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Reposted by Kendall Swarthout

Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 10d

I'm not an economist but seems worrying that the whole US economy is seven companies in a trenchcoat, passing the same $20 up and down

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 10d

NVIDIA and OpenAi:

Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“

@bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

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Reposted by Kendall Swarthout

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 9d

#WarRavagedPortland

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · 9d

KEXP is an incredible station. If you don’t know about them yet, start listening www.kexp.org

Help Power KEXP's Fall Drive

www.kexp.org

Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · 20d

It’s all about the women’s race at the inaugural Mammoth 200. Incredible to watch these runners on my home turf 🦣⛰️ www.youtube.com/live/yTZT9AJ...

2025 the MAMMOTH 200 | Day 2 Morning | Stream 4 presented by CRAFT

YouTube video by Mountain Outpost

www.youtube.com

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · 25d

“The researchers demonstrated that hallucinations stemmed from statistical properties of language model training rather than implementation flaws.”
www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

www.computerworld.com

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · 29d

In case anyone needs a primer on the authoritarian playbook youtu.be/vK6fALsenmw?...

History Professor Answers Dictator Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

YouTube video by WIRED

youtu.be

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Reposted by Kendall Swarthout

My Imaginary Brooklyn @myimaginarybrklyn.bsky.social · Sep 15

#illustration #creativity

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 15

Well deserved 👏🏻

Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 15

“They don’t really understand what’s going on, but that deep pile of data allows them to present an illusion of intelligence. I wouldn’t actually call it intelligence.”

Gary Marcus outlines an AI-realist position chatting with chess legend Garry Kasparov.

open.spotify.com/episode/564U...

The Computer Scientist

open.spotify.com

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 12

Oh no you didn't Disney 🤭 youtu.be/y6wLcx7AkRM?...

ONE HOUR OF DANCING MON MOTHMA | Andor Season 2 | Disney+

YouTube video by Star Wars

youtu.be

Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 12

lol did the dudes from ’Mountainhead’ establish this center?

Kendra Albert @kendraserra.bsky.social · Sep 11

Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

We align the aligners

alignmentalignment.ai

Reposted by Kendall Swarthout

Riding With Robots @ridingrobots.bsky.social · Sep 11

One-stop resource from NASA about yesterday's announcement of a potential biosignature on Mars: science.nasa.gov/mars/the-mar...

Screenshot of part of a web page showing the planet Mars, with text that read: The Mars Report.

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 9

“Generative ai would not be the first tech fad to experience a wave of excessive hype. What makes the current situation distinctive is that AI appears to be propping up something like the entire U.S. economy.”

The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · Sep 8

We might be “experiencing an AI bubble,” Rogé Karma argues. “If that bubble bursts, it could put the dot-com crash to shame—and the tech giants and their Silicon Valley backers won’t be the only ones who suffer.”

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be?

The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.

bit.ly

Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 9

Dan Carlin is one of my favorite podcasters, it really doesn’t get better than Hardcore History.

Here Dan reflects on the current times in America, with a historian‘s perspective. www.samharris.org/podcasts/mak...

Sam Harris | #433 - How Did We Get Here?

Sam Harris speaks with Dan Carlin about the decades-long buildup to our current political moment.

www.samharris.org

Reposted by Kendall Swarthout

John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · Sep 8

I suspect we're in the twilight period of traditional software development, and that an increasing number of successful supply chain attacks like this will be the driver towards fundamental shifts towards paranoia about dependencies and formal verification.
jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-fo...

Anatomy of a Billion-Download NPM Supply-Chain Attack

A massive NPM supply chain attack has compromised foundational packages like Chalk, affecting over 1 billion weekly downloads. We dissect the crypto-stealing malware and show you how to protect your p...

jdstaerk.substack.com

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 8

The smoke is unbearable rn in the Eastern Sierra 😞💨

Daniel Swain @weatherwest.bsky.social · Sep 7

#GarnetFire in Sierra Nevada is extremely active today--perhaps most active it has been so far, w/large & episodically tall (~30k ft) pyroCb plume. Now over 40k acres & burning in heavy forest, it'll likely burn until sustained rain/snow arrives (none on horizon). #CAfire #CAwx

Current satellite snapshot showing large pyrocumulonimbus plume atop the Garnet Fire, with large volume of smoke moving northeastward.

Reposted by Kendall Swarthout

Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · Sep 7

The more I learn about history, the more I understand how important learning about history is. This is doubly important in my own professional field.

@olivia and colleagues driving home the point against the inevitability of AI reminding us of this.

When we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared on the scene in the last three years. And they experience confusion and even dissonance when they discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades, if not centuries or even millennia (Bloomfield 1987; Boden 2006; Bogost 2025; Guest 2025; Hamilton 1998; Mayor 2018). Such ahistoricism facilitates “the AI-hype cycles that have long been fuelled by extravagant claims that substitute fictionforscience.”(Heffernan, 2025,n.p. Duarte etal.2024).

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 8

“correlations with human output mean little to substantiate claims of human-likeness, especially when the input to the AI models tested is the output of human cognition in the first place”

A truly incredible piece, so many amazing quotes. Well worth the read and a much needed counter.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 6

Ghost pepper strawberry jam might be a peak culinary combo 🌶️🍓

Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Sep 4

Lovely podcast about philosophy. It’s approachable and modern.

open.spotify.com/show/4aIlXHT...

Post-Truth

open.spotify.com

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Jun 26

The AI coding tools are dope but we still need to optimize code for humans to read. It’s still a human who will be debugging your multi-layered ternary during an incident, for now.

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Jun 25

www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

What’s Happening to Reading?

For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.

www.newyorker.com

Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · Jun 3

Having just returned from a trip to Baja California Sur, I find myself feverishly planning the next adventure. This article illuminates a simple but difficult to embody truth about the cycles of drudgery and excitement. moretothat.com/travel-is-no...

Travel Is No Cure for the Mind - More To That

Who you are in a venue matters far more than the venue itself.

moretothat.com

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Reposted by Kendall Swarthout

Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · Jun 2

The “AI jobs apocalypse” heralded by AI CEOs like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman is a story with one particular audience in mind: the bosses who are eager to see it happen

The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses

As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei forecasts mass job loss, Business Insider lays off staff and embraces AI

www.bloodinthemachine.com

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Kendall Swarthout @kendalls.bsky.social · May 1

I’ve always been fascinated by the engineering problems a product like Figma faces. This is an amazing read on how they (successfully) implemented horizontal sharding in their databases www.figma.com/blog/how-fig...

How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale | Figma Blog

Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.

www.figma.com

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