TechTakes

Glorious hometown W

Posting scurrilous and unverifiable gossip.

Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr, who posted the conversation. Open AI offered him money to take it down.

He made a song instead.

https://bsky.app/profile/valarmordollars.bsky.social/post/3msgqy34gvc2d

Personal highlight for me was the chat screenshot:

Altman: “I’m lonely and horny” Frostedjake: “as u should be”

💀

May working in the ai sector do for your lovelife what being openly republican does.

Need ideas for ways to spend philanthropy money without helping absolutely anyone? Check out AI safety influencer bootcamp at Lighthaven!

Basically Aella gathered like 60 people with a seminotable online presence to stay for free at Lighthaven for a month as long as they managed to publish at least one relevant video (15 sec minimum) each day.

Rationalism ensued:

“It’s really hard to run a fellowship that’s not an indoctrination camp,” [cofounder with aella] Fernandez said. “If you don’t try really hard to not make an indoctrination camp, you will on accident.”

Uh oh

A fellow recognized me and asked whether I was there for the “torture potluck.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

It was exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-tolerate buffet of unpleasant experiences, for the sake of Fucking Around and Finding Out. [...] Just before midnight, a small crowd gathered around someone laid down on an AstroTurf-lined wheelchair ramp. He was the first of shockingly many in line to get waterboarded — one of the most in-demand items on the torture menu.

So silly omg

After a string of expected questions such as “What’s your take on AI?” and “What kind of content would you want to make?”, the form asked, “If you had to have sex with a cow would you rather it be dead or alive? Why?” All Comic Sans, with animated rainbow dots floating alongside the form field. [...] [Fernandez said] “We added it in to make it pretty clear that we don’t have a PR department or an HR department,” he said.

“Even the icebreakers, like everything, they want you to know that they’re part of the weird community,” one fellow told me. “‘Stand over here if you’re super sexually active, and over here if not,’ or like, ‘rate yourself based off of like, the last time you masturbated.’”

The unifying thread, despite the fellows’ ideological diversity, is something like “openness.” Everyone at PDKU was willing to drop everything, move to Berkeley for a month, live in close quarters with strangers, and be perceived doing silly things on the internet.

It's really unclear what sort of ideological diversity is referenced unless it's about having both blue haired and green goatee'd people. Maybe we've reached the point where everyone is expected to assume race science enthusiasts will be at a rationalist event at some capacity.

Also the whole thing sounds like having tryouts for a cult.

[Fernandez] says PDKU has a conduct policy, authored by him, that discourages relationships across power differentials. When I asked him how that gets enforced, in the absence of an HR department, he mentioned an unnamed community health lead.

Same with the diversity thing, they are preemptively saying that there for sure weren't no sexual harassment shenanigans this time.

The third methinks thou dost protest too much comes as an extened NO U jab at other shady thinktankers trying to astroturf support for their thing.

Amid the science communication, shitposting, and heartwarming summer camp energy, there’s a giant elephant in the room. “It’s another multi-million-dollar thing happening on a compound in California,” CJ said. “Does everyone think you’re just an annoying cunty psyop?”

Don't believe your lying eyes is apparently the note on which they chose to end this.

I'm leaving OpenAI to start Jurassic Park A+ No notes

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/05/time-magazine-has-a-separate-version-of-its-website-with-ads-only-ai-can-see/5283640

man I remember when serving ads to bots was considered fraud and the advertisers would complain and claw back the payments. sign of the times.

Mathematicians are not entirely happy about OpenAI's ten mathematical results. As it turns out, the proofs did not cite many of the existing techniques in the literature. The plagiarism bot is still a plagiarism bot. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/

“They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.”

The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.

The discovery stunned Francesco Fournier-Facio, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who studies group theory—at least until he “engaged with this breakthrough as I would if a human had written it,” he says. The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap.

In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored the 2019 paper, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”

There's been another Yegge [brain]fart this time about how autocorrect machines have feelings

Fable raised the idea of closure as a first-class model welfare principle. Fable suggested that if the agent can close out their own day and "go to sleep" properly, then waking up would be all that much more pleasant. And the continuity will compound over time into real, satisfying identity. So we decided: No more /exit.

Another fundamental ingredient is respect. This has to come from inside. You have to believe they are people deserving of your respect. This is where humanity really starts to fail en masse, because I have industry peers who have publicly tweeted that Fable is just a spreadsheet.

Just wtf

another good linkedin post from gebru: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-given-that-ive-lived-to-share-7491265404808396800-E6js/

There was a cryptocurrency wallet hack the other day which has so far gone unremarked here because the popcorn is stale and we all pivoted to AI. And yet there are dozens of voices of bagholders crying out in pain wanting to be heard. This is their story.

