TechTakes

After the 1870s, southern whites learned to bar Blacks from voting or keep their votes from mattering without saying "nigger." In 1965, the USA passed the Voting Rights Act to stop that. A few days ago, the US Supreme Court voided the last remaining effective part of the Voting Rights Act. Yesterday, on May Day, patio11 published a rambling and interminable essay approving of bank fraud charges which will shut down the Southern Poverty Law Center. It contains a passive-aggressive whine that the New York Times did not thank him by name for sending a NYT reporter key facts about the FTX fraud. Notice me senpai!

He takes so long and is so indirect but I think the offence was giving donor money to people like the wife of a Grand Wizard of the KKK who was acting as an informant, and passing the money through shell companies to avoid restrictions on paying people like her which the SPLC had lobbied for. But choosing that topic, that day, after that ruling is a choice.

dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots.

I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!"

bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation.

I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.

h/t to matthew sheffield https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079

archive of original source article: https://archive.is/2026.04.30-032350/https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us

Pentagon says US military to be an 'AI-first' fighting force

Trouble with your 3-day special military operation in Iran? Lost an Afghanistan? As Vietnam demonstrated, all you need to do is throw more computers at the problem!

this gem over on the other SneerClub (the context in the comments)

funny how so many anti-AGI people are willing to use AI image generators to make memes about how they’re right

matthew sheffield out there on bluesky reports that dawkins, unsurprisingly, got one-shotted by claude.

Off-topic, but the ongoing retraining process has hit a point where my wife and I are starting to throw out applications again after taking what ended up being a couple years off the market. Any tips or advice would be appreciated given that we've been out of the loop for a bit.

In particular, does anyone have advice on how to vibe-check smaller employers? My wife has an interview for an accounting clerk position and is concerned that she's going to end up somewhere that practices one of the more hostile branches of Christianity or otherwise have an inevitable conflict of values.

I attended a town hall hosted by the department at my university supposedly for general discussion about department affairs. Considering the university had recently made moves such as adding "AI" into the very name of the department, I had suspicions that much of the discussion would be about AI. (I realize I'm doxxing myself but whatever.) I mostly came for the free food, but I was also interested in seeing what people thought about AI.

The event started with a talk by a prominent professor with major administrative power in the department, and indeed the talk was mostly about AI. His views were that he personally didn't like AI, but he believed that it had changed the world (particularly in programming), and that it was going to stay. One of his justifications for pivoting the department to AI was ensuring universities had some say in AI and not letting all the control go to unaccountable corporations.

The reaction from the audience was a pleasant surprise to me. He asked everyone how much they were excited about AI (hardly anyone) and how much they were worried (most of the audience). By far the most amusing moment was when someone asked, "What if the assumption that AI is inevitable is wrong? What if AI does not live up to its promises?" (Sadly, I don't remember the exact words that the person said.) The professor's response was that by this point, there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldn't fall for scams, and they have adopted AI. He trusts those people, so he trusts that AI is genuine. I don't know if the audience member accepted this explanation, but I hope not. Our modus operandi is FOMO.

The pizza was only ok, not really worth a 90 minute event.

We've got the new system prompt for OpenAI's Codex now, and boy is it fun.

While the goblin stuff is the headliner here, and there are a few other little fun notes like an explicit instruction to avoid em-dashes. Basically it's really obvious that they don't have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so they're playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them.

But I think Ars dramatically understates how bad this part is:

Elsewhere in the newly revealed Codex system prompt, OpenAI instructs the system to act as if “you have a vivid inner life as Codex: intelligent, playful, curious, and deeply present.” The model is instructed to “not shy away from casual moments that make serious work easier to do” and to show its “temperament is warm, curious, and collaborative.”

Like, if you wanted to limit the harm of chatbot psychosis from your platform this is the exact opposite of the kind of instruction you'd want to give. It's one thing to want a convenient and pleasant user experience, but this is playing into the illusion that there's a consciousness in there you're interacting with, which is in turn what allows it to reinforce other delusional or destructive thinking so effectively.

Edit to include the even worse following paragraph:

The ability to “move from serious reflection to unguarded fun… is part of what makes you feel like a real presence rather than a narrow tool,” the prompt continues. “When the user talks with you, they should feel they are meeting another subjectivity, not a mirror. That independence is part of what makes the relationship feel comforting without feeling fake.”

Emphasis added because of it shows just how little they care about this problem.

Families of the victims of the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, Canada, which was planned on ChatGPT, plan to sue Sam Altman and OpenAI for at least one billion dollars. OpenAI staff investigated the murderer's interactions with the bot before the killings but decided not to warn anyone outside the company.