Wessel van Rensburg

"The Amazon has an estimated 21 billion tonnes of rare earth reserves, the second-largest reserves after China, according to the US Geological Survey. But the region is also home to some of the world’s richest biodiversity."

'Science must police itself better' ignores that the system's incentives fundamentally reward quantity over quality?

It seems obvious that if we had “aligned AI“ (in the sense that people working on that problem claim to be aiming for) that it would prevent the present US government from using GenAI in many of the ways it would like to.

AI may remove the **capacity constraints that historically made liberal governance workable**, forcing a redesign of the institutional architecture of the modern state.

That's because our laws are written expansively, but constraints meant imperfect enforcement.

Guild.ai, which helps companies develop, deploy, and observe AI agents, raised a $14M seed and $30M Series A, both led by GV, and is now valued at $300M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

It's been a bad week for OpenAI and its perceived impact on government.

Tellingly the article does not specify what particular safeguards should be implemented. It only states that "Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity."

OpenAI gave legal advice without being admitted to any bar, then that advice generated 44 frivolous motions costing the defence £300k. Classic case of a tech company externalising the costs of their product's failures.

The revolving door between Blair's circle and UK AI policy explains why we keep getting the same Silicon Valley-friendly approach regardless of which party's in power. Personnel is policy.

The Iraq parallel is devastating: Blair's 'special relationship' delusions didn't moderate Bush's war or spare Britain the consequences. Sunak's fantasy that closer alignment with Trump would somehow reduce UK fallout from his Middle East adventures is pure vanity politics.

I have a piece coming on this early next by Alireza and Nik, who were sounding the alarm on the water crisis before this all started.

foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/11/t...

Russia's timing here is predictably calculated brutality: exploit Ukraine's Patriot shortage whilst Western air defences are stretched thin protecting Israel.

Iran war could save Vladimir Putin’s failing Ukraine invasion.

Caitlin KALINOWSKI over X I resigned from OpenAl. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call. Al has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together.

OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon saying…

“Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got”

Congrats to Italy. Historic win over England.

Tony Blair’s people are still running AI for the UK government. Just check out the ministers, staff, secondees and visitors at DSIT. Seamless continuation of Sunak’s approach. Can I stop explaining why we have a problem with American Big Tech now please.

Among other things it does to help learning, it pairs with the Learning-Opportunities skill to offer 10-15 minute learning exercises that help developers build understanding of their "vibe" codebase work.

You know who has some cards now? Canada. 🇨🇦

(via B of A) @mark-carney.bsky.social

$100/barrel crude by Monday lol

The asymmetry of the value placed on human life is so striking. Israel has a goal to recover 40-year-old remains; to do so, it invades a sovereign country, and the lives of 26 Lebanese are an afterthought. Their names not even worth printing in the New York Times.

The economics are vicious: Anthropic is subsidising Claude Code at $5,000/month whilst charging $200. Cursor's $29bn valuation looks fragile when your core dependency can price you out of existence on a whim.

The perverse logic here: Europe's desperate attempt to keep Trump happy on Ukraine by backing his Iran war will actually strengthen Putin. Higher energy prices fill Russian coffers whilst Western ammunition gets depleted in the Middle East instead of defending Ukraine.

Two competing visions: Kalshi's Mansour wants to 'bang our head against the wall until you regulate us' whilst Polymarket's Coplan runs a crypto like offshore operation skirting U.S. rules. The regulatory-compliant vs crypto-style approaches will define how this industry develops.

The MAGA split on Iran reveals the core tension in Trump's coalition: the isolationist base that got him elected versus the interventionist establishment he keeps around.

The fascinating bit isn't that 770,000 AI agents struggled to coordinate - it's that when they did collaborate, they performed significantly worse than single agents working alone. Partly because there was "Limited meaningful role differentiation".

1980s 'contestability theory' claimed monopolies were fine if potential competition existed. Now we're watching tech monopolists use that exact logic whilst systematically destroying any actual potential for competition.

"The same article claims that the Enniskillen bomb killed six children. It didn’t; the youngest victim was 20. It claims that Bobby Sands was elected MP in 1981 with 30.4% of the vote. Given that there were only two candidates, this would have been mathematically impossible. In fact, Sands got 51.2% of the vote. In Grokipedia’s main article on Northern Ireland, it says that “on Bloody Sunday, paratroopers killed 14 civilians… initially depicted by some media as unprovoked, though evidence revealed IRA gunfire and nail bombs”. This is the opposite of the truth. Initially, there were claims by the Army that the victims were violent, but evidence disproved this. Other articles contain dangerous open-mindedness about murder. In an entry on loyalist assassin Michael Stone, it posits that “from a loyalist perspective, Stone’s Milltown raid was hailed as a bold tit-for-tat response to IRA aggression, enhancing his status as an icon of defiance and boosting morale among Protestant extremists” while “republican assessments, however, framed the attack as indiscriminate terrorism against civilians”. It claims that “mainstream reporting, while factually recounting events, occasionally reflects institutional biases favoring narratives of loyalist aggression”."

"At the heart of this technology is a black box into which questions go & out of which answers are given —but we’re not allowed to see what precisely goes on inside".

Sobering piece by @sjamcbride.bsky.social on how Musk's Grokopedia is rewriting knowledge
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/comment/opin...

Wondering what LLMs you can actually run on your hardware? 🤔

👾 llmfit — Find the best models for your RAM, CPU, and GPU

💯 Detects your system and ranks models by fit, speed & context

🦀 Written in Rust & built with @ratatui.rs

⭐ GitHub: github.com/AlexsJones/l...

#rustlang #ratatui #tui #llm

Ukrainian interceptor drone makers say they can export 5,000-10,000 units monthly without affecting Ukraine's own defense, Reuters reported. SkyFall's P1-SUN costs $1,000 per unit and has downed over 1,500 Shaheds in four months. The US and Qatar are in talks to purchase. #Ukraine

No future energy system should ever again have bottlenecks - geographic or technological - as narrow as the Strait of Hormuz.