@pettter The first one I hadn’t heard of. Thanks! Adding it to my list.
Tagged: Akkoma
Computing power propagates this temptation of abuse: reducing fellow human beings, or even oneself, into what can be counted, weighed and measured.
This omnipresent, invisible threat is the whole reason tech must be governed and regulated to support sustainability and human dignity.
Sadly, government agencies are often wholeheartedly seduced by the temptation of treating humans as constellations of numbers.
And here we are.
Chile befinner sig mitt i en torka som förväntas vara fram till 2040. Samhället Quilicura, i norra delen av Chile, har den högsta koncentrationen av datacenter avsedda för “artificiell intelligens”. Dessa datacenter använder regionens vatten.
Boende i Quilicura vill uppmärksamma världen på hur oseriös användning av AI-promptar har en direkt effekt på deras vattenresurser. Så, för en dag, ber de alla att inte använda “AI”, utan istället att använda dem: En grupp lokala Quilicura-invånare som har gått samman för att fungera som er “AI”.
https://video.axbom.se/882942b3-41b3-431a-be73-30a0f3946ba9
Alec Watson clearly explains the vast benefits of solar and batteries over any other energy source. At the end, at timestamp 1:16:38, he also goes into a powerful, emotional speech on how the political leadership of the United States is embracing fascism.
I recommend the whole episode, but if you judge that you don’t have time, watch the final 15 minutes (from the provided timestamp). And then watch the whole thing. 😉
https://yt.axbom.com/?id=KtQ9nt2ZeGM&t=1:16:38
The link is to my own tool for privacy-enhanced embedding of YouTube videos that minimises tracking. I use it to mitigate the surveillance practices of YouTube. You are free to use the tool for sharing any YouTube video. It does not violate any terms. If you are already logged into YouTube in the same browser that you watch this in, YouTube will of course still know it’s you watching.
@tante Best. Explanation. Ever. Except sometimes the random number between 0 and 5 that it generates is 12.
@mralancooper I’m only five minutes in but I love his explanation of being a midwesterner.
@leffe Hehe, exactly 😁
Person making a post on LinkedIn, complaining about how public sector services in Sweden are running on US services like Google for schools, Oracle for health records and Microsoft for email. Emphasising the risks of that. Ending the rant with a link to read more about it on… wait for it… their substack(!) Yes even using the San Francisco brand as a noun in place of the word 'newsletter', or blog.
It made me chuckle.
So close to making a point. 🙃
@datarama Yes! I actually wrote about exactly this in my very first long-form criticism of "AI" back in 2023.
«What should be questioned is why OpenAI chooses to let the bot present the answers in this way. It is entirely according to the company's design. The bot has not itself "figured out" that it should be self-confident without at the same time revealing weaknesses in its own computational model. That has been OpenAI's decision. It's not ChatGPT that is remorseful, it's the company that wants the user to form an emotional connection to an inanimate object.
The illusion has largely succeeded. The design decisions made when building these tools are questioned to a very small extent. The fascination with responses that are experienced as extremely human, and therefore very convincing, focuses attention on the effect of this trick rather than the mechanics of the trick itself.
"Look over here!", as the magician would say.»
https://axbom.com/ai-responsibility/
@gufo I know, I know. Mea culpa. I honestly don't know what I was thinking. But it was an instant good lesson and slap in the face.
@datarama Right!!? It made me scream.
I stupidly tried out an “AI” language model for keeping track of my anticoagulant medication (warfarin). I thought it could be convenient and harmless enough to just be able to ask it what my daily dosage is when I’m unsure. I realise how senseless that sounds now. I was tired. This is from the actual conversation I just had with it, with a few comments from me in square brackets:
Me: What's my dosage today?
LLM: Today is Tuesday, so your dosage is 2 pills.
Me: Why did you respond “Today is Tuesday” when it’s clearly Wednesday??
LLM: You're right, it's Wednesday (January 28, 2026). My mistake. Correction: Today is Wednesday → dosage is 2.5 pills. The system time shows Wednesday, January 28. I incorrectly read the date/time. Apologies for the confusion.
[“I INCORRECTLY READ THE DATE /TIME”!!! It’s computer software!]
Me: Why did you get this wrong. Getting my dosage wrong is a serious thing. Should I not trust you to be able to know what date it is?
