There was a line in the piece you linked from Wired that seemed to imply that the AAI gulag might be a holding cell for engineers who zuck didn’t want to just lay off (presumably to avoid spooking investors and tanking morale even harder) but also didn’t want to have on their previous role of actually working on Facebook/insta/whatever.

What I find most interesting in all this is that none of the coverage I’ve seen has said that crimes happened in its vicinity that it failed to detect, only that it didn’t issue any citations or whatever. Which is wild if you consider that they basically had it doing laps of a parking garage or whatever. You would think that if it was encouraging people to not rob those cars or whatever that it was doing its job, much like how ostensibly a speed camera is supposed to discourage people from speeding rather than just issue fines.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this obelisk-looking-ass robopig was actually succeeding, I just think that the criteria being used to declare it a failure say some really bad things about the state of policing.

I mean, I think he is entirely too credulous of people who claim to be doing things better with AI and discounts a lot of the possible costs of AI systems that malfunction silently and produce plausible bullshit. But I think that those elements complicate his point more than they fully contradict it. Like, consider his last example. Lawyers looking for possible cases for something like the innocence project have to start somewhere, and I can fully believe that the kind of statistical analysis marketing itself as AI is going to be able to pick out viable leads better than doing it randomly or alphabetically or whatever, and that might save the lawyers time and let them help more people than they otherwise would have. But by replacing a naive algorithm with an opaque one you’re essentially baking in any underlying biases in the current system. The people who aren’t going to get seen now are still probably not going to get seen unless they’re right on the margins somehow, and that “somehow” is almost certainly going to be racism, sexism, etc. But by moving that bias from the immediate decision and placing it in the AI model it becomes that much harder to unpack, identify, and address. Like, I fully agree that much if not most of the harm being done by AI right now is more tied to the business and economic structures that it’s embedded in rather than the technology itself. There are very good reasons why so many crypto/metaverse/nft grifters moved straight to AI, and when they try and move on to quantum or web67 or whatever else comes next they will keep right on hurting the world in the same ways unless something about those structures changes. But that doesnt necessary mean we shouldn’t also focus on the harms and limitations that are inherent to the way these things function rather than how they’re used.

Wasn’t this the boat that everyone was like “yeah it’s gonna fall over in a stiff wind which is pretty bad for a sailboat” only to be overruled because money? And now the captain and crew who were actually willing to sign on are being investigated.

I would be slightly more charitable than that. I don’t think it’s a matter of failing to read or understand the surface of the material, I think it’s a failure to seriously engage with it. He’s the Tolkien equivalent of a 2005-era Reddit atheist who is can rattle off all the worst parts of Leviticus but has no empathy for why people actually connect with their religion. (Unrelated: I am describing myself here.)

Like, the beating heart of LotR is a kind of 20th-century romanticism, a celebration and eulogy for a world in transition to something wholly new. Combined with the fact that Tolkien largely codified the whole set of fantasy races I can sort of understand where people with fascist tendencies connect with it. You could interpret some of that in a very “RETVRN”-coded way where Gondor and the Shire are both the glorious homeland that needs to be protected and/or reclaimed, especially if you dig into certain elements of the lore around Numenor. Alternatively in that kind of reading it’s entirely possible to construct an argument about how Sauron and Saruman are the bringers of progress and industry. Pretty sure I remember a cracked article back in the day that made this argument for laughs, but you can assemble it from the parts in the text. Either way you can make something of it that I imagine Thiel and his set are pretty damn comfortable with.

Of course that would require ignoring the far more central theme of the story, which is how power is inherently destructive. The ring itself is the most obvious manifestation, but I think the other element that gets lost is the way that Sauron is ultimately defeated not by Gandalf out-wizarding him or by Aragor out-kinging him or Gimli, Legolas, or anyone else out-fighting him. It isn’t even Frodo and Sam persisting in their quest and resisting the call of the Ring, for in the final pivotal moments even their strength and righteousness failed them. Instead, it comes down to Gollum’s greed and devotion to his Precious. His weakness, in other words. Tolkien coined the term Eucatastrophe to describe this kind of moment, and it’s notable for being the culmination of the story’s smaller moments. Time and again the heroes of LotR choose to do what is right and act with mercy, honor, courage, kindness, or respect not because it’s the right strategic choice - indeed the most logical consequence would have been failure in a thousand predictable ways - but because of their connections to each other and their faith that rightness and righteousness will somehow align.

