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Timeline
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"But actually, there is one more thing..." 🤯
Surprising to include this. It also had its own spin on the phrase, though, almost downplaying it instead of hyping it. Interesting first keynote for John Ternus.
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Smear Campaign Says Anti-Flock Movement Is Chinese Propaganda
Sinclair Broadcasting is pushing the idea that China and the No Kings protesters are the reason people don't like Flock.Reply source - Reply source
Watching the Apple event. John Ternus is a great presenter who would do really well live. Maybe next year.
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I spent the day programming in Atlantis. It's buggy, and there are a few missing parts, but most of what I need is there. It's starting to feel like Frontier, which is cool because that's what we're making. And I have my backup tools working on the new machine, praise Murphy.
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Podcast: DHS’ Secretive ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit Pulling People Over
Secretive predictive policing units; a funk shirt designed to fool AI; and our third anniversary party.Reply source -
ICE Officer Hit With Federal Charges After Successfully Dodging Minnesota’s Attempt To Extradite Him On Assault Charges
One of the natural side effects of flooding the zone with hastily hired, poorly trained immigration enforcement officers is an increase in violence and rights violations. Christian Castro may not have been a new ICE hire, but he’d been there long enough to realize the new White House boss had given him and his fellow […]Reply source -
First ‘Take It Down Act’ Sentencing Puts Man Behind Bars for 15 Years
James Strahler was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “cybercrimes that included both real and AI-generated sexually explicit images and threats of violence to numerous victims.”Reply source - Reply source
During breakfast I usually turn on CNN just to make sure the world hasn't burned down yet. Today's headline was an Anthropic employee posting on X there's a 10% chance AI will destroy all humans. Yikes. Seems a bit high.
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New day. New coffee. What should we work on? Current priorities: wrapping up the new mobile app bug fixes, updating Wavelength, but open to other side quests this week. ☕️
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Jason Snell blogged a reaction to the latest rumors that the foldable will be called the iPhone Duo! Great name, I really didn't think Apple would go for it. Also happy to see pencil support:
I’ve been wondering about Apple Pencil support on the iPhone for some time now. This product does sort of make sense for it, given the larger canvas of an interior screen.
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'Tell Everyone:' A Man Died by Suicide After Talking to ChatGPT. His Former Partner Wants to Warn the World About AI
After allegedly becoming emotionally reliant on ChatGPT, Austin died at 40 years old, leaving behind family and friends who loved him. Megan wants everyone to know what happened.Reply source -
The Man on a Quest to Digitally Preserve America’s Public Restrooms
The Restroom Archive is a museum-style repository of 3D scans of the world's restrooms.Reply source -
The 101 Plays Itself . The five lanes of highway 101 in...
Reply sourceThe 101 Plays Itself. The five lanes of highway 101 in LA turned into a musical instrument: each car on the live Caltrans camera is a note.
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Fake Consumer Group Using AI To Generate Fake Support For Paramount Merger
In addition to the $111 billion Paramount/Warner Bros merger just being foundationally bad for creatives, labor, and consumers, the Ellison family-owned company’s executives just keep demonstrating why they’re not really the kind of folks you want dominating the lion’s share of U.S. media. That’s included calling deal critics “antisemitic,” cozying up to foreign authoritarians, constantly […]Reply source -
Reporting Indicates RFK Jr. Directly Intervened To Keep PA Deaths Off CDC Measles Report
The measles outbreak, that began in America nearly two years ago, has only increased in velocity. We recently talked about the deaths of two children in Pennsylvania who both died while infected with measles. I’m altering my language slightly here from that original post in which I described those children as having died of measles […]Reply source - Reply source
I know I’m really late to this show, but because of the new spinoff we’ve been watching The Big Bang Theory for the first time. A few seasons in. 📺
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Got this spam text today, just in case there was any question that data centers are going to be a big issue in November:
Manton, if you live at [my address], Republicans have supported a Data Center within 15 miles of you.
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The AI warnings are coming from inside the lab
Frontier labs make for lousy messengers on AI safety — but it would be foolish to ignore themReply source -
Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Reply sourceOn the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that have been subject to a $1,000,000 prize since May 24th, 2000.
The discovery is somewhat overshadowed by accusations of skulduggery from Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematics professor who was collaborating on related problems with Levent Alpöge, an accomplished mathematician who currently works for Anthropic.
Tristan's complaint accompanied a hastily published version of their own results. Here's the PDF describing what happened. The very short version is that Tristan and Levent worked on the problem for almost a year, making extensive use of Claude and Codex (mainly GPT-5.6 Sol), then had a breakthrough on August 15th. The mathematical rumour mill kicked into gear and Tristan and Levent heard that OpenAI had heard that Anthropic had resolved "a major open problem", so they reached out and learned that OpenAI had a team working on a related problem, with a similar approach. Quoting Tristan:
I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.
I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
It gets more complicated from there. The OpenAI team offered to wait for Tristan to publish, or to have him author a paper about their result, but were clear that Levent would not be invited as a co-author due to OpenAI's competitive relationship with his employer.
Here's how OpenAI described their work:
On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems. [...]
The agents arrived at their resolution on Saturday, September 5, about 88 hours after the first agents were launched. Lean formalization and verification took an additional 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.
Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens.
(We don't know the cost structure of the internal model they used, but 300 billion output tokens at public API prices for GPT-6 Astra would cost $15,000,000.)
Here's where they provide their perspective on Tristan and Levent's work (emphasis mine):
Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. [...]
We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).
My interpretation of what happened here is that OpenAI heard that some Millennium Prize problems had been solved using LLMs and saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of their latest model, without thinking too hard about the optics of scooping a team who had been using OpenAI's own models to work on this problem for the best part of a year.
This situation appears to mirror what's happening in the world of computer security right now. Anil Madhavapeddy recently pointed out that Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days, because if someone knows that some software has an unpatched vulnerability, they can set their agents the task of finding it. Is the same now true of mathematics? Just knowing that there is an unpublished solution to a problem might trigger millions of dollars in LLM spending to get there first.
This also highlights one of my ongoing frustrations about how all of this works. When an AI lab says that my data is "used to improve model performance", what does that actually mean?
My two favourite hypothetical questions regarding this used to be:
- If I'm running Codex and one of my API keys accidentally gets consumed in the context, what are the chances that someone else might ask for an API key in the future and get mine back? (I asked someone at OpenAI once and they called this the "regurgitation" problem and assured me that they take great pains to prevent that... but wouldn't describe how.)
- If I brainstorm with ChatGPT about potential new directions for my company, what's the chance that information might be exposed to a competitor in six months' time who asks "what might company X plan to do next"?
My new preferred hypothetical for this is:
- If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?
Via Hacker News.
You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options.
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Some Tech Companies Have Privately Pushed Back On ICE Subpoenas. They Should All Do More.
In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government. As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do […]Reply source - Reply source
Feels like the AI world is balancing on a knife's edge. On one side, the worst of big tech's social media addiction machine and an even greater concentration of power. On the other side, the democratization of intelligence and an abundance that lifts all of society. Either outcome seems possible.
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Cool Cool Cool: Hegseth’s DoD Is Running A Secret Network Of Online Influencers
It would be nice to go a day or two (or three-day weekend!) without being apprised of some new awfulness from this administration. Since that’s not going to happen, let’s check in with the latest shitshow! And here it is: the Pentagon has “enlisted” some X.com influencers to thrust and parry on behalf of the […]Reply source - Reply source
OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which I had never heard of because I'm not a mathematician, but which is apparently a very big deal:
The question of whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can break down has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
There is some controversy over whether two human researchers (one at Anthropic) working on similar problems might've accidentally influenced the OpenAI model. It doesn't sound like that's true, but it does feel a little unfair regardless, where credit likely means so much to people.
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Channel 5 Gave Hunter Biden a List of Its Subscribers’ Emails for Some Reason
A data protection lawyer told 404 Media the sharing was likely illegal, and Channel 5’s own privacy policy explicitly says it won't give subscribers’ emails away to people for marketing purposes.Reply source -
The DOJ’s AI Fair Use Brief Is Correct, But From A DOJ That Has No Credibility
I am never asking the monkey’s paw for a federal government that defends fair use again. For decades on Techdirt, I’ve talked about the absolute necessity of strong fair use, and have been disappointed over and over again at how little the federal government has fought for fair use. For decades, the rare times when […]Reply source -
Daily Deal: The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle featuring Databricks
The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle has 7 online courses designed to help learners build skills that align directly with industry expectations. The focus is on practical tools and languages used by data professionals: Python for programming, Pandas and NumPy for data manipulation, foundational certification prep and specialized work with Databricks, an industry-standard platform for data engineering […]Reply source - Reply source
Did a little Redis housekeeping, cleaning out orphaned records that were sitting around wasting memory. Down to 23 GB of RAM on a 48 GB machine. Still probably too much.
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ICE’s Vetting Standards Are So Low It Can’t Even Be Bothered To Verify The Identities Of New Hires
A whistleblower report delivered to the DHS Office of the Inspector General makes it clear ICE is willing to hire pretty much anyone who applies for the job. Keeping up appearances (and by “appearances,” I mean constantly pushing for 1,500-3,000 arrests per day) is tough when you don’t have the warm bodies to do all […]Reply source - Reply source
I had a nap yesterday and a late Dr. Pepper, so my sleep was all off. Caffeine really affects me late in the day. Woke up at 2am worried about all sorts of business and social things I can't control.
Let it go. 🎶
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Might be about time to get a Switch 2... Ocarina of Time remake looks good. 🕹️
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Ben Thompson in today's Stratechery blog post:
AGI is AI that learns continuously. That’s not the case with current large language models.
I agree with Ben's definition of AGI, but LLM memory is so good now, it's almost indistinguishable from learning. My
~/.codex/memoriesfolder is 7 MB, which doesn't sound like much, but it's only small Markdown files. It's incredible how much it knows. That doesn't even count ChatGPT's dreaming memory system and computer history. - Reply source
How am I just now hearing this interview with Jensen Huang? "You're not talking to someone who woke up a loser." 🤣
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A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over
404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol's predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.Reply source -
Paramount Caught Using ‘Astroturf’ Group To Drum Up Fake Support For Merger
We’ve well established how the $111 billion Paramount and Warner Brothers merger is terrible for labor, creatives, consumers, and markets. But the kind of behaviors Paramount leadership have been engaged in to sell the deal also give a pretty clear indication what kind of company we’re dealing with, and why they shouldn’t be allowed to […]Reply source - Reply source
Scott Hanson is working on a WordPress plugin that displays a FeedLand river — a constantly-updated stream of news items from feeds a FeedLand user subscribes to — on a WordPress page or post. It's important that news flows be part of managing a site. Help Scott make it perfect, WordPress is a very important part of the web. The news tab on my blog home page is an example. - Reply
RSS has a business problem, not a technical one
"I think the logical model is a reselling portal. It negotiates contracts with publishers and obtains full feeds."
https://twowavesandadot.blog/rss-has-a-business-problem-not-a-technical-one.html
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Teaser trailer for You Can See Everything from Nathan...
Reply sourceTeaser trailer for You Can See Everything from Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim. “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move.” WHAT WAS THAT?
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This could be really good. Trailer for a new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes: You Can See Everything. Amazing cut to the wider shot at the end.
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We Are Going to Be Okay: A Three Year Anniversary Events Recap
Thank you for three years, and for partying hard with us for two sold out nights of celebration IRL in NYC.Reply source - Reply source
Today I updated the Micro.blog web interface with better links and icons in the timeline, and a new context menu for editing your own posts or muting a conversation. There are a lot of related design fixes too. Just a better design and more room for us to build new things on.
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Reflecting on the Astra launch... It was a killer business instinct for Greg Brockman to say, "yeah, this is basically AGI." Dario Amodei is much more cautious. He's not going to say that about Fable. But it works because it actually feels true. Marketing not based on truth is just bullshit spin.
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Alignment and distrust
Reply sourceI wanted to quote a couple things from this OpenAI blog post on alignment by Jakub Pachocki:
The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasingly different from those they encountered in training. They can fail at generalizing from the values taught and reinforced in their training process to those new situations; and it can be hard for us to be sure how they will act.
And:
We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI.
When I read this sort of thing, it strengthens my belief that the big AI labs are fundamentally different from the ad-based big tech companies in Silicon Valley like Meta. In terms of public backlash, they are all lumped together. It’s that foundation of distrust in big tech that the more significant frustration with AI is built on.
But the technology and vision are different. It's hard to imagine Meta being as thoughtful as Jakub is in the essay linked above. Mark Zuckerberg does have his op-eds, but they usually ring hollow.
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A big corner-turn in the Atlantis project, the new version of Frontier for modern OSes, in development, just me and Claude Code so far. We now have the means to update the root, so anything implemented in script code can be released without fuss, using RSS of course. We're using a method that will be new to almost everyone, something I created in 2014 or so (will check) called codecasting. And today I did all my programming work in Atlantis. It feels just like Frontier, with a future. ;-)
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With the 40th anniversary re-release of the original Transformers movie coming up, I finally watched the 2007 Transformers. I had skipped it because it looked all wrong. The design doesn’t look like Transformers to me. Also watched Bumblebee, which it much better, just a better feel, better sound.
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Nitter and XCancel are back online after being shut down for a couple weeks following a cease and desist letter from X. I'm a little surprised. From the GitHub project page:
Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
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Working on some web timeline design tweaks that will go live in the morning. I've been stubbornly insisting on text labels for Reply, Bookmark, etc. where every other network uses icons only. Going to mostly keep that, but the new version looks way better.
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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about calls for RFK Jr.’s resignation coming entirely from Democrats: And that’s why trying to distill partisan politics down to just “team blue” vs. “team red” is reductive at best and false equivalence at worst. This and many other life-or-death […]Reply source - Reply source
Worrisome reporting from Mark Gurman:
Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.
John Gruber adds:
I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.
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I think I would really like the foldable iPhone. But at over $2k, I can't justify blowing that much money on a phone. It would be a crazy business expense when I could put that money back into Micro.blog hosting or paying people. Other folks may have different priorities, and that's fine! 💰
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Pretty thorough article at The Economist about whether AI is creating or destroying jobs:
Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them.
You could argue that construction-related jobs are temporary, but I don't think so. There's going to be demand for years.