How to get started in money laundering* Excited to team up with the legendary @pacoid.bsky.social for this Connected Data London session next month, examining how to spot fraud patterns + develop graph queries for improved AML inference 2026.connected-data.london/talks/how-to... *Tongue in cheek

Connected Data London 2026

A Talk by Paco Nathan & Stephen Abott Pugh

2026.connected-data.london

[[Stafford Beer]] 100 Festschrift book is out. I contributed a chapter on Autonomy & Cohesion, for which you can use my Metaphorum slidedeck as a TL;DR : kvistgaard.github.io/slides/ac/me... The electronic version of the book is free to download: staffordbeer100.com/festschrift

Programming used to be like literacy. Once you learned it, nobody could take it away. Now the craft comes on lease, metered, and on terms that can change overnight. This essay looks at seven orders of software makers, defined by what the lease did to them. www.linkandth.ink/p/the-new-co...

The New Coding Orders

Programming as a leased craft

linkandth.ink

NEW: Meet the real AI ‘rogue agent’: Lord Watson of Palantir. I am sick to the teeth of this current AI hype cycle & its perversion of language. The only thing going ‘rogue’ right now are AI boosters, a gullible & compliant press & a Labour Lord 1/ broligarchy.substack.com/p/meet-the-r...

Meet the real AI “rogue agent”: Lord Tom Watson

A Labour leader is out of control. The world needs a containment strategy now

broligarchy.substack.com

Two things really hit me about detailed research into the Azerbaijani Laundromat. 1: An immense large-scale operation, criminal services by people in EE/LV to target "wealthy Russian businessmen", which spread across the world, and overlaps with operations by Mossack Fonseca of the Panama Papers

screenshots and links to CA executive order N-9-26 aka requiring frontier labs to have independent verification, safety frameworks, kill switch, & have safety incidents def update to include recent "loss-of-control" incidents. www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/u...

Can confirm: this is INCREDIBLY rare. “Photographer and bird enthusiast Alexander deBarros captured a photo of a coyote with a greater roadrunner in its mouth.” KTLA: Rare, real-life coyote and roadrunner drama unfolds in L.A. ktla.com/news/local-n... #canislatrans #coyote #urbanwildlife

Rare, real-life coyote and roadrunner drama unfolds in L.A.

A Southern California bird watcher stumbled onto a scene over the weekend that looked like it came straight out of a classic cartoon, except this time, the coyote appears to have won and there&#821…

ktla.com

Tonight: Looking forward to seeing Cory Doctorow (in conversation with Carole Cadwalladr) discuss his book “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” at the Brighton Dome. Thanks to Kev of @brighthink.bsky.social for the invitation! brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC...

Cory Doctorow / Talks / What's On - Brighton Dome

Join celebrated author and technology critic Cory Doctorow in conversation with award-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr

brightondome.org

The Nerve weekend dish: Ottolenghi’s chicken meatballs with pistachios and spinach 🐓🌿🍋 The star chef and restaurateur shares a bright and highly flavoured dish from his new easy cookbook www.thenerve.news/p/the-weeken...

Stop whatever you’re doing & watch this now! Reform’s magic money tree has been bust wide open. Huge kudos to undercover reporters Verbatim via @channel4news.bsky.social youtu.be/aXut3s90rUI?... huge

Undercover: Exposing Reform's secret donations plot

YouTube video by Channel 4 News

youtu.be

A Sr Waymo telop (ERT: Event Response Team, can remotely drive vehicles per Waymo) told a passenger "I don't have clear visuals on what's going on" It took ~minute to get "visuals" (~9 cameras), which prob need >10 mbps ~continuously. US cell service is rarely life safety grade. OP: x.TexasTSLA

One thing I find really frustrating is that some people both (a) misunderstand the TESCREAL thesis, and (b), based on this misunderstanding, have decided it's not worth reading any of my explanations of the thesis since my 2024 paper with Gebru. Here are three essential readings:

canada: "fuck you, americans!" americans: "yeah, that's fair, fuck us up"

John Michael McGrath@jm-mcgrath.bsky.social · last mo.

