skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Pi: The minimal agent within OpenClaw in ~tech
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Comment on French company stops $365m migrant tracking contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Paris-headquartered Capgemini was acting as the lead contractor in a new programme to covertly surveil and photograph undocumented migrants across the US.
However, the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis amid the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown have put intense scrutiny on the role of ICE’s international contractors.
In December, the federal agency quietly began a US-wide programme to identify and track 1.5 million foreigners on US soil that it outsourced to contractors to help accelerate raids and deportations.
The US arm of Capgemini, one of Europe’s largest consulting and digital services multinationals, signed a two-year deal with ICE last month with a $365m ceiling to take part in the programme.
However, in the face of considerable backlash in France and following an intervention from France’s finance minister, a spokesman for Capgemini announced on Thursday that the contract is “not currently being fulfilled”.
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Capgemini’s contract was for part of what ICE calls “skip tracing services”, an initiative to create a force of non-government monitors to track down foreign nationals, “for enforcement and removal operations”.
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Two Native American-owned companies in Wisconsin and Kansas cancelled contracts with $38m (£28m) and $29.9m (£22m), following objections from tribal leaders and citizens.
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French company stops $365m migrant tracking contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
16 votes -
Comment on You are being misled about renewable energy technology in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentOkay, yeah, solar is great. The rapid growth of solar seems pretty well known.Okay, yeah, solar is great. The rapid growth of solar seems pretty well known.
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Comment on Pi: The minimal agent within OpenClaw in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Pi is written by Mario Zechner and unlike Peter, who aims for “sci-fi with a touch of madness,” 1 Mario is very grounded. Despite the differences in approach, both OpenClaw and Pi follow the same idea: LLMs are really good at writing and running code, so embrace this. In some ways I think that’s not an accident because Peter got me and Mario hooked on this idea, and agents last year.
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Pi also is a collection of little components that you can build your own agent on top. That’s how OpenClaw is built, and that’s also how I built my own little Telegram bot and how Mario built his mom. If you want to build your own agent, connected to something, Pi when pointed to itself and mom, will conjure one up for you.
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And in order to understand what’s in Pi, it’s even more important to understand what’s not in Pi, why it’s not in Pi and more importantly: why it won’t be in Pi. The most obvious omission is support for MCP. There is no MCP support in it. While you could build an extension for it, you can also do what OpenClaw does to support MCP which is to use mcporter. mcporter exposes MCP calls via a CLI interface or TypeScript bindings and maybe your agent can do something with it. Or not, I don’t know :)
And this is not a lazy omission. This is from the philosophy of how Pi works. Pi’s entire idea is that if you want the agent to do something that it doesn’t do yet, you don’t go and download an extension or a skill or something like this. You ask the agent to extend itself. It celebrates the idea of code writing and running code.
That’s not to say that you cannot download extensions. It is very much supported. But instead of necessarily encouraging you to download someone else’s extension, you can also point your agent to an already existing extension, say like, build it like the thing you see over there, but make these changes to it that you like.
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So for instance, Pi’s underlying AI SDK is written so that a session can really contain many different messages from many different model providers. It recognizes that the portability of sessions is somewhat limited between model providers and so it doesn’t lean in too much into any model-provider-specific feature set that cannot be transferred to another.
The second is that in addition to the model messages it maintains custom messages in the session files which can be used by extensions to store state or by the system itself to maintain information that either not at all is sent to the AI or only parts of it.
Because this system exists and extension state can also be persisted to disk, it has built-in hot reloading so that the agent can write code, reload, test it and go in a loop until your extension actually is functional. It also ships with documentation and examples that the agent itself can use to extend itself. Even better: sessions in Pi are trees. You can branch and navigate within a session which opens up all kinds of interesting opportunities such as enabling workflows for making a side-quest to fix a broken agent tool without wasting context in the main session. After the tool is fixed, I can rewind the session back to earlier and Pi summarizes what has happened on the other branch.
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I want to highlight some of my extensions to give you an idea of what’s possible. While you can use them unmodified, the whole idea really is that you point your agent to one and remix it to your heart’s content.
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Pi: The minimal agent within OpenClaw
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Comment on Moltbot personal assistant goes viral – and so do your secrets in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI guess it’s like a coding agent, but with a skill installer that’s easier to use? I think skills are a useful standard in principle, but haven’t seen any skills I want to install. I don’t want to...I guess it’s like a coding agent, but with a skill installer that’s easier to use? I think skills are a useful standard in principle, but haven’t seen any skills I want to install. I don’t want to connect anything that doesn’t absolutely have to be connected, like whichever git repos it needs access to. I could set up a cron job but why?
