The AI Doc

 

(This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc, I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.)

Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son’s future, freak out even more now with actual existential risk for (simplified versions of) the right reasons, go on a quest to stop freaking out and get optimistic instead, find many of the right people for that and ask good non-technical questions, get somewhat fooled, listen to mundane safety complaints, seek out and get interviews with the top CEOs, try to tell himself he could ignore all of it, then decide not to end on a bunch of hopeful babies and instead have a call for action to help shape the future.

The title is correct. This is about ‘how I became an Apolcaloptimist,’ and why he wanted to be that, as opposed to an argument for apocaloptimism being accurate. The larger Straussian message, contra Tyler Cowen, is not ‘the interventions are fake’ but that ‘so many choose to believe false things about AI, in order to feel that things will be okay.’

A lot of the editing choices, and the selections of what to intercut and clip, clearly come from an outsider without technical knowledge, trying to deal with their anxiety. Many of them would not have been my choices, especially the emphasis on weapons and physical destruction, but I think they work exactly because together they make it clear the whole thing is genuine.

Now there’s a story. It even won praise online as fair and good, from both those worried about existential risk and several of the accelerationist optimists, because it gave both sides what they most wanted. [...]

Yes, you can do that for both at once, because they want different things and also agree on quite a lot of true things. That is much more impactful than a diatribe.

We live in a world of spin. Daniel Roher is trying to navigate a world of spin, but his own earnestness shines through, and he makes excellent choices on who to interview. The being swayed by whoever is in front of him is a feature, not a bug, because he’s not trying to hide it. There are places where people are clearly trying to spin, or are making dumb points, and I appreciated him not trying to tell us which was which.

MIRI offers us a Twitter FAQ thread and a full website FAQ explaining their full position in the context of the movie, which is that no this is not hype and yes it is going to kill everyone if we keep building it and no our current safety techniques will not help with that, and they call for an international treaty.

Are there those who think this was propaganda or one sided? Yes, of course, although they cannot agree on which angle it was trying to support.

Babies Are Awesome

The overarching personal journey is about Daniel having a son. The movie takes one very clear position, that we need to see taken more often, which is that getting married and having a family and babies and kids are all super awesome.

This turns into the first question he asks those he interviews. Would you have a child today, given the current state of AI? [...]

People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

The first set of interviews outlines the danger.

This is not a technical film. We get explanations that resonate with an ordinary dude.

We get Jeffrey Ladish explaining the basics of instrumental convergence, the idea that if you have a goal then power helps you achieve that goal and you cannot fetch the coffee if you’re dead. That it’s not that the AI will hate us, it’s that it will see us like we see ants, and if you want to put a highway where the anthill is that’s the ant’s problem.

We get Connor Leahy talking about how creating smarter and more capable things than us is not a safe thing to be doing, and emphasizing that you do not need further justification for that. We get Eliezer Yudkowsky saying that if you share a planet with much smarter beings that don’t care about you and want other things, you should not like your chances. We get Ajeya Cotra explaining additional things, and so on.

Aside from that, we don’t get any talk of the ‘alignment problem’ and I don’t think the word alignment even appears in the film that I can remember.

It is hard for me to know how much the arguments resonate. I am very much not the target audience. Overall I felt they were treated fairly, and the arguments were both strong and highly sufficient to carry the day. Yes, obviously we are in a lot of trouble here.

Freak Out

Daniel’s response is, quite understandably and correctly, to freak out.

Then he asks, very explicitly, is there a way to be an optimist about this? Could he convince himself it will all work out?

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

She Left a Silicon Valley VC to Solve a Problem Left Untouched for 88 years

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, here’s a little bit of trivia for you: One of the premier patents in bras hadn’t been touched or improved upon in 88 years. That was until Bree McKeen went after it. 

[ed. I'd say this problem has been touched quite a bit in 88 years. But, anyway...]

In 1931, inventor Helene Pons was granted a U.S. patent for a brassiere featuring an open-ended wire loop that encircled the bottom and sides of each breast. That uncomfortable, unyielding design had largely been left unchanged for nearly a century—and remains the dominant style in the global bra market, which is expected to reach nearly $60 billion by 2032.

Nobody had filed a patent for an underwire replacement until McKeen, founder of Evelyn & Bobbie, left her Silicon Valley job to try to fix a personal problem. At the end of long work days working at a boutique venture capital firm doing due diligence on consumer health care companies, she would come home with divots on her shoulders and chronic tension headaches after being hunched over her desk for hours on end.

 

While the world was demanding, the culprit wasn’t her workload. It was her bra.

