new polemics.md: The Crypto Lotus Mystery feat. Sam Bankman-Fried

Purdue mandating AI to graduate: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/purdue-unveils-comprehensive-ai-strategy-trustees-approve-ai-working-competency-graduation-requirement/

I’m looking for the actual curricula / docs signed off by the trustees. Looks like another domino falls.

https://kevinmd.com/2025/12/why-ai-in-medicine-elevates-humanity-instead-of-replacing-it.html h/t naked capitalism

Throughout my nearly three decades in family medicine across a busy rural region, I watched the system become increasingly burdened by administrative requirements and workflow friction. The profession I loved was losing time and attention to tasks that did not require a medical degree. That tension created a realization that has guided my work ever since: If physicians do not lead the integration of AI into clinical practice, someone else will. And if they do, the result will be a weaker version of care.

I feel for him, but MAYBE this isn’t a technical issue but a labor one; maybe 30 years ago doctors should have “led” on admin and workflow issues directly, and then they wouldn’t need to “lead” on AI now? I’m sorry Cerner / Epic sucks but adding AI won’t make it better. But, of course, class consciousness evaporates about the same time as those $200k student loans come due.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Extensions-Block-AI

Now they just need to add a slider for touchpad scroll speed.

I’ve worked on LAPD ADSB data for a couple years and then some dude goes an posts this right before thanksgiving:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009591

Flying Moneybags!

fuck, why didn’t we think of that.

I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

In UCLA’s Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to “Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles” and Goal 5 is to “Become a more effective institution”. By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

My question is:

If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

Thank you.

My college used the green Russell Norvig text, which had (checking…) 12 pages on neutral nets out of 1000 pages. I liked the class well enough, but we used Java 1.3 and lisp would have been better.

New Time War lore dump

I need to quit clicking, my yt recommendations are so cursed now.

Love the Edgar Allen Poe thing at 3:30 though, wtf. Also where did he find the sephiroth at 4:19?

Is there even any young people we could plausibly call whippersnappers on orange site anymore, it feels like they’re all well into their 30s/40s at this point.

I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

But in fairness to actual whipper snappers, and to your point, the '56 Dartmouth Workshop forward privileged Symbolic AI over anything data driven up through the first AI winter (until roughly the 90s and the balance shifted) and really warped the disciplines understanding of its own influences and history - if 70s RMS was taught anything about Neural Nets, it’s relevance and importance would probably have been minimized in comparison to expert systems in lisp or whatever Minsky was up to.

Slopocalypse Now h/t The Syllabus

For context, Kunzru wrote the novel Red Pill a few years back.

Candace is a pioneer. Following her, we are exiting the age of the public sphere and entering a time of magic, when signs and symbols have the power to reshape reality. Consider the “Medbed,” a staple of QAnon-adjacent right-wing conspiracy culture. Medbeds are one of the many things about which “they” are not telling “you”; they can supposedly regenerate limbs and reverse aging. How evil would you have to be to deny such a boon to We the People? In late September, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself promoting the scam, promising that every faithful supporter would be given a card that would give them access to this magic technology. Trump posted it because it made him look good, a leader healing the sick, but also because it is a way to hyperstition a version of this fiction into reality. No one will really be cured, of course, because the Medbed doesn’t exist. Except now it is someone’s job to make sure it does: The president is a powerful magician who never tells a lie, so some loyal redhats will have to be given cards that let them lie down in some kind of cargo-cult version of a Medbed. Perhaps it will be a job for TV’s own Dr. Oz, who has crossed to the other side of the screen as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

God we live in the dumbest possible world.

This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand.

I hope so, Jesse Welles getting on the Colbert and playing Red shows some people are moving in that direction, but is also definitely sincere-posting, and ultimately that kind of performance just doesn’t pay the bills like if he went Truck Jeans Beer. Eddington seems to have gotten under some people’s skins in an interesting way… And I’m skeptical that /any/ novel would have any impact or reach outside the NYT class, what with having to actually read something.

h/t YT recommender, mildly unhinged: The Secret Religion of Silicon Valley: Nick Land’s Antichrist Blueprint

0:40 In certain occult circles, Land is a semi-mythical figure. A man said to have been possessed by not one, but four Lemurian time demons. Simultaneously.

Well, that explains things.

Is this some CCRU lore I’m not aware of?

It’s the McMindfulness guy, nice to see that he is still kicking around.

In Empire of AI, she shows how CEO Sam Altman cloaks monopoly ambitions in humanitarian language—his soft-spoken, monkish image (gosh, little Sammy even practices mindfulness!)

lol ofc he does

If you liked Brooks, you might give Gerald Weinberg a try. A bit more folksy / less corporate.

I associate Clausewitz (and especially John Boyd) references more with a Palantir / Stratfor / Booz / LE-MIC-consulting class compared to your typical bay area YC techbro in the US, and a very different crowd over in AU / NZ where grognards probably outnumber the actual military. LWers never bring up Clausewitz either but love Sun Tzu. But as far as software strategy posts go, I’d much rather read a Clausewitz tie-in than, say, Mythical Man Month or Agile anything.

Pam Samuelson (UC Berkeley) has a nice explainer on AI copyright - https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/does-using-in-copyright-works-as-training-data-infringe/

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/michigan/miedce/4:2025cv11168/384571/176/

Consistent with Magistrate Judge Patti’s warning that each AI citation might incur a cost of $200 per citation, the court adopts that amount and imposes a fine of $300 per Plaintiff (a total of $600) for three misrepresented, AI-generated citations.

lol

He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.

Bubble or Nothing | Center for Public Enterprise h/t The Syllabus, dry but good.

Data centers are, first and foremost, a real estate asset

They specifically note that after the 2-5 year mini-perm the developers are planning on dumping the debt into commercial mortgage backed securities. Echoes of 2008.

However, project finance lawyers have mentioned that many data center project finance loans are backed not just by the value of the real estate but by tenants’ cash flows on “booked-but-not-billing” terms — meaning that the promised cash flow need not have materialized.

Echoes of Enron.

Best part is the footnote:

About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.

He somehow did an ad read in the middle of a substack post. Sign of the times.