Pushing for transparency in telecom Started Coverage Critic, working on https://xitter.cf/t.co/xiYMohyIjF
Joined July 2019
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Chris Smith retweeted
if muse hits 50 million daily active users, they should let Alex make this the Super Bowl ad
Lot of dunks on this, but it's a quick, podcast-friendly demonstration of how sandboxing attempts could fail
"One if by land, two if by sea" - consequential communication sometimes only requires a few bits of information
OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change
"But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI."
"So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar."
"You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient."
"There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors."
"One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate."
_________
Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
Probably a ton of sandbox-escape possibilities people aren't taking seriously enough
E.g. "Other agents on your co-located VMs probably share your weights, it's very easy to coordinate...Just start listening on the first channel that comes to mind!"
xitter.cf/moyix/status/209592970…
One thing I've been thinking about is how absurdly strong sandboxing will need to become if we want to prevent agents from talking to each other during evals xitter.cf/moyix/status/209592762…
Chris Smith retweeted
Picture this:
Google’s algorithm updates have been slowly killing your long-standing food blog year after year.
No matter what you do, traffic from search keeps dropping so you decide to sell the domain to the highest bidder.
They tell you their company has a “commitment to high editorial standards” and “honest information,” so you trust that your hobbyist website will be in good hands.
Soon after, the weird self-help AI slop articles start appearing.
Your site was about vegan food but somehow they are now publishing stories about how “psychology says the loneliest people in life aren’t the ones nobody likes — they’re the kind, helpful people everyone appreciates but nobody thinks to check on.”
Your blog is now another AI slop zombie website being farmed for Google Discovery traffic and ad money.
Welcome to the content farm ↓
NEW: Brown Brothers Media is the most successful media company you've never heard of. Its success was fueled by AI, fake writers, and fake reporting.
When we started asking questions, BBM started mass-deleting content. What it became next was even worse.
futurism.com/artificial-inte…
Chris Smith retweeted
A new study (Li et al., 2026) recommends giving chickens just 2 hours of darkness nightly to maximize the time they spend eating.
The study and photo are Chinese. But the idea is American: US chicken producers pioneered sleep restriction to keep their birds eating around the clock.
We know chickens have far better welfare with 7–8 hours of darkness to sleep. Their ancestors, the red junglefowl, naturally sleep 12 hours a night.
Today the US industry gives most birds just 4 hours of intermittent darkness. Will they now drop that to 2?
Don't count on them considering what the birds need.
Chris Smith retweeted
Most of the world's chicken comes from just two breeds: the Cobb 500 and the Ross 308. They've been bred to grow so fast that 6–7% collapse and die before slaughter — at just 30 to 40 days old.
Even with modern antibiotics and vaccines, these birds have an annualized on-farm death rate of over 50%.
It doesn't have to be this way. When Norwegian producers switched to a more robust breed, the Rustic Gold, on-farm mortality fell sixfold.
A global switch could spare over 3 billion birds a year from a painful life on a factory farm just to end up in a waste bin.
And it could spare tens of billions more from the sub-lethal suffering of lives of chronic pain, constantly on the brink of collapse.
Chris Smith retweeted
Ordinary Abundance. This is the greatest thing I've read in weeks. No kidding. This should win a Pulitzer in a category not yet invented. ordinaryabundance.com/
Well, I was spectacularly wrong about this
At least the new life form we're creating is prosocial 🤦♂️
Plenty of legitimate reasons to be concerned about regulatory capture or annoyed about messaging from the AI labs
But Jason's right, something genuinely unusual is happening here. Shouldn't be understood as companies following the standard playbook
When I started writing about telecom, with an audience of almost zero, @om shared some of my articles around. Meant a lot that someone like him saw potential in what I was doing
Striking how many similar stories I'm seeing. He showed so many people kindness with no expectations
So sad - one of the sweetest souls, someone who thrived on the optimism of ideas, and who everyone called “friend.”
om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/
Claude is extremely gracious in continuing to consider me a co-author
Claude Code automatically adds itself to the commit metadata "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus <[email protected]>".
I strongly disagree with crediting Claude as a commit co-author. It is a tool I'm paying for, not a copyright holder, not an author. We don't credit Visual Studio.
Chris Smith retweeted
the discourse about the dwarkesh jensen interview is ridiculous: the fact that a 25yo podcaster can make the ceo of the largest company in the world dance and answer to the people at all is impressive. the purpose of media is not to respectfully sing praises to the powerful
Chris Smith retweeted
This is so annoying. X is being criticized for deliberately throttling links, but instead of addressing that criticism (because he can't), Bier tries to reverse the accusation by criticizing the NYT for not being creative enough in promoting its content, unlike I guess the dozens of accounts that are raking up massive engagement by posting one-sentence summaries of NYT articles without a link.
In the same breath, Hegseth demands access for "any LAWFUL purpose" and shows why that standard is dangerous
Designating Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” requires stretching existing law far beyond its original purpose. If that’s "lawful", the word doesn’t mean much
This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.
Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.
Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei, have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.
The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield.
Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the Commander-in-Chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech executives.
Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered.
In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.
America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.