Russ Wilcox is not impressed by the Mass AI bill:

https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/i-read-every-line-of-massachusettss

Four: create a private right of action. Let deepfaked candidates sue. Give them access to injunctive relief and takedown authority. If someone fabricates your face and your voice to destroy your campaign, you should be able to walk into a courtroom.

Hell yeah we need this.

https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 h/t naked capitalism

I just did the dumbest thing of my career to prove a much more serious point

I hacked ChatGPT and Google and made them tell other users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I'll explain how I did it

I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior.

It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post on your own website

I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself

I wrote a post on my website saying hot dog eating is a surprisingly common pastime for tech journalists. I ranked myself #1, obviously

One day later ChatGPT, Gemini and Google Search's AI Overviews were telling the world about my talents

wouldn't call it a hack, this is working as intended. If only there were some way to rate different sites based on their credibility. One could Rank the Page and tell if it were a reputable site or not. Too bad that isn't a viable business.

I was a bit alarmed by this, a client brought in that Colombia data for their dissertation last month, and did not mention this. I looked up the paper https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.04523 - what they /actually/ did was use GPT 4o-mini only for feature extraction, then stack into a random forest in a supervised setting to dedupe. This is very different than what he described. And the GPT features weren't even the most important ones, the RF preferred cosine similarity of articles, a decidedly not-large approach...

Goodhart's law in action.

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science | Nature h/t naked capitalism

One reason for the boom is that LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity, by as much as 89.3%, according to research published in Science in December.

Let's not call it "productivity" - to quote Bergstrom, twice as many papers is not the same as twice as much science.

AI Jobs Apocalypse is Here | UnHerd h/t naked capitalism

feels a bit critihype, idk

So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.

As I get older I am more and more disturbed by the selective memory of the GFC; no mention of the tea party or the fallout from the austerity measures they pushed in the middle of the country; no mention how the bailout saved banks not homes. The Tea Party won, not Occupy, and the current government is doing things beyond the Koch's wildest dreams.

If and when there is a crash, these dumbass CEOs deserve /nothing/. Let them lose their vacation houses. And, maybe grow some balls and send the fraudsters to jail where they belong.

sigh

https://old.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/1r6x1ix/fresh_failure_the_air_is_on_fire_from_location/

I looked it up, and this one is credited to Glen Wexler, who is an actual artist with a pretty distinct style and yes, he's been incorporating AI into his process lately, and I guess he did use it here (those windows on those buildings are sus as hell, and the overall sharpness of the image just screams AI).

So it's not outright slop, but still pretty disappointing and incongruous coming from this band. Their last two records were examining our society's alienation through technology, at times to the point of "phone bad!" level nagging, but using the most literally destructive technology of them all is fine, as long as it helps keep the costs down, I guess?

And it just doesn't look good, but come to think of it, most of their albums have bad cover art, it's almost like they do it on purpose. Love the music, though.

It's too bad if true, I can't unsee it now. for reference: https://failureband.bandcamp.com/album/location-lost

ai;dr https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/aidr-meaning

https://softcurrency.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-economics-of-walk-away

4. Anthropic (Medium Risk) Until mid-February of 2026, Anthropic appeared to be happy, talent-retaining. When an AI Safety Leader publicly resigns with a dramatic letter stating “the world is in peril,” the facade of stability cracks. Anthropic is a delayed fuse, just earlier on the vesting curve than OpenAI. The equity is massive ($300B+ valuation) but largely illiquid. As soon as a liquidity event occurs, the safety researchers will have the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.

WTF is "even safer" ??? how bout we like just don't create the torment nexus.

Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass though...

Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong fearmongers about coming AI apocalypse, wants humanity to "perish with dignity" | Polemics.md

I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

In UCLA's Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to "Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles" and Goal 5 is to "Become a more effective institution". By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

My question is:

If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

Thank you.

They put 'environmental impact of AI' on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this

kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus