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Introducing Claude Opus 4.7

Our lat­est model, Claude Opus 4.7, is now gen­er­ally avail­able. Opus 4.7 is a no­table im­prove­ment on Opus 4.6 in ad­vanced soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing, with par­tic­u­lar gains on the most dif­fi­cult tasks. Users re­port be­ing able to hand off their hard­est cod­ing work—the kind that pre­vi­ously needed close su­per­vi­sion—to Opus 4.7 with con­fi­dence. Opus 4.7 han­dles com­plex, long-run­ning tasks with rigor and con­sis­tency, pays pre­cise at­ten­tion to in­struc­tions, and de­vises ways to ver­ify its own out­puts be­fore re­port­ing back.The model also has sub­stan­tially bet­ter vi­sion: it can see im­ages in greater res­o­lu­tion. It’s more taste­ful and cre­ative when com­plet­ing pro­fes­sional tasks, pro­duc­ing higher-qual­ity in­ter­faces, slides, and docs. And—although it is less broadly ca­pa­ble than our most pow­er­ful model, Claude Mythos Preview—it shows bet­ter re­sults than Opus 4.6 across a range of bench­marks:Last week we an­nounced Project Glasswing, high­light­ing the risks—and ben­e­fits—of AI mod­els for cy­ber­se­cu­rity. We stated that we would keep Claude Mythos Preview’s re­lease lim­ited and test new cy­ber safe­guards on less ca­pa­ble mod­els first. Opus 4.7 is the first such model: its cy­ber ca­pa­bil­i­ties are not as ad­vanced as those of Mythos Preview (indeed, dur­ing its train­ing we ex­per­i­mented with ef­forts to dif­fer­en­tially re­duce these ca­pa­bil­i­ties). We are re­leas­ing Opus 4.7 with safe­guards that au­to­mat­i­cally de­tect and block re­quests that in­di­cate pro­hib­ited or high-risk cy­ber­se­cu­rity uses. What we learn from the real-world de­ploy­ment of these safe­guards will help us work to­wards our even­tual goal of a broad re­lease of Mythos-class mod­els.Se­cu­rity pro­fes­sion­als who wish to use Opus 4.7 for le­git­i­mate cy­ber­se­cu­rity pur­poses (such as vul­ner­a­bil­ity re­search, pen­e­tra­tion test­ing, and red-team­ing) are in­vited to join our new Cyber Verification Program.Opus 4.7 is avail­able to­day across all Claude prod­ucts and our API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Pricing re­mains the same as Opus 4.6: $5 per mil­lion in­put to­kens and $25 per mil­lion out­put to­kens. Developers can use claude-opus-4-7 via the Claude API.Claude Opus 4.7 has gar­nered strong feed­back from our early-ac­cess testers:In early test­ing, we’re see­ing the po­ten­tial for a sig­nif­i­cant leap for our de­vel­op­ers with Claude Opus 4.7. It catches its own log­i­cal faults dur­ing the plan­ning phase and ac­cel­er­ates ex­e­cu­tion, far be­yond pre­vi­ous Claude mod­els. As a fi­nan­cial tech­nol­ogy plat­form serv­ing mil­lions of con­sumers and busi­nesses at sig­nif­i­cant scale, this com­bi­na­tion of speed and pre­ci­sion could be game-chang­ing: ac­cel­er­at­ing de­vel­op­ment ve­loc­ity for faster de­liv­ery of the trusted fi­nan­cial so­lu­tions our cus­tomers rely on every day.An­thropic has al­ready set the stan­dard for cod­ing mod­els, and Claude Opus 4.7 pushes that fur­ther in a mean­ing­ful way as the state-of-the-art model on the mar­ket. In our in­ter­nal evals, it stands out not just for raw ca­pa­bil­ity, but for how well it han­dles real-world async work­flows—au­toma­tions, CI/CD, and long-run­ning tasks. It also thinks more deeply about prob­lems and brings a more opin­ion­ated per­spec­tive, rather than sim­ply agree­ing with the user.Claude Opus 4.7 is the strongest model Hex has eval­u­ated. It cor­rectly re­ports when data is miss­ing in­stead of pro­vid­ing plau­si­ble-but-in­cor­rect fall­backs, and it re­sists dis­so­nant-data traps that even Opus 4.6 falls for. It’s a more in­tel­li­gent, more ef­fi­cient Opus 4.6: low-ef­fort Opus 4.7 is roughly equiv­a­lent to medium-ef­fort Opus 4.6.On our 93-task cod­ing bench­mark, Claude Opus 4.7 lifted res­o­lu­tion by 13% over Opus 4.6, in­clud­ing four tasks nei­ther Opus 4.6 nor Sonnet 4.6 could solve. Combined with faster me­dian la­tency and strict in­struc­tion fol­low­ing, it’s par­tic­u­larly mean­ing­ful for com­plex, long-run­ning cod­ing work­flows. It cuts the fric­tion from those multi-step tasks so de­vel­op­ers can stay in the flow and fo­cus on build­ing.Based on our in­ter­nal re­search-agent bench­mark, Claude Opus 4.7 has the strongest ef­fi­ciency base­line we’ve seen for multi-step work. It tied for the top over­all score across our six mod­ules at 0.715 and de­liv­ered the most con­sis­tent long-con­text per­for­mance of any model we tested. On General Finance—our largest mod­ule—it im­proved mean­ing­fully on Opus 4.6, scor­ing 0.813 ver­sus 0.767, while also show­ing the best dis­clo­sure and data dis­ci­pline in the group. And on de­duc­tive logic, an area where Opus 4.6 strug­gled, Opus 4.7 is solid.Claude Opus 4.7 ex­tends the limit of what mod­els can do to in­ves­ti­gate and get tasks done. Anthropic has clearly op­ti­mized for sus­tained rea­son­ing over long runs, and it shows with mar­ket-lead­ing per­for­mance. As en­gi­neers shift from work­ing 1:1 with agents to man­ag­ing them in par­al­lel, this is ex­actly the kind of fron­tier ca­pa­bil­ity that un­locks new work­flows.We’re see­ing ma­jor im­prove­ments in Claude Opus 4.7’s mul­ti­modal un­der­stand­ing, from read­ing chem­i­cal struc­tures to in­ter­pret­ing com­plex tech­ni­cal di­a­grams. The higher res­o­lu­tion sup­port is help­ing Solve Intelligence build best-in-class tools for life sci­ences patent work­flows, from draft­ing and pros­e­cu­tion to in­fringe­ment de­tec­tion and in­va­lid­ity chart­ing.Claude Opus 4.7 takes long-hori­zon au­ton­omy to a new level in Devin. It works co­her­ently for hours, pushes through hard prob­lems rather than giv­ing up, and un­locks a class of deep in­ves­ti­ga­tion work we could­n’t re­li­ably run be­fore.For Replit, Claude Opus 4.7 was an easy up­grade de­ci­sion. For the work our users do every day, we ob­served it achiev­ing the same qual­ity at lower cost—more ef­fi­cient and pre­cise at tasks like an­a­lyz­ing logs and traces, find­ing bugs, and propos­ing fixes. Personally, I love how it pushes back dur­ing tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sions to help me make bet­ter de­ci­sions. It re­ally feels like a bet­ter coworker.Claude Opus 4.7 demon­strates strong sub­stan­tive ac­cu­racy on BigLaw Bench for Harvey, scor­ing 90.9% at high ef­fort with bet­ter rea­son­ing cal­i­bra­tion on re­view ta­bles and no­tice­ably smarter han­dling of am­bigu­ous doc­u­ment edit­ing tasks. It cor­rectly dis­tin­guishes as­sign­ment pro­vi­sions from change-of-con­trol pro­vi­sions, a task that has his­tor­i­cally chal­lenged fron­tier mod­els. Substance was con­sis­tently rated as a strength across our eval­u­a­tions: cor­rect, thor­ough, and well-cited.Claude Opus 4.7 is a very im­pres­sive cod­ing model, par­tic­u­larly for its au­ton­omy and more cre­ative rea­son­ing. On CursorBench, Opus 4.7 is a mean­ing­ful jump in ca­pa­bil­i­ties, clear­ing 70% ver­sus Opus 4.6 at 58%.For com­plex multi-step work­flows, Claude Opus 4.7 is a clear step up: plus 14% over Opus 4.6 at fewer to­kens and a third of the tool er­rors. It’s the first model to pass our im­plicit-need tests, and it keeps ex­e­cut­ing through tool fail­ures that used to stop Opus cold. This is the re­li­a­bil­ity jump that makes Notion Agent feel like a true team­mate.In our evals, we saw a dou­ble-digit jump in ac­cu­racy of tool calls and plan­ning in our core or­ches­tra­tor agents. As users lever­age Hebbia to plan and ex­e­cute on use cases like re­trieval, slide cre­ation, or doc­u­ment gen­er­a­tion, Claude Opus 4.7 shows the po­ten­tial to im­prove agent de­ci­sion-mak­ing in these work­flows.On Rakuten-SWE-Bench, Claude Opus 4.7 re­solves 3x more pro­duc­tion tasks than Opus 4.6, with dou­ble-digit gains in Code Quality and Test Quality. This is a mean­ing­ful lift and a clear up­grade for the en­gi­neer­ing work our teams are ship­ping every day.For CodeRabbit’s code re­view work­loads, Claude Opus 4.7 is the sharpest model we’ve tested. Recall im­proved by over 10%, sur­fac­ing some of the most dif­fi­cult-to-de­tect bugs in our most com­plex PRs, while pre­ci­sion re­mained sta­ble de­spite the in­creased cov­er­age. It’s a bit faster than GPT-5.4 xhigh on our har­ness, and we’re lin­ing it up for our heav­i­est re­view work at launch.For Genspark’s Super Agent, Claude Opus 4.7 nails the three pro­duc­tion dif­fer­en­tia­tors that mat­ter most: loop re­sis­tance, con­sis­tency, and grace­ful er­ror re­cov­ery. Loop re­sis­tance is the most crit­i­cal. A model that loops in­def­i­nitely on 1 in 18 queries wastes com­pute and blocks users. Lower vari­ance means fewer sur­prises in prod. And Opus 4.7 achieves the high­est qual­ity-per-tool-call ra­tio we’ve mea­sured.Claude Opus 4.7 is a mean­ing­ful step up for Warp. Opus 4.6 is one of the best mod­els out there for de­vel­op­ers, and this model is mea­sur­ably more thor­ough on top of that. It passed Terminal Bench tasks that prior Claude mod­els had failed, and worked through a tricky con­cur­rency bug Opus 4.6 could­n’t crack. For us, that’s the sig­nal.Claude Opus 4.7 is the best model in the world for