skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on The AI vampire in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Agentic software building is genuinely addictive. The better you get at it, the more you want to use it. It’s simultaneously satisfying, frustrating, and exhilarating. It doles out dopamine and adrenaline shots like they’re on a fire sale.

    [...]

    And that’s where the problem gets into full swing. Because other people are listening!

    [...]

    We’re all setting unrealistic standards for everyone else.

    Maybe me worst of all. I have 40 years of experience, I’ve led large teams, I read fast, and I have essentially unlimited time, energy, and now tokens for experimenting. I am completely unrepresentative of the average developer.

    But I’m still standing up and telling everyone “do it this way!” I even co-wrote a book about it.

    [...]

    I don’t think there’s a damn thing we can do to stop the train. But we can certainly control the culture, since the culture is us. I plan to practice what I preach, and dial my hours back. That’s going to mean saying No to a lot of people who want to chat with me (sorry!), and also dialing back some of my ambitions, even if it means losing some footraces. I don’t care. I will fight the vampire.

    [...]

    If you have joined an AI-native startup, the founders and investors are using the VC system to extract value from you, today, with the glimmer of hope for big returns for you all later.

    Most of these ideas will fail.

    I know this because they are literally telling me their plans like villains at the end of an old movie, since with Gas Town I have mastered the illusion of knowing what I’m doing. Truth is, nobody, least of all me, knows what they’re doing right now. But I look like I do, so everyone is coming to show me their almost uniformly terrible ideas.

    [...]

    Enterprises see the oncoming horde and think, oh jeez, we need to hustle. And they’re not exactly wrong. Which means this lovely dystopian picture is making its way slowly but surely into enterprise, at the big company where you work.

    [...]

    My friends who were grumbling back in 2001 needed some help with this, and I gave it to them. One day I walked up to the whiteboard during a particularly heated grumble-session, and I wrote a ratio on the board: $/hr (dollars divided by hours).

    [...]

    I said to everyone, Amazon pays you a flat salary, no bonuses, and you work a certain number of hours per week. From that, you can calculate that you make a certain number of dollars per hour.

    I told the grumbler group, you can’t control the numerator of this ratio. But you have significant control over the denominator. I pointed at the /hr for dramatic effect.

    [...]

    As for my part, I went ahead and dialed that denominator down, and lived life a bit while I was at Amazon, because fuck extraction.

    [...]

    That old formula is also my proposed solution for the AI Vampire, a quarter century later.

    Someone else might control the numerator. But you control the denominator.

    [...]

    You need to push back. You need to tell your CEO, your boss, your HR, your leadership, about the AI vampire. Point them at this post. Send them to me. I’m their age and can look them in the eye and be like yo. Don’t be a fool.

    [...]

    I regret the unrealistic standards that I’m contributing to setting. I don’t believe most people can work like I’ve been working. I’m not sure how long I can work how I’ve been working.

    I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on US Food and Drug Administration declines to review Moderna's mRNA flu shot in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    Prasad overruled FDA staff to reject Moderna’s flu vaccine application

    Prasad overruled FDA staff to reject Moderna’s flu vaccine application

    Three agency officials familiar with the matter told STAT that the team of career scientists was ready to review Moderna’s application, and that David Kaslow, the head of the vaccine office, wrote a detailed memo explaining why the FDA should embark on the review.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on How The New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere” in ~life.men

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    In July 2025, the Justice Department announced it would not make any additional files public from its investigation into child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The backlash against the decision was swift — and came from some unexpected corners of the internet.

    A chorus of right-wing commentators and influencers openly criticized President Donald Trump and his administration for failing to follow through on their campaign promise to release the federal documents. Political podcasters who had embraced Trump during his reelection campaign were up in arms, with social media figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz publicly pressuring the administration to reverse course.

    The New York Times tracked this growing discontent across the GOP base closely for months, culminating with the near-unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by Congress last November. An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration, according to Zach Seward, editorial director for AI initiatives at the Times. (Seward was once an associate editor at Nieman Lab.)

