nfultz

who is this Dean Ball guy? new week, new guy, I guess.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/19/pentagon-openai-dean-ball-trump-ai

Zoom in: "Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI," Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X.

"Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points)." Michael was arguing against Ball's point that various government agencies, including the Pentagon, have blocked employees from using Chinese AI, which has already sent a message to regulated companies.

Russ Wilcox felt compelled to weigh in also

Dean Ball, days into his new job as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, posted his assessment of Kimi K3, the new model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. Kimi is an open-weight model, which means its inner workings are published for anyone to download, run, and modify; the newest version’s weights ship later this month. It had just matched the best publicly available models of the first quarter. The post made three claims. Open-weight models are “inherently decelerationist.” A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is “full AI communism,” a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a “dystopian hellscape.” And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of “regulatory risk” around the use of open-weight Chinese models.

I have met Dean Ball. We have disagreed before. This time the disagreement is public, and so the response should be too.

oh no kimi3 got the neo marxist woke mind virus

via dumpsterfire

Robotaxi riders are falling asleep, sparking frantic emergency service calls

https://www.straitstimes.com/life/motoring/robotaxi-riders-are-falling-asleep-sparking-frantic-emergency-service-calls

So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: “sleepers”. The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo’s first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.

Hey, new ludicity post. wonder why he did a saturday post, he'll miss the HN monday cycle.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

For this reason, our team has quickly learned while on an engagement not to ask anything about ongoing AI projects in any context – by the time that project has started, it is too late for the management team, and intervention is not possible until a crisis point is inevitably reached. There is no conceivable positive outcome. The failure rate is so high that even basic inquiry leaves us in an untenable position. Any coherent question about how it’s going, what the goal is, who is using it, constitutes an inadvertent attack on the chain of command responsible for the work because there are no good answers to anything.

Matches my experience consulting these last few years. I'm still waiting to hear about the one gig where AI doesn't eventually degenerate into a CYA circlejerk. Perhaps that is just the dominant eigenvector of the technical consulting process.

Several of my peers now “AI-wash” their work, meaning that even when they can perfectly competently execute on their jobs to the satisfaction of their management teams, said managers are unhappy if the engineers haven’t used AI in the work.

Been there too.

Also, apparently layoffs.fyi added an "attributed to AI" filter - https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/

new polemics.md on luigi

https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/china-registered-the-humans-last

Last July, China gave every internet user a state identity: one number and one credential, good at the bank, the hospital, and the civil-service exam. That system took effect on July 15, 2025.¹ Yesterday, on July 15, 2026, exactly one year later, China did the same thing for AI.

These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot. As of yesterday, agents in China get registered on a national platform. They receive a digital identity and declare their capabilities the way a business declares its scope, and they can be recalled the way a defective car is recalled. A state planning analyst offered the official gloss: every agent gets a 数字身份证, a digital ID card.² Call it what it is, a birth certificate for machines.

I never know how to parse mainstream reporting about China or Wilcox's writing in particular. Maybe this means they have a universal kill switch.

If you read it the way a lawyer would and the genre is unmistakable. It follows an agent through an entire life. At birth, registration: identity, declared capabilities, payment rails, a procedure for disputes. In life, an audit trail, because in sensitive settings every action must be verifiable and traceable, with blockchain named as the technology of record, so that no act ever floats free of a responsible principal. At death, recall, in the language of defective products.

hmmm

The man behind the partnership is Lin Le, founder of Lingshu Technology, the firm ranked first in China for blockchain and trusted-data infrastructure. The founder of the country’s leading trusted-data company signed for board-level entry into a police-agent vendor five weeks before a law requiring trusted-data audit trails on police agents came into force.

OK back to be being terrified I guess.

https://www.reddit.com/r/murdle/comments/1ux0g4r/murdle_uses_ai/

Unfortunately you’re right about the Marot— in early 2022 I used a pre-ChatGPT transformer to come up with some of the symbolism, because I thought it was a funny source for essentially arbitrary “revelation.” It probably amounted to about 20-30 words in the final corpus and, although I only vaguely recall this, I believe I remember it being very bad at it. (Significantly more of it was decided under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms.)

OK I think we give GT Karber a pass on this one.

The other hell site, LinkedIn, says University of Ljubljana but no major / degree listed. maybe he studied with zizek though.

... apparently he's a second connection. !?

“The Madness of the Crowds”.

I like that there's a Gamache detective novel with that exact title and smile a little imagining some freshman edge lord accidentally buying it instead of Murray.

Two Drinks With. . . Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’

copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall

“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”

who in hell is Joe Allen.

I don't think brian johnson'll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon

Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.”

who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That's a depressing thought.

Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”

Titled his book after FFX bosses ????

Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it.

They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul.

Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won.

interesting

At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity.

acid trip, or wrong kind of anime

Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject.

This guy needs a QAA bio, he's been baking.

k5 rusty has a recap this week: https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged

Effective Altruism is a cognitive hazard that exists somewhere on a spectrum between prolonged lead exposure and a career in the National Football League. The loose nexus between E.A., the “rationalist” community, and the neo-reactionary movement has already given us the Zizian murder cult, the FTX fraud and bankruptcy, Curtis Yarvin’s whole deal, and the worst fanfic that can exist under currently understood laws of nature. Last week, Yarvin‘s ex-fiancée Lydia Laurenson published a 14,000 word abortive New York magazine story to her Substack about yet another Peter Thiel-funded nest of these dimwits so now, possibly due to severe crimes we committed in a past life, you and I have to learn about them. Let’s meet Leverage Research.

I hadn't thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this:

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ribbonfarm-resurrected

For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably won’t notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest it’s no longer a standard WordPress blog.

It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.

It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.

The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. It’s fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.

?O kay? wget -r wasn't good enough for a static copy?

Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.

This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora — ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.

wat

I suspect I’m going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self.

why can't you just make a tulpa like a normal person.

well whatever, I'll ask about the harari.

Harari's framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it's the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isn't em dash trigger happy.

now I'm afraid to google farnam street.

AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism.

hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk.

The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network.

If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations.

This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things.

So half-right that it's almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.