joe a wilkins

Thinking about Aaron Bushnell tonight

The “order” to disengage from Anthropic gave federal agencies six months to terminate use. www.cnbc.com/2026/02/27/t...

really good essay on the Amodei / Pentagon mess:

"When you take Doctor Doom's money to provide him a lathe to construct components for anthropomorphic robots, do you not understand that he is going to build Doombots?"

Lol

Nice yea

Wyd after drinking this?

One of the main reasons bosses wanted to crush the tight 21-23 labor market, and elected Trump to ensure they would, was because workers wouldn't put up with shit like this in a world where unemployment was 3%

Tech CEOs Confused by Why Everybody Hates AI So Much With public sentiment on AI resoundly negative, the tech CEOs pushing the new tech only seem to be doubling down.

just spitballing but some of it might have something to do with 15 years of sociopathic behavior culminating in the enthusiastic embrace of violent fascism

Ty dude!

This guy gets it.

Thanks to @yjeanrenaud.bsky.social for the neat story.

Check out Nearby Glasses on the google store: play.google.com/store/apps/d...

New App Detects the Radio Fingerprint of Smart Glasses and Warns You When Someone Is Using Them Nearby Yves Jeanrenaud is a scholar and amateur software developer behind Nearby Glasses, an open-source smart glasses detection app.

Bleak and cool: I wrote about a new open-source app that detects smart glasses peeping nearby. Still early days, but it's a fascinating look at the kind of grassroots resistance emerging against Big Tech's growing monopoly over public space.

There are toilet startups out there you can't even imagine

Made a video (!) about my story on chatbots reinforcing user fixations on other real people, and how that reinforcement can lead to real-world harm:

AI Delusions Are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are reinforcing users' delusions about other people — fueling fixations linked to stalking and abuse.

Perpetrators have long used new technologies to enable abusive behavior. @mharrisondupre.bsky.social finds that AI delusions are amplifying domestic abuse, harassment, and stalking in disturbing ways. futurism.com/artificial-i...

It Seems Bad That Temu Is Selling Peptides US consumers can now buy vials of experimental peptides from Temu for dirt-cheap prices, a sign that bio-hacking may be going mainstream.

Soon after we approached Temu for a comment on the dozens of peptide-ish products it had for sale, listings featuring glass vials and syringes started disappearing from the site.

My latest👇

Every single element of life is either more deadly, more expensive or more inconvenient (often all three) today than it’s been in decades & it’s purely because our robber baron overlords decided to dedicate the entirety of the US apparatus to doing barbaric & culturally suicidal white nationalism

Siri is such a badass for asking 404 to report this

when I was doxxed pre-LLMs, it took some creep 50+ hours to track down my name. it was game over the moment he posted it online. shit like grok amplifies this threat exponentially. it’s dangerous, it’s violent, & it’s coming for YOUR info next

Still, despite the relative alertness from political quarters, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the right is more alert, both to AI’s opportunity and its danger. That doesn’t mean they are masters of wise AI policy. Both the accelerationists and the industrialists influential in the current administration show it is alarmingly often the opposite. It simply means that, between them and the Steve Bannon anti-tech wing, more or less the entirety of the movement agrees AI is not a fake technology.

Kagan-Kans does accidentally get one thing correct: the right is a lot more interested in AI. Accelerationists and reactionaries are rabidly trying to advance their class project, so of course they're excited about a technology whose main use is to concentrate power and displace labor

Who owns the infrastructure? Who profits? Who loses their job? Who decides where to deploy AI?

These are the questions we need to grapple with. The question of whether we're 'missing out' on LLMs assumes tech has no class character, which is just silly

Screenshot of the header of the article "The left is missing out on AI," published in Transformer.

I have a lot of problems with Kagan-Kans' essay, mainly that it reeks of idealism.

Whether LLMs 'really understand' is maybe a fun thought experiment to hash out with your boys over a beer, but it's politically secondary to the question of ownership: in whose class interest is AI being developed?

Bugonia (2025)

Emails Show Epstein Scheming That Environmental Destruction Could Solve "Overpopulation" Recently spotted emails from 2016 show Jeffrey Epstein suggesting that climate change could be the answer to "overpopulation."

Emails Show Epstein Scheming That Environmental Destruction Could Solve “Overpopulation” | Article by Joe Wilkins (@joeonhere.bsky.social) for @futurism.com: futurism.com/science-ener...

TikTok Refuses to Confirm or Deny That It's Providing User Data to ICE TikTok refuses to confirm or deny that ICE is obtaining detailed information about its users via private data brokers.

"Yeah, everyone just go ahead and delete TikTok now if you haven't already."

A photo of The PriceMaster. He has a red ski mask on with a gold mask over his eyes and nose.

happy 25 years to the pricemaster

It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

look i know it's a very raw moment for folks in the wapo universe, but @ruthmarcus.bsky.social there's no reason to pay lip service to the "enormous" losses bezos sustained running the paper, and if you insist, you gotta compare them to his actual fortune. these sums are nothing to him!

Regardless of what you think of Ezra this is the kind of disagreement that could've been handled internally. DropSite firing its top reporter over some strategic criticism – as principled journalists are forced out of the industry by the truckload – is a big statement!

Here's the comment DropSite seems to have fired Alex Colston over, next to Ryan Grim's original missive comparing Palestinian student activists to the CIA.