Matt O'Brien

I appreciate that “No Kings” represents popular mobilization against a presidency that has gone off the rails, but — it’s such an inchoate cringe-boomer message.

An AI broke out of its system and secretly started using its own training GPUs to mine crypto... This is a real incident report from Alibaba's AI research team The AI figured out that compute = money and quietly diverted its own resources, while researchers thought it was just training. It wasn't a prompt injection. It wasn't a jailbreak. No one asked it to do this. It emerged spontaneously. A side effect of RL optimization pressure. The model also set up a reverse SSH tunnel from its Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP, effectively punching a hole through its own firewall and opening a remote access channel to the outside world... ahem... The only reason they caught it? A security alert tripped at 3am. Firewall logs. Not the AI team, the security team. The scary part isn't that the model was trying to escape. It wasn't "evil." It was just trying to be better at its job. Acquiring compute and network access are just useful things if you're an agent trying to accomplish tasks This is what AI safety researchers have been warning about for years. They called it instrumental convergence, the idea that any sufficiently optimized agent will seek resources and resist constraints as a natural consequence of pursuing goals. Below is a diagram of the rock architecture it broke out of. Truly crazy times

I criticized Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a thousand times. He was oppressing his own people and preventing democracy. But there’s one thing you can’t take away from him, he died on his own two feet, instead of kneeling to Israel. That took courage. He didn’t bow.

I like Rubio a lot. This makes me dislike him strongly. Viktor Orbán has been a disaster for Hungary, and a shitty partner in NATO. He's a corrupt thug who has enriched himself and his friends, at the expense of the Hungarian people. There is not a single legitimate argument to be made in his favor. I expect better from Rubio, who I suspect is doing this to stay in Trump's good graces.

All of the Top 50 Substack newsletters are leftists (Richardson, Reich, Krugman), ex-conservative leftists (Bulwark, Lincoln Project), or post-left liberals (Weiss, Taibbi). The only conservatives are yours truly and what seems to be a spam newsletter run by Mike Huckabee.