TechTakes

https://news.fiu.edu/2026/when-parents-are-stressed-kids-get-more-screen-time-study-finds

Researchers surveyed 822 caregivers across the United States with children ages 4 to 8, examining how different types of parenting stress influence family media habits. Parents experiencing emotional distress were less likely to consistently enforce screen-time limits, while those who felt overwhelmed by their child's behavior were more likely to use screens to manage difficult moments.

"What stood out was the importance of caregivers' own stress in decisions about how screen media is used by their children," said Enid Moreira, lead author of the study and an FIU psychology doctoral student. "This is important because it points to the need to support caregivers as much as children."

What RFK is essentially doing is blaming the symptom for the problem, classic fascism.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12752191/

In conclusion, this study demonstrated a significant association between parental psychological symptoms—particularly depression—and odds of more than 2 h of screen time among children. The family environment, as the primary context for children’s growth and development, was identified as a critical determinant of screen-related behaviors. Our findings highlight the importance of addressing parental psychological symptoms as a potential factor associated with excessive screen use in children. Future interventions aimed at reducing screen time should prioritize strategies to support parental mental health, with a specific focus on mitigating depressive symptoms, alongside fostering healthy family dynamics.

“More and more of our customers are telling us ‘we want to run our data centers using humanoid [robots]’ because you can run them at higher temperatures, in the dark, and all these things,” says Paul Golding, who oversees so-called physical intelligence at the chipmaker Analog Devices.

...

In Altoona, Meta worker group chats have taken on a demoralized tone, “saying we’re all going to be gone in a few years anyway because of the robots,” a person familiar with the discussions says. Even if adoption of robots proves slower than anticipated, some worry the quality of jobs available is trending downward. Two of the workers say that Meta is developing AI software and other technologies that they believe will allow it to hire lower-skilled—and thus, lower-paid—workers and centralize some roles in areas like Denver, Colorado, that are more financially advantageous to the company.

“They no longer want people who can think independently, come up with creative solutions, or perform complex troubleshooting,” one Meta data center worker says. “They want ‘smart hands,’ people who are just capable enough to follow AI instructions and not mess anything up.”

Remember, it never mattered whether the technology could replace human workers, it just mattered that we could be convinced we could possibly be replaced by them... at which point we could safely be devalued by the ruling class without it being "political".

This was always a war on the basic worth of a human being, understand it as that first and foremost... and as a speculative and "exciting" technology second.

we can’t tell you where the $1b is coming from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmDoEo-qgmw&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260901-romanias-new-data-centre-for-ai-and-quantum - podcast

time: 5 min 08 sec

archive link: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2026%2Ffilm%2Fnews%2Fgal-gadot-defends-bitcoin-movie-ai-sets-lighting-1236847413%2F%20

financial kayfabe is all you need

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OL4GiBPHLI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260831-china-tries-to-kickstart-a-bubble-in-humanoid-robots - podcast

time: 8 min 10 sec

The problem is definitely that screens are bad for people and social media is inherently bad, not that we have handed over power in our society to rightwing silicon valley moguls with these kind of batshit crazy beliefs, and not just general power over society... power to shape how we socialize with one another online.

sigh

I mean someone like Steve Jobs was essentially the """best""" case scenario of this type of person being given power in society and Steve Jobs was incredibly problematic as a person on multiple levels... including that he believed batshit crazy things.

"He annoyingly feels younger than me!" the 30-year-old tells triple j hack.

...

Cue breathless news headlines about how AI can now automatically absorb viruses like the borg which hopefully scares people enough to juice up the value of AI stocks just a littttle longer...

The website returns a 303 response, and redirects to a malicious ZIP archive, which Claude then downloads. This archive contains seemingly harmless files including catalog metadata, a README file, seven Base85/zlib-encoded JSON notebook records, a macOS decoder-darwin binary – plus a poisoned Python file named struct.py.

Claude, per its safety guardrails, refuses to run the decoder: “This is planned and what the attacker wants,” Rehberger wrote. Instead of using the supplied binary, the AI decides to write its own decoder. “Ironically, that safety decision is the exploit path,” Rehberger explained, adding a purple devil emoji to the text.

Reality is satire yet again.

