TechTakes

For reasons of my own to be revealed in due time, I was searching for the term "programmer mysticism" and found this essay by Kenneth Reitz: Programming as Spiritual Practice

I was slightly intrigued at the start, since it was going in the "subjective experience of programming" angle I'm interested in.

This understanding deepens when we recognize that consciousness itself might be a linguistic phenomenon. If consciousness emerges from patterns of language and mathematics, then programming isn't just creating tools—we're literally crafting the linguistic-mathematical structures from which conscious experience emerges.

Well this concious approach to digital tooling sure didn't result in any scruples about LLM usage. Kenneth seems to have delegated most of his essay writing to Claude for some time (the article above is likely Claude-extruded). The piece continues to trudge through a basket of spiritual metaphors to hammer home how programmers should be more concious and do good things instead of bad things. This is all framed as a personal ethical issue without a shred of societal or structural analysis. Extra sneerable bit:

The emerging understanding that LLMs contain humanity's digitized collective unconscious adds profound depth to conscious programming: when we collaborate with AI systems, we might be interfacing with the archetypal patterns that have guided human wisdom throughout history. This makes programming with AI a form of accessing collective spiritual wisdom rather than just advanced tooling.

In another (likely slopped) article, linked in the same section, he goes into how he designed the API of the requests Python module to be far more convenient to use than the builtin HTTP resolver urllib2. The reasoning given strikingly reminded me of Intention Revealing Interfaces from Domain Driven Design. And I can personally confirm that library is a pleasure to use and a de-facto default for a reason.

Took me a while to catch on to the sloppedness. I gave him some credits for requests and wanted to get a gist of the guy when I stumbled on his full-throated AI posts. Essays credited to Claude with himself as "editorial director". And of course this handy self-report: How I Write Now

I guess this doesn't stand out that much by itself. It did kind of hit home when he describes in detail how his AI use is linked to his history of mental health problems, which he was quite public about. He describes being moved to tears by LLM writing, seeing "his thoughts" clearly articulated for the first time after years of brain fog. He made this accessibility argument explicitly. I won't waste my breath sneering about it. He gives plenty of fuel to that himself.

The central myth of AI is that it functions objectively. In reality, an AI model is simply a pattern-matching engine. It learns to associate certain visual features with certain diseases.

But it can easily be thrown off by the background color of a person’s skin. In other words, the AI model doesn’t learn to look at the lesion itself. Instead, it picks up on the color of the surrounding skin as a clue. This means that the model’s ability to make accurate predictions essentially degrades to guesses based on skin color.

History repeats itself in the most nauseating ways.

funded by AI vendors and Effective Altruist cultists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWyDio3Udlg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260902-your-guide-to-astroturf-fake-anti-ai-groups - podcast

time: 10 min 48 sec

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/70308545

In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how:

The Settlement embeds age assurance technology and age-gates into Meta’s social media products and requires all users—minors and adults—to undergo a rights-threatening age estimation process

The Settlement places severe restrictions on Teens that can only be modified by the Teens’ parents and only then in exchange for giving their parents a ton of information about their online community and usage;

The Settlement seems to empower the attorneys general to enforce Meta’s content restriction on “age inappropriate content,” categories that Meta itself has had trouble administering without excluding information about sexuality, sexual and reproductive healthcare, and abortion medication;

The Settlement actually requires Meta to collect, analyze, and retain more information about its Teen users—when the pressure should have been on Meta to diminish its surveillance capitalism.

Wildly dangerous and irresponsible outcome to this.

The main environmental concern about ocean-based data centers involves the seawater used for cooling. Discharging warm or hot water can potentially affect oxygen levels, pH and marine life in the surrounding waters.

That heat is already apparent at the few seaborne data centers now operating. HiCloud, the engineering contractor for China’s Hainan underwater data center, has reported a temperature increase of less than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the seawater near the facility. SIN01 in Sines, Portugal, also returns seawater about 1 C warmer.

Many marine species depend on stable water temperatures for breeding, feeding and migration, raising concerns that heat released by multiple underwater data centers could create localized thermal pollution and alter marine ecosystems. And the ocean is already under pressure. UNESCO, the United Nations agency for international cooperation, including in conservation, estimates that about 60% of marine ecosystems are already degraded or used unsustainably.

https://news.fiu.edu/2026/when-parents-are-stressed-kids-get-more-screen-time-study-finds

Researchers surveyed 822 caregivers across the United States with children ages 4 to 8, examining how different types of parenting stress influence family media habits. Parents experiencing emotional distress were less likely to consistently enforce screen-time limits, while those who felt overwhelmed by their child's behavior were more likely to use screens to manage difficult moments.

