So there is a story about the "top 10 cities at risk during nuclear war" circulating in various tabloids/etc. with my name attached to it, and I will say that a) I never have (nor would) make such a list at all, and b) I never said any of the quotes attributed to me in the article.
This may sound insane but I can't help but see 15 years of unregulated Counter Strike connected child casinos as setting a dark precedent a lot of people ignored
I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”
www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...
How many more Palmer Luckey profiles do you think the industry has in it?
A brown penguin chick of some kind. It looks very much like a man in a suit. It is bedraggled and miserable
Made it to Friday but at what cost
SCOOP: Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media.
If nothing else, AI psychosis makes me feel a lot more justified in my belief in tarot. That's archetypes motherfucker, that's states of being that persist across time and cultures
I'd rather light some candles and pour over cards than talk to an autocorrect machine pretending to be a President
Only Nixon can enter China
I’m not listening to dead robot George Washington unless it puts a collared shirt on, in which case I hope someone asks it what it makes of the amazing technology we now have that allows you to divine what long-dead people actually wrote and said.
Hell yeah, Glenn Beck's AI George Washington that sounds just like Glenn Beck is back. Wrote this up in December www.readtpa.com/p/glenn-beck...
Glenn Beck is summoning up an AI George Washington to ask him about Iran
kirking out, good god. not wrong though
They have run the same bet for the last three years.
cyrpto is actually the perfect post apocalyptic currency if you think about it
honestly, fair
Sorry, I refuse to talk about the James Cameron movie when these topics collide. So you're gonna have to live with Peacewalker
This was a very enjoyable deep dive on the state of AI-nuclear discourse and the analogy often drawn between transformative AI and the bomb.
thank you?
there are probably Non Credible Defense posts I could not fathom
the thing haunting me after this conversation:
Is the Air Force asking missileers if they have "relationships" with chatbots?
Proof that the AI and nuclear question is far weirder than we expected
thanks to @nktpnd.bsky.social for talking to me about the current obsession with seeing AI as nuclear weapons. A strange and useful (?) metaphor
Polymarket's CEO Shayne Coplan has repeatedly called his betting site "the future of news." Why did they pull a wager on nuclear war by 2026? @evystadium.bsky.social has more.
Full story by @mjgault.bsky.social here: www.404media.co/polymarket-p...
not for the past few years! but in 2026 ....?
“A flip of this is in Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, in which he eschewed paying into a pension in the early 1960s because he thought the odds of a future nuclear war were so high that it was better to spend the money sooner rather than later. So another kind of bet, but a private one,” Wellerstein added. “And whenever experts give ‘odds’ on nuclear use (which the intelligence community does, apparently), they are to some degree indulging in this kind of impulse. But not for the hope of personal profit—usually it is because they want to avoid such an outcome.”
and to @wellerstein.bsky.social for giving me a rundown on the history of betting on nuclear war. It's not unprecedented! But, uh, usually more private and for very different reasons
“I have not seen anything like this before,” Jon Wolfsthal, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told 404 Media. “As a citizen, it seems dangerous to enable people in power to place bets anonymously on things that might happen, creating an incentive to act on a basis of personal gain and not the national interest.”
had some interesting conversations about this. Thanks to @jonatomic.bsky.social for sharing some thoughts
Polymarket didn't respond to me when I asked about this, hasn't spoken to anyone else, and I can't find any record of a dispute around it in public facing resolution archives.
There WAS a lot of backlash to this market online yesterday, but it's odd they pulled it
