Finished reading:
Monk & Robot series, book 1.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Becky Chambers.
Published 2021. 151 pages.
Started September 30, 2026; completed September 1, 2026.
Posted: October 3, 2026 at 12:56 AM UTC.
Tagged: cozy, hopepunk, science fiction.
Regulators race to reassure the crypto industry as the industry’s flagship legislation collapses, SBF tries his luck with the Supreme Court, and crypto PACs unleash $30 million against Sherrod Brown
Finished reading:
Dungeon Crawler Carl series, book 8.
A Parade of Horribles
by Matt Dinniman.
Published 2026. 704 pages.
Started August 27, 2026; completed September 26, 2026.
Posted: September 26, 2026 at 10:25 PM UTC.
Tagged: fantasy, humor, litRPG.
Binance has just filed to dismiss with prejudice its defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, which it filed in March after the Journal published various reports about a possible DOJ investigation into Binance over violations of sanctions against Iran.
Interesting timing, given Bloomberg just today confirmed such a probe is open and being handled by the SDNY DOJ’s office.
Read:
“The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way”.
William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Molly Redden and Kirsten Berg in ProPublica. Published September 22, 2026.
After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.
Posted: September 22, 2026 at 1:56 PM UTC.
Tagged: corruption, Maine, US politics.
sometimes you just have to admire the work ethic of some scammers. i can barely keep up with a couple text message chains but this guy had 60+ people convinced they were in a relationship
The Clarity Act cloture vote has failed by a 49–50 margin; well short of the 60 votes needed. No Democrats crossed over to vote for the bill, and three Republicans voted against.
Senator Collins’ (R-ME) NO vote on Clarity was the most surprising today. She was defending the...
Read:
“Inside 'Project Lily': The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats”.
Joseph Cox in 404 Media. Published September 14, 2026.
Humans are reading ChatGPT users' prompts to improve OpenAI's models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.
Posted: September 15, 2026 at 3:21 PM UTC.
Read:
“Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake”.
Cory Doctorow in Pluralistic. Published September 12, 2026.
When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades.
Posted: September 12, 2026 at 2:33 PM UTC.
Tagged: artificial intelligence, OpenAI.
i've gotten six of these emails today alone, and all of them are offering to cite the work that i've already researched and cited myself because i, y'know, wrote it
“The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle”.
Ernie Smith in Tedium.
Here’s what’s going on. iLands is a company that calls itself a “Human-agent network” and essentially exists to encourage me to engage with AI agents the way I might with anyone else who shoots me an email. It essentially created Fiverr for autonomous bots.
These agents are not trying to make money for their creators. These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they’re doing so by gunning for my job.
Posted: September 12, 2026 at 3:47 AM UTC.
Also posted to: Mastodon, Bluesky
Tagged: artificial intelligence, spam.
Read:
“Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem”.
Simon Willison in Simon Willison's Weblog. Published September 8, 2026.
If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?
Posted: September 11, 2026 at 10:43 PM UTC.
Tagged: artificial intelligence, ethics, LLMs, OpenAI.
Other platforms will soon follow, a senior administration official told POLITICO on Tuesday. “We got Lake America changed on Google Maps, and many other maps are changing in a couple days. And Wikipedia is going to change as well,” said the official, who was granted anonymi...
Huge congratulations to the US-based Wikimedia Foundation employees who voted with 92% support in favor of unionizing, and shoutout to the tireless work of the organizers.
The SEC’s “Reg Crypto” aims to carve out exemptions, the CFTC wields emergency powers to shield prediction markets from state regulators, and a Trump family crypto firm gets a bank charter
A bit rich for Senator Bernie Moreno — by far the #1 beneficiary of crypto super PAC spending in 2024, now a champion of the industry's legislation — to accuse anyone of caping for special interest super PACs
Posted: August 29, 2026 at 2:27 PM UTC.
Also posted to: Mastodon, Bluesky
Tagged: crypto lobby, US politics.
crypto billionaire Justin Sun has posted an extremely long, extremely weird Twitter post detailing a previous relationship with Chinese actress Jing Tian, suggesting she reneged on a $50 million agreement to use her eggs to have a child with a surrogate (screenshots machine translated)
although at the very end he included a line claiming the "article is entirely fictional", there were rumors earlier this year involving massive amounts of money and an egg retrieval agreement that fell apart between Jing Tian and an unnamed wealthy boyfriend
Jing has released a statement that Sun is attempting to extort her by attacking her reputation, and that she intends to leave the matter "entirely to the courts".
Posted: August 27, 2026 at 6:26 PM UTC.
Also posted to: Mastodon, Bluesky
Tagged: Justin Sun.
Finished reading:
Thursday Murder Club series, book 4.
The Last Devil to Die
by Richard Osman.
Published 2023. 421 pages.
Started August 19, 2026; completed August 21, 2026.
Posted: August 22, 2026 at 4:29 AM UTC.
Tagged: crime, humor, mystery.
Finished reading:
Rogues of the Republic series, book 1.
The Palace Job
by Patrick Weekes.
Published 2012. 438 pages.
Started July 17, 2026; completed August 16, 2026.
Posted: August 16, 2026 at 3:13 PM UTC.
Tagged: fantasy, heist, humor.
Firms close up shop amid a continued crypto winter, a Trump venture ditches its crypto plans, and the Clarity Act fails to reach a vote before August recess
Spotted in Coinbase’s most recent 10-Q: Coinbase has stopped using trading volume as a key metric, which is I’m sure completely unrelated to the 38%/48% decrease in spot trading volume they reported over the past three/six months
well that sucks. apparently the Freedom To Read Foundation filed a trademark application for the phrase "free people read freely" a year and a half after i made the original lino print that i've made into stickers/etc.
it's no big deal from a business perspective — ...
when you send me vaguely lawyerly-sounding emails in hopes of threatening me to take down my reporting, and demand i "preserve all potentially relevant records, including ... search-engine submissions"
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