Thanks. Not as many interesting details as I’d hoped. The comments are great though… today I learned that the 2008 crash was entirely the fault of the government who engineered it to steal everyone’s money, and the poor banks were unfairly maligned because some of them had Jewish names, but the same crash definitely couldn’t happen today because the stifling regulatory framework stops it? And bubbles don’t exist anymore? I guess I just don’t have the brains (or wsj subscription) for high finance.

Might be something interesting here, assuming you can get past th paywall (which I currently can’t): https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/abs-crashed-the-economy-in-2008-now-theyre-back-and-bigger-than-ever-973d5d24

Today’s magic economy-ending words are “data centre asset-backed securities” :

Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better…Data-center bonds are backed by lease payments from companies that rent out computing capacity

I always liked “bleat” myself, with its slightly mocking overtones, but it never took off.

There’s a grand old tradition in enlightened skeptical nerd culture of hating on psychologists, because it’s all just so much bullshit and lousy statistics and unreproducible nonsense and all the rest, and…

If you train the Al to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it’s got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil.

…was it all just projection? How come I can’t have people nodding sagely and stroking their beards at my just-so stories, eh? How come it’s just shitty second rate sci-fi when I say it? Hmm? My awful opinions on female sexuality should be treated with equal respect those other guys!

I wouldn’t say that modern computer programming is that hot either. On the other hand, I can absolutely see “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” being enthusiastically applied to genetic engineering products. Silicon Valley brought us “move fast and break things”, and now you can apply it to your children, too!

He’s right that current quantum computers are physics experiments, not actual computers, and that people concentrate too much on exotic threats, but he goes a bit off the rails after that.

Current post quantum crypto work is a hedge, because no-one who might face actual physical or financial or military risks is prepared to say that there will be no device in 10-20 years time that can crack eg. an ECDH key exchange in the blink of an eye. You’ve got to start work on PQC now, because you want to be able subject it to a lot of classical cryptanalysis work because quantum-resistant is no good by itself (see also, SIKE which turned out to be trivially crackable).

The attempt to project factorising capabilities of future quantum computers is pretty stupid because there’s too little data to work with, so the capabilities and limitations of future devices can’t usefully be guessed at yet. Personally, I’d expect them to remain physics experiments for at least another 5-10 years, but once a bunch of current issues are resolved you’ll see rapid growth in practical devices by which time it is a bit late to start casting around for replacement crypto systems.

The thing that currently cannot be worked around is the “play integrity api”, but relatively few applications make use of it yet.

It is a terrible security measure (because it give the impression to app developers that a 5+ year old android installation that’s never had a patch is more secure than an up-to-date graphene install) so there’s a chance that it might be improved in future, but it is currently a looming problem.

Graphene is very nice, but you should be aware that:

• the only supported hardware at present are pixel phones by google who are not the world’s most ethical company
• google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working

which can be used in many very useful ways, including saving life and reducing the work needed to fulfill the needs of a population

Uh huh. “Can” needs an asterisk and some disclaimers there. And probably “useful”, too.

Encouraging news: Thompson Reuters has won a copyright case against defunct AI firm Ross Intelligence, with the judge ruling that training your ai on copyrighted works is not fair use. I’m interested to see where this goes next.

https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/

An entertaining bit of pushback against the various bathroom bills being pushed at the moment. Bonus points for linking it with ai training. I feel like this is an idea that’s very adaptable…

https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/113983951020093710

Signs which have been adhered to bathroom stall interiors at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

SECURITY NOTICE Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (Al) in lieu of traditional genital inspections. At this time, images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process. Your participation in this program is voluntary. You have the right to request removal of your data by calling the EGV program office at (512) 463-0001 during normal operating hours (Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM). STE OP CRATMENT OA Pusi DFW DALLAS FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

The contact number appears to be for Dan Patrick, the lt. governor of Texas.

