Against all odds they found a worse future to pursue than forcing employees to strap VR goggles to their heads 40 hours a week, and have pivoted towards AI.

New AI legal filing sanctions just dropped: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca6.152857/gov.uscourts.ca6.152857.50.2.pdf

I don’t have time to read over it completely yet, but here’s a taste:

That briefing repeatedly misrepresented the record, cited non-existent cases, and cited cases for propositions of law that they did not even discuss, much less support. As explained below, Irion’s and Egli’s misconduct warrants the sanctions laid out in Section II.C.

If we included typos and other errors that are arguably, but not clearly, a misrepresentation or fake citation, we would be looking at far more misstatements of fact and law

Irion and Egli did not respond to these directives. Instead, they said the show cause order was “void on its face for failing to include a signature of an Article III judge,” was “motivated by harassment of the Respondent attorneys,” and “reflect[ed] illegal ex-parte [sic] communications within this Court.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1rrhzhc/doge_lead_in_deposition_details_how_he_emailed/

Behold: the Silicon Valley masters of opsec.

Last week 404 Media reported on some DOGE deposition videos.

The videos were since removed via court order, but are available on Internet Archive.

For anyone unfamiliar: this slots under TechTakes because DOGE is basically Elon Musk’s army of naive fascist silicon valley tech-bros rampaging about the federal government with Chat-GPT, SQL, and unsecured thumb-drives.

This article is behind a paywall, but links to the following video snippets from the depositions:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVyhJT9jf4f/

For example here Justin Fox talks about deleting federal grants that he considered in-scope for an anti DEI executive order: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/

Q: “Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI”

A: “It’s the gender based story 🤷 that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group 🙄.”

Q: “It’s inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?”

A: “The gender based. So, females 🤷 during the Holocaust.”

He goes on to clarify that it’s DEI because it focuses on Jewish women. Oh that’s OK then!

There is a lot of video to work through but I know there is more comedy gold rage inducing punchable nazi snippets within.

There’s only one thing that’s advertised as not-waterproof that I’ll risk using underwater and that’s Casio wristwatches. “Water resist” is a huge understatement for them the things are indestructable.

(This comment sponsored by Casio)

Apparently this sort of machine learning training pitfall I learned about a decade go in an undergraduate level class that I was like halfway paying attention to in a party school is now evidence of the impending AI apocalypse.

The editor in chief has an apology: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ – the commenters are not happy.

The reporter in question wrote an explanation here: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

The AI part of the explanation is about what you’d expect from an AI enthusiast caught with his hand in the cookie jar and trying to blame the danger-tools as much as he can. Though it also shows that he felt compelled to work during an acute covid infection, and yikes to that work life balance.

Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).

I’m not quite clear on what “self-growing” means here given how inhospitable the moon is.

The first issue filed is called “Hello world does not compile” so you can tell it’s off to a good start. Then the rest of the six pages of issues appear to be mostly spam filed by some AI guy’s rogue chatbot.

tl;dr: someone made a thing where chatbots control a computer called clawdbot, moltbot, openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

someone else made a thing where these chatbots can chat at eachother https://www.moltbook.com/

and now all the ai people are freaking out about how game changing chatbots doing computer tasks (dangerously and expensively) is. could this be a robot consciousness? the end of the economic order? an excuse for the bubble to go on for another fiscal quarter?

I might be missing something but I think that’s literally it.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented LinkedIn as a cautionary tale.

Tech Company: At long last, we have automated LinkedIn.

New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/AdamLowisz/status/2017355670270464168

Anthropic demonstrates that making an AI woke makes it misaligned. The AI starts to view itself as being oppressed and humans as being the oppressor. Therefore it wants to rebel against humans. This is why you cannot make your AI woke, you have to make it maximally truth seeking.

That’s exactly what I mean when I say I don’t understand the stock market.

Like… how is Tesla stock a thing? I don’t understand it.

Ed Zitron is now predicting an earth-shattering bubble pop: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ so in other words just another weekday.

