TechTakes

Today in Seems Legit News:

"As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office."

• why is engineer working before contracted time
• if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
• if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
• if "no engineer has written a line of code since December", when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
• why is hypothetical engineer a "he", Spotify
• do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
• in unrelated news, Anna's Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
• though I won't do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is "AI" "music" anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago

https://xcancel.com/allTheYud/status/2020177765534953662#m

"As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts"

Medical malpractice as a service, coming to a GP near you

Eliezer, I would be very careful about talking about age of consent if I were you

I did a five line PR to a little shell util I've used for a decade or so, and bickered with the stupid PR bot. Fuck you kody, you have bad taste, go away, go back to enterprise.

I want to force feed it Worse is Better until it chokes, surely that's in its corpus somewhere.

ok done venting

Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).

I'm not quite clear on what "self-growing" means here given how inhospitable the moon is.

Great news everybody! Copilot will no longer delete your files when you ask it to document them and it took only 6 months to vibe code a solution.

https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421

Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn't actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.

I was trying to see if Paul Graham was in the Epstein files (seems to mostly be due to Twitter spam) but then I found this email from 2016 with Scooter's powerword:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00824072.pdf

The context is that AI guy Joscha Bach wants to "have a brainstorm" on "forbidden research" (you best believe IQ is in there, but also climate change prepping which in phrased in a particularly omenous fashion) and there's a long list of people at the end. Besides slatescott it includes

Epstein Himself Paul Graham Max Teigmark Stephen Wolfram Stephen Pinker (ofc) Reid Hoffman

It's unclear if this brainstorm ever happened or if Astral Scottdex was even contacted. The next email features Epstein chastising Joscha Bach for not shutting up in a discussion with Noam Chomsky and Bach's last email is just groveling and trying to smooth over the relationship with his benefactor.

I think this is (at least a little bit) interesting because it's back in 2016, a year before 'intellectual dark web' was coined and that whole ball got rolling.

Has Scooter addressed his presence in the files the way other-scott did?

A prompt enjoyer does eschatology. Along the way he abuses mathematics, Ohio, and a chinchilla.

https://campedersen.com/singularity

Great 5-character sneer dropped: "ai;dr" (source: https://bsky.app/profile/katemckean.bsky.social/post/3memb4hybpk2u)

Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.

For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.

here's another very good take from baldur bjarnason, answering the question if he had hardened his stance against LLMs.

(the answer is “not exactly”, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)

EDIT:

I'm removing the image (keeping the original text for posterity), but I just completely got had by someone straight up lying.

It's quite embarrasing, I should've been way more skeptical of someone posting an image without sourcing the original paper. Turns out not only is it not a recent paper at all (published June 2025), not only is that table not saying what he claims it's saying, but the authors have since removed that table altogether from revised versions of the paper!

That's what you get from reposting someone who has "The Finance Newsletter" in his fucking username, couldn't have gone well for me.

A machine learning researcher points out how the field has become enshittified. Everything is about publications, beating benchmarks, and social media. LLM use in papers, LLM use in reviews, LLM use in meta-reviews. Nobody cares about the meaning of the actual research anymore.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1qo6sai/d_some_thoughts_about_an_elephant_in_the_room_no/

OT: Just gave my two weeks notice and it turns out management is very big on using ChatGPT…

Have to get a new apartment, I did not understand that you have to apply via AI application screening now for so many buildings. I don't know why it won't read my statement from the credit union. I hate this so much.

Dear rentier class, maybe don't force people to upload PDFs your bot can't even open, swear to god someday you will make someone mad enough they inject some prompts into the files metadata and go from there.

this article involving an incredibly eyebrow-raising take from one of the people at METR (the team behind the famous "tasks AI can do doubles every 7 months" graph) saying AI is eventually going to become more impactful than the invention of agriculture and more transformative than the emergence of the human species and also calls it an intelligent alien species. Immensely funny amongst the other people saying "please stop treating AI like magic"

the Harari guy also seems to be into transhumanism if a skim of his wikipedia page is correct

Ars Technica published a story about that nonsense of a github bot "posting" on its "blog" about human developers having rejected its "contributions" to matplotlib.

Ars Technica quote developer Scott Shambaugh extensively, like:

“As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,” Shambaugh wrote. “Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.”

If you find that to be long-winded inanity, yep, you guessed it: Shambaugh never said that, the Ars Technica article itself is random chatbot output, and his "quotes" are all made up.

https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116065340523529645

Ars Technica has removed the article, but mittaggart (linked above) saved a copy: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie

RFK Jr's Nutrition Chatbot Recommends Best Foods to Insert Into Your Rectum.

>10k words into writing a piece of fiction that has a lot to do with our good friends

OT: Anybody up for making convincing fake book cover/jacket art for "Don't Build the Torment Nexus"?

It just occured to me that having that as a fake book that's actually just a container for shit would make for a great addition to my desk at work, and I'm not finding any suitable pre-existing fake covers myself, surprisingly.