build­ing dash­boards and data-rich in­ter­faces. The de­sign taste is gen­uinely sur­pris­ing—it makes choices I’d ac­tu­ally ship. It’s my de­fault daily dri­ver now.Claude Opus 4.7 is the most ca­pa­ble model we’ve tested at Quantium. Evaluated against lead­ing AI mod­els through our pro­pri­etary bench­mark­ing so­lu­tion, the biggest gains showed up where they mat­ter most: rea­son­ing depth, struc­tured prob­lem-fram­ing, and com­plex tech­ni­cal work. Fewer cor­rec­tions, faster it­er­a­tions, and stronger out­puts to solve the hard­est prob­lems our clients bring us.Claude Opus 4.7 feels like a real step up in in­tel­li­gence. Code qual­ity is no­tice­ably im­proved, it’s cut­ting out the mean­ing­less wrap­per func­tions and fall­back scaf­fold­ing that used to pile up, and fixes its own code as it goes. It’s the clean­est jump we’ve seen since the move from Sonnet 3.7 to the Claude 4 se­ries.For the com­puter-use work that sits at the heart of XBOWs au­tonomous pen­e­tra­tion test­ing, the new Claude Opus 4.7 is a step change: 98.5% on our vi­sual-acu­ity bench­mark ver­sus 54.5% for Opus 4.6. Our sin­gle biggest Opus pain point ef­fec­tively dis­ap­peared, and that un­locks its use for a whole class of work where we could­n’t use it be­fore.Claude Opus 4.7 is a solid up­grade with no re­gres­sions for Vercel. It’s phe­nom­e­nal on one-shot cod­ing tasks, more cor­rect and com­plete than Opus 4.6, and no­tice­ably more hon­est about its own lim­its. It even does proofs on sys­tems code be­fore start­ing work, which is new be­hav­ior we haven’t seen from ear­lier Claude mod­els.Claude Opus 4.7 is very strong and out­per­forms Opus 4.6 with a 10% to 15% lift in task suc­cess for Factory Droids, with fewer tool er­rors and more re­li­able fol­low-through on val­i­da­tion steps. It car­ries work all the way through in­stead of stop­ping halfway, which is ex­actly what en­ter­prise en­gi­neer­ing teams need.Claude Opus 4.7 au­tonomously built a com­plete Rust text-to-speech en­gine from scratch—neural model, SIMD ker­nels, browser demo—then fed its own out­put through a speech rec­og­nizer to ver­ify it matched the Python ref­er­ence. Months of se­nior en­gi­neer­ing, de­liv­ered au­tonomously. The step up from Opus 4.6 is clear, and the code­base is pub­lic.Claude Opus 4.7 passed three TBench tasks that prior Claude mod­els could­n’t, and it’s land­ing fixes our pre­vi­ous best model missed, in­clud­ing a race con­di­tion. It demon­strates strong pre­ci­sion in iden­ti­fy­ing real is­sues, and sur­faces im­por­tant find­ings that other mod­els ei­ther gave up on or did­n’t re­solve. In Qodo’s real-world code re­view bench­mark, we ob­served top-tier pre­ci­sion.On Databricks’ OfficeQA Pro, Claude Opus 4.7 shows mean­ing­fully stronger doc­u­ment rea­son­ing, with 21% fewer er­rors than Opus 4.6 when work­ing with source in­for­ma­tion. Across our agen­tic rea­son­ing over data bench­marks, it is the best-per­form­ing Claude model for en­ter­prise doc­u­ment analy­sis.For Ramp, Claude Opus 4.7 stands out in agent-team work­flows. We’re see­ing stronger role fi­delity, in­struc­tion-fol­low­ing, co­or­di­na­tion, and com­plex rea­son­ing, es­pe­cially on en­gi­neer­ing tasks that span tools, code­bases, and de­bug­ging con­text. Compared with Opus 4.6, it needs much less step-by-step guid­ance, help­ing us scale the in­ter­nal agent work­flows our en­gi­neer­ing teams run.Claude Opus 4.7 is mea­sur­ably bet­ter than Opus 4.6 for Bolt’s longer-run­ning app-build­ing work, up to 10% bet­ter in the best cases, with­out the re­gres­sions we’ve come to ex­pect from very agen­tic mod­els. It pushes the ceil­ing on what our users can ship in a sin­gle ses­sion.Be­low are some high­lights and notes from our early test­ing of Opus 4.7:Instruction fol­low­ing. Opus 4.7 is sub­stan­tially bet­ter at fol­low­ing in­struc­tions. Interestingly, this means that prompts writ­ten for ear­lier mod­els can some­times now pro­duce un­ex­pected re­sults: where pre­vi­ous mod­els in­ter­preted in­struc­tions loosely or skipped parts en­tirely, Opus 4.7 takes the in­struc­tions lit­er­ally. Users should re-tune their prompts and har­nesses ac­cord­ingly.Im­proved mul­ti­modal sup­port. Opus 4.7 has bet­ter vi­sion for high-res­o­lu­tion im­ages: it can ac­cept im­ages up to 2,576 pix­els on the long edge (~3.75 megapix­els), more than three times as many as prior Claude mod­els. This opens up a wealth of mul­ti­modal uses that de­pend on fine vi­sual de­tail: com­puter-use agents read­ing dense screen­shots, data ex­trac­tions from com­plex di­a­grams, and work that needs pixel-per­fect ref­er­ences.1Real-world work. As well as its state-of-the-art score on the Finance Agent eval­u­a­tion (see table above), our in­ter­nal test­ing showed Opus 4.7 to be a more ef­fec­tive fi­nance an­a­lyst than Opus 4.6, pro­duc­ing rig­or­ous analy­ses and mod­els, more pro­fes­sional pre­sen­ta­tions, and tighter in­te­gra­tion across tasks. Opus 4.7 is also state-of-the-art on GDPval-AA, a third-party eval­u­a­tion of eco­nom­i­cally valu­able knowl­edge work across fi­nance, le­gal, and other do­mains.Mem­ory. Opus 4.7 is bet­ter at us­ing file sys­tem-based mem­ory. It re­mem­bers im­por­tant notes across long, multi-ses­sion work, and uses them to move on to new tasks that, as a re­sult, need less up-front con­text.The charts be­low dis­play more eval­u­a­tion re­sults from our pre-re­lease test­ing, across a range of dif­fer­ent do­mains:Over­all, Opus 4.7 shows a sim­i­lar safety pro­file to Opus 4.6: our eval­u­a­tions show low rates of con­cern­ing be­hav­ior such as de­cep­tion, syco­phancy, and co­op­er­a­tion with mis­use. On some mea­sures, such as hon­esty and re­sis­tance to ma­li­cious prompt in­jec­tion” at­tacks, Opus 4.7 is an im­prove­ment on Opus 4.6; in oth­ers (such as its ten­dency to give overly de­tailed harm-re­duc­tion ad­vice on con­trolled sub­stances), Opus 4.7 is mod­estly weaker. Our align­ment as­sess­ment con­cluded that the model is largely well-aligned and trust­wor­thy, though not fully ideal in its be­hav­ior”. Note that Mythos Preview re­mains the best-aligned model we’ve trained ac­cord­ing to our eval­u­a­tions. Our safety eval­u­a­tions are dis­cussed in full in the Claude Opus 4.7 System Card.Overall mis­aligned be­hav­ior score from our au­to­mated be­hav­ioral au­dit. On this eval­u­a­tion, Opus 4.7 is a mod­est im­prove­ment on Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, but Mythos Preview still shows the low­est rates of mis­aligned be­hav­ior.In ad­di­tion to Claude Opus 4.7 it­self, we’re launch­ing the fol­low­ing up­dates:More ef­fort con­trol: Opus 4.7 in­tro­duces a new xhigh (“extra high”) ef­fort level be­tween high and max, giv­ing users finer con­trol over the trade­off be­tween rea­son­ing and la­tency on hard prob­lems. In Claude Code, we’ve raised the de­fault ef­fort level to xhigh for all plans. When test­ing Opus 4.7 for cod­ing and agen­tic use cases, we rec­om­mend start­ing with high or xhigh ef­fort.On the Claude Platform (API): as well as sup­port for higher-res­o­lu­tion im­ages, we’re also launch­ing task bud­gets in pub­lic beta, giv­ing de­vel­op­ers a way to guide Claude’s to­ken spend so it can pri­or­i­tize work across longer runs.In Claude Code: The new /ultrareview slash com­mand pro­duces a ded­i­cated re­view ses­sion that reads through changes and flags bugs and de­sign is­sues that a care­ful re­viewer would catch. We’re giv­ing Pro and Max Claude Code users three free ul­tra­reviews to try it out. In ad­di­tion, we’ve ex­tended auto mode to Max users. Auto mode is a new per­mis­sions op­tion where Claude makes de­ci­sions on your be­half, mean­ing that you can run longer tasks with fewer in­ter­rup­tions—and with less risk than if you had cho­sen to skip all per­mis­sions.Opus 4.7 is a di­rect up­grade to Opus 4.6, but two changes are worth plan­ning for be­cause they af­fect to­ken us­age. First, Opus 4.7 uses an up­dated to­k­enizer that im­proves how the model processes text. The trade­off is that the same in­put can map to more to­kens—roughly 1.0–1.35× de­pend­ing on the con­tent type. Second, Opus 4.7 thinks more at higher ef­fort lev­els, par­tic­u­larly on later turns in agen­tic set­tings. This im­proves its re­li­a­bil­ity on hard prob­lems, but it does mean it pro­duces more out­put to­kens. Users can con­trol to­ken us­age in var­i­ous ways: by us­ing the ef­fort pa­ra­me­ter, ad­just­ing their task bud­gets, or prompt­ing the model to be more con­cise. In our own test­ing, the net ef­fect is fa­vor­able—to­ken us­age across all ef­fort lev­els is im­proved on an in­ter­nal cod­ing eval­u­a­tion, as shown be­low—but we rec­om­mend mea­sur­ing the dif­fer­ence on real traf­fic. We’ve writ­ten a mi­gra­tion guide that pro­vides fur­ther ad­vice on up­grad­ing from Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.7.Score on an in­ter­nal agen­tic cod­ing eval­u­a­tion as a func­tion of to­ken us­age at each ef­fort level. In this eval­u­a­tion, the model works au­tonomously from a sin­gle user prompt, and re­sults may not be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of to­ken us­age in in­ter­ac­tive cod­ing. See the mi­gra­tion guide for more on tun­ing ef­fort lev­els.

