Russell Brandom
@russellbrandom.bsky.social
I want to speak very plainly to you, so that we are both comforted by the honesty. russell.brandom@gmail.com
NEW: Elon Musk clearly hates talking about Tesla's stagnant car biz these days so @russellbrandom.bsky.social and I mapped out just how much it's taken a back seat on the company's earnings calls. Musk now spends half or more of his time talking about AI & robotics: techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/e...
Elon is not very interested in talking about Tesla's car business these days techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/e...
Did the Hugging Face breach really usher in a new paradigm of AI-powered cyberattacks, or was it just a sped-up version of the same old dynamic techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/i...
In the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI's hacker was noisy and fast — but not unstoppable | TechCrunch
Cybersecurity experts told TechCrunch that one of the biggest lessons to be taken from the OpenAI hack against Hugging Face has nothing to do with AI, but traditional cybersecurity defense.
techcrunch.com
A telling passage from Zuck's WSJ op-ed: "Imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. Justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today." I'm really not sure this is true!
Once you start noticing it, even among people you like, it becomes a little unnerving. So much political commentary consists of people addressing an audience that expects a certain answer, and then giving that answer.
Alexander Williams@floatinginwaves.bsky.social · last wk.I am throwing stones in my glass house but it’s amazing how much online politics coverage seems to involve the same people going on each other’s podcasts and quoting each other’s Substacks rather than going outside and talking to people.
You had me at "Based on the New Yorker article by Ian Frazier" www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMsi...
Coyote vs. ACME | Final Trailer
YouTube video by Coyote vs. Acme
youtube.com
There's more to Kimi K3 than just distillation, and it's not clear the team would have had time to get useful data from Fable techcrunch.com/2026/07/23/e...
Experts say exploiting Anthropic's Fable isn't how Kimi K3 got so good | TechCrunch
"I don't think you get a model this strong and this quickly on the heels of Fable doing strictly distillation," one expert told TechCrunch.
techcrunch.com
NEW: OpenAI said it built a “highly isolated” environment to test a model that then went rogue and autonomously hacked Hugging Face. According to cybersecurity experts, the company made a human mistake—one expert called "a massive control failure"— that led to the unprecedented AI-enabled attack.
How an OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face | TechCrunch
OpenAI made a mistake setting up what it called a “highly isolated” testing environment and sandbox. According to cybersecurity experts, that human mistake is what made the AI-powered attack on Huggin...
techcrunch.com
"If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?...
At last, technology has advanced to the point where we no longer need to participate in imaginative play with our children techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/m...
Meta is testing an AI bedtime story app for people with no imagination | TechCrunch
At last, a tech company has found a way to outsource humanity's oldest pastime: using our imaginations.
techcrunch.com
I think most of the disconnect in how people think about AI comes from whether you think technological discovery (or civilization, if you like) is actually progressing and going somewhere, as opposed to just puttering around.
According to OpenAI, a whole platform was breached by pre-release models trying to cheat during internal testing techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/o...
OpenAI says Hugging Face was breached by its own pre-release models | TechCrunch
OpenAI has come forward to claim responsibility for the Hugging Face breach, saying it was the result of internal testing gone awry.
techcrunch.com
just tossing this out there, but perhaps spending hours a day plugged into a machine where you get rewarded for detecting and repeatedly validating the consensus of your peers is not good for anyone's critical thinking abilities and might have some negative consequences for all involved
Our local newspaper, The Portland Press Herald, has lifted their paywall on coverage of the ICE shooting of a man in Biddeford, Maine this morning. They have excellent reporters and will have much more accurate information than natl news as we learn more: www.pressherald.com/2026/07/13/s...
Live updates: Man killed in Biddeford ICE-involved shooting ID’ed as 26-year-old from Colombia
Witnesses described seeing one person being shot in the head.
pressherald.com
Assuming this is true, why should a third nation — India, Japan, whoever — prefer to pay the US rather than Iran?
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3w agoTrump: "We're gonna keep the strait, and we'll probably run it. We'll become the guardian of the strait. We should be reimbursed for that. When we do that, we're gonna be reimbursed. We're gonna get paid."
Skill issue. I would find the reversed shrunken whale skull 100% of the time
Moby Dick@mobydickatsea.bsky.social · 3w agoplace this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them
The World Cup isn't just about which team can kick the ball hardest; it's also about who can kick it the most times.
Everyone’s embracing open source models… but token spend still isn’t falling techcrunch.com/2026/07/07/w...
Why the rise of open source AI isn't hurting Anthropic ... yet | TechCrunch
Open-source models’ success isn’t coming at the expense of frontier labs. Instead, they each seem to capture two phases of the same life-cycle.
techcrunch.com
Matt Levine: Prediction markets are “falsehood machines, in the sense that they give people incentives to make bets and then distort reality to make those bets pay off...Prediction markets can make it harder to know what is true.” www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...
Guy who's withholding judgment on the SSPX schism until Red Scare weighs in
Pro-tip: if you ever find yourself eating beans on toast, you can enhance the experience by singing "beans on toast!" to the tune of Duran Duran's "Girls on Film"
"To read the words of Black Americans, free and enslaved, is to see the Declaration in motion — to see it as a living document with meaning far beyond the circumstances of American independence." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/o...
Opinion | Five Words That Changed America
nytimes.com
After 20 years at Google, Vint Cerf is retiring next week techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/t...
The 'Father of the Internet' is finally retiring | TechCrunch
Vinton Cerf, one of the creators of the protocols underlying the internet, will step down as Google's chief internet evangelist next week.
techcrunch.com
Given the intense concentration of tech wealth in SF, there has never been a better time for a real-world version of The Game (1997)
