Vice has a writeup - https://archive.is/ooVju - more of a bring-your-own-taser kind of thing I guess

The tortures varied wildly in nature, and were too numerous to list in full, but several stuck out for me: There was someone pinning clothespins to partygoers’ cheeks; a man called SirLemmings used some herbal powder to strip you of your sense of sweetness, then made you eat an Oreo to test the result; Avalon Warren, an actress resembling Lola Bunny sprung to life, made partygoers make the ahegao hentai face, and carried a fly zapper; other electric torments were also popular—several people carried tasers, and someone had an electric baton that transferred shocks between participants; someone else’s bit was asking you to yell compliments for Donald Trump, which was perhaps the most polarizing (SirLemmings told me that when he declared the president was an excellent comedian, he drew glares); yet another was writing unknown directives onto others’ foreheads. My friend Jahnik had “pls give me a smooch <3” penned on his, and afterward, received kisses throughout the night. Meanwhile all I got was “CTRL-ALT-Z,” making me wonder if they wanted to undo me from reality.

As for my torture? I was merely a journalist. A lazy choice, I felt, but for some it was the most terrifying of the bunch. One girl even walked away when I told her; before, she’d been nothing but smiles.

Another resident teacher was political satirist YouTuber JREG, real name Greg Guevara, who recently published a polemical video calling for Total Clanker Death, or the eradication of all would-be sentient machines.

youtube faves are implicated!?

The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting| Telegraph

Not sure who Wes Streeting is, but “Labour for the Long Term” and “Effective Altruism for Christians” sound like some internet rabbit holes to go down later.

Prof MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried first met in 2012, long before Bankman-Fried would make his billions. Prof MacAskill had contacted him out of the blue while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inviting him to attend a talk he was giving to students at nearby Harvard University.

/why/ did he do that? out of the blue, no reason at all? what did SBF have going on in undergrad?

Mr Lawrence now runs the Centre for British Progress, a “non-partisan” think tank “producing concrete ideas for… British growth”.

jfc even my old company has full pivoted to ai - https://platform.mapquest.com/mcp

sorry guys too little too late

Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

Nobody Knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI Hacking Sprees Are Illegal | Wired via naked capitalism

Are you liable when your random sentence generator does something random to someone else? Nobody knows!

I see you, and raise by a Gundam solar space laser - https://www.reflectorbital.com/

AI Crisis Flowchart spotted on linkedin

and the actual article: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out-and-the-hype-that-followed-it

quoted zvi haha :|

To be fair, the safety community can plausibly claim vindication here. At worst, an autonomous agent that breaches containment and attacks a real third party is precisely the scenario researchers have warned about for years, which enthusiasts have routinely dismissed as speculative. And at best, the company in charge of maintaining safety failed to construct an adequate containment system.

are you fucking kidding me, they have been DDoSing sites for months, everybody knows about it, and the “safety” community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions. I know multiple companies that woke up one day to 10-20k netlify bills until they could stand up an anubis.

Just let hugging face sue the idiots, it isn’t like law enforcement will do anything even though there’s already laws on the books for unauthorized access, industrial espionage, etc etc etc.

zerohedge sponcon so obviously a grift but wtf is this AI Black Paper by Jim Rickards

https://www.zerohedge.com/sponsored-post/sobering-july-29th-announcement-set-crush-ai-stocks

Have the goldbugs been reading Zitron? or just an extremely late pivot from btc to ai? or flooding the zone?

Anyway who the hell is Jim Rickards? Another week, another guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:James_Rickards

“AI Black Paper” is catchy enough though, should be a goth band.

its not plagiarism, its listserv to journal intellectual arbitrage, totally rational thing to do. /s

You said friends and family, does that mean orgmode or vimwiki is out of the running? I liked fedwiki back in the day but it had a learning curve. Never tried it on the phone.

Also to be fair to the FOSS options, commercial applications like OneNote or Google Keep also suck, and are somehow worse than I remembered.

“Other Scott” Scott “Unicorn Feces” Galloway appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of California.

https://dailybruin.com/2026/07/22/gov-gavin-newsom-appoints-podcaster-scott-galloway-to-uc-board-of-regents

well that wasn’t on my bingo card. what’s next, Bill Maher for governor?

