PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • The AI Bubble

    This is such a good analysis of the practical constraints around AI: the financial, physical, technical and how they all come together.

    The buyers have not learned to manage and the sellers have not learned to price, the two failures meeting in the middle and being reported, in the aggregate, as demand. The buildout is being sized against consumption figures that include their own inefficiency — and the revenue projections required to justify it assume this inflated consumption will grow, not contract, as teams mature and architectures stabilize.

  • Self driving taxis and what we’ll lose

    Robo taxis are coming and we might lose some serendipitous human interaction.

    Then, the woman on the line for the bank told him that it wasn’t enough — he would have to come to the branch in person.

    “He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,’” Father McCarthy said in a video clip shared on social media, recounting the new pope’s growing frustration as the audience laughed. “I gave you all the security questions.”

    The bank employee apologized. The pope tried a different tack.

    “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked, according to Father McCarthy.

    She hung up.

  • Taken, an illustration on surveillance capitalism

    Taken is a micro website that shows the state of the modern web and how it functions as a tool for surveillance capitalism.

  • YouTube took over school

    For numerous reasons, YouTube became a permanent element in schools across the country. It’s easy, contains nearly any marginally educational topic, and accessible.

    American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.

    YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles.

  • AI goblin mode

    Open AI had to make a special update to tell its model to tone down the goblin references.

    The system prompt for OpenAI’s Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”

    The explicit operational warning was made public last week as part of the latest open source code for Codex CLI that OpenAI posted on GitHub. The prohibition is repeated twice in a 3,500-plus word set of “base instructions” for the recently released GPT-5.5, alongside more anodyne reminders not to “use emojis or em dashes unless explicitly instructed” and to “never use destructive commands like ‘git reset –hard’ or ‘git checkout –’ unless the user has clearly asked for that operation.”

  • City okay with cops spying on people

    An Atlanta suburb learned cops use Flock cameras to spy on people. And signed a contract with them anyway.

    The records Hunyar obtained, however, show that some of the cameras that were accessed were in sensitive locations, including the pool at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (in Dunwoody), the children’s gymnastics room at MJCCA, and several fitness centers and studios. The access logs obtained by Hunyar show at the very least how expansive Flock’s surveillance systems can be in a single city, encompassing not just cameras purchased by the city but also cameras purchased by private businesses.

  • THE FUTURISM YOU WERE SOLD WAS A WEAPON

    I really enjoy Monika Bielskyte’s ideas and futurist critiques. They’re nuanced, well researched, and contain a pragmatic depth to our current path. She goes long on “THE FUTURISM YOU WERE SOLD WAS A WEAPON“, deconstructing a vision for the future that isn’t healthy.

    Futurism did not emerge from neutral curiosity about tomorrow. It came wrapped in the aesthetics of domination: speed prized above reflection, homogeneity above plurality, command above reciprocity. Inside that grammar, the body is an obstacle, connection reads as weakness, dependence as a humiliation, and the living world merely as raw material or enemy terrain. The techno-centric futurist tradition has spent a century projecting a dead mechanical fantasy as an account of life.

  • AI glasses kinda suck

    At some point AI glasses will be a worthwhile device, right now, they still kind of suck at doing things correctly. Such a true for any new technology, but this year amount of money and hype putting into these kinds of devices, a healthy amount of skepticism it’s worthwhile.

    So what do my miraculous sunglasses tell me? Many things. They inform me, in the voice of Princess Anna from “Frozen,” that my dog is a golden retriever mix (he is not) and that a tree I am looking at is probably an oak (it is not). They tell me to walk north when I know I should be walking south. One afternoon, on a sunny stroll, I stop to admire a bright red cardinal singing its heart out in a tree.

  • Russians surrendering to robots in Ukraine

    Russians surrendering to robots in Ukraine. Nice harbinger of doom.

  • AI hasn’t earned its social and political capital

    Nilay Patel of The Verge makes the case that AI hasn’t earned its social and political capital because technologists confuse application of technology and law governing society..

    But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. I have to remind our fairly technical audience on Decoder and at The Verge all the time that the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.

    But at the end of the day, it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations.