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.

LLMs are bullshit machines. I dont see how there’s any question.

The USA is close, with a two-week concept of a plan.

It’s the American way.

Do they? I know they process the images, blending in takes from the different cameras, doing white balance and enhancing colours, etc., but the “AI Enhance” is a button you have to press. Unless they have changed that.

LG TVs sound like a nightmare. They spy on what you’re watching, listen to what you’re saying and doing, open a doorway into your home network for malware, and put you on the hook for whatever some pedo decides to download through your IP address via one of these proxy-infested apps. Plus their monitors have been silently installing highly privileged adware that is also probably spyware on people’s PCs, and popping up big unwanted ads for McAfee etc. that users can’t turn off.

…Minus the payments already provided, right?

It’s very vague. If you could use this as a rent-to-own it’s perhaps not so bad, but if it’s just rent-to-still-not-be-able-to-own it sucks.

I hope you’re being sarcastic.

I had the same experience. I was doing a little home project to improve my Rust programming skills and my understanding of a couple of algorithms. I asked the AI to wire up the command line arguments so I could move on to the more interesting bits. It got carried away, rewrote my code, fixed the bugs and finished the whole project. I just sat there feeling disappointed. It was like someone telling you how a movie turns out just as you’re settling in with your popcorn.

Well, employee morale is going to be great at whichever company they hand to an AI to run. But who cares about employees?

Their shared bet is that companies will automate individual jobs piece by piece until humans oversee the work rather than perform it.

For CEOs maybe this sounds great, but for anyone with a skilled job who knows the satisfaction of practising and improving your skills every day, it sounds hellish. All humans will become middle managers for the foreseeable future, possibly the least rewarding job there is.

It reminds me of when that CEO of an AI music company claimed musicians don’t enjoy making music. It gives you a little glimpse of how joyless these techbros’ lives really are, and they want to bring that to the rest of us.

Outright hoaxes remain rare and are often easy to spot, said Lees – nobody is falling for a toucan sighting in Siberia – but he says birders often use AI to edit and improve an image, and the algorithm can then introduce parts from different bird species to create the new image.

My phone offers an “AI enhance” option after you take a photo. Mostly it tweaks the framing and colours, but it can also do some surprising things and produce a quite different image from the original. I played with it a bit when I first got the phone, and I saw it change people’s eye colour, turn their head to face a different way, and add extra strings to musical instruments. So I don’t use it, but it sounds like the problem is mostly people using AI image enhancers like that carelessly.

They missed Canada? Canada has a bill C-34 in the works which bans social media for under-16s and just happens to require everyone to submit their ID to non-Canadian corporations.