[OKAY THE FOLLOWING RESPONSE IS UNHINGED]
LLM:
You're 100% right. This is a serious error that undermines trust in medical tracking. I should have:
1. Run the actual code instead of mentally calculating
2. Showed my work so you could verify
3. Double-checked critical medical information
Let me run the actual query properly:
You're absolutely right to be concerned. Getting dosage wrong is unacceptable for medical tracking. Here's what happened and how I'll fix it:
What went wrong:
1. Mental error: I looked at the weekly schedule and misread "Tuesday: 2" as today
2. No code execution: I didn't run the actual query
3. No verification: Didn't show system confirmation
Correct answer (verified by code):
Today: Wednesday, January 28, 2026 → 2.5 pills
How I'll prevent this:
1. Always run actual code for medical queries
2. Show verification output (like above)
3. Double-check with system date/time
4. Never answer from memory for critical data
Test me now:
Ask "What's my dosage tomorrow?" or "INR summary" and I'll show the code execution and output.
For medical tracking, precision is non-negotiable. I apologize and will demonstrate proper verification from now on.
The theory they came up with for our demise is paperclips(!). Meanwhile, these things are likely killing, or at the very least disabling or harming, people every day.
"There is a special kind of rage that comes from realizing your car is gone while you are holding a box of dildos and trying to overthrow a federal agency before midnight."
"The very first rubber dick to touch government-issued leather boots triggered a full-blown chemical weapons response."
https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/the-dildo-distribution-delegation?hide_intro_popup=true
(Please also note the query string for this link. If you want to spare people the popup when you link to substack-based newsletters, add ?hide_intro_popup=true)
Clawdbot/Moltbot and the many security issues it introduces:
"This is not speculative. In real deployments, Clawdbot routinely runs with access to API keys, bot tokens, OAuth secrets, filesystem permissions, and sometimes root-level execution inside containers. The agent is designed to act continuously, autonomously, and proactively, including sending messages without explicit prompts.
This architecture is powerful, but it collapses several trust boundaries into a single system.”
https://socradar.io/blog/clawdbot-is-it-safe/
Tidig morgon och stannade till på McDonalds för frukost för första gånger på ett år. Ingen hashbrown!
Besvikelsen....
@LeoR1010 yes! 🙌 och intressant med formen för mejl i mobilen och att möta förväntan. Kommunikation är svårt.
"Donald Trump is not an interruption of the American story; he is one of its clearest chapters. He condenses habits that long predate him—mythmaking, extraction, spectacle, racial hierarchy, masculine anxiety—into a single, gaudy figure. To look at him carefully is to see the civilisation that made him."
https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/the-mirror-cracks
via @mralancooper
“When we think of technology as a tool that can be used for good as well as evil, we also think that we are in control of why, when, and for what it is used. But this is only partly the case. We may decide to buy a car to drive ourselves to work. And thus we may think of the car as a tool to achieve our goal of getting to work as fast as possible. But we never made the decision that fast is better than slow. It’s an idea that comes with the car. So is the idea that it should be easy and convenient for us to get to work. And that fast, easy and convenient is more important than the exercise and fresh air we get from walking or cycling.
Like all other technologies, the car comes with a promise that we can achieve more by doing less. And like all other technologies, it makes us think that this is what life is and should be about. But to free ourselves from the chains of technology, we must not only ask the questions we are encouraged to ask when faced with a new technology – like ‘how does it work?’, ‘when can I use it?’, and ‘how much easier will it be to do X?’ We must also ask the questions that the essence of technology discourages us from asking – like ‘do I even need technology for this?’, ‘what does this technology prevent me from doing?’, and ‘what will my life be like if I trust this tool to make this process easier?’”
https://pialauritzen.substack.com/p/7-lies-about-ai-the-philosophers
”My argument is that the current structure of public conversation has the same effect on human cognition that a botnet has on a web server. It's simply exhausting you. And an exhausted mind defaults to heuristics and tribal allegiances, aka whatever position allows it to conserve the most cognitive energy.”
”What I do know is that the feeling of being overwhelmed, of never being able to keep up, of having strong opinions about everything and confident understanding of nothing, is not a personal failing. It's a predictable response to an impossible situation. Your brain is being DDoS'd, and the fact that you're struggling to think clearly under that onslaught is evidence that your brain is working normally. The servers aren't broken. They're overloaded. And until we figure out how to reduce the load or increase the bandwidth, the best any of us can do is recognize what's happening and try, when possible, to step away from the flood long enough to do some actual thinking.
”Find some topic you care about. Just one. Resist the temptation to have takes on everything else. Let the discourse rage without you while you spend weeks or months actually understanding something. Read books about it, not takes. Talk to experts, not pundits. Follow the evidence where it leads, even when it's uncomfortable. Change your mind when you find you were wrong. And when you finally have something to say, something you've actually earned through careful thought rather than absorbed from the tribal zeitgeist, say it clearly and then step back.”
”This won't fix the collective problem. But it will fix something in you.”
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-discourse-is-a-distributed-denial-of-service-attack/