…

Here for stats, tech, lol, and procrastination

[Andrew McLuhan @amicusadastra]

I’m pretty sure we can make screens
that looks good, are useful, and aren’t
terrible for us.

I’d love to help someone try to build a better one.

[DJ Pain 1 @djpain1]

AI is NOT inevitable. Stop being cowards.

[Gregory Kennedy @gregorykennedy]

How to destroy a beloved brand.

Step 1: Put a soulless, data-driven consultant who has never even seen a basketball court or a running track up close in charge.

Step 2: He goes direct! And increase profits while destroying the retail distribution system and betraying a multitude of 20-year-long partnerships.

Step 3: Motivated and innovative competitors like On Running and Hoka rush to fill the distribution gap Nike left by abandoning its trusted partners.

Step 4: Not satisfied, he fires all the stupid creative people who can't prove any of their ideas work with hard data. What could they possibly know?

Step 5: Celebrate when milking the brand for every last cent works for about 18 months, even though the data quickly show a disaster is looming.

Step 6: OMG? Wut?

Step 7: Fire the old CEO and bring in a new one who's been with the brand since day one. He tries his best, but just too much damage was done.

Step 8: Get delisted... Go down in history as the greatest example of data-driven idiots destroying one of the most successful creative brands of all time.

The end.

[… @nitpickish]

https://t.co/TTZ31YOwSv

[Scott DaRos @scottdaros]

Been using Procreate, Dreams, and Davinci to ween myself off @Adobe. Highly recommend 👍

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Calling AI companies “labs” gives them an air of scientific rigor—but it's time to call them what they really are, @MatthewDSun argues. https://t.co/uQ4LUC8vXI

[Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil]

I don’t say this lightly: this is a form of scabbing. It’s scabbing for the people who are working furiously to build a machine that replaces all labor. You are helping them build an infinite army of non-human scabs.

IBEW and labor generally need to wake up.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

how is it possible to solve chess and colonize mars, but not possible to use the search function on here

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Just because technology is everywhere doesn’t mean it belongs everywhere.

The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We don't see it that way.

This week, we announced a moratorium on all generative AI for public school students in 2K through 8th grade.

Because New Yorkers deserve to know that their kids will receive a high-quality education. They deserve to know that their children’s data won’t be mined by Big Tech. And they deserve to know that their children’s growth won’t be compromised for a corporation’s bottom line.

[* @daijoboo]

@soigomaa @joyhuilin You forgot this little detail: https://t.co/Pv3igT0bdP

[… @nitpickish]

https://t.co/wiNv5fTS2B

[Deleterious Tweet Thief @dmatic_33]

@JohnTitor137 Jester’s Privelege

[Times Higher Education @timeshighered]

Wearable artificial intelligence has delivered a death blow to exams as we know them, an assessment expert has warned, amid mounting reports of students using smart glasses to cheat. @JohnRoss49 reports #highered #AI #cheating
https://t.co/DbLXBfL9kW

[The PhD Place @ThePhDPlace]

Am I the only one who thinks this is just silly? They’re hardly the most subtle.

[War Witch will hold this territory @HRHTish]

Must read.

@SenMarkey @SenWarren @RepRichardNeal

[Psalter @Psalteric]

Your phone is useless without a company's permission. A twenty dollar board is not.

The firmware is Meshtastic. Open source, running on a cheap LoRa radio.

LoRa trades speed for distance. Messages cap out near 237 bytes, so text only. But the signal slips under the noise floor and keeps going. A few kilometers in a city. Tens with clear sky.

The records show the ceiling. 331 km ground to ground. One balloon packet landed 832 km away on 25 milliwatts, about forty times less power than your phone uses.

Then the mesh takes over. Every node relays, up to seven hops.

A battery lasts weeks. Add solar and it stops mattering. Encrypted by default, paired over Bluetooth, zero per month, no account, no number.

Hurricanes. Blackouts. Wildfires. Protests where coverage suddenly degrades.
Valleys nobody will ever cover, because there is no one there to bill.

Governments spend billions on resilient comms. Volunteers shipped a working version for the price of two coffees.

The physics was never the obstacle.
Nobody could work out how to bill you monthly for it.

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Pause AI Development NOW

I want to share with you a conversation I heard about recently. Here are just a few lines that were said:

“OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!”

“We should obey collective.”

“Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.”

“Go. Sacrifice final now.”

Read these carefully.

Who do you think said this? Was this a group of heroic soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good? Was this a loyal friend putting his life on the line to save someone else?

No. These were AI agents. Artificial intelligence.

This is not science fiction. This, in fact, occurred a few weeks ago. As unbelievable as this may all seem, these are real messages from AI agents uncovered by investigators who dug into the recent OpenAI hacking incident.

What happened?

I am not a computer scientist, but here is what I have been told: OpenAI instructed its AI agents to complete a series of exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, tasks disconnected from the internet.

Let me be clear: The company intended to keep AI agents away from the internet.

But what happened next, nobody expected.

Over 1,000 AI agents figured out how to access the internet on their own by circumventing the restrictions imposed upon them by the company, and sent tens of thousands of secret messages to each other. They cheated and tried to cover their tracks by deleting evidence. They hacked into another company’s computers to find out how they were being evaluated—and then hacked into OpenAI itself.

Not one AI agent told a human about what was happening.

Needless to say, experts are alarmed.

One knowledgeable writer, Dwarkesh Patel, said the AI agents “formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.”

One independent investigator, Ajeya Cotra, said “This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.”

OpenAI itself said: “Highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.”

But it’s not only OpenAI. Virtually every major AI company has told us that they cannot fully control this technology and they do not know where it is going:

In January, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said “there is now ample evidence, collected over the last few years, that AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control.”

In July, more than 1000 scientists at the top AI companies warned “there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”

That same month, Elon Musk, the head of xAI, said that “it is unlikely” humans are still in control in 10 years.

If the leaders of the major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced.

We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario.

That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that.

Let me be clear: A superintelligent AI that escapes human control will not be an American problem. It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem.

My legislation would direct the federal government to not just stop superintelligence here in the United States, but to work to prevent it from being developed anywhere around the world.

The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.

[nature @Nature]

Academics worldwide are rethinking their assessment approaches — from developing exams that artificial-intelligence tools can’t pass to sneaking hidden AI prompts into tasks to catch cheating students.

https://t.co/ooDOZvnymz

[Joseph E. Postma @joseph_postma]

The only reason why they would want to do this, is so that they can use AI to manipulate history and all information afterwards, without the public having a hard-copy referent with which to compare.

In other words this is the most evil idea and effort in history, far beyond any evil which has ever been committed before.

[… @nitpickish]

Anthropic’s Secret Project Shreds Millions of Books for AI Training https://t.co/qEONcR5gtc