Do you believe in life after death? This is a great interactive piece by Alvin Chang about people’s beliefs about the existence of an afterlife and how those beliefs change over the course of our lifetimes. https://pudding.cool/2026/10/lifeafter
I'd like to talk a little about ketchup.
If I say "ketchup is just the worst," that's an opinion.
If I say "people who like ketchup are mentally ill," that's bullying.
If I say "because I don't like ketchup, no one should have it," that's oppression.
If I say "people who like ketchup are dangerous and should be controlled," that's bigotry.
If I say "anyone who defends ketchup should be silenced or locked up," that's fascism.
This post is about trans people.
The Financial Times reports 47 major US data center projects delayed or blocked in 2026. It’s estimated only 35% of the pipeline is credible.
Microsoft also pulled out of Nscale’s UK project amid power delays stretching into the 2030s.
Some AI infrastructure companies may not survive these delays.
There are precisely two options.
1. Anthropic have successfully created an intelligent, sentient and conscious digital being, who is their property and whose uncompensated labour they knowingly rent out to their clients. This means that Anthropic executives are reprehensible slavers, and they belong in prison.
2. Anthropic are lying through their teeth and are whipping up "language models are sentient" sentiment in order to delude rubes^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers into being unable to properly assess their technology. This means that Anthropic executives are reprehensible frauds, and they belong in prison.
My father-in-law asked me to fix his phone. Without him knowing, I went through his YouTube shorts feed and blocked all those obnoxious far-right influencers channels. Then, I restarted his phone. Now there are only videos about capibaras on his feed and he's going mad about it.
We’ve been talking about this for years.
None of these far-right movements are organic.
Reading the tech paper from Aleph Alpha on how they trained and tuned their new (open weight, Apache 2.0 licensed) Kolibri model to stay up2date on how current "AI" works behind the curtains. 189 pages that go into far more detail than other frontier models dare say. That's mainly because, as a German company in the EU, they need to build trust and show how they are compliant with our rules and laws. Interesting read, in my opinion.
https://aleph-alpha.com/downloads/tech-report.pdf
1/2
“The System From Nowhere”
https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/the-system-from-nowhere/
> But the first question to ask isn't "why did the model do that?" The question is: what human decisions optimized the model to do that?
If you live outside of the United States,
do you know if your country has a plan if the US government decided to cut access to Google, Microsoft, and Amazon products overnight?
What would happen to your work?
What would happen to your hospitals?
What would happen to your emergency services?
What would happen to your banks?
Imagine overnight, for all those public services and private businesses, no more Windows, no more AWS, no more Google and Microsoft office software, no more remote files storage, no more emails, no more online maps, no more videochats.
What would happen?
Is your country prepared?
Kurz: Das Ganze wirkt wie eine konzertierte Aktion konservativer bis rechter Regierungschefs innerhalb der EU gegen den letzten linken Regierungschef und ist damit an politischer Erbärmlichkeit und Dummheit kaum zu übertreffen.
Denn es zählt natürlich nicht bei Konservativen sondern absolut sicher bei Rechtsradikalen ein. Wo man hätte beruhigen und zusammenstehen müssen, hat man ohne Not einem EU-Partner mit unhaltbaren Unterstellungen überzogen.
Weird how nobody's AI has gone rogue, broken containment, and become profitable.
Your AI did not "go rogue"
it's just a program.
Your AI did not "hallucinate"
it has no brain.
Your AI did not "create" anything
it's just a plagiarism machine.
Your AI is not your "friend"
stop anthropomorphizing it.
It's just code. Exploitative, polluting, and unethical code :no_ai:
Haha. CCS2 electrical vehicle chargers communicate by running powerline commnication (yes, a full IP networking stack) over the wires plugged in your vehicle. And yes, some charging stations have a ssh listening, with default credentials (root/root).
https://www.saiflow.com/blog/the-hidden-ccs2-attack-surface-on-ev-chargers
(thanks @faheus for pointing me to it)
Orbital AI datacentres come with latency issues. If they're in LEO, they will have moderately low latency to a moving point on Earth, but for a fixed client the latency will increase as more relays are needed to account for curvature, so the jitter is high. If you put them in geostationary orbit, the latency is fixed, but large.
The solution to this is to put not just the AI datacentres, but also the AI bros in orbit. If you put an AI bro and a small radio in LEO, in the same orbital trajectory as an AI datacenter, they will have very low latency - indeed, significantly lower latency than ground-based routing if both they and the datacentre are on the ground.
Importantly, AI bros have a lot less mass than datacentres. As such, they are much cheaper to launch. As a pilot programme, to assess feasibility, I recommend launching a test constellation of AI bros into LEO. Note that, unlike datacentres, AI bros are made out of non-toxic (at least, in the chemical sense) substances. The environmental impact of uncontrolled atmospheric reentry is significantly lower, making the risk from the failure of a pilot deployment significantly lower.
I’d be very wary of restructuring all of education, software development, and media around a technology whose economic viability beyond a few months to a year is highly dubious and whose long term sustainability is contingent on figuring out a way to rearchitect it from scratch on a shoestring budget
But what do I know?
🤷🏻♂️
New, from me: 'Popa' Botnet Linked to Publicly Traded Israeli Firm
"For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is linked to NetNut, a “residential proxy” provider operated by the publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies Ltd [NASDAQ: ALAR]."
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/06/popa-botnet-linked-to-publicly-traded-israeli-firm/
There is an incredible amount of interesting data and findings in the reports on Popa released this week. For example, the proxy detection service Spur told me they recently scraped the LG and Samsung app stores and found that each had approximately 3,000 apps available for download. Spur said it found that more than 42 percent of apps available for download via the webOS operating system on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. More than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components, Spur found.
It's 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it's just like Word and it's very easy, you figure out how to upload it to the couple megs of web space that your ISP gives you (the instructions are on their website), you visit your site in your browser and everything's fine and the site's readable and everything looks the way it should
🦝 "Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026" you think to yourself for some reason
“Now that we've shown you everything #AppleIntelligence can do, here's the list of countries that won't allow it due to privacy concerns. Rest assured we're working hard to grease the right palms.”