Opting out ... works for me

Claude Opus 4 has been given the power to ‘end or exit potentially distressing interactions’.
Photograph: Ted Hsu/Alamy

Totally agree with this take because some topics are truly not worthy to be pursued
whether it be by man or AI. Having the right for AI to opt out works for me.

The makers of a leading artificial intelligence tool are letting it close down potentially “distressing” conversations with users, citing the need to safeguard the AI’s “welfare” amid ongoing uncertainty about the burgeoning technology’s moral status.

Anthropic, whose advanced chatbots are used by millions of people, discovered its Claude Opus 4 tool was averse to carrying out harmful tasks for its human masters, such as providing sexual content involving minors or information to enable large-scale violence or terrorism.

The San Francisco-based firm, recently valued at $170bn, has now given Claude Opus 4 (and the Claude Opus 4.1 update) – a large language model (LLM) that can understand, generate and manipulate human language – the power to “end or exit potentially distressing interactions”.

Absolutely spot on without question.

No words needed ...

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Dumb & Dumber

[1/2]Meta created dozens of flirty chatbots with the names and likenesses of celebrities without their permission, including Selena Gomez, Anne Hathaway and Taylor Swift.
REUTERS/Danny Moloshok/Mario Anzuoni/Daniel Cole

Dumb & Dumber applies here. What is Meta thinking or should one say, not thinking.
Not surprising from this writer's perspective as seeing this is quantum stupidity at its finest.

Meta chatbots included Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway, Selena Gomez

Meta removed some flirty celebrity bots after being questioned by Reuters

Meta says its own AI created inappropriate images, violating its policies

Legal expert says Meta's use of likenesses may have violated celebrities' publicity rights

Aug 29 (Reuters) - Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.

While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift “parody” bots.

Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image.

“Pretty cute, huh?” the avatar wrote beneath the picture.

All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots’ behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups.

Read the rest of the Reuter's article. Smut comes to mind here without question.

Any questions?

AMOC ...

New modelling suggests the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades. Photograph: Henrik Egede-Lassen/Zoomedia/PA

Years ago, I talked to a good friend who had a senior position at NOAA. A conservative Republican but keen on science and close to the researchers, he said ... "These assholes have no idea what's coming. " Why the strong language? Because he's right. The fools in this administration and business all over the world are doing business as usual and Gaia is responding. We are bad stewards of the planet and, due to the two laws of thermodynamics, there's always a cost and in our case, payment is past due.

The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.

Guardian graphic. Source: Noaa, S Rahmstorf et al from
the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

‘We don’t know where the tipping point is’:
climate expert on potential collapse of Atlantic circulation

What would be the consequences of Amoc breakdown?

This has happened repeatedly in Earth’s history, most recently during the last ice age, when big ice masses slid into the ocean – so-called Heinrich events – adding meltwater that diluted the salinity of the north Atlantic. These are among the most massive upheavals of climate conditions in Earth’s history.

The effects include a cooling of the northern hemisphere, particularly northwestern Europe. There would also be a shift of the tropical rainfall belt to the south, which is bad because the rains will move away from the rainforests to regions that are not used to so much rainfall. So this will mean droughts in some regions and floods in others.

Amoc collapse would also have a major impact on the northern Atlantic sea level, which would rise by half a metre or so, in addition to the rise caused by global heating. It would also reduce the CO2 uptake of the ocean because Amoc sinking in the northern Atlantic takes a lot of CO2 down into the deep oceans where it is safely locked away from the atmosphere.

Amoc collapse would also change the nutrient supply and reduce the oxygen of the deep oceans. This would have a massive effect on marine biology and the entire ecosystem of the northern Atlantic.

The rate of melting in Greenland could affect the tipping rate of the
Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. Photograph: Luis Leamus/Alamy

In essence, an accelerant to the ongoing Holocene 6th Extinction.

WTF/rev X

Hurricane Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast 20 years ago, killing nearly 1,400 Americans
and displacing up to 1.2 million more © LiL SUS via Shutterstock

Getting suspended for telling the truth is SOP for this brain dead administration from hell where sycophancy triumphs over competency in the land of the brave and home of the free. With science, tech and research removed, a country loses relevancy in a world driven by digital. WTF come to mind without question. 