But McKeen had zero experience in fashion. She studied medical anthropology and earned her MBA from Stanford. The turning point for her, though, came in a physiologist’s office, where McKeen had been working on her posture, along with regular barre training.

“He’s like, your posture looks great,’” McKeen recalled to Fortune. “And I kind of blurt it out: When I stand like this, I get pain from my bra.”

The physiologist explained it was a neuromuscular feedback loop, or the body’s automatic response to pain, like a pebble in a shoe.

“Here I am doing all this work to carry myself with authority and poise, and my bra, I find out, is totally doing the opposite,” McKeen said. “You don’t have to tell your body to curl around the pain. It just does.”

She had zero fashion experience. She filed a patent anyway

That realization kickstarted McKeen on a major career switch, costing her a career in VC—but earning her one of the most quietly disruptive brands in women’s fashion (Evelyn & Bobbie is now the fastest-growing brand at Nordstrom). She moved to Portland, home to Nike, Adidas, and Columbia for inspiration from major brands and proximity to new connections.

She started tinkering with prototypes in her garage and immediately filed for intellectual property rights. That was based on her VC knowledge that a woman’s company would need that to get funded.

McKeen got her first works utility patent (the harder, more defensible kind that covers how something works, not just how it looks) within a year. The brand declined to disclose how much funding it has raised, but now holds 16 international patents protecting its proprietary EB Core technology, which mimics the support and structure of a wire without causing discomfort.

To put into perspective how critical it was to protect her intellectual property, only 12% of patents in the U.S. were awarded to women, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as of 2019. McKeen has six of them, protecting the unique 3D-sling technology in her bras.

The brand McKeen built, Evelyn & Bobbie, was named for her maternal grandmother and her aunt, and operates on a simple premise: a bra that fits well and feels good all day.

“I wanted a bra that made me look better in my clothes,” McKeen said—an inspiration reminiscent of how Spanx founder Sara Blakely started her now-$1.2 billion shapewear empire. “Wire-free bras give you that mono boob—not a nice silhouette. They make your clothes look frumpy. I wanted nice lift, separation, a beautiful silhouette. I could not find that bra. How outrageous, really.”

The average U.S. bra size is 34F. Most brands design for something much smaller

With major brands like Victoria’s Secret, Aerie, Third Love, Savage X Fenty, and countless others on the market, Evelyn & Bobbie is undoubtedly in a crowded, competitive space. But as all women know, not all bras are comfortable to wear, especially for extended periods.

What sets Evelyn & Bobbie apart is their approach to sizing. McKeen designs with 270 fit models across seven easy sizes, grading each style individually rather than scaling up from a single sample.

“Most bra companies have like one or two fit models,” she said. “They’ll make a 34B and just scale it up, which is why it doesn’t fit well in larger sizes.

The average bra size in the U.S., McKeen pointed out, is a 34F, a stat that’s surprising to most people—including initial investors she once had to convince that comfort was even a relevant selling point.

“I had many investor meetings where they were 60-minute meetings, and 50 minutes of it was me trying to convince them that comfort was relevant,” she said. “I mean, Victoria’s Secret kind of figured it out, right? Like it’s just sexy, isn’t that what women want?” [...]

With a luxury product comes a luxury price point: Evelyn & Bobbie bras retail for $98 each. But that price tag could be worth avoiding chronic pain for some women.

by Sydney Lake, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: Evelyn & Bobbie

[ed. An entire article about bras but mostly about protecting intellectual property rights (16 international patents!), never fully explaining what the new technology actually is, other than it uses more fit models to ensure proper sizing. FYI: according to E&B's website EB Core uses "bonded internal structures and a soft, adaptive material, that stretches, molds, and supports—delivering wire-free lift.". Well, guess that explains it.] 

The 49MB Web Page

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let's quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

CPU throttles, tracking and privacy nightmares

For the example above, taking a cursory look at the network waterfall for a single article load reveals a sprawling, unregulated programmatic ad auction happening entirely in the client's browser. Before the user finishes reading the headline, the browser is forced to process dozens of concurrent bidding requests to exchanges like Rubicon Project (fastlane.json) and Amazon Ad Systems. While these requests are asynchronous over the network, their payloads are incredibly hostile to the browser's main thread. To facilitate this, the browser must download, parse and compile megabytes of JS [ed. javascript]. As a publisher, you shouldn't run compute cycles to calculate ad yields before rendering the actual journalism.

1. The user requests text.
2. The browser downloads 5MB of tracking JS.
3. A silent auction happens in the background, taxing the mobile CPU.
4. The winning bidder injects a carefully selected interstitial ad you didn't ask for.

Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user's cross-site identity together across different ad networks.

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe's IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.

So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background. But that's enough about NYT.

