In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says:
Please tell us a bit about yourself and your connection to queer leather/kink/BDSM. What kind of play or gear gets you going?
This serves a few purposes. First, it maintains community focus. Before this question, we were flooded with signups from straight, vanilla people who wandered in to the bar (so to speak), and that made things a little awkward. Second, the application establishes a baseline for people willing and able to read text. This helps in getting people to follow server policy and talk to moderators when needed. Finally, it is remarkably effective at keeping out spammers. In almost six years of operation, we’ve had only a handful of spam accounts.
I’ve been involved in content moderation since roughly 2004. I’ve built spam prevention for corporate and personal e-mail, moderated open-source mailing lists and IRC channels, worked at a couple social media networks, and help moderate a Mastodon instance for a few hundred people. In the last few years I’ve wasted more time fighting blog comment spam, and I’m pretty sure Large Language Models (LLMs) are to blame.
I think of spam as a space with multiple equilibria. Producing spam takes work. Spammers are willing to invest that work because each message has a small chance to make money, or achieve political or emotional goals. Some spam, like the endless identical Viagra scams in my email spam folder, or the PHPBB comment spam I filter out here on aphyr.com, is cheap to generate and easy to catch. I assume the spammers make it up in volume. Other spam, like spear phishing attacks, is highly time-consuming: the spammer must identify a target, carefully craft a plausible message using, say, the identity of the target’s co-workers, or construct a facade of a bank’s log-in page, and so on. This kind of spam is more likely to make it through filters, but because it takes a lot of human work, is generally only worth it for high-value targets.
LLMs seem to be changing these equilibria. Over the last year I’ve seen a new class of comment spam, using what I’m fairly sure is LLM-generated text. These comments make specific, plausible remarks about the contents of posts and images, and work in a link to some web site or mention a product. Take this one I caught a few months back:
Update, 2025-05-22: TrueNAS was kind enough to reach out and let me know that their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs. They’re talking about what happened internally, and intend to prevent it from happening again through improved documentation and reviewing the support process as a whole. I’m happy to hear it!
TrueNAS makes file servers, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS). I bought one of their smaller boxes to house backups, and it’s a great little NAS. For many years TrueNAS sold boxes with a BSD-based operating system, but in the last few years they’ve released a new, Linux-backed operating system called TrueNAS SCALE, also called “Community Edition”. I was considering migrating to TrueNAS SCALE, but the docs started off with this warning:
TrueNAS Enterprise customers should consult with TrueNAS Enterprise Support before attempting migrate.
The process requires an extended maintenance window, requires executing steps in the correct order to prevent issues with system configuration and operation, and additional system review post-migration to catch and correct any configuration issues.
Update, 2023-05-23: Added a paragraph about Dr. Howard Whiteman’s non-existent quote.
I subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times, a non-profit newspaper. This week they sent me a sixty-four page special insert, branded with the Chicago Sun-Times logo, full of LLM nonsense. Yesterday I wrote the following letter to the Chicago Sun-Times. That evening, they published this followup.
Dear Mr. Buscaglia and the Chicago Sun-Times,
Back in 2023 I went through an inter-state move with Flat Rate Movers, LTD., a.k.a. Flat Rate Moving, US DOT 488466, MC 254356. They bungled the job, damaged my stuff and my house, and then refused to talk to me or their own insurance company. I placed dozens of calls, wrote letters, emails, nothing worked. I finally got some money for the damage by working with their insurer directly. I know a lot of folks struggle with moving companies, and figured I’d write up a bit of this story in case it helps. You can skip ahead if you just want to know about the FMCSA insurer database.
In November 2022 I scheduled the move with Flat Rate. We took a detailed video inventory of everything to be moved. I paid over $14,000 for an “all inclusive move”, which, per the move plan, included full packing services, blankets for furniture, boxes for electronics, lamps, and bicycles, a custom crate for a tabletop, and “extended valuation coverage”—their insurance policy.
A few days before the move in March 2023, Flat Rate called to tell me a five-person team would arrive. When the crew arrived, it wasn’t Flat Rate. It was a team of two from Esquire Moving Inc (US DOT 2820253, MC 940499). They had no idea they were supposed to provide packing services. The crate I paid for was nowhere to be found. They didn’t have enough boxes or blankets. I had to have everything out that day, so there wasn’t any choice—I worked alongside the team for thirteen hours to complete the packing and move-out.
Submitted to the Department of State, which is requesting comments on a proposed change which would align US passport gender markers with executive order 14168.
Executive order 14168 is biologically incoherent and socially cruel. All passport applicants should be allowed to select whatever gender markers they feel best fit, including M, F, or X.