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2 420 shares, 20 trendiness

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7

For any­one who has been (inadvisably) tak­ing my pel­i­can rid­ing a bi­cy­cle bench­mark se­ri­ously as a ro­bust way to test mod­els, here are pel­i­cans from this morn­ing’s two big model re­leases—Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from Alibaba and Claude Opus 4.7 from Anthropic.

Here’s the Qwen 3.6 pel­i­can, gen­er­ated us­ing this 20.9GB Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_S.gguf quan­tized model by Unsloth, run­ning on my MacBook Pro M5 via LM Studio (and the llm-lm­stu­dio plu­gin)—tran­script here:

And here’s one I got from Anthropic’s brand new Claude Opus 4.7 (transcript):

I’m giv­ing this one to Qwen 3.6. Opus man­aged to mess up the bi­cy­cle frame!

I tried Opus a sec­ond time pass­ing think­ing_level: max. It did­n’t do much bet­ter (transcript):

A lot of peo­ple are con­vinced that the labs train for my stu­pid bench­mark. I don’t think they do, but hon­estly this re­sult did give me a lit­tle glint of sus­pi­cion. So I’m burn­ing one of my se­cret backup tests—here’s what I got from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Opus 4.7 for Generate an SVG of a flamingo rid­ing a uni­cy­cle”:

I’m giv­ing this one to Qwen too, partly for the ex­cel­lent SVG com­ment.

The pel­i­can bench­mark has al­ways been meant as a joke—it’s mainly a state­ment on how ob­tuse and ab­surd the task of com­par­ing these mod­els is.

The weird thing about that joke is that, for the most part, there has been a di­rect cor­re­la­tion be­tween the qual­ity of the pel­i­cans pro­duced and the gen­eral use­ful­ness of the mod­els. Those first pel­i­cans from October 2024 were junk. The more re­cent en­tries have gen­er­ally been much, much bet­ter—to the point that Gemini 3.1 Pro pro­duces il­lus­tra­tions you could ac­tu­ally use some­where, pro­vided you had a press­ing need to il­lus­trate a pel­i­can rid­ing a bi­cy­cle.

Today, even that loose con­nec­tion to util­ity has been bro­ken. I have enor­mous re­spect for Qwen, but I very much doubt that a 21GB quan­tized ver­sion of their lat­est model is more pow­er­ful or use­ful than Anthropic’s lat­est pro­pri­etary re­lease.

If the thing you need is an SVG il­lus­tra­tion of a pel­i­can rid­ing a bi­cy­cle though, right now Qwen3.6-35B-A3B run­ning on a lap­top is a bet­ter bet than Opus 4.7!

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Read the original on simonwillison.net »

3 341 shares, 17 trendiness

The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs

I had cof­fee last year with a guy - I won’t use his real name - who told me he was building a busi­ness.” I asked what it did. Dropshipping jade face rollers.

I made him say it twice.

He’d found them on Alibaba for $1.20 each, and started sell­ing them through Shopify for $29.99. Never used one him­self. Didn’t re­ally know what they were for - some­thing about lym­phatic drainage? Reducing puffi­ness? He said lymphatic” the way you say a word you’ve only ever read and never heard out loud.

Some guy on YouTube said jade rollers were trending,” the mar­gins looked in­sane on pa­per, so he’d built” a web­site with stock pho­tos of a dewy-skinned woman rolling a green rock across her cheek­bone and started run­ning Facebook ads at $50 a day. Customers would email ask­ing where their stuff was - ship­ping from Guangzhou, three to six weeks, some­times way longer - and he’d copy-paste a re­sponse he found on a drop­ship­ping sub­red­dit. He had a Google Doc full of pre-writ­ten cus­tomer ser­vice replies.

Five months in, he was $800 in the hole.

He told me all this like he’d in­vented the wheel.

I bought him an­other cof­fee. I gen­uinely had no idea what else to do.

Jade Roller Guy has be­come my go-to ex­am­ple of some­thing that went dras­ti­cally, ter­ri­bly wrong with how a whole gen­er­a­tion of would-be en­tre­pre­neurs thought about work and money. A spe­cific ide­ol­ogy - I’ve been call­ing it Passive Income Brain - grabbed a huge chunk of the peo­ple who were, by tem­pera­ment and abil­ity, most likely to start real busi­nesses, and it gave them a com­pletely fucked set of pri­or­i­ties.

Somewhere be­tween 2015 and 2022, passive in­come” stopped be­ing a bor­ing fi­nan­cial plan­ning term and be­came, I don’t know how else to put this, a sal­va­tion nar­ra­tive. I mean that lit­er­ally. There was an es­cha­tol­ogy if you want to get nerdy about it. The Rapture was the day your passive in­come” ex­ceeded your monthly ex­penses and you could quit your job for­ever. People talked about it with that ex­act en­ergy.

But, of course, the folks mak­ing any ac­tual in­come, of any kind, were the ones sell­ing courses about mak­ing pas­sive in­come. It was an ouroboros. It was an ouroboros that had in­cor­po­rated in Delaware and was run­ning Facebook ads.

The pitch went some­thing like: you, a sucker, cur­rently trade your time for money. This is what em­ploy­ees do, and em­ploy­ees are suck­ers. (I’m para­phras­ing, but not by much.) Smart peo­ple build SYSTEMS. A sys­tem is any­thing that gen­er­ates rev­enue with­out your on­go­ing in­volve­ment. Write an ebook. Build a drop­ship­ping store. Create an on­line course. Set up af­fil­i­ate web­sites.

The spe­cific ve­hi­cle does­n’t mat­ter be­cause the im­por­tant thing is­n’t what you build, it’s the struc­ture. You want a ma­chine that gen­er­ates cash while you sleep, and once you have that ma­chine, you are free.

Free to do what? Sit on a beach, ap­par­ently. Every sin­gle one of these peo­ple wanted to sit on a beach. I’ve never un­der­stood this. Have they been to a beach? There’s sand. It gets every­where. You can sit there for maybe three hours be­fore you want to do lit­er­ally any­thing else.

The al­lure is real. Who does­n’t want money that shows up while you sleep?

I’d fuck­ing love that. I’d love it very much in­deed. But passive in­come” as an or­ga­niz­ing phi­los­o­phy for your en­tire busi­ness life, for how you think about work, is al­most per­fectly de­signed to pro­duce garbage.

When you make passivity” the thing you’re op­ti­miz­ing for, you stop car­ing about any­thing a cus­tomer might ac­tu­ally want. Caring is ac­tive. Caring takes time. Caring is work.

Giving a shit is, by de­f­i­n­i­tion, not pas­sive.

Between 2019 and 2021, roughly 700,000 new Shopify stores opened. The plat­form went from about a mil­lion mer­chants to 1.7 mil­lion in two years. About 90% of those stores failed within their first year. Which is re­ally more a meat grinder, than it is a busi­ness model…

We started drown­ing in a mil­lion busi­nesses no­body was ac­tu­ally run­ning. Dropshipping stores with six-week ship­ping times and cus­tomer ser­vice that was just copy-pasted tem­plates. Guys who’d put their brand name” - usu­ally some­thing like ZENITHPRO or AXELVIBE, al­ways in all caps, al­ways vaguely ag­gres­sive - on a gar­lic press iden­ti­cal to four hun­dred other gar­lic presses on the same Amazon page. AXELVIBE! For a gar­lic press!

And the af­fil­i­ate blogs! Hundreds of thou­sands of them, pumped full of SEO-optimized re­views of prod­ucts the au­thors had never touched, never even seen in per­son. A frac­tal of bull­shit that tech­ni­cally qual­i­fies as com­merce but puts zero dol­lars of ac­tual value into the world.

Leverage is real; I’m not dis­put­ing that. There is a dif­fer­ence be­tween trad­ing hours for dol­lars and build­ing some­thing that scales. Software does this. Publishing does this. You write a book once, sell it many times, no­body calls that a scam. Fine! That part they got right!

Where it went wrong is that the whole move­ment con­fused build a good prod­uct that scales” with build any mech­a­nism that ex­tracts money with­out you be­ing in­volved.” I don’t think that con­fu­sion was ac­ci­den­tal. I think the con­fu­sion was the point. Because if you’re teach­ing peo­ple to build real busi­nesses, you have to sit with hard, bor­ing ques­tions about whether any­one ac­tu­ally wants what you’re sell­ing. But if you’re teach­ing peo­ple to build passive in­come streams” you can skip all of that and go straight to the fun tac­ti­cal shit. How to run Facebook ads, how to set up a Shopify store in a week­end, how to write email se­quences that ma­nip­u­late peo­ple into buy­ing things they don’t need.

Nobody talks enough about what the pas­sive in­come move­ment did to the con­tent qual­ity of the en­tire in­ter­net. If you’ve tried to google best [anything]” in the last five years and got­ten a wall of nearly iden­ti­cal lis­ti­cles, all with the same struc­ture (“We tested 47 blenders so you don’t have to!“), all mak­ing the same rec­om­men­da­tions, all link­ing to the same Amazon prod­ucts, you’ve ex­pe­ri­enced the re­sults.

Those ar­ti­cles weren’t writ­ten by peo­ple who cared whether you bought a good blender. They were writ­ten by peo­ple who cared whether you clicked their af­fil­i­ate link, be­cause that’s what gen­er­ated pas­sive in­come, and the in­cen­tives made hon­esty ac­tively coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.

The hon­est re­view of blenders is: most blenders are fine, just get what­ev­er’s on sale, the dif­fer­ences be­low $100 are ba­si­cally mean­ing­less.” That re­view gen­er­ates zero af­fil­i­ate rev­enue. So no­body wrote it.

Instead you got The Vitamix A3500 is our #1 pick!” with a nice af­fil­i­ate link, writ­ten by some­one who has never blended any­thing in their life. Multiply this across every prod­uct cat­e­gory and you start to un­der­stand the in­for­ma­tional desert we’ve been liv­ing in. We broke Google re­sults, at least partly, be­cause an army of pas­sive in­come seek­ers had an in­cen­tive to flood the in­ter­net with plau­si­ble-sound­ing garbage.

I’ve met dozens of smart, ca­pa­ble peo­ple who had ac­tual en­ergy, and who spent their en­tire twen­ties bounc­ing be­tween pas­sive in­come schemes in­stead of build­ing real skills // real busi­nesses // real ca­reers. The pat­tern was al­ways the same: six months on a drop­ship­ping store, it fails, pivot to Amazon FBA, that fails, pivot to cre­at­ing a course about drop­ship­ping (because of course), and then the course does­n’t sell ei­ther be­cause by 2021 there were ap­prox­i­mately forty thou­sand courses about drop­ship­ping and the mar­ket had been sat­u­rated since be­fore they started.

And the whole time they were get­ting fur­ther and fur­ther from the thing that ac­tu­ally cre­ates eco­nomic value, which is: find a real prob­lem, solve it for real peo­ple, care enough to stick around and keep im­prov­ing. The bor­ing thing. The thing that takes years. The thing that is, to be ab­solutely clear about this, not pas­sive.

I once saw a guy ask whether he should start a dog walk­ing busi­ness and the top re­sponse was some­thing like dog walk­ing is­n’t scal­able, you should build a dog walk­ing plat­form in­stead.” This per­son liked dogs! He liked walk­ing! He lived in a neigh­bor­hood full of busy pro­fes­sion­als with dogs!

But the Passive Income Brain thing had got­ten so deep into how peo­ple talked about busi­ness on­line that do the sim­ple ob­vi­ous thing that works for you” was con­sid­ered naive, and build a tech­nol­ogy plat­form for an ac­tiv­ity you’ve never ac­tu­ally done as a busi­ness” was con­sid­ered smart.

The dog walk­ing guy could have been prof­itable in a week.

The app guy would have burned through his sav­ings in six months and ended up with a land­ing page and no users.

By 2020 the pas­sive in­come world was ab­solutely crawl­ing with grift: guys pos­ing with rented Lamborghinis in YouTube thumb­nails, digital no­mads” whose ac­tual in­come came en­tirely from sell­ing the dream of be­ing a dig­i­tal no­mad to other as­pir­ing dig­i­tal no­mads, pod­cast hosts in­ter­view­ing each other in an end­less cir­cle of mu­tual pro­mo­tion where every­one claimed to make $30K/month and no­body could ex­plain what they ac­tu­ally pro­duced. By 2021 or so it started to look like a dis­trib­uted, so­cially ac­cept­able MLM. The prod­uct was the dream of not work­ing. The cus­tomers were peo­ple des­per­ate enough to pay for it.

