They are positioning AI as the nuclear weapons of the 21st century, angling for a nationalization as a strategic weapon when the bottom drops out of it.

The AI bubble bursting will wreck the economy far harder than the Dotcom bubble did. And the dynamic is OBVIOUS. This is not an "if" problem, it's a "when" problem.

If AI produces a maximal result along the lines of what the frontier labs suggest, it'll eat fifty million jobs, which will wreck the economy far harder, and for far longer.

The constant chatter about AI breakout is half legitimate concern and half positioning to nationalize it, shielding the circular dealing crew from consequences.

This will not be Skynet; as a society we are far too primed to envision events that can be told in a single two hour action adventure with a clear, satisfying ending. When the historians get to this they will note the breakout happened 2025 - 2027 -- because that will be the time where human network threats enhanced by AI will starting further enhancing AI.

There are no "sides" to this, it'll be like the African savanna - lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, servals & caracals, clear down to my personal favorite, the black backed jackal. A network of carnivores of various sizes pursue networks of herbivores. Nation states, corporations, non-state actors, activist groups, talented individuals; all are making use of AI in conflicts already.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle, the open models are only a little behind the frontier, and things are going to keep happening no matter what bellicose policy pronouncements come from an increasingly irrelevant Washington, D.C.

I'll be riding the Claude subsidy until it ends, then hopefully have acquired a potent professional GPU or unified memory setup of my own. Won't be nearly as quick, but it'll keep me moving.

Now scale that thinking up by whatever percentage of eight billion people have technical capabilities. That's the future.

The AI industry has blown a spectacular bubble via circular dealing - Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, etc are all doing monopoly money deals. Nvidia "sells" some GPUs, then "invests" the proceeds back into OpenAI, nothing got done, no money changed hands, but their stock values zoom. This looks exactly like the Dotcom bubble in the late 1990s and such things always implode - the market doesn't just correct, it panics, it liquidates, nobody can tell what's real, so everything is for sale at pennies on the dollar.

The industry's strategy to not go to prison for this stunt is to make AI equivalent to nuclear weapons. When the bubble begins to burst, the Trump administration will "make a deal", what you see is the beginning of that process. This will work about as well as the attempt to shake down Iran for their oil, but cause and effect are not the Trump administration's strong suit.

For a technology, and now an entire industry, founded on massive IP theft, fraud, and C-Suite thuggery, this story should not be surprise to anyone, especially the part about Sam Altman stealing credit for someone else's work.

We, The People, have ample reason to NOT TRUST Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta, and dozens of other companies that put their quarterly profits over people every second of every minute of every hour of every day in this world. I can't imagine why the "Magnificent Seven" AI companies should expect that we would trust them any more that the other huge tech companies. Would you trust Elon Musk at this point? Or Sam Bankma...., er, I mean Sam Altman? Shitty psychotic billionaires hiding behind huge corporate mazes inducing mind-boggling circular cash flows to prop up an entire industry founded by outright Intellectual Property theft is an unspeakably complex problem. Then add in use-cases like Flock cameras and job displacement and you're talking about a lot of anxiety from a LOT of people. You want people to trust huge companies more? Give them the power to put your entire C-Suite in prison for crimes they commit (either randomly or intentionally, because we know that some of this shit is intentional) and make them accountable again, rather than untouchable because corporate attorneys can generally be scum too. For that matter, the corporate attorneys should be held accountable for the work they do for their companies. And crazy, stoopid billionaires making fiscal or political policy has also proven to be a problem. Now couple that with the AI cheer-leading about how you should spend $30K for an AI-powered robot to dig a hole in your back yard rather than just go pick up a shovel and get it done for the cost of a little effort and sweat on your brow and you have a recipe for hating an entire industry. This whole "AI Everything" nonsense has got to stop. Here's were I'm at, Mr. Dipshit-Moji; "I trust an egg salad sandwich out of a vending machine in a men's room in a truck stop on the edge of Phoenix in the middle of August more than I trust you and your friends." And we know "who" you're so fervently developing AI for, and it's not, apparently, the commonwealth, or the general welfare, or, anyone or anything other than YOU. (Also, I think the potential is growing for you morons to actually destroy the planet at this point.)

I guess I'll have to find a different venue to stream from/to then. Goodbye, Twitch. That simple sentence has a rather resounding sense of finality to it for me.

