… the language we are using about AI adoption is very similar to how Clayton Williams described rape.
“It’s happening whether you want it or not.”
“Better get on board if you know what’s good for you.”
“If you want to keep working here, this is what it takes.”
“You can’t yell it away.”
“It’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”
Am I comparing AI to rape? I am not. I am, however, comparing the language we use when discussing AI adoption to the language of rape culture. It’s the language of coercion. Language that implies a lack of choice and reminds you of the power those who are using it have over you. A lack of agency. It’s language that does not rely on consent, but instead the idea that we are bereft of choices, so we might as well get with the program.
The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy - Include Security Research Blog
In this post, we’re going to explore how the company Bright Data facilitates modern AI models scraping training data from the Internet using its residential proxy network.
Bright Data is a data-collection company that sells access to what it markets as the world’s largest residential proxy network of 400M+ home IP addresses that its customers route web-scraping traffic through. The supply behind that network comes from an SDK: a piece of software embedded in consumer apps that, with the user’s consent, turns their phone or smart TV into one of those exit nodes.
We’ll document what you, the average user, should know about what this company’s SDK does on your systems such as your mobile phone and your smart TV. We’re going to explore how their SDK works, which platforms have shipped it, and why your Internet-connected TV is the ultimate proxy for AI models looking to train on data scraped from the Internet.
lessons learned:
- anthropic's LLM assumes the persona of rich liberal who will only listen to you if you're nice
- which is to say, if you're too forceful or strict, the LLM will ignore everything you say and will become adversarial
- anthropic's LLM is literally "the absence of tension is the presence of justice"
- we live in a society
I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. It was the same AI answer again.
I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.
Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.
I’m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
"NASA is aware of the anomaly that occurred tonight at Launch Complex 36...."
This is the "increased latency in us-east-1" of space
Companies such as Microsoft and Meta have shared the names of civil servants and academics working on European tech regulation with a senate committee investigating “tech censorship” or “jawboning”, news magazine Vrij Nederland reported on Friday.
The cabinet has described the news as “extremely worrying”, given that the named officials could now face travel bans or even sanctions, Vrij Nederland said.
“If you want to discuss policy, then you do it with us, not over the backs of civil servants,” digital economy minister Willemijn Aerdts told the magazine. “That has happened and we will now talk to our contacts, including those in the US.”
This is the job now. You're standing on a burning ship, holding a map, trying to figure out where the hell we're going and how we're going to get there.
There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember.
Companies like Lovable, Base44, Replit, and Netlify use AI to let anyone build a web app in seconds—and in thousands of cases, spill highly sensitive data onto the public internet.
The European Commission has delayed formal presentation of its tech sovereignty package to 3 June … marking the third such delay on the flagship plan’s big reveal.
The latest postponement comes soon after a blunt warning by the US ambassador to the EU, speaking in an interview with Euractiv earlier this month, that “protectionist” rules could derail the EU-US trade deal.
See also yesterdays "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born":
The US no longer has the power or influence it once did and that changes everything for US tech companies.
LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.
LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.
There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.
The ground is shifting underneath every industry that was built on the assumption that the US would protect and preserve the globalised status quo. The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.
It’s impossible to guess what exactly will happen next to software or tech. All I know is pretty much all of modern software is built on a premise that no longer holds. Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright. Whether tech has enough clout on its own to continue its strategy of capture and control, whether it compromises with local governments to retain its power, whether we’re in for a period of collapse and fragmentation is anybody’s guess. The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.
A GPU-rendered terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics 🧀
Seit vergangener Woche werden Land auf Land ab private Pools im Garten befüllt. So manche Wasserversorger bringt das derzeit an ihre Grenzen. Gerade in Zeiten extremer Trockenheit wird in manchen Regionen Oberösterreichs ein Rekord-Wasserverbrauch verzeichnet.
Bosses betting on AI to slash headcount and boost margins are discovering an uncomfortable truth: the strategy isn't working.
New research from Gartner lays out the problem in stark terms. The analyst firm surveyed 350 global businesses - all with annual revenues above $1 billion, all piloting or deploying intelligent automation - and found that around 80 percent had cut staff as a result.
The returns? Elusive. Companies that reduced their workforces were just as likely to see negative outcomes or marginal gains as they were to generate any meaningful return on investment (ROI).
Aufgrund der geringen Niederschläge in den vergangenen Wochen steigt die Waldbrandgefahr deutlich an, warnt das Landesfeuerwehrkommando. Und auch in der Landwirtschaft sorgt die Trockenheit für Probleme, weil das Grünfutter nur zaghaft wächst.
Eine Rechtsauskunft auf Knopfdruck, visualisierte Baupläne in wenigen Sekunden und hocheffiziente Softwarecodes: Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) ist im Berufsleben von Anwaltskanzleien, Architekturbüros und IT-Firmen auch in Österreich längst angekommen – mit Folgen für alle, die künftig in Berufe einsteigen.
Im heurigen April ist laut Daten der Geosphere Austria nur halb so viel Regen wie im 30-jährigen Durchschnitt gefallen. Es gab bereits Waldbrände, nun wird in den ersten Tiroler Gemeinden offenbar auch das Wasser knapp. In Iselsberg-Stronach und Reith im Alpbachtal wurden die Bewohnerinnen und Bewohner zum Wassersparen aufgerufen.
Die Gemeinde Reith im Alpbachtal ruft ihre Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner zum Wassersparen auf. Wegen der anhaltenden Trockenperiode seien im gesamten Gemeindegebiet rückläufige Quellschüttungen in der öffentlichen Wasserversorgung zu verzeichnen.
Während in Brüssel viel von digitaler Souveränität gesprochen wird, bleibt die Finanzierung der Projekte, die diese verwirklichen sollen, ungewiss. Michiel Leenaars von der niederländischen NLnet Foundation gibt Einblicke in seine Arbeit zur Förderung von Alternativen und erläutert, was er von der EU erwartet.
You see, it’s not that Microsoft was subsidizing nearly two million people’s compute, it’s that AI has become so strong, powerful and complex that it’s basically a different product!
While Copilot might not be “...the same product it was a year ago,” very little has changed about the underlying economic mismatch: that Microsoft was allowing users to burn more than their subscription costs in tokens every single month for three years. Per the Wall Street Journal in October 2023: