Putting shit in your food is OK as long as it is only a little bit of shit and you can't immediately taste it.

The US narrowly avoided boarding a Chinese ship based on an “entirely false” US intelligence report generated with the help of AI tools, according to a CNN report.

That erroneous intelligence, submitted by a US Special Operations Command analyst, suggested the Chinese ship was transporting nuclear arms program components through the Middle East, according to “four sources familiar with the episode” cited by CNN. The US military was preparing to intercept and board the ship, with air support, before officials discovered a chatbot used in generating the report had “inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying.”

One source told CNN the AI-powered fiasco “almost started a war.”

This is such a lame timeline, like god damn this is so stupid I can barely believe it is true.

No to a full moratorium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlqRKNkXVrg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260918-scottish-parliament-passes-ai-data-centre-pause - podcast

time: 3 min 50 sec

Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

ughhhhh

Keep the home fires from burning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ZzwvnNi2U&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260917-ai-data-centre-fires-overwhelm-emergency-responders - podcast

time: 3 min 44 sec

Not a Ponzi scheme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfJ1gdMm17E&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260915-jensen-claims-100-returns-on-nvidias-circular-financing - podcast

time: 7 min 15 sec

ads for people who block ads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0PsTnLVL0I&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260916-chatgpt-ads-media-agencies-are-underwhelmed - podcast

time: 4 min 50 sec

"Hype hype hype fomo fomo hype fearmongering hype fearmongering hype fomo fomo fomo fearmongering..."

edit Wait, these secret communists AREN'T THEY!??? See only anti-americans are against AI!!!!!!!!

I think it's up Sep 14 to Sep 30

Where the real economic opportunity in AI rests is with all of the news organization daily home pages from this time period that are easily turned into hyperbolic ad-libs retroactively by removing the word "AI" and letting people replace it with something funny like "Sporks".

It is like selling shovels in a gold rush, same idea.

The leopards have been punished for eating faces with paid leave and when they are brought back to supervise people with tasty faces they will take the consequences of their actions FAR more seriously, we guarantee you!

We have taken immediate steps to condescend victims for having tasty faces, especially if they are children and will continue to do so as our PR campaign progresses over the next couple of months.

We will also, starting now, only allow leopards in schools, daycares, pediatric facilities and homes so that a child is not attacked by a leopard in a tragedy on the main streets of america EVER again! Additionally to reduce this risk even further for children we are restricting their movements to schools, daycares, pediatric facilities and other locations approved by boards of expert christian business leopards such as Official US Church Franchises.

We realize these measures cannot bring back the loved ones that have been lost by our wrecklessness except through our new Meta fAImly Bots that recreate past family members using proprietary surveillance databases made automatically for all users of Meta products! All of it free through ads delivered in a personalized fashion by life-like fascimiles of dead family members! Never feel alone again while watching ads! Even better to give back to kids and prove our good intentions we are going to provide this service free for kids with no advertising at all!

Where was I... ah yes! --While we understand we cannot change the past consequences of our actions these measures we are taking will hopefully prevent the public from ever blaming us instead of victims again and we are confident through this process we can rebuild the public's trust of leopards.

Thank you, american people, for your fatal patience for our hyperbolic lies and continual, ever faithful, gullibility! Please keep believing everything we tell you because we definitely aren't getting away with the money from the bank robbery while everyone is distracted by a moral panic.

I was very excited about this year's Akademy (KDE's anual conference), until I saw this... Linux desktops won't save us.

A talk in three parts, building towards a vision for a sovereign desktop in 2026 (and a look back).

Loved. In 2003, together with Eva Brucherseifer, Jan's company relevantive ran the first large-scale usability study of the Linux desktop on behalf of decision-makers considering migration. KDE 3.1 on SuSE was tested by 60 office workers with no prior Linux experience; 87% enjoyed working with it, 80% estimated they could reach professional competence within a week. The Linux desktop wasn't a usability disaster — but realising its potential required deliberate configuration, honest naming, and treating migration as a human-resources problem, not a technical one. The findings shaped a decade of OpenUsability work inside KDE. They are, awkwardly, almost entirely still applicable. We'll look at what stuck, what didn't, and why "lovable" — not merely "usable" — is the bar today, and why getting it right cuts the cost and risk of every migration discussion that follows.

AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user — what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity. Plasma is uniquely well-fit for this — Activities, Plasmoids, the existing scripting surface — but a handful of upstream changes (declarative reconciliation, per-widget capabilities, richer Activity metadata) would turn KDE into the first shell that treats AI as infrastructure rather than as a chat box bolted to the side.

Sovereign. Once a user owns their model and their tools, the same question returns at institutional scale. EU institutions, member countries, and a long tail of organisations are openly asking what a credible, non-colonialising desktop stack looks like. No project carries this alone — a sovereign desktop is an ecosystem question. KDE is uniquely positioned as the shell, the integration layer, the experience; but filesharing belongs with Nextcloud, the browser with Firefox, the office suite with .... The last third of the talk is about what KDE's partnership surface could look like — outward, to industry and public administration, and sideways, to the allied open-source projects that already do the rest of the work better than anyone could redo it. Who owns that surface, where it lives, what KDE e.V. would need, what not to build. Sovereignty, from this angle, is just lovability and AI-ownership scaled up to the organisation: the user not owned by a vendor, the institution not owned by a foreign supplier — and the stack not owned by anyone, because the right partners hold the right pieces.

This talk is an invitation — from peple with a long arc inside this community — to take a serious swing at the question the 2003 study posed and never quite resolved: what would it take for KDE to be the desktop people actively choose, not just the one some of us settle for? Attendees will leave with: a concrete proposal (KaDAi) to react to or tear apart, a clear set of asks the project could direct at Plasma maintainers, and the framing for a sovereignty conversation that KDE is uniquely positioned to lead.

And among tech oligarchs, Bezos is all too typical. Peter Thiel, for one, once revealed that his three best ideas for achieving true freedom are “cyberspace”, “outerspace” and “seasteading” (the idea of building new countries on floating oil rigs). In other words, this man, whose enormous wealth affords him access to the most spectacular settings our planet has to offer, actually believes these three cold, dead places are superior to the Earth we have, verdant and alive.

Something similar seems amiss with Elon Musk, a man who seems to look up at the wonders of the night sky and see only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. The venerable novelist Joyce Carol Oates highlighted these apparent limits in the fall of 2025 when she roasted him ruthlessly on his own platform, X.

“So curious,” she wrote, “that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates – scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter [X] may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’”

The observation clearly got under the tech baron’s notoriously thin skin: he called her “a lazy liar” and began posting approvingly about various movies to prove Oates wrong.

we’re not running out of money, no no

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y5SpNLoRsY&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260914-ai-slowdown-the-only-ai-guardrails-you-need-are-trump-apparently - podcast

time: 7 min 55 sec

A Potrait Of A Genius As Young Man

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/12/openai-delays-ipo-sam-altman-ai-safety-concerns

1. I don't know what the article says.

2. Why? I am looking for a job and am broke. $4000??!

3. Congratulations on your fake dog my dude. You're The Man Now Dog!!

4. I will stick to real/meat dogs.

archive link

https://web.archive.org/web/20260912042044/https://tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-agents-email-spam-kaixin-tang/

Coming to PBS Monday 14 September!

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260911-valerie-veatch-ghost-in-the-machine-ai-as-eugenics - podcast

time: 41 min 02 sec

Maybe Gavin Newsom could try helping the quality of life of his constituents rather than just punish them in a moral panic.

The package of new legislation is not without critics. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), a non-profit focused on digital privacy and free speech, argues that AB 1709 is a “functional ban on social media use” for users under 16.

“California should be passing laws to ensure that technology really works for people of all ages, not enacting social media bans that cut young people off from digital lifelines, communities and speech,” Rindala Alajaji, the EFF associate director of state affairs, said in a statement.

“Denying minors access to digital forums – or stripping out basic tools needed to navigate them – is not going to help make young people safer or healthier in the AI age.”

to keep you talking about Skynet — not the data centre down the road

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3IoTZNN6iM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260910-jacob-coxon-how-to-run-an-ai-doomsday-media-campaign - podcast

time: 6 min 20 sec

Microsoft literally titled the blog post ‘Vibe Gaming’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIsARMEsZg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260909-microsoft-vibe-gaming-an-ai-to-play-your-games-for-you - podcast

time: 5 min 32 sec