    [...]

    Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool uses large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize new episodes of dozens of podcasts.

    [...]

    “In order to adequately cover this administration — among many other sources — it seemed crucial to have an eye on influencers, largely conservative young male influencers,” Seward told me. “It turned out there were enough specific requests and enough broad interest [in the newsroom] that it made sense to automate sending that out.”

    Launched a year ago, the Manosphere Report now follows about 80 podcasts hand-selected by reporters at the Times on desks covering politics, public health, and internet culture. That includes right-wing podcasts like The Ben Shapiro Show, Red Scare with “Dimes Square” shock jocks Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, and The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, a successor to Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. It also keeps tabs on Huberman Lab, a podcast hosted by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman that has been criticized for spreading health misinformation. Seward notes the report also includes some liberal-leaning shows, like MeidasTouch, an anti-Trump podcast with a largely male audience.

    When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those summaries and generates a meta-summary with shared talking points and other notable daily trends. The final report is automatically emailed to journalists each morning at 8 a.m. ET. The Times is exploring how to use this workflow to launch similar AI-generated summary reports for other beats.

    [...]

    The Times is not the first newsroom to turn to LLMs to parse through the mountains of audio and video material on the internet that journalists are expected to consume to keep on top of their beats. Local news outlets across the country have been using LLMs to keep tabs on school board and town hall meeting livestreams through email summaries. Last year, my colleague Neel covered “Roganbot,” a tool created by AI consulting lab Verso to generate searchable transcripts of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Among several features, the tool suggests potentially controversial or false statements to fact-check.

    [...]

    Seward said that the Manosphere Report was an outgrowth of one of those existing tools, called Cheatsheet.

    [...]

    As with the Manosphere Report, Cheatsheet is rooted in a philosophy that creating new text and images for publication is not the most effective use case for generative AI in a newsroom like the Times. Rather, Seward sees the technology as a way to amplify the newsroom’s existing investigative power.

    8 votes

  6. Comment on Illness is rampant among children trapped in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s massive jail in Texas in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Amid growing calls from lawmakers and human rights groups to shut down the sprawling Dilley Immigration Processing Center in southern Texas, an analysis shows the number of people incarcerated at the notorious immigration jail for children and families has nearly tripled in recent months.

    Texas lawmakers and attorneys for immigrant families say a growing number of children at the facility are suffering in dangerous and inhumane conditions. People incarcerated at Dilley were quarantined after at least two became sick with measles last week. In another recent case, an 18-month-old girl was hospitalized with a life-threatening lung infection after spending two months in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the migrant jail. The girl was reportedly returned to Dilley after spending 10 days at the hospital and denied prescribed medication, according to a federal lawsuit. She was only freed after lawyers filed an emergency petition demanding her release.

    As the nation’s main large immigration jail designed to hold families — though the Trump administration is racing to build more — families are transferred from across the country to a remote part of Texas as they wait weeks or months to see an immigration judge. Recent federal data show that the average daily population exploded from an average of 500 people a day in October to around 1,330 a day in late January, according to Detention Reports, a new tool that maps data on 237 immigration jails nationwide.

    [...]

    ICE does not release the number of children held in its custody, including at Dilley. However, the facility requires at least one parent be held along with each child. Adult women vastly outnumber adult men in the latest data. Kocher estimates that about 800 children are held there on any given day, and a ProPublica investigation estimates Dilley was holding about 750 families as of early February.

    [...]

    The Dilley facility garnered national attention after the incarceration of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, whose arrest in Minnesota and transfer to Texas became a national symbol of the Trump administration’s brutality. Like other children held in confinement, Ramos reportedly fell ill while detained. The two were released on February 1 after lawmakers and attorneys intervened, with U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issuing an almost poetic yet scathing rebuke of the Trump administration in his ruling freeing the father and son.

