Routine automation trims headcount; complex automation trims salaries. AzAz.
Tech: really small drones. EDA for rare earth. FEMA not answering calls (calls for alarms not heard). Head of NASA?
Security: Cartels, FBIs, and phones. Iran and US, and critical infra. UK MoD’s report on F35s. Remote access to chips. Nova scotia cyber attack.
People: the cool ones (notes). Time billionaires. When polic;e uses AI in evidence pics. First year out of prison.
Planet: What kills bees. Plague in Arizona? Psilocybin and cellular age.
AI: 40% of projects to be killed in 2y. Slowburn AI revolution. And scrapping. Anduril’s. Futures of coding? Managers use of AI - and entry-level impact. Weak grid for AI in the US.
Thoughts on the EU AI Code of Conduct.
AI to free or loose time?Wishlist: Pacifism as a map (PDF).
Code in the Age of Chaos
In the twice-bleached, caffeine-infused air of Central London, a woman named Elara sat at her cluttered desk, staring at a bright screen. She was a coder by trade and a philosopher at heart, mulling over the paradox of her time. A mere hour earlier, she had dived into a rather alarming AI-generated report – a treatise released by her company detailing the United Kingdom’s F-35 Lightning II program. It contained every bureaucratic hiccup and delivery delay imaginable, weaving through the UK’s military recent purchases like an unwelcome guest at a seven-course dinner. If planes were supposed to supplant squabbles, they were doing a lousy job of it.
Elara adjusted her glasses, wincing slightly at the shoddy tech town hall she'd just escaped. “Behold,” her boss had proclaimed, waving an arm like a deranged conductor, “we are the future of coding!”^1 Yet here she was, still wrestling with the sentiments of the previous evening, where a plague—a genuine one, not just the metaphorical sort that infested 280,000 customer records at Nova Scotia Power—had claimed a life in Arizona, reminding her awkwardly of mortality's inconvenient habit of crashing festive parties.
Deciding to distract herself, she clicked onto an open-source application featuring something promisingly named Local LLM Notepad. The idea of using large-language models on her aging laptop without the need for complex installations seemed fantastical yet elegantly simple. If only the generals running the F-35 program could boot up their combat plans this effortlessly. “Maybe a coupe of prairie dogs would be more persuasive?” she mused, pondering the unexpected links between climate chaos and military procurement while noting that rodents weren't the most effective negotiators.^2
An alert popped onto her screen, advising about an increase in hacking attempts from Iranian-affiliated baddies targeting critical systems like hers. She swore under her breath. While her coding prowess could direct neural nets, it couldn't defend against more nefarious outcomes. She shivered with thoughts of El Chapo’s hackers—able to track someone simply with a flick of a virtual wrist^3—wondering if the CEO of Anduril Industries had any tips on incorporating a 'kill switch' into her life.
"So much reliance on AI," she chuckled to herself. “What’s next? An algorithm to plan my week? Because I’d gladly give it my time—though it might just stretch it into another dimension where meetings are delightful affairs.” Elara worried momentarily that the future was being penned by those who didn’t truly appreciate the value of time, nor the right to say "no." Rather, it was disappearing like a mirage in the desert of endless notifications and deadlines.
She shifted, remembering Ursula Franklin, the fierce feminist physicist whose insight on pacifism surged through her mind like coffee through an IV. If only pacifism had a better grip on technology, perhaps it wouldn’t be framed as a futuristic pipe dream when it could easily guide strategic decisions in war^4.
With a hopeful suddenness, Elara visualized her progress towards the future: the coding had become more about qualities like risk-taking and authenticity, rather than pie charts and pixel-perfect graphics. As she plunged back into her code, she found herself comforted by the thought that through every line she crafted, she wasn't just building programs; she was forging a weapon against the mundanity of existence. Like pair of conjurers at a stage aptly lit by glowing screens, she was determined to bend time and technology to make life a bit more bearable, and—dare she say—cool. ^5
1. No conductor has ever been as disorganized as a coder with missing semicolons.
2. Although, in the right conditions, they might serve more than just snacks.
3. The only real question here: cleverly orchestrated synchronized swimming or simply criminal masterminds?
4. Imagine if honchos asked physicists for the solution to world peace instead of F-35 contracts.
5. Less about lava lamps and mohawks, more about solving existential crises one bug at a time.