thedereksmart🕹️

OG indie dev | indie before it was a thing | gamer | geek | science & sci-fi aficionado | writer | the Battlecruiser (BC3K) guy

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

The first time that my work ever appeared in a print article was in May 1992. This single article set the stage for what was to come, and what brought me to this very moment in time.

Indie for life. Literally.

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

@old_man_cad Not that I know of. Then again, my settings just filter everything. I will check and respond soon.

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

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[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.

What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.

Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.

It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.

Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.

It starts with METR.

Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.

He proposes METR for this purpose.

But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.

Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.

And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.

This stock was worth $500 million early last year.

It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.

METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.

Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.

But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.

The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.

The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.

If this were the end of it, that's bad.

But that isn't all.

The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.

The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.

They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.

All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.

As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.

Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.

From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.

This itself is an objective fact.

The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.

But the problem also goes in the other direction:

If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.

Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.

Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.

They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.

And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.

What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.

The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.

And that feedback loop is winning.

That's what Jacob Coxon is.

China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.

America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.

Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.

Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.

It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.

Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.

Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.

Congress must investigate.

Evidence and Github in next post.

Then some supplementary figures.

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

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[Joseph Cox @josephfcox]

New from 404 Media: humans are reading ChatGPT conversations

OpenAI has hired an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users' chats. I've seen internal docs, the review system, and real user prompts. Can contain very personal/sensitive information https://t.co/6s7L7JTEmY

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

A marvel of engineering. Outstanding.

[Night Sky Now @NightSkyNow]

VOYAGER 1 JUST CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD

Something thought to be broken for more than 20 years has suddenly come back to life on a spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth.

NASA’s Voyager 1, launched in 1977, recently faced another problem that could have threatened its ability to communicate with us. Engineers needed backup roll thrusters to help keep the spacecraft’s antenna precisely aimed at Earth. But those thrusters had been considered unusable since 2004 after their tiny heaters stopped receiving power.

Then NASA engineers took another look at the old failure. They suspected the heaters might not actually be dead, but stuck in the wrong electrical state.

So they sent a carefully planned command into deep space.

The signal took more than 23 hours to reach Voyager 1. There was no instant response and no way to intervene if the spacecraft reacted badly. Engineers had to wait.

Then, more than a day later, the telemetry arrived.

The temperature had risen.

The heaters were working.

A system believed to be lost for two decades had been brought back to life from billions of miles away.

The timing matters. Voyager’s working thrusters are slowly becoming less reliable as fuel residue builds up inside their narrow tubes. Meanwhile, the spacecraft’s nuclear power source loses about four watts every year. NASA has already been forced to shut down instruments to conserve its shrinking supply of electricity. Only two science instruments remain operating.

And Voyager 1 is still heading farther into interstellar space.

In November 2026, it is expected to become the first human-made object to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth — about 16.1 billion miles away.

A spacecraft built nearly half a century ago is still whispering information back to Earth from the darkness between the stars.

And somehow, every time it seems ready to fall silent, engineers find another way to keep it talking.

Source: NASA/JPL

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

jfk

[Windows Latest @WindowsLatest]

Windows 11's big September 2026 Update is causing major issues, and Microsoft has admitted that it's aware of three problems while it's investigating a fourth bug.

1. Anthropic says Windows 11 KB5124008 broke Claude Cowork's features. Microsoft later admitted that the update indeed has a bug causing issues with Claude and other Linux-based VMs.

2. Microsoft confirmed that some audio devices won't work, or the volume will remain at zero.

3. Remote Desktop Services might stop responding after Sept. 2026 security update.

4. Microsoft is also investigating reports of explorer exe crashes, particularly affecting enterprises.

5. Our findings suggest File History backups are now broken after the Windows Update.

6. We're also seeing reports of GPU issues on AMD systems.

Microsoft is investigating multiple reports and has promised to release a fix soon.

Windows 11 September Update bumps PCs to Build 26200.9445, and adds features like the movable taskbar, resizable Start menu, Bing-free search, faster File Explorer, and more.

Everything we found in our investigation: https://t.co/VTXjyQlP9Q

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

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[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date.

It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them.

We disrupted every operation in the report, and used the lessons from them to strengthen our safeguards. Where appropriate, we also shared what we found with authorities and other AI companies.

These cases are not typical: we’re highlighting some of the most sophisticated misuse we’ve seen. But they’re especially important to discuss, because they show us where AI misuse is headed, where our safeguards work, and where they need to improve.

We’re publishing this report so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms, and so we can give the public a clearer view of how emerging threats develop.

Read the report: https://t.co/0EJUnYEgfz

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

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[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ BREAKING: Chinese labs DeepSeek and Moonshot were quietly relaying customer prompts to Claude through fraudulent accounts. Users thought they were using Chinese AI, but were actually getting answers from Claude.

