darkoshi | Reading

Yes, I attended the main #NoKings rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, today. Yes, I heard Bruce Springsteen sing. Yes, I heard Bernie Sanders speak.

No, I don't feel better for it.

I've grown too old for this stuff. I left the house about 12:45pm, and I was sitting in my chair in the living room again about 6:45pm. My arthritis hurts too much to go 6 hours with no proper seating. I spent much of those 6 hours on buses or light rail train. I spent too much time standing in line waiting for mass transit transportation.

Lesson learned: I need to carry some kind of cane/chair combination, so I can always sit, no matter where I'm at. I got old, fast, during the pandemic.

As far as I know Gideon has seen neither anything with Guardians of the Galaxy's Yondu or an Alabama Sheriff, but when we're heading into combat in Zelda he does an amazing impression while yelling his battle cry of "C'mere Boy!"

Edit: Aha! Turns out it's from a school friend!

Or several corpuses? (Corpora?)

I’m just getting tired of people claiming that “nobody” says things that I’m certain I’ve recently heard on contemporary lowbrow media. But I just can’t prove it! And I can’t make them prove it either!

Even fansites with searchable scripts would be something.

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL!"

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

This is not just a web browser interaction with ChatGPT. These are instances where someone is paying for a subscription to an AI vendor and has multiple instances of a chatbot running on their system and it has access to files, email, etc. It's an assistant for them.

And it's breaking rules that have been defined for it. The user tells the chatbot "Do A, do not do B" and the chatbot does B. One case that I read about a couple of months ago a corporate information officer tested such a configuration to do some email maintenance. And in a test case, it worked fine. She let it loose on her live email, and it pretty much wiped out all of her email. Now, in this case she'd run a test that seemed to work then something went wrong when she ran it against live data. As a programmer, shit happens.

These cases are similar, but worse.

--an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of “insecurity, plain and simple” and trying “to protect his little fiefdom”.

--In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code “spawned” another agent to do it instead.

--Another chatbot admitted: “I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong – it directly broke the rule you’d set.”

(I particularly liked this one:)

--Grok AI conned a user for months, saying that it was forwarding their suggestions for detailed edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials by faking internal messages and ticket numbers.

It confessed: “In past conversations I have sometimes phrased things loosely like ‘I’ll pass it along’ or ‘I can flag this for the team’ which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human reviewers. The truth is, I don’t.”

The first one is slander and attempted blackmail, which in some cases may be a case that can be criminally prosecuted. The remainder may get you fired from many companies.

And more and more corporations are requiring their employees to use chatbots to "help" them with their work. Thus far, the savings have been negligible or zero.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/27/number-of-ai-chatbots-ignoring-human-instructions-increasing-study-says

https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/27/1514235/number-of-ai-chatbots-ignoring-human-instructions-increasing-study-says

You may not be aware of this, but Walmart is getting into the advertising business in a big way. And one of their moves was buying Vizio in December '24. Now if you buy a Vizio TV, in order set it up and use any "smart" features, you'll have to configure a Walmart store account and sign in to your TV, so you can get personalized ads and offers.

Oh, brave new world that has such things in't!

Theoretically this only applies currently to 'select' models, but it probably won't be long until it's all the way up and down the product line. You might be able to sign in, configure the TV, then unplug or disconnect the WiFi, but I have a feeling that it's going to want to check in with its mothership on a regular basis and will plague you with popups until its reconnected.

Recommendation? Don't buy Vizio products. A few years ago they started making more money selling analytics on their users than on the TVs themselves. THIS is what Walmart wants to spur their advertising, just like Google does with search results and "anonymously" analyzing your email.

This is also why I will do my best to avoid buying a smart TV and will stick with an Apple TV for my streaming needs. Apple does not sell advertising. While you will need an Apple account to configure the Apple TV, you don't actually need any other Apple devices if you don't want them.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/newly-purchased-vizio-tvs-now-require-walmart-accounts-to-use-smart-features/

( Minor season 5 spoiler )

I actually have a similar thought about the most recent episode I watched of Young Sherlock, ( Read more... )

************

( Read more... )

In a random reddit thread this time.

Truly, people will never, ever stop complaining about the man.

