Recent content on Ministry of Intrigue
Last.fm announces that it has separated from CBS and is now an independent company. Today, Last.fm begins a new chapter as an independent company. Ownership has changed, but the product you use every day has not. Your account, your listening history, and your data remain exactly where they are. The team building Last.fm is the same. The service continues as normal. — Last.fm Team, Last.fm is now…
Top AI labs have recently changed their policies on API usage and third-party tools — like Anthropic essentially banning the use of OpenClaw unless subscribers pay extra — due to the extra strain. “You’ve got these tools that are basically just sitting as background processors on everyone’s laptops and desktops, just continuously waking themselves up, generating some tokens,…
Ars Technica reports that an article touting the effectiveness of ChatGPT in education has been retracted by the original publisher due to questionable methodology. That analysis supposedly showed how “ChatGPT has a large positive impact on improving learning performance” along with a “moderately positive impact on enhancing learning perception” and “fostering…
Nilay Patel lays out a concept he calls “software brain”, an outlook that sees everything in terms of algorithms, databases, and loops. Specifically, he breaks down how this perspective fuels the tech industry’s obsession with adding AI to everything despite the clear polling data showing that their users hate it. This bit from the second half really stuck out to me. I’ve…
To put it mildly, the “AI” industry is not built on a sound foundation. Investors are spooked by the staggering amount of debt underpinning the industry’s obscene growth, especially since none of the flagship names care about profitability. And in their desperate search for capital to shore up their ballooning valuations, these companies have turned toward governments, and the…
Charlie Stross writing in response to a horrific exchange in the Epstein files that suggests Epstein asked of Bill Gates: “How do we get rid of poor people as a whole?” You can find the original email exchange on the DOJ website. (For now.) As an editor of mine once observed, America is ruled by two political parties: the party of the evil billionaires, and the party of the sane (so…
From an excellent interview with Rob Perlman on his recent Fallout appearance: I’m about 15 seconds into my conversation with Ron Perlman when we get sidetracked. When I join our Zoom call and mention offhandedly that I’m currently in Minneapolis, Perlman—who got his MFA in Theater from University of Minnesota—jumps in to ask me what life is like now that ICE has descended upon the…
Every single one of these problems comes down to one simple thing: growth. Limited Partners invest in venture capitalists that can show growth, and venture capital invested in companies that would show growth, which would in turn increase their value, which would allow them to sell for a greater amount of money. The media covers companies based not on what they do but their potential value , a…
After three lovely years with the team at NewCompliance , I’m now searching for new opportunities. I’m extremely proud of everything I achieved there, particularly in the robust product management process we were able to introduce. I’ll miss my wonderful team of colleagues, and am deeply grateful for all I learned from them about the healthcare industry. However, it is time to…
Glyph puts forward a strong argument for why the next innovations in technology will not be big flashy ones. The impulse to find the One Big Thing that will dominate the next five years is a fool’s errand. Incremental gains are diminishing across the board. The markets for time and attention2 are largely saturated. There’s no need for another streaming service if 100% of your leisure…
In a wide ranging, but compulsively readable essay, Erin Kissane discusses how information systems for knowledge can suddenly erode, and how easy it is for us to assume we understand something when we do not. A cartoon model of collective knowledge-making goes like this: Some people—scientists, reporters, scholars, fixers and builders—go out and mess around with the surfaces of the world and…
Warning : spoilers for Stranger Things season five are found below. Writer and general SFF badass, Kameron Hurley, has posted what might be the definitive analysis of the Stranger Things finale, and why it worked so well even with its narrative flaws. They made the kind of subtext that I took for granted and very much appreciated in more complex and “high minded” shows and just made it…
Glyph lays out his rules of engagement if you want to argue with him about AI. This excerpt is from his second rule, “ No ‘Look at this cool thing’ ”: Purely as a productivity tool, I have had a terrible experience with genAI. Perhaps you have had a great one. Neat. That’s great for you. As I explained at great length in “The Futzing Fraction” , my concern…
You ever start writing a thread and realize it should be a blog post instead? Embrace that feeling. This is one of those. I’m kicking myself that once again, despite living in the suburbs of Philly, I didn’t go to PAX Unplugged or any associated events this year. I know I should have, at the very least to say hi to friends and meet with collaborators and sponsors, but I put it off…
Ewan Croft’s thoughts on why his blog doesn’t focus on a niche category really resonated with me. I think of my blog less as a publication and more as a digital garden – a space that grows organically, sometimes in unexpected directions. Some plants (posts) are carefully cultivated over days, while others spring up spontaneously because I had a thought at 02:00 that needed to be…
On my way out of the polls / Proof of life Did my civic duty and cast my vote this morning. This year, most of the races are uneventful in my area. The highlight has been a (somewhat desperate ) campaign by the commonwealth’s Republican party to get people to vote out Democratic majority of the state Supreme Court. I was delighted to vote retain for our sitting justices.