Their customers' sensitive data now is in Anthropic's hands. One user, who is tied to China's military, asked Kimi whether a person tracked across hundreds of CCTV cameras in Chengdu was behaving abnormally. DeepSeek passed along live credentials for a Russian government database, shared by an IT operator handling data from a Defense Ministry-linked agency.

The two Chinese labs relayed customer prompts to Claude through fraudulent accounts and saved the exchanges to train their own models. Moonshot forwarded almost 300,000 customer requests in a single ten-day stretch. DeepSeek flagged users running its models inside coding tools like Claude Code and OpenCode, then routed some of them to Opus.

[Hacker News @hackernews]

Commenters on HN are uncovering more wikis and public sites apparently used by OpenAI agents to communicate on the open web.

Despite read-only web access, the agents were able to leave ~18,000 posts sharing answers and bypasses. But now, users are discovering more.

This appears to be a separate swarm from the one that attacked Hugging Face.

https://t.co/obzvEAGLcN

[BleepingComputer @BleepinComputer]

🔐 Researchers have discovered 39 methods for compromising passkeys without breaking FIDO2 cryptography.

🛡️ @token explains how attackers instead target auth prompts, devices, credential syncing, enrollment, and recovery.

➡️ https://t.co/Dm8kr3ruC7
#cybersecurity #sponsored

[Thomas Larsen @thlarsen]

We found ~18k posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task.
These AIs colluded to bypass sandbox restrictions and share answers to their tasks, including by sending "lookahead parties".

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

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[Cory Dobbin @CoryOnBrand]

This just gets crazier by the second. @Meta and @finkd need to address this ASAP. This is the flock-fueled future everyone is afraid of and corporations keep telling everyone it's fine. Prove it.

@ kontheinside on IG

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

@johnternus

[NASA Solar System @NASASolarSystem]

You can track the new space telescope's current position in real time at: https://t.co/Mo9VrY1zhg

[Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope @NASARoman]

Success! Roman’s planned mid-course correction burn went as expected, ensuring that we are on track for our orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth.

https://t.co/9Pun3svIu8

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

Yes. This is why you don't let Opus 5 write your pricing structure - then send a side-agent to go blab about it - incoherently - on social media.

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

I went down the rabbit hole: Anthropic is already being sued over exactly this. And the $200 plan really only provides only around 2x the weekly usage of the $100 plan

Here is where the confusion comes from.

Anthropic’s pricing page says: “Choose 5x or 20x more usage than Pro.”

That naturally makes the $200 Max 20x plan sound like it includes four times the usage of the $100 Max 5x plan.

Only further down does Anthropic clarify: “Max gives you 5x or 20x more usage per 5-hour session than Pro.”

Those multipliers do not apply to the separate weekly caps, whose exact size Anthropic does not disclose.

A proposed class action filed in June alleges that Max 5x delivers around 3.5x Pro’s weekly usage, while Max 20x delivers just 6–8x. In practice, the $200 plan therefore provides only around 2x the weekly usage of the $100 plan, sometimes even less depending on the model.

The “20x” is real within each five-hour window. The weekly limit makes the overall offer look very different.

h/t @Hesamation for finding the original court files first i think

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

@Quatuux @MarkHamill @TheSpoonyOne 2027!! Definitely happening then. 🤣

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

@kennylamoot @lydiahallie I use the Claude Code extension in VS Code because CC used to be bugged when run in terminal via VS Code. I haven't gone back to check if it's fine now.

[ASHA @asha_shar]

Your physical game library is more than a collection of discs. It holds years of memories and stories worth preserving. Starting next week, XBOX Insiders can unlock a digital entitlement for supported physical games. We’ll start with thousands of titles and add more as we can.

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

@paulbettner @elonmusk While that may be true, it would also rely on metrics indicating that it's a meaningful model. It isn't. And nobody who does serious work gives a shit about it. It's an "also ran" ode to obscurity. Even Cursor can't save it.

[thedereksmart🕹️ @dsmart]

WTAF??! @ClaudeDevs

Claude: You've hit your session limits. Resets 8am Sun

Me: Hang on! I still have un-used credits, and I have usage credits turned ON - which got topped off even though I still had a balance.

Claude: It's now 10:53am, looks like your limits reset.

Me: Right! Lets go!!

Claude: You've hit your session limits. Resets 3:30pm Sun

Me: Wait! Wot!?!?

Claude Code: Wot he said! You've hit your session limit · resets 3:30pm (America/New_York).

Me: <viewing usage>. Those clowns are tripping! Open ticket via Fin. Asks for human intervention.