LLMs are like slot machines, in that an incorrect answer (the slot machine eating your dollar) is unremarkable, while the LLM solving a problem (a jackpot) is amazing, and the latter stands out in your memory, causing you to overestimate the reliability of LLMs.

Deciphering Glyph :: The Futzing Fraction

Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.

Delta airlines has announced a new surveillance pricing plan: they're going to feed an AI the nonconsensually harvested personal data that data-brokers and credit bureaux hold on you to predict the maximum you're willing to pay, and then price their tickets accordingly:

Fortune

Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket | Fortune

The airline touted a partnership with an AI-enabled revenue system as a step on the road to fully personalized ticket pricing, part of its goal to ...

-- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: Delta’s AI-based price-gouging (30 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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In reading a fascinating and important discussion of the lack of a termination clause in the new Mastodon.social Terms of Service, I was GOBSMACKED to discover that the new ToS including a "binding arbitration waiver," which takes away your right to sue, no matter how badly the service abuses you. These are profoundly unethical, terrible clauses. They should never, ever appear in "adhesion contracts" (that is, contracts that you merely click through, rather than negotiating.)

If there's anything that illustrated the hollowness of the Democratic Party as an effective opposition for me, it's this. Yesterday, I watched a video of a sitting US Senator being thrown to the ground and cuffed by fed goons for asking questions of the fed official he has direct oversight authority over. Within minutes, I'd gotten DOZENS of texts from Dems and Dem orgs asking for $5-$50 to "fight fascism." That's it. "Are you terrified that your country is slipping into fascism? Pay me."

Trump's coalition includes a huge number of people who will suffer terribly from his policies, but who voted for him anyway. Trumpism requires that he find ways to keep those Christmas-voting turkeys happy, or at least distracted. -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: Trump can’t do ANYTHING for his base (12 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Now, that's an audiology bargain!

I'm trying to extract this video of a speech I gave last night (I want to extract the audio and put it in my podcast):

2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture: Cory Doctorow

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist Cory Doctorow presents the 2025 Ursula Franklin Lecture.

Every. Single. Vimeo. Downloader. Fails. They all give some variety of 404 or 505. Does anyone have a RELIABLE Vimeo download recipe that works with THIS file? Thank you!

Let me tell you about the most wasteful US federal government spending I know about. It's a humdinger. You and everyone you know are mired in it for weeks, or perhaps months, every year. It will cost you, personally, thousands of dollars over your lifetime. I'm talking about filing your taxes. -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit (11 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

The American Prospect

Maureen Tkacik, Author at The American Prospect

- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: “The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets” (07 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto - trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

Pluralistic: The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (09 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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911 words (30817 total) on Enshittification (a nonfiction book about platform decay) #DailyWords Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

Let's take a sec here and notice something *genuinely great* happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of *major*, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, *with* the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, *that* Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up! 1/

I can't get a definitive answer on whether TV static (see attached) constitutes a strobe effect that could endanger people with photosensitive epilepsy. Anyone know? PEAT (the only tool that measures this, seemingly?!) is Windows-only and won't run under WINE.

Even Google admits - grudgingly - that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

Google for Developers

What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies | Google Search Central Blog | Google for Developers

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