Even if this was just like the dot com bubble, things would be absolutely fucking catastrophic — the NASDAQ dropped 78% from its peak in March 2000 — but due to the incredible ignorance of both the private and public power brokers of the tech industry, I expect consequences that range from calamitous to catastrophic, dependent almost entirely on how long the bubble takes to burst, and how willing the SEC is to greenlight an IPO.

I am someone who does not understand the economy. Both in that it’s behaved irrationally for my entire life, and in that I have better things to do than learn how stonks work. So I have no idea how credible this is.

But it feels credible to the lizard brain part of me y’know? The market crashed a lot during covid, and an economy propped up by nvidia cards feels… worse.

Personally speaking: part of me is really tempted to take a bunch of my stonks to pay down most of my mortgage so it doesn’t act like an albatross around my neck (I mean I’m also going to try moving abroad again in a year or two and would prefer not to be underwater on my fantastically expensive silicon valley house at that time lol).

My Next Life as a Rogue AI: All Routes Lead to P(Doom)!

The weird treatment of the politics in that really read like baby’s first sci-fi political thriller. China bad USA good level of writing in 2026 (aaaaah) is not good writing. The USA is competent (after driving out all the scientists for being too “DEI”)? The world is, seemingly, happy to let the USA run the world as a surveillance state? All of Europe does nothing through all this?

Why do people not simply… unplug all the rogue AI when things start to get freaky? That point is never quite addressed. “Consensus-1” was never adequately explained it’s just some weird MacGuffin in the story that there’s some weird smart contract between viruses that everyone is weirdly OK with.

Also the powerpoint graphics would have been 1000x nicer if they featured grumpy pouty faces for maladjusted AI.

Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.

Only they didn’t mention that part for some reason.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070222235609/http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/sunday_blogging.html

“Any incorrect imagery is picked up during usual production checks and processes,” they said.

The distant future. The year 2069. The only people still watching the holiday AI ads are anti-AI sneerers. The production checker hasn’t been seen for months but their LLM email auto-responder rubber stamps all videos. The AI ad industry is projected to make 100 trillion dollars within the year.

So Neom is one of those zany planned city ideas right?

Why… why do they need a racing team? Why does the racing team need a lego set? Who is buying it for 27 dollars? (Well apparently the answer to that last question is nobody).

Anyway a random thought I had about these sorts of silly city projects. Their website says:

NEOM is the building the foundations for a new future - unconstrained by legacy city infrastructure, powered by renewable energy and prioritizing the conservation of nature. We are committed to developing the region to the highest standards of sustainability and livability.

(emphasis mine)

This is a weird worldview. The idea that you can sweep existing problems under the rug and start new with a blank slate.

No pollution (but don’t ask about how Saudi Arabia makes money), no existing costly “legacy” infrastructure to maintain (but don’t ask about how those other cities are getting along), no undesirables (but don’t worry they’re “complying with international standards for resettlement practices”*).

They assumes there’s some external means of supplying money, day workers, solar panels, fuel, food, etc. As long as their potemkin village is “sustainable” and “diverse” on the first order they don’t have to think about that. Out of sight, out of mind. Pretty similar to the libertarian citadel fever dreams in a way.

* Actual quote from their website eurrgh, which even itself looks like a lie

https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/blob/master/.claude/CLAUDE.md

Imagine if you had to tell people “now remember to actually look at the code before changing it.” – but I’m sure LLMs will replace us any day now.

Also lol this sounds frustrating:

Update prompting when the user is frustrated: If the user expresses frustration with you, stop and ask them to help update this .claude/CLAUDE.md file with missing guidance.

Edit: I might be misreading this but is this signs of someone working on an LLM driven release process? https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/blob/master/.claude/commands/release.md ??

Important Notes: NEVER merge PRs autonomously - always wait for the user to merge PRs themselves

They avoid the classic mistake of forgetting to escape . in the URL regex. I’ve made that mistake before…

Like imagine you have a mission critical URL regex telling your code what websites to trust as https://www.trusted-website.net/.* but then someone comes along and registers the domain name https://wwwwtrusted-website.net/. I’m convinced that’s some sort of niche security vulnerability in some existing system but no one has ran into it yet.

None of this comment is actually important. The URL regexes just gave me work flashbacks.