Curious as to how many "Agentic AI workflows" these days are just triggered scripts and not particularly #AI in any meaningful sense...
ai
Promo'd my Substack yesterday w #YouTube link. Oops. Now Real One
#DonaldTrump wants a military parade to feel adequate. Sorry, Don, no d*k measuring in democracy. David Shuster's fab video on Trumper Denialism. NYT Pitchbot on Maureen Dowd & Signalgate 2. READ (SUB!) to our NEW Blue Amp Substack!
https://substack.com/home/post/p-161966209 #writing #news #poliltics #us #usa #unitedstates #america #press #ai #trump #musk #tariffs #tech #nato #tv #canada #europe #russia #ukraine #eu #stockmarket #video #media
I continue to experiment with #AI in the context of #softwareengineering. I’m fortunate that my team supports me in exploring different ways to improve our daily work. This week, I designed a team of #autonomousagents to implement features, from design to implementation.
This Sunday-morning-in-europe I am just going to briefly opine on Minsky and Papert's #Perceptrons ( #bookstodon ) and leak disspiriting nz government secrets about how nz's #AI #strategy is going by way of illustration (and #original #news #journalism I guess), from a multifarious handful of senior employees from different regions and departments / crown corporations.
https://toobnix.org/w/ayXvcND3PWuHVqB3gx9Ngm
#commonLisp on #irc #live #liveNOW
#lispyGopherClimate ! Every week since 2022 #technology #podcast .
Edited 60d ago
"Who is going to be motivated to adopt if they know the intent is to replace them?"
Nearly one in three (31%) company employees say they are "sabotaging their company’s generative AI strategy".
https://www.cio.com/article/4022953/31-of-employees-are-sabotaging-your-gen-ai-strategy.html
I'm thinking of excluding AI generated content explicitly in the terms of MakerTube. Background is that more and more generated content is uploaded and frankly resources are to sparse and costly to host this crap. What do you think? #peertube #makertube #terms #ai
"Vibe-coded build system NX gets hacked, steals vibe-coders’ crypto": https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/29/vibe-coded-build-system-nx-gets-hacked-steals-vibe-coders-crypto/
As someone who spent time in infosec and then more time infosec adjacent, this was painful to read.
1400 folks got hit on this, that is not huge but it sure ain't small either. This will not be the last and it will not be the biggest.
![So in the future, we should see more malware that only works against vibe coders!
Just yesterday, 28 August, it came out there was a second wave of hacks, where the attackers used compromised keys from the first wave to get copies of those users’ private code repos. [StepSecurity]](/proxy/post_attachment/149266/6994377e5f.png "So in the future, we should see more malware that only works against vibe coders!
Just yesterday, 28 August, it came out there was a second wave of hacks, where the attackers used compromised keys from the first wave to get copies of those users’ private code repos. [StepSecurity]")
很高兴看到公众对 deepseek 项目背后诸多技术资本和统治贵族之间阴暗且密切的关系的揭示。我们不会反对技术进步，只要技术进步可以造福人类，让我们不再辛劳，不再为了温饱而忍受剥削压榨，不再因人类肉身的局限性而不得不放弃自由的梦想委身于统治。
但是，当技术被掌握着法西斯手里时，我们所期待的一切不仅都无法实现，更将导致我们已经熟悉的噩梦变本加厉。它绝不可持续。
帝国冷战和民族主义的价值判断是本阶段你能遇到的最愚蠢的烟雾。扫清它们，才能看到你我的未来 - 那里不应再有它们的存在。
希望本文能为华人反抗者带来提示。
🧬 更新《斩断AI法西斯主义》
https://iyouport.notion.site/AI-19034ca2d46d804893acd4f301a76498
—— 📌 借此周知：本项目一期工程增补了一个新的栏目，将从理论原理和战术技巧等多方面讲述这场二十一世纪最重要的战斗如何与您密切相关：尤其是，您可以借助的机会和使用的武器。
这场战斗对中美两国至关重要，且只对这两国最重要；正如华语朋友在我们年初动员期间的讨论中所提到的；「这个世界的秩序正在变成两个法西斯之间的对峙、平衡、协调和合作， …… 华人Antifa的崛起将成为我们翻身的起点。」
希望本栏目能有助于更多华语地区的进步人士补充洞察力，并提升战斗力。
该栏目才刚开启，后续将有更多重要内容进入。如果您准备复制本数据库，可晚些再操作。
（本项目未来还将有一个单独讨论战术问题的专题站点，而将要收录在本栏目中的战术原理会具有一定的针对性。）
#高堡奇人 #China #USA #AI #法西斯 #fascism #resistance #tactics #initiatives
"[...] there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that's now a Windows default app."
https://www.xda-developers.com/microsofts-huge-venture-flatlines/
"Children shouldn’t speak with companion chatbots because such interactions risk self harm and could exacerbate mental health problems and addiction."
