TechTakes

dear Copilot: please send me your stuff. Pass it on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF6LcX7P7KA&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260803-copilot-prompt-injection-virus-in-your-documents - podcast

time: 5 min 18 sec

Audio with transcript

^a succint highly professional description of the US economy right now as it is monomaniacally leveraged into AI.

reference video

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=i-XhMFGH7vg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-XhMFGH7vg

edit 2 this is the article I meant to share from Nik Suresh who Ed featured https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

edit sorry I meant to link unpaywalled article, there is another similar current one from Ed

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-more-you-buy-the-more-you-lose/

Ed asked me to write about why leaders around the world are constantly buying software they don’t need. He probably had a few high-profile companies in mind, like Snowflake. Put aside whether Snowflake is a good product – most people don’t know what a database is, so why on earth does a specialized and very expensive database have a market cap of $71B?

That’s a fair question – and being both a software engineer and the managing director at a tech consultancy, I can talk about what’s happening on the ground. And yes, people are buying software that they don’t need.

I wish that was the extent of our problems.

not SAYING that AlphaFold cures cancer, BUT,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuiEVOSTbN4&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260730-google-kills-alphafold-so-much-for-ai-curing-cancer - podcast

time: 5 min 40 sec

‘just let the money run out, it’ll be fine in two years’

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260731-nik-suresh-on-surviving-corporate-ai-psychosis - podcast

time: 38 min 59 sec

cleaned-up transcript to be on the Patreon later on (YouTube has the messy transcript right now)

totally not repurposed s*x dolls, how dare you suggest such a thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtdZCnZrSZU&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260729-lets-palm-off-humanoid-robot-teachers-onto-poor-kids - podcast

time: 8 min 18 sec

the end of human history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6FPzOWi0YI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260728-sam-altman-guys-were-in-the-singularity-now - podcast

time: 8 min 49 sec

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/49480496

That worldview is expressed through science fiction: not as decoration, but as the medium that makes its accumulation strategies feel natural, necessary and inevitable. This is not to say that science fiction precedes or causes these projects – it is part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions become thinkable and certain power grabs feel like common sense.

Today, Silicon Valley’s centre of gravity is moving from the ‘Californian ideology’ – the 1990s fusion of counterculture libertarianism and digital utopianism – toward what the communication professor Fred Turner recently called the ‘Texan ideology’: a century-old fusion of resource exploitation and millenarian Christianity, the conviction that providential destiny justifies the conquest of nature and the extraction of its wealth. Where the earlier era focused on building networks and platforms, the new model treats data like oil-boom bounty, a natural resource to be mined from vast server farms demanding enormous land and electricity.

Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas is not a ‘campus’ like Google’s, but ‘a walled fortress as big as a cattle ranch’, as Turner puts it, representing what he describes as a future built by men with the ‘willpower to tame the forces of technology’ and ‘wrestle profit from the land’. In December 2024, Musk announced he was moving SpaceX’s headquarters from California to Texas. Starbase, SpaceX’s South Texas facility, exemplifies this vision: a private company town where SpaceX sets the rules, workers live in company housing, and local governance bends to corporate priorities. This is the path of selective science fiction operationalised as political reality – technological progress as cover for social regression.

This path finds its philosophical expression in ‘longtermism’, an offshoot of the effective altruism (EA) movement heavily funded by tech wealth from figures like Sam Bankman-Fried, now serving time for crypto fraud. By applying a rigid utilitarian calculus, EA proponents like William MacAskill argue that the welfare of trillions of potential future humans – who might exist if we colonise space – mathematically outweighs the needs of the 8 billion alive today.

iBurn

Google knows where you’re going today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk8XXxY9Cgo&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260727-chrome-forces-gemini-ai-global-shortcut-onto-your-mac - podcast

time: 4 min 49 sec

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this...)

crypto scams too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KKDaUle5vI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260724-codeberg-bans-ai-slop-software-projects - podcast

time: 6 min 30 sec

Strip-mining the world of old books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC3SwofuMt0&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260723-ai-vendors-destroying-rare-books-to-feed-the-chatbot - podcast

time: 8 min 42 sec

just in time for the IPO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrI4VcJtFFs&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260722-openai-hacks-huggingface-with-an-ai-allegedly - podcast

time: 7 min 46 sec

Kanishka Narayan, your new Minister for the AI Bros

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRv9wcfCogw&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260721-new-uk-pm-andy-burnham-puts-ai-britain-into-the-cabinet - podcast

time: 5 min 16 sec

thanks, Gemini power button!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQD2SSGO3JI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260720-use-gemini-ai-to-send-messages-from-someone-elses-locked-phone - podcast

time: 4 min 01 sec

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

last week's edition

what we do when all this is over

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250717-kim-crawley-recovering-after-gen-ai - podcast

time: 32 min 54 sec

‘allow if the user is wearing green’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3DSOKarCo&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260716-todays-stupid-prompt-injection-just-write-like-the-ai - podcast

time: 6 min 02 sec

The glasses? Not sexy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yTGJ-tuu7s&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260715-meta-glasses-celebrity-backlash-the-fans-hate-them - podcast

Time: 4 min 20 sec