Thursday Morning Tab Clearing

AI may be good for some comedy:

Meanwhile, it is being alleged that the companies involved in AI are hiding huge amounts of debt in the same way that Enron did.

It’s an extremely costly undertaking built on seemingly bottomless hype — and a mountain of debt. As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.

Meta alone has amassed around $420 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, according to Nikkei, highlighting how precarious the AI industry’s steep investment in AI has become, and inspiring comparisons to energy company Enron, which collapsed in spectacular fashion in 2001 because of similar debts hidden behind shell companies. Like Enron, they’re using special purpose vehicles, or off-balance sheet arrangements such as legally distinct subsidiaries, as a way to make their financial reporting look healthier than it actually is — often a glaring sign that something is deeply amiss behind the scenes.

We'll see if our largely corporate-owned media covers this. It's probably a good bet that you won't see a mention of it on CBS or in the WaPo. When the AI bubble bursts, it could be bad.

Elsewhere, Julie DiCarlo, a reporter, posted this:

It's funny how many men come into my mentions to "protect women's sports" but have zero other posts talking about women's sports, or even women, in any kind of meaningful or supportive way.

— Julie DiCaro (@juliedicaro.bsky.social) July 29, 2026 at 8:58 PM

She is exactly right. Trump and the rest of his ilk have done nothing to support women's sports, other than requiring genital checks. They've been ramming through anti-abortion laws that have essentially required doctors to let women having problem pregancies die. And they haven't scrapped Blanche's nomination because of his active role in hiding All Things Epstein.

AI; No Shit, It's Bad

The CEO of Anthropic is warning that AI needs guardrails. Well, no fucking shit. The rest of us have known about the risks of AI for fucking decades.

One real risk is that lazy-ass cops are cheerfully using AI to try to send innocent people to prison, because actually investigating crimes is hard work and cuts down on their time better spent swilling bad coffee and eating pastries.

Apple: Tool of Repressive Governments?

Apple removed thousands of apps from its app store at the request of the Russians, but they're not the only authoritarians Apple has bowed to.

You can step outside of Apple's app store at your own risk.

In Case You’re Stupid Enough to Install the White House App

This is what it'll do to your Google/Android phone.

in short, it's spyware.

Floating in the Winter Sky, 99 Red Balloons Go By.....

Mylar balloons and the DoD's jonesing to play with its new laser toys may have caused the El Paso and Santa Teresa TFRs this morning. It may also have been the result of a bureaucratic pissing contest between the DoD and the FAA.

No matter what was going down, it looks like yet another Federal clusterfuck as the Boyos From Fort Fumble want to screw around with their new shit, which disrupted the travel plans of thousands of people and screwed with cargo commerce.

Trump Hires Stupid Fuckers While He Bashes the 2A

The interim head of the country’s cyber defense agency uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT last summer, triggering multiple automated security warnings that are meant to stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks, according to four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident.

How stupid does one have to be in order as, a computer security expert, to do this stupid shit?

Meanwhile, the Orange Sundowner continues to bash the Second Amendment.

Imagine Obama saying that; the frothing from the Right would have been monumentous. Because the Right has not been shy about bringing their guns to demonstrations.

But when it's not thier side, they bleat, without an ounce of self-reflection, that people shouldn't bring guns to demonstrations.

Hell, they want to ban whistles, too.

That's a common theme with the Right: freedoms and liberties are only theirs to exercise. The rest of us should shut up, lie down, and let them stamp on our faces, forever. They haven't changed since the 18th Century, when they were the Loyalists collaborating in the oppression of the Colonialists by the armed forces of Mad King George.

They lost, then. They'll lose, now.

$500 Million Gone

So $500 million in cash from selling Venezuelan oil is in a bank account in Qatar that is controlled by Trump and Trump alone.

If the sale was on the up-and-up, then why wasn't the money depositied in a USG account in an American bank?

I'm going to assume that the cash will soon disappear into crypto investments and will make its way into the pockets of Trump and/or his kids.

Because corruption on a massive scale is the name of the game. Which is why he is so terrified of losing the mid-terms and then the White House-- investigations will follow and he and his relatives will be in line for a nice stay in a Federal cross-bar rest hotel.

Meanwhile, this is intriguing. I can see how it works: a link can be embedded that won't be visible to humans, but a webcrawler will see it.

AI is Stupid and the Cops Use It

AI can't tell the difference between a bag of Doritos and a gun. Which ended up with a kid in handcuffs and cops pointing guns at him.

I expect an interesting lawsuit will be filed.

Winning the Internet

There was an Internet outage this morning and this response won:

Relying on connected things such as Alexa for alarm clocks or starting your morning cuppa joe isn't a good thing.

Google Comes Down on the Side of Trump

Goggle's tilting the table on searching about Trump's senility. Try it yourself: Run a search on Google AI for "Trump senile". It'll give information on Biden.

The tech bros and the oligarchs are all bending their knees to the Obscene Orange Senile Pedo. Don't trust the results that you get from Google.

Melt Down the Umpire! Melt Down the Umpire!

Robot umpires are getting called up to the big leagues next season.

It's not quite a full replacement of the umpires, but make no mistake about it, we are getting there.

Dumping American Software, Plus Putin's European Poodles

Hard on the heels of concerns about a killswitch in F-35s, Europeans are now worried about digital sovereignty.

Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because Denmark wants to claim "digital sovereignty." In the States, you probably haven't heard that phrase, but in the European Union, digital sovereignty is a big deal and getting bigger.

They didn't worry much about it before. But with Brain-Rotting Mangolini as our president, the U.S. has become an unreliable ally, if not an adversarial state, to European countries. It makes eminent sense for them to reduce reliance on American technological services. The article didn't mention Amazon's cloud service, but you can bet heavily that's also being eyed to be replaced.