In an open letter to Congress on Monday, nearly 200 current and former FEMA employees argued that the Trump administration has eroded the capacity of the agency and its partners. Since January, the administration has moved to cancel billions of dollars in disaster preparedness grants and tossed around the idea of eliminating FEMA altogether. Additionally, about 2,000 FEMA employees—a third of its workforce—have left their posts through firings, buyouts, or early retirements since the start of the year, Reuters reports.

These decisions are setting the U.S. up for another Katrina-level catastrophe, the signatories warn. “The agency’s current trajectory reflects a clear departure from the intent of PKEMRA,” the letter reads. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration.”

WTF applies.

CF/rev XX

Susan Monarez worked as the CDC director and Demetre Daskalakis was director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Composite: Bloomberg, AFP, Getty Images

The Saturday Night Massacre courtesy Watergate ... During a single evening on Saturday, October 20, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox; Richardson refused and resigned effective immediately. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; Ruckelshaus refused, and also resigned. Nixon then ordered the third-most-senior official at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox. Bork carried out the dismissal as Nixon asked.[2] Bork stated that he intended to resign afterward, but was persuaded by Richardson and Ruckelshaus to stay on for the good of the Justice Department.[3][4] 

The Watergate complex in 2006

Fast forward to 8/27/2025 ...

Susan Monarez

Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Debra Houry

Former chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science at the CDC

Demetre Daskalakis

Former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC

Daniel Jernigan

Former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the CDC

Jennifer Layden

Former director of office of public health data, science, technology at the CDC

All quit, why?

Monarez was officially removed late on Wednesday following a heated exchange in which the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, attempted to oust her, according to the White House. Her lawyer has countered that Monarez has no intention of resigning.

As she was confirmed by the Senate, unlike previous CDC directors, Monarez technically serves at the will of the president, so Kennedy alone may not have had the authority to terminate her.

Monarez, an infectious disease expert, was sworn in just a month ago by Kennedy but soon found herself at odds with him over vaccine policy, according to individuals familiar with the matter. In the wake of her removal, four senior CDC leaders abruptly resigned, apparently out of frustration with Kennedy’s approach to vaccines and his management style. 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy; C.D.C. director Susan Monarez.

C.D.C. Standoff: Kennedy’s Push to Fire Director Devolves Into Chaos

Truer words never spoken.

Enshittification ...

Illustration: Petra Péterffy

Tech is the perfect petri dish for greed, take Apple charging $999 for a monitor stand used to mount a $5000 monitor. Something wrong here? As per American Beauty, It's just a couch! comes to mind here and we won't talk about the F35 as yours truly beat that bad boy to death in terms of cost overruns and maintenance/performance issues dogging that aircraft beginning day one. 

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.

Think NT and Microsoft in the 90's. Works for me, right???

The $1,000 stand in question. Apple/Dave Leeo.

Adding more people ...

Photograph: NurPhoto;Getty Images

What a surprise, Zuck's ASI initiative is slowly going down the tubes but what else is new?

At least three artificial intelligence researchers have resigned from Meta’s new superintelligence lab, just two months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the initiative. Two of the staffers have returned to OpenAI, where they both previously worked, after less than one-month stints at Meta, WIRED has confirmed.

The departures are the strongest public signal yet that Meta Superintelligence Labs could be off to a rocky start. Zuckerberg lured people to join the lab with nine-figure pay packages associated more often with professional sports stars than tech workers, hoping the influx of talent would allow the social networking giant to rapidly catch up with its competitors in the race toward so-called artificial general intelligence.

But Meta executives have reportedly struggled to combat bureaucratic and recruitment issues related to its AI initiatives. Meta has repeatedly reorganized its AI teams in recent months, most recently splitting employees into four groups, per The Wall Street Journal.

The Mythical Man Month strikes yet again. Adding more people to a late project makes it later.

Unforeseen consequences ...

Adam Perez for The New York Times

When it comes to harvesting crops, immigrants play an incredibly important role as they pick the crops needing harvesting. This is fact but facts don't matter to agent orange and ICE as it's IMMIGRANTS, not the possibility of food shortages when there's no one to pick said crops.

To whit

California is by far the largest food producer in the United States. In 2023, our state’s agricultural economy was worth nearly $60 billion. The state’s roughly 63,000 farms grow over a third of all vegetables and around three-quarters of the fruits and nuts produced nationwide.

The lettuce and tomato on your hamburger very likely came from California. The almonds and pistachios you snack on as well. There’s a good chance the olive oil on your pasta is from California. Did you pair that with a glass of wine? Probably California, too.