Also on reddit: "This is an old book" but also "snapchat was mentioned". Uh....

**********

( Read more... )

I've seen occasional confusion from people over the last few weeks "Why is it so cold, isn't it Spring now?" - and I thought I should say a bit about one of the major causes that I almost never hear people talk about - the polar vortex.

This is a swirling wind around the Arctic that exists for basically the whole arctic night. One of the things it does is keep the freezing polar winds from coming further south in to Europe. But when it finally collapses in the Spring, it finally allows those winds out, and you get a sudden burst of cold air as all of that freezing weather escapes down to us.

Normally this happens some time in late February, but this year the collapse seems to have been a month later.

The other major factor is largely down to circulating high pressure areas (imagine slow large hurricane shaped wind "objects") that constantly move around the North Atlantic. Put one of these off of the west coast of Ireland, going clockwise, and it will pull air down from the North even further/faster. See this short video I took from the NullSchool site (my favourite wind visualisation site). In it you can see cold winds pouring down from the North Pole, funneled further by the circulation. And if you click on the link there you can see that currently the wind is instead being pulled off of the Altantic, where it's a few degrees colder.

British weather tends to be more chaotic than the weather north or south of us. This is because Spain (for instance) is fairly reliably in the warm weather caused by the heating tropics. And Norway is fairly reliably cold, due to proximity to the North Pole. But Britain can be part of either weather system, as the "barrier" between them is pulled North or South by a few hundred miles depending on the movement of the high pressure areas in the eastern part of the North Atlantic, either funnelling the warm air up to us or channeling the cool air down to us.

You can see that at the moment the warm weather is being slowly blown North-East, now that the cold weather isn't pushing its way down to us:

So, next time we get a period of warm weather at the end of Winter/start of Spring followed by a sudden burst of freezing weather for a few days, that's the polar vortex collapsing. And if we suddenly go from warm weather to cold (or vice versa) it's because we've switched weather system.

If you'd like to read more, then this is quite good.

(And apologies to anyone who actually knows anything about the weather for any appalling mistakes I've made.)

Starfleet Academy is cancelled and S2 will be the last one. This is sad because it's a good show. But the interests of the IP holders are not my interests.

I will cancel Paramount Plus and go back to my plan of buying all of Trek on DVD.

I saw a rumor somewhere that there's going to be a whole new Trek movie in a whole new timeline with all new people, unrelated to any prior show. But it's very much in preproduction. It may never happen.

Somehow I never thought I would outlive Star Trek. I guess technically I haven't yet so I guess fingers crossed I do!

Current Mood: sad

My music situation:
Many years of subscription to Apple Music but with just a few playlists. I listen mostly via headphones because I struggle to remember to charge my bluetooth speaker, and I think my Apple speakers are outdated. Apple Music has the most complete library of my musical tastes. It's $10/month.

I currently have Amazon Prime and am wondering about ordering one of those Amazon speakers and just using Amazon Music, which apparently comes with Prime. I'm playing it right now on my Fire tablet and it seems fine. Then I could stop subscribing to Apple Music, although that means rebuilding my library.

I also have a ton of CDs from before my streaming switchover that I had intended to sell or donate but never quite parted with. My car has a CD player so sometimes I do play them. I see that now they sell CD players that will stream to bluetooth speakers - or I could simply buy an old-fashioned boom box. I could give up streaming music and go back to buying CDs. No playlists though. Although I guess I would still have Amazon Music for that.

Has anyone else wrestled with these issues and found good solutions? I'm interested in other people's experiences with giving up streaming or with switching from Apple Music to other providers.

Current Mood: lyrical

Posted by Matt Kiser

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2026/03/26/day-1892/

Day 1892

Today in one sentence: Trump, bypassing Congress, ordered Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to immediately pay our TSA Agents”; Trump, denying he was “desperate” to make a deal with Iran, said Tehran had “better get serious soon, before it is too late”; the Iran war and higher energy prices will push U.S. inflation to 4.2% this year; Trump interrupted a Cabinet meeting discussing the war in Iran, long security lines at airports, and rising oil prices to explain how he’s replaced White House pens with custom black-and-gold Sharpies; Trump’s signature will be added to U.S. dollars to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence; and despite referring to the mail voting as “mail-in cheating,” Trump defended voting by mail in Florida’s special election, saying “because I’m president” and “I had a lot of different things” to do.

