Bad Ideas

This is how you generate restrictive legislation... if you're lucky. Molotov cocktails if you're not.

I'm good, thanks...

"What is X Money? The new service on X basically provides banking and financial services for paying X Premium and Premium+ subscribers right within the app. X Money includes peer-to-peer payments and money transfers within the X platform, as well as a deposit account. Users will also receive "the X card," a physical Visa debit card for ATM withdrawals and in-person transactions."

Now you'll be able to pay for your Grok-generated revenge porn without even leaving the app!

Jerked by a Mechanical Turk

The latest iteration of the Neo domestic robot from startup manufacturer 1X has freakishly sensitive and mobile fingers. Very dextrous, pretty much the equivalent of human hands, capable of delicate chores like screwing in a light bulb, or... well, you know how people are.

Thing is, like most of these robots today, it's not entirely autonomous...

1X says the goal is full automation for Neo, but for now, the robot is partly teleoperated, as a Wall Street Journal video noted last year.

Some guy who works in a Singapore cubicle farm sits at the dinner table with a haunted, 1000yd stare.

“How was work today, honey?” asks his wife…

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Incredibly Bad Idea

Using Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, they made bets on the fires — how they would grow, how long they would last and how much they would destroy.

Using online prediction markets to place bets on wildfires is basically incentivizing arson. This is like the literal definition of a moral hazard.

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Panopticon Update...

Meta's pervert goggles are getting face recognition to make stalking random strangers you run across in public even easier.

"Rank One, whose board includes a former CIA deputy director and a former FBI science chief, supplied face recognition to Meta for internal development of its smart glasses app."

Well, there's nothing creeptastic about that at all.

This meme remains undefeated:

The Panopticon...

This sounds horrible and dystopian...

BusPatrol plans to scan the license plates of all vehicles the buses drive past, and then let law enforcement search that data. The plan would essentially turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles.

Basically turning your local Anytown School District's bus fleet into mobile Flock cameras.

They've already drawn scrutiny from Florida to Pennsylvania.

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Tab Clearing...

• Oops. It looks like half of all global seaborne sulphur shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz.


• Papyrus containing part of The Iliad found in tomb with Egyptian mummy.


• Meta to add facial recognition to its creeper glasses, to make being stalked even easier!

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Tab Clearing...

• High-resolution sonar images of the USS Monitor wreck.


• Russia's hacker unit known as Fancy Bear is behind the hacking of wi-fi routers.


• Panopticon-like surveillance isn't any better just because it's not the government doing it.

A.I. Delusions

Suppose you were the sort of person who got a little obsessed with someone. Suppose you thought that this person was sending you subtle signals that they really wanted to be with you. Suppose you had a machine that would confirm those delusions, one that was, in fact, programmed to encourage you to think you were right?

We’ve identified at least ten cases in which chatbots, primarily ChatGPT, fed a user’s fixation on another real person — fueling the false idea that the two shared a special or even “divine” bond, roping the user into conspiratorial delusions, or insisting to a would-be stalker that they’d been gravely wronged by their target. In some cases, our reporting found, ChatGPT continued to stoke users’ obsessions as they descended into unwanted harassment, abusive stalking behavior, or domestic abuse, traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives.

In other cases, the built-in confirmation bias of LLMs can lead otherwise intelligent people to think they were doing some serious "research" to their own detriment...

Though Dr. Marzbani didn’t know it, Joe was routinely asking questions about his cancer to several generative A.I. tools, which often struggle to give accurate medical advice. He told them to list the early signs of Richter’s, interpret his lab results and explain complicated research about the treatment his doctor recommended. He knew not to trust A.I. unilaterally. He often read the scientific papers the tools cited and — as best he could without medical training — tried to verify that they aligned with what the tools had said.

He came away feeling so confident in his understanding of the science that declining treatment seemed to be the obvious choice.

It can be a useful tool for some things, but it's important to get second opinions and reality checks. I know we think we're all way too smart to get trapped in a spiral like that, but...

YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA

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Tab Clearing...

• Fortunately, that will buff right out: Photos of a visibly patched-up KC-135 transiting through RAF Mildenhall en route back to CONUS for repairs.


• The Click That Cost $11,000: Google placing ads for various third party travel agency intermediaries above the links to the actual hotel is a perfect example of enshittification.


• Europe about to feel jet fuel crunch.

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They're from the government and they're here to help.

"The Trump administration wants to require health insurance companies to hand over troves of sensitive, detailed, and identifiable medical records from millions of federal workers and retirees, along with their families. The move is raising immediate concern from legal and health policy experts, according to a report by KFF Health News."

I see no way that this data could possibly be misused. Besides, citizen, if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about, nicht wahr?

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Top. Men.

Info is coming out around the lawsuit regarding the DOGE cuts to National Endowment for the Humanities grants and... wow. 

Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”

That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.

Apparently this posse of barely post-pubertal broccoli-haired incels were just feeding grant text into an LLM and asking "Chat, is this DEI?" 