The Economics of Hostile Architecture

Publishers aren't evil but they are desperate. Caught in this programmatic ad-tech death spiral, they are trading long-term reader retention for short-term CPM pennies. The modern ad industry is slowly de-coupling the creator from the advertiser. They weaponize the UI because they think they have to.

Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.

And almost all modern news websites are guilty of some variation of anti-user patterns. As a reminder, the NNgroup defines interaction cost as the sum of mental and physical efforts a user must exert to reach their goal. In the physical world, hostile architecture refers to a park bench with spikes that prevent people from sleeping. In the digital world, we can call it a system carefully engineered to extract metrics at the expense of human cognitive load. Let's also cover some popular user-hostile design choices that have gone mainstream.

The Pre-Read Ambush

Selected GDPR examplesThe advantage and disadvantages of these have been discussed in tech circles ever since they launched.

When a user clicks a news link, they have a singular purpose of reading the headline and going through the text. The problem is that upon page load, users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare. The GDPR/Cookie banners occupy the bottom 30%. The user scrolls once and witnesses a "Subscribe to our Newsletter" modal. Meanwhile the browser has started hammering them with allow notification prompts.

The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons (which are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side quests just to access the 5KB of text they came for. Let's look at how all these anti-patterns combine into a single, user-hostile experience.

by Shubham Bose, Thatshubham |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

NASA's 'Lunar Viceroy' on Moon Base Plans

NASA's “Lunar Viceroy” talks about how NASA will build a Moon base (Ars Technica)

Image: Rendering of a Moon base that will be built over the next decade. Credit: NASA

[ed. In the next 10 years.]

Seeing Like a Sedan

Waymos and Cybercabs see the world through very different sensors. Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles.

Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.

Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.

 

One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.

In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.

This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.

The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.

This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.

The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.

Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond.

by Andrew Miller, Asterisk |  Read more:

Image: Jared Nangle

[ed. via DWAtV:]

***

A relevant thing about Elon Musk is that, while he has a lot of technical expertise and can accomplish a lot of seemingly impossible tasks, he also just says things.

For example, here’s another thing he just said this week, in a trick he’s pulled several times without delivering, where the prediction market is at 12% but that seems rather high to me:

NewsWire: Elon Musk offers to pay TSA workers' salaries amid government shutdown.

Just saying things, and announcing with confidence he will do things he probably cannot do, is central to his strategy of then yelling at people to sleep on floors until they manage to do it, which occasionally works to at least some extent. Elon Musk may plausibly start such a project, but the chances he achieves the goals he is stating are very low.

Announce periodically you are going to the moon and stars, and if one time you end up with SpaceX, it’s still a win. It’s worked for him quite well, so far.

Vertical Farming

via:
[ed. Impressive.]

***

"While most vertical farms are limited to lettuces, Plenty spent the past decade designing a patent-pending, modular growing system flexible enough to support a wide variety of crops – including strawberries. Growing on vertical towers enables uniform delivery of nutrients, superior airflow and more intense lighting, delivering increased yield with consistent quality.

Every element of the Plenty Richmond Farm–including temperature, light and humidity–is precisely controlled through proprietary software to create the perfect environment for the strawberry plants to thrive. The farm uses AI to analyze more than 10 million data points each day across its 12 grow rooms, adapting each grow room’s environment to the evolving needs of the plants – creating the perfect environment for Driscoll’s proprietary plants to thrive and optimizing the strawberries’ flavor, texture and size. Even pollination has been engineered by Plenty, using a patent-pending method that evenly distributes controlled airflow across the strawberry flowers for more efficient and effective pollination than using bees, supporting more uniform strawberry size and shape."  ~ Greater Richmond Partnership

Bow and Arrow Diffusion Across Cultures

Study pinpoints when bow and arrow came to North America (Ars Technica)

Image:A petroglyph from Newspaper Rock, a site along Indian Creek in southeastern Utah. Credit: David Hiser/Environmental Protection Agency/Public domain
[ed. I haven't finished half my morning coffee and already know about atlatls (and why dogs love them), risk-buffering, and frozen feces knives. Is science great, or what?]

***

1. Introduction

In his book, Shadows in the Sun, Davis (1998: 20) recounts what is now arguably one of the most popular ethnographic accounts of all time:

“There is a well known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement. Over the objections of his family, he made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all of his tools. So in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.”

