Author | Lightnews

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 1d

Maybe I spent too much as a kid with the Civilisation games' technology trees. But it really does feel like ceremonial burial can lead to satellites. And that climate change will be fought with technologies created adjacent to industries that helped cause it.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 1d

Mobile phones begat battery development that massively accelerated renewable energy.

There seems a decent chance AI will do the same for carbon capture, because data centres that can't wait turn to LNG – but can't defend doing so. And have, effectively, infinite money to address that tension.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 2d

Quantum is so weird. The encryption side is scrambling to stay ahead of it, the startups are wondering when the avalanche of money will hit - yet we don't have a single proven ROI-capable use-case.

Unprecedented potential, to be sure, potentially an utter transformation, but it's all theoretical.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 4d

These are not people who come from a place of belief in Trump, but diplomats and academics desperately trying to make sense of what is, in a functional sense, divine self-contradiction.
Good thing we still keep some theologians around for just this kind of eventuality.
*drafts feature pitch*

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 4d

Remarkable to listen to analysts talk about Donald Trump's statements (in this case on Nigeria) with the same language Christians use about the Old Testament: it's true but don't take it literally, it meets the morality of the audience, influences through description though it sounds like command.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 7d

Cracking TLS certificates could basically break the entire internet as we know it, doing unimaginable harm. But the crypto good guys are on it.

blog.cloudflare.com/bootstrap-mtc/

A while ago it was Signal. Likewise, post-quantum could be utter disaster for messaging. And likewise, they're on it.

Keeping the Internet fast and secure- introducing Merkle Tree Certificates

Cloudflare is launching an experiment with Chrome to evaluate fast, scalable, and quantum-ready Merkle Tree Certificates, all without degrading performance or changing WebPKI trust relationships.

blog.cloudflare.com

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 7d

All the noise is about AI. But it is striking how 2025 is becoming the year in which the IT sector comes to grips with the encryption disaster that is quantum computing.

This week: Cloudflare says it is about to start experimenting with a neat way to prevent server impersonation.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 8d

This begs for some FOIs and data work, on the reliance of gov dot uk on what-was-Twitter, and whether there is even discussion on spinning up some Mastodon servers or something.
(Which you can totally classify as extended defence spending under Nato rules...)

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 8d

One way to think about it: like any good employee, LLMs works towards their metrics – and if you have bad metrics, you get bad output from, eventually, bad employees.

Some good stuff happening in benchmarking, though, which could help significantly.

www.science.org/content/arti...

AI hallucinates because it’s trained to fake answers it doesn’t know

Teaching chatbots to say “I don’t know” could curb hallucinations. It could also break AI’s business model

www.science.org

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 11d

There is no better pro-parent propaganda than Sunday morning. And that hits at a more visceral level than tax breaks and parental leave ever will.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 11d

Tactical proposal for countries with low birth rates: get younger people into family-friendly social spaces before 9AM Sundays.

Instead of sleeping off Saturday night, get late-20-year-olds where the toddlers – fresh from a good sleep, managed by parents not trying to juggle work – are being cute.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 13d

This has always been a fundamental problem across journalism and data analysis both: you need to ask the right questions. A companion system that acts as a sense-check on what I've missed is terribly exciting, now that I see it in action.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 13d

Gemini is the one top-end system I effectively get for free, and until this week it ranked way, waaaaayyyyyy below Perplexity and ChatGPT in use.
Then integration with Google Docs got good, and suddenly I'm using it to answer a lot of questions about my work and financials I never thought to ask.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 23d

But hey, the boats come with helicopters, so I guess people find ways to get around.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 23d

First time back in Manhattan for a couple of years after hanging around Europe, and I've figured out what feels wrong: too few bicycles.

Elsewhere they have grown into predatory flocks you had better keep an eye on if you like your limbs unbroken. Here they are few, and furtive.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 24d

"I lost propulsion while going at low speed" is the good news from the Jeep software update – over the air, just needed drivers to click "yes" – that bricked vehicles mid-drive.

www.thestack.technology/jeep-softwar...

Jeep software update bricks vehicles

“Please exercise extreme caution”

www.thestack.technology

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 28d

The circular deals the likes of NVIDIA and OpenAI are cooking up? A potential disaster. The idea that AI is pure hot air? Not buying it.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 28d

The BoE and IMF warnings about the consequences of an AI bubble popping are necessary and important. The danger is real.

But, as someone who lived through dotcom, there is a fundamental difference: AI has huge revenue.

Customer value is in doubt. Cashflow is not.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · 29d

I was a second-generation kid in a school system that actively indoctrinated for Apartheid, alongside robust religious institutions and the like.

And then, one day, the majority of people who went through that system went "yeah, let's not".

Conversion and radicalisation aren't the norm.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · Oct 7

It doesn't help that an ex Deloitte partner heads the government department that has happily accepted all of this.

I sometimes think consultants are given too hard a time for no good reason – and then they do stuff like this.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · Oct 7

* didn't check the LLM output
* issued a faceless "we stand by our work" when busted
* took more than a month to correct errors
* underplayed those errors
* didn't do any kind of erratum
* offered, or accepted a demand for, only a partial refund
* still won't talk about it

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · Oct 7

Honestly can't remember the last time I saw such an outstanding effort to keep failing at every turn – and to synergise the individual failings.

Deloitte in Australia
* didn't disclose the use of an LLM in an important report
* didn't use its own LLM
(cont)

www.thestack.technology/deloitte-use...

Deloitte used govt client's own GPT to invent references

Then failed to disclose it, took a month to fix errors publicly pointed out, and is apparently on the hook for a partial refund

www.thestack.technology

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · Oct 7

There should be a specific prize for that kind of high-context, high-foresight high-skill shot.
Maybe named the This Is Why You Still Need Specialist Photographers Yes Even With GenAI You Bloody Beancounters prize.

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Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · Oct 6

Selling orange juice? You'd better be extremely clear whether it is from concentrate and if you have any other ingredients in there.

Selling a house? Go caveat your emptor if you think there will be up-front disclosure.

Phillip de Wet @phillipdewet.bsky.social · Oct 6

Even if you are buying groceries, a vendor can't change the price of goods between the time you put it in your basket and handing over your money.

Real estate transaction? Nah, we can't be bothered with binding offers and conditions-precedent contracts, way too complicated.

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