    Children held inside Dilley organized protests in solidarity with Liam Conejo Ramos as the case hit the headlines. Immigration attorney Eric Lee posted a viral video in mid-January recording the sound of hundreds of children shouting for freedom from behind the prison walls. Meanwhile, journalists, families incarcerated at Dilley, and their attorneys have reported inedible food, undrinkable water being mixed with baby formula, and medical neglect of children with severe illnesses.

    “Medical professionals have repeatedly documented how any amount of detention has long-term negative consequences for children,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, in an email. “Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community, never behind bars in ICE detention where conditions [are] abysmal and abusive.”

    [...]

    Since Trump returned to office, the daily average number of children incarcerated with adults fighting deportation orders has grown at least sixfold, according to The Marshall Project. That growth is part of a general explosion of the incarceration of immigrants as the Trump administration systemically dismantles legal avenues for bonding out of immigration jail, fights review of removal orders to maximize deportations, and moves to revoke legal status and protections for hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Airspace closure in the Texas border city of El Paso followed spat over drone-related tests and party balloon shoot-down, sources say in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The unexpected but brief airspace closure in the Texas border city of El Paso stemmed from disagreements between the Federal Aviation Administration and Pentagon officials over drone-related tests, multiple sources close to the matter told CBS News.

    The Pentagon had undertaken extensive planning on the use of military technology near Fort Bliss, a military base that abuts the El Paso International Airport, to practice taking down drones.

    Two sources identified the technology as a high-energy laser.

    Meetings were scheduled over safety impacts, but Pentagon officials wanted to test the technology sooner, stating that U.S. Code 130i requirements governing the protection of certain facilities from unmanned aircraft had been met.

    FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford on Tuesday night decided to close the airspace — without alerting White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources said.

    Bedford told officials the airspace restrictions would be in place to ensure safety until issues with the War Department could be resolved.

    [...]

    The critical bulletin issued to pilots and airlines not to fly below 18,000 feet was initially set for 10 days, a duration for a full grounding not used since the 9/11 terror attacks. The FAA notice warned violators risked being shot down.

    Earlier this week, the anti-drone technology was launched near the southern border to shoot down what appeared to be foreign drones. The flying material turned out to be a party balloon, sources said. One balloon was shot down, several sources said.

    [...]

    Sources familiar with the discussions said Pentagon and Department of Transportation officials had been coordinating on the military drone tests for months, and the FAA had been assured that there was no threat to commercial air travel.

    Two airline sources said airline officials were told the decision to halt flights in and out of the El Paso Airport appeared to stem from drone activity and U.S. government efforts to counteract it.

    The airlines were under the impression that the airspace closure was put into place out of an abundance of caution because the FAA could not predict where U.S. government drones might be flying. The drones have been operating outside of their normal flight paths. The airlines were also aware of the apparent impasse between the FAA and Pentagon officials over the issue because the Pentagon has been using Fort Bliss for anti-cartel drone operations without sharing information with the FAA, the sources said

    8 votes

  10. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    My personal link-archiving site is coming along well. I figured out what I’m going to do as an alternative to Tilde’s groups. These are just tags that begin with a tilde. So now I get to define my...

    My personal link-archiving site is coming along well. I figured out what I’m going to do as an alternative to Tilde’s groups. These are just tags that begin with a tilde. So now I get to define my own categories like ~research, ~opinion, and ~dev (software development).

    I also spent some time figuring out how to do auto-tagging. We (the coding agent and I) can define Taggers, which are rules for when to auto-add a tag. In some cases the rules are very simple such as domain name matches, so any link to GitHub gets a ~dev tag. But we’re working on keyword matches using a naive Bayes approach, which should work better for ~health. I have an admin page that does naive-Bayes “training” for a tag, gathering statistics about what words appear in tagged versus untagged Links.