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a research fellow at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, explores how new technologies like "AI" chatbots are reshaping our understanding of death, loss and grief.
I read @baldur's post Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity today, here: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/disingenuous-discourse/ and felt like riffing a bit on the section "Task sequences as vectors" since I've modeled stuff like this too. As with baldur's post mine is a bit of a gallop, meaning I might make some errors and omissions. The tl;dr is that this model suggests that in many workplaces, mandating AI tool use might have the perverse effect of making the group or workplace less productive overall, even if the tools make individuals more productive (as measured by unit throughput, say).
The rough idea is to model a bunch of people working in a company using queuing theory. Each person receives tasks to perform, completes each task in sequence, and passes the result onto another person. If a person is busy when they receive a new task, the task goes into a sort of inbox to wait till they're ready to work on it (the "queue" in "queuing theory"). Each person is modeled as a probability distribution, where the mean specifies the average or typical amount of time they take to complete a task, and the variance models the fact that sometimes tasks take more or less time to complete for unaccounted for reasons (you spill your coffee; the previous person did a bang up job that time; etc). You can model workplaces with many people, like factories and offices, in this way, and ask questions about how quickly the entire group can complete tasks (throughput, which relates to productivity), how much time passes between an initial incoming request and the output of a final product (latency or wait time), and how much variability there is in the throughput and latency. It's mathmagical!
Anyhow, baldur points out that the variance in individual task completion is the killer variable here. As you introduce more and more variability in the time-to-complete distribution of individuals, the group's throughput and latency suffer significantly. Depending of course on the structure of the group, there can be phase shifts from "throughput decreases" to "throughput effectively stops altogether" as this variability goes up. He argues, I think correctly, that forcing workers to use generative AI tools in their workflows can increase their task completion time variance. Even worse, even if it does make their individual throughput higher--meaning the tools locally "increase productivity"--an increase in the variance of that throughput can make the overall productivity of the workplace lower despite what seem to be individual gains! A manager that actually did care about productivity would at the very least consider this possibility before mandating the use of such tools.
I wanted to add that these sorts of phenomena can be even worse depending on how you model time-to-complete. Often a Gaussian distribution (bell curve) is used, reflecting that sometimes tasks can be completed faster and sometimes they take a bit more time, but tend to an average and do not skew towards faster or slower. This is largely the model baldur was discussing. However, knowledge work, and especially work like coding or R&D, are often better modeled by exponential distributions or similarly long-tailed distributions like the gamma distribution. With knowledge work, most tasks are completed in an average-ish amount of time, occasionally some are completed more quickly, but more often there are tasks that take 2, 3, sometimes 10 or more times as long as the average case. For the exponential distribution, roughly 5% of tasks take an "anomalously" long time.
A sequence of exponentially-distributed tasks has challenging throughput and latency behavior. The sum of independent exponential distributions is a gamma distribution, which is also long-tailed but usually with an even worse rate parameter that tends to lengthen the tail, meaning delays compound (in baldur's post delays tend to be compensated by symmetrical gains if the group is large enough, but that doesn't happen with long-tailed distributions). I don't know enough about queuing theory to say what the general behavior is, but intuitively it seems it must be equally challenging in real-world arrangements. This is one way to account for why software development projects and R&D projects are almost never completed early and can sometimes take 2 or more times longer than anticipated.
Adding variance to an exponential distribution--as mandated use of AI tools might do--has the effect of also increasing the mean time to completion. It also flattens/lengthens the tail. I haven't worked it out for other long-tailed distributions but I suspect similar phenomena with those. Overall this would be going in the wrong direction, making the killer problem--the long tail--even worse!
