Chris Riley

Another excellent piece from Rosie Spinks: rojospinks.substack.com/p/does-where...

Read through to the end, the bit about how AI will remove more friction, which will undercut our thriving and sense of life's meaning. Great stuff.

And yet, there will be (many) mainstream Democrats hemming and hawing about whether this is an intellectually sound or fair argument to make, on the grounds that allegedly Trump and friends are paying for the costs, as if that distinction mattered any more.

I can see this, particularly in 2025, yeah. But my greater concern is that we will put AI in charge of everything, and then everything will break.

This feels like an Onion article.

I wonder how Adam Becker's More, Everything, Forever is faring via Bluesky. Feels like the kind of book tailor-made for purchases from this community. (Highly recommended, to be clear: www.goodreads.com/book/show/21... )

a man is holding a purple iron with the words the irony written on it Alt: a man is holding a purple iron with the words the irony written on it

Sam Altman says "don't use GPT for therapy" (techcrunch.com/2025/07/25/s...), meanwhile "therapy/companionship" is literally the #1 use case (hbr.org/2025/04/how-...)

I know approximately one million. Paul is good people, for those who spot this.

Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

"vibe physics" lol gizmodo.com/billionaires...

Screenshot from the linked article that reads: I also know that our credibility and the trust of our audience is the only thing that separates us from anyone else. It is the only "business model" that we have and that I am certain works: We trade good, accurate, interesting, human articles for money and attention. The risks of offloading that trust to an Al in a careless way is the biggest possible risk factor that we could have as a business. Having an article go out where someone goes "Actually, a robot wrote this," is one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to us, and so we have made the brave decision to not do that.

Screenshot from the linked article that reads: There is no reason for an individual journalist or an individual media company to make the fast food of the internet. It's already being made, by spammers and the Al companies themselves. It is impossible to make it cheaper or better than them, because it is what they exist to do. The actual pivot that is needed is one to humanity. Media companies need to let their journalists be human. And they need to prove why they're worth reading with every article they do.

This, from @404media.co, is very good

“The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work”

www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

First instinct says there's no "solution" other than relying on in-person, F2F communication in many circumstances. But old-school spy codewords are fun too.

A Marco Rubio impostor is using AI voice to call high-level officials An imposter using AI to pose as Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacted three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor and a member of Congress, according to a State Department cable.

This is only the beginning. And I don't know what to do about it. (... which makes it exactly the sort of problem that interests me ... who wants to chat?) www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Lately I feel like the internet was a mistake.

Here are some cool websites to help you find joy on the internet. It's much harder to find cool stuff these days. Here's some stuff I've discovered lately. Please feel free to share more in the thread.

Mac OS 9 emulator: macos9.app

I will also add, computer science is about a LOT more than just coding. That's why it's called a science...

This.

Also, I'm designing a course on technology law and policy for computer science students, slotted just after ethics. Getting close to full approval to teach it at UW Tacoma in the spring!

Is there any chance that, measured by volume of posts [side note: is that the right metric? does anything make sense any more?], X is now at least 1/3 porn bot content?

That would be an "interesting" outcome!

Still Under Review Support for Artificial Intelligence. This provision provides federal aid to states under the condition that states agree not to regulate AI. (Section 0012) The Parliamentarian’s advice is based on whether a provision is appropriate for reconciliation and conforms to the limitations of the Byrd Rule; it is not a judgement on the relative merits of a particular policy.

Still awaiting the Senate Parliamentarian review of the proposed federal moratorium on state AI laws.

A portion of an article saying that any individual has 32,766 12th great-grandparents.

The New York Times magazine made a bizarre random math error? In their article about the new Pope's ancestry. How do you calculate 2^15 and be off by exactly 2?

Colonize the galaxy in 2030... give me a break.

Apropos of nothing, today I remind you all that the "S" in "IFRS Standards", used for international accounting, stands for "Standards" and thus double-counts "standards" in the name. www.ifrs.org/issued-stand...

The Agentic Web and Original Sin Microsoft is putting forth compelling proposals for the Open Agentic Web. However, the proposal needs digital payments, which will be key to creating a new content marketplace for AI.

Does this align incentives with creating useful and accurate content online? That would be big. "Second, AI providers like ChatGPT should build an auction mechanism that pays out content sources based on the frequency with which they are cited in AI answers." From: stratechery.com/2025/the-age...

oh god it's june

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Utterly unsurprising: futurism.com/ai-models-fa...

The future of AI is blindingly obvious, no? Stop scraping whatever data can be found (and rewind the models by a few months!), and do more of this, structured deals with legitimate, mostly human-powered sources: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/b...

the people here probably already know this but really spread this far and wide:

tell your normal offline friends and family to stop using ChatGPT for legal advice. it's happening constantly now. I'm always explaining to people why the advice this silly thing gave them is not real legal advice.

Anthropic's new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline | TechCrunch Anthropic says its Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail software engineers when they try to take it offline.

I really thought AI systems would get smarter before they turned evil, but hey, this is Season 2025, and we all know Earth's script writers are just mailing it in. techcrunch.com/2025/05/22/a...

I wrote a book on influencers, so I have opinions, and one of them is that the juggernaut was not run through explicitly political influencers.

A “Joe Rogan of the left” would not be a political creator. Most of the pods Trump did weren’t pol creators. MAHA was also hybrid - started in wellness.

under no circumstances will this then be followed up by a proposal that a robot simulate the parent's entire attendance at said birthday party while using a simulacrum of the parent's voice in order to establish a better rapport with the birthday child.

you can tell this is clearly coming from someone who has spent significant amounts of personal time on such activities and absolutely has the right perspective to opine on AI-based solutions, no doubt.

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