Which, I guess, made sense since this merry band of Einsteins seems unclear on what "DEI" even is. I could only take a minute or two of this guy talking in circles in his deposition video trying to avoid admitting he has no idea what he's talking about.

This is how Indianapolis lost a federal grant to restore urban trees. See, if the trees in your city are, like, mostly elms or ash and Dutch elm disease or ash borers come through, that would be bad. So biodiversity in your city's trees is good... but whoops! The word "biodiversity" contains the word "diversity", and Chat-GPT says that's a no-no.

Or say you're at Duke University and you have a federal grant to study, oh, something involving disease transmission or transgenic genetic material... well, all the LLM sees is "trans" and bye bye disease research! 

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Piercing the Veil

Way back in the mists of time, in the autumn of 2005 when this blog was still in diapers, there was a minor kerfuffle about the virtues and vices of blogging anonymously.

Since the sort of people who start blogs do so because they tend to have opinions on frickin' everything, it was no surprise that lots of people had opinions on the topic.

It's popped up here and there since then in various online spaces where I participate, like forums and certain corners of social media.

I'm pretty ambivalent on the topic. I don't blog anonymously because for me there's hardly any point in it. I've gone by my government name all over the web since the days of dialup but I respect that other people may not want to and, to rifle through Thomas Jefferson's desk drawers for an appropriate aphorism, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. You want to blog anonymously, knock yourself out.

But I do think it's chilling that one thing LLMs seem to be good at is sussing out anonymous posters and tying them to their wallet name via language use analysis.

Anonymity ain't what it used to be.

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Epistemic Crackup

The universality of always-on broadband internet connections in our pockets really kicked off an experiment in Epistemological Choose Your Own Adventure and, friends, it's not going swimmingly.

The proliferation of AI-generated imagery and video has absolutely turbocharged it. Social media was awash by yesterday afternoon in AI videos of varying quality claiming to show a burning USS Abraham Lincoln sinking. (You know, the one the Houthis claimed they sank last year.)

Can't wait to run into the CVN-72 Truthers in the wild later this year who claim that the Iranians actually sank the Lincoln and the Deep State is covering it up.

QotD: Moderate Killbot Edition...

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten on the Anthropic v. DoD slap fight...

Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.

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Tab Clearing...

• The Spinner from Blade Runner, from the fertile mind of Sid Mead...


• Saudi Arabia is scaling back on Neom, their weird project to build a linear megacity in the desert.


• It's cold, y'all.

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Projection

It is possible to believe both that military action against Greenland is very unlikely and also that this administration’s unhinged obsession with it has already done serious long term damage to relations with European nations that will take generations to repair.

We obviously don't think it's vital to our national security or else we wouldn't have closed all the bases we used to have there.

(Meanwhile, if you checked Marco Rubio's browser search history, I guarantee you'd find "map projection that makes cuba look huge".)

I would also point out that ratified treaties, such as the North Atlantic Treaty, have the force of law in the US.

So any order of hostilities against Danish territory is prima facie, de facto and de jure, cut and dried, no two ways around it and any way you slice it, definitionally an illegal order.

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High Grade Idiocy

So a dude here in Hoosieropolis went to the hospital after being hit by a bullet that came plummeting out of the sky on New Year's Eve, went through his hat, and injured his noggin.

All because some dumbass had to go shooting his blaster in the sky like an idiot (and, mind you, regular old fireworks are plenty legal here and sold from itinerant seasonal places that pop up like Spirit Halloween stores in any vacant retail space in the run-up to New Year's Eve and Independence Day.)

Of even more note than the "what goes up must come down" angle is the fact that the guy was on the 4300 block of S. High School Road, near the intersection with Kentucky Avenue, when he was hit.

You know what else is in that neighborhood?

Around the Web

• Techbros are still failing to beat the “Don’t understand Tolkien” rap in their corporate naming practices by naming a super premium home security company after a guy killed by burglars.


• "When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw": When a copy writer kept losing work to AI, he asked a chatbot for career advice. This piece did not go in the direction that I, cynically, thought it was going.


• An extremely cool piece about the fastest cars available in the United Kingdom, decade by decade. Lavishly photographed automotive pornography.

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Oh, Mickey, you're so fine...

Disney inked a deal with OpenAI to allow the use of numerous characters from its formidable arsenal of intellectual property (which, remember, includes a lot of Marvel and Star Wars stuff, too) in AI-generated Sora videos.

I'm sure the idea here is that kiddos would make short videos featuring Goofy or Darth Vader and then buy more merch or beg mom and dad for a trip to Orlando. See, while movies and video are not a loss leader for Disney, they aren't the main profit center, either. That's all rolling in from licensing, merch, and their hospitality and amusement park arms.

I predict this arrangement will last about a week, during which time the 'net will be flooded with AI slop vids of Mickey and Minnie piloting the jets into the World Trade Center on 9/11 and Iron Man doing hardcore porn scenes with Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

We'll see. Disney's always been extremely protective of their IP.

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