← Feed

Posts

• View post

  I was skeptical about the climate costs of Google pushing a 4Gb AI model to every copy of Chrome, but this article is more careful and reasonable than I expected: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/ Specifically: - It's not the normal "AI inference costs energy" talking point. It's purely about the cost of _transferring_ the model. - It argues that the problem is the forced mass push. - It boils down to 240GWh of energy, or 72K hom...

• View post

  Found on Bluesky (by @hannahshelley.site)

• View post

  I think this will be my last MacBook.

• View post

  I feel a certain amount of dread knowing that there is a Richard Dawkins novel in progress.

• View post

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/116499639295847975 This is a recurring theme now. Long story short: AI can find vulnerabilities quickly, so open source is now seen as a risk. I think this is misguided. Closed source is not a sound safety measure. One code leak and your vulnerability-finding AI is like a kid in a candy store: there will be vulnerabilities everywhere, because the code has been secret for so long.

• View post

  So, copy.fail was found with one hour of AI assistance, and would (according to this article) have earned $500K on the open market not too long ago. https://www.bugcrowd.com/blog/what-we-know-about-copy-fail-cve-2026-31431/ I'm no security researcher, but this kind of contradicts all those people who said that the OpenBSD bug that Mythos found (for $20K of compute) was just fancy fuzzing, and the only reason it was there was that nobody was investing 20K in OpenBSD security and the sec...

• View post

  I am reading, with morbid fascination, the Palantir "manifesto". This bit sticks out to me. It's very illustrative of how shallowly these people think about AI. They always build on some assumption that the effect on society can be predicted and harnessed. If it really is what they all seem to think it is, "deterrence built on A.I." is an insane concept.

• View post

  If respecting a bike lane is too difficult—and I cannot emphasize this enough—then the system is not robust enough for the real world. Not just for the bits with bike lanes. For any of it. Not a highway, not a parking garage, not a bus lane. These are not coding agents or image generators. They are systems that can accelerate a thousand kilograms of metal to a hundred kilometers per hour. They need to be kept out of Europe. https://road.cc/news/driverless-taxis-veering-into-cycle-lanes-norm...

• View post

  We're really speedrunning this episode of The Scary Door, aren't we? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSEo64cW3mc

• View post

  Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...

• View post

  Look at what Mathematicians have been demanding your Respect for ...

• View post

  A rare misfire from Tufekci, I'd say. She's usually on the money. While the algorithm is always the same, AI is operating in substantially different modes when it's hallucinating to when it's retrieving factual information. Hallucination is not a solved problem, but it's reducing substantially and because concrete innovations, not just "more data, more compute".

• View post

  Explaining the fediverse is simple. It's social media for people who hate social media. There aren't that many people on it? Feature. It's not that addictive or even engaging? Feature. You can't make money on it and it won't help your career? Feature.

• View post

  I wrote a blog post. It's about my previous life as an interaction designer. There are some lessons we as academics can learn from designers, and they run a lot deeper than just how to make things look a little prettier. https://peterbloem.nl/blog/design-thinking

• View post

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@paulbiggar/116153528253708733 I have a horrible sinking feeling that the aftermath of the Iran strikes is going to be the first "but AI said" of international geopolitics.