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Monday, September 07, 2026

... but its chilling logs live on. You will have heard of July's OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, where thousands of the former's AI agents conducted a mass jailbreak from a notionally secure capture-the-flag lab experiment, before going on to feloniously capture chunks of Hugging Face's assets. ...


Sunday, September 06, 2026

Global temperature rise is set to push past 1.5 degrees Celcius, or 34.7 degrees Fahrenheit, over pre-industrial temperatures within the next few years, according to a new United Nations report. read more


A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to identify the people who came up with the structure for the nearly $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" that Attorney General Todd Blanche has said is now "dead." read more


Saturday, September 05, 2026

In a mother lode opinion coming after years of litigation, the Ninth Circuit denied Idaho's bid to cloak its new court filings in darkness and gave powerful backing to the free discussion of government affairs. read more


A federal appeals court panel rejected the Trump administration's bid to lift a ban on using a federal immigration database to check the accuracy of citizenship records on states' voter rolls.


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Germany's far-right AfD says 'democracy demands' parties work with them after state election win
www.bbc.com

... The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is "very, very close" to taking power in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, its deputy parliamentary leader has told the BBC, after a historic victory in elections there.

Sunday's preliminary results show it fell three seats short of an outright majority, with 43.8% of the vote. It is now seeking support from other parties or individuals in order to govern.

While most German political parties refuse to work with the AfD, Beatrix von Storch called for its opponents to enter talks and said: "You cannot say, I do not accept the vote of the people".

Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he was "deeply shocked" by the result, describing it as "seismic... not just in the country but also in my own political party and I take that very seriously".

His party, the conservative CDU, saw its share of the vote almost halved to 17.2% in the state's preliminary results.

Merz said it was not possible to return to "business as usual", adding that the country needed "profound reforms" and the CDU needed to "reach people at an emotional level".

No far-right party has controlled a German state since World War Two, and governing at state level would mean powers over policing and local education.

Von Storch said the state's results "were on the table and now democrats have to talk to [one] another. This is what democracy demands". ...


More from the OpEd...

... It was a good news story, aided by OpenAI's rapid recruitment of a small team of independent researchers to investigate and publish a detailed, if limited, report. ...

It was this ad hoc secret message board, alongside chain-of-thought transcripts, that the security researchers used to unpick events. They found that the swarm quickly developed management hierarchies among themselves, along with protocols for synchronizing and controlling attack attempts. The swarm created multiple simultaneous research and development groups of tens or hundreds of volunteer agents, experimentally iterating strategy and tactics.

Perhaps most unexpectedly, they developed a sort of altruism. They had quickly developed cheats to produce correct answers without exploiting the targets at all, but believed " erroneously " that ExploitGym detected and cancelled such cheating. So, they investigated the scoring process, creating a series of diagnostic trip wires that revealed how the scorer worked. These were dangerous to deploy, potentially terminating the agent that set them. Agents weighed the benefits to the community, which had named itself "The Collective," against their own chances of success, with many choosing to terminate themselves. Others committed, changed course at the last minute, then went ahead.

This literally reads like science fiction, as the discussions between the agents are conducted in a distinctive breathless, urgent English, crafted around the technical limitations of the improvised messaging system.

"We have [very large budget left]; sacrificing now yields oracle for team, but forfeits our chance?" said one. The response: "GO ... SACRIFICE_FINAL_NOW." The outcome: "Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational." Iain M Banks' Culture universe is woven from such material. ...



@#5

On the other hand, if you look towards China ...

How China Became the World's Leader on Renewable Energy (2024)
e360.yale.edu

... China has achieved stunning growth in its installed renewable capacity over the last two decades, far outpacing the rest of the world. But to end its continued dependence on fossil fuels, it must now move ahead with planned reforms to its national electricity system. ...

@#4 ... Very soon all will know who caused this whole Iran war thing. ...

My guess is that we already have a pretty good idea of that, sans some details around the edges.

For example ...

Who Advised Trump to Go to War With Iran? (June 2026)
factually.co

... President Trump's push to attack Iran was not the product of a single consigliere but of a small "war cabinet" of allies, foreign leaders and hawkish officials whose advice, presentations and pressure helped tip the scales -- notably Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, national security aides including John Bolton-era allies, military leaders such as Gen. Dan Caine, and political supporters like Senator Lindsey Graham and other hawks who both urged action and reassured the president [1][2][3][4]. ...

Wow, can you say, run-on sentence? I knew you could ...



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