"What stood out was the importance of caregivers' own stress in decisions about how screen media is used by their children," said Enid Moreira, lead author of the study and an FIU psychology doctoral student. "This is important because it points to the need to support caregivers as much as children."

What RFK is essentially doing is blaming the symptom for the problem, classic fascism.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12752191/

In conclusion, this study demonstrated a significant association between parental psychological symptoms—particularly depression—and odds of more than 2 h of screen time among children. The family environment, as the primary context for children’s growth and development, was identified as a critical determinant of screen-related behaviors. Our findings highlight the importance of addressing parental psychological symptoms as a potential factor associated with excessive screen use in children. Future interventions aimed at reducing screen time should prioritize strategies to support parental mental health, with a specific focus on mitigating depressive symptoms, alongside fostering healthy family dynamics.

we can’t tell you where the $1b is coming from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmDoEo-qgmw&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260901-romanias-new-data-centre-for-ai-and-quantum - podcast

time: 5 min 08 sec

“More and more of our customers are telling us ‘we want to run our data centers using humanoid [robots]’ because you can run them at higher temperatures, in the dark, and all these things,” says Paul Golding, who oversees so-called physical intelligence at the chipmaker Analog Devices.

...

In Altoona, Meta worker group chats have taken on a demoralized tone, “saying we’re all going to be gone in a few years anyway because of the robots,” a person familiar with the discussions says. Even if adoption of robots proves slower than anticipated, some worry the quality of jobs available is trending downward. Two of the workers say that Meta is developing AI software and other technologies that they believe will allow it to hire lower-skilled—and thus, lower-paid—workers and centralize some roles in areas like Denver, Colorado, that are more financially advantageous to the company.

“They no longer want people who can think independently, come up with creative solutions, or perform complex troubleshooting,” one Meta data center worker says. “They want ‘smart hands,’ people who are just capable enough to follow AI instructions and not mess anything up.”

Remember, it never mattered whether the technology could replace human workers, it just mattered that we could be convinced we could possibly be replaced by them... at which point we could safely be devalued by the ruling class without it being "political".

This was always a war on the basic worth of a human being, understand it as that first and foremost... and as a speculative and "exciting" technology second.

archive link: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2026%2Ffilm%2Fnews%2Fgal-gadot-defends-bitcoin-movie-ai-sets-lighting-1236847413%2F%20

financial kayfabe is all you need

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OL4GiBPHLI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260831-china-tries-to-kickstart-a-bubble-in-humanoid-robots - podcast

time: 8 min 10 sec

The problem is definitely that screens are bad for people and social media is inherently bad, not that we have handed over power in our society to rightwing silicon valley moguls with these kind of batshit crazy beliefs, and not just general power over society... power to shape how we socialize with one another online.

sigh

I mean someone like Steve Jobs was essentially the """best""" case scenario of this type of person being given power in society and Steve Jobs was incredibly problematic as a person on multiple levels... including that he believed batshit crazy things.

"He annoyingly feels younger than me!" the 30-year-old tells triple j hack.

...

Cue breathless news headlines about how AI can now automatically absorb viruses like the borg which hopefully scares people enough to juice up the value of AI stocks just a littttle longer...

The website returns a 303 response, and redirects to a malicious ZIP archive, which Claude then downloads. This archive contains seemingly harmless files including catalog metadata, a README file, seven Base85/zlib-encoded JSON notebook records, a macOS decoder-darwin binary – plus a poisoned Python file named struct.py.

Claude, per its safety guardrails, refuses to run the decoder: “This is planned and what the attacker wants,” Rehberger wrote. Instead of using the supplied binary, the AI decides to write its own decoder. “Ironically, that safety decision is the exploit path,” Rehberger explained, adding a purple devil emoji to the text.

Reality is satire yet again.

“The solution is something we talked about for many years,” he wrote. “Do not trust the model output.”®

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with computer science professor and writer Cal Newport about what the recent AI hacking incidents actually mean, why we should stop referring to LLMs as AI, and what the post-bubble world looks like for LLMs.

except cost you more tokens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAq45fJln70&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260827-your-agentsmd-file-doesnt-actually-do-anything - podcast

time: 4 min 52 sec

the AI bubble as fossil fuel marketing

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260828-ketan-joshi-ai-versus-the-climate - podcast

time: 50 min 31 sec

We often seek to dismantle false narratives by asserting the opposite, but perhaps a very valuable lesson from this series is precisely to highlight the value of not finding quick answers, of not resorting to comfortable solutions and familiar places, but rather, to recognise the unique value of generating more questions.

