Matthew Gault
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mjgault.bsky.social
Matthew Gault
@mjgault.bsky.social
9.7K followers 1.1K following 1.8K posts
Nukes, weird tech, and conflict at @404media.co Host of angryplanetpod.com

Tips: [email protected] // signal: 347 762-9212
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mjgault.bsky.social
as @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social pointed out, part of Microsoft's pitch is that it's AI will work much better if companies feed all their juicy nuclear secrets into the dataset.
November 14, 2025 at 6:24 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
When I showed this slide to my wife, who is a software engineer for a power company who has written environmental impact statements for the DoD, she simply started screaming
Slide from a presentation by Microsoft that outlines how it would use AI to speed up the nuclear licensing process, including the use of AI to generate complicated safety reports.
November 14, 2025 at 6:17 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
The authors of the AI Now report worry that using AI to speed up the licensing process will bypass safety checks and lead to disaster. “Producing these highly structured licensing documents is not this box taking exercise as implied by these generative AI proposals that we're seeing,” Khlaaf told 404 Media. “The whole point of the lesson in process is to reason and understand the safety of the plant and to also use that process to explore the trade offs between the different approaches, the architectures, the safety designs, and to communicate to a regulator why that plant is safe. So when you use AI, it's not going to support these objectives, because it is not a set of documents or agreements, which I think you know, is kind of the myth that is now being put forward by these proposals.” Sofia Guerra, Khlaaf’s co-author, agreed. Guerra is a career nuclear safety expert who has advised the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and works with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the safe deployment of AI in nuclear applications. “This is really missing the point of licensing,” Guerra said of the push to use AI. “The licensing process is not perfect. It takes a long time and there’s a lot of iterations. Not everything is perfectly useful and targeted …but I think the process of doing that, in a way, is really the objective.”
November 14, 2025 at 6:16 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
November 14, 2025 at 3:04 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
November 13, 2025 at 6:58 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
Bruce has approved new 404 Media merch
November 13, 2025 at 3:12 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
what, exactly, the data center would be used for is vague. The University has promised it won't be for the "manufacture" of nuclear weapons. But that wording leaves a lot of wiggle room for other nuclear projects
LANL is going all in on AI. It partnered with OpenAI to use the company’s frontier models in research and recently announced a partnership with NVIDIA to build two new super computers named “Mission” and “Vision.” It’s true that LANL’s scientific output covers a range of issues but its overwhelming focus, and budget allocation, is nuclear weapons. LANL requested a budget of $5.79 billion in 2026. 84 percent of that is earmarked for nuclear weapons. Only $40 million of the LANL budget is set aside for “science,” according to government documents. “The fact is we don’t really know because Los Alamos and U of M are unwilling to spell out exactly what’s going to happen,” Fellows said. When LANL declined to comment for this story, it told 404 Media to direct its question to the University of Michigan.
November 10, 2025 at 3:16 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
a recent city council meeting had a lot of impassioned testimony
“My grandfather was a rocket scientist who worked on Trinity,” Pedri said at a recent Ypsilanti city council meeting, referring to the first successful detonation of a nuclear bomb. “He died a violent, lonely, alcoholic. So when I think about the jobs the data center will bring to our area, I think about the impact of introducing nuclear technology to the world and deploying it on civilians. And the impact that that had on my family, the impact on the health and well-being of my family from living next to a nuclear test site and the spiritual impact that it had on my family for generations. This project is furthering inhumanity, this project is furthering destruction, and we don’t need more nuclear weapons built by our citizens.”
November 10, 2025 at 3:14 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
um, actually
November 7, 2025 at 4:52 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
wild wild wild
“The list of local food support was created weeks ago, when the U.S. Army was concerned that its German employees might not be getting paid during the lapse in appropriations, which could have caused them to need temporary assistance,” a spokesperson for U.S. Army Europe and Africa said. “It was released in guidance provided by the U.S. Army’s Installation Management Command-Europe under the heading ‘Germany Specific Resources and Legal/Rental Information and elsewhere it was listed on websites as ‘local national employee resources.’ It was not intended for use by Soldiers or American civilian employees, who have access to several support programs on their bases.”
November 5, 2025 at 8:45 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
The shutdown of the American federal government is affecting all its employees, from TSA agents to the troops, and the longer people go without paychecks, the more they’re turning to nonprofits and other services to survive. American military bases are like small cities with their own communities, stores, and schools. The US Army Garrison Bavaria covers four bases spread across the German state of Bavaria and is one of the largest garrisons in the world, hosting around 40,000 troops and civilians. Like many other American military websites, the Garrison’s has stopped updating, but did publish a page of “Shutdown Guidance” to help the people living on its bases navigate the shutdown. At the very bottom of the page there was a “Running list of German support organizations for your kit bags” that included various local food banks. It listed Tafel Deutschland, which it called an “umbrella organization [that] distributes food to people in poverty through its more than 970 local food banks,” Foodsharing e.V, and Essen für Alle (Food for everyone).
November 5, 2025 at 6:13 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
Behold the piece that was removed from the site.
November 5, 2025 at 6:12 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
OK man
404 Media reached out to Meta for comment for each of these stories, and in each case Meta’s rebuttal was a mind-bending argument: What is the difference between Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and an iPhone, really, when you think about it? “Curious, would this have been a story had they used the new iPhone?” a Meta spokesperson asked me in an email when I reached out for comment about the massage parlor story.
November 5, 2025 at 3:48 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
slop for the slop tide
But because of an onslaught of AI-generated research, specifically in the computer science (CS) section, arXiv is going to limit which papers can be published. “In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers,” arXiv said in a press release. “Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write.”