Not every­one in this world was cyn­i­cal. I gen­uinely be­lieve that. A lot of the peo­ple sell­ing pas­sive in­come con­tent be­lieved their own pitch. They’d had some real suc­cess with a niche site - pulled $3,000/month for a while, it does hap­pen - read the same books every­one else read, fig­ured okay, I’ll teach other peo­ple my sys­tem. Why not. I would have done the same thing at 24. I’m al­most sure of it.

But zoom out and what you had was just an enor­mous ma­chine con­vert­ing hu­man am­bi­tion into noise. Affiliate spam // drop­shipped junk // ebooks about pas­sive in­come // courses about courses. An en­tire layer of the in­ter­net that was noth­ing but con­fi­dent-sound­ing bull­shit pro­duced by peo­ple who had op­ti­mized for every­thing ex­cept mak­ing some­thing worth buy­ing.

The peo­ple near the top made money. Everyone else spent months or years chas­ing a mi­rage and came out with noth­ing but a Shopify sub­scrip­tion they for­got to can­cel. They thought they’d failed. They had­n’t failed. The sys­tem, every sys­tem, failed them.

What ac­tu­ally makes money has­n’t changed. You find some­thing peo­ple need. You get good at pro­vid­ing it. You charge a fair price and you keep show­ing up even when it’s te­dious and even when you don’t want to. You build re­la­tion­ships over years. You build rep­u­ta­tion over years. None of it is pas­sive, and none of it has ever been pas­sive! All of it re­volves around giv­ing a shit, day af­ter day, about some­thing spe­cific. I don’t think any­one has ever found a way around that and I don’t think any­one will.

The pas­sive in­come thing was a fan­tasy about not hav­ing to give a shit.

This is a ter­ri­ble foun­da­tion for pretty much any­thing.

The af­fil­i­ate SEO blogs are be­ing slaugh­tered right now by AI-generated con­tent. The peo­ple who spent years pro­duc­ing al­go­rith­mi­cally op­ti­mized con­tent of no value to hu­mans are get­ting out­com­peted by soft­ware that does the ex­act same thing, faster and cheaper. Facebook ad costs went through the roof and took the drop­ship­ping gold rush with them. The biggest pas­sive in­come gu­rus have al­ready piv­oted to sell­ing AI courses. The ma­chine keeps run­ning. It just swaps out the brochure.

But I’ve no­ticed more peo­ple talk­ing about what I’d call give a shit” busi­nesses - peo­ple who make fur­ni­ture, run plumb­ing com­pa­nies, write soft­ware they ac­tu­ally use them­selves. Stuff where the an­swer to why does your busi­ness ex­ist?” is­n’t to gen­er­ate pas­sive in­come for me.” This works a lot bet­ter than the lap­top-on-the-beach grind.

Jade Roller Guy, if you’re out there: I hope you found some­thing real.

I hope it keeps you busy.

...

Read the original on www.joanwestenberg.com »

4 310 shares, 28 trendiness

US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

A bill in­tro­duced by Representative Josh Gottheimer in the House on April 13 would re­quire Apple, Google, and every other op­er­at­ing sys­tem ven­dor to ver­ify the age of any­one set­ting up a new de­vice in the United States.

The leg­is­la­tion, H. R. 8250, trav­els un­der the friend­lier name of the Parents Decide Act, and it is among the most ag­gres­sive sur­veil­lance man­dates ever pro­posed for American con­sumer tech­nol­ogy.

We ob­tained a copy of the bill for you here.

The press re­leases de­scrib­ing it lead with chil­dren. The text de­scribes some­thing much larger. To con­firm a child is un­der 18, the sys­tem has to iden­tify every­one else, too, and the bill builds the in­fra­struc­ture to do ex­actly that.

This is child safety as a de­liv­ery mech­a­nism for mass iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. The pat­tern is fa­mil­iar by now. A gen­uine harm gets named, a sym­pa­thetic vic­tim gets cen­tered, and the so­lu­tion pro­posed re­shapes the dig­i­tal lives of three hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple who were not the prob­lem.

The Parents Decide Act fol­lows that tem­plate with un­usual pre­ci­sion. It takes the real suf­fer­ing of real chil­dren and uses it to jus­tify build­ing a na­tional iden­tity layer un­der­neath every de­vice sold in the coun­try, ad­min­is­tered by two pri­vate com­pa­nies, with the de­tails to be filled in later.

The man­date sits in Section 2(a)(1), which ob­lig­ates providers to Require any user of the op­er­at­ing sys­tem to pro­vide the date of birth of the user” both to set up an ac­count and to use the de­vice at all. Adults in­cluded.

There is no carve-out for grown users, no opt-out for peo­ple who sim­ply want to turn on a phone with­out hand­ing a date of birth to Apple or Google first.

The age check is the en­try fee for own­ing a com­puter. What hap­pens to that data af­ter­ward gets handed off to the Federal Trade Commission to sort out later. A fed­eral bill that man­dates iden­ti­fi­ca­tion as a con­di­tion of us­ing a gen­eral-pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice rep­re­sents some­thing the United States has not pre­vi­ously had, which is a na­tional ID re­quire­ment for turn­ing on a de­vice.

Gottheimer framed the pro­posal at a Ridgewood news con­fer­ence on April 2, stand­ing out­side the lo­cal YMCA with a coali­tion of al­lies. With each pass­ing day, the in­ter­net is be­com­ing more and more treach­er­ous for our kids. We’re not just talk­ing about so­cial me­dia any­more — we’re talk­ing about ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and plat­forms that are shap­ing how our kids think, feel, and act, of­ten with­out any real guardrails,” he said.

His di­ag­no­sis of the cur­rent sys­tem is ac­cu­rate enough. Children are able to by­pass age re­quire­ments by en­ter­ing a dif­fer­ent birth­day and ac­cess­ing apps with­out any real ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Kids can by­pass age re­quire­ments by sim­ply typ­ing in a dif­fer­ent birth­day. That’s it. That’s the sys­tem,” he said.

The rem­edy he pro­poses just hap­pens to re­quire build­ing new sur­veil­lance plumb­ing un­der­neath every de­vice sold in the coun­try, and rout­ing that plumb­ing through two of the largest com­pa­nies on earth. The so­lu­tion cho­sen is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the prob­lem, and dis­pro­por­tion­ate in a spe­cific di­rec­tion, which is the di­rec­tion of less pri­vacy and less anonymity for every­one.

Section 2(a)(3) di­rects op­er­at­ing sys­tem providers to Develop a sys­tem to al­low an app de­vel­oper to ac­cess any in­for­ma­tion as is nec­es­sary” to ver­ify a user’s age.

Translated out of leg­isla­tive prose, Apple and Google be­come age bro­kers for the en­tire American app ecosys­tem. Every app that wants to check whether you are over 18, or over 13, or over 21, will be able to ping the op­er­at­ing sys­tem for an an­swer de­rived from the birth date you handed over at setup. The bill pre­sents this as a con­ve­nience. It is a new data pipeline be­tween the OS layer and every de­vel­oper who plugs into it, and the bill spends re­mark­ably lit­tle time ex­plain­ing how that pipeline will be con­strained.

Free speech im­pli­ca­tions travel through that same pipeline. Once the op­er­at­ing sys­tem knows your age with ver­i­fied cer­tainty, it can tell any app to de­liver, re­strict, or with­hold con­tent ac­cord­ingly. The bil­l’s sup­port­ers de­scribe this as parental con­trol. The in­fra­struc­ture it builds is a con­tent con­trol sys­tem, run­ning at the OS level, with Apple and Google as the gate­keep­ers of who sees what.

The First Amendment has his­tor­i­cally pro­tected the right to read, watch, and speak with­out first pre­sent­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. This bill erodes that prin­ci­ple at its foun­da­tion. Once ver­i­fied age be­comes a stan­dard sig­nal flow­ing from the op­er­at­ing sys­tem to every app, the de­fault as­sump­tion shifts. Users are no longer pre­sump­tively anony­mous adults with full ac­cess to law­ful con­tent. They are iden­ti­fied sub­jects whose per­mis­sions are de­ter­mined by the data Apple or Google holds about them.

An age-ver­i­fi­ca­tion layer built to block AI chat­bots from mi­nors is also ca­pa­ble of block­ing jour­nal­ism a state deems too vi­o­lent, po­lit­i­cal com­men­tary an ad­min­is­tra­tion deems too in­flam­ma­tory, re­port­ing on drugs or protest tac­tics, or any other sub­ject a fu­ture reg­u­la­tor de­cides re­quires age gat­ing.

