Interesting links, noteworthy journalism and other miscellanea from around the web.
Recently, Gary’s buddies requested he not mention Palantir on their nights out together so as to not tank the whole group’s chances of getting laid.
Why No One Wants to Date Tech Broswired.comOnce seen as nerdy but harmless innovators, men in tech are now widely regarded as red-pilled Elon Musk wannabes. It’s made getting laid a whole lot harder.Young kids not able to use social media have, as critics warned us, been pushed to the darkest extremes of the internet: The comment section of an NPR podcast.
(The episode is here.)
Gordon Brown's reputation as an "elder statesman" of the Labour Party obscures the obvious fact he is very much in-touch with today's problems. His ideas are as progressive and modern as anything we're hearing from western leaders today. (Besides, he's almost five years younger than Trump.)
What if we just stopped?
What if we stopped plugging our selves into the machines, stopped performing (wittingly and unwittingly) for the algorithm, stopped letting bots bait us, stopped all of it and figured out new ways—our ways—to do things again.
Because there has to be a better way of connecting and sharing and existing together, a way that isn't locked into the exploitative doom loops and psychic death of what we currently have. A way that's built around humans again, not around algorithms. A way that values connection instead of confrontation.
What If We Just Stopped? | dansinker.comdansinker.comOur analysis, using Pangram, finds that one in ten of the words spoken in Britain’s parliamentary debates are drafted by ai (see upper chart 1). That share is rising, from near-zero in 2024. Most mps are less willing to fess up. The most common response of Parliament’s most prolific ai users was surprise and denial. One mp, a quarter of whose speeches appear to be ai-written, denied using the technology at work. He added that he and his parliamentary assistant “do have a bit of a running joke, though, that his writing style often uses some of the ai-generated tropes”.
AI-written speeches are taking over politicseconomist.comBritish MPs are avid users. But they have nothing on Australians or CanadiansInside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.
In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.
Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations.
A Palantir spokesperson said that the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there’s no evidence that its software was at fault in the Minab strike.
Two people familiar with the firm’s Pentagon contracts said the government retains primary responsibility for the quality of the information that’s fed into Maven. But they said it’s not uncommon for personnel who use tools such as Maven to develop operational understandings that differ from contractual terms.
After the Minab strike, Palantir built new capabilities into Maven that “re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed,” according to a person familiar with the matter. That work has already caught some anomalies, the person said.
Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian Schoolbloomberg.comPentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 children in Minab.A war correspondent for The New York Times named Samuel Wilkeson Jr. trudged through the violated Pennsylvania landscape on a solitary quest. The weary journalist was searching for one particular Union soldier who was said to have had his leg blown off. His teenage son.
At Gettysburg, a Reporter Captured a Nation’s Loss, and His Ownnytimes.comSamuel Wilkeson Jr. filed a report for The Times from the battlefield. Then he went looking for a Union officer, his son.It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say | CNN Politicscnn.comThe episode shows the risks of using this new, relatively poorly understood technology in the middle of the Iran warIf you have a desk at Anthropic, and you are analyzing the same data as Anthropic employees, and you have the same skillset as Anthropic employees, and you are paid 1/5th what Anthropic employees are paid, then you will eventually apply for a job at Anthropic. Third-party, independent evaluators will either become a revolving door to the industry, or else they’ll be utterly outmatched.
Who Should Pace the Frontier? Not Dario Amodeitechpolicy.pressWe should take Dario Amodei’s writing just seriously enough to stop entrusting him with so much power, writes Dave Karpf.For two years, we’ve held our tongue. We don’t know whether Andreessen has simply misremembered our discussion or purposely misrepresented it. But as the AI policy debate once again centers on questions of corporate power and government oversight, it’s time to set the record straight.
Opinion | What Really Happened at the White House Lunch That Marc Andreessen Says Sent Him to Trumppolitico.comSetting the record straight about the venture capitalist’s meeting with us in the Biden White House.The mod installs 235 Flock cameras around the fictional Los Santos, a riff on the real-life city of Los Angeles. Players can smash and shoot down the cameras and get paid $600 for each one they destroy, which Kolman priced based on a teardown of a Flock Falcon Flex Camera by the Iowa-based civil liberties group Eyes Off of Cedar Rapids. The in-game cameras log every time a player destroys and drives by one, and players can render a photo album of their interactions.
You Can Now Destroy Flock Cameras for Cash in GTA Vwired.comA new GTA mod lets you smash and shoot Flock’s automatic license plate readers around the fictional Los Santos.A new big player in Washington D.C journalism, capitalizing on the Post's Bezos-driven brain drain:
We launched two years ago as NOTUS, a news site focused on national politics and policy. But as we watched others pull back on Washington coverage, we knew our hometown deserved better. So we invested — more than doubling the size of our newsroom in just six months.
Welcome to The Washington Sunwashingtonsun.com“Chicken Shop Date” is among a slew of digital-first, creator-led shows that have become such powerful cultural tent poles that they are now folded into a celebrity’s overall promotional press circuit that once included only radio, television and magazine interviews.
Amelia Dimoldenberg Closes ‘Chicken Shop Date’nytimes.comThe popular online blind date show, set at a fried chicken shop in London, became a celebrity magnet in recent months.