Bill

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Bill Atkinson, one of the most quietly revolutionary minds in computing, has passed away. His creations — QuickDraw, MacPaint, and especially HyperCard — transformed not just the Mac, but how I thought about computing. A thread 🧵… 1/9

Things that greatly worry me about AI:
- conflict-increasing algorithms
- hyper-capitalistic AI agents
- mass unemployment

Things that do not much worry me about AI:
- carbon emissions (still less than 1% global)
- copyright violation (will get sorted out, ala Google Books)

Newborn babies exposed to measles in Texas hospital Infants barely three days old are receiving antibody injections to help protect against the virus. Nearly 300 cases have been reported in the outbreak.

"Hospital staff are scrambling with damage control efforts implementing emergency masking policies and giving babies as young as 3 days old injections of immunoglobulin, an antibody that helps their fragile immune system try to fight off #measles."
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

She Promised Not to Speak Ill of Meta. Then Wrote a Tell-All. Now, She Can’t Talk About It. An arbitrator ruled that a former Meta employee has to halt publicity push for her new book; publisher plans to keep promoting it.

Meta’s former public policy chief signed a nondisparagement agreement when she left the social-media company in 2017. Now, Meta is using that pact to prevent her from promoting her tell-all book.

I didn’t notice how optimistic the early 90s were. 😢

cut to me shoveling snow in a panic right before i have to take an important call

The NIST's new directive to AI Safety Institute partners scrubs mentions of "AI safety" and "AI fairness" and prioritizes "reducing ideological bias" in models (Will Knight/Wired)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Americans Overestimate the Value of Business Skills in Government In The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam demonstrated that private-sector skills have no place in government.

Before Musk, there was McNamara: Why do Americans stubbornly cling to the notion that business skills are what's needed to fix government?

Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having 'profound' security and privacy issues | TechCrunch Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in

Meredith Whittaker on the security and privacy risks of Ai agents in messaging platforms, which I also worry about a lot. techcrunch.com/2025/03/07/s...

Last year I shared our discovery of the Crescendo and Skeleton Key jailbreak techniques. We have identified a new one, Context Compliance Attack (CCA) that's very simple, yet very effective at bypassing LLM guardrails.

Peruvian Lillies in a vase.

Flower break.

A painting of a bird next to the words "oh, I'm ignoring your shit"

Elon Musk, Human Meme Stock How to lose $148 billion in less than two months

It's probably premature to suggest Musk is cooked but I wrote about the dangerous game he's playing. how the protests are working, how people are mad, and how you can really see the contours of how the whole thing could collapse for him www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Humanoid Robots Finally Get Real Jobs These creatures of science fiction are moving toward a practical reality, stacking sorting and li…

Humanoid Robots Finally Get Real Jobs
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/humanoid-robot-workers-ai-brain-08027439

Hat with the words “please do not talk to me about AI I will kill myself”

Visiting friends in New York

Will America’s stockmarket convulsions spread? Investors are hurrying to find alternatives—but all face difficulties of their own…

Will America’s stockmarket convulsions spread?
https://economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/03/11/will-americas-stockmarket-convulsions-spread

Oh! She has! In at least one interview she talked about the briefings she's received on counter-intelligence. She has made music videos to click tracks instead of audio so it wouldn't leak.
Taylor Swift is a legitimate security expert like almost nobody in the world. She has to be. She's the target.

“ThErE Is nO EvIdEnCe oF AnY ThReAt aCtOr aCtIvItY” said the clowns at @lastpass.bsky.social in their many, many updates trying to downplay the severity of this breach.

If you’re using LastPass in 2025, you’re being grossly negligent.

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say | CNN Politics Foreign adversaries including Russia and China have recently directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of US federal employees working in national security, targeting those who have b...

"Exclusive: US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say."

This was never in doubt. DOGE’s damage will be deep, lasting, and generational. www.cnn.com/2025/02/28/p...

Brutal.

RESOLVED: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is so much more expressive and therefore preferable than 🤷

Discuss

Rare video captures super pod of 2,000 dolphins breaching and playing off California Among the pod were northern right whale dolphins, one of two dolphin species without dorsal fins.

Rare video captures a super pod of more than 2,000 dolphins breaching off the coast of Monterey Bay.

From a FOIA perspective, "the entire federal workforce should write down and email what they did last week" is extremely funny

WaPo Page One:

“If you’re going to just yell at me, that’s not going to be an effective town hall,” McCormick said ..

“But we’re pissed!” a woman shouted. #GA07

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Filing: Amazon estimated the fair value of its stake in Anthropic at $14B at the end of December 2024, after agreeing to invest $8B in Anthropic so far (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Adopt or resist? Beyond the AI Culture Wars How to find a middle ground about a technology that is, and will remain, unavoidable for virtuall…

Adopt or resist? Beyond the AI Culture Wars
https://www.chronicle.com/article/adopt-or-resist-beyond-the-ai-culture-wars

As AI models grow in size, their values seem to increasingly converge on the same preferences, whether the model is made by OpenAI or Musk’s X or China’s DeepSeek

Not everyone will like resulting AI preferences, so value engineering is likely to become a topic of discussion arxiv.org/abs/2502.08640

Exhausted Friends Slowly Realize They Were Playing Board Game Wrong Entire 6 Hours MILWAUKEE—Growing more despondent as each turn brought them no closer to a conclusion, an exhausted group of friends was reportedly coming to the realization Friday that they had been playing the boar...

Exhausted Friends Slowly Realize They Were Playing Board Game Wrong Entire 6 Hours