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AIMandates #QueuingTheory #modeling #WorkplaceModeling #productivity
The rough idea is to model a bunch of people working in a company using queuing theory. Each person receives tasks to perform, completes each task in sequence, and passes the result onto another person. If a person is busy when they receive a new task, the task goes into a sort of inbox to wait till they're ready to work on it (the "queue" in "queuing theory"). Each person is modeled as a probability distribution, where the mean specifies the average or typical amount of time they take to complete a task, and the variance models the fact that sometimes tasks take more or less time to complete for unaccounted for reasons (you spill your coffee; the previous person did a bang up job that time; etc). You can model workplaces with many people, like factories and offices, in this way, and ask questions about how quickly the entire group can complete tasks (throughput, which relates to productivity), how much time passes between an initial incoming request and the output of a final product (latency or wait time), and how much variability there is in the throughput and latency. It's mathmagical!
Anyhow, baldur points out that the variance in individual task completion is the killer variable here. As you introduce more and more variability in the time-to-complete distribution of individuals, the group's throughput and latency suffer significantly. Depending of course on the structure of the group, there can be phase shifts from "throughput decreases" to "throughput effectively stops altogether" as this variability goes up. He argues, I think correctly, that forcing workers to use generative AI tools in their workflows can increase their task completion time variance. Even worse, even if it does make their individual throughput higher--meaning the tools locally "increase productivity"--an increase in the variance of that throughput can make the overall productivity of the workplace lower despite what seem to be individual gains! A manager that actually did care about productivity would at the very least consider this possibility before mandating the use of such tools.
I wanted to add that these sorts of phenomena can be even worse depending on how you model time-to-complete. Often a Gaussian distribution (bell curve) is used, reflecting that sometimes tasks can be completed faster and sometimes they take a bit more time, but tend to an average and do not skew towards faster or slower. This is largely the model baldur was discussing. However, knowledge work, and especially work like coding or R&D, are often better modeled by exponential distributions or similarly long-tailed distributions like the gamma distribution. With knowledge work, most tasks are completed in an average-ish amount of time, occasionally some are completed more quickly, but more often there are tasks that take 2, 3, sometimes 10 or more times as long as the average case. For the exponential distribution, roughly 5% of tasks take an "anomalously" long time.
A sequence of exponentially-distributed tasks has challenging throughput and latency behavior. The sum of independent exponential distributions is a gamma distribution, which is also long-tailed but usually with an even worse rate parameter that tends to lengthen the tail, meaning delays compound (in baldur's post delays tend to be compensated by symmetrical gains if the group is large enough, but that doesn't happen with long-tailed distributions). I don't know enough about queuing theory to say what the general behavior is, but intuitively it seems it must be equally challenging in real-world arrangements. This is one way to account for why software development projects and R&D projects are almost never completed early and can sometimes take 2 or more times longer than anticipated.
Adding variance to an exponential distribution--as mandated use of AI tools might do--has the effect of also increasing the mean time to completion. It also flattens/lengthens the tail. I haven't worked it out for other long-tailed distributions but I suspect similar phenomena with those. Overall this would be going in the wrong direction, making the killer problem--the long tail--even worse!
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AIMandates #QueuingTheory #modeling #WorkplaceModeling #productivity
Edited 1y ago
https://open.substack.com/pub/blueamp/p/sit-abc-news-sit-good-dog?r=j0lyx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
NEW SUBSTACK (Check it out/Subscribe!): A moment that defines our time. From Trump’s aggressive lying to the lack of pushback/weakness from Terry Moran & ABC’s corporate entanglements.
Also: David Shuster video (Hilarious!). NYT Pitchbot (Hilarious!). #news #usa #politics #russia #ukraine #press #us #america #unitedstates #tech #china #tariffs #stockmarket #donaldtrump #trump #press #media #podcast #eu #ai #canada #europe #nato
Please stop saying "AI powered". It's a mixed-up way to talk that allows for a lot of mischief:
1. It's a mixed metaphor. AI is reactive, not propulsive (think through what the word "power" means)
2. AI is a mixed bag of a large number of different technologies, making the term imprecise at best ("AI" in video games frequently leans on old school A*, quite different from the LLMs that make the news)
3. LLM-based AI mixes up other people's words into a slurry that is full of content-free phrases like "AI powered". Why ape that?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI
1. It's a mixed metaphor. AI is reactive, not propulsive (think through what the word "power" means)
2. AI is a mixed bag of a large number of different technologies, making the term imprecise at best ("AI" in video games frequently leans on old school A*, quite different from the LLMs that make the news)
3. LLM-based AI mixes up other people's words into a slurry that is full of content-free phrases like "AI powered". Why ape that?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI
My half-baked deep thought of the day is that we are living through a time in which imagination has been de-legitimatized generally, and we are reaching the necessarily absurd crescendo of this process. It is taking physical form in technologies such as generative AI, literal Anti-Imagination generators.