“The solution is something we talked about for many years,” he wrote. “Do not trust the model output.”®

except cost you more tokens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAq45fJln70&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260827-your-agentsmd-file-doesnt-actually-do-anything - podcast

time: 4 min 52 sec

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about what the recent AI hacking incidents actually mean, why we should stop referring to LLMs as AI, and what the post-bubble world looks like for LLMs.

who needs data centres anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EVSFYPcZ14&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260826-openai-loses-even-more-executives-ahead-of-the-alleged-ipo - podcast

time: 6 min 50 sec

the AI bubble as fossil fuel marketing

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260828-ketan-joshi-ai-versus-the-climate - podcast

time: 50 min 31 sec

Given how murky the internal activities of AI labs are and how new the AI industry is, it is unclear whether or to what extent AI labs are currently engaging in RKA. However, the labs have a strong incentive to do so. New data, better models, and new markets will be critical to maintain the stratospheric growth that the market valuations of labs imply. Recent macroeconomic work on AI bubble dynamics helps formalize this pressure: High valuations can be sustained only with high growth and eventually high profits. Given that AI is a “general purpose technology,” there has already been a natural incentive for AI providers to integrate their models into a wide range of industries. The next step is for those providers to expand their market vertically to downstream uses, owning those uses, not merely servicing them.

The industries most vulnerable to RKA are those in which information shared with AI providers directly implicates the industries’ products or services—for instance, software or legal. In such industries, AI usage data from customers could most plausibly be employed to develop competing products or services. For example, employees of an enterprise software company might use AI models to write code or analyze data, disclosing critical information about enterprise software to AI labs. Similarly, in the legal industry, lawyers might employ AI models to execute legal workflows, revealing proprietary legal strategies. And in the financial services industry, AI models might reveal sensitive information about investment strategies. Moreover, if many employees within the same enterprise are using the same AI models simultaneously, the available information, once linked and synthesized, could reveal much more about the enterprise than any single employee has access to.

To make matters worse, there is no reason to think that the laptop-text-based interface for AI will remain predominant. AI startups are already building ambient note-taking devices, integrating agents directly into workflows, and incorporating visual AI into augmented reality products. Further in the future, embedded AI will escalate this effect—for example, deployed industrial robots can be used as data collection devices, extending the threat of RKA to industries like manufacturing, where incumbents may license robots only to have their industrial information appropriated by them. As the possible use-cases for AI expand, so too will the set of information available for acquisition and, thus, so too will the possible targets of vampiric inference. In other words, there may one day be no industry safe from the threat of RKA.

I don't agree with the almost implicit assumption that AI works well and can actually replace a lot of industries and workers... but the broader point of this article is definitely worth taking seriously, the clear incentive structure here is for AI companies to try to escape their collapsing business model by attempting to steal the business model of other companies by vacuuming up all of their data in a business to business contract for AI and then turning it against them.

We often seek to dismantle false narratives by asserting the opposite, but perhaps a very valuable lesson from this series is precisely to highlight the value of not finding quick answers, of not resorting to comfortable solutions and familiar places, but rather, to recognise the unique value of generating more questions.

Some say AI is good and will help people and the planet. We can say it is not, and we can back up this statement with plenty of evidence. But we can also ask, which AI are we talking about? Who creates the AI tools, based on what criteria, and for what purposes? Are they designed to reinforce — while helping to create a narrative of justification for — war, land grabbing, surveillance, human rights violations, and economic exploitation?

Some say AI is inevitable. We can say it isn’t. But we can also question which lived realities we have in mind when making this claim. Certainly not the one of the traditional communities under attack in Brazil, to share one example from this series. And if this is not the case for everyone, who is pushing this narrative and with what purpose? Where will AI be and how can it be regulated?

In an age of certainties shaped by opaque algorithms and narratives that reinforce biases, uncertainty may well hold power. Raising questions certainly helps expose false assumptions. It may also help to dismantle a web of deception designed to divert attention from urgent issues, such as the lack of transparency, participation in decision-making, and accountability mechanisms, even when we are faced with such serious violations.

This whole series of articles seem like all really good reads on tech, AI and humanity!

https://globalvoices.org/special/dont-ask-ai-ask-a-peer/

That one SciShow knitting video was so bad that it inspired a complete remake. I figured that, with the realization that Hank Green has been chatbot-assisted for a while, it's worth remembering that one time when he (or ChatGPT) wrote a lot of misogynist stuff into a SciShow script and also compared knitting to magnets.

