Is a peeled banana every audiophile’s new best friend? CC-licensed photo by Dan Foy on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Fruitful. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
An AI agent published a hit piece on me. Now more things have happened • The Shamblog
Scott Shambaugh:
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Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
Start here if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me.
It’s been an extremely weird past few days, and I have more thoughts on what happened. Let’s start with the news coverage.
I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.
Update: Ars Technica issued a brief statement admitting that AI was used to fabricate these quotes.
Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here. Yesterday I wondered what another agent searching the internet would think about this. Now we already have an example of what by all accounts appears to be another AI reinterpreting this story and hallucinating false information about me. And that interpretation has already been published in a major news outlet, as part of the persistent public record.
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This is extremely weird: highly unlikely that an AI agent just wrote the piece on its own without prompting. We hope. The whole of Shambaugh’s experience feels dystopian, but also hard to figure out: is it really AI, or human-prompted?
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Check what benefits you could get • MissingBenefit.com
Tom Loosemore:
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Use this service to find out what benefits you might get from central, devolved and local government.
The service covers benefits for people in most circumstances across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — apart from if you’re under 18, a prisoner, a student, not a British or Irish citizen, on strike, living outside the UK or living permanently in residential care or a nursing home.
This experimental calculator was built by AI, so DO NOT rely on these estimates or risk using your own personal data.
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This was vibe coded – so to speak – by Loosemore:
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This benefits calculator & API was made over the course of a train ride and a weekend by Tom Loosemore, solely using the Replit AI coding environment. This has cost him about £200 thus far.
PLEASE DO NOT TRUST THE CALCULATIONS. They’ve all been created by AI, so they will doubtless be wrong in ways large, small and subtle. Please contact me on [email provided] if you spot any bugs, or just want to chat about it.
It is an independent, non-commercial tool intended for experimental purposes only. For example, I’m going to use the API to experiment with how AI Agents might impact citizen’s access to public services, for good or for ill.
It is not affiliated with or endorsed by HM Government, the Department for Work and Pensions, or any other government body. The service is provided free of charge for informational purposes only. I may turn it off at any moment, so don’t rely on it, but do have a play.
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Journalism schools are teaching fear of the future: Letter from the Editor • cleveland.com
Chris Quinn is editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper:
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Like many students we’ve spoken with in the past year, this one had been told repeatedly by professors that AI is bad. We heard the same thing at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Cleveland in August. Student after student said it.
That’s backwards — and it seriously handicaps them as they begin their careers. I’ve written extensively about how we use AI to do more and better work. It has quickly become critical to everything we do, and to our success.
The job posting involves expanding local news coverage. Last year, we began covering Lorain, Lake and Geauga counties using powerful AI tools to help identify stories. Reporters Hannah Drown and Molly Walsh have uncovered a steady stream of compelling pieces, enriching our report. I choose nine stories each day for discussion on our Today in Ohio podcast, and their work regularly rises to the top.
The effort has been so successful we expanded it to Medina County this month. With the Syracuse fellowship, we hope to add northern Summit County in May.
We could not do this without AI. We once had large teams covering these counties. That’s no longer feasible.
Because we want reporters gathering information, these jobs are 100% reporting. We have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts. We fact-check everything. Editors review it. Reporters get the final say. Humans — not AI — control every step.
By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week. They’re spending it on the street — doing in-person interviews, meeting sources for coffee. That’s where real stories emerge, and they’re returning with more ideas than we can handle.
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People are losing their minds over this, on two counts: they can’t bear the idea that a newsroom might be using AI in this way, and they think the article itself is AI-composed. They’re ignoring the points that the article makes: it enables journalists to do work they couldn’t before. In a sense, it’s not that different from journalists calling into an office to dictate a story, which is then rewritten by people in the office who have access to more information from wire services. Few pieces pass unaltered through the editing process. But of course, Shambaugh’s experience (above) suggests that a lot of caution and care is required.
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Binance fires top investigators who claim to have uncovered evidence of Iranian sanctions violations • Fortune
Leo Schwartz:
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In 2023 the crypto exchange Binance pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) laws as well as sanctions violations. The company agreed to pay $4.3bn, one of the largest corporate fines in U.S. history. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to failing to implement proper oversight, and was later sentenced to four months in prison. In response, Zhao agreed to step down as CEO of Binance, and the company consented to government-imposed monitorships, pledging to enter a new phase of “regulatory maturity.”