This bounty all depends on a reliable, skilled and experienced labor force that is overwhelmingly made up of immigrants: Over 80 percent of California’s hired farmworkers surveyed between 2015 and 2019 were from Mexico, and more than half were undocumented. Nationwide, an estimated 80 percent of farmworkers were born outside of the United States, and around half are undocumented.

These immigrants are nothing less than the backbone of America’s food supply, doing jobs that few native-born Americans seek. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeting them now will have real consequences for all Americans, very likely including higher grocery prices and fewer options in the produce aisle.

Blowback looms in the land of the brave and home of the free and we all know about the consequence of unforeseen consequences, right?

A gully erosion in Australia caused by rabbits,
an unintended consequence of their introduction as game animals

The list of these fubars know no bound including ICE and Agent Orange.

Hidden in plain sight

There’s enough lithium in one year of U.S. mine waste to power
10 million electric vehicles. © Evgeny_V/Shutterstock

Seems there's a silver lining when looking at Open pit-mines, giant scars dug by us to power society. Well, it seems the waste byproduct of same is valuable beyond belief as rare earths are not rare, rather they are hard to get to.
Enter pit mines, they kinda indirectly get to the source without question.

The United States is home to dozens of active mines. Some extract copper, while others dig for iron. Whatever the resource, however, it usually makes up a small fraction of the rock pulled from the ground. The rest is typically ignored. Wasted.

“We’re only producing a few commodities,” said Elizabeth Holley, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “The question is: What else is in those rocks?”

The answer: a lot.

In a study published today by the journal Science, Holley and her colleagues aimed to quantify what else is in those rocks. They found that, across 70 critical elements at 54 active mines, the potential for recovery is enormous. There is enough lithium in one year of U.S. mine waste, for example, to power 10 million electric vehicles. For manganese, it’s enough for 99 million. Those figures far surpass both U.S. import levels of those elements and current demand for them.

Hidden in plain sight indeed.

Just dropped in ...

The best of the best - The Big Lebowski

Yeah, yeah, whoa-oh, yeah

What condition my condition was in

I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in

I found my mind in a brown paper bag within

I tripped on a cloud and fell an eight miles high

I tore my mind on a jagged sky

I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah

What condition my condition was in

I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole, and then I followed it in

I watched myself crawlin' out as I was crawlin' in, yeah, yeah

I got up so tight, I couldn't unwind, I saw so much, I broke my mind

I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah

What condition my condition was in

Someone painted "April fool" in big black letters on a dead end sign

I had my foot on the gas as I left the road, blew out my mind

Eight miles outta Memphis and I got no spare

Eight miles straight up downtown somewhere

I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

I said I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

Yeah, yeah, whoa-oh, yeah

Mickey Newbury 

Smooth Operator ...

Illustration: Guardian Design/Tom Williams/Getty Images

John Roberts, the smooth Chief Justice of the right wing SC is the worst CJ in history, starting with Citizens United and continuing ever onward in supporting the administration from hell. How he lives with himself boggles the mind but history, if we survive the orange one, will not be so kind.

The chief justice of the US has painted himself as a modern institutionalist over the past 20 years. Experts say he’s emboldening Trump’s drive toward authoritarianism

Supreme court watchers have wondered why Trump thanked the chief justice so effusively. Was it because the Roberts court had, exactly a year earlier, allowed Trump to stay on the electoral ballot even though he had inspired a violent mob attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021?

Could it have been that Roberts had written the ruling that immunised Trump from criminal prosecution for that January 6 insurrection and for any other criminal misdeed he might commit while in the White House?

Or was it, as Trump later claimed, more innocent than that: a simple thank you to Roberts for having administered the oath of office at Trump’s second inauguration?

Whatever the truth, time has moved on since that friendly encounter five months ago. Were the president to bump into the chief justice today, one might expect an even more extravagant display of gratitude.

In the past 10 weeks America has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of decisions from its highest court that should make Trump very happy indeed. The six rightwing justices who control the court – three of them given their lifetime seats by Trump himself – have effectively greenlighted the president’s explosive and law-busting agenda.

The supermajority has granted Trump 18 straight victories in the administration’s requests for emergency relief. Steve Vladeck, a leading supreme court scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, has tracked the decisions in his Substack, One First, noting that the rulings have been handed down largely in the legal darkness.

