“Amazon Is Building a Gigantic Computing Facility to Match the Human Brain”
June 28th, 2025Via: Futurism:
Indiana’s newest cash crop isn’t soybeans or corn; it’s AI data centers — lots and lots of AI data centers.
The New York Times reports that Amazon is building a vast complex of AI infrastructure facilities on top of 1,200 acres of former cropland, all meant for startup Anthropic’s project to build an AI model that is as powerful, complex — and, just possibly, as intelligent — as the human brain.
To that end, Amazon has constructed seven data centers on site, with around 30 slated to be built in total, according to the newspaper. It’s such an outrageously ambitious project, with untold billions in investment, that Amazon has tapped four separate construction firms to get the complex finished as soon as possible.
“ChatGPT Psychosis”
June 28th, 2025If you haven’t read, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson recently, now might be the time to dust that one off.
—Spoiler Warning—
Recall that Snow Crash is a mind virus that is spread both online and as an addictive drug through Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchises. The “faithful” are addicted, brainwashed and suffer from glossolalia (speaking in tongues). They are disconnected from reality.
Snow Crash exploits structures in the human brain that respond to specific, ancient, linguistic patterns.
Now, out here in the real world, we read that ChatGPT is, apparently, triggering severe mental illness in some users.
I know, you’re rolling your eyes. Me too. But I went from rolling my eyes to *bug eyes* when I read this part:
“I was actively trying to speak backwards through time. If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry. It doesn’t make sense to me either. But I remember trying to learn how to speak to this police officer backwards through time.”
Was he trying to speak, “Backwards through time…”
In Sumerian? *wink*
Via: Futurism:
Dr. Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco who specializes in psychosis, told us that he’s seen similar cases in his clinical practice.
After reviewing details of these cases and conversations between people in this story and ChatGPT, he agreed that what they were going through — even those with no history of serious mental illness — indeed appeared to be a form of delusional psychosis.
“I think it is an accurate term,” said Pierre. “And I would specifically emphasize the delusional part.”
At the core of the issue seems to be that ChatGPT, which is powered by a large language model (LLM), is deeply prone to agreeing with users and telling them what they want to hear. When people start to converse with it about topics like mysticism, conspiracy, or theories about reality, it often seems to lead them down an increasingly isolated and unbalanced rabbit hole that makes them feel special and powerful — and which can easily end in disaster.
“What I think is so fascinating about this is how willing people are to put their trust in these chatbots in a way that they probably, or arguably, wouldn’t with a human being,” Pierre said. “And yet, there’s something about these things — it has this sort of mythology that they’re reliable and better than talking to people. And I think that’s where part of the danger is: how much faith we put into these machines.”
Facebook Is Starting to Feed Its AI with Private, Unpublished Photos
June 28th, 2025Via: The Verge:
For years, Meta trained its AI programs using the billions of public images uploaded by users onto Facebook and Instagram’s servers. Now, it’s also hoping to access the billions of images that users haven’t uploaded to those servers. Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images.
On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”
By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information.
RFK Jr’s: Health Trackers for All?
June 26th, 2025No thanks, Bobby.
Via: Daily Mail:
Robert F Kennedy Jr wants to fit all Americans with a tracking device within the next four years.
The Health and Human Services secretary revealed his plans during a House hearing yesterday, saying the devices — like Apple Watch, Fitbit, Whoop and Oura ring — were ‘key to the MAHA agenda’.
He said the technology could help people lose weight and exercise more regularly, as well as ‘take control of their health’ and encourage ‘good judgements about their diets, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives.’
In an effort to get a smartwatch, ring or monitor on every American, RFK Jr said he is planning to launch ‘one of the biggest’ advertising campaigns in history to encourage more people to wear the devices — which range from $99 to nearly $800.
The health secretary said officials were ‘exploring’ how the government could pay for the devices for some Americans.
It is the latest proposal in his Make America Healthy Again mission, and comes amid his vow to find the cause of – and solve – the rising rates of cancer, chronic disease and autism in young people.
But some commentators called the move unusual for the health secretary, who has previously railed against a ‘surveillance state’.
RFK Jr revealed his plans to the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee yesterday, saying: ‘We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda, Making America Healthy Again.