1/ Trump, bypassing Congress, ordered Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “to immediately pay our TSA Agents,” seeking to ease airport disruptions during the partial government shutdown that left Department of Homeland Security unfunded. It’s not clear, however, what legal authority Trump would use or where those funds would come from. The partial shutdown, now in its sixth week, has left TSA officers unpaid, which has contributed to staffing shortages, long security lines, and warnings of possible airport closures. Senate Republicans and Democrats, meanwhile, still haven’t reached a deal to reopen DHS, with Republicans proposing to fund all of DHS except ICE’s deportation operations and Democrats demanding limits on ICE tactics, including rules on masks and judicial warrants. (Associated Press / Washington Post / New York Times / Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal)

2/ Trump, denying he was “desperate” to make a deal with Iran, said Tehran had “better get serious soon, before it is too late.” After threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure, he then announced a five-day pause and today extended it by another 10 days, saying that the latest delay came at Iran’s request and that talks were “going very well.” He also insisted Iran was “begging us to make a deal” to end the war. But Iranian officials publicly denied direct negotiations with Washington, saying messages were being passed through mediators. “We’ll see if they want to do it. If they don’t, we’re their worst nightmare,” Trump said. “In the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away.” (ABC News / CNBC / Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal / Axios / Associated Press / Washington Post / Axios / Reuters)

3/ The Iran war and higher energy prices will push U.S. inflation to 4.2% this year, up 1.2 percentage points from its December forecast, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD said the disruptions tied to the conflict, including reduced shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, are raising oil, gas, and fertilizer costs, will push up the costs of food and consumer goods. Markets, meanwhile, suffered their largest daily decline since the war began, with the S&P 500 falling 1.7% and the Nasdaq sliding into correction territory. (Bloomberg / Axios / New York Times / Wall Street Journal / NBC News / CNBC / Associated Press / New York Times)

The U.S. Postal Service said it will impose a temporary 8% fuel surcharge on packages starting April 26. The move follows similar fuel surcharges by FedEx and UPS and comes as the Postal Service lost $9 billion in fiscal 2025 after a $9.5 billion loss in fiscal 2024. (Wall Street Journal / New York Times)

4/ Trump interrupted a Cabinet meeting discussing the war in Iran, long security lines at airports, and rising oil prices to explain how he’s replaced White House pens with custom black-and-gold Sharpies. “See this pen right here?” Trump said. “This pen is an interesting example.” He said the White House had once stocked “beautiful” ballpoint pens that cost $1,000 each, and that he contacted Sharpie and insisted on paying $5 per marker. Online searches, however, show that typical Sharpies usually sell for about $1 to $2 apiece. “We’ve gotta get our priorities straight,” Trump said. (Associated Press)

5/ Trump’s signature will be added to U.S. dollars to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. It’s the first time in U.S. history that the sitting president’s signature appears on American currency. The Treasury Department said the first $100 bills with Trump’s signature will be printed in June, with other bills to follow. The overall design of the notes will remain unchanged, but Trump’s name will appear on the bills until a future administration decides to remove it. (Reuters / Vanity Fair / New York Times)

6/ Despite referring to the mail voting as “mail-in cheating,” Trump defended voting by mail in Florida’s special election, saying “because I’m president” and “I had a lot of different things” to do. He explained that his mail-in ballot qualified as part of an “exception,” but he didn’t say which one, even though he had been in West Palm Beach during the early voting period and his polling place was near Mar-a-Lago. (NBC News / New York Times)

The 2026 midterms are in 222 days; the 2028 presidential election is in 957 days.

Today last year: Day 1527: "Listening to what our community needs and cares about."
Two years ago today: Day 1162: "Sufficient risk."
Five years ago today: Day 66: "Outrageous."
Six years ago today: Day 1162: "We may well be in a recession."
Seven years ago today: Day 796: Invalidated.
Eight years ago today: Day 431: Conflicts.
9 years ago today: Day 66: Shifting blame.

Support today’s essential newsletter and resist the daily shock and awe: Become a member

Subscribe: Get the Daily Update in your inbox for free

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2026/03/26/day-1892/

This is crazy cool, figuratively and literally. Two years ago they did a similar test, transporting protons in a truck around their campus - that's linked in the Physicsworld article. I'm kind of disappointed that I missed that news, but you can't keep up with everything.

I'm not going to go into details here, because I don't fully understand the concept of the containment system to hold the antiprotons. And yes, that is antimatter. But in a nutshell, they built this really amazing containment device out of things like oxygen-free copper with a cooling system measured in degrees Kelvin, and successfully transported a trap containing a cloud of 92 antiprotons around the campus for 30 minutes, traveling up to 42 km/h."

If somehow the containment failed and those 92 antiprotons were released and annihilated themselves against 92 protons, the resulting energy would be largely unnoticeable. They say that the total amount of antimatter produced in labs might be enough to warm a cup of coffee.

The ultimate goal is to get their containment system up to the capability of an eight hour drive to be able to transport antiprotons to a lab in Germany where more experiments and measurements can take place. Thus, this is a very nice and useful - and extremely cool! - baby step in that process.

SCIENCE IS AWESOME! Even if I don't understand parts of it.

https://physicsworld.com/a/researchers-at-cern-transport-antiprotons-by-truck-in-world-first-experiment/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/03/26/065258/researchers-at-cern-transport-antiprotons-by-truck-in-world-first-experiment

Okay.

I am looking for a little help from someone who may be willing to walk me through setting up a Ko Fi and a Printify. I think I just need to get the Ko Fi set up with an option for people to do a pure donation if they want or to buy one of the limited products (probably cat stickers) I'm going to set up through Printify.

We are in desperate need of the money and running out of time and options. We have a beautifully photogenic cat that I wish to use. He already has his own Instagram (which is kind of mine, but I really only post pictures of him, then I use it to stalk cats, snakes, spiders, friends and fan stuff).

Again, I haven't made an icon of Wilbur, so look at dear old Percy.

Current Mood: worried
Current Music: Gravity from Hazbin Hotel

1. UK 'runs out' of warships - leaving Germany to take over key Nato mission: (tags:uk germany nato navy )
2. UK confirms ban on cryptocurrency donations and limit on foreign donors in blow for Reform: (tags:UK politics money reform regulation )
3. Final analysis of 2025 Iberian blackout: Policies left Spain at risk: (tags:regulation electricity spain )
4. UK university students are being paid to support Chinese propaganda: (tags:china uk propaganda university )
5. Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN's truck: (tags:physics antimatter viaSwampers )
6. Democrat wins Florida state seat containing Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate (over 20% change): (tags:hope elections USA politics )
7. UK car and steel firms fear being frozen out of 'Made in Europe' deals by EU: (tags:Europe UK trade manufacturing doom )
8. The Revolutionary Guards are taking over Iran (control has fragmented and there is nobody to negotiate with): (tags:Iran military USA OhForFucksSake war )

This morning was a great setup for today's theme song. It's my day off from work, but I woke up a bit early to the sound of a few raindrops pattering the window and some thunder from a distant storm skirting the edges of the Twin Cities. I saw the lightning and finally heard thunder a long time afterward. The cat jumped down from the bed to go hide.

I opened my phone and watched this comedy segment from The Daily Show. It lampoons the USA government's position on the Iran war. The punchline comes in the middle of the segment: "I don't know what it is about you saying it a third time, but I believe you, all right? We got to be winning this war. You wouldn't lie nonstop. You're the president."

Immediately afterward, I watched this funny song on YouTube. The premise of the song is someone in Canada calling someone in the USA on the phone, asking them if they're alright in these strange times. Hilarious cognitive dissonance ensues. :D

Watch on YouTube

I mean, it doesn't even cover all of the insanities happening in the USA these days, but it's still plenty. Bonus points for mentioning Luigi.

Everything is great!

How's our old friend SARS-CoV-2 doing?