    Pretty soon I’ll be ready to start importing all my old links from Tildes.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on Why computers won’t make themselves smarter - Ted Chiang in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think the article does work in the sense of “it’s not proven and imagining it isn’t the same as proving it.” But such an argument doesn’t provide any constraints on what might happen, and we’re...

    I think the article does work in the sense of “it’s not proven and imagining it isn’t the same as proving it.” But such an argument doesn’t provide any constraints on what might happen, and we’re unlikely to get any. There’s no law of physics we can use to put bounds on what AI might do someday.

  12. Comment on New Bay Area Rapid Transit fare gates generate $10 million annually in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/l6GKo From the article: [...]

    https://archive.is/l6GKo

    From the article:

    BART’s new Plexiglass fare gates generate an estimated $10 million annually for the beleaguered transit agency, and have saved 961 hours in maintenance work, according to staff reports.

    The revenue gains and time savings stem from a years-long effort to modernize the system and clamp down on rampant fare evasion. Officials at BART spent years testing designs for a perfect barrier to protect station areas and platforms from street conditions outside, while effectively forcing people to pay. After discarding concepts for double-decker and shark fin gates, as well as an “Iron Maiden” model with revolving bars that join like interlocking teeth, the agency found success with the current institutional-looking saloon-door stiles.

    Now installed at all 50 stations, these gates are “a symbol of the new BART,” General Manager Bob Powers said. Charts presented in advance of Thursday’s board of directors workshop show that stations in downtown San Francisco benefited the most from “hardened” infrastructure, indicating a reduction of 110 hours in maintenance work at Embarcadero in the last six months. Crews who repair equipment at Daly City reaped 109 hours of saved time, while 75 hours were saved at Balboa Park and 57 at 16th and Mission.

    [...]

    Powers and other leaders are touting their success at a moment when BART needs every win it can get. Faced with a looming deficit of $400 million a year, BART has warned of an all-out nuclear scenario if voters defeat a sales tax measure to bail the rail agency out in November. Without that economic life raft, BART will undergo a death in three phases, management warn.

    Staff at the agency would close ten stations as soon as next January, with another five on the kill list in July. Within two years, BART could activate “Phase 3” a move to shut down service altogether.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on Why Google just issued a rare 100-year bond in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The tech giant on Tuesday issued an extremely rare corporate bond that matures 100 years from now, part of a multibillion-dollar borrowing spree the company is undertaking to fuel its AI ambitions.

    Now, let’s just underline that for a second: Google, a nearly $4 trillion public company with more than $73 billion in free cash flow annually, is turning to debt markets to raise even more money. That’s because even Google’s $126 billion cash on hand starts to look pretty paltry when the company says it plans to double its AI spending this year – to a staggering $185 billion.

    [...]

    Companies don’t typically launch such extremely long-dated bonds because companies don’t tend to last forever. People also don’t tend to live that long or enjoy it much if they do. If you’re a regular investor buying a Google century bond today, you’re not going to be around to see it mature, let alone do much with it. You can’t take it with you, after all.

    [...]

    There is a market for these hundo bonds, but it’s not huge. They really only make sense for high-level institutional investors, like life insurance companies and pension funds that have long-term liabilities to cover.

    So far, at least, it seems the market is more than willing to extend Alphabet some credit. And by some credit, I mean a boatload: The company raised nearly $32 billion in less than 24 hours, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the 100-year bond offering. Alphabet sold British pound- and Swiss franc-denominated debt Tuesday, following a $20 billion debt sale in the US the day before. The 100-year bond was nearly 10 times “oversubscribed,” meaning investor demand far outstripped supply.

    So while the hundo bond is an unusual offering with some ominous historical precedents (particularly in tech), there’s clearly some hunger for it.

    8 votes

  16. Comment on US Food and Drug Administration declines to review Moderna's mRNA flu shot in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The Food and Drug Administration rejected Moderna’s application for its mRNA-based flu vaccine, the drugmaker said Tuesday.

    [...]

