Two things at play - ClickFix (website asks user to press Windows key + R, run a command) is *incredibly successful*, and just phoning the helpdesk and asking for password reset. The GenAI research stuff being pushed out by security and AI vendors is completely absent in the real world trenches.

Stefano Zanero@raistolo.bsky.social · 6d ago

Cyber insurer (Chatham house forbids me from saying who) at BH CISO summit: “so far this year 0 payouts for claims even remotely connected to a AI-driven breach, 85% of payouts related to social engineering”. Sobering statistic.

fortunately red teaming any website you want and saying "it was not me, it was the one-armed AI!!" is completely fine and legal now, right? because OpenAI and Anthropic sure are getting away with it a lot

Asher Wolf@asherwolf.bsky.social · 17h ago

The Interview: Cory Doctorow thinks tech executives' story about AI is not an inevitability

Cory Doctorow thinks Australia should be worried about digital sovereignty before AI

Cory Doctorow says the AI revolution promised by tech bros isn't inevitable but the bursting of an AI bubble is. He wants to remind us another future is possible.  

abc.net.au

Really important research with clear findings, implications & policy recommendations to arrest the trend of oversized cars & trucks killing & maiming more pedestrians 🙏 & kudos to Milad Haghani, Abbas Rajabifard, Iman Taheri Sarteshnizi, & Neema Nassir @aunz.theconversation.com

Big US-style trucks are killing more pedestrians in Australia – our research proves it

Pedestrians are more likely to be killed by heavier cars – and even more so if the vehicle is taller, Australian-first research has found.

theconversation.com

just another thing that casually makes Australia suck a little bit more that we'll continue to ignore while it kills people

Rohan Pearce@rohan-p.bsky.social · 4d ago

"Big US‑style trucks are killing more pedestrians in Australia – our research proves it" theconversation.com/big-us-style...

BWM cars now showing owners and unskippable ad for the new Spider Man Film whenever they start the vehicle. This shit needs to become illegal, yesterday, else how long before you have to watch it *before* you can start the vehicle.

how do we turn AI agents on phone calls into free coding agents like Chipotlai Max, which figured out that you can use Chipotle's support agent to get free compute (github.com/cyberpapiii/...)

GitHub - cyberpapiii/chipotlai-max: The AI coding agent that runs on stolen Chipotle compute 🌯 Fork of OpenCode with Pepper AI as default model. Community project to add providers from Home Depot, Low...

The AI coding agent that runs on stolen Chipotle compute 🌯 Fork of OpenCode with Pepper AI as default model. Community project to add providers from Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Starbucks & more....

github.com

George Pearkes@peark.es · 6d ago

AI deployment tidbit from subprime auto lender $CACC. 67% of inbound customer service/account solutions calls were routed to an AI agent in June versus 27% in March. "We expect further gains in call handling and unit economics as we scale this platform throughout 2026."

drink every time Elon uses a plot device from a well-known sci fi to pump SPCX (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress)

George Pearkes@peark.es · 6d ago

Elon is talking about using robots to build a mass accelerator on the moon in support of an economy 1000x to 1 million times the current earth economy. It's a bad sci fi novel not an earnings call.

holy shit, imagine intentionally sabotaging your product to put your customer's critical data at risk, just so you can sell a few bucks more of the world's least favourite cloud storage platform

Heather Burns@heatherburnstech.bsky.social · 6d ago

The most terrifying enshittification I've discovered has been learning that Microsoft Word documents no longer auto-save if you are not saving them to one of their own proprietary cloud services. I'm slapping control-S like it's 1999.

Grocery margins are low is a frequently rehashed point to argue against Mamdani’s public grocery stores. Grocery is indeed a low margin business. But its median return on invested capital is above that for all firms, so it is NOT a low profitability business. Let me explain. 🧵

jfc

Jess Piper@piperformissouri.bsky.social · last wk.

…

Good reporting and a sign that Warsh has completely lost his colleagues two meetings in. Temu Greenspan in for a bad couple quarters.

pretty convenient time to get such a big efficiency boost!

Jesse Felder@jessefelder.com · 2w ago

‘OpenAI will lower the price of GPT-5.6 Luna — the fastest and lowest cost version of the new model — by roughly 80%. Luna will now cost 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens.‘ www.axios.com/2026/07/30/o...

This is some good digging of Microsoft's financials by Paul - I didn't know MS were doing this. One of my old employers (not Microsoft) did extending depreciation on prior Capexs as they needed to invest but couldn't afford to. It was a major red flag and where things started to go wrong.

Paul Thurrott@thurrott.bsky.social · 2w ago

Hi there #opensource #ruby #developers: morph needs you. It keeps scrapers running for Planning Alerts, and the stack has aged badly. Come and take a piece of it. Even a README fix helps. oaf.org.au/2026/07/30/m...

morph.io is stuck in 2016. Help us get it out.

morph.io has been quietly running scrapers for the civic tech world for over a decade. Over 11,100 public scrapers, 43 million rows of data, and one server that’s still running Ubuntu 16.04. …

oaf.org.au

My take on the three Fed dissents. Inflation is becoming a norm, not an anomaly. That is a problem for the Federal Reserve. Warsh has argued it is a choice - time to choose to derail it. www.linkedin.com/pulse/warshs...