This is of course antithetical to Thiel and the whole project which worships power rather than fearing it. The whole theme of the Hobbit essentially is a rejection of the attempt to be “agentic” and exercise power over the whole world rather than enjoying your own life. Bilbo’s heroism explicitly comes not because he’s going to save the world but because he wants to help his compatriots recover the same humble comfort of home that he enjoyed his whole life.

“The assumption is: you have to physically own the books and destroy them after ‘reading’ them – in order to argue that no unauthorized copy remains in circulation and that it qualifies as fair use,” the bookseller says of the presumed logic behind it.

Have any actual courts ruled in favor of this nonsense? Because I thought fair use was tied to things like public benefit and transformation more than a direct number of copies. Like, I’m pretty sure that I’m not allowed to fax a book to myself even if I put the original through a shredder, and that’s ignoring the question of how much gets inexorably lost in the process.

Given how our very good friends were promoting the concept of prediction markets for ideological/idiot-logical reasons before polymarket existed I’m pretty sure they didn’t need to be bribed or set up. Just let them show off that someone actually made the real thing they were pitching as a concept a decade ago and pretend all the issues don’t exist.

I guess the voice recognition probably used some kind of machine learning?

AIrstrip One sounds like Elon’s company trying to use solar-powered ultralight UAVs to replace geostationary orbiting satellites.

GilAId is obviously chatbot tradwives that will definitely have artificial wombs and humanoid robot bodies by Q3 2027.

NorsefAIre is just the latest attempt by the psychic parasite desperately trying to serve as Peter Thiel’s conscience to get somebody to stop him. It won’t work any better than the name “Palantir.”

That’s better but I think the overdiagnosis and overtreatment risks still apply. Also: shit, your insurance covers that?

Today (actually sourced to Perun’s video from a few weeks back but I watched it today) in Everything is Connected:

One of the advancements in one-way attack drones in the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the move to directly-connected fiber optic cables for control. This has proven an effective way to counter electronic warfare, but has also meant that both sides have started using a volume of fiber optic cable that boggles the mind. This made the single fiber optic manufacturer in Russia a substantial strategic target, which Ukraine obligingly took advantage of. In turn, this has forced Russia to rely completely on imports, placing the Russian war effort in direct competition with China’s AI datacenter buildout for this now-vital resource.

China being a proudly socialist country, this allowed the fiber optic manufacturers to raise their prices through the roof and absolutely take the Russians (and presumably their AI customers) to the cleaners.

Never let it be said that there are no AI-tangential stories that you can’t feel at least a little bit good about, even if it is just the endless grift nexus capturing an even bigger bastard.

however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not

See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they can’t just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know that’s a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.

The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.

You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you’re done.

When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

Assuming 30s down and 30s up, this platform will lower you a total of 60 inches, or 5 feet. So even in the magical fantasy land where this works at all you’re going to have a great tool to detect what’s happening in the body as long as it’s below the average person’s heart, an organ that is famously unnecessary and irrelevant.

Gay people I respect:

I can pretend they’re straight

Gay people I don’t:

I can’t pretend they aren’t gay and I’ve decided this is a ‘them problem’

This feels like yet another case of “what no postmodernism does to a mf”. Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that’s entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren’t “abnormal” and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.

But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it’s easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of “how do I help people be happy and successful” necessitates asking “how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person.” Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.

But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can’t really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he’s a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don’t listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

As I recall the impetus for this was that the team working on grok’s code generation ability was preferring to use cursor. Imagine making a model so shitty that even the kind of ai-brained buffoons who want to work on fucking grok don’t want to use it. Now consider that apparently that model is grok itself.

3. Shit piles up at the bottom of the hill

4. Bottom of the hill elevates until it reaches the enshittifiers

5. Dinosaur eats man

6. Woman inherits the earth

I’m sorry are you telling me that there people’s social circle includes the same like 50 oligarchs and apparatchiks and they’re making a dating site for themselves? I know they lost Epstein but this is just pathetic.

How is it that whenever I learn something new about this family it’s always a new way for them to be awful to each other or their kids?

Well yeah. Just because they call their crypto scheme an Oracle doesn’t mean they’ve actually solved the oracle problem.