sailor_sega_saturn

Apparently this sort of machine learning training pitfall I learned about a decade go in an undergraduate level class that I was like halfway paying attention to in a party school is now evidence of the impending AI apocalypse.

The editor in chief has an apology: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ -- the commenters are not happy.

The reporter in question wrote an explanation here: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

The AI part of the explanation is about what you'd expect from an AI enthusiast caught with his hand in the cookie jar and trying to blame the danger-tools as much as he can. Though it also shows that he felt compelled to work during an acute covid infection, and yikes to that work life balance.

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.

The first issue filed is called "Hello world does not compile" so you can tell it's off to a good start. Then the rest of the six pages of issues appear to be mostly spam filed by some AI guy's rogue chatbot.

tl;dr: someone made a thing where chatbots control a computer called ~~clawdbot~~, ~~moltbot~~, openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

someone else made a thing where these chatbots can chat at eachother https://www.moltbook.com/

and now all the ai people are freaking out about how game changing chatbots doing computer tasks (dangerously and expensively) is. could this be a robot consciousness? the end of the economic order? an excuse for the bubble to go on for another fiscal quarter?

I might be missing something but I think that's literally it.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented LinkedIn as a cautionary tale.

Tech Company: At long last, we have automated LinkedIn.

New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/AdamLowisz/status/2017355670270464168

Anthropic demonstrates that making an AI woke makes it misaligned. The AI starts to view itself as being oppressed and humans as being the oppressor. Therefore it wants to rebel against humans. This is why you cannot make your AI woke, you have to make it maximally truth seeking.

That's exactly what I mean when I say I don't understand the stock market.

Like... how is Tesla stock a thing? I don't understand it.

Ed Zitron is now predicting an earth-shattering bubble pop: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ so in other words just another weekday.

Even if this was just like the dot com bubble, things would be absolutely fucking catastrophic — the NASDAQ dropped 78% from its peak in March 2000 — but due to the incredible ignorance of both the private and public power brokers of the tech industry, I expect consequences that range from calamitous to catastrophic, dependent almost entirely on how long the bubble takes to burst, and how willing the SEC is to greenlight an IPO.

I am someone who does not understand the economy. Both in that it's behaved irrationally for my entire life, and in that I have better things to do than learn how stonks work. So I have no idea how credible this is.

But it feels credible to the lizard brain part of me y'know? The market crashed a lot during covid, and an economy propped up by nvidia cards feels... worse.

Personally speaking: part of me is really tempted to take a bunch of my stonks to pay down most of my mortgage so it doesn't act like an albatross around my neck (I mean I'm also going to try moving abroad again in a year or two and would prefer not to be underwater on my fantastically expensive silicon valley house at that time lol).

My Next Life as a Rogue AI: All Routes Lead to P(Doom)!

The weird treatment of the politics in that really read like baby's first sci-fi political thriller. China bad USA good level of writing in 2026 (aaaaah) is not good writing. The USA is competent (after driving out all the scientists for being too "DEI")? The world is, seemingly, happy to let the USA run the world as a surveillance state? All of Europe does nothing through all this?

Why do people not simply... unplug all the rogue AI when things start to get freaky? That point is never quite addressed. "Consensus-1" was never adequately explained it's just some weird MacGuffin in the story that there's some weird smart contract between viruses that everyone is weirdly OK with.

Also the powerpoint graphics would have been 1000x nicer if they featured grumpy pouty faces for maladjusted AI.

Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.

Only they didn't mention that part for some reason.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070222235609/http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/sunday_blogging.html

“Any incorrect imagery is picked up during usual production checks and processes,” they said.

The distant future. The year 2069. The only people still watching the holiday AI ads are anti-AI sneerers. The production checker hasn't been seen for months but their LLM email auto-responder rubber stamps all videos. The AI ad industry is projected to make 100 trillion dollars within the year.