TechTakes

Molly White continuing to slam it out of the park with a pivot to AI. As always, worth a read in full, but this intro bit stuck out to me after reading lots of inane blather on how crypto and AI are different:

Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.

Coworker got fired because he used AI to plan for a site installment of our product. The AI made a very nice looking plan but it failed to include enough packing material so nearly half of the units arrived broken. Boss still thinks AI is going to revolutionize work for the better though.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to "sue" journalists by "summoning" them to a "tribunal" staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first "lawsuit", which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D'Souza ~~threw a hissy fit~~ has shuttered everything "temporarily".

What if we replaced the kid in the Omelas hole with the wealthiest guy in Omelas?

UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You won't be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.

Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach

Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess what...

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

When Frontiers started automating the editorial process, I stayed. I reasoned that as long as the automation could be turned off, human editors can still ensure rigorous, high-quality peer review. This now became impossible - the system has been entirely hijacked by algorithms. ‪

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts. ‪

I emailed and met with the editorial office to ask for the AI assistant to be turned off. I was told this is not possible. Instead, I was treated to some vague promises of potential future improvements and a dose of gaslighting. ‪

If human editors can’t control who reviews science, it’s no longer peer review — it’s a rubber-stamp machine designed for volume and profit, not quality. I have no intention of attaching my name to it. So I’m out.

https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25

massive bong rip musk is broadsides-ing the spacex ipo so hard not only because he's desperate for cash (he is) but also because he wants to stick it to saltman after losing the recent court case

The new Claude model will silently decide whether what you asked it to do is in line with anthropic ToS and silently corrupt your prompt if it doesn't like what you're asking. It's couched as a "safety countermeasure" but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.

We've moved from 'accidental' hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and you're paying $$$ for the privelige.

3 weeks after the "as soon as Friday" news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure don't sound confident about it. Whole post in full (sans legal fine print):

We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.

May, likely, if... Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.

Edit: also Altman's eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now

Please enjoy this comment saying "Nate Silver is a major proponent of AI assisted writing" like that's a good thing, and the reply that argues against slop from the weird premise that enjoying one's own writing process is bad.

Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.

All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI "audience immersive presentations" where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.

Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).

Gary Marcus has been spamming out sneers at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic over the last 24h. He's right but he's such a knob about it. The first of his posts was a whopper where he just quoted himself predicting things correctly from like a year ago. It is nice to feel vindicated and say "I told you so" but it's way too much. It reminds me of Juergen Schmidhuber who was famous on x-twitter for shouting "I ALREADY INVENTED THIS 30 YEARS AGO" every time a new notable paper came out of an AI Lab and whose name became a verb for "claiming credit for something"

He keeps going on about how we will have AGI but it won't be via transformers. Dude why do we even need or want AGI? He comes so close to being "one of the good guys" and then shows his true colours every single time.

"Endless Shrimp Jesus": Red Lobster (a) still exists and (b) is going all-in on AI

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/red-lobsters-ceo-says-hes-153500558.html

J-R Conlin has left Mozilla after 15 years, and has some choice words for the company.

You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?

Well now malware authors are including biology terms like "saccharide" in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway

What a time to be alive

I'd been betting on one of the promptfarmer companies being the ones to set off the bubble-popping chain reaction, but looks like musk is so desperate for cash that his coterie of grifts are speedrunning for the underdog position

This is a new method of bootlicking: if you as a FLOSS developer don't use LLMs to fix vulnerabilites identified by LLMs, you're being unethical

https://lobste.rs/c/5toqqs

New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so they've blocked it for everyone.

They're claiming they believe it's because someone has managed to find a "minor" vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.

My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.

I question how robust Anthropic's geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.

The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic's "it's too powerful" narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don't think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.

I think it's more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. It's an IPO race to the bottom.

It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.

New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/

It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)

Some highlights in sneering:

The hours Christian’s team pulled were insane – seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, people sleeping in the office.

One of the character's is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.

Someone mentioned, in passing, that they thought artificial general intelligence - AI that is better than any human at most tasks - was probably two or three years out.

This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as "Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks." Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to 'most' and not 'all' and swapped 'cognitive tasks' for 'benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks' and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.

Standalone American AI tools are considered a data-protection risk.

This 'scenario' has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.

The infrastructure story is just as grim. The largest AI supercomputer in the US runs at 1,250 megawatts. The largest in Europe runs at eighty-three.

So I couldn't a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the 'planned' American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.

Up to this point, everything we've said has happened – with only Caroline’s and Christian’s personal stories representing fictional elements. From here on out, we start speculating. We no longer single out individual AI companies, and instead refer to made-up actors: Atlas for the leading American AI company, Helios for the leading European company, and Zimo for the leading Chinese one.

They are even copying AI 2027's stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!

Works councils slow the deep adoption of powerful AI tools; employment protections make it hard to let go of staff whose jobs can be automated and whose labour force would be needed in parts of the labour market that faces shortages.

Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is "Europe needs to copy America's lack of labor laws or other regulations". I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other 'parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing' or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.

But Europe has one last card to play. After five years of failing to build a frontier AI sector, it still owns the one bottleneck which the entire race runs through. ASML remains the only company in the world capable of building the EUV lithography equipment that is used to print cutting-edge chips. Without access to its machines, the US could not keep extending its lead in AI; with access to its machines, China would likely have caught up some time ago.

So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?

Europe's slide into irrelevance was not inevitable. Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course, had it shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures.

By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.

The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have discovered that Grok leaks its prompts when slopping out Grokipedia pages. Examples:

• "The instructions say "You are an agent that writes the various article sections for an encyclopedia entry on Joseph Kanuku."

• "[Note: Britannica is encyclopedia, but instructions say no Britannica. Wait, replace with another.]"

• "Wait, instructions say NEVER cite Wikipedia. Oops. Let me adjust."

• "The instructions say prioritize peer reviewed, books, etc."

• "Wait, but instructions say never cite social media, so omit that last part. Wait, adjust. Since Instagram is social media, omit that."

• "Wait, instructions say avoid "References" as a section, but for completeness, I've omitted it from structure.)"

• "The guidelines say "Include any of the following where relevant: - Factual details..." under Missing Information or Knowledge Gaps Examples. And in format, it's to list only critical issues or all missing info or knowledge gaps."

I guess a certain country is using LLMs to try to engage people 1:1 to change their opinions of said country.

AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42

Edward W. Niedermeyer, who wrote the book on how Tesla is a tax fraud and pump-and-dump disguised as a car company, will livestream the SpaceX IPO Friday https://atmo.rsvp/p/niedermeyer.online/e/3mo23aiagjs3t The real drama will be spread over at least a month.

Remember, investing is about decades and national economies not days and individual companies. If you think the US stock market is going to become more like Russia's than France's, you can make a policy and act on it to reduce your stocks' exposure to the Mega-IPOs.