Greg Linden

This is exactly my view on LLMs and AI more broadly. And I've been in AI/ML for 30 years.

Why are we here, you ask? This. This exchange, between these two men - in which the Speaker of the House is systematically not held to account for serially lying, violating his oath of office, & not respecting the results of democratic elections - illustrates exactly why we are here:

More than *anything* the people who actually know how technology works, who actually build things, wish that people would treat LLMs like every other technology, and be normal about them. Don't build a religion about them, don't force them on people, don't ignore the problems. Just be normal.

"I have a decent fluency in LLMs, and they have utility, but the absurd degree of over-hype, the way they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

I get the point that's trying to be made here, but it's actually inaccurate. The *MAJORITY* of actual practitioners in the tech industry have a position that is neither of these, it's merely getting drowned out by these two loud positions. The most common belief in the tech industry is simple:

Opinion | Silicon Valley Is Investing in the Wrong A.I.

Jevin West and I have long argued that if OpenAI survives, it will be as 1000 squirrels in an LLM-shaped trenchcoat. A thin language layer will farm tasks out to 1000 domain-specific modules, much as Google evolved from PageRank to 1000 different systems.

Here's Gary Marcus (h/t @mehr.nz)

The shutdown keeps dragging on, this line keeps going up, and prediction markets now suggest that it's more likely than not this will be the longest government shutdown in US history (previous record 35 days).

HASC Ranking Smith:

"The orders to blow up those six boats, in my view and in the views of most legal scholars, are absolutely illegal. It is an extrajudicial killing. There is no possible Article II justification for that, and there has been no congressional authorization for the use of force."

America First? No, Billionaire Buddies First Argentina: A very Trumpy debacle

"Incredibly, Trump’s recent announcements have made the situation even worse. By declaring that U.S. economic support will only continue if Milei wins at the polls, he has galvanized the Argentine opposition to Milei, thus leading to more capital flight and skyrocketing interest rates."

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking to the site

www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Pope Leo calls on journalists to report facts and expose disinformation.
www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

Mike Johnson has now had the House adjourned for 74 out of the last 86 days.

They have worked 12 days in 3 months.

Epstein Shutdown.

In retrospect, perhaps trusting all of the government's systems and data to Elon Musk and his band of 20-year-old cybercriminals was not the smartest move.

@justinwolfers.bsky.social is fantastic, one of my favorites on Bluesky, but this post may have been poorly done. That's fine, no one is perfect all the time. If it were me, I'd just apologize, admit error, and move on, which Justin already did:
bsky.app/profile/just...

More of this, please

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Pritzker: "Stephen Miller is clearly ordering people to break the law. So he should know that yeah, it may be three years from now that he is held accountable, but I think it's important for them to know that whatever they do now, it's not like we're going to forget."

Obituary: Farewell to robots.txt (1994-2025) The voluntary compliance protocol that civilized the internet has departed, bids Henning Fries farewell.

"In its golden years, robots.txt lived in perfect harmony with the major search engines. [...] Today, this contract is broken: AI crawlers generate thousands or millions of accesses, while hardly any traffic returns through links or mentions."

Trying to imagine the furor if Democratic leadership had called the Tea Party protests "Hate America" protests. Every day a new lesson in how different the rules really are.

"Republicans are on an unprecedented five week recess from Congress because they don't want to talk about why they're cutting health care to pay for a billionaire tax cut, and they don't want to talk about the President's lawlessness and corruption."

The Cybertruck: for when you want to communicate “yeah… my ex got full custody of the kids in the divorce” without saying one goddamn word.

This is blatantly unconstitutional and why no Democrat should ever hedge on "well tariffs..."

The President does not have the authority to impose taxes nor does he have the authority to distribute unconstitutionally collected revenue from those taxes.

Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin AI-generated Reddit Answers are giving bad advice in medical subreddits and moderators can’t opt out.

Reddit's AI generated answers are giving bad advice, including in a medical subreddit; moderators can't stop the AI answers appearing

www.404media.co/reddit-answe...

More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...

BREAKING from PP

We found immigration agents have held more than 170 *citizens*

The govt doesn't track citizens held. So we did. We tallied:

Nearly 20 kids, two w/ cancer

More than 20 citizens held for day or more, incommunicado

www.propublica.org/article/immi...

by @nicolefoy.bsky.social

The most corrupt administration, the most corrupt party, the most corrupt people

They’re all crooks

Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin AI-generated Reddit Answers are giving bad advice in medical subreddits and moderators can’t opt out.

Bad content drives out good.

www.404media.co/reddit-answe...

Chart of the day - from this story on how ten AI start-ups have gained close to $1tn in valuation over the past 12 months from @georgehammond.bsky.social. “Of course there’s a bubble,” said Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst. www.ft.com/content/59ba...

‘Of course it’s a bubble’: AI start-up valuations soar in investor frenzy Unprecedented funding leads 10 groups including OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI to gain almost $1tn in value in past year

"Ten lossmaking artificial intelligence start-ups have gained close to $1tn in valuation over the past 12 months, an unprecedented increase that adds to fears about an inflating bubble in private markets that could spill over into the wider economy."

50% of American adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. Just 10% are more excited than concerned.
🧪

Screaming. Guys will literally install Grok in their cybertrucks instead of going to (real) therapy.