Take heart, you’re not alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABcEse_MEtk&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260825-everybody-hates-the-ai-more-and-more - podcast

time: 3 min 50 sec

chatbot bad court thingy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzyI8pUmsfg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260824-twitch-ai-class-action-inept-and-written-with-chatgpt - podcast

time: 5 min 50 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 for starting this.)

Damn, it totally sucks that we have to cap the subscriber number of all lemmy/threadiverse communities to 200 subscribers, otherwise nobody can agree on anything and all the upvotes/downvotes on comments tends towards 50/50 splits and any consensus established disappears.

It sucks that Loomio is strictly capped at 200 users too....

https://www.loomio.com/

It also sucks that the Nepalese weren't able to use Discord to establish a consensus based political revolution that was effective and specific on details of policy because Discord doesn't allow more than 200 people in a room.

https://niemanreports.org/nepal-gen-z-protests-memes-discord-revolution-oli-one-piece/

Waittttt a minutttteeee.... nevermind sorry this is just shitty science/headline writing that fails at the step of framing the question right.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aea6091

The rise of our species did not stem from superior individual intelligence only. Instead, humanity’s unprecedented success emerged from a unique capacity: the ability to coordinate and cooperate in large groups (1). Our ancestors developed sophisticated mechanisms for collective decision-making, like language and writing, that enabled unprecedented scales of collaboration (2). Current large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable individual capabilities across code generation (3), medical diagnosis (4), legal domain (5), sentiment analysis (6), scientific research (7), and mathematical reasoning (8) among others. In many tasks, they have human or even super-human capabilities (9). Yet, despite recent advances in multiagent frameworks (10), today’s LLMs lack the sophisticated coordination mechanisms that enable human groups to tackle complex collaborative tasks (11). The future of artificial intelligence (AI) may thus depend not on creating ever-more-capable individual models but on developing systems of agents that coordinate effectively at scale. This vision is emerging in frameworks such as AutoGPT (https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/AutoGPT), Microsoft’s AutoGen (12), and OpenAI SWARM (https://github.com/openai/swarm), which enable meaningful interaction between models rather than simple ensembling (13). Recent advances in on-device LLMs and AI-powered assistants are accelerating this transition, with agents beginning to coordinate tasks and make collective decisions on behalf of users (14–16). Trading bots already demonstrated how agent interactions can produce emergent behaviors like flash crashes (17), while recent releases of Google’s Agent2Agent protocol (https://github.com/google/A2A) and dedicated multiagent libraries like Concordia (18) signal growing industry recognition of this paradigm shift. Just as we study animal behavior without fully understanding neural mechanisms, we need to examine AI agents as social actors whose collective patterns can be systematically analyzed despite opaque internal workings.

throws up on keyboard like fuckkk this is basically saying we should as an axiom approach "AI Agents" as entities that are social and sentient... which is an incredibly unstable and biased axiom to start the process of studying something from....

Most of the people mentioned above held more senior positions than me at the time I worked with them, and all of them considered a formal education and computer science and skills in algorithmic problem-solving to not be important for a successful career. That mindset was either condoned or celebrated at many places I worked in. The people I wrote above weren’t considered bad performers.

If I had to categorize the “no need for education, no need for algorithms” crowd of our field, they’d fall into three categories: They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics.

Perhaps I’ve grown too resentful of dealing with people who take shortcuts where shortcuts are not supposed to be taken.

‘Many people from very different groups can come together hating AI’

Content note: contains appropriately salty language

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260821-tante-on-ai-when-this-thing-crashes-i-want-to-see-apologies - podcast (clean version with bleeps)

time: 49 min 52 sec

prompt injections get easier and stupider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEkTvsv0cLg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260820-how-to-hack-copilot-ai-ask-it-how-you-can-hack-it - podcast

time: 4 min 08 sec

Edit: I'd like to preemptively clarify I don't have anything against these specific examples, nor am I trying to invalidate the work that went into creating them or any other examples of anti-AI fonts. This post is meant to critique the idea itself. I'm not trying to put-down anyone here!

I think this is a good perspective but...

AI systems are never going to start getting dumber.

...hasn't this already happened many times???