Quinn Comendant
LightNews LightNews
banner
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Quinn Comendant
@com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
33 followers 8 following 420 posts
I live in remote places and complain about internet connectivity. Perpetual traveller, more-or-less living out of a suitcase since 1999. Founder–engineer at […]

🌉 bridged from https://mastodon.social/@com on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Quinn Comendant
pikesley.mastodon.me.uk.ap.brid.gy
Sometimes I just get an idea and it won't go away
The end scene from Planet Of The Apes, on the beach, but the Statue Of Liberty is now the XKCD All Modern Digital Infrastructure thing
November 28, 2025 at 11:18 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Here are 3× free three-month trials of Kagi Professional: https://kagi.com/p/THANKSGIVING895970C2B6 🎁

If you use the code, leave a reply. Code expires soon. #Kagi #privacy
Kagi Search
Better search results with no ads. Welcome to Kagi (pronounced kah-gee), a paid search engine that gives power back to the user.
kagi.com
November 27, 2025 at 1:59 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
First time I’ve seen Cloudflare's blame screen point back to them.

I can imagine 1% of how stressed their team might feel right now. #hugops
Screenshot of a browser window showing Cloudflare’s “Internal server error” screen with: - You: working - Cloudflare: error - Host: working
November 18, 2025 at 2:18 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
[covid, non-severe illness]

My latest unwanted achievement: my first covid infection, unlocked via antigen test. Just got back from a trip where I relaxed my “mask when indoors and >10 people” policy, switched to a vibes-based policy, and I regret it.

I’m […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
A QuickVue covid antigen test showing a blue and red line. Screenshot of an Apple Watch’s Vitals app. It shows 4 metrics well outside normal range (resting heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, and SpO2) and 1 metric in range: sleep duration.
November 15, 2025 at 11:44 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Anthropic releases their most obedient cyberslave yet: Sonnet 4.5.

https://assets.anthropic.com/m/12f214efcc2f457a/original/Claude-Sonnet-4-5-System-Card.pdf
#anthropic #claude #llm
Bar chart comparing AI behavior across four Claude models in six categories. Shows Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 have highest rates of misaligned behavior (around 35%) and brazen misalignment (around 19%), while Claude Sonnet 4.5 shows lowest problematic behaviors across all categories. All models show relatively low rates for intentional deception, self-preservation, cooperation with harmful requests, and anthropic sabotage. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.
September 29, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by Quinn Comendant
tomgauld.bsky.social
My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com
Night time. Three figures walk up a set of stairs. They are in fact Penrose stairs, an impossible object which one can walk up endlessly. Low on the side of the stairs is a window. Another figure leans out and shouts up at the walkers: “Guys! I'm sure it's not easy being trapped in an endless paradox representing the limited nature of human perception, but some of us are trying to sleep down here!”
September 21, 2025 at 1:30 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
I suspect a conspiracy… 😅

@emcro @kylebshr @expenses
#iOS #ios26 #indiedev
A screenshot of the iOS App Store updates page shows three indie apps with new releases for iOS 26, including updated icons designed for the new OS’s liquid glass UI. They’re all using the same shade of purple.
September 15, 2025 at 7:00 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
This is the most complicated lodging check-in procedure I've ever seen. It even *requires* using Microsoft Teams. https://sen-retreat.com/stay/takahara/
A screenshot from the website showing the Check In Procedure with four steps and photos: 1. Enter the PIN number provided in the advance email and unlock (photo of what looks like a telephone booth with a door). 2. Read the QR code on the left tablet and enter information (a person inside the booth). 3. Launch Teams on the tablet on the right and talk to the operator (a person launching Teams on an ipad). 4. Enter the facility by entering the PIN number provided by the operator (a person entering a PIN on a keypad).
September 14, 2025 at 4:13 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web (unaffiliated) applies the same principles to web typography: https://webtypography.net/toc

#design #typography #webdev

https://mastodon.social/@com/113439823928491052
Table of Contents | The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
webtypography.net
September 11, 2025 at 6:21 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
[#USPol, #misinformation]

4.5%. We’re doomed.