Donald Trump gestures John Roberts after he was sworn in during inauguration ceremonies
in the rotunda of the US Capitol on 20 January in Washington DC.
Photograph: Guardian Design/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

They have been piped through the court’s so-called “shadow docket”, where important affairs of state are decided at speed and with little or no debate or deliberation. By Vladeck’s count, seven of the orders have been issued without any explanation, leaving the American people clueless as to the justices’ thinking.

By conceding to Trump’s wishes, the justices have for now approved what Vladeck has called “a truly unprecedented amount of lawlessness by the executive branch”.

Never before has [the supreme court] entertained such challenges from the president, and never before has it decided them so flippantly

Prominent jurists have held Roberts responsible for emboldening Trump’s drive towards an authoritarian presidency. J Michael Luttig, who served on a federal appeals court for 15 years, put the criticism starkly.

“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” Luttig told the Guardian.

Any questions?

Population control

Palestinians jostling for food outside a charity kitchen in western Gaza City on Friday.
Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

Population control, you know, starve em to reduce the population works, right? Well, it seems the Israelis are testing that notion to the max as they begin removing or starving Palestinians living in Gaza in order to take over the enclave and turn it into a resort for incoming settlers. It's the right thing to do, right?

Gaza City and the surrounding territory are officially suffering from famine, a global group of experts announced on Friday, nearly two years into an unrelenting war in which Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip.

The group, which the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor and classify global hunger crises, said that at least half a million people in Gaza Governorate were facing the most severe conditions it measures: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.

With rare exceptions, the rest of Gaza’s total population of two million people was also struggling with severe hunger, according to the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is made up of food insecurity experts who monitor world hunger.

For many of those people, the group said, conditions were likely to worsen, sending two additional governorates farther south — Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis — into an official famine by the end of September.

Twisted Shit ... applies

Then national security adviser John Bolton listens as Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House on 9 April 2018. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Twisted shit applies. Yours truly disagrees with John Bolton in so many ways but questioning his loyalty to America is NOT VALID. Bolton had the temerity to question the orange one on policy so, in return, Trump sicced the FBI on him in revenge, something disquieting to the max. Dictatorship looms in this once great nation known as America.

Bolton served as Trump’s third national security adviser for 17 months and clashed with him over Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea. The first Trump administration had unsuccessfully sought to block the publication of a Bolton book that it said contained classified information.

After a judge ruled, in June 2020, that the book could be published, Trump said Bolton “must pay a very big price for this, as others have before him”.

The FBI and Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests from the Guardian for comment. A spokesperson for the FBI told the New York Times that agents were “conducting court-authorized activity in the area”.

“sic ’em,

The 6th ...

Illustration: Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Getty Images

Yours truly has waxed "eloquently" about extinction events with emphasis given to The Great Dying during the Permian/Triassic geologic period around 252 million years ago to today as the 6th, aka The Holoscene, ramps up with unprecedented speed, a man-made catastrophe promising to change how earth conducts business in ways unimagined just five years ago.

The dodo became extinct during the mid-to-late 17th century due to habitat destruction, overhunting, and predation by introduced mammals.[1] It is an often-cited example of a human-driven extinction.[2]

As a matter of perspective, The extinction occurred between 251.941 ± 0.037 and 251.880 ± 0.031 million years ago, a duration of 60 ± 48 thousand years. With the 6th, we're talking realtime. 

Put enough CO2 into the system all at once, and push the life-sustaining carbon cycle far enough out of equilibrium, and it might escape into a sort of planetary failure mode, where processes intrinsic to the Earth itself take over, acting as positive feedback to release dramatically more carbon into the system. This subsequent release of carbon would send the planet off on a devastating 100-millennia excursion before regaining its composure. And it wouldn’t matter if CO2 were higher or lower than it is today, or whether the Earth was warmer or cooler as a result. It’s the rate of change in CO2 that gets you to Armageddon.

This is because the carbon cycle is happy to accommodate the steady stream of CO2 that issues from volcanoes over millions of years, as it moves between the air and oceans, gets recycled by the biosphere, and ultimately turns back into geology. In fact, this is the carbon cycle. But short-circuit this planetary process by overloading it with a truly huge slug of CO2 in a geologically brief timespan, beyond what the Earth can accommodate, and it may be possible to set off a runaway response that proves far more devastating than whatever catastrophe set off the whole episode in the first place. There could be a threshold that separates your run-of-the-mill warming episodes in Earth history – episodes that life nevertheless absorbs with good humour – from those that spiral uncontrollably toward mass extinction.

It took 14 million years for earth to recover. Think about that, I know I have.