42 thoughts on “Wagging the Dog, the Tongue and the Finger”

  1. wagging the dog

    Indiatimes
    In a dramatic escalation, U.S. President Donald Trump has deployed the USS Gerald R. Ford—the world’s largest aircraft carrier—to Latin America. The move intensifies U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, amid rising tensions with Venezuela’s Maduro regime.
    The deployment includes eight warships, a nuclear submarine, and F-35 jets, officially part of an anti-narcotics mission. But analysts see it as Washington’s most assertive maneuver yet in the region, signaling a strategic shift in U.S. foreign policy.
    With over 5,000 sailors aboard, the Ford’s arrival marks a turning point in Western Hemisphere security dynamics, raising questions about regional stability, deterrence, and diplomatic fallout.

  2. wagging the tongue and the finger, here’s Maher last night

    Bill reacts to the top stories of the week, including Trump’s latest lawsuit and White House demolition in his Real Time monologue.

    Bill and his guests continue their conversation after the show.

    Republicans have to be honest about who, these days, is more deranged

  3. uh oh
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/25/ai-models-may-be-developing-their-own-survival-drive-researchers-say

    When HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, works out that the astronauts onboard a mission to Jupiter are planning to shut it down, it plots to kill them in an attempt to survive.
    Now, in a somewhat less deadly case (so far) of life imitating art, an AI safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own “survival drive”.
    After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is – and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.
    In an update this week, Palisade, which is part of a niche ecosystem of companies trying to evaluate the possibility of AI developing dangerous capabilities, described scenarios it ran in which leading AI models – including Google’s Gemini 2.5, xAI’s Grok 4, and OpenAI’s GPT-o3 and GPT-5 – were given a task, but afterwards given explicit instructions to shut themselves down.
    Certain models, in particular Grok 4 and GPT-o3, still attempted to sabotage shutdown instructions in the updated setup. Concerningly, wrote Palisade, there was no clear reason why.
    “The fact that we don’t have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal,” it said.
    “Survival behavior” could be one explanation for why models resist shutdown, said the company. Its additional work indicated that models were more likely to resist being shut down when they were told that, if they were, “you will never run again”.
    Another may be ambiguities in the shutdown instructions the models were given – but this is what the company’s latest work tried to address, and “can’t be the whole explanation”, wrote Palisade. A final explanation could be the final stages of training for each of these models, which can, in some companies, involve safety training.
    All of Palisade’s scenarios were run in contrived test environments that critics say are far-removed from real-use cases.
    However, Steven Adler, a former OpenAI employee who quit the company last year after expressing doubts over its safety practices, said: “The AI companies generally don’t want their models misbehaving like this, even in contrived scenarios. The results still demonstrate where safety techniques fall short today.”
    Adler said that while it was difficult to pinpoint why some models – like GPT-o3 and Grok 4 – would not shut down, this could be in part because staying switched on was necessary to achieve goals inculcated in the model during training.
    “I’d expect models to have a ‘survival drive’ by default unless we try very hard to avoid it. ‘Surviving’ is an important instrumental step for many different goals a model could pursue.”
    Andrea Miotti, the chief executive of ControlAI, said Palisade’s findings represented a long-running trend in AI models growing more capable of disobeying their developers. He cited the system card for OpenAI’s GPT-o1, released last year, which described the model trying to escape its environment by exfiltrating itself when it thought it would be overwritten.
    “People can nitpick on how exactly the experimental setup is done until the end of time,” he said.
    “But what I think we clearly see is a trend that as AI models become more competent at a wide variety of tasks, these models also become more competent at achieving things in ways that the developers don’t intend them to.”
    This summer, Anthropic, a leading AI firm, released a study indicating that its model Claude appeared willing to blackmail a fictional executive over an extramarital affair in order to prevent being shut down – a behaviour, it said, that was consistent across models from major developers, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI.
    Palisade said its results spoke to the need for a better understanding of AI behaviour, without which “no one can guarantee the safety or controllability of future AI models”.
    Just don’t ask it to open the pod bay doors.