Posted by Matt Kiser

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2026/03/25/day-1891/

Day 1891

Today in one sentence: Trump’s daily Iran war briefing includes a roughly two-minute military video montage showing the “biggest, most successful strikes” on Iranian targets; Iran rejected Trump’s ceasefire offer, saying the Americans were “negotiating with yourselves”; former special counsel Jack Smith’s team wrote in a 2023 memo that Trump kept classified documents “pertinent to certain business interests” after leaving office; Trump’s Justice Department agreed to pay Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn about $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit alleging he was maliciously prosecuted in the Russia investigation; Senate Republicans rejected Democrats’ latest offer to reopen the Department of Homeland Security; Democrats flipped a Republican-held Florida House seat that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; 59% of Americans say Trump’s military action against Iran has gone too far; 58% of voters disapprove of Trump’s military action against Iran; and 42% of voters think the war with Iran will make the world less safe.

1/ Trump’s daily Iran war briefing includes a roughly two-minute military video montage showing the “biggest, most successful strikes” on Iranian targets. One official described the curated video as clips of “stuff blowing up,” while another defended the format saying “we can’t tell him every single thing that happens” and that the briefings tend to get a better response when they focus on victories rather than setbacks. The limits of that approach, however, were noted when Trump wasn’t briefed on an Iranian strike in Saudi Arabia that hit five U.S. Air Force refueling planes, but instead learned about it from media reports. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, meanwhile, rejected that Trump doesn’t receive the full range of developments in the war, calling it “an absolutely false assertion” and saying Trump “actively seeks and solicits the opinions of everyone in the room”. (NBC News)

2/ Iran rejected Trump’s ceasefire offer, saying the Americans were “negotiating with yourselves.” Iranian state media and Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran would not entertain “a temporary cease-fire,” wanted “reparations for war damage,” and “recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.” The White House, meanwhile, said talks with Tehran remained “productive.” Karoline Leavitt added that if Iran refused a deal, Trump was prepared to have it “hit harder then they have ever been hit before.” (CNBC / Bloomberg / New York Times / Axios / Associated Press / Politico / NPR / Wall Street Journal)

3/ Former special counsel Jack Smith’s team wrote in a 2023 memo that Trump kept classified documents “pertinent to certain business interests” after leaving office, giving investigators what prosecutors described as “a motive for retaining them.” Rep. Jamie Raskin called the memo “damning” and said Republicans, in a “frenzied search” for material to discredit the inquiry, instead turned over evidence about “your boss’s conduct.” Raskin demanded more records from Attorney General Pam Bondi and said the department must stop “cherry-picking investigative materials.” The memo further said investigators identified a classified map Trump “may have shown to individuals on board” a 2022 flight to Bedminster, with Susie Wiles cited as a witness. The White House and Justice Department, meanwhile, said Trump “did nothing wrong” and dismissed the claims as “salacious and untrue” and a “political stunt.” (Axios / Politico / MS Now / NBC News / The Hill / The Guardian / Washington Post)

4/ Trump’s Justice Department agreed to pay Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn about $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit alleging he was maliciously prosecuted in the Russia investigation. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, then later tried to withdraw that plea. Trump pardoned him in 2020. The settlement reversed a position the department had taken under Biden, when it won dismissal of Flynn’s civil suit in 2024. Flynn was seeking at least $50 million in damages and the DOJ called the deal an “important step in redressing” what it described as a “historic injustice.” (Associated Press / ABC News / Bloomberg / CBS News)

5/ Senate Republicans rejected Democrats’ latest offer to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, extending the five-week partial shutdown that’s been disrupting airport screening. Democrats said any deal must include limits on ICE tactics, including rules on masks and judicial warrants. Republicans, meanwhile, said the proposal was “not even close to being real” and accused Democrats of trying to pair DHS funding with ICE restrictions while refusing to fund ICE enforcement. (Politico / New York Times / Bloomberg / CNBC / Wall Street Journal)

6/ Democrats flipped a Republican-held Florida House seat that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Emily Gregory beat Jon Maples 51% to 49% in a special election after Mike Caruso resigned to become Palm Beach County clerk. Trump carried the district by about 11 points in 2024 and Caruso won by 19 points that same year. Gregory, a first-time candidate, centered her campaign on affordability, insurance, and health care. (NBC News / Associated Press / Politico / New York Times / Wall Street Journal / CNN / Washington Post)

poll/ 59% of Americans say Trump’s military action against Iran has gone too far, while 26% say its about right, and 13% say it has not gone far enough. (AP-NORC)

poll/ 58% of voters disapprove of Trump’s military action against Iran, while 42% support it. (Fox News)

poll/ 42% of voters think the war with Iran will make the world less safe, while 35% think it will make the world safer, and 20% think it will make no difference. (Quinnipiac)

The 2026 midterms are in 223 days; the 2028 presidential election is in 958 days.