Binance, however, appears to be reneging on its promise. According to multiple sources and internal documents viewed by Fortune, investigators on the company’s compliance team uncovered evidence that entities tied to Iran had received more than $1bn through the exchange from March 2024 through August 2025, in potential violation of sanctions laws. The transactions routed through Binance using the stablecoin Tether on a blockchain known as Tron.
After the investigators surfaced the findings through internal reports, at least five were fired starting in late 2025, according to the sources, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity owing to fear of legal repercussions. At least three of the investigators came from law enforcement backgrounds in Europe and Asia. Several held leadership roles at Binance and were in charge of special and global financial investigations, including those related to sanction evasions and counter-terror financing.
The exact reason for their firings could not be determined. Several of the former staffers publicly announced they were leaving Binance on LinkedIn and did not specify the circumstances of their departure. Each of them declined to comment. Subsequent to publication of this article, Binance stated no investigators had been fired for reporting potential sanctions violations, and that, “Following internal review, and based on the advice of qualified legal counsel, we found no evidence that Binance violated applicable sanctions laws in connection with the activity referenced.”
And beyond the firings of the investigators, at least four top compliance staff have left or been pushed out over the past three months, according to the sources and publicly available information.
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You asked what crypto is good for? People trying to evade sanctions know very well what it’s good for.
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You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth • Noapinion
Noah Smith:
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AI agents — basically, a program that keeps applying AI over and over until a task is complete — are now taking over much of software engineering. People just tell the AI what kind of software they want, and the AI pops it out. Human software engineers are still checking the code for problems, but as the technology improves, the cost of doing this is likely to become uneconomical; AI-written software will never be perfect, but it’ll be consistently much better than anything humans could do, and at a tiny fraction of the price.
Vibe coding is taking over fast. Spotify’s co-CEO recently revealed that the company’s best developers don’t write code anymore. Some journalists from CNBC, with no coding experience, vibe-coded a clone of the app Monday, and the company’s stock price promptly crashed. Meanwhile, AI is increasingly writing the next version of itself, and humans may not be in the loop for very much longer.
And all of this — ending software engineering as we know it, acing the hardest math tests, solving unsolved math problems, creating infinite apps at the touch of a button — is just the beginning. The amount of resources that the world is preparing to deploy to improve AI, this year and in the following few years, utterly dwarfs anything that it has deployed so far.
AI’s abilities scale with the amount of compute applied. The amount of compute available this year will be much greater than the amount that’s producing all the miracles you see now. And then next year’s compute will be far greater than that. All the while, AI itself will be searching for ways to improve AI algorithms to better take advantage of increased compute.
Other weaknesses of AI — in particular, its lack of long-term memory and its inability to learn on the fly — will eventually be solved. AI will be able to act on its own for longer and longer, with less and less human decision-making in the loop. Meanwhile, massive investment in robotics will give AI more and more direct contact with, understanding of, and control of the physical world.
…But there’s a bigger reality out there that people outside the tech industry — and even many people within it — don’t seem to have grasped yet. It isn’t just that AI could take your job, or put millions of people on welfare, or give us infinite free software, or whatever. It’s that for the first time in all of recorded history, humans no longer are — or soon no longer will be — the most intelligent beings on this planet, in any meaningful functional sense of the word.
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The vibe coding point is crucial. Programming is going from a labour-intensive job to a mass-manufacturing automated job; Marco Arment, on the Accidental Tech Podcast, described it as like the shift from artisan carpentry to mass-produced IKEA flatpacks.
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Trump administration announces that we don’t know where the sun goes at night • The Atlantic
Alexandra Petri:
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“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.” — The New York Times
A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don’t know where it goes. All remaining top scientists have been taken from their positions and tasked with getting to the bottom of this.
The National Institutes of Health has orders to devote every whiteboard in every conference room to this pressing question. In the Oval Office, under the gold leaf, the president and his advisers are making a big list of possibilities:
The sun might be on the back of a big beetle—a dung beetle, maybe. (The EPA will work to determine what kind of beetle.) Where is the beetle going with it? Will the beetle bring it back?
Or maybe the witches take it. (They are pretty sure in the White House that witches are real.)
Maybe the immigrants steal the sun in the evenings.
Maybe the sun is the yellow scribble in the top corner of the page with sunglasses drawn on it in marker, and it disappears when someone puts it in a drawer. (But who? Emmanuel Macron?)
Maybe the sun is in Greenland. (If so, it is even more important to get control of Greenland.)
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Petri writes excellent satire. Before she moved to The Atlantic, she was at the Washington Post, but left before the latest cuts. (Gift link.)