https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/nearly-two-thirds-of-americans-believe
As in July, nearly two thirds of Americans (64 percent) said they believed at least one of the three false claims to be true, and 95.5 percent either believed or were unsure of at least one claim. ⁠⁠Just 4.5 percent of respondents could correctly identify all three claims as false.⁠⁠ A wide margin of Americans (73 percent) believed (35 percent) or were uncertain (38 percent) about the claim that photos and a video circulated in June and July 2025 showing Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein with underage girls were authentic. In fact, analysis by AI detection tools found that these images and the video were generated by artificial intelligence. Respondents had the highest rate of correctly identifying the claim as false (39 percent), that Donald Trump declared martial law to address crime in Washington D.C. in August 2025. But 34 percent of Americans believed the claim and 27 percent were uncertain. For the false claim that “The $100 million raised for victims of the 2025 Southern California wildfires by California charity FireAid has gone missing,” the majority (61 percent) of respondents were unsure, with 19 percent responding true and 20 percent responding false.
September 9, 2025 at 8:53 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Stratosphere Laboratory’s excellent “Introduction to Security” course is coming back this year: Sept 25–Jan 8, and it’s still free. It’s a comprehensive base for getting started in cybersecurity. Highly recommended.

My post about it last year…
https://mastodon.social/@com/113213312251167423 […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
September 9, 2025 at 12:24 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Apple Maps’ “Look Around” feature is incredible – its LIDAR point cloud rendering is clearly a generation step above Google Street View (predictably: 2019 vs 2007 tech). Moving through Tokyo is like exploring on an open-world game platform.

Also cool that […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
September 6, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Quinn Comendant
shine-mcshine.neopaquita.es.ap.brid.gy
cuando me preguntan que por qué no me voy a bluesky
Meme de dos paneles de la película Rogue One. En el panel superior el Director Krennic, rodeado de soldados de asalto imperiales, pregunta "Mastodon? Really? Man of your talents?" y en el panel inferior Galen Erso contesta "It's a peaceful life"
September 3, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Reposted by Quinn Comendant
n-dimension.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy
#3iatlas is outgassing so much CO2 that 👉IF👈 it actually is an alien, 40km sized space ship, it could contain 10 million beings packed as densely as Manhattan.

NASA pointed the James Webb telescope at it, and it took them two weeks to release a heavily pixelated photo.

If it is an artifact […]
Original post on infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
August 27, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Quinn Comendant
n-dimension.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy
Picture this: you're examining what you think is a regular snowball, only to discover it's breathing fire and bleeding liquid mercury. That's essentially what's happening with 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar visitor that's making astronomers question everything they thought they knew about comets […]
Original post on infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
August 29, 2025 at 2:10 AM
Reposted by Quinn Comendant
dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
"Open"AI is scanning its users' chats and reporting them to the cops.

https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police
OpenAI Says It's Scanning Users' Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police
For the better part of a year, we've watched (and reported) in horror as more and more stories emerge about AI chatbots leading people to self-harm, delusions, hospitalization, arrest, and suicide. As the loved ones of the people impacted by these dangerous bots rally for change to prevent such harm from happening to anyone else, the companies that run these AIs have been slow to implement safeguards — and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has been repeatedly implicated in what experts are now calling "AI psychosis," has until recently done little more than offer copy-pasted promises that the company is "working on […]
futurism.com
August 28, 2025 at 11:44 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
New #claude T&C require toggling a checkbox to disallow sharing your chats and code: https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls #privacy #llm #claudecode #agenticai
A screenshot of Claude’s “Updates to Consumer Terms and Policies,” which says: > Allow the use of your chats and coding sessions to train and improve Anthropic AI models The checkbox is enabled by default, which allows sharing.
August 28, 2025 at 8:21 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
After reading this article, I feel like I might be able to get some shit done. But watch me as I post about it on Mastodon instead.

