Compuguy 💻 😺

FYI to anyone reading this, Benj Edwards said Kyle had no role in this error:

bsky.app/profile/benj...

I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026

I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026

I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026

Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)

I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...

this is so funny, god bless louise lucas, Hero of the Commonwealth

🫡

3 dogs waiting on treat. McKellan sitting on a rolled up rug

McKellan has been taught “sit” on the rug to wait to go out. He’s meeting the exact letter of the law sitting on the rolled up rug

Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 Look. All technology comes with a learning curve.

Cops were frequently getting caught planting drugs in 2017 because body cameras were new and many of them didn't understand how the technology worked.

When cops hit "record" it saved the 30 seconds from *before* they hit the button. Eventually, they figured it out.

search showing bitcoin is down to $63,500, down 13% today

margin call, gentlemen

White House ‘can’t guarantee’ ICE won’t be at polls The federal government has historically recognized polling places as off-limits for immigration enforcement precisely to avoid deterring lawful voters.

🚨BREAKING: The White House Thursday refused to rule out the presence of immigration enforcement at voting locations this November, a response that follows extremist rhetoric about placing federal forces at the polls. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Good. "But DHS isn't just ICE, it's also..." nope, wrong. DHS no longer serves any useful functions, the whole thing has been reassigned to repression. FEMA isn't even paying out to states. All DHS does is shooting, teargassing, facial recognition, and administrative warrants. Shut it down.

JUST IN: A federal judge has barred ICE and DHS from using taxpayer information provided by the IRS.

Judge Talwani says that DHS' view that noncitizens lack 4th amendment rights — combined with ICE use of administrative warrants — is a recipe for abuse.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

i got a few "i don't get it, ICE might be going too far but don't we have to have a way of removing illegal immigrants?" type responses to my charity drive announcement video and the answer there is no you do not. nobody illegal. don't care what the law says

Claire Lehmann: Who would be a good person to write an essay about the Epstein story being a moral panic?

Charles Manson.

I mean, Taibbi is right there and waiting.

Talked this week about why removing the fascist boot from your neck will help you find a much bigger audience and, also, your soul.

"There's a reason the Washington Post is going to die before The Onion becomes one of the biggest newspapers in the country: They licked the boot, and we kicked back."

Here's what Republicans think is "unrealistic"

1) Need a judicial warrant to enter private property
2) Require verification that someone is not a US citizen before sending them to immigration detention
3) No masks
4) No secret police: Officers must have ID
5) Keep enforcement away from

as a longtime McMegan watcher she has a sort of self imposed dimly malicious stupidity that is impossible to come by naturally. normal brains don’t get like that

ok, whoa. the DOJ just told me that the unredacted version of the document in question contains an image of a victim’s face overlayed on the face of the Mona Lisa image. so, that's why it's redacted. jesus christ

Having literally written the book on the National Prayer Breakfast -- borne of the idea that God cares more for the rich and powerful than everyone else -- I can say this is the rare instance where Trump's grotesqueness is deeply appropriate.

WTF? I'm a 50 year old man and as far back as I can remember, including when I was in high school it was *obviously* wrong and fucked up for older men to be targeting high school girls.

People claiming it's somehow normal are trying to cover for predators. This isn't some new way of thinking.

She's 16. It's not like she's four. And we have now really shifted on how we think about that, I think, in a good way. Right. Right. I do not think that 50 year old men should be having sex with 16 year old girls. But I think that you're not going to find the evidence of a pedophile ring where he is actively trafficking these girls because until Me Too... It's not like a pedophile, right? There are 16-year-old girls around who are vulnerable and can be exploited, but not in this, like, there is a mastermind who is going on the dark web and selling these girls to you. They're just around, and they're close enough to the age of consent that a lot of people probably felt like it was okay to hit on them.

This level of apologia (from Megan McArdle in a podcast with Josh Barro and Ross Douthat) is fucking appalling. Idk what else there is to say.

I asked Claude to implement something and it spat out the most convoluted (but working) 200-liner. I asked "wouldn't something like this be simpler?" and gave it about 15 LoC.

It goes "oh yes, that would be" then proceeds to commit MY OWN CODE with this at the bottom, the fucking audacity.

Why nobody really knows the scale of the U.S. housing crisis Experts say the U.S. needs an additional 2 million to 20 million homes to fix the shortfall, underscoring the challenge of meeting the nation’s housing needs.

"Why nobody really knows the scale of the U.S. housing crisis -

Experts say the U.S. needs an additional 2 million to 20 million homes to fix the shortfall, underscoring the challenge of meeting the nation’s housing needs."

www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

The head of a weary black and white tuxedo cat peeks out of a carrier.

He had the dignity to be affronted when I poked at his paw. He liked his forehead being scratched but not his chin. He allowed himself to be taken out of the carrier to lay on a soft blanket. I said a prayer for him but I think he was an atheist. He was polite about it. /11

Today I was walking back from an errand when I woman flagged me down and pointed at a cat laying at her feet. A black tuxie, very skinny and very much worse for wear. “I would take him but he won’t let me pick him up,” she said. “Really?” I said, and cradled my sweatshirt around him. /1

150 days of Kavanaugh stops, and it just keeps getting worse Kavanaugh stops would always be bad. As a tool in the Trump administration's authoritarianism arsenal, they are worse. The consequences are everywhere.

NEW: 150 days of Kavanaugh stops, and it just keeps getting worse.

Kavanaugh stops would always be bad. As a tool in the Trump administration's authoritarianism arsenal, they are worse. The consequences are everywhere.

This evening, at Law Dork:

Subprime mortgages but for rent, brilliant

Minute Maid discontinues frozen juice concentrate after 80 years The process to make juice concentrate was invented by the research team C.D. Atkins, Edwin Moore and Louis MacDowell in the 1940s.

The iconic, slush-filled tubes of orange juice concentrate, which have been around for 80 years, are being discontinued, the Coca-Cola Company says.

Yup (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

Folks, please do not try and “cure” autism with raw camel’s milk

Just because RFK Jr took down the warning about the dangers of unproven remedies like raw camel’s milk, it does not mean they are safe and effective!

At the same time, the extent of the Washington Post layoffs highlight how it didn't matter how hardworking, loyal, smart, collaborative, award-winning, competitive, knowledgeable and devoted so many of the staff were. It wasn't enough to prevent being laid off by one of the richest men in the world.

the Epstein files are really devastating because they remind me of how many girls and women miss out on professional opportunities, mentorship and careers because of how many powerful, rich and influential men only view girls and women — and interactions with them — through the lens of sex