Tootfinder

TL;DR Trump had another brain fart. Nevertheless it’s unlikely anything good will come out of it.
Tech Industry Scratches Its Head Over Trump's 'AI Force' Proposal - Slashdot https://politics.slashdot.org/story/26

China has made AI a national mission, but local workers' fear of displacement mirrors worries abroad, and potential for social unrest may force CCP to slow down (Michael Schuman/The Atlantic)

China’s AI Rollout Is Messier Than It Looks
A top-down tech revolution is harder to manage than a bottom-up one.

What does unintentionally mean here "Google's Gemini AI model unintentionally hacked three companies by guessing passwords during a security test with Israeli startup Irregular."
Can I as a human unintentionally guess passwords? I thought it was called brute force attacks and therefore intentional #ai

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signs an EO to slow down data center approvals, create an AI task force to evaluate workforce displacement, and more (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/policy/997573/virginia-governor-spanberger-da…

Virginia governor creates an AI task force and moves to restrain data centers
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) signed an executive order banning NDAs for data center development and creating an AI task force.

Donald Trump said he will soon appoint an artificial intelligence czar
amid heightened scrutiny of whether the technology is progressing at a dangerous pace, he announced Saturday on Truth Social.
In a long post defending the industry, Trump said he would create an
“AI Force” without specifying its exact functions.
He added that in his capacity as president, he would “not stand by” and allow its “decimation, or destruction.”
Lawmakers and tech leaders have soun…

Trump Pledges to Appoint an ‘AI Czar’ as He Defends the Technology
The president did not detail what the office’s responsibilities would look like or who he could appoint to the role.

Trump says he will appoint an AI czar and form an "AI Force", in a Truth Social post that rejects AI safety concerns as a "hoax" (María Paula Mijares Torres/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Trump to form 'AI Force,' name AI czar but rejects calls for constraints (Isaac Arnsdorf/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/19/trump-form-ai-force-name-ai-czar-rejects-calls-constraints/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260919/p54#a260919p54

According to this updated password hacking table from #HiveSystems, my password system is firmly in the green zone. 💚
https://www.hivesystems.com/password

The 2026 Password Table Is Here: How Fast Can a Hacker Crack Your Password?
The 2026 Hive Systems Password Table is here. This year's cracking rig is a rented 16x RTX 5090 fleet running against bcrypt, and was about 24% faster than last year. See the latest brute force times, why AI makes the rig easier to build but can't crack bcrypt itself, and what quantum really threate

1) Use AI to flood FOSS maintainers with reports of security issues.
2) Burn out the maintainers who refuse to use AI to process said reports.
3) Force remaining maintainers to rely on on AI to process security issue reports. I mean, how else are you going to deal with a new "security" release that includes 600 patches?
4) Profit? I mean not really, but at least now we've created an extremely unsustainable feedback loop.
This is a thing that I'm seeing …

Sources: Microsoft security chief Hayete Gallot, who took over in February, has prioritized AI tools, cut several hundred roles, replaced senior execs, and more (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-new…

Microsoft’s New Security Chief Replaces Top Execs to Force an AI Overhaul
Microsoft, the largest cybersecurity software seller in the world, is overhauling that business to cash in on corporate anxieties about AI-powered hacks. Hayete Gallot, who took over Microsoft’s security business in February, has directed more teams to develop AI security products such as those ...

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are “all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that ‘AI is paying off’ every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as ‘better value’ in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street.”

Back when I was diagnosed with #diabetes, I've found two apps to help me. Both were proprietary.
The first one came from the glucometer's manufacturer, and it featured the ability to copy its readings over Bluetooth. It also had a pretty useful bolus calculator. However, it was also annoying in a number of ways: it required an account with all the implied data sharing, was premiumware (though using their glucometer implied a free "pro" version), was quite childish in design, didn't respect disabled animations or dark theme.
The second one was an independent Polish app to compute carbs from meals. It wasn't perfect, but it had a rich database of products and quite a few convenient features (like copying meals or calculating carbs based on recipes). Unfortunately, the authors went full way into AI hype, and while I didn't use any of the "AI" features (they were premiumware anyway), the app itself was becoming increasingly crappy.
Eventually, this motivated me to look for a new app. I've settled for #Diaguard. It's just got the basics: meal composition and computing carbs, plus letting me log blood sugar and insulin doses manually. It used to have a bolus calculator before I used it, but it was removed over legal concerns. Still, it's open source, it's nice, it's got no crap and it respects the dark theme. And honestly, given that I've already reached the point of overriding bolus calculator, I've figured out it's enough for me.
In fact, it's so "enough" that I'm not even using it regularly. I mean, if my blood sugar is predictable and my meals are predictable, there's no reason to waste time logging them. The app is there to assist me when I need it, not force me to use it.
I still keep the two other apps installed. The first one in case I had doubts over insulin doses and wanted to use the bolus calculator. The second one over my database of meals; though I had already exported it, so I just need to figure out if the export is complete enough.
#Android

Trump Pledges to Appoint an 'AI Czar' as He Defends the Technology (Angie Orellana Hernandez/The Washington Sun)
https://www.washingtonsun.com/technology/trump-appoint-ai-task-force-czar
http://www.memeorandum.com/260919/p57#a260919p57

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are “all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that ‘AI is paying off’ every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as ‘better value’ in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street.”

