floofloof

If a piece of the model's answer is genuinely useful, quote it and say why. "I checked with Claude and this part lines up:" works great.

It still drives me nuts when my boss does that. Especially since the next thing he sends is a bunch of AI-generated code he just wants us to copy and paste into our application. He treats anything the magic AI says as authoritative, and it overrides anything an actual person can say to him.

Khosla had seen Microsoft’s announcement last year that it was winding down its free nonprofit licenses beginning July 2025, but, per the record, he should have still been in the clear. He renewed Canopy’s yearly license last October, and Microsoft had emailed him to confirm he would retain access until Oct. 4, 2026. Khosla had no reason to expect anything would change, and he received no additional warnings—even as Microsoft kept in regular touch about other software updates. And he later learned he wasn’t alone, when another company service representative called the very next day and told him that roughly 171,000 small nongovernmental organizations “lost everything” in their OneDrive accounts.

In a statement emailed to Slate, Microsoft wrote that the original offers were “retired to streamline our grant offerings and simplify our grant portfolio,” adding, “We strongly advised our nonprofit customers and partners to transition to a different Microsoft 365 offer for nonprofits before their renewal date to avoid disruption and data loss.”

As an IT person I can't imagine just deleting customers' data one day without keeping an archival copy. This feels like a mistake, in which case they're being dishonest in order not to admit to their mistake. And if it wasn't a mistake, it's a sign that they aren't competent at understanding their customers, making plans, or communicating. Either way, it shows Microsoft is not a company you can have confidence doing business with.

Without evidence, the idea that there's a hidden camera in the exam room is just paranoid speculation. By contrast, this was an actual visible camera in the exam room, and a camera that was obviously the doctor's own personal device. It makes sense to worry more about the camera you know is real.

Here's a link with more details of that attack:

https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/claude-ai-just-cracked-post-quantum.html?m=1

I have been enjoying Qobuz, since quitting Spotify a couple of years ago. Everything's better quality, they have proper credits and PDF CD booklets, the classical music metadata is much better, it encourages you to listen more deliberately to music you choose, and I don't feel dirty for funding scumbags.

It is better at producing relevant information, but it may never be great, or even as good, at producing reliable information.

OK, but the point still stands if you allow that: It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are often not, in fact, helpful.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.

Karp is a nut; Thiel is a nut. Is Palantir elvish for "bag o' nuts" or something?

In ISBNdb’s now-removed marketing materials, it admitted that getting caught destroying printed books during the scanning process would not be a good look. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site said. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

So their solution was to do the evil thing secretly?

Sends like we have that anyway. Let's replace them with AI then switch the AI off.

There's no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.

There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They're rare, so that means they're hard to find (that's what rare means, after all).

Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.

The destruction is the point.

Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.

But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.