rook

I’m more familiar with vox day than I’d really like. He hasn’t pivoted from the culture war stuff that he’s known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.

More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware.

Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments.

Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandoned… not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. There’s no malice in the same way there’s no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.

what they can do is mitigate the effects of those data centers

Oooor, and I know this is a bit of a wild idea, they could instead not offer llm search.

I’m hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that I’d be safe from that particular filter, so I’ll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.

Whilst I try and remember, there’s this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning children’s schoolwork.

Which was then followed by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall). I can’t find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.

A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come across them already:

Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace

I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all.

Meta's Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected

This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.

In retrospect, he said, the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," and ​that the company's bets on the new structure "haven't come to fruition yet." Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can ​execute tasks on behalf of a user.

Conversations he was having "with our top people" when they started planning the restructuring in January and February "were that they ‌were ⁠worried that we weren't going to move fast enough to adapt," Zuckerberg said.

I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.

Here’s one from the archives: https://spectrum.ieee.org/children-beating-up-robot

Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System

tl;dr: small children have no empathy for your robot and will torture it and hound it to death if they can. The safest thing to do is to head for the nearest adult-sized people, who will hopefully be less inclined to kill it simply because it is a robot.

I wouldn’t want to do that myself… personally too much tracking gear in there, and it’s easy to make a mistake and not disable it all. Also, you just know that if you get caught, they’ll try and prosecute it like you kidnapped and dismembered a regular officer.

Now, I’m more surprised that they don’t get black bagged and tipped over. Maybe they only ever use them in super thoroughly surveilled areas with nearby human backup, but you’d expect at least one successful tipping to make the news somewhere.

How it started: in 2025, the city of dublin, ohio (the latter detail missed by quite a lot of reporting,because there are no other dublins it might get confused with, I guess) gets an autonomous? ai powered police surveillance robot.

City officials are encouraging residents to interact with Dubbot—ask questions, take selfies, and experience firsthand how AI is shaping public safety. The goal is to foster transparency and gather feedback to refine the robot’s role in the community.

How it’s going

The person-sized, camera-covered robot that looked like it rolled right out of a sci-fi movie did not identify any criminal incidents, issue any tickets or help with any arrests in its nearly 10 months on the job.

On the other hand, I bet it didn’t shoot anyone’s dog, so who’s to say that the $64k was wasted.

Anyone who names a security company “sauron” has critically failed their reading comprehension. Mercifully, there’s no company naming itself saruman, because that character was breathtakingly dumb in so many ways that perhaps even the y-combinator set are dimly aware of them.

Who even has time for that? Do you think that the people behind palantir, icarus and sauron have time to read google summaries? They’re too busy remaking the world!

Anyway, if you’re successful enough you’ll eclipse the original source in terms of importance and all the search engine summaries will be about you anyway, so any time spent learning anything before that will have been completely wasted.

Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks CLAUDE.MD to, say, /dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code.

the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do.

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173

The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but they’ve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.