I got involved in social media for politics starting in 2008. Things were "as bad as it gets" toxic in terms of 4chan cretins by 2010 and by 2012 there were obvious signs of nation state activity. Now, eighteen years after I started, I've got a precedent setting 1st Amendment case with my name on it, I live in this weird little protective program California offers, since one of my codefendants was murdered, and that case remains unsolved. If you Google "Rauhauser vs. McGibney" you'll find an endless rabbit hole excavated by clever hackers & lawyers vs. judicial corruption in Texas. I'm easily reached online if you'd like to see the affidavit from an FBI agent about McGibney being an informant. And this all flowed entirely from Twitter slap fights.

These days I've got a Twitter account again, briefly, because I want just one phone call with 420chan founder Aubrey Cottle, now that he's out of prison for the hit he did on the Texas GOP back in 2021. It's just NealR in hex, come on Kirt, gimme a ring :-)

And once that call is done I go back to the ONLY place I engage online - Reddit. I do get the occasional precocious windowlicker every now and then, but mostly it's got health related information, and a good supply of cat photos.

"Huge douchey tech giant adopts softer tone on data centers as politics shift even just slightly back towards more humanism. Would still willing murder hundreds of thousands of people if it made their quarterly earnings reports look better." This is literally one of a handful of companies that are so untrustworthy that they make digital sovereignty an issue for every other country on the planet. Don't trust them. They don't deserve it. Don't fall for the new dialog either.

(Imagine "Mobster Lilt" since I can't tag it as such) "My, what a nice school network you have there. It would be a SHAME if anything were to happen to it..." -- It's a classic case of "we're not gonna play nice if you don't play our way" and Google should be kicked to the curb. It's a totally artificial requirement and they should be ashamed. Their search has sucked for years now anyway. I guess they should give up all of those government contracts while they're at it as well....

"Yawn!" That's my comment. And the price tag makes it a hard "no" real quick.

Seriously, he's not wrong. The internet of today is NOT what we thought we were building 30 years ago, and most of the big tech companies make me want to wretch.

If you ask a bare LLM to do stuff you'll get a mess. I run Claude code with a multipart harness that compels the model to treat the code as the mathematical thing it is, not human prose. LSP Enforcement Kit keeps low capability tools like grep out of the mix, Abstract Syntax Tree things handle the code as its meant to be understood, so that's CodeSight, OptiVault, Serena. About a year ago I gave Antigravity the boot after their awful 2.0 release and went back to JetBrains IDEs, which now offer code structure wise MCP services. Code review with the Ponytail skill chases away LLM excesses, and there's a smattering of other stuff like that in the mix. And then you hunt for whatever additional guardrails you can get the LLM to apply systemically.

I've evolved my own higher level project methods and they're comparable in a lot of ways to what Matt Pocock offers, but his stuff is more structured, more carefully considered, and I have to work with others now, after a long time solo. I'm taking his stuff, implementing a Kanban/wiki system, Gitlab CE, and NanoClaw for anyone who wants agents. I expect quite the slog between now and New Years, but in 2027 we're gonna stop trudging and start gliding over the landscape.

Honestly I don't care if you choose to view Elizabeth Holmes as a naive idiot or as a brutally efficient sociopath. Either way, she's dangerous. And my biggest fear is that she'll do it again. Unless one of her former investors goes full Joe Pesci on her for "losing" a couple hundred million bucks. Somehow I just don't feel like her "crime time" antics are over yet.

...and the Hubitat C-7 really isn't that bad. No cloud, no subs, unless you want them. The C-8 looks like it might be leaning a little heavier on the internet access so your mileage may vary. My C-7 is still doing just fine without having to buy the latest thing out there or being forced into an upgrade I don't want.

See also; "Sony Dash" and "Chumby". The Dash didn't even make a credible door stop, before or after Sony chose to shut the Dash servers down, thereby relegating all Dash's to the status of e-waste. Don't bother. Same junk, different vendor.

One of the first uses "AI for the masses" was put to was generating non-consensual sexual imagery (oh, FFS, lets just call it porn already), ripping off artists, authors, musicians, and coders in a massive way, and then then, of course, there's the attempted "addiction loop" where they're trying to get everyone to rely on the technology even more than alcohol, tobacco, and hard drugs like heroin. It is "Effective Altruism" at it's worst, saying, "it's okay if we kill millions of people in the process because just look at all of the shareholder value we can create." You want some credibility, Sam Bankma...er-Altman? Disavow all of the supposed wealth that comes with your company being successful. Then take personal responsibility for any deaths that happen on your watch. If your fancy auto-correct happens to start a war is it okay to start a war against you? These are questions no one wants to answer. They just want us to stay dumb and quiet and in-the-dark enough so that they can blaze past Mark Zuckerberg on "The World's Most Important Douche Bag" list THEN they'll worry about the implications of what they've done. ...Maybe.

They are positioning AI as the nuclear weapons of the 21st century, angling for a nationalization as a strategic weapon when the bottom drops out of it.

The AI bubble bursting will wreck the economy far harder than the Dotcom bubble did. And the dynamic is OBVIOUS. This is not an "if" problem, it's a "when" problem.

If AI produces a maximal result along the lines of what the frontier labs suggest, it'll eat fifty million jobs, which will wreck the economy far harder, and for far longer.

The constant chatter about AI breakout is half legitimate concern and half positioning to nationalize it, shielding the circular dealing crew from consequences.

This will not be Skynet; as a society we are far too primed to envision events that can be told in a single two hour action adventure with a clear, satisfying ending. When the historians get to this they will note the breakout happened 2025 - 2027 -- because that will be the time where human network threats enhanced by AI will starting further enhancing AI.

There are no "sides" to this, it'll be like the African savanna - lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, servals & caracals, clear down to my personal favorite, the black backed jackal. A network of carnivores of various sizes pursue networks of herbivores. Nation states, corporations, non-state actors, activist groups, talented individuals; all are making use of AI in conflicts already.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle, the open models are only a little behind the frontier, and things are going to keep happening no matter what bellicose policy pronouncements come from an increasingly irrelevant Washington, D.C.

I'll be riding the Claude subsidy until it ends, then hopefully have acquired a potent professional GPU or unified memory setup of my own. Won't be nearly as quick, but it'll keep me moving.

Now scale that thinking up by whatever percentage of eight billion people have technical capabilities. That's the future.

The AI industry has blown a spectacular bubble via circular dealing - Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, etc are all doing monopoly money deals. Nvidia "sells" some GPUs, then "invests" the proceeds back into OpenAI, nothing got done, no money changed hands, but their stock values zoom. This looks exactly like the Dotcom bubble in the late 1990s and such things always implode - the market doesn't just correct, it panics, it liquidates, nobody can tell what's real, so everything is for sale at pennies on the dollar.

The industry's strategy to not go to prison for this stunt is to make AI equivalent to nuclear weapons. When the bubble begins to burst, the Trump administration will "make a deal", what you see is the beginning of that process. This will work about as well as the attempt to shake down Iran for their oil, but cause and effect are not the Trump administration's strong suit.

For a technology, and now an entire industry, founded on massive IP theft, fraud, and C-Suite thuggery, this story should not be surprise to anyone, especially the part about Sam Altman stealing credit for someone else's work.