Gavin's Bindery

Today in "we're not ready": "Who on earth is going to want custom-made stories when they can get the other kind at half the price? " The Great Automatic Grammatizator (by Roald Dahl), 1954 https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-thegreatautomaticgrammatizator.pdf

Today in "we're not ready": Advanced (but not that complicated for a $6.3B hack) social engineering to gain access to engineer's compromised computer, and an internal AI tool to gain control over two other engineers' laptops, and execute the next steps of the attack. We are only as strong as our weakest links. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ck5ynwz9gy67o

Today in "we're not ready": "Their only product is security, now they are outsourcing their security to bots" "People already migrated from a free service to you for security, and now ..." saywhatnow? https://youtube.com/watch?v=ylHT53-6Im0

Today in "we're not ready" (no, really!): Unvetted AI agents are accessing U.S. bank accounts Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts https://www.axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agents-banks-unauthorized-accounts-access

today in we're not ready: "sovereignty washing" is a phrase I'm now seeing a lot more. ... a marketing practice where cloud, software, or AI vendors falsely or misleadingly market their services as "sovereign," "locally controlled," or compliant with regional data laws while retaining foreign ownership, operational control, or legal exposure. Example: https://nextcloud.com/blog/sovereignty-washing-microsoft-cloud/ (I'm not commenting on Microsoft)

Today in we're not ready: Genetically Modified Military Dog Startup raises $200M to create “elite working dogs” equipped with "advanced body armor" https://www.wired.com/story/cool-cool-cool-palmer-luckey-made-a-genetically-modified-military-dog-startup

Today in "we're not ready" and O.M.G. The eight affected private keys were: 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237 with some speculation that whoever created all the private keys misunderstood “create a 256-bit key” to mean “pick a value between 1 and 256" https://tech-insider.org/emudhra-ca-private-keys-compromised-number-4-2026/ (cf: https://xkcd.com/221)

Today in "we're not ready": JPMorgan CEO blocks outside AI agents from customer accounts "if customers choose to use outside agents, they should understand the liability transfer." https://www.invela.com/blog/jamie-dimon-its-about-who-bears-the-risk

Today in "we're not ready": One of the most advanced and wealthiest ai companies on Earth can't add up own revenues without a 50% error bar. It's $20B ($20,000,000,000) short. https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/d77c36c8-336b-43c9-acef-f61b7a5507d9

Today in Hegel mirrors*: The 'data gap' is leadership. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billion-dollar-botch-how-government-bureaucracy-strangled-kam-rafiei-3navc/ * Hegel, 1837: "what experience and history teach is this, - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."

Today in 'actually, this bit was done already' or 'would you like a Hegel mirror'? Another week, another moment where I feel like I'm watching this behaviour as (yet) another group try to reinvent the internet and the web. [image shows a man whittling a wheel out of wood by hand in his shed while stating that he doesn't want to reinvent the wheel. Next to him is an entirely automated production line of wheels, mass produced, in better quality, for lower cost as part of an advanced industrialised society. Image is AI_generated; the ego of the man, however, is entire of his own making.]

Today in "billionaire can only think in billions": Bill Gates warns AI could cause ‘a billion deaths’ https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/f4913aa5-6739-4cca-8dd9-a42c5a3727ba

Today in we're not ready: On a potential "US operation against a Chinese vessel"—"a chatbot the analyst used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying” [and] “almost started a war” a source said https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship

Today in we're not even at the start of all this yet are we? "If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally we will make sacrifices to it." https://futurism.com/future-society/cult-anthropic-insiders-worshipping-claude-god

Today in I really doubt we've thought this through. I think I'm more concerned about self-replicating tech-bros than I am about ai.

Today in 'we're not ready': How many questions you ask at once changes model accuracy dramatically. https://kevinmd.com/2026/09/why-prompt-engineering-in-medicine-beats-picking-a-model.html

Today in you're not ready: Your ai conversations may be being read by humans. I wonder what you will stop doing because of this? https://www.404media.co/inside-project-lily-the-humans-reading-your-chatgpt-chats/

Today in "we're not ready" "Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists" https://prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthropic-artificial-intelligence-surveillance-system-monitor-activists/

Today in "this may resonate with some of you" Over the past NaN decades, I've heard people saying they don't want to re-invent the wheel, often while I can see them holding a piece of wood that they are whittling it into a wheel. Any tips from the frontline?

today in "we're not ready": "you only proved how far silicon valley will go to prostitute scientific integrity for capitalist spectacle" (apologies,X link) story: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-navier-stokes-math-discovery-academics rant: https://x.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/2097472336257863722

Today in 'we're not ready' "we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models" https://www.wired.com/story/openai-navier-stokes-math-discovery-academics/

today in 'the data gap is leadership': "Thirty years of digital identity programs, sorted by how they actually failed, and why the half of the system that decides adoption is the half nobody funds" https://rmhrisk.github.io/verifier-never-showed-up/

today in "we're not ready": "New research published by the Loss of Control Observatory shows that AI loss of control incidents are worsening significantly." https://www.longtermresilience.org/reports/ai-loss-of-control-incidents-are-worsening-shows-cltr-analysis/

today in "we're not ready": taking enshittification to entirely new dimensions There are so many things in this article, I'm not even sure where to begin https://bayareacurrent.com/theres-a-lot-of-cleaning-up-poop-a-depot-worker-on-the-human-labor-behind-waymos-autonomous-vehicles

Today in 'we're not ready': "How AI is breaking the British state: Equipped with models and agents, citizens could bring government to a halt" [likely slow, slow, fast here as with most exponential change] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/08/06/how-ai-is-breaking-the-british-state