WindBorne Systems, one of the most interesting AI companies out there, raised $37 million to scale up its weather-forecasting global balloon network. techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/a...

AI makes weather prediction better. Can WindBorne make it lucrative? | TechCrunch

WindBorne Systems has raised $37 million Series B round to scale its weather balloons and AI forecasts.

techcrunch.com

I actually just wrote about this techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/e...

Elon Musk repeatedly one-upped his execs on SpaceX's first earnings call | TechCrunch

Musk kept inflating the already-big promises being made by SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen and Gwynne Shotwell on the company's first call.

techcrunch.com

Cas Piancey@cascoinfoundation.org · 19h ago

You can feel every executive trying to answer the question and move on, only to be stopped by Elon going “let me elaborate on that”

Thought someone on here might know someone: we're looking to add a mid-level commodities analyst in our alternative products group (we do hedging for corporates/asset managers). They need to do analysis and write at a high level about rates, energy, metals, ag, etc (1/2)

If there's one thing I've learned from publishing this story is that there is a very, very, very wide chasm between what the law says about all this... and what people *think* the law says and/or *should* say.

Zack Whittaker@zackwhittaker.com · 2d ago

After Anthropic and OpenAI both admitted to their AI models hacking other companies, @lorenzofb.bsky.social and I wanted to find out: Who is legally to blame when an autonomous AI agent hacks something? Lawyers say it's really complicated! Bypass for ad-blockers: web.archive.org/web/20260803...

Conscientiously placing a falconry hood over my infant child's head as we settle in for a packed matinee screening of The Odyssey

getting ME political ads while visiting the fam, and Troy Jackson is getting blasted for supporting Platner through his various scandalous revelations. There is something to learn here...

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

a very good essay on twitter about why Situational Awareness blew up, and why the SAASpoclaypse has not come to fruition. This to me is the most important bit, which you can see in all kinds of AI (and other VC-backed sector) screw ups x.com/porterstansb...

This is so frustrating to read from The New Yorker. Reward hacking *long* predates LLMs. The Coast Runners paper on reward hacking (in reinforcement learning, pre-LLMs) is 10 years old! Reward hacking is not new, and not a sign of a breakthrough intelligence, much less sentience. Did AI write this?

SCOOP: Warsh is considering reducing the number of policy meetings the Fed holds each year. He raised the idea at this week's meeting, according to four people with knowledge of the situation

Service members that survived an Iranian attack claim the Trump admin IGNORED their asks for advanced medical aid and failed to protect them from strikes. Our troops deserve better. Rep. Pat Ryan and I led Democrats in opening an investigation into whether Pete Hegseth left them behind.

Lawmakers will investigate Iranian attack that killed 6 U.S. troops

Citing reporting by The Post, lawmakers told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the probe is necessary because they are not confident in the Pentagon’s ability to examine the incident objectivity.

washingtonpost.com

www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

EXCLUSIVE: Chinese military researchers tap US AI models to train defence systems

Military researchers have used outputs from leading U.S. artificial intelligence models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic to train domestic AI systems to advance China's defence capabilities.

reuters.com

this is a very cool visual explainer that shows what happens inside in an LLM laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/

Dont worry guys they made it vulnerable to guns and knives

Taghan@conasg.com · 6d ago

Found the most cursed, evil and possibly satanic commercial robot ever designed www.satyress.com

CONCACAF should too! and probably will chicken out

Defector@defector.com · 6d ago

UEFA is ready to go to war with FIFA over the World Cup:

US defeat in Iran isn't just real. It's quantifiable. And it can get a whole lot worse.

The Math Behind The U.S. Defeat in Iran

Missile-interceptor stocks are dwindling after only five months. That Memorandum of Understanding is looking pretty enticing!

forever-wars.com

Denying FMAGs (FEMA fire management grants) is a big deal. Especially for the kind of fire outbreak that OR has gone through the past few weeks. A troubling development and hopefully not a trend as we hit the heart of fire season.

Michael Wara@michaelwara.bsky.social · 6d ago

www.kptv.com/2026/07/29/f...

This is why I don’t understand why anyone, even the effective-altruism groups, thinks they’re going to get a philanthropy boost off of AI IPO millionaires. These people don’t give their money away. It’s a boom, nominally, and Bay Area cultural institutions and social-aid NGOs are starving.