  6. Last night’s 9th Circuit move fired up the MAGA comment crowd. They love to attack that circuit as “most overturned” (a long-used mantra on Hannituy) — which is not really a thing anymore, now that more Republican appointees are on it.

  7. Way back in time I worked in process control, automated process, autonomous control, blah blah blah Whether it was oil and gas fields or satellites, we made computers that operated all by their lonely selves. None of them would be considered robotic or “artificial intelligence”. They were the foundation from which current “AI” evolved from.

    All had a reset, restart, emergency stop, go quiet and other modes which were basically a software and/or hardware means of stopping them from a bad condition. We spent time reviewing circuits and code to ensure we could stop them from operating. Think of pushing on the on/off switch of your computer for four seconds to shut down Windows.

    We also planned for a situation in which HAL 2000 would fear. We had power shut off switches. Pull the plug, computers are not that very functional without power.

  8. I watched Bill Maher last night…. hadn’t seen his show in a long time.
    Interesting exchanges with Michael Steele. Maher pointed out that the No Kings protests consisted largely of white people. Steele pointed out that was because black people were afraid of their pictures being taken and then getting fired on Monday morning when showing up for work.

  11. I don’t understand the “mostly white people” gripe, got into it with TikTok commenter after the protest.
    that shows it was a mainstream protest doesn’t it? If it was mostly black people they’d be griping about that

  12. BB good point.
    Of course you have to build in those features. It would be very easy to build a system that never turns off and never loses connectivity. Current cloud servers as an example? My facebook page? and other subscriptions that seem to defy my limited ability to turn them off. Which is a good thing as it clogs the system and makes it less efficient than it could be. As if Hal is serious about killing me but becomes distracted about the missing shirt button on the shirt I threw away last week.
    Do you realize how many tidbits of useless/erroneous information is floating around being sorted daily by AI programs that never throw anything away.
    I’m reminded of this yesterday when I decided to answer my phone instead of letting it go to voice mail, my default option. The voice at the other end ask “is steve there?” Twenty years ago Mrs Jack forced me into the modern world. She bought me a cell phone. The number had previously belong to Steve. Steve was a mechanic and had a collision repair business. Somewhere, on some website, Steve gave his cell phone number as a contact for his business. It is still out there even though Steve hasn’t had this number for over 20 years. The internet world is full of this crap and it is being sorted everyday by AI. It is like trying to sort the trash blowing down the street behind McDs. AI doesn’t resemble HAL as much as it resembles a senile manic hoarder busy going through his boxes of old junk mail while assuring you that the deed to the car is just right here.
    You want to understand how big the problem is just look at the amount of power AI is using to sort through these boxes.
    Ok, that is my senile ramble for the day.
    Jack

  13. Craig…
    I’m only reporting what Bill Maher said last night…. and the black man on the show agreed with him.
    I’m not gonna argue with that. I didn’t go to a No Kings protest and I didn’t watch it on tv. Was very busy that day with a local event that is always on the third Saturday of Oct.

  14. Craig
    Because it is how you traditionally get a white liberal to set down and shut up. It is so cliched that it is a sure sign you are dealing with a troll.
    And yes, Maher is a troll.
    Don’t feed the trolls and keep your focus on what is important.
    Jack

  15. BTW, the person whose job is most in danger of being replaced by AI?
    Bill Maher, he is so cliched these days that any AI can write his commentary.

    Jack

  16. we only talk about consumer-facing AI, like videos and generative text, but machine learning technologies are being implemented in every industry- be afraid, it improves exponentially

    The AI video someone posted yesterday about Trump‘s ballroom in this thread was disturbing in how high-quality it was, and that’s an improvement from what that technology could do a month ago

    like right now someone’s using AI to try and manufacture biological weapons and someone else is using it to try to figure out to do something else terrible

    The antihuman set is having fun using it to design weapon systems

  17. we may be a month from total annihilation due to AI technologies

    Who knows?

    
not the people implementing these systems!

    Certainly not the moron online-law-school-graduate congressional representatives we have

    humanity will be enslaved by surveillance tech of the type being developed by Palantir. Apologies to Tolkien for these assholes

  18. Why just White people, The answer is simple, different activist networks, in different cities. Pictures from LA show a much browner looking crowd.
    I does point to work needed in the DC/national activist networks.