The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism

choice quotes:

More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.

Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.

If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.

At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.

We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.

That Greer/Land crossover podcast is one of the funnier things I’ve listened to in a while, thanks for the ref, I guess I had missed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-pcSez32-s if others are interested.

Land opens with a Greer/Land yin-yang and we’re off the to races. Greer definitely brings up Spengler. Then Land starts talking about “Father Chad the Colorado Exorcist” and Greer is just yes-and-ing about the Solomonic tradition of binding demons.

… Half way through, that’s enough for one sitting.

Relatedly, C2C had a guy on talking about the singularity plus the bible. https://kfiam640.iheart.com/featured/coast-to-coast-am/content/2026-07-22-1100-the-best-of-coast-to-coas-the-singularity-best-of-coast-to-coast-am-72/

Seems like America is definitely getting ready for this stuff to cross over to the Left Behind crowd, I predict more Tucker segments. I’ll post some of the other guys I’ve found, digging into the “AI is actually the demonic spiritual energy of surviving nephilim” theory rn.

John Michael Greer writes:

Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds. https://ecosophia.net/july-2026-open-post/

Good for you, you peak-oil meme-magic druid, for keeping your corner of the net weird.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/23/oracle-wins-10-year-pentagon-software-contract-worth-up-to-7-billion.html

guess the pentagon is footing the power bill?

I hate LLMs because I am under enormous pressure, from many different angles, to also use them. I’m being asked – required, in some cases – to ignore all of my concerns about them and use them anyway because everyone else does and “obviously” they are the future. Because, somehow, all of my positions against LLMs make me unreasonable and a less valuable member of society.

oof. yeah that’s me.

I had heard the reverse of this a year or so back, that prompting in Chinese and answers in English was fewer tokens e2e than English/English somehow. Probably depends on the specific model build.

who is this Dean Ball guy? new week, new guy, I guess.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/19/pentagon-openai-dean-ball-trump-ai

Zoom in: “Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI,” Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X.

“Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points).” Michael was arguing against Ball’s point that various government agencies, including the Pentagon, have blocked employees from using Chinese AI, which has already sent a message to regulated companies.

Russ Wilcox felt compelled to weigh in also

Dean Ball, days into his new job as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, posted his assessment of Kimi K3, the new model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. Kimi is an open-weight model, which means its inner workings are published for anyone to download, run, and modify; the newest version’s weights ship later this month. It had just matched the best publicly available models of the first quarter. The post made three claims. Open-weight models are “inherently decelerationist.” A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is “full AI communism,” a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a “dystopian hellscape.” And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of “regulatory risk” around the use of open-weight Chinese models.

I have met Dean Ball. We have disagreed before. This time the disagreement is public, and so the response should be too.

oh no kimi3 got the neo marxist woke mind virus

via dumpsterfire

Robotaxi riders are falling asleep, sparking frantic emergency service calls

https://www.straitstimes.com/life/motoring/robotaxi-riders-are-falling-asleep-sparking-frantic-emergency-service-calls

So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: “sleepers”. The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo’s first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.

Hey, new ludicity post. wonder why he did a saturday post, he’ll miss the HN monday cycle.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

For this reason, our team has quickly learned while on an engagement not to ask anything about ongoing AI projects in any context – by the time that project has started, it is too late for the management team, and intervention is not possible until a crisis point is inevitably reached. There is no conceivable positive outcome. The failure rate is so high that even basic inquiry leaves us in an untenable position. Any coherent question about how it’s going, what the goal is, who is using it, constitutes an inadvertent attack on the chain of command responsible for the work because there are no good answers to anything.

Matches my experience consulting these last few years. I’m still waiting to hear about the one gig where AI doesn’t eventually degenerate into a CYA circlejerk. Perhaps that is just the dominant eigenvector of the technical consulting process.

Several of my peers now “AI-wash” their work, meaning that even when they can perfectly competently execute on their jobs to the satisfaction of their management teams, said managers are unhappy if the engineers haven’t used AI in the work.

Been there too.

Also, apparently layoffs.fyi added an “attributed to AI” filter - https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/