My guest today is Jia Tolentino. Jia is the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Paris Review, and more. She won a National Magazine Award for her work at the New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer since 2016. Her writing covers so many different topics, from Roe V. Wade to the internet to pop culture and music. And today, we’re going to talk about the 1996 pop hit “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis.
We simply don’t know to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks. Any AI that is working in an adversarial environment—and by this I mean that it may encounter untrusted training data or input—is vulnerable to prompt injection. It’s an existential problem that, near as I can tell, most people developing these technologies are just pretending isn’t there.
I love these author cards from McSweeney’s in the style of baseball cards.
For years you’ve seen athletes, web-slinging superheroes, orcs, and pocket monsters get the trading-card treatment, while you’ve sat in your room hoping upon hope that the heroes of magical realism or giants of New Journalism would get their own. The wait is over, friends.
They have three sets: the first set is a part of their 74th issue, series 2, and series 3. The authors featured in the sets include Octavia Butler, Judy Blume, Lauren Groff, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, George Saunders, Sarah Vowell, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Tags: books · McSweeneys · remix · sports
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law:
CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling
that overturned its own January decision without notice or input
from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint
filed Wednesday in the U...
“The evidence for millionaire tax flight is scant. If high earners were truly fleeing high taxes, low-tax states would be swarming with millionaires. Instead, the highest concentrations of millionaires are found in high-tax states.”
Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate.
Sponsored by:
Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free.
Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box.
Supply chain leaker Majin Bu has the scoop, including photos of the cases and their packaging, of Apple’s second attempt at a fabric-based successor to leather iPhone cases. Apple’s first attempt two years ago, FineWoven, was so unpopular that they didn’t even offer a premiu...
After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month.
The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily...
Rock guitarist Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) has made a playlist called Fuck ICE, “a rocking little soundtrack to enjoy while you drive those bastards out of your neighborhood”. Springsteen, Public Enemy, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, etc.
Piloting Claude for Chrome
Two days ago I said:
I strongly expect that the entire concept of an agentic browser extension is fatally flawed and cannot be built safely.
Today Anthropic announced their own take on this pattern, implemented as an invite-only preview Chrome ex...
Tulsi Gabbard — who, believe it or not, is the US director of national intelligence — on X last week:
Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our
partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’
private data remains private and our Cons...
Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called
Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is
very real!
In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not
themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be
possible to simulate them entirely with AI.
If it’s “a purely AI software company” why do they need to hire anyone?
John McCoy, on the supposedly controversial Cracker Barrel rebranding:
But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by
politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something
basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have
discarded ch...
Right on schedule: second Tuesday of September, so long as that second Tuesday doesn’t fall on September 11. (Last year’s event went on Monday 9 September, probably because the Harris-Trump debate was already scheduled for Tuesday the 10th.) There’s an interactive animated version of the “heat map” event logo on Apple’s homepage. (A little bit odd that the second item below the event announcement, after a back-to-school promotion, is a “Meet the iPhone 16 family” promotion.)
