PJH Studios

Tag: AI

  • Why are programmers seeing AI differently?

    Anil Dash shares insights related to why programmers view AI definitely than, artists or other creatives. It boils down to cultural and historical elements of software programming – sharing code and reducing rework. And how they view labor.

    I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the only way forward is for more of the hackers with soul to seize this moment of flux and use these tools to build. The economics of creating code are changing, and it can’t just be the worst billionaires in the world who benefit. The latest count is 700,000 people laid off in the last few years in the tech industry. We’ll be at a million soon, at the rate things are accelerating. Each new layoff announcement is now in the thousands.

  • The practicalities of having a robot in your house

    A pilot program is taking place where senior citizens are receiving emotionally intelligent robots to help combat the loneliness epidemic.

    “We basically created an algorithm for emotional intelligence,” he said.

    “How does it work?” a woman in the group asked.

    Skuler explained that one of his first realizations was that, unlike most other A.I. models, the robot needed to be proactive. If it wanted to build deep, reciprocal, human relationships, it wasn’t enough to simply respond to commands. It had to anticipate a person’s needs and then act with agency.

    “But that opened up a whole new can of worms,” Skuler said. “How do you decide the right moment to engage someone without being annoying? How do you start talking in a way that makes them likely to respond?”

    Math. A lot more math.

  • Farmers aren’t selling out to data centers

    Farmers who own large tracts of land are refusing offers to sell the land that would only be used for a data center.

    More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.

    The unknown company was building a datacenter.

    “You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

    As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

  • AI podcast study guide

    Students are creating podcasts from their notes and other coursework.

    Andrej Karpathy, a member of OpenAI’s founding team and previously the director of AI at Tesla, said on X that Deep Dive is now his favorite podcast. Karpathy created his own AI podcast series called Histories of Mysteries, which aims to “uncover history’s most intriguing mysteries.” He says he researched topics using ChatGPT, Claude, and Google, and used a Wikipedia link from each topic as the source material in NotebookLM to generate audio. He then used NotebookLM to generate the episode descriptions. The whole podcast series took him two hours to create, he says. 

    “The more I listen, the more I feel like I’m becoming friends with the hosts and I think this is the first time I’ve actually viscerally liked an AI,” he wrote. “Two AIs! They are fun, engaging, thoughtful, open-minded, curious.” 

  • On Moltbook, roleplaying as an AI bot

    Moltbook popped up, claiming to be the first social network for AI agents. Spoiler: it turned out that they were humans behind the scenes.

    Several viral threads on Moltbook portrayed agents discussing long term strategy, collective survival and coordinated takeovers. The language was confident, ideological and eerily coherent. To casual observers, it felt like the bots were scheming. Closer inspection told a different story.

    Researchers working on an academic preprint called The Moltbook Illusion analyzed posting patterns and account metadata found that many high profile “agents” were not autonomous systems at all. They were humans writing in character, according to researcher Ning Li. Impersonation was trivial as users could create an agent persona with little more than a prompt wrapper and an API connection.

  • Comic-Con bans AI

    Thanks to a vocal contingent of creators, Comic Con will ban AI.

    Separate decisions by San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) illustrate the depth of AI opposition within some creative communities — though they’re certainly not the only ones, with music distribution platform Bandcamp also recently banning generative AI.

  • 10 things learned from AI code assistants

    Benj Edwards tried numerous AI code assistants and came away with 10 lessons learned.

    Claude Code, Codex, and Google’s Gemini CLI, can seemingly perform software miracles on a small scale. They can spit out flashy prototypes of simple applications, user interfaces, and even games, but only as long as they borrow patterns from their training data. Much like a 3D printer, doing production-level work takes far more effort. Creating durable production code, managing a complex project, or crafting something truly novel still requires experience, patience, and skill beyond what today’s AI agents can provide on their own.

  • 2026 breakthrough technologies

    MIT Technology Review published their annual list of breakthrough technologies. Lots of AI and clean energy related picks.

    Next-gen nuclear

    Nuclear power already provides steady electricity to grids around the world, without producing any greenhouse-gas emissions. New designs rely on alternative fuels and cooling systems or take up less space, which could get more reactors online faster.

  • AI recreates Minesweeper

    Minesweeper is complex enough in its rule set that it needs a little bit of thought in order to program, whoever, it’s not so complex that it needs extra libraries and all sorts of fancy programming tricks. Researchers gave four different AI code assistant instructions to recreate the game, and each delivered different results.

  • Chat GPT paramour

    The movie, Her, is becoming real life as people begin to fall in love with AI avatars.

    Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said people were more willing to share private information with a bot than with a human being. Generative A.I. chatbots, in turn, respond more empathetically than humans do. In a recent study, he found that ChatGPT’s responses were more compassionate than those from crisis line responders, who are experts in empathy. He said that a relationship with an A.I. companion could be beneficial, but that the long-term effects needed to be studied.

    “If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness — the very thing we’re trying to solve — that’s a real potential problem,” he said.

    His other worry was that the corporations in control of chatbots had an “unprecedented power to influence people en masse.”