TechTakes

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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."

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

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.

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

Old: AI Winter

Bold: AI Ragnarok

AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42

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.

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).

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.