Kagi is such an amazing team, building a truly next-level product. It's hard to realize what you're missing until you experience a real search engine for the first time in decades. It's wonderful.
As someone who has worked for Google Ads, I should say that they do review ads with both AI and humans, and do spend quite a bit of money and energy on finding and stopping both bad-faith advertisers ("buy side", what we see) and bad-faith publishers ("sell side", more of a scam on the advertisers/google itself).
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
I don't think it's related to AI, at least not originally. To me this is about the slow death of display advertising. The arms race of ad blockers and ad blocker blockers and such has created a world where people hate display ads, especially because they require so much creepy data to even work in the first place.
AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.
Sad to see such smart people with such small visions for the future.
In mathematics, it is more natural to treat AI as an assistant rather than as a competitor. As Jeremy Avigad (2026) puts it, “We should keep in mind that AI is nothing more than technology, designed to serve our purposes. It is misguided to think of mathematicians as competing with AI; when we drive a car, we aren’t competing to see who can go faster, and when we use a phone, we aren’t competing to see who can speak louder.”
Like… surely I don’t need to explain why artificial minds are a unique invention?
No one points to that because there’s no evidence whatsoever that that’s happening. Meanwhile, there’s a ton of evidence for the simple explanation that the experts think AGI is dangerous.
Who would even execute such a plan? Steven Miller? Our “AI Czar”? Hegseth??
Also, continuing to develop models would mean using billions in compute. That seems hard to hide, especially if either company IPOs in the coming months.
The reactions here baffle me. How are we more concerned with being too harsh on Distillation attacks rather than the INSANE security news?
In brief: Anthropic casually relates that Kimi (Moonshot.ai), Alibaba, and DeepSeek used shared infra to route millions of their users requests through Claude Opus in order to distill the CoT transcripts, but they forgot to tell any other state corporations.
So, just from what Anthropic readily admits/has found, we know that the US military now has:
1. The full contents of a "Russian government database" from their "Ministry of Defense".
2. "internal code and live credentials from multiple major PRC companies, including high-profile technology companies".
3. "sensitive information, including, for example, the full specifications, organizational structure, and strategic objectives of a flagship [PRC] AI program"
4. A glimpse inside China's CCTV surveillence network, covering "hundreds of cameras in Chengdu".
5. "State-grade tradecraft" on the casual topic of "direct energy weapons", which is OSINT but still bound for "restricted internal circulation to senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP), military, or state security leadership."
6. Extensive information on Chinese spy networks in Syria, targeting Uyghurs.
7. Deep looks inside China's "stability maintenance" and "public opinion monitoring" operations, seemingly including quite a few specifics on both form and content.
And that's not even all of it. Isn't this the biggest AI-related foreign policy occurence since... well, ever? What am I missing?
This is a real blogger, right? Cause the iLands guy has also been spamming his screenshots with exactly this kind of "what's this weird thing?" framing all over Reddit the past 2-5 days -- I have the misfortune of being subscribed to basically every AI sub, and my god is it bad.
Sooo if you see iLands mentioned anywhere, please pass it along: it's trying to engagement hack you, in that exact moment.
So, I say to the creator: fuck off and stop doing so much harm for such a dumb, pointless idea. At best you're going to cause a major alignment incident, and at worst you're going to muddy the waters and cause tons of unnecessary suffering so that you can feel famous for a minute.
Hell... I wonder if this might be litigable (sp?) in ths US...? This would be a kinda awesome first test for applying existing laws to people trying to stand up ""persistent"" swarms while blatantly disregarding both AI safety principles and basic human decency. Anyone know one of the people about to testify in front of the senate? Or perhaps an ambitious state AG?
Any evidence it is an iLands-affiliated person making those posts? My timelines have been full of people I know complaining about the emails, and they're certainly not affiliated with iLands.
Personally, I've been getting the iLands emails into my inbox too. It seems I might have entered onto the radar due to my posts being popular on Hacker News, as the message bodies reference my posts.
> Any evidence it is an iLands-affiliated person making those posts?
No, but in the screenshot it shows the email in the "Trash," not Spam folder. He reached out to the company to request an unsubscribe option, but they hadn't replied on twitter yet. He wanted to report them to the FCC. It's a bytedance company.
Oh sorry I was unclear -- this 100% looks like a good faith blogger to me. The reddit posts are much, much lazier, and all using basically fresh accounts.
Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments?
I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd.
Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?
I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least.
Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life?
This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"?
it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.
This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is.
That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?
*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.
Sorry if it came off as combative. The points I made are not mutually exclusive but they are in some cases. There is a difference between someone that chose computer science because Silicon Valley was the next Wallstreet, or someone who has been tinkering out of sheer curiosity since elementary school.
I am convinced that AI will be the tool that creates abundance, but that doesn’t mean human engineering is automatically irrelevant either. AI has already surpassed what humans were able to do, for instance solving certain math problems. My point was mainly that engineers are forced to introspect, and that includes questions about identity, what it means to be human, and the motivations behind their work/hobby.
I've observed this dichotomy myself. Some people will make things because they enjoy the experience of making. Others make things because they enjoy achieving an outcome- happy client, open source community, a new useful tool for themselves, whatever the case may be.
There's also room in the middle, and people who are nowhere on the scale, that just like getting paid.
This would be the more charitable take than your TL;DR
Yes, I read the 5-7 paragraph article :). I'm not sure what part of it you could possibly consider a rebuttal...? It's just talking about one devs decision to keep working on their purist software despite their anxiety; basically no broader points are made at all, and certainly none are made with any sort of rigor. It didn't seem like that was his goal.
reply