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Comment on Silver plunges 30% in worst day since 1980, gold tumbles as Kevin Warsh pick eases US Federal Reserve independence fear in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI agree that it’s foolish to bet on such things. Saying that things are “priced in” assumes markets are better at predicting the future than they actually are. I think it’s fair to say that...I agree that it’s foolish to bet on such things.
Saying that things are “priced in” assumes markets are better at predicting the future than they actually are. I think it’s fair to say that markets try to anticipate the future, they can be wrong (overshoot or undershoot), and there is often not a clean way to make a bet on some future event. You also need to decide what the market is wrong about, and that’s difficult when you don’t actually know whether the “correct” price is higher or lower.
Also, the “correct” price is going to be based on the probability of an event and markets should move when news makes it certain.
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Comment on You are being misled about renewable energy technology in ~enviro
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Comment on Moltbot personal assistant goes viral – and so do your secrets in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don’t understand the appeal of this project at all. Why connect a chatbot to so many things? But to me it’s like people losing their money gambling or betting on crypto or meme stocks. Often,...I don’t understand the appeal of this project at all. Why connect a chatbot to so many things? But to me it’s like people losing their money gambling or betting on crypto or meme stocks. Often, they sort of knew they were doing something risky. But there is collateral damage. There is an assumption that most people are responsible adults that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
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Comment on Moltbot personal assistant goes viral – and so do your secrets in ~tech
skybrian Link(Since this article was written, they renamed Moltbot to OpenClaw.) From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...](Since this article was written, they renamed Moltbot to OpenClaw.)
From the article:
Moltbot (formerly known as Clawdbot) is an open-source, self-hosted AI agent that operates directly on your local machine. It acts as your 24/7 personal assistant, and easily integrates with popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Slack, enabling it to execute tasks and take actions, going beyond simple conversational interactions.
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Moltbot versatile and automated actions make it an extremely powerful tool whose adoption has continued to grow since its release in November 2025. Its usage went viral on January 24 2026, when the number of daily forks on GitHub went from 50+ to 3000+. The project's star count mirrored this explosive growth: Moltbot gained a record-breaking 17,830 stars in a single day, ultimately crossing 85,000 stars within weeks—the fastest growth trajectory in GitHub history.
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The documentation recommends treating the workspace as private storage and strongly encourages users to save it in private GitHub repositories. One section of the documentation is even dedicated to the risks associated with hardcoded secrets.
However, as might be expected, some people make mistakes and push their workspaces to public repositories - including secrets.
Since November, GitGuardian has detected 181 unique secrets, leaked from repositories with names containing either the clawdbot or moltbot keywords. At the time of writing, 65 secrets were still valid – 30% are Telegram Bot tokens, the easiest solution to interact with Moltbot.
Among these secrets, two caught our attention: a Notion Integration token and a Kubernetes User Certificate. Leaked on January 24, the first one gave access to the entire corporate documentation of a healthcare company. The second, leaked on January 18 gave full privileged access to a Kubernetes cluster of a fintech company, used to host a Moltbot instance. Inside the repository, other credentials were leaked, including for a private Docker images registry. Following these discoveries, we performed responsible disclosures to their owners.
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DockerHub also contains public images containing secrets related to Moltbot. The first leak was detected on January 15, followed by several images every day. Now, 18 are still valid. Here, the types of secrets vary. We find GitHub tokens, AWS IAM keys, and Cloudflare tokens. This provides interesting information about the likely uses of Moltbot for automating cloud infrastructure-related tasks.
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To address this gap, we developed a ggshield skill for Moltbot. Once installed, users can ask their assistant to scan the workspace for leaked credentials:
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Moltbot personal assistant goes viral – and so do your secrets
25 votes -
Comment on AntiRender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the website:From the website:
Upload an architectural render. Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.
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AntiRender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings
31 votes -
Comment on Stargaze: SpaceX’s space situational awareness system in ~space
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ...From the article:
SpaceX has developed a novel Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system, called Stargaze, that significantly enhances the safety and sustainability of satellite operations in low Earth orbit (LEO), and its screening data will be made available to the broader satellite operator community free of charge in the coming weeks.
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Stargaze delivers a several-order-of-magnitude increase in detection capability compared to conventional ground-based systems. Stargaze uses data collected from nearly 30,000 star trackers, each of which makes continuous observations of nearby objects, resulting in approximately 30 million transits detected daily across the fleet.