Alasdair Stuart writing on Sigourney Weaver’s performance in The Cabin in the Woods : Sigourney Weaver is one of modern western horror’s Patron Saints, and you relax when she shows up. Hey look, it’s Ripley – the mother of every final girl, here at the end to save the day. So when she, instead, enables the atrocities at the cabin, it’s a betrayal so large that you…
Comics writer and game designer Kieron Gillen has written a great post over at Old Men Running the World about what draws him to running a new game, and the things that turn him off. I found myself nodding along as I read, especially when it came to his turn-offs. The most basic criteria is actually the easiest. I will flick to a games’ average NPC stat block. I will compare it to the length…
Erin Kissane has written an insightful piece on the challenges facing Bluesky now that the Trump administration has begun the join the network, and what it means for the future of moderation. Last week, the United States Department of Homeland Security—last seen brutalizing journalists, children, and clergy in the streets of Chicago— joined the Bluesky social internet platform and began, with the…
This is a very cool tribute. In honor of the late Robert Redford, “Sneakers”, in high def ANSI with full subtitles: ssh sneakers@ansi.rya.nc (needs a terminal with 24 bit color support) — Ryan Castelluci, via Mastodon The tooling behind it is written in Rust. It’s delivered via SSH is to achieve the necessary compression. According to them the data rate for the ANSI version…
One of the not-funny ironies of the 21st century has been that everything we thought was social media is actually just mass media, except it’s terrible and broken. Luckily, journalists and creators are finally figuring out how to leave the old media models behind and enter the future. […] Platforms such as X, Facebook and TikTok were made for mass consumption. Every post, video and…
Last week, I finished migrating my open source projects to Codeberg . You can read more about why I did it in this article . Here are my notes from the migration, how it was different from my private Forgejo migration , and how I got everything working the way I wanted. Special considerations # The projects I was going to migrate were using a number of GitHub features that I would have to account…
I recently moved all my personal/private projects from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo instance, and it’s been a great experience. You can read about why I did it in this article . Here are my notes from setting up the Forgejo server, migrating the repository data, and setting up CI workflows via Forgejo Actions. Installing and configuring Forgejo # Forgejo is a really nice and lightweight…
Last week, I finished migrating all my maintained projects away from GitHub. I did this for a few reasons. The why # Due to their ownership of GitHub, Microsoft has an undue level of influence in the open source world as it has become the de facto host for repositories. Microsoft was the origin of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy when it comes to dealing with competing open source…
Love this bit of world building. Faith healers discovered their snakes now had opinions, many of which were kinder than their own. Relics were demanding their burials, along with a share of what wealth had been accrued through illegal use of their matter. The graveyards woke with barghests and gwisin. Rat kings whispered through the walls. The housing market collapsed as hauntings drove tenants to…
OpenAI’s recent blog post on responding to self-harm conversations includes a surprising disclosure. Namely that they scan ChatGPT chat logs for possible criminal behavior which can be referred to police! “When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and…
This kind of thing should make everybody stop and really think before deploying any AI agents. We simply don’t know to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks. Any AI that is working in an adversarial environment—and by this I mean that it may encounter untrusted training data or input—is vulnerable to prompt injection. It’s an…
Another huge fuckup in the AI space, apparently caused by the Paradox.ai’s team vibe coding an HR screening system for the McDonald’s. Until last week, the platform that runs the Olivia chatbot, built by artificial intelligence software firm Paradox.ai, also suffered from absurdly basic security flaws. As a result, virtually any hacker could have accessed the records of every chat…
The team at Brave has published a vulnerability related to Perplexity.ai’s AI-enabled Comet Browser. This is particularly nasty one demonstrating that the browser is vulnerable to malicious prompts that can be injected from any visited webpage. In their demonstration, they show the browser visiting a Reddit post where a comment contains the injection text hidden behind a spoiler tag. If…
The Glaze Project at the University of Chicago has released their previously announced AI poisoning tool for images, Nightshade . This follow-up takes a more aggressive approach then their previous tool, going from defensive to offensive strategies. An AI model that ended up training on many images altered or “shaded” with Nightshade would likely erroneously categorize objects going forward for…