Imagine the following situation: your company receives a ZIP file with an invoice, and you're the person responsible for checking if all the details are correct, before sending it off to the payment department. You open the archive, and there's a single PDF inside. You view it, and all the details match—your company's details, seller's company's details, items and total amount are what's expected, and even the bank account number is the same as on previous invoices from this company. As everything looks good, you forward the ZIP with the invoice to the payment team, and move onto reviewing other incoming invoices.

A few days later you receive the same invoice again, but you already have it in the system. Just in case you reach out to the payment department whether it's been paid, and they confirm it has—great, no action required.

Another month passes by, and you get a "payment due" reminder. What's this? You remember it being paid already, so what gives. You ask the payment team, they again confirm the invoice was settled. You phone the seller about this, but they say they received nothing. So you head down the hall to the payment department, you open the invoice on your laptop, and start going through the details with them. But what's this? The destination account number and amount in the wire transfer and the invoice don't match! The payment team manager's face gets a bit red—seems like it was their mistake? But no! They show you the invoice, and the amount and account number match the actual payment... but it doesn't match what you see on your screen! How can this be?

Both of you re-download the ZIP archive from the email you've forwarded and open the PDF inside. And there it is—you see two different invoices. What in the world is happening?

Immediately you report it up the chain, and your boss's boss gets a pair of IT forensics consultants on the job. They investigate, and later you learn that your company has been scammed with a pair of different invoices hidden inside a schizophrenic ZIP file. This means that you—on your work laptop running a certain software stack—saw and approved the correct invoice. But the payment team—running a different software stack—saw the fake invoice inside the ZIP, which they thought was what you had approved. Even later on you find out that the seller's company has been partially compromised and a lot of their customers got fake invoices. But that's water under the bridge at that point, and the money your company transferred is long gone.

Technical details → https://hackarcana.com/article/yet-another-zip-trick

They stole all your codes, art, books, videos, and everything else out there. This solution doesn't fix anything. It might help newspaper sites where they write fresh news or detailed reports. But that will only be for the top 100 news sites. The rest of the artists and writers are doomed already because there is no law in place. I can't wait to retire, which is a few years away, and never have to look back again. But, it is the next generation of people who are going to struggle a lot :(

Ach sehr schön, das @Weizenbaum_Institut streamt die Veranstaltung heute abend mit @alex zum Buch "The AI Con" von ihr und @emilymbender

Intensive Empfehlung:

https://www.weizenbaum-institut.de/veranstaltungen/detailseite/the-ai-con-how-to-fight-big-techs-hype-and-create-the-future-we-want/

Das #Rechenwerk in #Halle braucht mal einen kleinen Gefallen: Wir haben da eine #Robotron K1840 stehen, ein #VAX 11/780 Nachbau.

Uns fehlt eine seltene Platine um den Rechner starten zu können.

Wir haben einen Händler in den USA ausfindig machen können, der die benötigte Platine hat, sie aber nicht auf dem Postweg nach Deutschland versenden kann.

Wir brauchen nun eine Person, die für uns die Platine mal bei passender Gelegenheit mit nach Deutschland bringt.

Interfaces are for people. The fewer people can use an interface, *the less it is an interface*. There is no more important measure of interface quality than accessibility. https://front-end.social/@heydon/114754750942586329

A friend asked my opinion on an op-ed in the New York Times today, written by a scholar whose work was much cited by the majority in Friday’s birthright citizenship case. I’m not naming the scholar or linking to the op-ed because, as I told my friend, I think the scholar is disingenuous - his defense of the opinion cannot be taken seriously. All this just by way of background …. 1/

Jemand Lust, sich mit automatisierter #Sacherschließung, #MachineLearning und #NLP Methoden und #Annif zu beschäftigen und mit dem @fidromanistik und mir zusammenzuarbeiten? Hier eine Gelegenheit mit 0,75% E13 (leider befristet, I'm sorry):

https://openbiblio.social/@fidromanistik/114740241054397290

#DigitalHumanities #bibliojobs

I had a great conversation with @baratunde on Life with Machines about the millions of data workers worldwide who produce the data that fuels AI. We dug into the scale of this labor, its deeply human costs, and the possibilities for something better.

Watch it here https://youtu.be/4NSWFy11E8Q?feature=shared

🚨 Attention Berlin!

Next Monday, June 30th, I am thrilled to welcome @alex to the @Weizenbaum_Institut for a conversation about her book, THE AI CON (co-authored with Prof. Emily M. Bender).

Don't miss it! Register here to attend: https://tickets.weizenbaum-institut.de/sgvbf/

we have got to stop talking about open source software this way man. someone who published work with an explicit label on it saying "this comes with absolutely no warranty" and is not being compensated is not part of a "supply chain" https://abyssdomain.expert/@filippo/114723318068853623

Stellenausschreibung: Teamleitung Bibliotheksmanagementsystem (E13)

In der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg ist schnellstmöglich folgende Stelle zu besetzen: Teamleitung Bibliotheksmanagementsystem Die Stelle ist: unbefristet Vollzeit/Teilzeit Stellennummer: J000034547 Die Ausschreibung richtet sich an: Alle Interessierten Entgelt-/Besoldungsgruppe: EGr. 13 TV-L Bewerbungsschluss: 29.06.2025 Ausführliche Informationen zur Bewerbung entnehmen Sie bitte diesem…

https://blog.sub.uni-hamburg.de/?p=40449

Heute aus unserer Reihe
Wir suchen Verstärkung - Stellenausschreibungen der VZG:

Das FOLIO-Team der VZG freut sich über neue Kolleg*innen - bei Fragen könnt ihr uns gerne auch auf der BiblioCon 2025 am Stand AG Verbund (D05) ansprechen.