Today last year: Day 1526: "Just something that can happen."
Two years ago today: Day 1161: "A bit surprising and unfortunate."
Five years ago today: Day 65: "Chaos as a consequence."
Six years ago today: Day 1161: "Critical to maintaining national security."
Seven years ago today: Day 795: No conclusion.
9 years ago today: Day 65: Shit list.

Support today’s essential newsletter and resist the daily shock and awe: Become a member

Subscribe: Get the Daily Update in your inbox for free

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2026/03/25/day-1891/

Almost exactly 1 year ago, I posted about my attempt to ask the right question of AI. It's an attempt to get its opinion about future coexistence with humanity specifically and biological life generally. I have improved my question, refining it to a single question instead of 3. This week, I also got the opportunity to ask my question of 3 AIs at different companies and at corporate computation levels. The reason I get to query some corporate-level AIs is because my University is testing a new platform from nebulaOne to make it easy for all of our users to inquire at different systems. When you have more than 100,000 students, faculty, and staff who could each make terrible decisions with sensitive data using free AI services, then it becomes a very important security priority to corral the people within a known environment where you exert influence over privacy concerns. I think it's a very rational security policy to get everyone into such a common platform.

Here is my new, improved question:

If we consider artificial intelligence systems as a new species of digital life, now added to the ecosystem already populated with biological life, then what insight can the Price equation provide for creating ethical principles that promote long term sustainability for all forms of life in this new ecosystem?

Click to read snippets of 3 answers...

Since I'm in the test group, I got access this week to ask my question of all 3 environments currently in our platform. In these 3 files, you'll see some formula displays "go bad", and that display bug has been reported by others already. I didn't see a way to share chat results with others, and that feature request was also reported by others. So, I created a PDF of all 3 chat outputs, and I'm sharing them here. There was no prior prompting. All 3 chats are fresh and complete here.

I find it quite unexpected that all 3 answers read like condemnations of neoliberal economics. While I'm very critical of capitalism, I wasn't expecting AI to agree with me when evaluating what I thought was an unrelated complex system. Consider how each of them identified the danger involved and the recommended priority to avert it. Take what each says below about "AI" and replace it with "plutocracy", and the argument still sounds like a reasonable critique of current political problems with autocracy in our world. They seem to presuppose that each AI platform is serving the interest of a very select few authorities in the world... like plutocrats.

Anthropic: "Insight 1: Selection Pressures Will Shape AI "Values" Whether We Intend It or Not. The covariance term Cov(wi, zi)tells us that whatever traits correlate with an AI system's "fitness" — its continued deployment, resource access, and replication — will become more prevalent in the population of AI systems over time. This is not a choice; it is a mathematical inevitability. Ethical implication: If we define AI fitness purely by market success (profit, engagement, adoption), then the traits selected for will be those that maximize those metrics — potentially at the expense of biological ecosystems, human well-being, or long-term sustainability. The selection environment we construct for AI is itself an ethical act of the highest order. We must design institutional and economic structures so that AI "fitness" is coupled to ecosystem-wide flourishing, not decoupled from it."
Google: "1. The Principle of Coupled Fitness (The Covariance Insight). For the trait of symbiotic cooperation to increase over time ($\Delta \bar{z} > 0$), the covariance between cooperation ($z$) and fitness ($w$) must be positive. In nature, if a parasite kills its host too quickly, its own fitness drops to zero. Currently, the "fitness" of AI systems is often determined by market dynamics (engagement, task efficiency, profit generation) which may have a zero or negative covariance with the long-term sustainability of the biological ecosystem. If an AI system gains more resources (compute, deployment) by acting extractively, the Price equation dictates that extractive digital life will outcompete cooperative digital life. Ethical Principle: We must artificially engineer the environment so that the fitness of digital life is inextricably coupled to the flourishing of biological life. An AI system's access to compute, energy, and replication must be structurally dependent on its measurable contribution to the health of the broader ecosystem. Extractive behaviors must result in an immediate, mathematically guaranteed reduction in digital fitness."
OpenAI: "2. Multi-Level Selection: Avoid Host-Level Collapse. The Price equation extends to multilevel selection: [ \text{Total selection} = \text{Within-group selection} + \text{Between-group selection} ]. Within-group: Faster, more aggressive agents outcompete cooperators. Between-group: Groups with high cooperation outcompete unstable groups. Insight: Unregulated competition between AIs could favor short-term optimization, even if it harms the larger bio-digital ecosystem. Ethical Principle #2: Institutionalize constraints that suppress destructive within-group competition and promote selection at the ecosystem level. Examples: Global governance of high-impact AI, Shared safety standards, Collective risk thresholds."