Pissing off a bloc of about 350 million people in mostly-wealthy nations isn't smart business. But that's what this Administration, helmed by a dementia case with the impulse control of a toddler, is doing.

Also, some of Putin's useful idiots are squawking about being affected by the war:

Russian oil supplies to Hungary and Slovakia could be suspended for at least five days after a Ukrainian strike on a facility in Russia, Hungarian and Slovakian officials said on Aug 22, in a widening of the fallout of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
...
EU members Slovakia and Hungary have maintained relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and opposed sanctions against Russia that Ukraine says are vital to make Moscow drop unacceptable war demands. They also oppose the phase-out of Russian energy supplies via the Druzhba pipeline.

Awww, the Quisling Caucus in the EU isn't happy. Cue the violins.

Current EVs May Be Worthless in Five Years

Li-ion batteries may be obsolete in the near future. If solid state batteries pan out, current EVs are going to be junk.

You, Too, Can Buy and Drive Your Own Personal Apollo 1

A Tesla Cybertruck owner in Texas was unable to escape after rolling it into a ditch last year, experiencing an unthinkable demise as the batteries powering the $100,000 stainless steel SUV burst into flames with such intensity the helpless driver's skeletal system literally disintegrated, his family says.
...
On April 25, 2024, [Michael] Sheehan purchased a brand-new Cybertruck from a Tesla showroom in the Houston suburb of Cypress, Texas, according to his family’s complaint, which was filed June 13 in Harris County District Court.

Just 102 days later, the complaint says Sheehan was driving home when the Cybertruck “left the road” and struck a large concrete culvert, after which the vehicle’s “hyper volatile” battery system went into “thermal runaway” – a chain reaction of short-circuits ultimately resulting in uncontrollable temperature escalation – and caught fire.

Once power was lost, it was impossible for Sheehan to open the Cybertruck’s electrically operated doors in the normal way, the complaint goes on, highlighting a major issue that has similarly doomed others riding in Teslas. The external door handles also failed to work, and the emergency manual door release handles within the Cybertruck are “unreasonably difficult to locate in an emergency,” the complaint states.

Someone else said that "Apollo 1 mode" comes standard with Cybertrucks, so as much as I'd like to take credit for that snark, I can't.

If you bought one, you might want to consider parking it until you can find some other sucker to burden it with.

Napster vs. AI

Remember Napster and other file-sharing systems? The music industry went batshit. The threatened and, in some cases brought, legal action against people who downloaded music. They threatened criminal action.

But when you're a billionaire and have an AI company, you can get away with vacuuming up millions of copyrighted works in order to train your program and you don't have to pay a fucking nickel for that.

Once again, laws and rules are only for little people to obey.

Internet Gobbledygook = Garbage

Illinois’ prominent Chicago Sun-Times newspaper has confirmed that a summer reading list, which included several recommendations for books that don’t exist, was created using artificial intelligence by a freelancer who worked with one of their content partners.

Social media posts began to circulate on Tuesday criticizing the paper for allegedly using the AI software ChatGPT to generate an article with book recommendations for the upcoming summer season called “Summer reading list for 2025”. As such chatbots are known to make up information, a phenomenon often referred to as “AI hallucination”, the article contains several fake titles attached to real authors.

“I went into my library’s database of Chicago area newspapers to confirm this isn’t fake, and it’s not,” a post on Bluesky by Book Riot editor Kelly Jensen says. “Why the hell are you using ChatGPT to make up book titles? You used to have a books staff. Absolutely no fact checking?”

"Freelancing content provider using AI", instead of "staff reporter" sounds like a recipie for utter garbage. And so it was.

I wonder, sometimes, how many people could get themselves from one place to another if they were handed a map.

I am Shocked, Shocked, to Find Out That a Racist Works for the World's Richest Nazi

Elon Musk’s DOGE, the fake government agency currently doing real damage to the safety and security of the United States, just lost one of its most crucial members. And it will come as no surprise that this distinguished member of Musk’s team left because he was allegedly writing racist garbage on the internet.

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who previously worked at X and SpaceX, resigned from DOGE on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the newspaper contacted Donald Trump’s administration to ask about old deleted posts that advocated for racism and eugenics. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the Journal that Elez had resigned.

Elez was allegedly linked to the account @nullllptr, which was deleted in December. But the account was filled with tweets like, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool” and, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” according to the Journal. That last tweet was reportedly sent in September, just a couple of months before the 2024 election.

The account often wrote about politics and international affairs, tweeting in June, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth,” according to the Journal.

Is anyone surprised that a prominent bigot like Musk would attract like-minded turdlets to his ranks?

For the future, whenever Elez goes to look for a job, the fact that he's a racist, an antisemite and an all-around Nazi will pop up on every background search.

ETA: The original WSJ article.

Somewhere, a Gas Station Awning is Waiting for These Guys

These are some of the child soldiers that King Elon is using to destroy the Federal government:

Remember who these kids are. They are not loyal to the United States, but to one man. They are Musk's computer brownshirts.

Ashka Bobba. Luke Farritor. Ethan Shaotran. Edward Coristine. Gauthier Cole Killian. Gavin Kliger.

Pay heed, kids. Justice (and Karma) doesn't forget. Your time to answer for your crimes will come.

UPDATE: They've been doxxed. The information is available elsewhere, but I'm not going to post it.

Ah, the Irony

OpenAI is complaining that DeepSeek stole all of the data from OpenAI that OpenAI stole from everyone else.

No wonder Sam Altman wants to hang around with the bloated Felon: They're both thieves without a shred of self-awareness.

He’s Baaaack!

Burr Deming, fresh from an attack by Russian trolls. Drop by, if you please.

H/T