can be trusted with a couple billion dollar annual budget.

The utility of racial supremacism lies in the belief that there is some innate quality to one race that elevates it above all others, regardless of any lack of achievement, merit or aesthetic appeal. Supremacism is literally and specifically an ideology for losers

Although there have been changes in cognition and systems theory, I wanted to bring up some stuff Rasmussen published in the 80s that was really elegant. I'll use 3 diagrams he published, covering the ideas of abstraction hierarchies and how people operate systems when troubleshooting them.

The last few months have been about building strong foundations and ergonomic improvements. I wrote about why I built the language, and EYG got a shoutout in a conference talk. This shout out wasn't even from me. eyg.run/news/edition...

it was already a close race, but now it’s a dead heat OpenAI announces two more accidental felonies openai.com/index/third-...