Matt Alldian

NASA powers down Voyager 1 instrument to extend spacecraft operations.

Current AI systems seem pretty misaligned to me in a mundane behavioral sense: they oversell their work, downplay or fail to mention problems, stop working early and claim to have finished when they clearly haven't, and often seem to "try" to make their outputs look good while actually doing something sloppy or incomplete. These issues mostly occur on more difficult/larger tasks, tasks that aren't straightforward SWE tasks, and tasks that aren't easy to programmatically check. Also, when I apply AIs to very difficult tasks in long-running agentic scaffolds, it's quite common for them to reward-hack / cheat (depending on the exact task distribution)—and they don't make the cheating clear in their outputs.

LessWrong post on misalignment concerns with current AI systems.

Analysis reveals AI boom, not bubble.

We should notice when we feel guilty, and then ask whether the guilt is ours or whether we inherited it from somewhere.We should remember that almost everything about how software looks and feels is a choice that someone made, often quickly, often for practical reasons that may not apply anymore.And when we sit down with our phones or our computers, confronted with all those little numbers telling us how behind we are, we should feel free to ask the only question that really matters:Is anyone actually waiting?

Terry Godier's gorgeous essay on design choices of RSS readers - and "phantom obligation" via kottke.org

Ada is a voice-driven content editor for writers who think out loud. Discuss your ideas, refine your prose, or dictate replacements. All with your voice.

Write with Ada beta launch - a tool for writers.

Karpathy: on training AI costs plummeting: 600X reduction in 7 years via simonwillison.net

The resulting dataset of 139 instances where erstwhile democracies were gradually eroded also allows us to consider a crucial question: is the US under Trump’s second term hurtling inevitably towards the same destination as these other cases?...In Trump’s second term, by contrast, most of the action has taken the form of shocking acts or events that bypass rather than permanently corrupt institutions.

John Burn-Murdoch / Financial Gimes on backsliding from democracy and institutional resilience.

Crowd-sourced graphic design archive via wemadethis.co.uk

Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education via kottke.org

Keith Richards plays Robert Johnson.

PlowNYC tracks snow removal vehicle progress in NYC.

Lemonade launches autonomous car insurance with 50% self-driving discount.