The in­fra­struc­ture is neu­tral about con­tent. It cares only that the user has been iden­ti­fied. Every fu­ture fight over what Americans are al­lowed to see on­line will start from a po­si­tion where the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion layer al­ready ex­ists, and the only re­main­ing ques­tion is who qual­i­fies for ac­cess. That is a pro­found change in how speech works, and the bill en­acts it while point­ing at chil­dren.

What the bill says about data pro­tec­tion is ef­fec­tively a to-do list for the FTC. Section 2(d)(1)(B) tells the Commission it must even­tu­ally is­sue rules en­sur­ing that birth dates are collected in a se­cure man­ner to main­tain the pri­vacy of the user” and are not stolen or breached.”

Those are out­comes, not mech­a­nisms. The leg­is­la­tion sets no re­ten­tion lim­its, no min­i­miza­tion re­quire­ments, no re­stric­tions on sec­ondary uses, and no pro­hi­bi­tion on link­ing age data to other iden­ti­fiers Apple and Google al­ready hold. It of­fers no guid­ance on how providers should ver­ify the age of a par­ent or guardian be­yond in­struct­ing the FTC to fig­ure that out within 180 days of en­act­ment. The en­tire ar­chi­tec­ture of the sys­tem is to be drawn up af­ter the fact by reg­u­la­tors work­ing un­der a safe-har­bor pro­vi­sion that shields op­er­at­ing sys­tem providers from li­a­bil­ity as long as they fol­low what­ever rules even­tu­ally emerge.

Congress is be­ing asked to au­tho­rize a sur­veil­lance sys­tem it has not de­signed, whose op­er­a­tion it does not un­der­stand, and whose safe­guards do not yet ex­ist.

The Parents Decide Act solves the self-re­ported-birth­day prob­lem by de­mand­ing some­thing ver­i­fi­able, which in prac­tice means a gov­ern­ment ID, a credit card, a bio­met­ric scan, or some com­bi­na­tion.

However, Gottheimer has not spec­i­fied which. The bill does not ei­ther. It’s up to the FTC to de­cide.

Operating sys­tem providers will, and the in­cen­tives point to­ward what­ever is cheap­est to de­ploy at scale. Facial analy­sis is cheap. ID up­loads are cheap. What is ex­pen­sive is build­ing a ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem that does not also cre­ate a per­sis­tent, cross-ref­er­enced data­base of every­one who has ever ac­ti­vated a phone. The in­cen­tives run di­rectly against user pri­vacy, and the bill pro­vides no mean­ing­ful coun­ter­weight.

The bill also dep­u­tizes a du­op­oly. Requiring operating sys­tem providers” to per­form na­tion­wide age ver­i­fi­ca­tion is a re­quire­ment only two com­pa­nies can eas­ily sat­isfy in the mo­bile space, and a hand­ful more across desk­top and con­sole plat­forms.

Smaller OS de­vel­op­ers, open-source pro­jects, Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions, cus­tom Android forks, pri­vacy-fo­cused al­ter­na­tives, all face a com­pli­ance bur­den de­signed around the as­sump­tion that the provider is a tril­lion-dol­lar firm with le­gal staff and bio­met­ric-scan­ning part­ner­ships al­ready in place.

The safe har­bor in Section 2(b) pro­tects providers who fol­low the rules, but fol­low­ing the rules re­quires in­fra­struc­ture only the in­cum­bents can build. A law nom­i­nally aimed at tech com­pa­nies en­trenches the two tech com­pa­nies most re­spon­si­ble for the sta­tus quo.

Apple and Google be­come the manda­tory iden­tity check­points for every app de­vel­oper in the coun­try, which is a com­mer­cial po­si­tion worth a great deal of money and a great deal of lever­age. Any fu­ture com­peti­tor that wants to build a pri­vacy-re­spect­ing op­er­at­ing sys­tem will dis­cover the law has made that ef­fec­tively il­le­gal.

There is also an­other change buried in the text. The de­f­i­n­i­tion of operating sys­tem” in Section 2(g)(4) cov­ers software that sup­ports the ba­sic func­tions of a com­puter, mo­bile de­vice, or any other gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing de­vice.” That lan­guage reaches well be­yond phones and tablets.

Laptops run op­er­at­ing sys­tems. Desktop com­put­ers run op­er­at­ing sys­tems. Gaming con­soles, smart TVs, cars with in­fo­tain­ment soft­ware, and a grow­ing cat­a­log of am­bi­ent de­vices all qual­ify un­der a plain read­ing of the de­f­i­n­i­tion. The bill does not dis­tin­guish be­tween the fam­ily iPad and the lap­top a col­lege stu­dent uses for course­work. Every de­vice with an OS be­comes a de­vice that ver­i­fies age at setup, and by ex­ten­sion, a de­vice that iden­ti­fies its user at setup. The scope creep is built into the de­f­i­n­i­tions.

Gottheimer cited cases of teenagers al­legedly harmed by AI chat­bots and by al­go­rith­mi­cally pro­moted con­tent about self-harm.

What the bill does with those harms is use them as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for an iden­tity sys­tem that ap­plies to every user. The tem­plate is con­sis­tent: a child is hurt, leg­is­la­tion is drafted, the leg­is­la­tion re­shapes the dig­i­tal en­vi­ron­ment of every­one, child and adult, sub­ject and by­stander alike.

Less in­va­sive al­ter­na­tives ex­ist and have ex­isted for years.

Device-level parental con­trols al­ready ship with iOS and Android. Family Sharing and Google Family Link al­ready let par­ents con­fig­ure age-ap­pro­pri­ate re­stric­tions. App stores al­ready al­low per-app age rat­ings.

None of these re­quire every user in the coun­try to prove their age to Apple or Google when turn­ing on a phone. The bill skips past those op­tions in fa­vor of a man­date that treats uni­ver­sal age ver­i­fi­ca­tion as the base­line con­di­tion of de­vice own­er­ship.

Protecting chil­dren does not re­quire build­ing any of this. The bil­l’s au­thors chose to build it any­way, and the choice tells you what the bill is ac­tu­ally for.

...

Read the original on reclaimthenet.org »

5 287 shares, 17 trendiness

Everything we like is a psyop

Last year, I was telegraphed a sub­lim­i­nal man­date from the in­die rock pow­ers that be: I was sup­posed to like Geese. The young Brooklynites make good mu­sic, but are they the sav­iors of rock and roll, the defin­ing rock band of Gen Z, the sec­ond com­ing of The Strokes?

The buzz around the band would sug­gest so. After their al­bum Getting Killed” came out in September, the band was un­avoid­able if you’re the kind of per­son who refers to con­certs as shows.” When front­man Cameron Winter played an extremely sold-out” solo set at Carnegie Hall, peo­ple in the au­di­ence seemed con­vinced that they’d be able to look back on that night in 50 years and tell their grand­chil­dren that they wit­nessed a sem­i­nal mo­ment in American mu­si­cal his­tory — the birth of the next Bob Dylan. How could any­one live up to that hype?

That’s why, when Wired re­ported that Geese’s pop­u­lar­ity was a psyop, I felt vin­di­cated — I was right! I knew it! I was smarter than every­one for only ca­su­ally en­joy­ing Geese!

But it’s never that sim­ple. The real story is that Geese worked with a mar­ket­ing firm called Chaotic Good, which cre­ates thou­sands of so­cial me­dia ac­counts de­signed to man­u­fac­ture trends on be­half of their clients, which also in­clude TikTok fa­vorites Alex Warren and Zara Larsson. This rev­e­la­tion has in­spired a range of re­ac­tions, from feel­ings of be­trayal to con­fu­sion at why any­one is mad about a band do­ing mar­ket­ing, a nor­mal thing that bands do.

On TikTok, it’s re­ally easy to get views. You just post trend­ing au­dios. But artists can’t do that, be­cause they want to pro­mote their own mu­sic,” ex­plained Chaotic Good co-founder Andrew Spelman in an in­ter­view with Billboard. So a big part of what we are do­ing is post­ing enough vol­ume across enough ac­counts with enough im­pres­sions to try to sim­u­late the idea that the song is trend­ing or mov­ing.”

When you learn how preva­lent these mar­ket­ing strate­gies are, it kind of feels like you’re a kid who just learned that the Tooth Fairy is­n’t real — you prob­a­bly had a hunch that some­thing was up, but you want to be­lieve in the fan­tasy that a flut­ter­ing fae is sneak­ing into your room, and every vi­ral suc­cess story is a fairy tale.

