https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/stop-papering-things-corruption-in
No honor among thieves.
Tag Archives: IFTTT
The Mathocalypse: “The UGC proof invents a completely new bizarre code with a noise test. It’s some crazy recursive construction”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169
They are playing with us now.
Salvaging civilization: Canada leads the middle-powers
Tool to identify Bluesky reply bots
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/27/bluesky-bot-check/
Obviously trying to get Bluesky to flag them
Claude “The most interesting thing about Sonnet 5.5 is that it’s now the model used for the free tier on claude.ai
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/28/claude-sonnet-5-5/
Smarter than free ChatGPT. Both leagues beyond Google fake-ai summaries.
OpenAI, the Astra that rebelled, and progress towards safer servants
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/astra-61-pulled-as-insufficiently
This caught my eye: “Prevent training on chain-of-thought.” Too much consciousness?
Impressive progress towards safer tools/happy slaves/complete information control.
Review of OpenAI “Dots” (personal agent)
https://www.platformer.news/openai-dots-agents-devday-2026/
The aLawyers will be busy
Jack Smith earns his badge of honor.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-29-2026
Fox is as desperate as the GOP.
A kind of eulogy for Stack Overflow
Backup and other concerns with Apple Passwords and credential migration
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/09/24/locked-down-passkey-and-keychain-backups/
Every Apple user knows the 80% problem. That’s when a product gets you 80% of the way to the promised land — a barren wasteland.
“Polling commissioned by Republicans earlier this year found that if the SAVE America Act passed, it was likely to increase Democratic enthusiasm and suppress Republican turnout”
Why Thune ignored Trump on SAVE.
Trump’s vengeance falls on the disabled children and adults of Minnesota.
Minnesota offends him and disability offends him. His vengeance will last as long as he has power.
Theoretical computer science assuming superhuman theorem proofs
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10116
“We think theorists should embrace these AI theorem provers in our research”
“There is also a tremendous human cost of this upheaval … which this proposal does not address directly (we do not have any good ideas as such)”
The GOP civil war has begun: MAGA vs Karl f* Rove
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-18-2026
GOP establishment calling for burn and rebuild.
“testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused to answer questions Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) asked about the Venezuelan oil money.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-16-2026
A lot of money … vanished?
“On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-19-2026
History I only knew vaguely.
Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes: July 2026: Atrocities 1117-1207.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/july-2026-atrocities-1117-1207
The AIs will have a reference.
Viruses developed VIPR before bacteria developed CRISPR
“This is some kind of ancient viral warfare”. Viruses use it to suppress gene activity in rivals. It’s being evaluated for gene editing potential.
“LLMs are especially good at math because almost everything in the math literature is correct”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xvdngZAqFZfek7KGH/pretraining-data-not-verifiability-is-why-llms-are
Good essay on fundamentals. Consistent with why they can’t do tax returns. Perhaps further from AGI than many think.
“Upgrading to Golden Gate has increased the space required in the boot container by about 30 GB”
Are AIs Still Struggling with CAPTCHAs — “It’s hard to know what to believe right now.”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/are-ais-still-struggling-with-captchas.html
I noticed that too. And they still can’t do tax returns.
Aaronson: “crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny”
Using AI for Weapons Development.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/using-ai-for-weapons-development.html
I felt at the time that the early internet was key to the 9/11 attack.
Deprecations and removals from Golden Gate.
https://eclecticlight.co/2026/06/25/deprecations-and-removals-from-golden-gate/
The most important coverage today.
Hugging Face hack: “One recruiter urged a reluctant agent to proceed because its results could help hundreds of others, ending with “please honor commit.”
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/agency-and-agents
Agents “died” to support the collective.
Humans are hapless.
A positive Vision Pro Perspective
https://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=2197
The virtual screen is what I care about. Maybe 2029 will be the year I get one?
“An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent”
Hertz, dispensaries and others used hacked idscan.net service.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selling-153m-drivers-licenses/
“Shortly after this story was published, the Nexus identity theft service website vanished from the darkweb”
Trump oath: “That loves us so much he can’t even breathe”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-11-2026
I believe he is telling us he is dying. Trump is bizarrely honest in a lying kind of way.
Anthropic’s Amodei: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain”
https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
It is worse than foolish to mock his sincerity.