Zach Lipton@zachlipton.com · 6d ago

the docs are amazing here. OpenAI actually produced an infographic to highlight how in their entire history, they've donated a whopping $800K to local civic causes the Mayor just out here trying to do reputation cleanup for OpenAI and they're just "nah we already gave 47% of a public toilet"

the age-old path for a space startup: science fiction scheme with no customers pivots to infrastructure the government might pay for

Alan Boyle@b0yle.bsky.social · 6d ago

Thanks to NASA's $30 billion #MoonBase initiative, Interlune and Vermeer are pivoting their partnership to focus on building lunar construction tools as well as mining precious helium-3 on the moon. www.geekwire.com/2026/interlu... H/T @interlune.bsky.social

NEW @crisesnotes.bsky.social PIECE: In this piece I critique a recent piece from @edzitron.com comparing the AI(LLM) boom to the "Subprime" Mortgage Crisis (and implicitly the GFC of 2007-2009). The ? is:"How big of a macrofinancial threat is the AI(LLM) Boom?" www.crisesnotes.com/sigh-no-ed-z...

*Sigh* No Ed Zitron, AI bond issuance is not AI’s "Subprime Mortgage Crisis”

EDITORIAL NOTE: Given the importance of this issue, and in a desire to be fair when writing such a critical piece, I sent a draft of this article to Ed Zitron to review and give his response to. I've ...

crisesnotes.com

Sophia Space and Caltech have been granted a patent for an approach to orbital data centers that they say will get around one of the biggest technical challenges: how to get rid of the heat generated by thousands of AI data processing chips. www.geekwire.com/2026/sophia-...

AI plus IP: Sophia Space and Caltech secure a patent for orbital data centers that use passive cooling

Sophia Space's co-founder believes his company's modular architecture for data-crunching satellites will become the industry standard.

geekwire.com

Bad news: The 30-year Treasury yield hit a 19-year high today. 🚨🚨🚨 America's going to have to pay more for its colossal debt, which will soon hit $40 trillion. Interest already tops $1T a year and is growing rapidly. Latest GOP/WH plans would increase the deficit. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Treasuries Jolted as Fed Hold Trims September Hike Bets

US bond traders lowered their expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates at its next meeting after officials kept their benchmark steady on Wednesday, while 30-year Treasury yield...

bloomberg.com

"AI models right now are less regulated than restaurants. Talk of relying on voluntary commitments, that AI companies are going to be able to self-regulate, is nonsense."

It’s Frighteningly Easy to Jailbreak Some Frontier AI Models

I watched a new tool try to get around the model safeguards of four major frontier companies. You might be surprised by how they performed.

wired.com

I have been having this conversation with regulators and emphasize this point. Worries about AI alignment need to be matched with equal concern about aligning the incentives of people using AI (to make important decisions that affect others’ lives) by requiring human responsibility to be legible.

Sat down to write about the Hugging Face/AI incident. Ended up drawing this instead.

Israel is giving Trump's former campaign manager millions of dollars to fill the internet with pro-Israel articles written by AI, not so that anyone will actually read them, but so that *LLMs will train on them* & regurgitate their perspective. This is the future of the information environment.

Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working.

Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.

dropsitenews.com

EXCLUSIVE: OpenAI's rogue agent compromised an account at a second tech firm, executive says reut.rs/45xMdru

EXCLUSIVE: OpenAI's rogue agent compromised an account at a second tech firm, executive says

The rogue agent that escaped from OpenAI and went on a days-long hacking spree ​at the AI firm Hugging Face also ​compromised a customer at a second tech ⁠company — New York-based Modal Labs — according to ​a Modal executive and two other sources familiar with ​the matter.

reut.rs

I'm glad the space press is finally covering the reality that SpaceX doesn't have the heat shield technology it needs to make Starship rapidly reusable: arstechnica.com/space/2026/0...

Experts warn current Starship heat shield tech is a "dead end" for rapid reuse

NASA has not made substantial investments in thermal protection research for decades.

arstechnica.com

Tariff revenue turned negative in June after refunds began to flow in the wake of the the Supreme Court judgment (via @johnauthers.bsky.social)