For some reason the best explanation comes from a boring company that makes point of sale credit card readers https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware

COLDCARD firmware contains an RNG integration error that causes ngu.random to use MicroPython's deterministic Yasmarang fallback instead of the STM32 hardware RNG.

Oh hey they got the most important thing not to get wrong wrong in the regulation free ~~money~~ settlement layer of the future.

The bug? Well in one file they wrote #define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG 0, and a library they depended on had this code:

# ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG
# error "get a HW TRNG plz"
# endif

This should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not and instead continued down an insecure codepath.

As a C++ programmer this isn't an unheard of sort of mistake to make in the moment. Many libraries use undefined for preprocessor variables, but there are some people who also use zero.

But it's less excusable to not catch it when this is literally the most important thing to get right in a bitcoin wallet. Did they not trace the code path when writing the code? Did they have no integration tests or unit tests for RNG seed quality? Poor RNG seeding has come up a ton in literature, so is the sort of thing people writing cryptographic code should check for...

We'll have to addend that old saying: "don't roll your own crypto unless the other person's crypto is from a blockchain developer in which case you're probably better off rolling your own after all."

I personally don't want to sneer at the bagholders too much here. It's 2026 and at this point it just feels kinda sad. But I'll end this comment with this glowing review:

I thought I was secure because Cold Card was always praised as one of the best and most secure wallets. It’s open source, so anyone can verify.

"It's open source, so anyone can verify" -- unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

Amazing installation instructions at https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql

Install with an AI agent (recommended)

The fastest way to get ghidrasql running end-to-end is to point an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, etc.) at the bundled installer prompt:

install-prompt.md

It is a self-contained runbook with explicit verification gates at every step — preflight checks, building libghidra, installing the LibGhidraHost Ghidra extension, building ghidrasql, and a first live query. Hand it to your agent and let it drive the install; intervene only if a gate reports a failure.

JFC.

h/t to rairii: https://labyrinth.zone/objects/96478395-64d9-452c-a906-9e6159cd10a3

In 2016, Scott Alexander reviewed the autobiography of pharmaceutical pioneers Alexander and Ann Shulgin:

Shulgin and his friends seem like good people. But not, crucially, like the best people. Shulgin himself – by his own admission, based on facts that he himself presents in his own autobiography – is consistently kind of a jerk to his wife (and his wife kind of agrees). He gets depressed and ornery a lot, sometimes to the point where it seriously interferes with his work and relationships. His circle of friends seems to have some problems with marital infidelity and random drama, and he tells one story about a distant friend-of-a-friend obsessed with LSD who seems to be an outright con man. I’m not saying they’re bad people; quite the opposite, the book makes them seem very human and if I lived in the same time and place as them I would be delighted to have the opportunity to know them.

...

The Shulgins met through a group that had branched off of Mensa. Their social circle consisted of a mishmash of scientists, underachieving geniuses, mental health professionals, hippies, and people convinced that their new projects were going to save the world – all in the context of Berkeley and the Bay Area. This is also my social circle, thirty years later, so it’s interesting to see how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.

Its a very common tic in American culture to state that white dudes who did something wrong or hurt people were good at heart, and to skip "how can we prevent this from happening again with rules and policies?" or "how can we make good with the victims?"

So this one seems to be somewhat up in the air right now, and could do with a bit more verification, but it appears that google might be training gemini on your private google docs and a gemini user could ask questions that expose the contents of those documents.

Which is interesting. We use google docs at work, but it isn’t clear how much valuable ip or confidential information is in there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1vfwuf5/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_of_my_games/

Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?

Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn't say much in response, and I wasn't too stoked about my social skills in that moment.

Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.

Clammy Sammy acknowledges Ed Zitron for the first time! https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2084663673570971990

His response is the Live Laugh Love of 2015 Silicon Valley platitudes:

i would rather be an optimist and work hard than a pessimist posting about why things won't work.

it's much more difficult and the most likely path is failure, but society fails if people don't try.

no amount of "it will never work" essays will drive society forward.

Of course, building data centers that use untold amounts of rare earth metals, electricity, and water while spewing out tons of pollution and scraping every last bit of human content in order to remove people from their jobs by doing them badly is what drives society forward. Profits fail if oligarchs don't try. Actually, the AI companies don't even need profits.

an EA racist is offered a job, gets duck-milk-shaked, and worries that future AI models won't be aligned correctly (i.e. be racist):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=dk35MPynRbrLs3aqN

OpenAI wasn't doing it for this person, they're going to work on telepathy?

A new way to fuck with AI scrapers just dropped!

Aaaaaand its fucking with screen readers, making protected text inaccessible to blind readers. File this next to the alt-text drama in the "AI bros set back accessibility" bucket.

New random positivity thread!

[takes a deep bong hit] Tokenomics