Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads.

From Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/apple-agrees-to-pay-95m-delete-private-conversations-siri-recorded/

I'm not sure I'm convinced Apple is really that much better than the other big tech companies when it comes to this kind of thing. Their reputation is better and they do seem to be better about things like on-device encryption, but then stories like this come out.

This year is a perfect square: 2025 = 45². Most of us reading this at time of posting won't be alive next time that happens since 46² = 2116, 91 years from now. This has been bouncing around the internet but for some reason I felt compelled to record it here!

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further

Once you’ve trained your large language model on the entire written output of humanity, where do you go?

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/14/openai-google-anthropic-admit-they-cant-scale-up-their-chatbots-any-further/

So we're going to destroy the environment for AI slop that isn't fit for purpose now and, if you believe the above post, never will be.

Silicon Valley and Wall Street invent collateralized GPU obligations. Surely this will work out fine

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/04/silicon-valley-and-wall-street-invent-collateralized-gpu-obligations-surely-this-will-work-out-fine/

Blackstone, Pimco, Carlyle, and BlackRock have so far lent $11 billion to GPU cloud companies — now apparently called “neoclouds” — such as CoreWeave, Crusoe, and Lambda Labs. The loans are collateralized by the neoclouds’ Nvidia GPUs.

Look ma, new asset bubble!

There is a bug in yarnd that's been around for awhile and is still present in the current version I'm running that lets a person hit a constructed URL like

YOUR_POD/external?nick=lovetocode999&uri=https://socialmphl.com/story19510368/doujin

and see a legitimate-looking page on YOUR_POD, with an HTTP code 200 (success). From that fake page you can even follow an external feed. Try it yourself, replacing "YOUR_POD" with the URL of any yarnd pod you know. Try following the feed.

I think URLs like this should return errors. They should not render HTML, nor produce legitimate-looking pages. This mechanism is ripe for DDoS attacks. My pod gets roughly 70,000 hits per day to URLs like this. Many are porn or other types of content I do not want. At this point, if it's not fixed soon I am going to have to shut down my pod. @prologic please have a look.

Yet another study strongly calling into question the concept of "echo chambers". I've argued it here before and people pushed back, but there is growing evidence that "echo chambers" are a moral panic and not a real phenomenon that we need to worry about. It's time to throw it out and re-think, in my opinion.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81531-x

Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. : youtube

More data contradicting the existence of "echo chambers". As I've argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects' beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

AWS: Cannot Escape IPv4

more than 90% of all AWS service API endpoints do not support IPv6

Sounds like AWS is instituting an IPv4 tax soon.

Keyword: Decentralization - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure

Figured you'd be interested in this @prologic

Release jq 1.7rc1 · jqlang/jq · GitHub

Renewed activity on jq after five years. This RC looks nice!

The hottest 21 days ever recorded on Earth were the last 21 days.

There are climate scientists saying that this summer will be the coolest summer of the rest of our lives. It won't get cooler.

They can say that with confidence because Earth's energy imbalance--the difference between how much energy comes in versus how much is radiated back to space--has been positive since around 2010. Prior to that, the balance would shift negative sometimes, so Earth would radiate a bunch of energy back into space. Not anymore. Earth is an energy sponge now. And net positive incoming energy means temperatures go up.

Climate disaster has been here for awhile, but it's kicking into high gear now. This will not change until we take drastic action.

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

Google can eat shit.

Sam Altman on Twitter: "a new version of moore’s law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months" / Twitter

The more I read from this guy, the more I come to believe he is a gigantic douchecanoe. What a profoundly stupid thing to say.

GitHub and OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot lawsuit • The Register

Lawsuits alleging GitHub Copilot breached licenses can move forward. Will be interesting to see how these cases are decided.

This is a fucked up detail:

The judge meanwhile rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs should not be allowed to continue their claim pseudonymously based on death threats sent to the plaintiffs' counsel.

Who is sending death threats to the lawyers of people trying to sue GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI, and why? Something's fishy there.

Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions

40% of code produced by GitHub Copilot has at least one well-known security vulnerability, in the test reported in this paper.

"Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow"

"The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends"

"It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy"

Yes.

On Understanding Power and Technology

This guy is just such an idiot lol.

• There's no such mass migration to "the south". Tons of people are leaving Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and New Mexico for instance. I don't know enough about the states with net influxes like Texas and Florida but I suspect they have policies that make it attractive for people to move there
• Not everybody is able to take account of long-term trends when they make housing decisions. There are financial reasons, family reasons, educational reasons, etc that impact such decisions
• But of course, most laughably, cheap energy is fast becoming a thing of the past, and so the problem isn't "solved" by cheap energy, it's just kicked down the road. And ffs, cheap energy is literally causing the very heating that he pretends air conditioning will "solve"--like "solving" your drinking problem by staying drunk all the time

This oversimplification to drive some kind of political point is so embarrassing coming from someone who pretends to be a university professor. It sounds like a teenage doofus from a 1980s movie talking. He well knows all these things, but he decides to present these views anyway.

According to the RedMonk programming language rankings from Jan 2023, Go and Scala are tied at 14th place 😏

1 JavaScript 2 Python 3 Java 4 PHP 5 C# 6 CSS 7 TypeScript 7 C++ 9 Ruby 10 C 11 Swift 12 Shell 12 R 14 Go 14 Scala 16 Objective-C 17 Kotlin 18 PowerShell 19 Rust 19 Dart

Sam Wight :verified:: "Fucking Christ the @protocol i…" - Urbanists.Social

Incredible critique of the protocol Bluesky is creating. It sounds like s shitshow.

The weather all of a sudden went from chilly and wet to warm and pleasant. It's before 8am and it's already 15°C and sunny.

BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization

I say “ostensibly decentralized”, because BlueSky’s (henceforth referred to as “BS” here) decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.

I don't know why anyone would want to use this crap. It's the same old same old and it'll end up the same old way.

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of "If you're not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you're going to be left behind."

Two things about that:

1. No you're not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you're already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they've been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the "AI" that they're forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don't fall for it. It's far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way--most of these "AI" tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that'll catch up with them.

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.