Alle Stellen der VZG sind hier zu finden: https://karriere.niedersachsen.de/dienststellen/verbundzentrale-des-gbv-2.html

Wade and found wanting: Two fishermen set off at dawn in handmade dugout canoes on Lake Dembel, one of Ethiopia’s Central Rift Valley lakes under threat from pesticide pollution from nearby farms.

Photo: Marco Simoncelli/AFP

The Index: Issue #103

The Index #103 is here, featuring conversion optimisation, CSS transforms, Eleventy, Safari's lethargy and how an online publisher is dealing with the bad times.

https://piccalil.li/the-index/103/

"This is open-source software written by hobbyists, maintained by a single volunteer, badly tested, written in a memory-unsafe language and full of security bugs. It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data. As such, we treat security issues like any other bug. Each security report we receive will be made public immediately and won't be prioritized."
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913

Since I've left my last job, I've been thinking about the guy who used me as an alternative to ChatGPT whenever he hit a problem that he couldn't vibe code the answer out of at work.

He basically rotted his own brain by compulsively using ChatGPT in lieu of actually thinking with most any of the projects he was working on. Instead of taking the time to read through code in our framework, look up documentation, or do any sort of debugging, he instead just begged and pleaded with ChatGPT to try and get somewhere because "it was faster." Basically just really hammering his brain with the Programmer's Slot Machine. (@davidgerard wrote a really good article here about this specific gambling addiction angle here. I highly highly recommend reading/watching the corresponding YouTube video:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ )

Back to the story; When that wasn't working, which was a significant portion of the time, he'd then just turn and use me as a "more informed alternative" to ChatGPT.

I worked fully remote and the majority of our interactions was via a Teams chat. which apparently crossed some wires in his monkey brain and made him start just... Basically verbally barraging me like he would with the company ChatGPT instance. No thoughts at all, just an immediate process of:

- Ask vague question
- Get guess for an answer with a request for more details
- Try applying the guess blindly without thinking if it's applicable at all
- Have it not work and just report back that it didn't work.
- No follow-up details, no further explanation of what was going on or what he's trying to do. Nothing added past the original vague situation
- If lucky, I might get a screenshot of part of the error, meticulously sliced before it gave something useful in the output because he stopped reading error output to things and made no attempt to understand it. (Why? ChatGPT can do that part!)
- Rinse and Repeat until I get fed up and get into a call with him
- Fix the thing in less than a minute, pointing out that he should have been able to tell what was wrong almost immediately if he actually dropped a break-point and debugged the code at *literally any point* along the way
- Fuck off immediately after getting his fix, no thank you or anything
- start the process anew the following day when he vibe coded himself into a corner all over again

I literally had to go to leadership and make them have a talk with him and get him to leave me the fuck alone at work, after repeated attempts to establish boundaries about it, due to how much time it sucked out of me being able to work on other projects. Effectively just doubling up my work and slamming me with burn out right at the start of the year for absolutely no reason other than his belligerent insistence to just Not Do His Job Without His Hand Being Held By A Chat Window.

It rapidly went from a "He sometimes asks informed questions that I can answer and help him with. I enjoy working with him" to "The dude isn't even trying in the slightest and is now basically offloading his work onto me because he broke his capacity to actually do work independently of an external chat window. I fucking hate him and I hope he gets in a car wreck so I can get a break from the bleakness of dealing with him every goddamn morning"

ChatGPT has basically just been an absolute blight for me since it's inception. Going from the team being generally pro-crypto to intensely pro-genAI/LLM because their favorite scammers (er.. I mean YouTubers) had them hooked on a fantasy of some day making it Big by jumping from one Hype cycle to the next. I sincerely was very close to just finding an entirely different career path altogether because of just how incredibly shitty it was working with that team on just about anything, but lacking the job experience on the resume to land someplace else.

Nobody wanted to be an actual expert, nobody really wanted to learn anything. They had their degree and ChatGPT, which means they learned all they ever will need. ...While working in an industry that tends to re-invent itself every half decade or so while half-assing solutions with an outsourced bullshit generator. 🫠

All in the name of "Well it got me from point A to point B faster." and leaving it at that, despite taking significantly longer than they should have from the get go over it.

I've seen and lived what an AI Fueled future looks like:
Mediocre men harassing their talented and likely autistic peers until their peers just up and fuckin leave to a different organization out of frustration and exhaustion.

I think down the road, we'll be able to measure the negative impact using LLMs has on people's cognitive faculties by comparing it to horse kicks to the head, and only be exaggerating it by a little bit.

"AI bots that scrape the internet for training data are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, and are in some cases knocking their collections offline"

#AI is ruining our digital world

(Original title: AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums)

https://www.404media.co/ai-scraping-bots-are-breaking-open-libraries-archives-and-museums/