Good blog post '"Who Owns ROM Hacking?" And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With' on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.

The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.

In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors

According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article's summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn't even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn't happening.

Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don't Vibe Code

(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)

Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.

The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.

The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.

So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto...

Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow

"A type III super-civilization can harness the energy output of an entire galaxy, and all the inhabitants stare at you like sleep paralysis demons, except for Bob, and we don't want to get into what Bob's deal is"

https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/117475880503916662

Stumbled upon this book today the author is apparently fake as per this article (I did my own search and didn't find anything)

There's a youtube video (edit:podcast) on it that I'll watch later

Is anyone familiar with the website I Can Eat Glass? It was apparently created in the 90s by a Harvard student, who was concerned that people learning foreign languages only learn common phrases (e.g. "Where's the loo?") which makes them stand out as tourists when they speak. If one were to say a truly uncommon phrase, it stands to reason one would be instantly respected as a native. So he set up a website to collect as many translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" as he could.

Surely you are riveted to your screens right now, desperate to learn what this very special brain genius has been up to since then. Ethan Mollick is a professor at a Pennsylvania business school and published "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI" in 2024. Some say he is substacking about the exponential growth of AI capabilities to this day, but critically this book was apparently read by some german teaching influencer.

He in turn published a self-help book for parents of school kids this year, that got put on display in my local library. And of course it has a chapter on AI, so I had to lend it and hate-read a little. And of course he references Mollick and his Co-Intelligence screed, which he apparently absorbed as a base expectation what the future of AI will look like, and this is how I got to learn about one very special brain genius from Harvard.

On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.

So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I'm thinking locksmithing.

Quick Q, from where does the weird term "abliteration" come from? I've seen it used for "jailbroken" GenAI models.