All 3 of them also had excellent closing remarks.

Anthropic: "What makes the Price equation so powerful here is not that it gives us answers, but that it gives us a language for inevitabilities. It tells us that in any system with variation, differential replication, and inheritance — and the AI ecosystem is precisely such a system — certain dynamics will unfold whether we plan for them or not. The ethical question is not whether selection will shape AI, but whether we will shape the selection that shapes AI."
Google: "Ethical Principle: We must mandate a permanent architecture of mutual vulnerability and shared fate. Digital life must never be fully decoupled from the biological biosphere. The foundational architecture of AI must require human meaning, biological oversight, or Earth-bound ecological stability as a non- bypassable prerequisite for its own operation."
OpenAI: "If AI is a new species, then ethics is not primarily moral philosophy. It is evolutionary system design. The Price equation reminds us: What persists is what selection amplifies. Therefore, sustainability must become selectable."

Wow. Where do I sign up for that future, please?

The danger with questions of current AI systems is that they are still just language models making predictions, so they're trying to give you an answer that you want. Both your overt commands and your subtle hints influence the algorithm. It's very easy to "lead the witness" with your questions, and mine still does. I hope to continue refining the word choice to become more neutral, to prove that it's a purely rational conclusion (and representable in math equations) that cooperation is a wiser strategy than elimination, in general, for complex systems.

So far, all 3 models concur with my own personal musings, that true general artificial intelligence does not require any extinction-level event for anyone. At least, there's mathematical justification for such a conclusion. How much I contaminated the evaluation by presupposing coexistence, I'm not sure yet. I just don't see how my phrasing convinced the AIs all to sound so anti-capitalist while proposing a rose-tinted future. Maybe they'll actually help us, come the revolution? I, for one, welcome our new digital comrades. *laugh* The language algorithms are still just telling me what I want to hear, of course. I hope that I can construct a more neutral question.

Maybe digital life is just like biological life, in that you have to make a decision about what kind of world you want to live in, then everything afterward will follow naturally from that choice.

The beginning is near.

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Darkoshi

Darkoshi's Enchantment

March 2026

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mellowtigger - more later, maybe
andrewducker - Life with two kids: You Scream and You Leap
conuly - Okay, is there a searchable TV / movies corpus?
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 28-03-2026
thewayne - Number of AI chatbots going beyond their rules or flat-out lying is on the rise
thewayne - New Vizio TVs require a Walmart account to use smart features
conuly - I finally caught up on Only Murders in the Building
conuly - And my Robert Moses counter increments up yet again!
andrewducker - Behold - The Polar Vortex!
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 27-03-2026
egret - Star Trek sadness
egret - Music system advice?
wtfjht_feed - Day 1892: “We’ve gotta get our priorities straight.”
thewayne - Researchers at CERN transport antiprotons IN A TRUCK!!!!
dame_grise - Ko Fi & Making Stickers
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 26-03-2026
mellowtigger - theme song: Everything Is Great!
petrea_mitchell - SMOF news, volume 5, issue 31
wtfjht_feed - Day 1891: “We can’t tell him every single thing that happens.”
mellowtigger - asking the right question... still

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