It’s not just the mu­sic in­dus­try tak­ing ad­van­tage of this mar­ket­ing strat­egy — young startup founders are fol­low­ing the same play­book.

While prepar­ing for an in­ter­view with the Gen Z founders of the fash­ion app Phia, I searched TikTok to see what real peo­ple were say­ing about the app. I found videos re­peat­ing the same talk­ing points about how Bill Gates’ daugh­ter cre­ated an app that helps you save money on lux­ury prod­ucts, or how us­ing Phia is like hav­ing a per­sonal shop­ping as­sis­tant that wants you to get the best deals. When I clicked on these ac­counts, I found that many of them only ever posted videos about Phia.

It’s not like I caught Phia in some gotcha” mo­ment. Founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni aren’t try­ing to hide their so­cial me­dia strat­egy — this is just how mar­ket­ing works now.

One thing we’ve been try­ing lately is ba­si­cally run­ning a cre­ator farm, so we have a ton of dif­fer­ent col­lege stu­dents that we pay to make videos about Phia on their own ac­counts,” Kianni said on her pod­cast. This is an ap­proach that’s re­ally fo­cused on vol­ume. We have like ten cre­ators, they post twice a day, and we ul­ti­mately reach like 600 videos to­tal.”

On TikTok-like feeds, peo­ple watch videos in a vac­uum, sep­a­rate from the rest of a cre­ator’s ac­count. Few view­ers will stop to look at what else that per­son is post­ing, so they won’t sus­pect that the post about this cool new app could be an in­or­ganic pro­mo­tion.

Creators will sim­i­larly pay armies of teenagers on Discord to make clips of their streams and post them en masse.

That’s been go­ing on for a bit,” Karat Financial co-founder Eric Wei told TechCrunch last year. Drake does it. A lot of the biggest cre­ators and stream­ers in the world have been do­ing it — Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] has done it — hit­ting mil­lions of im­pres­sions … If it’s al­go­rith­mi­cally de­ter­mined, clip­ping sud­denly makes sense, be­cause it can come from any ran­dom ac­count that just has re­ally good clips.”

Marketing firms like Chaotic Good scale that same ap­proach — in­stead of pay­ing col­lege stu­dents or teenage fans to make videos, they buy hun­dreds of iPhones and make a bunch of so­cial me­dia ac­counts that they can use to fab­ri­cate a vi­ral trend. Spelman told Billboard that Chaotic Good’s of­fice is overrun with iPhones,” and that they have so many phones that they’re treated like VIPs at Verizon.

Unfortunately, a lot of the in­ter­net is ma­nip­u­la­tion … Everything on the in­ter­net is fake. One thing that we al­ways say is all opin­ions are formed in the TikTok com­ments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.

This is the same line of think­ing that fu­els the Dead Internet Theory, which ar­gues that bot-gen­er­ated con­tent dom­i­nates the web.

If Chaotic Good’s con­tent armies aren’t post­ing trend­ing au­dio, they’re com­ment­ing on posts about the com­pa­ny’s clients to con­trol the nar­ra­tive. Instead of wait­ing to see how fans will re­spond to a new song, they can use their ac­counts to flood the com­ments of videos and talk about how much they love the song.

For Geese, it’s an in­sult to be called an in­dus­try plant. After song­writer Eliza McLamb wrote the blog post that first con­nected Geese and Chaotic Good, the firm re­moved men­tion of Geese and narrative cam­paigns” from its web­site. (The com­pany told Wired that it did this to pro­tect artists from be­ing wrapped up in false ac­cu­sa­tions or mis­con­cep­tions about how their mu­sic was dis­cov­ered.”)

But like the un­apolo­getic mar­ket­ing be­hind some Gen Z star­tups, the global girl group Katseye has been in­cred­i­bly clear that they are the de­f­i­n­i­tion of in­dus­try plants — there’s lit­er­ally a Netflix do­cuseries, Pop Star Academy,” that il­lus­trates how a room full of global record ex­ec­u­tives turned these six young women into su­per­stars, even pit­ting po­ten­tial mem­bers against each other in a sur­prise K-pop-style sur­vival show.

When Pop Star Academy” came out, I watched it in a state of hor­ror — HYBE and Geffen treated these as­pir­ing teenage pop stars like cat­tle to mold into hu­man bill­boards that they could use to sell Erewhon smooth­ies and hair serums. But over the course of the eight-episode se­ries, I be­came deeply in­vested in these girls’ lives. I wanted to watch them thrive in the face of un­re­lent­ing in­dus­try pres­sure.

I’m sure that this is ex­actly what Katseye’s man­age­ment wanted from the doc­u­men­tary — to cul­ti­vate a fer­vent sense of sup­port and de­fen­sive­ness over the girls, even if it means paint­ing the ex­ec­u­tives as the bad guys. Fast-forward a few years, and Katseye is per­form­ing a song called Gnarly” at the Grammys — a track that fans hated at first un­til, sud­denly, they did­n’t.

It’s hard not to think about Chaotic Good’s narrative cam­paigns,” flood­ing com­ment sec­tions to con­trol dis­course. Though I hated Gnarly” when it came out, I de­cided over time that it’s ac­tu­ally an avant-garde mas­ter­piece. Did I change my mind on my own, or was it changed for me? For as much pride as I took in re­sist­ing the hype around Geese, I am so wrapped up in Katseye that I’ve spent hours spec­u­lat­ing on Reddit fo­rums about the real story be­hind Manon’s hia­tus.

Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an in­dus­try plant, but do we ac­tu­ally care?

This is not a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion. The Geese dis­course (which could also be man­u­fac­tured, now that I think about it!) has in­spired such var­ied re­sponses be­cause we have not es­tab­lished clear so­cial norms around what is nec­es­sary mar­ket­ing and what is in­au­then­tic growth hack­ing.

We, the fans, get to de­cide now where we draw the line.

...

Read the original on techcrunch.com »

6 274 shares, 14 trendiness

Documentary

Simple Made Easy (2011) — Rich’s fa­mous talk from Strange Loop 2011. Defines the dis­tinc­tion be­tween simple” and easy.”

Clojure at LispNYC (2007) - the first pub­lic talk about Clojure.

Sierra’s Blog on LispNYC Presentation — 2007. An early pub­lic in­tro­duc­tion to Clojure.

Are We There Yet? (2009) - The Clojure state model and a dis­sec­tion of time in pro­gram­ming.

Hammock Driven Development (2010) — On think­ing deeply about prob­lems be­fore writ­ing code.

The Value of Values (2012) — The case for im­mutable val­ues over mu­ta­ble ob­jects.

Writing Datomic in Clojure (2012) - An overview of Datomic and how Clojure was the per­fect lan­guage to write it in.

Expert to Expert: Rich Hickey and Brian Beckman - Inside Clojure (2013) - a long-form in­ter­view with Rich about Clojure.

Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure (2017) - Rich re­flects on the first 10 years of Clojure and the pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of Clojure’s fea­tures for solv­ing real-world prob­lems.

Talk Transcripts — Community-maintained tran­scripts of Clojure talks by Rich Hickey and oth­ers.

Rich Hickey Talks - A video playlist of many of Rich’s talks.

...

Read the original on clojure.org »

7 270 shares, 14 trendiness

Build Android apps 3x faster using any agent

As Android de­vel­op­ers, you have many choices when it comes to the agents, tools, and LLMs you use for app de­vel­op­ment. Whether you are us­ing Gemini in Android Studio, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, or third-party agents like Claude Code or Codex, our mis­sion is to en­sure that high-qual­ity Android de­vel­op­ment is pos­si­ble every­where.

Today, we are in­tro­duc­ing a new suite of Android tools and re­sources for agen­tic work­flows — Android CLI with Android skills and the Android Knowledge Base. This col­lec­tion of tools is de­signed to elim­i­nate the guess­work of core Android de­vel­op­ment work­flows when you di­rect an agen­t’s work out­side of Android Studio, mak­ing your agents more ef­fi­cient, ef­fec­tive, and ca­pa­ble of fol­low­ing the lat­est rec­om­mended pat­terns and best prac­tices.