If you IPO for any dollar amount described with the word "trillion" does that instantly make the company "too big to fail"? Does this mean that they should instantly qualify for government bail-outs if/when things go sideways for them? Do they screw hundreds of millions of tax payers to keep a couple thousand douchy-investor-types whole? Or does this particular event signal the dawn of a new day where "too big to fail" should no longer be a thing? Because if your IPO is in the Trillions of Dollars, your investors had better be ready to take it on the chin when your share price drops. Just sayin'.... cuz I'm sick of it happening the other way.

Back in the teens we found a couple of instances where political actors were encouraging people to install screen savers or cryptocurrency wallets that turned their phones into reverse proxies. This was thought to be specifically for the sake of giving hostile foreign operations (read: Russia) access to U.S. domestic politics.

The fact that smart TVs are facilitating this is just ... we're going to need home networks that treat IoT stuff as different than our actual systems.

Oh, wait, TP-Link had well over half the U.S. router market, but they're getting banned over national security concerns?

Maybe there's a market for a router with traffic accounting as a service so one can see what's happening?

This is why the only device in my house with internet is a Roku. I simply will not tolerate the rest of that invasive junk.

The call centers are going to be decimated ... but so will the AI replacements meant to talk to humans.

I have a number of issues this morning that require calls. First, deal with PG&E about changing the billing for my new house. The I need to talk to my bank about banning Google from ever billing me again. I absolutely HATE changing doctors, but had to do it, because getting to Antioch, then into the city, is just ridiculous from here, so it's time for first appointment.

I would love to be able to just give Claude a list of administrivia like that and let it plow through the work. I see progress on agent related billing, I see Cloudflare doing stuff for an internet dominated by agents ... everyone in the industrialized world is going to have an AI adjutant to handle this stuff. I really hope the old military term "dog robber" gets revived as a way to describe them.

There's an obvious bubble, the circular dealings among the large core players are an enormous red flag.

The frontier labs are in the same position that DEC and Sun Microsystems were in the 1990s, as consumer hardware running Linux began to displace them. There will be ups and downs, but the trend is unavoidable.

The productivity gains are not there, AI is great for coding, some customer service is working, but the "50% of all white collar workers" that the frontier labs thought was good positioning last year 1) ain't gonna work but it did 2) infuriate the managerial class.

The frontier labs got away with it, thus far, in part because of concerns over the arrival of artificial general intelligence, which occupies a similar niche to nuclear weapons in the minds of policy makers. We ARE seeing frontier models escaping and attacking others, there ARE hazards, but it's nothing like what was imagined.

And the open models plus wild talent are as much a danger as wild talent was all on its own.

The frontier labs are like the coyote in that last moment when he's windmilling wildly, but not falling yet.

Go for the C-Suite. Surveil them. Document their movements. Make them the center of attention for some unknown not-necessarily-an-assailant(s). Let them know how it feels to be tagged and mapped and their whereabouts reconstructed. (Now I'm using a metaphor:) "Lop of the head and the body will whither and die." That's how you treat the mass surveillance beast of a thousand eyes.

Someone needs to launch a national campaign educating people on jury nullification.

The property damage laws are not really the sort of thing nullification is meant for, it's supposed to quickly put an end to the effect of bad laws, but if that's the one tool handy, and it's this much of a social issue, it should be put to work.

The duress deletion function was always obviously and transparently going to get treated as obstruction of justice issue the minute it got used in a high profile case. Here we are.

If you don't want to have trouble at the border, wipe your devices before you get anywhere near, and restore them once you are across. The precursors to this event have been in the news for years - the border is a legal gray zone, act accordingly.

I have mixed feeling here - sad for this kid, whomever he may be. Once again annoyed at the activist/NGO world for not training up to the point they can dodge this *easily* avoided problem. And I'm leaning forward in anticipation of being able to point and laugh at any crypto enthusiasts who make comically implausible arguments about these simple facts.

WIPE YOUR DEVICES BEFORE CROSSING THE BORDER.

Is that clear enough?

"Who's more foolish? The Fool? Or the fool who follows?" -- or maybe Vizzini from The Princess Bride, "...Plato, Socrates, Sam Altman? Morons, all of them." Well, something like that. How about, "Burn, baby, burn, Token Inferno..." No? Well, maybe you were just born too late.