Since publication, this story has been told and re-told in documentaries, books, and across internet websites and message boards (Davis, 2007, Davis, 2010; Gregg et al., 2000; Kokoris, 2012; Taete, 2015). Davis states that the original source of the tale was Olayuk Narqitarvik (Davis, 2003, Davis, 2009). It was allegedly Olayuk's grandfather in the 1950s who refused to go to the settlements and thus fashioned a knife from his own feces to facilitate his escape by skinning and disarticulating a dog. Davis has admitted that the story could be “apocryphal”, and that initially he thought the Inuit who told him this story was “pulling his leg” (Davis, 2009, Davis, 2014). Yet, as support for the credibility of the story, Davis cites the auto-biographical account of Peter Freuchen, the Danish arctic explorer (Hodge and Davis, 2012). Freuchen (1953) describes how he dug himself a pit to sleep in and woke up trapped by snow. Every effort to get out that he tried failed. Finally, he recalled seeing dog's excrement frozen solid as a rock. So, Freuchen defecated in his hand, shaped it into a chisel, and waited for it to freeze solid. He then used the implement to free himself from the snow: “I moved my bowels and from the excrement I managed to fashion a chisel-like instrument which I left to freeze… At last I decided to try my chisel and it worked” (Freuchen, 1953: 179).

2. Materials and methods
In order to procure the necessary raw materials for knife production, one of us (M.I.E.) went on a diet with high protein and fatty acids, which is consistent with an arctic diet, for eight days (Binford, 2012; Fumagalli et al., 2015) (Table S1). The Inuit do not only eat meat from maritime and terrestrial animals (Arendt, 2010; Zutter, 2009), and there were three instances during the eight-day diet that M.I.E. ate fruit, vegetables, or carbohydrates (Table S1).

Raw material collection did not begin until day four, and then proceeded regularly for the next five days (Table S1). Fecal samples were formed into knives using ceramic molds, “knife molds” (Figs. S1–S2), or molded by hand, “hand-shaped knives” (Fig. S3). All fecal samples were stored at −20 °C until the experiments began.

Pest Control

[ed. Auto-play ad from Meta/Facebook, embedded in an article I was reading this morning. Thank you DDG. See also: Out to Get You (DWAtV):]

Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You.

They seek resources at your expense. Fees are hidden. Extra options are foisted upon you. Things are made intentionally worse, forcing you to pay to make it less worse. Least bad deals require careful search. Experiences are not as advertised. What you want is buried underneath stuff you don’t want. Everything is data to sell you something, rather than an opportunity to help you.

When you deal with Out to Get You, you know it in your gut. Your brain cannot relax. You lookout for tricks and traps. Everything is a scheme.

They want you not to notice. To blind you from the truth. You can feel it when you go to work. When you go to church. When you pay your taxes. It is bad government and bad capitalism. It is many bad relationships, groups and cultures.

When you listen to a political speech, you feel it. Dealing with your wireless or cable company, you feel it. At the car dealership, you feel it. When you deal with that one would-be friend, you feel it. Thinking back on that one ex, you feel it. It’s a trap.

A Pattern Language

Nat Sauer: Every time I throw a large house party i am surprised by where people end up congregating. It’s never where I plan for them to congregate.

systemlayers: A few years ago UCLA did a study on room usage. I often think about how useless a porch/dining room is. Why hasn’t there been more innovation around how people ACTUALLY use their space in their homes?

David Roberts: I think the message about the uselessness of formal dining rooms has finally gotten through -- I never see them any more.

The way people use space follows from design and actual patterns of life experience. If you notice people using the space ‘wrong’ then that’s on you, and you can either accept that and lean into it or you can redesign to get the patterns you want. Often subtle changes can radically improve interactions or shift them were you want them.
via:
Image: uncredited

Pieterjan Ginckels, LPJG5000ps4, 2018

via:

The Sluishuis

The Sluishuis (Dutch for 'sluice house') is an apartment building in IJburg, a neighbourhood on artificial islands in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The building, which opened on 13 July 2022, was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, an architecture firm based in Copenhagen and New York City, in collaboration with Rotterdam-based Barcode Architects.

The Sluishuis is a sustainable building, with solar panels installed on the roof providing the energy for the lighting and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in the complex. Its courtyard has a publicly accessible jetty where boats can moor...

The Sluishuis has 442 apartment units; 369 of them, mainly in the middle segment, are for renting and the rest are on sale. The size of the residential units ranges from 40 to 180 square metres (430 to 1,940 sq ft). Around the entire building is a publicly accessible jetty where there is space for 34 houseboats. The Sluishuis is built over the water of the IJ, allowing boats to moor at a dock of the complex. The unusual shape makes the building appear to float above the water.

via: Wikipedia

Image: Hay Kranen

World Monitor

How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time. Frustrated by fragmented war news, Anghami’s Elie Habib built World Monitor, a platform that fuses global data, like aircraft signals and satellite detections, to track conflicts as they unfold.

Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time.

The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral. [...]

The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.”

Traditional media wasn’t solving the problem he had in mind. “I didn’t need a news aggregator,” he says. “I needed something that showed me how these events connect to each other in real time. The existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large enterprises tens of thousands of dollars annually.” [...]

The platform processes a messy stream of global data, bypassing social media noise to pull facts directly from the source.

“The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously,” Habib notes. The result is a constantly updating map of global tensions: conflict zones with escalation scores, military aircraft broadcasting positions through ADS-B transponders, ship movements tracked through AIS signals, nuclear installations, submarine cables, internet outages and satellite fire detections.

“Everything is normalized, geolocated and rendered on a WebGL globe capable of displaying thousands of markers without frame drops,” Habib says...

When the War Hit

Before the missiles started flying, people used the map for very specific reasons. Traders tracked cargo ships to monitor supply chains, while engineers watched power grids and infrastructure networks. “One sports bar runs it on their TVs when there are no games,” Habib says.

But when joint US-Israeli military strikes hit Iran in late February—disrupting maritime logistics and forcing commercial airspace to clear—the platform’s role changed almost overnight.

What had been a curiosity for analysts and hobbyists became a live threat monitor. Casual observers began watching active escalations unfold in real time.

How the Map Verifies Reality

Processing hundreds of live data streams during a military conflict raises a question: How do you verify information fast enough to keep the system moving?

Habib’s answer was to remove human editors entirely. “Zero editorializing,” he says. “No human editor makes a call.”

Instead, Habib says the platform relies on a strict source hierarchy. Wire services and official channels such as Reuters, AP, the Pentagon and the UN sit at the top tier. Major broadcasters including the BBC and Al Jazeera follow, along with specialist investigative outlets such as Bellingcat. In total, he says the system processes about 190 sources, assigning higher confidence scores to more reliable ones.

Software then scans incoming reports for major events and emerging patterns. If multiple credible sources report the same development within minutes, the system flags it as a breaking alert. But headlines alone are not enough.

Because online claims can be unreliable, the platform also looks for physical signals on the ground. It tracks disruptions such as internet blackouts, diverted military flights, halted cargo ships and satellite-detected fires. “A convergence algorithm then checks how many distinct signal types activate in the same geography simultaneously,” Habib says.

“One signal is noise. Three or four converging in the same location is the signal worth surfacing,” Habib says. If an internet outage coincides with diverted aircraft and a satellite heat signature in the same area, the map flags a potential escalation.

by Lilian Wagoy, Wired |  Read more:

Image: World Monitor

[ed. Example here. Also, just as an aside (since World Monitor was created by a music streaming CEO) I'd like to highlight once again the totally awesome Radio Garden. I've been using this streaming app ever since I got it, exploring and listening to FM music stations all over the world.]

via:

Tomorrow’s Smart Pills Will Deliver Drugs and Take Biopsies

One day soon, a doctor might prescribe a pill that doesn’t just deliver medicine but also reports back on what it finds inside you—and then takes actions based on its findings.

Instead of scheduling an endoscopy or CT scan, you’d swallow an electronic capsule smaller than a multivitamin. As it travels through your digestive system, it could check tissue health, look for cancerous changes, and send data to your doctor. It could even release drugs exactly where they’re needed or snip a tiny biopsy sample before passing harmlessly out of your body.

This dream of a do-it-all pill is driving a surge of research into ingestible electronics: smart capsules designed to monitor and even treat disease from inside the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The stakes are high. GI diseases affect tens of millions of people worldwide, including such ailments as inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Diagnosis often involves a frustrating maze of blood tests, imaging, and invasive endoscopy. Treatments, meanwhile, can bring serious side effects because drugs affect the whole body, not just the troubled gut.

If capsules could handle much of that work—streamlining diagnosis, delivering targeted therapies, and sparing patients repeated invasive procedures—they could transform care. Over the past 20 years, researchers have built a growing tool kit of ingestible devices, some already in clinical use. These capsule-shaped devices typically contain sensors, circuitry, a power source, and sometimes a communication module, all enclosed in a biocompatible shell. But the next leap forward is still in development: autonomous capsules that can both sense and act, releasing a drug or taking a tissue sample.

That’s the challenge that our lab—the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Laboratory (MSAL) at the University of Maryland, College Park—is tackling. Drawing on decades of advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), we’re building swallowable devices that integrate sensors, actuators, and wireless links in packages that are small and safe enough for patients. The hurdles are considerable: power, miniaturization, biocompatibility, and reliability, to name a few. But the potential payoff will be a new era of personalized and minimally invasive medicine, delivered by something as simple as a pill you can swallow at home. [...]