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are “all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that ‘AI is paying off’ every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as ‘better value’ in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street.”

What makes me lose trust in a maintainer even more than seeing "[AI tool] has previously contributed to this repository." on it overview page? Seeing that old forks have diverging master branches, where the diff indicates that "Co-Authored-By: [tool]" lines have been removed in a force push.
The former might have defensible use cases. The latter indicates lack of understanding of versioning, combined with either loss of control over agents, or deliberate attempts to…

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh names Marc Andreessen and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to lead a task force on the economic impact of new technologies, including AI (Andrew Ackerman/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/20

Fed chief taps Trump ally Marc Andreessen to advise on how AI reshapes work
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh named venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to co-lead a task force on AI's economic impact — a technology his firm has bet billions on.

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/116919466945948663
The implementation of AI in the workforce is inherently anti-worker and anti-human,
both in how it might replace us and in how it might force workers to push themselves to inhumane levels of work to prove their wort…

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok take turns as AI czar. One quarter/season each, and within a year they will solve all the world's problems. 💡🙄
#AI_force #AI_czar #propsal #sarcasm #policy #society

Anthropic plans to lease a 16-story building in Lower Manhattan and double its NYC workforce to 1,000 people this year, as AI companies expand in the city (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/nyregion/anthropic-ai-boom-nyc.html

Anthropic Expands in Manhattan, Part of an A.I. Boom in New York
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, plans to lease a 16-story building in Hudson Square and to double its work force in New York City to 1,000 people this year.

We have been trained and trained ourselves to lose touch with the magical, life-giving force of stories.
And our life-sustaining love for stories has been beaten out of us by AI slop, by a shitty, commercialized culture industry, by living under capitalism and end-times fascism, etc.
I get why we feel that way, and I feel it, too. But there’s something really, really wrong there.
Like our air and water and soil and atmosphere, I think we have been trained and trained oursel…

Why the stories working people tell ourselves about ourselves matter
“We are not the only ones to face hard times. Our ancestors who faced such times left us their stories so that we would know what to do now. Don't let those stories go to waste! There is power in them. We have power in them.”

A record 12.7M graduates are entering China's workforce in 2026 as AI adds uncertainty to an oversaturated job market with a shrinking pool of entry-level roles (Yan Zhuang/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/202…

China’s New Graduates, Facing a Dire Job Market, Must Also Contend With A.I.
A record 12.7 million young people are looking for jobs as the country embraces artificial intelligence — and as the technology begins to upend the work force.

Big Companies Aim to Ease A.I. Transition for American Workers (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/business/economy/ai-work-force-training-job-losses.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260625/p121#a260625p121

OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and others launch Raise Us, a new non-profit led by ex-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to help US workers adapt to AI (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/business/economy/ai-work-…

Big Companies Aim to Ease A.I. Transition for American Workers
OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and Microsoft have signed on to an effort led by Gina Raimondo, a former commerce secretary.

Global VC funding hit a record $510B in H1 2026, with OpenAI and Anthropic accounting for $217B, or 43% of the total; in Q2, VCs put $205B into 5K startups (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/global-startup-exits-ipo-ma-soar-a…

Crunchbase Data: Global Startup Investment Hit Record $510B In H1 2026 As AI Boom Accelerates Funding And...
Investors poured more than $200 billion into startups globally in the just-ended quarter, making Q2 2026 the second-largest quarter on record, our data shows. And, with IPOs and acquisitions returning in force, the second quarter notched one of the strongest periods for venture-backed exits in years.

Sail, whose software optimizes how AI models run on existing chips, emerges from stealth with $80M in seed and Series A led by Kleiner at a $450M valuation (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/06/25/exclusive-sail-apple-k…

Exclusive: A former Apple engineer thinks AI infrastructure is built for the wrong future. Investors just gave him $80 million to fix it
Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, the startup is betting an explosion of AI agents will force enterprises to rethink the economics of computing.

Chinese state media: Xi Jinping called for more defense applications using autonomous and AI technologies, as he pushes to build an advanced fighting force (Josh Xiao/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-31…

The DOD seeks to recruit engineers experienced in frontier AI, machine learning and automation, and data systems, to embed them "down to the unit level" (John Harney/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20