    In a release Tuesday, Moderna said the FDA did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with the vaccine. Instead, it said the FDA took issue with the “comparator” in its clinical trial — the vaccine the company used as a benchmark to evaluate its own shot.

    The FDA said the use of the standard flu shot as a comparator “does not reflect the best-available standard of care.” The standard flu shot is FDA-approved.

    However, Moderna said that the agency’s stated reason is “inconsistent” with what regulators had told the company in 2024 and 2025.

    “It should not be controversial to conduct a comprehensive review of a flu vaccine submission that uses an FDA-approved vaccine as a comparator in a study that was discussed and agreed on with CBER prior to starting,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in the release, referring to the FDA’s Centers for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which reviews and approves vaccines, as well as other treatments such as gene therapies.

    Moderna said last year that its mRNA flu shot was 26.6% more effective than the standard flu shot, based on a Phase 3 clinical trial.

    [...]

    Regulators in the European Union, Canada and Australia have accepted Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine application, the company said.

    18 votes

  18. Comment on Why computers won’t make themselves smarter - Ted Chiang in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    This argument seems a bit surprising coming from the author of "Understand," but I suppose it's fair to say that being able to imagine superintelligence isn't enough to justify believing in it. I...

    This argument seems a bit surprising coming from the author of "Understand," but I suppose it's fair to say that being able to imagine superintelligence isn't enough to justify believing in it. I wonder if he's changed his opinion any since 2021?

    9 votes

  19. Comment on Why computers won’t make themselves smarter - Ted Chiang in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/BP606 From the article: [...] [...]

    https://archive.is/BP606

    From the article:

    What might recursive self-improvement look like for human beings? For the sake of convenience, we’ll describe human intelligence in terms of I.Q., not as an endorsement of I.Q. testing but because I.Q. represents the idea that intelligence can be usefully captured by a single number, this idea being one of the assumptions made by proponents of an intelligence explosion. In that case, recursive self-improvement would look like this: Once there’s a person with an I.Q. of, say, 300, one of the problems this person can solve is how to convert a person with an I.Q. of 300 into a person with an I.Q. of 350. And then a person with an I.Q. of 350 will be able to solve the more difficult problem of converting a person with an I.Q. of 350 into a person with an I.Q. of 400. And so forth.

    Do we have any reason to think that this is the way intelligence works? I don’t believe that we do. For example, there are plenty of people who have I.Q.s of 130, and there’s a smaller number of people who have I.Q.s of 160. None of them have been able to increase the intelligence of someone with an I.Q. of 70 to 100, which is implied to be an easier task. None of them can even increase the intelligence of animals, whose intelligence is considered to be too low to be measured by I.Q. tests. If increasing someone’s I.Q. were an activity like solving a set of math puzzles, we ought to see successful examples of it at the low end, where the problems are easier to solve. But we don’t see strong evidence of that happening.

    [...]

    Obviously, none of this proves that an intelligence explosion is impossible. Indeed, I doubt that one could prove such a thing, because such matters probably aren’t within the domain of mathematical proof. This isn’t a question of proving that something is impossible; it’s a question of what constitutes good justification for belief. The critics of Anselm’s ontological argument aren’t trying to prove that there is no God; they’re just saying that Anselm’s argument doesn’t constitute a good reason to believe that God exists. Similarly, a definition of an “ultraintelligent machine” is not sufficient reason to think that we can construct such a device.

    [...]

    The rate of innovation is increasing and will continue to do so even without any machine able to design its successor. Some might call this phenomenon an intelligence explosion, but I think it’s more accurate to call it a technological explosion that includes cognitive technologies along with physical ones. Computer hardware and software are the latest cognitive technologies, and they are powerful aids to innovation, but they can’t generate a technological explosion by themselves. You need people to do that, and the more the better. Giving better hardware and software to one smart individual is helpful, but the real benefits come when everyone has them. Our current technological explosion is a result of billions of people using those cognitive tools.

    6 votes