Warsh’s short-lived honeymoon

Three dissents at his second meeting. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) – the policy-setting arm of the Federal Reserve – voted to hold interest rates unchanged in July.

linkedin.com

Siri show me regulatory capture

Richard Chirgwin@rchirgwin.bsky.social · 2w ago

This must not happen in Australia: www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

NPRs Planet Money did an interesting episode on ASML a while back looking at how it was largely a US innovation that ended up in the Netherlands: www.npr.org/2024/11/29/n...

'Planet Money': The strange way the world's fastest microchips are made

We get a rare up close look inside the Dutch company ASML, and its technology behind the most advanced microchips.

npr.org

George Pearkes@peark.es · 2w ago

Missed this an hour ago, The Information reporting that a Chinese company has started production of deep ultraviolet lithography machines, a market that up until now ASML has a total monopoly on. Shares -6%. www.theinformation.com/articles/chi...

the costs and limitations of AI do what now?

Jesse Felder@jessefelder.com · 2w ago

‘Major employers largely held back on adding people due to economic uncertainties or a belief that artificial intelligence could shoulder more tasks on the job. But some executives say the costs and limitations of AI now demand that more people be added.’ www.wsj.com/business/big...

the paradox of tolerance, in pictures

derek guy@dieworkwear.bsky.social · 2w ago

ok reasonable

www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79G...

Neuromancer — Official Teaser | Apple TV

YouTube video by Apple TV

youtube.com

NPR's Planet Money did a bunch of great episodes about how when people expect inflation, it changes their behaviour (e.g. they spend more and it makes more inflation) - www.npr.org/transcripts/... Very curious if/how en masse stock market expectations can impact

How the Phillips Curve shaped macroeconomics : Planet Money

When economists and policymakers talk about getting inflation under control, there's an assumption they often make: bringing inflation down will probably result in some degree of layoffs and job loss....

npr.org

Asher Wolf@asherwolf.bsky.social · 2w ago

Short sellers have placed a nearly unprecedented magnitude of bets against the domestic stock market futurism.com/future-socie...

This is cool. I have a 'work' tailnet and a 'personal' one and on occasion wish I'd be able to be connected to both at the same time to be able to move stuff between them.

Philip Z@philz.dev · 2w ago

"The solution was fairly straightforward" blog.exe.dev/a-tale-of-tw... by Maisem is very cool. Learning cool stuff at work is fun.

Insane new research. Scientists gave asthma patients free electric stoves to replace their gas stoves, then checked to see if symptoms improved. Not only did symptoms improve, ditching gas was *better than medicine.* Details in today's newsletter: www.climatecoloredgoggles.com/p/electric-s...

Researchers used electric stoves to treat asthma. It worked.

The latest evidence that gas is bad for your health.

climatecoloredgoggles.com

Veppers once again surprised to discover that he is, in fact, the bad guy (still cannot believe he ever actually read a single Culture novel)

Peter Murphy@peterkmurphy.bsky.social · 3w ago

"From that point on, it was all downhill for Musk. He suggested that everyone read Iain Banks for a vision of the future, and Beddoes pointed out that Banks was a socialist. Musk insisted he wasn’t."

My notes on Kimi K3, plus some thoughts on what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark even while it becomes further detached from how good the models are at the things that matter (like agentic tool calling across longer conversations) simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/...

Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 this morning, describing it as their “most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters”. It’s currently available via their website and …

simonwillison.net

For those of you in game development or infosec or any of the related fields: my friend and colleague @steve-guris.bsky.social, over at @armada-ops.com, did a really interesting and informative analysis of an AI video game cheat. armada.risk3sixty.com/blog/reverse...

Reverse Engineering Commercial Video Game AI Cheat

This post is part 1 of a 2-part series that provides extensive technical details on a commercial AI video game cheat.

armada.risk3sixty.com

finally, an investment that will never go down

Jesse Felder@jessefelder.com · 4w ago

‘There was a time when it seemed like housing would always pay-off, no matter how much debt you took on; and often it did. The housing bust of the global financial crisis shattered that illusion. Now it seems stocks are the sure bet.’ www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

I blogged about last week’s viral video of the pervert on the Scottish train filming some quiet teenage girls, and why it matters for the debate on young people and smartphones. I didn’t share it anywhere, but it’s top of Hacker News. This happens to me a lot. heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/t...

moving TPB to Australia and pivoting to AI to get a copyright exemption

Asher Wolf@asherwolf.bsky.social · 4w ago

The Albanese government will force large-scale data centres to generate as much power as they take from the grid and minimise water usage to keep household bills from rising and is also exploring a new copyright solution designed for artificial intelligence training www.afr.com/technology/a...