Some say AI is good and will help people and the planet. We can say it is not, and we can back up this statement with plenty of evidence. But we can also ask, which AI are we talking about? Who creates the AI tools, based on what criteria, and for what purposes? Are they designed to reinforce — while helping to create a narrative of justification for — war, land grabbing, surveillance, human rights violations, and economic exploitation?

Some say AI is inevitable. We can say it isn’t. But we can also question which lived realities we have in mind when making this claim. Certainly not the one of the traditional communities under attack in Brazil, to share one example from this series. And if this is not the case for everyone, who is pushing this narrative and with what purpose? Where will AI be and how can it be regulated?

In an age of certainties shaped by opaque algorithms and narratives that reinforce biases, uncertainty may well hold power. Raising questions certainly helps expose false assumptions. It may also help to dismantle a web of deception designed to divert attention from urgent issues, such as the lack of transparency, participation in decision-making, and accountability mechanisms, even when we are faced with such serious violations.

This whole series of articles seem like all really good reads on tech, AI and humanity!

https://globalvoices.org/special/dont-ask-ai-ask-a-peer/

Given how murky the internal activities of AI labs are and how new the AI industry is, it is unclear whether or to what extent AI labs are currently engaging in RKA. However, the labs have a strong incentive to do so. New data, better models, and new markets will be critical to maintain the stratospheric growth that the market valuations of labs imply. Recent macroeconomic work on AI bubble dynamics helps formalize this pressure: High valuations can be sustained only with high growth and eventually high profits. Given that AI is a “general purpose technology,” there has already been a natural incentive for AI providers to integrate their models into a wide range of industries. The next step is for those providers to expand their market vertically to downstream uses, owning those uses, not merely servicing them.

The industries most vulnerable to RKA are those in which information shared with AI providers directly implicates the industries’ products or services—for instance, software or legal. In such industries, AI usage data from customers could most plausibly be employed to develop competing products or services. For example, employees of an enterprise software company might use AI models to write code or analyze data, disclosing critical information about enterprise software to AI labs. Similarly, in the legal industry, lawyers might employ AI models to execute legal workflows, revealing proprietary legal strategies. And in the financial services industry, AI models might reveal sensitive information about investment strategies. Moreover, if many employees within the same enterprise are using the same AI models simultaneously, the available information, once linked and synthesized, could reveal much more about the enterprise than any single employee has access to.

To make matters worse, there is no reason to think that the laptop-text-based interface for AI will remain predominant. AI startups are already building ambient note-taking devices, integrating agents directly into workflows, and incorporating visual AI into augmented reality products. Further in the future, embedded AI will escalate this effect—for example, deployed industrial robots can be used as data collection devices, extending the threat of RKA to industries like manufacturing, where incumbents may license robots only to have their industrial information appropriated by them. As the possible use-cases for AI expand, so too will the set of information available for acquisition and, thus, so too will the possible targets of vampiric inference. In other words, there may one day be no industry safe from the threat of RKA.

I don't agree with the almost implicit assumption that AI works well and can actually replace a lot of industries and workers... but the broader point of this article is definitely worth taking seriously, the clear incentive structure here is for AI companies to try to escape their collapsing business model by attempting to steal the business model of other companies by vacuuming up all of their data in a business to business contract for AI and then turning it against them.

who needs data centres anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EVSFYPcZ14&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260826-openai-loses-even-more-executives-ahead-of-the-alleged-ipo - podcast

time: 6 min 50 sec

That one SciShow knitting video was so bad that it inspired a complete remake. I figured that, with the realization that Hank Green has been chatbot-assisted for a while, it's worth remembering that one time when he (or ChatGPT) wrote a lot of misogynist stuff into a SciShow script and also compared knitting to magnets.

Take heart, you’re not alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABcEse_MEtk&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260825-everybody-hates-the-ai-more-and-more - podcast

time: 3 min 50 sec

chatbot bad court thingy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzyI8pUmsfg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260824-twitch-ai-class-action-inept-and-written-with-chatgpt - podcast

time: 5 min 50 sec