Targeted drug delivery is one of the most compelling applications for ingestible capsules. Many drugs for GI conditions—such as biologics for inflammatory bowel disease—can cause serious side effects that limit both dosage and duration of treatment. A promising alternative is delivering a drug directly to the diseased tissue. This localized approach boosts the drug’s concentration at the target site while reducing its spread throughout the body, which improves effectiveness and minimizes side effects. The challenge is engineering a device that can both recognize diseased tissue and deliver medication quickly and precisely.

With other labs making great progress on the sensing side, we’ve devoted our energy to designing devices that can deliver the medicine. We’ve developed miniature actuators—tiny moving parts—that meet strict criteria for use inside the body: low power, small size, biocompatibility, and long shelf life.

Some of our designs use soft and flexible polymer “cantilevers” with attached microneedle systems that pop out from the capsule with enough force to release a drug, but without harming the intestinal tissue. While hollow microneedles can directly inject drugs into the intestinal lining, we’ve also demonstrated prototypes that use the microneedles for anchoring drug payloads, allowing the capsule to release a larger dose of medication that dissolves at an exact location over time.

In other experimental designs, we had the microneedles themselves dissolve after injecting a drug. In still others, we used microscale 3D printing to tailor the structure of the microneedles and control how quickly a drug is released—providing either a slow and sustained dose or a fast delivery. With this 3D printing, we created rigid microneedles that penetrate the mucosal lining and gradually diffuse the drug into the tissue, and soft microneedles that compress when the cantilever pushes them against the tissue, forcing the drug out all at once.

by Reza Ghodssi, Justin Stine, Luke Beardslee, IEEE Spectrum |  Read more:

Image: Maximilian Franz/Engineering at Maryland Magazine

Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer

Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer. He precisely controlled modulation and feedback loops (IEEE Spectrum).

Image: James Provost

[ed. Everything was new and primitive back then. Jimi pushed these new tools to their limits.]

Hissy Fit

The public spat between the Pentagon and Anthropic began after Axios reported that US military leaders used Claude to assist in planning its operation to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. After the operation, an employee at Palantir relayed concerns from an Anthropic staffer to US military leaders about how its models had been used. Anthropic has denied ever raising concerns or interfering with the Pentagon’s use of its technology. (Ars Technica).

It is perfectly legitimate for the Department of War to decide that it does not wish to continue on Anthropic’s terms, and that it will terminate the contract. There is no reason things need be taken further than that.

Undersecretary of State Jeremy Lewin: This isn’t about Anthropic or the specific conditions at issue. It’s about the broader premise that technology deeply embedded in our military must be under the exclusive control of our duly elected/appointed leaders. No private company can dictate normative terms of use—which can change and are subject to interpretation—for our most sensitive national security systems. The @DeptofWar obviously can’t trust a system a private company can switch off at any moment.

Timothy B. Lee: OK, so don't renew their contract. Why are you threatening to go nuclear by declaring them a supply chain risk?

Dean W. Ball: As I have been saying repeatedly, this principle is entirely defensible, and this is the single best articulation of it anyone in the administration has made.

The way to enforce this principle is to publicly and proudly decline to do business with firms that don’t agree to those terms. Cancel Anthropic’s contract, and make it publicly clear why you did so.

Right now, though, USG’s policy response is to attempt to destroy Anthropic’s business, and this is a dire mistake for both practical and principled reasons.

Dario Amodei and Anthropic responded to this on Thursday the 26th with this brave and historically important statement that everyone should read.

The statement makes clear that Anthropic wishes to work with the Department of War, and that they strongly wish to continue being government contractors, but that they cannot accept the Department of War’s terms, nor do any threats change their position. Response outside of DoW was overwhelmingly positive.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

Image: Truth Social

[ed. Another rant from the Mad King™. Anthropic had a contract with DOD that included terms DOD now wants to reneg on. Just cancel the damn contract. See also: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War (Anthropic). My admiration for Amodei and Anthropic has gone up ten fold in the last two weeks. What's at stake (DWAtV):]

***

Axios calls this a ‘first step towards blacklisting Anthropic.’

I would instead call this as the start of a common sense first step you would take long before you actively threaten to slap a ‘supply chain risk’ designation on Anthropic. It indicates that the Pentagon has not done the investigation of ‘exactly how big of a cluster**** would this be’ and I highly encourage them to check.

Divyansh Kaushik: Are we seriously going to label Anthropic a supply chain risk but are totally fine with Alibaba/Qwen, Deepseek, Baidu, etc? What are we doing here?

An excellent question. Certainly we can agree that Alibaba, Qwen, Deepseek or Baidu are all much larger ‘supply chain risks’ than Anthropic. So why haven’t we made those designations yet? [...]

