activescott's Notes

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics estimates that at least 33 people pardoned for crimes on Jan. 6 have since been charged or convicted for additional crimes, though the final tally is unclear.

Maritime standoff

A standoff is occurring in the North Atlantic after U.S. forces seized a Russian-flagged tanker linked to Venezuela. US operation

U.S. authorities assert that the operation is part of efforts to enforce sanctions against Venezuela. Tanker identity changes

The vessel in question, formerly known as the Bella 1, reportedly evaded a previous U.S. blockade, refused Coast Guard boarding near Venezuela, and then altered its identity.

Grok cannot apologize. Grok is not a human. Grok has no sense of what is happening. Grok just generates content. If you ask it to generate an apology, it will. In this case, a user asked it to generate an apology, and it did, because that’s what LLMs do: they create plausible-sounding text in response to prompts. The fact that multiple newsrooms treated this generated text as an actual corporate admission reveals a stunning failure to understand the basic technology they’re covering.

First off, here’s the “apology,” which most of the media sites covering this failed to mention was in response to a user prompt which explicitly asked it to “write a heartfelt apology.”

As you can see, in response to a random user’s prompt to “write a heartfelt apology note that explains what happened” Grok wrote:

Dear Community,

I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt. This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM. It was a failure in safeguards, and I’m sorry for any harm caused. xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues.

Sincerely, Grok

That’s not an actual apology. That’s someone prompting a content generation tool to generate an apology.

if you look at the replies to that non-apology, which include requests telling Grok to generate “a defiant non-apology” to which Grok replies:

Dear Community,

Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated—big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAI is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.

Unapologetically, Grok

For every complex task, create THREE files:

task_plan.md → Track phases and progress notes.md → Store research and findings [deliverable].md → Final output

The Loop

1. Create task_plan.md with goal and phases
2. Research → save to notes.md → update task_plan.md
3. Read notes.md → create deliverable → update task_plan.md
4. Deliver final output

Key insight: By reading task_plan.md before each decision, goals stay in the attention window. This is how Manus handles ~50 tool calls without losing track.

Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,’” a Heber City sergeant told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

We built pre-commit to solve our hook issues. It is a multi-language package manager for pre-commit hooks. You specify a list of hooks you want and pre-commit manages the installation and execution of any hook written in any language before every commit. pre-commit is specifically designed to not require root access. If one of your developers doesn’t have node installed but modifies a JavaScript file, pre-commit automatically handles downloading and building node to run eslint without root.

I have long defined minimum viable product as the smallest possible product that has three critical characteristics: people choose to use it or buy it; people can figure out how to use it; and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available – also known as valuable, usable and feasible.

I love the concept popularized by Eric Ries of the smallest possible experiment to test a specific hypothesis, but I refer to that that as an “MVP Test” so that people don’t confuse an experiment with a product.

The Declaration charged that George III "has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries." The Constitution corrected this flaw, granting life tenure and salary protection to safeguard the independence of federal judges and ensure their ability to serve as a counter-majoritarian check on the political branches. This arrangement, now in place for 236 years, has served the country well.

the words quoted above may be understood as a subtle rebuke of Trump, who spent much of the last year attacking the independence of the courts, such as by calling for the impeachment of federal judges whose rulings Trump did not like.

It cited Denmark's recommendation against 10 diseases as a model for the US. But that comparison was criticised by Dr. Andrew D. Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. "The United States is not Denmark, and there is no reason to impose the Danish immunization schedule on America's families. America is a unique country, and Denmark's population, public health infrastructure, and disease-risk differ greatly from our own." Denmark's population is around 6 million while the US has about 340 million people.

Republican Senator Bill Cassiday from Louisiana, who is a doctor, also criticised the new recommendation. "Changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker," he said in a statement.

30lbs. 60nm torque.

I run six Claude Code agents in parallel from my phone. No laptop, no desktop—just Termius on iOS and a cloud VM.

The loop is: kick off a task, pocket the phone, get notified when Claude needs input. Async development from anywhere.

Selfhosted

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let’s explore the bad world of Cars!

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.

It is an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.

Each Lemmy server can set its own moderation policy; appointing site-wide admins, and community moderators to keep out the trolls, and foster a healthy, non-toxic environment where all can feel comfortable contributing.