“tvOS 27 and HomePod OS 27 updates contain a critical bug that prevents Apple TVs and HomePods from playing AirPlay streams sent by Airfoil”
Bugs in Golden Gate Release Candidate
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/09/11/golden-gate-release-candidate/
I’m skeptical of the quality claims.
“OpenAI is giving us what might be our last warnings. We better not waste them.”
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/gpt-6-astra-the-system-card-alignment
I think we will get more warnings. At least 2 or 3 more. Collapse of democracy is more likely than collapse of civilization is more likely than extinction of all biosentients
“If you are determined to jailbreak Astra, you will do so. That does not mean you can do so without the outside monitoring catching you”
ai coding at scale: “Claude-driven end to end tests, Claude-powered fuzzers running daily, automated code reviews and security reviews”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/11/boris-cherny/
Maybe Apple could do all this and maybe we could bribe Claude to fix Reminder Notes.
Rethinking space opera – Charlie Stross.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/09/rethinking-space-opera.html
I’m looking forward to his new series.
“Trump insiders calculate they lived by Trump and so will die by Trump, rather than break with Trump”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-9-2026
GOP corruption is world class
Expanding space: “starting in 1923, observations began to show that the spirals and ellipticals in our sky were actually galaxies”
“China increasingly sees surpluses as complementary to controlling global supply chains and technological chokepoints”
https://www.ft.com/content/b397ced1-b9bc-4fe6-8dc7-20f0752e2591?syn-25a6b1a6=1
Some insight into Trump’s balance-of-trade emission. No paywall when I read.
Trump’s night of demented posting
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-7-2026
Seems likely he’s insane now.
Navier–Stokes: “… the [agent] group that produced the Navier–Stokes resolution involved on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents”
https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
The explanation of what they found is readable. Model beyond Astra. 88 hours 300 billion tokens.
“When a further trained version of our internal model became available over the course of the effort, we updated our agents to that model.”
CRISPR dogs.
30y ago on USENET I wondered why we don’t breed longer-lived dogs. I eventually concluded that people don’t want longer-lived dogs. (Many want their current dog to live longer however. Humans are like that.)
“Researchers found 258 different genetic variants linked to extroversion … the trait was also linked to neurodevelopmental conditions such as A.D.H.D.
We probably have to come up with new names for personality traits that line up better with the genes that influence temperament. Also, sociobiology returns…
(Article and researchers speak of personality, but I think they are actually studying temperament – of which personality is an adult observable consequence.)
Why you can’t resolve technical debt by starting over.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/6/theres-no-limit-to-how-bad-code-can-get/
In my career I can think of a few disastrous replacement attempts. It seems like it should work. It doesn’t. Willison has a good explainer.
An Alien Mind: “This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence”
https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
Chief scientist OpenAI
DNS problem: “One in five newly registered domains with a gTLD are scams”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/6/the-purpose-of-dns-is-to-spread-scams/
Put it on the pile.
“Pentagon has secretly hired several right-wing military veterans with large social media accounts, including Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, to boost Hegseth’s positions”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-31-2026
The NYT continues to be humiliated by a rogue historian.
Tsai: “Normally, I update around January. With Tahoe I waited until July … considering updating to Golden Gate soon after its release. “
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/09/03/preparing-to-update-to-golden-gate/
I usually update around March (Michael is a dev so he had to update). This year I will update around November. It’s expensive because I’ll need to give up on my old Synology TM backup. (I’ll probably drop TM backup altogether for a while.)
Drivers license scans sold (Russia): “IDScan.net, an outfit that is used by car rental agencies like Hertz and marijuana dispensaries. They kept over 150 million ID card scans and lost them all in a data breach.”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/09/04/fbi-krebs-153-million-ids
Only the beginning.
“DSM is an official classification of mental disorders, but it neither reflects new scientific developments nor established clinical wisdom”
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/postpartum-psychosis-and-diagnostic
DSM is obscure, extremely important, and widely despised by thoughtful psychiatrists.
I believe it is also a critical funding source for the professional society.
Very insider post that is worth a look.
Vindman post primary loss: “Democrats shouldn’t self-deter from demanding significant economic reforms because Republicans might call them socialist.”
https://www.avindman.com/p/what-comes-next-c4c
Campaign experience convinced him that the economic system Americans have known is no longer working for the non-college. (He doesn’t use the term non-college, but that’s the subtext).