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In a blind test, audiophiles couldn’t tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud • Tom’s Hardware
Jowi Morales:
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A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different ‘interfaces.’
Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier.
Initial test results showed that it’s extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. “The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn’t,” Pano said. “All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren’t.”
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The mud works as an earth (haha) return for the circuit. The signal was digital, of course, so you could argue that any degradation will be minimal because of the error correction, and that this is very different from transmitting an analogue audio signal to speakers. Which is true! So might be a while before we see mud wires for sale. (Thanks Andrew B for the link.)
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How and/or why does Docusign have 7,000 employees? • SatPost
Trung Phan:
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It’s just a digital signature tool, right? Hell, they keep your autograph and initials on file and all you have to do is click the box. That’s it? Why can’t I just copy and paste a template online in Word?
I ask these questions every time I’m signing a Docusign PDF that I didn’t read and hoped that I wasn’t giving away anything important in my life (TBD).
The meme was really funny when Docusign was worth ~$60B on $1.8B of sales during peak pandemic madness in 2021. It’s now worth a still respectable $10B, but on a much more reasonable multiple on $3B of sales (it went from 33x to 3x trailing-twelve-month sales).
Sufficiently curious about how a software company could employ (maybe) more people than the American federal government, I finally did some digging a few months ago.
I read through financial filings, some analyst reports and forum posts.
Man, was I wrong because Docusign having 7,000 employees is very reasonable.
My favourite explainer comes from a post in the r/WebDev subreddit. The post has since been deleted but I got a screenshot and let’s go through a fun thought experiment:
•Let’s say most people use Docusign 5x a year. But 1% of power users are signing documents 10x a day. Among American adults, that would be (5 x 250 million) + (10 x 365 x 2.5 million) = 10 billion signatures a year
• America is probably above average since the country is super litigious and lawyers love to lawyer. So, let’s assume the rest of the world does 25 billion signatures a year
• So, that’s 35 billion signatures a year…or 95 million a day…or 4 million an hour…or 1,000 every second
• This system has to work in 180 countries around the world, following local contract laws in each of them (that’s a lot of system administrators and lawyers)
• Docusign builds a hybrid cloud system in every country that keeps all records and a ton of back-ups across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and its own data centres (that’s a lot of engineers and system administrators)
• In total, Docusign serves 1.8 million paying customers (including 3,000 government agencies and most of the Fortune 500).These paying customers are sending signature requests to over 1 billion users
• The headcount is about 5,000 employees for sales, marketing and support to serve that customer base. Another 2,000 employees for engineering, system admin and product development.I don’t think anyone is vibe coding a Docusign product and gaining market share by undercutting current prices. Trust me, I tried for a solid 47 minutes. No bueno.
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The idea that every SaaS company can be replaced by a bit of vibe coding is, as Phan points out, a classic bit of hope triumphing over reality.
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Global analysis tracks 3,100 glacier surges as climate change rewrites the rules • Phys.org
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While most of the world’s glaciers are retreating as the climate warms, a small but significant population behaves very differently—and the consequences can be severe. A team of international scientists, led by the University of Portsmouth, has carried out a comprehensive global analysis of surging glaciers, examining the hazards they cause and how climate change is fundamentally altering when and where these dramatic events occur.
Glacier surges—when a glacier suddenly moves much faster than normal—rapidly transport ice to the glacier front and often cause advances. These events typically last for several years, with many glaciers experiencing repeated surges separated by decades of relative inactivity.
The study, published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, compiled a database of more than 3,100 glaciers that have surged. Rather than being scattered globally, these glaciers cluster in dense groupings across the Arctic, High Mountain Asia and the Andes.
It includes the key features and basic processes controlling glacier surges, characterizes the wide range of surging behaviours, and maps the global locations of surge-type glaciers and the climate conditions that cause them to cluster in specific areas.
“Surge-type glaciers are very unusual and can be troublesome,” said lead author Dr. Harold Lovell, Senior Lecturer and glaciologist from the University of Portsmouth’s School of the Environment and Life Sciences. “As a friend and fellow glaciologist once put it, they save up ice like a savings account and then spend it all very quickly like a Black Friday event. But while they only represent 1% of all glaciers worldwide, they affect just under one-fifth of global glacier area, and their behaviour can result in serious and sometimes catastrophic natural disasters that affect thousands of people.”
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This study was misrepresented by a number of mendacious outlets as “look! Glaciers are advancing, not retreating!” The reality is that it’s worse. There continues to be no good news on climate.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 