https://contemplationstation.substack.com/p/how-to-pay-attention-again-the-neuroscience
#productivity #mentalhealth #adhd
In the Moment (Micro-Wins for Distracted Brains) Name the tug. When you feel the urge to switch tasks or check your phone, pause and label it: “distraction impulse”. This tiny act of awareness reactivates your prefrontal cortex and gives you a choice.Change the channel, not the habit. Your brain isn’t just seeking distraction - it’s seeking stimulation. Replace doomscrolling with a more grounding form of novelty: a walk, a stretch, a song you haven’t heard in years.Create a “landing strip”. If your brain is bouncing from one thing to another, give it a soft place to land. That could be a sticky note saying “just this one little thing”, a 10-minute sand timer, or a favorite “getting in the zone” song (think: lo-fi beats, forest sounds, or this ambient jungle jazz 90’s DNB that makes answering emails feel like hacking into the mainframe). The goal: make focus feel like a soft return, not a hard reset.
August 28, 2025 at 12:06 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Stop Talking to Technology Executives Like They Have Anything to Say

https://www.stilldrinking.org/stop-talking-to-technology-executives-like-they-have-anything-to-say
When Altman goes on to compare Marvel movies with fake social media, he illustrates that he truly does not understand the problem he is invested in exacerbating. A Marvel movie cannot lie to us in any important way. It’s the difference between entertainment and documentation: we expect to be misled for the purpose of entertainment, and rightly decry illusion in what is presented to us as documentation. Social media has always muddled this demarcation, to the evident detriment of our faith in any kind of information. If Altman thinks it’s fine to make this worse, he can converge on my balls. A better question, or at least a question related to these problems, might have been: ⁠⁠Now that the individual experience of quantifiable knowledge is predominantly filtered through a shrinking variety of companies and devices, what do we do when there’s no way to reliably map that experience to the shared reality we used to know and love?⁠⁠ Altman’s not qualified to answer this either, and nobody in tech wants to address it because it’s another scary and unprecedented thing making a small number of people rich, so we end up with “What’s, like, real, man?”
August 27, 2025 at 5:53 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Here’s a new study that explains the mechanisms enabling LLM sycophancy: it’s a structural side effect of RLHF. Models are trained on human ratings that reward responses which “cater to user beliefs or expectations, even when these deviate from truth.” The […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Conclusion This study provides a mechanistic explanation for sycophancy in LLMs, showing it is opinion-driven, not authority-driven. Models consistently agree with incorrect user opinions regardless of their claimed expertise, as they fail to represent authority internally. In contrast, user opinions actively suppress the model’s learned knowledge in later layers, validated by causal activation patching. The study also identifies a powerful perspective-driven effect: first-person prompts (“I believe…”) induce significantly more sycophancy than third-person ones (“They believe…”) by creating a stronger override of the model’s internal knowledge.
August 25, 2025 at 5:47 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
You ever accidentally go to the wrong airport for an international flight but were lucky enough to find a taxi driver who woke up with a mission that day and drives like an action film at twice the speed limit to the correct airport and you actually make your flight?

Yeah, i still cant believe […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
August 17, 2025 at 6:16 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
@phanpy I'm noticing duplicate posts when following a user + a hashtag used by that user. Didn't notice this before, so maybe a regression?
A screenshot of phanpy showing the same Mastodon post twice: - One is shown because I follow the user. - The other is shown because I follow a hashtag included in the post.
August 14, 2025 at 11:09 PM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Does this product exist? I need it!

- For long-term/scope creep projects.
- Threaded chat UI where team discusses requirements and design (engineers, designers, managers, and maybe clients).
- A project specifications document is automatically created/kept up-to-date with #ai.
- View and chat […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
August 10, 2025 at 1:23 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
GPT-5 Thinking mode feels weak. I get shallow, rushed replies. Is its router sending work to mini and nano to save compute? #chatgpt #ai
August 9, 2025 at 3:25 AM
com.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
The Groq API has OpenAI’s new open-weights models. I’m getting 1,200 tok/sec for gpt-oss-20b. It costs $0.10/0.50 per megatoken (about the same price as gpt-4.1-nano). https://console.groq.com/docs/model/openai/gpt-oss-20b #llm #groq
OpenAI GPT-OSS 20B - GroqDocs
GPT-OSS 20B is OpenAI's flagship open source model, built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 20 billion parameters and 32 experts.
console.groq.com
August 6, 2025 at 4:03 AM