This might be the funnier YouGov poll: Canada's retaliatory tariffs are above water with US adults:

Microsoft's authentication is down for several hours, which means for so so many people that email, calendar, video calls, etc., are out the window -- and because Slack does MFA via email (not a wise thing) people can't login on Slack. BWAHAHAHA!!!

Palantir, Anduril, Cellebrite and others supply America’s deportation machine. They also hold UK contracts with the Home Office, MoD and police – offering surveillance capabilities that a Reform government would inherit. @mc00.bsky.social reports www.thenerve.news/p/ice-tech-c...

Two recent conversations I've had with Voice of Islam Radio about AI: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v... (automation, human purpose, genuine agency) Segment start: 1:45:44 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v... (cognitive offloading, productive struggle, children’s use of AI) Segment start: 1:29:44

Breakfast Show Podcast 08-04-2026: Truthfulness & How Technology is Reshaping Society

Podcast Episode · Voice of Islam · April 8 · 1h 54m

podcasts.apple.com

Slack has no emoji built-in for Emacs, which is why I've never been able to trust the Millennial-ish drama called Slack. So good to finally realize this.

Who was the real Jason Arday? In the relentless culture war surrounding the professor’s death, the voices of those closest to him were lost. Here, his longstanding friend Sam Clark talks to Carole Cadwalladr about the kind, warm and remarkable man he remembers 1/

This, from my friend @gilduran.com (Gil Duran), is fucking incredible. If you haven't bought a copy of his book yet, I'd encourage you to do so NOW. The anti-tech movement is growing, and this book will became a major part of that movement in the coming months and years (so will Timnit's!).

Here's Jason Arday's death - and the media's role in it - trending on social media, again. And yet it's *nowhere* in the mainstream media today. It's "fallen" out of the news cycle in the same way that Russian scientists "fall" out of windows. 🔗

NEW: It was a digital lynching. And the media is never going to hold itself to account for the role it played in Jason Arday’s death. But there are things we can do. This is a practical guide based on my own experience. broligarchy.substack.com/p/a-digital-...

A Digital Lynching

A practical guide for individuals and organisations when the mobs gather

broligarchy.substack.com

New article about a recent interview with Connor Leahy (@NPCollapse, @ControlAI), on the Onezero podcast with Robert Wright (@robertwrighter). Leahy appears to be passing off my research--solo and with Dr. Timnit Gebru--as his own. I object to this. Here are the details:

Connor Leahy Copies the TESCREAL Thesis in a Recent Interview

(8,500 words, but 14,400 words if footnotes are included.)

realtimetechpocalypse.com

it's august, so next time i'm out en vacances please have my tagline read: "paco has developed superintelligence and escaped containment"

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

🔇 🔇 🔇 My book, Deep Unlearning, is now available for preorders! I don't know how people write so many books because this one took a lot out of me. It turns out, I had a lot to say 😂, with editors cutting out 50k of my words 🫣 ✴️ You can now preorder it at www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-U....

I wrote about how one can hold that AI models are advancing rapidly and pose major risks to society while simultaneously maintaining that we're no closer to AGI, ASI, or the Singularity. The argument is linked below. 👇

btw. if you are into citations & resources related to what's going on in compute, "the chip war" and "empire of ai" are worth purchasing just for the citations (aka "notes") sections of those books.

New article on why Astra solving math problems, AI going rogue and hacking into Hugging Face, etc. DOESN'T imply that we're any closer to ASI or the Singularity. Still, I argue that we should be *very worried* about narrow, spiky AI. Read it below ... 👇 www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/why-increa...

Why Increasingly Powerful AI Models Do NOT Imply that Superintelligence Is Imminent

(2,500 words)

realtimetechpocalypse.com

A mysterious case where the first piece of the first apple galette of the season, along with a scoop of lavender gelato, both jump into my tummy. #FoodSky

A look at all the best newsletter articles I've published over the past year! If you're curious about the sorts of topics I write about (e.g., intellectual history of SV), check this out: www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/realtime-t...

Realtime Techpocalypse Has Its First Birthday!

This newsletter is now a 1-year-old. A look at some of the past year's highlights.

realtimetechpocalypse.com