Oh jolly can’t wait for this to go viral enough that my boss schedules time to ask me about it.

The tumblr thread is a must read if you’ve ever been near HIPAA regulated infrastructure.

This account is just that sort of shit 24/7, just constant linkedin lunacy that everyone should treat as rage bait and move on.

exciting new roles of liquid management

algorithmic uh sovereignity

fantastic

Sam Altman wants his eye scanning crypto bullshit to be used to verify AI agents so he can save the internet from himself.

Rather than blocking automated traffic outright as a safety or data-protection measure, World [previously world coin] suggests sites could instead require AI agents to present an associated World ID token to prove they represent an actual human who’s behind any request. In this way, the site could allow agents to access limited resources like restaurant reservations, ticket purchase opportunities, free trials, or even bandwidth without worrying about a single user flooding the process with thousands of anonymous bots. The same idea could apply to sensitive reputational systems like online forums and polls, where it’s important to prevent automated astroturfing or dogpiling.

increasing fidelity of game graphics was actually making games better, or just more expensive

I really liked what Control did with cranking up the verisimilitude and the photorealism, namely to accentuate the uncanniness and really up the new weird vibe.

Maybe it’s just me but even the enhanced lighting aspect doesn’t look especially good, at least where faces are concerned; shining a hard light sideways so every facial nook and cranny gets highlighted in excruciating detail looks less natural and more like the old android HDR photo filter, even before you realize it’s giving some characters instagram make-overs.

Probably should’ve written ‘not a deal breaker’ instead of not a big deal.

It’s possible the attempt to shove AI in every nook and cranny in the pentagon didn’t especially pan out and since his face was all over that project, he’s desperate for a scapegoat.

Like for sure he’d have had the logistics of the entire US army running smoothly despite layoffs by now, if it weren’t for the wokies in anthropic acting up.

It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They’re not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They’re not generating tech debt at scale:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

They’re just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won’t always choose wisely, but that’s normal too. There’s plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray. A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.

Wow, the whole thing is indefensibly capital-W wrong, just an utterly weird rose-tinted view of the current corporate experience.

The one-shotting phenomenon (or how a positive initial experience with the technology seems to lead to a heavily biased view of its merits) should probably be considered a distinct cognitive bias at this point.

Turns out a lot of bright people can’t deal with a technology being utterly subjective in its efficiency, and also how that’s specifically the part that reduces it to being so narrowly useful as to force the existential question, given the insane resource burn and the socioeconomic disruption that’s part and parcel, even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artist’s rights and intellectual property in general isn’t an especially big deal.

Also, local LLMs are hardly extricable from the whole mess, they are basically a byproduct, and updated versions only will keep coming as long as their imperial size online counterparts remain a viable concern.

In the original post he kept referring to Ollama like it was an LLM instead of a server app that hosts LLMs so I’d say the jury’s out on that.

edit: Also, throughout this piece he keeps equivocating between local LLMs and their behemoth online counterparts with their heavily proprietary tooling that occasionally wraps them into a somewhat useful product.

I think he assumes that because he can load up a modest speech-to-text model locally and casually transcribe several hours of video resources in somewhat short order (this was apparently his major formative experience with modern AI) it works the same with e.g. coding.

Like, hey gpt-oss please make sense of these ten thousand lines of context without access to a hundred bespoke MCP intermediaries and one or three functioning RAG systems as I watch the token generation rate slow to a trickle while the context window gradually fills up.

Usually, you wake up on a lifeless beach that’s adorned with some sort of abandoned marble temple. It’s supposed to be beautiful, but instead it’s really sad. Almost unbearably sad. So much so that you want to get away from it. So you crawl downward into these vents going below the horrible temple, and suddenly it’s like you’re moving through the innards of an incomprehensible machine that’s thudding away, thud, thud, thud. And as you get deeper, the metal sidings are carved with scrawled ominous curses and slurs directed toward you, and you hear the voices, louder than before, and you somehow know these people are in pain because of you. It keeps getting colder. Color drains from the world. And you see the crowd through the slats of the vents: pale and emaciated men, women, and children from centuries to come, all of them pressed together for warmth in some sort of unending cavern. What clothes they have are torn and ragged. Before you know it, their dirty hands and dirty fingernails lurch through the grates, and they’re reaching for you, tearing at your shirt, moaning terrible things about their suffering and how you made it happen, you made it, and you need to stop this now, now, now. And next they’re ripping you apart, limb from limb, and you are joining them in the gray dimness forever.

A potential massive uptick of consumer tier subscribers that they don’t break even on at the same time the DoD fallout drives more lucrative prospects away could be fun to watch at least, a considerable chunk of the llm code helper ecosystem appears to hinge on anthropic not doing anything crazy like suddenly hiking prices.

edit: Aaaand they had a worldwide outage

It unthickened, it was just Altman grandstanding while at the same time taking over Antrhopic’s DoD DoW: The Everything App contracts.

Pentagon labels Anthropic a supply-chain risk, strikes deal with OpenAI whose president Greg Brockman is a Trump mega-donor.

🍌🍌🍌

Trump added there would be a six-month phase-out for the Defense Department and other agencies that use the company’s products. If Anthropic does not help with the transition, Trump said, he would use “the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.”

The designation could bar tens of thousands of contractors from using Anthropic’s AI when working for the Pentagon. That represents an existential threat to its business with the government and could harm its private-sector relationships, said Franklin Turner, an attorney who specializes in government contracts.

“Blacklisting Anthropic is the contractual equivalent of nuclear war,” he said.

deleted by creator

As far as I can tell it’s only on anthropic’s word that that’s the main issue, DoD just talks about unfettered access for all lawful purposes, which is basically a bend-the-knee-or-else framing, and pivoting away from that to bargaining on particulars will make them look weak, so I guess that’s that for now.

Αnthropic being against mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry while in bed with Palantir is kind of if IBM took a stand against antisemitism while spearheading the computerization of the third reich prison system.

Kudos to Dario for stepping off the hype train for one millisecond to admit that using an LLM to control an automated weapons platform is currently kind of out of scope for this technology, I bet that took a toll on his psyche.

And also for pointing out that something can be legal only because the law hasn’t yet caught up with the technology.

It’s entirely possible he does get that it’s a nothing burger but is just being his usual disingenuous self to pull people in.

I mean the whole entire premise (not unique to this post, scoot’s gotten a lot of mileage out of this) is shoehorning LLMs into the predictive coding framework mostly on the grounds that they both use prediction terminology and deal with work units that they call neurons, with the added bonus that PC posits Bayesian inference is involved so it’s obviously extra valid.

Queue a few thousand words of scoot wearing his science popularizer hat and just declaring the most vacuous shit imaginable with a straight face and a friendly teacher’s casual authority.

He isn’t even trying with the yellow and orange boxes. What the fuck do “high-D toroidal attractor manifolds” and “6D helical manifolds” have to do with anything? Why are they there? And he really thinks he can get away with nobody closely reading his charts, with the “(???, nothing)” business. Maybe I should throw in that box in my publications and see how that goes.

It’s from another horseshit analogy that roughly boils down to both neural net inference (specifically when generating end-of-line tokens) and aspects of specific biological components of human perception being somewhat geometrically modellable. I didn’t include the entire context or a link to the substack in the OP because I didn’t care to, but here is the analogy in full:

re: the bolded part, I like how explicitly cherry-picking neuroscience passes for peak rationalism.