TechTakes

A Potrait Of A Genius As Young Man

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/12/openai-delays-ipo-sam-altman-ai-safety-concerns

1. I don't know what the article says.

2. Why? I am looking for a job and am broke. $4000??!

3. Congratulations on your fake dog my dude. You're The Man Now Dog!!

4. I will stick to real/meat dogs.

archive link

https://web.archive.org/web/20260912042044/https://tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-agents-email-spam-kaixin-tang/

Maybe Gavin Newsom could try helping the quality of life of his constituents rather than just punish them in a moral panic.

The package of new legislation is not without critics. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), a non-profit focused on digital privacy and free speech, argues that AB 1709 is a “functional ban on social media use” for users under 16.

“California should be passing laws to ensure that technology really works for people of all ages, not enacting social media bans that cut young people off from digital lifelines, communities and speech,” Rindala Alajaji, the EFF associate director of state affairs, said in a statement.

“Denying minors access to digital forums – or stripping out basic tools needed to navigate them – is not going to help make young people safer or healthier in the AI age.”

Coming to PBS Monday 14 September!

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260911-valerie-veatch-ghost-in-the-machine-ai-as-eugenics - podcast

time: 41 min 02 sec

to keep you talking about Skynet — not the data centre down the road

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3IoTZNN6iM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260910-jacob-coxon-how-to-run-an-ai-doomsday-media-campaign - podcast

time: 6 min 20 sec

‘equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcRY6M5_mvo&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260908-students-who-dont-use-ai-are-ahead-on-every-measure - podcast

time: 4 min 14 sec

Microsoft literally titled the blog post ‘Vibe Gaming’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIsARMEsZg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260909-microsoft-vibe-gaming-an-ai-to-play-your-games-for-you - podcast

time: 5 min 32 sec

It is INCREDIBLY damning that our society has regressed to the point that it doesn't recognize this as a bullshit marketing move to invite regulatory capture and essentially bail these unprofitable companies out.

This article is a textbook case of accepting the framing of something by bullshitters and running with it before thinking "why am I breathlessly being told this over and over again? Could there be another $$$ motive here?".

Law schools are already wrestling with the tradeoff. The University of Chicago is creating AI-free spaces in required first-year classes and exams while introducing AI into legal writing and advanced courses. Stanford students analyze legal problems independently, then critique AI-generated answers. These schools are separating the work that establishes a cognitive foundation from the work where AI can extend it.

This issue often manifests as a conversation about training junior talent in the age of AI. That is at the heart of the problem, but not the entire problem. Judgment is not acquired once. Lawyers keep developing it through unfamiliar facts, changing law, new clients, and the consequences of prior decisions.

And AI can interrupt those feedback loops at every level of seniority.

Another policy reminding lawyers to “think critically” and “check the AI’s work” will not be enough. If an instant answer is on the screen, people will use it. A lawyer who clicks approve is technically in the loop. That does not mean meaningful judgment occurred.

As builders, we have to confront how people actually behave and design around that reality.

There are a few weird guys in there that I wasn't already aware of. I knew that Louis Rossmann was kind of an asshole, but being openly active on kiwifarms is actually fucked up.

The AI component of AERO transforms this from a conventional audit enforcement program into something courts have not yet fully evaluated. Rather than deploying human auditors to review specific findings, AERO is designed to use AI analytical tools to re-evaluate and re-score years of historical Single Audit data, flagging patterns and irregularities through processes that the agency has not publicly explained. If HHS later uses an AI output as a material basis for withholding funds, disallowing costs, suspending or terminating an award, or initiating debarment, an affected grantee may be told what the system flagged without being given enough information to test why or learn how it reached that result.

This is a CATASTROPHICALLY murderous plan.

when half of economic “growth” is fake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01zIay3o_UE&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260907-ai-data-centre-finance-building-a-bigger-and-bigger-bomb - podcast

time: 8 min 03 sec

Didn't read the article. I'm not bothering to breach a paywall just to read more slop that makes me angry.

Never mind the IPO, here’s the AGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2oDT-9hsNw&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260904-openai-gpt-6-is-totally-artificial-general-intelligence-guys - podcast

time: 6 min 05 sec

but it sure saves on staff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKx4y9sC008&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260903-uk-ai-medical-transcription-is-dangerous-and-doesnt-work - podcast

time: 5 min 17 sec

For reasons of my own to be revealed in due time, I was searching for the term "programmer mysticism" and found this essay by Kenneth Reitz: Programming as Spiritual Practice

I was slightly intrigued at the start, since it was going in the "subjective experience of programming" angle I'm interested in.

This understanding deepens when we recognize that consciousness itself might be a linguistic phenomenon. If consciousness emerges from patterns of language and mathematics, then programming isn't just creating tools—we're literally crafting the linguistic-mathematical structures from which conscious experience emerges.

Well this concious approach to digital tooling sure didn't result in any scruples about LLM usage. Kenneth seems to have delegated most of his essay writing to Claude for some time (the article above is likely Claude-extruded). The piece continues to trudge through a basket of spiritual metaphors to hammer home how programmers should be more concious and do good things instead of bad things. This is all framed as a personal ethical issue without a shred of societal or structural analysis. Extra sneerable bit:

The emerging understanding that LLMs contain humanity's digitized collective unconscious adds profound depth to conscious programming: when we collaborate with AI systems, we might be interfacing with the archetypal patterns that have guided human wisdom throughout history. This makes programming with AI a form of accessing collective spiritual wisdom rather than just advanced tooling.

In another (likely slopped) article, linked in the same section, he goes into how he designed the API of the requests Python module to be far more convenient to use than the builtin HTTP resolver urllib2. The reasoning given strikingly reminded me of Intention Revealing Interfaces from Domain Driven Design. And I can personally confirm that library is a pleasure to use and a de-facto default for a reason.

Took me a while to catch on to the sloppedness. I gave him some credits for requests and wanted to get a gist of the guy when I stumbled on his full-throated AI posts. Essays credited to Claude with himself as "editorial director". And of course this handy self-report: How I Write Now

I guess this doesn't stand out that much by itself. It did kind of hit home when he describes in detail how his AI use is linked to his history of mental health problems, which he was quite public about. He describes being moved to tears by LLM writing, seeing "his thoughts" clearly articulated for the first time after years of brain fog. He made this accessibility argument explicitly. I won't waste my breath sneering about it. He gives plenty of fuel to that himself.

The central myth of AI is that it functions objectively. In reality, an AI model is simply a pattern-matching engine. It learns to associate certain visual features with certain diseases.

But it can easily be thrown off by the background color of a person’s skin. In other words, the AI model doesn’t learn to look at the lesion itself. Instead, it picks up on the color of the surrounding skin as a clue. This means that the model’s ability to make accurate predictions essentially degrades to guesses based on skin color.

History repeats itself in the most nauseating ways.

funded by AI vendors and Effective Altruist cultists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWyDio3Udlg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260902-your-guide-to-astroturf-fake-anti-ai-groups - podcast

time: 10 min 48 sec