In a hilarious turn of events that no one could have foreseen, Anthropic is having problems with people sending llm generated job applications, and is asking potential candidates to please not use ai.

While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.

https://www.404media.co/anthropic-claude-job-application-ai-assistants/

Additionally, https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/

Some of this stuff could be conceivably implemented as an easy-to-consume service. It would be nice if it were possible to fend off the scrapers without needing to be a sysadmin or, say, a cloudflare customer.

(Whilst I could be either of those things, unless someone is paying me I would very much rather not)

an entire economy built on intellectual property thievery

The historic attitude of the US to copyright is interesting (you can still see old English-language books that are labelled not for sale in the USA). In these enlightened days of course there’s a half-trillion dollar plan to shore up the LLM business, which is already a half-trillion dollar crater of debt and is still digging hard.

and slave labor

I always wondered how the manufacture of white goods in the US was competitive with the likes of Mexico, and it turns out that the secret ingredient is incredibly cheap prison labor, where the prisoners face significant negative consequences if they’re not prepared to work for pennies.

Prisoners can be firefighters for a few dollars a day and risk their lives, but are denied jobs when they get out. California, that noted bleeding heart lefty bastion, refused to abolish penal servitude (ie. slavery of prisoners).

The US health insurance industry means that huge swathes of the population may as well be indentured because cannot afford basic healthcare if they quit and changing employers risks rejection of coverage of pre-existing conditions.

I could go on. For quite a while.

all the downvotes confirm the ccp is here and active on the fediverse

By all accounts, the ccp do a pretty poor job of influence operations compared to russia. Personally I suspect that the fediverse is just too small compared to twitter and bluesky and reddit, so why would anyone bother here?

Truth is, both the US and the PRC are capitalist hellholes of differing degrees, and the current team in the White House works hard to reduce those differences. Remember, with the right wing, it is always projection and envy. They hate Iran because they want to be a fundamentalist dictatorship too. They hate china because they want uncontested power and a labor force without human rights.

You are not obliged to carry water for them.

We’ve had recent eruptions in all be big categories, so we’re not due another one for a while and trying to cheat by setting one off early won’t allow sufficient pressure for a proper bang.

Not that I want to discourage you, but don’t be sad if you try for a year without summer and get a couple of weeks without flights instead.

The whole thing is just weirdly incompetent. Maybe they just had everything configured wrong and accidentally deployed sone throwaway tests to production? I could almost see it as a way to poison scrapers, given that there are some odd visibility settings on the slop posts, though the owner’s shiftiness and dubious explanations suggest it wasn’t anything so worthy.

And on a less downbeat and significantly more puerile note, Dan Fixes Coin Ops makes a nice analogy for companies integrating ai into their product.

https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/112847573063473767

Hey, did you know of you own an old forum full of interesting posts from back in the day when humans wrote stuff, you can just attach ai bots to dead accounts and have them post backdated slop for, uh, reasons?

https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

Corporations institute barebones, born yesterday AI models that don’t know their ass from their elbow because they can’t be bothered to pay the devs to actually train them but when shit goes south they turn around and blame the devs for a bad product instead of admitting they cut corners

Sounds like all it would take is one company to do it right, and they’d clean up. Except somehow, with all of the billions being poured into it, every product with ai sprinkled on it is worse than the non-ai-sprinkled alternatives.

Now, maybe this is finally the sign that everyone will accept that The Market is completely fucking stupid and useless, and that literally every company involved in ai is holding it wrong.

Or, and I know it’s a bit of a stretch here, but consider the possibility that ai just isn’t very useful except for fooling humans and maybe you can fool people into paying for it but it’s a lot harder to fool them into thinking it makes stuff better.

Maybe I’m missing something, but has anyone actually justified this sort of “reasoning” by LLMs? Like, is there actually anything meaningfully different going on? Because it doesn’t seem to be distinguishable from asking a regular LLM to generate 20 paragraphs of ai fanfic pretending to reason about the original question, and the final result seems about as useful.