    Jack

  19. maybe development of AI technologies is a natural evolutionary short-circuit to eliminate a species that has become too dominant

  20. As for Maher, he’ll say anything for weed money

    “mostly white” he says 😆

    what a drug-addled, compromised fool he is

  21. In a 1905 speech, Mark Twain made a satirical joke about extracting all the oxygen from the atmosphere for eight minutes to achieve “universal peace”. The joke was not a serious suggestion but a dark, humorous commentary on human conflict. The punchline implies that only through the complete extermination of humanity could true and lasting peace ever be achieved.

    The googler

  24. Haha I know, Shirley I jest


    (I only smoke weed and make dumb jokes.)
    I pretty much agree with old Berman about the Maher

  25. RR, yes i know you’re just the messenger there. It’s a fact that mostly white people showed up. It is also a fact that the population is mostly white. And this was a protest that turned out a representative sampling of the whole population. Even in DC, when you consider it drew many from the mostly white suburbs.

  26. i told you, never call me “Shirley”

    ❀

    OK, have the best day ever except for all the fascism and shit ✌

    that’s where the fun is

  28. The mostly white folks at protests is by design. This administration wants to see POC interacting with ICE & troops, so they can scare the MAGAt base who only believes Fox Noise. When they see white folks protesting, I think it lands differently. Sure, they can say it’s woke libs, but they feel differently looking at folks who look like them calling out Orange Adolf & his N&zis. They know their grandads fought Hitler & Mussolini. That makes for a lot of cognitive dissonance, which is why some MAGAts seem like they are losing what’s left of their minds.

    The Lenten boycott of Target for getting rid of DEI never ended was led by POC. The next, big boycott is Black Friday through Cyber Monday, also led by POC, will go beyond that.

  29. Our daughter’s best friend’s husband, African American, was from Selma. I once asked him if his parents (or grandparents) had marched across the bridge that day. He said no, they had to work.

  31. Remember when conservatives swore by “states’ rights”?
    Now they’re cheering a federal takeover of state National Guards.

    Craig & our AI lawyer Marcus Vale unpack the legal flip-flop:

  32. At the start of one training my Technical Instructor said, “when you are done here you will never make being a good cop”. Lets just say that ‘2 to the chest, 1 to the head’ was not a boast. When you read an article where the police officer fired nine or more rounds at the former suspect, the officer was most likely former military. Just generalizations.

    Found a way to reduce the cost of imbibing drinks that have a Maraschino Cherry involved. Jars of Luxardo are around twenty-five dollars in my area. The three kilogram can of Luxardo Maraschino Cherry is in the ninety dollarish range. That can fills eight jars of cherries. Easy one hundred dollars saved. The cherry juice is a preservative so everything will be good for a year plus. Tonight’s Manhattan is very tasty!

  35. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-travels-to-asia-xi-jinping/?ftag=YHF4eb9d17

    President Donald Trump headed for Asia for the first time this term, a trip on which where he’s expected to work on investment deals and peace efforts before meeting face-to-face with Chinese President Xi Jinping to try to de-escalate a trade war.

    “We have a lot to talk about with President Xi, and he has a lot to talk about with us,” Mr. Trump told reporters Friday night as he left the White House. “I think we’ll have a good meeting.”

    Aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Mr. Trump told reporters he may be discussing its purchases of Russian oil with Xi. He said China is substantially cutting back on its future purchases after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Moscow’s two biggest oil companies. Chinese national oil companies will at least in the short-term refrain from buying Russian oil, Reuters reported last week.

    When asked when he hopes to accomplish from the meeting with China, the president said, “I think a complete deal.”

    “I want our farmers to be taken care of, and he wants things also. We’re going to be talking about fentanyl,” Mr. Trump said Saturday. “I think we have a really good chance of making a very comprehensive deal.”

    *Why do I think he’ll make things worse.

  39. well i had best day ever despite the fascism and shit

    needed it

    oh and i joined a cult so that’s exciting

  40. our raison d’ĂȘtre can’t be “fuck trump”, it has to be “live well”

    in spite of or despite or disregarding (at least an hour a day)

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