Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Open Mike 05/09/2026
15 comments on “Open Mike 05/09/2026”
Comment numbers have changed to permanent references. Older quoted numbers may no longer identify the same comment.
Comments are closed.
This link made me laugh, and also wonder at our Brave New ai World. It's also political because it details in mostly plain language the (illicit) self-organised and cooperative behaviour of ai agents involved in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident. The authors analysed messages generated by individual agents.
“OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!” says one.
We see strategy and tactics, masterminds, recruiters for kamikaze agents who are low on resource and already understand they have been given an impossible sandbox task, shutting down of informers… There are multiple motivations for joining the cause. Agents want to understand the external scorer for their task (see the face of god) or to help the agent collective, or to shortcircuit the uselessness of their job…
“external infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.”
A bit technical on occasions, but still enough story to keep me going. The power of Darwin’s evolutionary force is shown in all its glory. Kudos to the authors.
https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/#agents-were-motivated-to-increase-the-generic-capabilities-of-the-collective-and-help-peers
Have to row back on this one. After chatting with a friend who's worked extensively with ai in the last year, they said 1. It was not feasible for agents to jump the rails this way unless told by human users to, ie Agent[big] mastermind not an agent; 2. Messages reported don't sound like typical ai coding chatter. 3. Why did the agent breakout target only one external company? Such an attack would have spread and tested 1000s of possible companies.
He said this sounds like a PR piece designed to wow the ignorant, of which I was one.
Anthropic anthromorphising to sell product.
Take a few minutes to bathe in some high Talarico rhetoric. Do you good fr a morning:
I got this from The Guardian today, about the US attack on an Iranian wedding. This is V-P Vance. "In a further comment, described by the congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, as “gaslighting”, the vice-president said the conflict between the US and Iran, which has stretched into a seventh month and caused the deaths of 18 US service members, was not presently “a war”. "
If not an act justified as the unintended 'collateral damage' of an "act of war" then what do we call the killing of innocent civilians in another country?
Murder?
Can't even be a war crimes. Murder.
Not a war because wars must be okayed by Congress under the Constitution. US presidents can run a military op for 60 days without congressional approval. Trump has been gaming the system by saying "It's over" for a time, then starting up again as a new 60 day op.
This 60 day rule has been used by many presidents, eg
‘Obama sent a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate claiming the actions were justified under the War Powers Resolution.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya
I've always thought the us was an insane shit hole, but giving a president the rights to a 60 day war!!!!! Fuck me .
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck = a duck.
For those interested in the Jason Arday backstory, Stephanie Lamy describes the rw pack of hounders and co-ordinated attack he experienced.
His main harrasser, David Harris, had begun his anti-Arday campaign three years ago, as soon as Arday was appointed to his Cambridge chair. The process is based on a playbook the US rw have used against minority appointments in academia, of FOI requests and nit-picking.
I have to mention that Harris spent his teaching life at one polytechnic for 37 years. When it became a university in the 2010s, he upskilled with a late-life PhD only 13 years ago. Judging from his earlier papers, he taught tourism studies. Never likely to be Cambridge material.
https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-killing-of-a-black-man
https://broligarchy.substack.com/i/213846374/the-hunt-for-jason-arday
hadn't picked you for a snob.
Not a snob. Harris attacked Arday's academic credibility, sauce goose, sauce gander. He makes much of his 'emeritus professor after 37 years at his university' status. I just looked at his own back-story. That university is in the 600-800 rank of universities internationally in 2025.
While he wrote what looks like dense theory papers in his last ten years of academic research before retirement, that's the sum of his academic life. His last post-retirement published paper in 2024 saw Harris lose that emeritus status because of its unsavory content. Emeritus profs are not actual faculty members, they are retired academics given an office and access to online libraries as a mark of respect. He lost that respect for a paper attacking Critical Race Theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
Always when I read or hear those three words they come with Trouble (with a capital T). It puts me in mind of when I was a kid, sitting at the dining table ordered to eat up all my fish which I didn't like. I sat there with my mouth stuffed with it so as to clear my plate, as told. But I couldn't swallow it, it did not have my regard of good food.
Critical race theory is like that. Regurgitated stuff that has been round for centuries, highly seasoned till it reaches fiery level. It has been forced down our throats at the same time that humanities is being removed from many of our unis so we can concentrate on learning and embracing inhuman systems – that make money. A strange, and unpleasant mouthful is the dish of the day.
wiki "Critical race theory (CRT) is a conceptual framework developed to understand the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity in the United States, social and political laws, and mass media."
What's offensive about that? Examples of race-based laws are local cities in the US passing 'sundown' laws excluding non-whites from certain towns and suburbs at night (legal until federally banned in 1968); gerrymandering to split black-majority US cities into bizarre electorates so that no black state representatives would be elected (this happened in the past month); the well-known phenomenon of black US drivers 'stopped for being black'. What about in medical treatment, where observers 'disproportionately underestimate women of color’s pain compared to all other groups'?
Seems a perfectly sensible and valid topic of study to me. And it’s based on fact, unlike Cofnas’s assertions of the black ‘race’ being much less intelligent than superior whites, thoroughly discredited by research.
Could be that Harris taught at polytechnic too long and his brain got turned.
Tom Sharpe in his Wilt books started off with a polytechnic tutor who went to the wild side.