Let me be clear what I (don't) mean by "imagination". I do not mean "creative", "fictional", "imaginary", or "artistic"--those words can be related, but they've also been co-opted into exactly the trend I'm calling out. I also don't mean interesting images that appear in your mind or dreams but are then dismissed as lacking significance. I do mean truly imaginative acts arising within and from the mind, and not subjected to editorial scrutiny by logic, empiricism, or other instrumentalized forms of reason. Dreams are one way to access imagination; active imagination--stream of consciousness directed but not edited by the conscious mind--can be a way to explore it. Religious, magical, mystical, or meditative practices can too if that's your jam. So can psychoanalysis and some other forms of therapy. There are countless other ways and I don't pretend to have any special knowledge of this, I'm just riffing on an idea.
More and more I believe that we have to rediscover and exercise this aspect of ourselves if we're to navigate the current crisis. (*) Our collective imagination lacks force at a time when generative Anti-Imagination is reaching industrial scale.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #imagination #ActiveImagination
(*) "Crisis" has a medical definition: "that change in a disease which indicates whether the result is to be recovery or death" (Webster's dictionary). Its Greek root can also mean "decision", which I like to think about when considering "crises". They are decisions that need to be made.
Let me be clear what I (don't) mean by "imagination". I do not mean "creative", "fictional", "imaginary", or "artistic"--those words can be related, but they've also been co-opted into exactly the trend I'm calling out. I also don't mean interesting images that appear in your mind or dreams but are then dismissed as lacking significance. I do mean truly imaginative acts arising within and from the mind, and not subjected to editorial scrutiny by logic, empiricism, or other instrumentalized forms of reason. Dreams are one way to access imagination; active imagination--stream of consciousness directed but not edited by the conscious mind--can be a way to explore it. Religious, magical, mystical, or meditative practices can too if that's your jam. So can psychoanalysis and some other forms of therapy. There are countless other ways and I don't pretend to have any special knowledge of this, I'm just riffing on an idea.
More and more I believe that we have to rediscover and exercise this aspect of ourselves if we're to navigate the current crisis. (*) Our collective imagination lacks force at a time when generative Anti-Imagination is reaching industrial scale.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #imagination #ActiveImagination
(*) "Crisis" has a medical definition: "that change in a disease which indicates whether the result is to be recovery or death" (Webster's dictionary). Its Greek root can also mean "decision", which I like to think about when considering "crises". They are decisions that need to be made.
What if "42" is just the hallucination of an LLM from the future? 🤔
Edited 1y ago
Dear Mozilla what you're doing is stupid, dangerous, and opposed to your mission. You need to stop. #ai #aibrowser #mozilla #firefox #webbrowser
https://gardinerbryant.com/mozilla-ai-in-the-browser-is-disgusting-please-stop/
"Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.”"
I found this to be excellent: https://mass-driver.com/article/from-human-hands
From human hands.
We don’t use AI in any of our design or production processes. Here’s why.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ImageGeneration #fonts #typefaces #art
From human hands.
We don’t use AI in any of our design or production processes. Here’s why.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ImageGeneration #fonts #typefaces #art
This definition of #AISlop popped out of my head after a bit of un-entrainment (if you dig).
https://realityfragments.com/2026/02/01/a-definition-of-ai-slop/
Outlook not so good 🎱
Police tech doesn’t predict crime. It predicts policing.
Based on biased data, it brings more of the same – racist policing and poverty punishment.
Read our latest blog on why crime 'predicting' police tech must be BANNED ⬇️
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/why-predictive-policing-must-be-banned/
#policing #AI #precrime #justice #criminal #police #ukpol #ukpolitics #surveillance