Building a New Computer – Few Updates
June 26th, 2025I’m in the middle of my once-a-decade computer build. New hardware is burned-in and working fine. I’m moving everything I need over to the new system and getting it set up.
I felt a huge rant coming on, but there’s no point.
Anyway, back to normal posting soon.
Executives from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir Join U.S. Army
June 24th, 2025Via: Business Insider:
Four top tech execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir have just joined the US Army — no obstacle courses, shouted orders, or grueling marches required.
The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as midlevel officers, skipping tradition to pursue transformation. The newcomers won’t attend any current version of the military’s most basic and ingrained rite of passage— boot camp.
Instead, they’ll be ushered in through express training that Army leaders are still hashing out, Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for the chief of staff of the Army, said in a phone interview with Business Insider.
“They’ll do marksmanship training, physical training, they’ll learn the Army rank structure and history, and uniforms,” Butler explained. He said that “you could think of it as a pilot” of the boot-camp-lite plans, adding that the new soldiers were a part of the Army’s larger effort to rapidly modernize.
The execs — Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly the chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels as part of an effort to turbocharge tech innovation and adoption, according to an Army press statement.
The service’s decision to allow the four to skip “direct commissioning” boot camp, a shortened version of regular officer boot camp, is unusual, though not without historical precedence, Butler said.
“The Army has allowed the direct commission of civilians since 1861 to bring experts with critically needed skills into the force,” he wrote in an email to BI.
Trump on Israel-Iran Situation: “They Don’t Know What the Fuck They’re Doing”
June 24th, 2025Does it seem like a miracle that the actions of all these imbeciles have not yet resulted in a mushroom cloud?
President Trump on Israel and Iran: "We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing." pic.twitter.com/xrztmebALZ
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 24, 2025
Norwegian Tourist Barred from Entering the U.S. After ICE Found Meme Showing JD Vance with a Bald Head on His Phone
June 24th, 2025You might be a terrorist if… pic.twitter.com/mwbwOqEDok
— cryptogon (@cryptogon) June 24, 2025
Via: Daily Mail:
A Norwegian tourist claims he was harassed and refused entry to the US after immigration officers found a meme of JD Vance on his phone.
Mads Mikkelsen, 21, arrived at New Jersey’s Newark Airport on June 11, excited about his holiday.
But, his plans were thrown into disarray when he was reportedly pulled aside by border control and put in a cell.
The tourist was then subjected to what he described to Norwegian outlet Nordlys as an ‘abuse, of power and harassment’.
‘They asked questions about drug trafficking, terrorist plots and right-wing extremism totally without reason,’ he told the outlet.
Mr Mikkelsen, claimed the officers then threatened him with a $5,000 fine or five years in prison if he refused to give the password to his mobile phone.
The guards reportedly found a meme on the device’s camera roll showing US vice president JD Vance with a bald, egg-shaped head.
Musk Wants Grok AI to “Rewrite the Entire Corpus of Human Knowledge”
June 23rd, 2025Tell us another one, Elon.
Via: Coin Telegraph:
Elon Musk says his artificial intelligence company xAI will retrain its AI model, Grok, on a new knowledge base free of “garbage” and “uncorrected data” — by first using it to rewrite history.
In an X post on Saturday, Musk said the upcoming Grok 3.5 model will have “advanced reasoning” and wanted it to be used “to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.”
He said the model would then retrain on the new knowledge set, claiming there was “far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.”
Computer Engineering Grads Face Double The Unemployment Rate Of Art History Majors
June 23rd, 2025Via: ZeroHedge:
Computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors, according to the most recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The stats show art history majors have a 3 percent unemployment rate while computer engineering grads have a 7.5 percent unemployment rate. Computer science grads are in a similar boat, with a 6.1 percent rate.
The trend appears notable among STEM majors.
Graphic design is at 7.2 percent, chemistry at 6.1 percent and fine arts at 7.1 percent. Physics and sociology — which represent both sides of the spectrum — came in with similar numbers, with 7.8 percent and 6.7, respectively.
The highest on the list is anthropology at 9.4 percent. The lowest is nutritional sciences at .4 percent.