The system autonomously detects observations of orbiting objects and are then aggregated to generate accurate orbit estimates and predictions of position and velocity for all detected objects in near real-time. These predictions integrate into a space-traffic management platform that identifies potential close approaches between objects in space and generates Conjunction Data Messages (CDMs). To fully realize the utility of such frequent observations, SpaceX developed this system to provide conjunction screening results within minutes, compared to the current industry standard of several hours.
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Stargaze: SpaceX’s space situational awareness system
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Comment on AI chatbots are becoming lifelines for China’s sick and lonely in ~health.mental
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Nearly three years after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and ushered in a global frenzy over large language models, chatbots are weaving themselves into seemingly every part of society in China, the U.S., and beyond. For patients like my mom, who feel they don’t get the time or care they need from their health care systems, these chatbots have become a trusted alternative. AI is being shaped into virtual physicians, mental-health therapists, and robot companions for the elderly. For the sick, the anxious, the isolated, and many other vulnerable people who may lack medical resources and attention, AI’s vast knowledge base, coupled with its affirming and empathetic tone, can make the bots feel like wise and comforting partners. Unlike spouses, children, friends, or neighbors, chatbots are always available. They always respond.
Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and even some doctors are now pitching AI as a salve for overburdened health care systems and a stand-in for absent or exhausted caregivers. Ethicists, clinicians, and researchers are meanwhile warning of the risks in outsourcing care to machines. After all, hallucinations and biases in AI systems are prevalent. Lives could be at stake.
Over the course of months, my mom became increasingly smitten with her new AI doctor. “DeepSeek is more humane,” my mother told me in May. “Doctors are more like machines.”
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China’s health care system is rife with severe inequalities. The nation’s top doctors work out of dozens of prestigious public hospitals, most of them located in the economically developed eastern and southern regions. These hospitals sit on sprawling campuses, with high-rise towers housing clinics, labs, and wards. The largest facilities have thousands of beds. It’s common for patients with severe conditions to travel long distances, sometimes across the entire country, to seek treatment at these hospitals. Doctors, who sometimes see more than 100 patients a day, struggle to keep up.
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My mother’s reliance on DeepSeek grew over the months. Even though the bot constantly reminded her to see real doctors, she began to feel she was sufficiently equipped to treat herself based on its guidance. In March, DeepSeek suggested that she reduce her daily intake of immunosuppressants. She did. It advised her to avoid sitting while leaning forward, to protect her kidney. She sat straighter. Then, it recommended lotus root starch and green tea extract. She bought them both.
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With her consent, I shared excerpts of her conversations with DeepSeek with two U.S.-based nephrologists.
DeepSeek’s answers, according to the doctors, were full of errors. Dr. Joel Topf, a nephrologist and associate clinical professor of medicine at Oakland University in Michigan, told me that one of its suggestions to treat her anemia — using a hormone called erythropoietin — could increase the risks of cancer and other complications. Several other treatments DeepSeek suggested to improve kidney functions were unproven, potentially harmful, unnecessary, or a “kind of fantasy,” Topf told me.
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Dr. Melanie Hoenig, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and nephrologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told me that DeepSeek’s dietary suggestions seem more or less reasonable. But she said DeepSeek had suggested completely wrong blood tests and mixed up my mother’s original diagnosis with another very rare kidney disease.
“It is sort of gibberish, frankly,” Hoenig said. “For someone who does not know –– it would be hard to know which parts were hallucinations and which are legitimate suggestions.”
Researchers have found that chatbots’ competence on medical exams do not necessarily translate into the real world. In exam questions, symptoms are clearly laid out. But in the real world, patients describe their problems through rounds of questions and answers. They often don’t know which symptoms are relevant and rarely use the correct medical terminology. Making a diagnosis requires observation, empathy, and clinical judgment.
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As my mother bonded with DeepSeek, health care providers across China embraced large language models.
Since the release of DeepSeek R1 in January, hundreds of hospitals have incorporated the model into their processes. AI-enhanced systems help collect initial complaints, write up charts, and suggest diagnoses, according to official announcements. Partnering with tech companies, large hospitals use patient data to train their own specialized models. One hospital in Sichuan province introduced “DeepJoint,” a model for orthopaedics that analyzes CT or MRI scans to generate surgical plans. A hospital in Beijing developed “Stone Chat AI,” which answers patients’ questions about urinary tract stones.
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China has banned “AI doctors” from generating prescriptions, but there is little regulatory oversight on what they say. Companies are left to make their own ethical decisions. Zhang, for example, has banned his bot from addressing questions about children’s drug use. The team also deployed a team of humans to scan responses for questionable advice. Zhang said he was overall confident with the bot’s performance. “There’s no correct answer when it comes to medicine,” Zhang said. “It’s all about how much it’s able to help the users.”
