US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it...
Three scenes and a comment:
Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.
I see another story: some AI bros posting about their "anxiety" about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.
I'm still sweating and scrolling from my garden... I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI...
We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don't have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it
This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.
The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don't need to list them in this forum.
Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.
First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.
Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don't keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don't produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.
Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn't be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We're doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.
You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?
Well now malware authors are including biology terms like "saccharide" in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway
What a time to be alive
UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You won't be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.
Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach
Claude Mythos... I'm already sick of hearing about it. The self-imposed critihype is insane.
A friend just pointed out that Anthropic are making all this big noise about having an AI that is "too good" at finding bugs and security problems 1 week after the source code for one of their flagship products was leaked to the public and was found to be riddled with security holes... Why would they not use it themselves?
Same as the ~~vague markdown files~~ skills that are supposedly going to make all SaaS redundant and finally kill off all the COBOL running on mainframes that checks notes IBM have spent hundreds of thousands of man hours trying to kill over the last 3-4 decades
Honestly fuck this shit. Bunch of absolute clowns 🤡 🤡 🤡
GitHub have finally achieved zero 9s stability for the last 90 days. Congratulations to all involved
Think of all those poor billionaires who won't be able to afford that 29th yacht if we made them pay their fair share instead of externalising their costs onto an already stretched general.public!
Turns out Google Gemini will let you use any old Google API key from things like maps and firebase to access it. So, baddies can do key scanning in public repos and then charge LLM usage to anyone who has committed an API key to their repo!
So many layers of stupidity going on here!
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules
IBM stocks take a tumble after anthropic release a COBOL skill - the rational market strikes again.
I wrote up my take here but TL;DR - a few markdown files telling Claude it's an expert at COBOL development aren't going to unpick decades of risk averse behaviour from bank and government cios. Similar to the SaaSpocalypse this is pure nonsense. Investors don't tend to let reality dissuade them though.
AI bros are seizing the means of computation: RAM, GPUs, SSDs and now HDDs...
I don't think there's an actual conspiracy, just lots of MBAs following their noses towards the $$$.
That said, time to buy a new lipo battery for that 10 year old laptop in the loft and stick Linux on it - before the lithium miners announce they've sold the next 12 months global supply of Lithium to Altman because he needs it to sleep at night...
The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven't considered that if no-one has any income they won't have any customers. However, they do value geese).