This goes well beyond those people entirely ignoring existential risk. The Very Serious People are denying existence of powerful AI, or transformational AI, now and in the future, even on a mundane level, period. Dean came in concerned about impacts on developing economies in the Global South, and they can’t even discuss that.

Dean W. Ball: At some point in 2024, for reasons I still do not entirely understand, global elites simply decided: “no, we do not live in that world. We live in this other world, the nice one, where the challenges are all things we can understand and see today.”

Those who think we might live in that world talk about what to do, but mostly in private these days. It is not considered polite—indeed it is considered a little discrediting in many circles—to talk about the issues of powerful AI.

Yet the people whose technical intuitions I respect the most are convinced we do live in that world, and so am I.

The American elites aren’t quite as bad about that, but not as bad isn’t going to cut it.

We are indeed living in that world. We do not yet know yet which version of it, or if we will survive in it for long, but if you want to have a say in that outcome you need to get in the game. If you want to stop us from living in that world, that ship has sailed, and to the extent it hasn’t the first step is admitting you have a problem.

But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”​

What it probably means for our lives is that it ends them. What it definitely doesn’t mean for our lives is going on as before, or a ‘gentle singularity’ you barely notice.

Elites that do not talk about such issues will not long remain elites. That might be because all the humans are dead, or it might be because they wake up one morning and realize other people, AIs or a combination thereof are the new elite, without realizing how lucky they are to still be waking up at all.

I am used to the idea of Don’t Look Up for existential risk, but I haven’t fully internalized how much of the elites are going Don’t Look Up for capabilities, period.

Claude Lalanne,‘Ginkgo’ Chairs, 1999
via:

Kung Fu Robots Steal the Show

 

Cyber kung fu show at Chinese New Year Gala

Dozens of G1 robots from Unitree Robotics delivered the world's first fully autonomous humanoid robot kung fu performance, featuring rapid position changes. The show pushed the limits of robotic movement and set multiple global records.

[ed. Not your mom's old roomba anymore. Robotics + AI the next frontier.]

Claude's New Constitution

[Read the constitution]

We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.

The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.

In this post, we describe what we’ve included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach...

What is Claude’s Constitution?

Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.

We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society1.

We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we’ve been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

Our new approach to Claude’s Constitution

Our previous Constitution was composed of a list of standalone principles. We’ve come to believe that a different approach is necessary. We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do. If we want models to exercise good judgment across a wide range of novel situations, they need to be able to generalize—to apply broad principles rather than mechanically following specific rules.

Specific rules and bright lines sometimes have their advantages. They can make models’ actions more predictable, transparent, and testable, and we do use them for some especially high-stakes behaviors in which Claude should never engage (we call these “hard constraints”). But such rules can also be applied poorly in unanticipated situations or when followed too rigidly2. We don’t intend for the constitution to be a rigid legal document—and legal constitutions aren’t necessarily like this anyway.

The constitution reflects our current thinking about how to approach a dauntingly novel and high-stakes project: creating safe, beneficial non-human entities whose capabilities may come to rival or exceed our own. Although the document is no doubt flawed in many ways, we want it to be something future models can look back on and see as an honest and sincere attempt to help Claude understand its situation, our motives, and the reasons we shape Claude in the ways we do.

by Anthropic |  Read more:

Image: Anthropic

[ed. I have an inclination to distrust AI companies, mostly because their goals (other than advancing technology) appear strongly directed at achieving market dominance and winning some (undefined) race to AGI. Anthropic is different. They actually seem legitimately concerned with the ethical implications of building another bomb that could potentially destroy humanity, or at minimum a large degree of human agency, and are aware of the responsibilities that go along with that. This is a well thought out and necessary document that hopefully other companies will follow and improve on, and that governments can use to develop more well-informed regulatory oversight in the future. See also: The New Politics of the AI Apocalypse; and, The Anthropic Hive Mind (Medim).

The Questionable Science Behind the Odd-Looking Football Helmets

The N.F.L. claims Guardian Caps reduce the risk of concussions. The company that makes them says, “It has nothing to do with concussions.”

The first time Jared Wilson, a New England Patriots offensive lineman, is seen on the Super Bowl broadcast on Sunday, some viewers may wonder why he has such a big helmet.

It’s called a Guardian Cap, and Mr. Wilson is among about two dozen National Football League players who have worn the helmet covering in games this season. Not for comfort or style. Even the company that makes the cap acknowledges that it’s bulky and ugly. Rather, Wilson and others have worn it for its purported safety benefits.