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AI chatbots are becoming lifelines for China’s sick and lonely
7 votes -
Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkChina’s new condom tax will prove no effective barrier to country’s declining fertility rate (Mostly for the headline.)China’s new condom tax will prove no effective barrier to country’s declining fertility rate
Once the world’s most populous nation, China is now among the many Asian countries struggling with anemic fertility rates. In an attempt to double the country’s rate of 1.0 children per woman, Beijing is reaching for a new tool: taxes on condoms, birth control pills and other contraceptives.
(Mostly for the headline.)
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Comment on A lot of population numbers are fake in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
The PNG government conducts a census about every ten years. When the PNG government provided its 2022 estimate, the previous census had been done in 2011. But that census was a disaster, and the PNG government didn’t consider its own findings credible. So the PNG government took the 2000 census, which found that the country had 5.5 million people, and worked off of that one. So the 2022 population estimate was an extrapolation from the 2000 census, and the number that the PNG government arrived at was 9.4 million.
But this, even the PNG government would admit, was a hazy guess.
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Late in 2022, word leaked of a report that the UN had commissioned. The report found that PNG’s population was not 9.4 million people, as the government maintained, but closer to 17 million people—roughly double the official number. Researchers had used satellite imagery and household surveys to find that the population in rural areas had been dramatically undercounted.
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Like PNG, Nigeria is supposed to conduct a census every 10 years. But in Nigeria, the census is a politically fraught thing. Nigeria is not a natural polity, and its ongoing unity as a single country is fragile. And so Nigerian elites expend enormous effort to ensure that Nigeria remains one country. They have two important tools at their disposal. The first is the relative representation of different regions in the Nigerian state. And the second is the distribution of Nigeria’s vast oil revenues. Both of these—how many seats a state is given in the Nigerian parliament, and how large a share of oil revenues it receives—are determined by its share of the population.
So local elites have a strong incentive to exaggerate the number of people in their region, in order to secure more oil revenue, while national elites have a strong incentive to balance populations across states in order to maintain the precarious balance of power between different regions. And so the overwhelming bias in Nigerian population counts is toward extremely blatant fraud.
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So the Nigerian government’s figure of 240 million people is, as is the case in Papua New Guinea, an extrapolation from a long-ago census figure. Is it credible? Very few people think so. Even the head of Nigeria’s population commission doesn’t believe that the 2006 census was trustworthy, and indeed said that “no census has been credible in Nigeria since 1816.” (Nigeria’s president fired him shortly thereafter.) There are plenty of reasons to think that Nigeria’s population might be overstated. It would explain, for instance, why in so many ways there appear to be tens of millions of missing Nigerians: why so few Nigerians have registered for national identification numbers, or why Nigerian voter turnout is so much lower than voter turnout in nearby African nations (typically in the 20s or low 30s, compared to the 50s or 60s for Ghana, Cameroon, or Burkina Faso), or why SIM card registration is so low, or why Nigerian fertility rates have apparently been dropping so much faster than demographers expected.
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Nigeria is not the only poor country with an extremely patchy history of censuses. Indeed we find that countless poor nations with weak states have only the vaguest idea how many people they govern. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which by most estimates has the fourth-largest population in Africa, has not conducted a census since 1984. Neither South Sudan nor Eritrea, two of the newest states in Africa (one created in 2011 and the other in 1991), has conducted a census in their entire history as independent states. Afghanistan has not had one since 1979; Chad since 1991; Somalia since 1975.
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And when we do have ground-truth data, we tend to find that satellite-based data doesn’t perform much better. Last year, three Finnish scientists published a study in Nature looking at satellite-based population estimates for rural areas that were cleared for the construction of dams. This was a useful test for the satellite data, because in resettling the people of those areas local officials were required to count the local population in a careful way (since resettlement counts determine compensation payments), and those counts could be compared to the satellite estimates. And again and again, the Finnish scientists found that the satellite data badly undercounted the number of people who lived in these areas. The European Commission’s GSH-POP satellite tool undercounted populations by 84 percent; WorldPop, the best performer, still underestimated rural populations by 53 percent. The pattern held worldwide, with particularly large discrepancies in China, Brazil, Australia, Poland, and Colombia. Nor is it just rural areas being resettled: WorldPop and Meta estimated slums in Nigeria and Kenya to be a third of their actual size.
Yes, it’s certainly possible. This is why I run coding agents in virtual machines that don’t have access to anything they don’t need.