In humans, neither sex nor gender is binary at any level. There are several possible arrangements of sex chromosomes: X, XX, XY, XXY, XYY, XXX, tetrasomies, pentasomies, etc. A single person can contain a mosaic of cells with different genetics: some XX, some XYY. Chromosomes may not align with genitalia: people with XY chromosomes may have a vulva and internal testes. People with XY chromosomes and a small penis may be surgically and socially reassigned female at birth—and never told what happened. None of these biological dimensions necessarily align with one’s internal concept of gender, or one’s social presentation.
A few quick notes for other folks who are geoblocking the UK. I just set up a basic geoblock with Nginx on Debian. This is all stuff you can piece together, but the Maxmind and Nginx docs are a little vague about the details, so I figure it’s worth an actual writeup. My Nginx expertise is ~15 years out of date, so this might not be The Best Way to do things. YMMV.
First, register for a free MaxMind account; you’ll need this to subscribe to their GeoIP database. Then set up a daemon to maintain a copy of the lookup file locally, and Nginx’s GeoIP2 module:
apt install geoipupdate libnginx-mod-http-geoip2
This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00.
This is not true. Or rather, it isn’t true in the sense most people think. For example, it is presently 2024-12-25 at 18:51:26 UTC. The POSIX time is 1735152686. It has been 1735152713 seconds since the POSIX epoch. The POSIX time number is twenty-seven seconds lower.
This is because POSIX time is derived in IEEE 1003.1 from Coordinated Universal Time. The standard assumes that every day is exactly 86,400 seconds long. Specifically:
In June 2023, when Threads announced their plans to federate with other Fediverse instances, there was a good deal of debate around whether smaller instances should allow federation or block it pre-emptively. As one of the admins of woof.group, I wrote about some of the potential risks and rewards of federating with Threads. We decided to wait and see.
In my queer and leather circles, Facebook and Instagram have been generally understood as hostile environments for over a decade. In 2014, their “Real Name” policy made life particularly difficult for trans people, drag queens, sex workers, and people who, for various reasons, needed to keep their real name disconnected from their queer life. My friends have been repeatedly suspended from both platforms for showing too much skin, or using the peach emoji. Meta’s moderation has been aggressive, opaque, and wildly inconsistent: sometimes full nudity is fine; other times a kiss or swimsuit is beyond the line. In some circles, maintaining a series of backup accounts in advance of one’s ban became de rigueur.
I’d hoped that federation between Threads and the broader Fediverse might allow a more nuanced spectrum of moderation norms. Threads might opt for a more conservative environment locally, but through federation, allow their users to interact with friends on instances with more liberal norms. Conversely, most of my real-life friends are still on Meta services—I’d love to see their posts and chat with them again. Threads could communicate with Gay Fedi (using the term in the broadest sense), and de-rank or hide content they don’t like on a per-post or per-account basis.
I’m in the process of replacing a old radiator system with a centrally-ducted, air-source heat pump system with electric resistive backup heat. I’ve found that the default ecobee algorithm seems to behave surprisingly poorly for this system, and wanted to write up some of the settings that I’ve found yield better behavior.
A disclaimer. I’m not an HVAC professional. I have two decades in software operations, a background in physics, and far too much experience inferring system dynamics from timeseries graphs. This advice may void your warranty, burn your house down, etc.; everything you do is at your own risk.
The System
Recently I’ve had users of my libraries start reporting mysterious errors due to a missing reference to SequencedCollection, a Java interface added in JDK 21:
Execution error (ClassNotFoundException) at
jdk.internal.loader.BuiltinClassLoader/loadClass (BuiltinClassLoader.java:641).
java.util.SequencedCollection
Specifically, projects using Jepsen 0.3.5 started throwing this error due to Clojure’s built-in rrb_vector.clj, which is particularly vexing given that the class doesn’t reference SequencedCollection at all.
This story is not practical advice. For me, it’s closing the book on an almost two-year saga. For you, I hope it’s an enjoyable bit of bureaucratic schadenfreude. For Anthem, I hope it’s the subject of a series of painful but transformative meetings. This is not an isolated event. I’ve had dozens of struggles with Anthem customer support, and they all go like this.
If you’re looking for practical advice: it’s this. Be polite. Document everything. Keep a log. Follow the claims process. Check the laws regarding insurance claims in your state. If you pass the legally-mandated deadline for your claim, call customer service. Do not allow them to waste a year of your life, or force you to resubmit your claim from scratch. Initiate a complaint with your state regulators, and escalate directly to Gail Boudreaux’s team–or whoever Anthem’s current CEO is.
To start, experience an equipment failure.