November 3, 2025 at 4:35 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
October 31, 2025 at 6:06 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
I am demanding answers from the Cuomo campaign.
Perplexed by all this, I reached out to Cuomo’s campaign for an explanation. I wanted a response to the ad and to get his thoughts on AI-generated political content. More importantly, I needed to know their opinion on the pregnancy. “Does that bill look pregnant to you?” I asked. “I think it looks pregnant, but my editors are split. I would love for the Campaign to weigh in.” Out of journalist due diligence, I also reached out to Mamdani’s press office. Neither campaign has responded to my request for it to weigh in on the pregnancy of the AI-generated cartoon bill.
October 30, 2025 at 7:39 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
thank you to @emilylip.bsky.social for bringing this ad to my attention. Now for the hard questions.

Why does the cartoon bill have thick red lips? The original does not
For some reason, the bill in Cuomo’s ad has thick red lips (notably absent in the original) and appears to be pregnant. Adding to the discordant AI jank of the image, the pregnancy is only visible when the bill is standing up. Sometimes it’s leaning against the steps and in those shots it has the slim figure characteristic of its inspiration. But when the bill stands it looks positively inflated, almost as if the video generator used to make Cuomo’s ad was trained on MPREG fetish art of the bill and not the original cartoon itself. The thick and luscious red lips are present whether the bill is leaning or standing.
October 30, 2025 at 7:38 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
despite the shutdown, the Secretary of Energy said he was able to find SOMETHING to pay contractors .... just not federal employees.
“We have run out of federal funds for federal workers,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press conference announcing furlough on October 20. “This has never happened before…we have never furloughed workers in the NNSA. This should not happen. But this was as long as we could stretch the funds for federal workers. We were able to do some gymnastics and stretch it further for the contractors.”
October 30, 2025 at 4:26 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
one thing lost in Trump's call to resume nuclear testing (other than what the hell he actually means) is that the people who would do the testing are either on furlough or not getting paid right now
Right now, the NNSA might be hard pressed to find someone to conduct the test. It employs around 2,000 people and the shutdown has seen 1,400 of them furloughed and 375 working without pay. The civilian nuclear workforce was already having a tough year. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency cut 350 NNSA employees only to scramble and rehire all but 28 when they realized how essential they were to nuclear safety. But uncertainty continued and in April the Department of Energy declared 500 NNSA employees “non-essential” and at risk of termination.
October 30, 2025 at 4:25 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
and @etbrooking.bsky.social brings it all home for me
“In many ways, Trump administration officials are trying to use these online motifs to smuggle concepts that would otherwise be too extreme for the American people. Most Americans do not want to ‘destroy’ legal asylum seekers. And referring to this group of people as a ‘flood’ is the sort of thing that was once the domain of white-nationalist manifestos. But tie these things together with an image of Master Chief and a Halo Warthog, and the inconceivable becomes a casual joke,” Brooking said.
October 28, 2025 at 9:19 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
the distance between this and Nazi propaganda is vanishingly short
“Second, and far worse in my opinion is this reaches a new level of dehumanization of immigrants by referring to them as the Flood, a parasitic alien lifeform in Halo who exist solely to eradicate all other forms of life and are controlled by the Gravemind, a monstrous intelligence that lurks in the shadows,” Senters said. “Immigrants stand in for the Flood while the Gravemind stands in for the Jews, creating a perfect metaphor for the far-right that allows them to target to of their traditional enemies with exterminationist rhetoric and it's not hyperbolic to say it's exterminationist because in Halo the only way to defeat the Flood is to wipe them out entirely, otherwise they will continue to reproduce.”
October 28, 2025 at 9:18 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
The rogue librarian claims Goodreads is censoring negative reviews of pro-Trump books. They said that Goodreads deleted negative reviews of Under Siege as they came in after its publication on October 14. “These were the honest opinions from real readers who disagreed with the book’s content,” the Librarian said in their post. “When people noticed and complained, Goodreads deleted ALL reviews of the book—positive and negative alike. This wasn’t an accident or a one-time glitch. It was a deliberate pattern.”
October 28, 2025 at 3:53 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
Karbler was fascinating. If he would have had to make the choice in the film, he wouldn't have launched a nuke. But ...he still believes we need more of the weapons.
Karbler, too, said he wouldn’t have launched the nukes. It’s just one nuke, after all. It’s millions of people, sure, but if America launches its nukes in retaliation then there’s a good chance Russia, China, and everyone else might do the same. “Because of the potential of a response provoking a much, much broader response, and something that would not be proportional,” Karbler said. “Don’t get me wrong, 20 million people, an entire city, a nuclear attack that hit us, but if we respond back, then you’re going to get into im-proportionality calculus.” Despite the horrors present on screen in House of Dynamite, Karbler isn’t a nuclear abolitionist. “The genie is out of the bottle, you’re not going to put it back in there,” he said. “So what do we do to ensure our best defense? It seems counterintuitive, you know, the best defense is gonna be a good offense. You’ve gotta be able to have a response back against the adversary.”
October 28, 2025 at 2:07 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
retired Lt. Gen Dan Karbler told me he pitched himself to the crew by scaring them all on a Zoom call
“And I stopped there and I clicked on my camera and I said, ‘ladies and gentleman, that’s how the worst day in American history will begin. I hope your script does it some justice,’” Karbler said. The theatrics worked and, according to Karbler, he sat next to Bigelow every day on set and helped shape the movie.
October 28, 2025 at 2:05 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
on the one hand, IT: Welcome to Derry was one of the worst pilots I've ever seen. On the other hand, it's full of nuclear war fear. I suppose I'll hate-watch every moment of it
October 27, 2025 at 4:23 PM