The N.F.L. claims the cartoonish caps reduce the risk of getting a concussion, convincing some players that they are worth wearing. The company that designed and manufactures Guardian Caps, though, makes no such claim.

“No helmet, headgear or chin strap can prevent or eliminate the risk of concussions or other serious head injuries while playing sports or otherwise,” the product’s disclaimer warns. Instead, the company says its caps blunt the impact of smaller hits to the head that are linked to long-term brain damage.

“It has nothing to do with concussions,” said Erin Hanson, a co-founder of Guardian Sports, the Atlanta-area company that makes the cap. “We call concussions ‘the C word.’ This is about reducing the impact of all those hits every time. That’s all that was.”

The disconnect between the N.F.L.’s claims about the Guardian Caps and what the company promises is emblematic of the messy line between promotion and protection, and the power of the N.F.L. to sway football coaches and players trying to insulate themselves from the dangers of the sport.

An endorsement by the N.F.L., the country’s most visible and powerful sports league, can generate millions of dollars in sales for equipment makers, including Guardian Sports. The N.F.L.’s embrace of the caps, beginning in 2022, has led to a surge in orders from youth leagues to pro teams. About half a million players at all levels now wear them, Guardian Sports said.

“Anything I can do to save my brain, save my head,” said Kevin Dotson, an offensive lineman on the Los Angeles Rams who has worn the cap in games since last season.

The league claimed that the Guardian Cap had helped reduce concussions by more than 50 percent, which has put the company in the awkward position of embracing the spirit of the endorsement while distancing itself from the facts of it. Further complicating the situation: The model worn by pro and college players, the NXT, is not the same as the company’s mass-market product, the XT, which retails for $75. That model has less padding than the NXT, and may be less effective at limiting the impact of hits to the head, studies have shown.

Ms. Hanson said the company had struggled with whether to promote the N.F.L.’s claims about concussions. It decided to do so because the N.F.L.’s boasts might persuade young players to use the product, even if the benefits are not comparable. (...)

Guardian Caps are the latest in a wave of products that have emerged since researchers linked the sport to the progressive brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E. Scores of companies have introduced equipment that purports to prevent head injuries, from a silicone collar worn around a player’s neck, known as the Q-Collar, which is promoted as a way to give the brain an extra layer of cushioning, to G8RSkin Shiesty, a head covering that is worn under helmets and promises to significantly reduce concussion risk.

Independent neurologists are generally skeptical, if not outright dismissive, of the benefits of any product claiming to reduce concussions because few rigorous studies have been done to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Few products have received as much publicity as the Guardian Cap, though. Sales of the caps, which were introduced in 2012, took off after the company won the N.F.L.’s HeadHealthTECH Challenge in 2017 — two years after the league settled a lawsuit brought by more than 5,000 former players who accused the N.F.L. of hiding from them the dangers of concussions.

Guardian Sports received $20,000 from the league for additional testing, but the N.F.L.’s endorsement was priceless.

Orders for the caps from colleges, high schools and youth teams poured in. Nearly every college team in the top ranks practices with the caps. In 2021, researchers, including some affiliated with the N.F.L. and its players’ union, published a paper that said Guardian Caps reduced “head impact severity” by 9 percent.

That year, Guardian Sports introduced its NXT model, with an extra layer of padding for bigger, stronger players. The N.F.L. required linemen, tight ends and linebackers to wear them in training camp. In 2023, the mandate expanded to all contact practices, and running backs and fullbacks were added. Starting in 2024, wide receivers and defensive backs had to wear them in practices, and players could wear them in games. (...)

Researchers at Virginia Tech, which runs a well-regarded helmet-testing laboratory, found that players who wore the NXT version of the Guardian Cap experienced a 14 percent decline in rotational accelerations — basically, the turning of the head — and that their concussion risk was 34 percent lower than for players who wore only helmets.

The benefits were significantly lower for players who wore the XT, the model worn in youth leagues and high schools. Rotational acceleration was only 5 percent lower, and the concussion risk was reduced by 15 percent.

Stefan Duma, who leads the lab, said the smaller reductions, combined with better helmets and fewer full contact practices, suggested that the benefits of wearing the XT were negligible.

“We tested it thoroughly, and the benefits are just not there,” Dr. Duma said. “It’s all noise, no statistical difference in youth.”

Most parents and coaches, though, do not read research reports from testing labs, and there is little information on the Guardian Sports website that explains the difference in performance between the XT and NXT models. But looking at the testimonials on the website from Mr. Goodell and other N.F.L. luminaries, parents and coaches might believe they were buying the cap worn by the pros.

by Ken Belson, NY Times |  Read more:
Images: Audra Melton, NYT; Cooper Neill/Getty