Elon Musk defends Grok feature that generates images of women and children stripped of their clothes (and much worse):
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/12/us/video/grok-elon-musk-ai-lead-jake-tapper
#Musk is beneath contempt and apparently quite stupid too.
Smart Interface Design Patterns
• Vitaly Friedman
Meet Inclusive Design Patterns For 2025, a free 3h 30mins-workshop with yours truly on accessibility — with all videos, slides and examples, recorded yesterday. Feel free to share with your friends and colleagues — no strings attached!
INCLUSIVE.
Still plenty of work to do but pretty excited to relaunch my website for the first time since 2018. Lots of new typography and techniques already, and really chuffed about how it’s coming along. Welcome to the new rwt.io
Marilyn
Smart Interface Design Patterns
• Vitaly Friedman
More late-night noodling using the Blender ‘toolkit’ to overhaul my ‘Gnarlybot’ virtual pinball table! Shiny shiny!
“At this point they had to convince Claude—which is extensively trained to avoid harmful behaviors—to engage in the attack. They did so by jailbreaking it, effectively tricking it to bypass its guardrails.”
Reminds me of this great interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nn0-kAE5c0
“Share information, freely. Blog.”
👏, @Jayhoffmann
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/information-is-still-free/
(Nothing to see here, @davatron5000)
“The actor achieved what we believe is the first documented case of a cyberattack largely executed without human intervention at scale—the AI autonomously discovered vulnerabilities in targets […]. Most significantly, this marks the first documented case of agentic AI successfully obtaining access to confirmed high-value targets for intelligence collection, including major technology corporations and government agencies.”
This is fine. 🔥
https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage
Last night I started my journey into ‘VLM’ - using Blender to create baked light maps - which then get reimported back into Visual Pinball to make the tables look super realistic! This is a very early ‘v0’ of me testing the pipeline for my ‘Gnarlybot’ table!
I really wonder how long it takes a beginner like me to go from beer belly to get ripped again with Tai Chi. I bet that by the end of November, my family won’t even recognize me.
This piece by @WeirdWriter just hits different. So good.
“The "problem" was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don't fit into a corporate style guide. […]
So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely.”
1/2
“They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.
They built a machine to gentrify the English language.
And the horror of watching my friend lose his soul almost eats me alive.”
The Colonization of Confidence.
https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/
Note to self: if you block all the bots™, remember to not block archive.org_bot. Especially if you even wrote a Craft CMS plugin that notifies the Wayback Machine to crawl new posts on your site … 🤦♂️
Just renewed my Flickr Pro account for another two years as it’s one of the few places that still hold true to the original vision of the web. ❤️
Oh, THE LÄND FÄNSHOP got häcked.
Happy 2026!! 🎆🎉🤗💚
Rollin’ into 2026 like… [contains quote post or other embedded content]
Over the holiday period I created Chromacode. A visual identity system for my work inspired by Peter Saville’s Blue Monday cover. Read about it here brendandawes.com/chromacode/ or see it in action in any project page on my site.
