nfultz, nfultz@awful.systems

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.

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/

new polemics.md on luigi

https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/china-registered-the-humans-last

Last July, China gave every internet user a state identity: one number and one credential, good at the bank, the hospital, and the civil-service exam. That system took effect on July 15, 2025.¹ Yesterday, on July 15, 2026, exactly one year later, China did the same thing for AI.

These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot. As of yesterday, agents in China get registered on a national platform. They receive a digital identity and declare their capabilities the way a business declares its scope, and they can be recalled the way a defective car is recalled. A state planning analyst offered the official gloss: every agent gets a 数字身份证, a digital ID card.² Call it what it is, a birth certificate for machines.

I never know how to parse mainstream reporting about China or Wilcox’s writing in particular. Maybe this means they have a universal kill switch.

If you read it the way a lawyer would and the genre is unmistakable. It follows an agent through an entire life. At birth, registration: identity, declared capabilities, payment rails, a procedure for disputes. In life, an audit trail, because in sensitive settings every action must be verifiable and traceable, with blockchain named as the technology of record, so that no act ever floats free of a responsible principal. At death, recall, in the language of defective products.

hmmm

The man behind the partnership is Lin Le, founder of Lingshu Technology, the firm ranked first in China for blockchain and trusted-data infrastructure. The founder of the country’s leading trusted-data company signed for board-level entry into a police-agent vendor five weeks before a law requiring trusted-data audit trails on police agents came into force.

OK back to be being terrified I guess.

https://www.reddit.com/r/murdle/comments/1ux0g4r/murdle_uses_ai/

Unfortunately you’re right about the Marot— in early 2022 I used a pre-ChatGPT transformer to come up with some of the symbolism, because I thought it was a funny source for essentially arbitrary “revelation.” It probably amounted to about 20-30 words in the final corpus and, although I only vaguely recall this, I believe I remember it being very bad at it. (Significantly more of it was decided under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms.)

OK I think we give GT Karber a pass on this one.

The other hell site, LinkedIn, says University of Ljubljana but no major / degree listed. maybe he studied with zizek though.

… apparently he’s a second connection. !?

“The Madness of the Crowds”.

I like that there’s a Gamache detective novel with that exact title and smile a little imagining some freshman edge lord accidentally buying it instead of Murray.

Two Drinks With… Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’

copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall

“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy…and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”

who in hell is Joe Allen.

I don’t think brian johnson’ll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon

Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.”

who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That’s a depressing thought.

Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”

Titled his book after FFX bosses ????

Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it.

They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul.

Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won.

interesting

At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity.

acid trip, or wrong kind of anime

Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject.

This guy needs a QAA bio, he’s been baking.