Sunday, September 27, 2026

LAPD to place all-purpose, AI-augmented readers on street lights (This week in AI)

@nbcla The Los Angeles Police Department is expected to expand its use of automatic license plate readers weeks after ending its contract with Flock Safety over privacy and data concerns. The new company that will log license plate and pictures of cars is Axon, which also provides stun guns and body-worn cameras. #nbcla ♬ original sound - NBC Los Angeles
("It also boasts of the system's artificial intelligence capabilities to identify vehicles, license plates, pedestrians and other objects that pass into view...The Axon contract includes the replacement of thousands of body-worn video cameras and taser electronic stun guns, massive amounts of cloud storage for the video collected by officers and new artificial intelligence features that promise to write first drafts of police reports based on body-worn video recordings.")



can't a guy walk down the street anymore without being harassed by artificial intelligence

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— Cabel Sasser (@cabel.panic.com) September 26, 2026 at 9:07 AM








(You can't bill a new grad associate at a huge rate if an AI will do a comparable job)











effective altruism is when one of the train tracks has a guy tied to it, and the other one might have five guys tied to it, in some distant point you can't see

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— zaratustra (@zaratustra.bsky.social) September 20, 2026 at 2:14 PM








hey, has the context of this tweet changed given recent revelations

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— zaratustra (@zaratustra.bsky.social) September 26, 2026 at 7:00 AM








Also notable about the recent vibe shift in AI is that it has made Jensen Huang – a plainly motivated CEO of the world's largest company, familiar sort of capitalist, and someone with a legible perspective on the industry surrounding him — sound like a heretic www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

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— John Herrman (@jwherrman.bsky.social) September 23, 2026 at 9:00 AM
("A collection of people want to make the software more than it is, and we talk about software in a new way, but they’re all the same old words. Now, the last generation of computer engineers, we were doing all the same things...[s]oftware breaks out of sandboxes all the time. That’s the reason why we need virtual machines. You can’t have agents, their own sandbox, monitoring themselves. You need, if you will, a whole bunch of watchdogs. So these are ideas that have been around for a long time. We just, somehow in the recent generation, gave it a whole bunch of human words, and I just think that it’s unnecessary. It’s software.")

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

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— Matt Ford (@mford.bsky.social) September 24, 2026 at 9:04 AM


( ) (Sounds a lot like claiming you don't even own a home)







("The trailers held a combined 20 tons of sand, which the company uses to simulate real freight during research and development")







Next week, Google is set to launch an experimental satellite to test the feasibility of data centers in space and it's doing it on a SpaceX rocket. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/t...

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— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@rmac.bsky.social) September 24, 2026 at 9:07 AM
("The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said [], Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher. During that time, the chips can process short queries so Google’s A.I., known as Gemini, can respond.")







Yes









OpenAI ‘agent’ hacked Australia’s health service www.ft.com/content/5613... via @FT

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— Ankit Panda (@nktpnd.bsky.social) September 23, 2026 at 2:54 PM
("The portal contains non-sensitive Medicare information relating to data and statistics, such as spending")







("He initially thought DraftKings aimed to save money by avoiding people who were unlikely to be profitable. But he said his supervisors told him that the company did not want to reduce its promotional spending but rather to “redeploy” it. He understood this to mean the goal was to direct more promotions toward the biggest losers")







(The defendant gave a "no comment")















People have wondered what happens when the web fully rots out from underneath chatbots and search engines. Now we know at least one answer: AI is watching a lot of YouTube nymag.com/intelligence...

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— John Herrman (@jwherrman.bsky.social) September 21, 2026 at 8:52 AM

A chatbot pivot to video makes sense. But the relationship between AI and the web has been almost purely extractive, and video production — even though it's governed by different platform incentives — probably isn't immune

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— John Herrman (@jwherrman.bsky.social) September 21, 2026 at 8:52 AM
















This is a very fascinating observation from a person who was instrumental in popularizing Italian Brainrot! A decentralized hyperstitional creation with no singular origin medium.com/@fabianmosel...

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— GAI Debord (@dylanschenker.com) September 21, 2026 at 6:59 AM








Here's the biggest accusation of AI writing in the literary world so far, a book that was likely to win the Prix Goncourt. The author has been disqualified due to separate cases of plagiarism, so the question of whether Pangram can be used as evidence remains open www.theguardian.com/books/2026/s...

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— Sam Sacks (@ssacks.bsky.social) September 25, 2026 at 10:14 AM








Expecting people to use agents to shop for them sounds a lot like believing people would use Alexa to shop







Scoop: Meta's Muse AI can make phone calls. Internally, Meta has told employees that many of these calls will be made by human beings in a call center: www.404media.co/meta-tests-m...

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— Jason Koebler (@jasonkoebler.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 9:34 AM

mere moments ago the nytimes published this article which heavily features Muse's ability to make calls, lol: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/t...

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— Jason Koebler (@jasonkoebler.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 9:54 AM








(I guess he's saying he was a shitposting and gaming out what a malicious user would do)

Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare. In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”

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— Astra Taylor (@astra.bsky.social) September 25, 2026 at 8:33 PM
("representing Blue Cross, said the insurance plans were the main victims of this new wave of technology. “It’s not a war,” he said. “It is a completely one-sided blood bath.”")















Someone asked Muse to dump its entire virtual machine file system, and it did

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— Mark Riedl (@markriedl.bsky.social) September 24, 2026 at 5:28 PM
Facebook said it was no big deal























("When the newly reopened Teatre Raval, which seats 193 spectators, asked Meta, the parent company of the two social media sites, why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.")







Mercedes-Benz signs deal to put Wayve AI Driver in cars within 2 years

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— Electrek (@electrek.co) September 22, 2026 at 8:04 AM
("So Mercedes is hedging: a rules-based L3 system for a narrow highway case, Nvidia’s stack for L2+ point-to-point, and Wayve’s embodied AI as a scalable path toward higher automation. It’s the strategy of a company that wants autonomy, but it isn’t sure which path will suceed yet.")







"I was 10 minutes into my first trip in a driverless car when I realised my vehicle was potentially obstructing the president of the United States." - great column here from @joemillerjr.ft.com on what seems like a pretty stressful situation as.ft.com/r/2037e2fc-a...

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— Tony Tassell (@tonytassell.bsky.social) September 23, 2026 at 7:00 AM
("“Tell the Waymo it needs to go to the right,” bellowed the officer who stood in front of me. I was not sure to whom, or to what, I could communicate this, but sheepishly relayed his command out loud inside the car. There was no response.")















("A little over a day after that post began making the rounds, both Qwen options had been removed from the Federal Register search interface")







("two op-eds arguing that AI cannot replace human “judgement” and “responsibility”")















("The other students’ appearances had been altered so that they appeared thinner") (The articles I saw didn't mention whether the black studen was completely hallucinated)

























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— la li lu le lo (@olololu.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 5:14 PM








Good news, sophonts: a new story has arrived! If you like stories about sapient digital intelligences and environmentalism, "Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed" by @hansew.bsky.social should be one you'll really like. Also the lizards!

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— Escape Pod (@escapepod.org) September 10, 2026 at 3:30 PM
(Enjoyable, cozy rogue-AI story)







terminator reboot but it’s humans going back to 1999 to make sure Y2K happens so the internet dies forever

— Joey Esposito (@joeyesposito.bsky.social) September 23, 2026 at 4:47 PM