Whether you are just start­ing your de­vel­op­ment jour­ney on Android, are a sea­soned Android de­vel­oper, or man­ag­ing apps across mo­bile and web plat­forms, build­ing your apps with the lat­est guid­ance, tools, and AI-assistance is eas­ier than ever. No mat­ter which en­vi­ron­ment you be­gin with these re­sources, you can al­ways tran­si­tion your de­vel­op­ment ex­pe­ri­ence to Android Studio—where the state-of-the-art tools and agents for Android de­vel­op­ment are avail­able to help your app ex­pe­ri­ence truly shine.

Your agents per­form best when they have a light­weight, pro­gram­matic in­ter­face to in­ter­act with the Android SDK and de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment. So, at the heart of this new work­flow is a re­vi­tal­ized Android CLI. The new Android CLI serves as the pri­mary in­ter­face for Android de­vel­op­ment from the ter­mi­nal, fea­tur­ing com­mands for en­vi­ron­ment setup, pro­ject cre­ation, and de­vice man­age­ment—with more mod­ern ca­pa­bil­i­ties and easy up­data­bil­ity in mind.

In our in­ter­nal ex­per­i­ments, Android CLI im­proved pro­ject and en­vi­ron­ment setup by re­duc­ing LLM to­ken us­age by more than 70%, and tasks were com­pleted 3X faster than when agents at­tempted to nav­i­gate these tasks us­ing only the stan­dard toolsets.

Key ca­pa­bil­i­ties avail­able to you in­clude:

* SDK man­age­ment: Use an­droid sdk in­stall to down­load only the spe­cific com­po­nents needed, en­sur­ing a lean de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment.

* Snappy pro­ject cre­ation: The an­droid cre­ate com­mand gen­er­ates new pro­jects from of­fi­cial tem­plates, en­sur­ing the rec­om­mended ar­chi­tec­ture and best prac­tices are ap­plied from the very first line of code.

* Rapid de­vice cre­ation and de­ploy­ment: Create and man­age vir­tual de­vices with an­droid em­u­la­tor and de­ploy apps us­ing an­droid run, elim­i­nat­ing the guess­work in­volved in man­ual build and de­ploy cy­cles.

* Updatability: Run an­droid up­date to en­sure that you have the lat­est ca­pa­bil­i­ties avail­able.

While Android CLI will em­power your agen­tic de­vel­op­ment flows, it’s also been de­signed to stream­line CI, main­te­nance, and any other scripted au­toma­tion for the in­creas­ingly dis­trib­uted na­ture of Android de­vel­op­ment. Download and try out the Android CLI to­day!

Traditional doc­u­men­ta­tion can be de­scrip­tive, con­cep­tual, and high-level. While per­fect for learn­ing, LLMs of­ten re­quire pre­cise, ac­tion­able in­struc­tions to ex­e­cute com­plex work­flows with­out us­ing out­dated pat­terns and li­braries.

To bridge this gap, we are launch­ing the Android skills GitHub repos­i­tory. Skills are mod­u­lar, mark­down-based (SKILL.md) in­struc­tion sets that pro­vide a tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tion for a task and are de­signed to trig­ger au­to­mat­i­cally when your prompt matches the skil­l’s meta­data, sav­ing you the has­sle of man­u­ally at­tach­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion to every prompt.

Android skills cover some of the most com­mon work­flows that some Android de­vel­op­ers and LLMs may strug­gle with—they help mod­els bet­ter un­der­stand and ex­e­cute spe­cific pat­terns that fol­low our best prac­tices and guid­ance on Android de­vel­op­ment.

In our ini­tial re­lease, the repos­i­tory in­cludes skills like:

If you’re us­ing Android CLI, you can browse and set up your agent work­flow with our grow­ing col­lec­tion of skills us­ing the an­droid skills com­mand. These skills can also live along­side any other skills you cre­ate, or third-party skills cre­ated by the Android de­vel­oper com­mu­nity. Learn more about get­ting started with Android skills.

The third com­po­nent we are launch­ing to­day is the Android Knowledge Base. Accessible through the an­droid docs com­mand and al­ready avail­able in the lat­est ver­sion of Android Studio, this spe­cial­ized data source en­ables agents to search and fetch the lat­est au­thor­i­ta­tive de­vel­oper guide­lines to use as rel­e­vant con­text.

By ac­cess­ing the fre­quently up­dated knowl­edge base, agents can ground their re­sponses in the most re­cent in­for­ma­tion from Android de­vel­oper docs, Firebase, Google Developers, and Kotlin docs. This en­sures that even if an LLMs train­ing cut­off is a year old, it can still pro­vide guid­ance on the lat­est frame­works and pat­terns we rec­om­mend to­day.

In ad­di­tion to em­pow­er­ing de­vel­op­ers and agents to han­dle pro­ject setup and boil­er­plate code, we’ve also de­signed these new tools and re­sources to make it eas­ier to tran­si­tion to Android Studio. That means you can start a pro­to­type quickly with an agent us­ing Android CLI and then open the pro­ject in Android Studio to fine-tune your UI with vi­sual tools for code edit­ing, UI de­sign, deep de­bug­ging, and ad­vanced pro­fil­ing that scale with the grow­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties of your app.

And when it is time to build a high-qual­ity app for large-scale pub­li­ca­tion across var­i­ous de­vice types, our agent in Android Studio is here to help, while lever­ag­ing the lat­est de­vel­op­ment best prac­tices and li­braries. Beyond the pow­er­ful Agent and Planning Modes for ac­tive de­vel­op­ment, we have in­tro­duced an AI-powered New Project flow, which pro­vides an en­try point to rapidly pro­to­typ­ing your next great idea for Android.

These built-in agents make it sim­ple to ex­tend your app ideas across phones, fold­ables, tablets, Wear OS, Android Auto, and Android TV. Equipped with full con­text of your pro­jec­t’s source code and a com­pre­hen­sive suite of de­bug­ging, pro­fil­ing, and em­u­la­tion tools, you have an end-to-end, AI-accelerated toolkit at your dis­posal.

Android CLI is avail­able in pre­view to­day, along with a grow­ing set of Android skills and knowl­edge for agents. To get started, head over to d.an­droid.com/​tools/​agents to down­load Android CLI.

...

Read the original on android-developers.googleblog.com »

8 238 shares, 15 trendiness

Newly unsealed records reveal Amazon’s price-fixing tactics, California attorney general claims

Hundreds of pre­vi­ously redacted records re­veal how Amazon has put pres­sure on in­de­pen­dent sell­ers us­ing its plat­form into rais­ing their prices on the sites of com­peti­tors such as Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can ap­pear to have lower prices, California au­thor­i­ties al­lege.

The global con­glom­er­ate be­came con­cerned even if a com­peti­tor was sell­ing an item for as lit­tle as a penny less, ac­cord­ing to one seg­ment of the newly unredacted ev­i­dence.

The doc­u­ments — which have never pre­vi­ously been re­ported on — in­clude in­ter­nal emails, de­po­si­tion tes­ti­mony and con­fi­den­tial cor­po­rate pre­sen­ta­tions that the California at­tor­ney gen­eral, Rob Bonta, ob­tained as part of a civil case his of­fice launched in 2022 ac­cus­ing Amazon of large-scale price-fix­ing.

The Guardian ob­tained and re­viewed the cache of ev­i­dence, which has been filed in San Francisco county su­pe­rior court but has not yet be­come pub­licly avail­able. Within the doc­u­ments, lawyers for the state of California have un­masked key de­tails, para­graphs and some­times whole pages that had pre­vi­ously been blacked out. A judge per­mit­ted some redac­tions to re­main at Amazon’s re­quest.

In a state­ment, Bonta said the newly un­veiled ev­i­dence re­in­forced his of­fice’s claims that Amazon’s ac­tions unlawfully pun­ishes sell­ers whose prod­ucts are sold at lower prices by other on­line re­tail­ers”.

Especially while con­sumers face an af­ford­abil­ity cri­sis, there is no room for il­le­gal prac­tices that im­pede com­pe­ti­tion and raise prices,” Bonta said. California looks for­ward to our trial in January 2027.”

Amazon has called the claims in the law­suit entirely false and mis­guided”.

Amazon is con­sis­tently iden­ti­fied as America’s low­est-priced on­line re­tailer, and it is ironic that the at­tor­ney gen­eral seeks to have us fea­ture higher prices in ways that would harm con­sumers and com­pe­ti­tion,” the com­pany said in a state­ment.

For years, the state al­leges, Amazon has used au­to­mated tools to track how in­de­pen­dent ven­dors on its plat­form price their goods on com­peti­tor sites, then lever­aged its dom­i­nant po­si­tion in e-com­merce to en­sure that those prices do not fall be­low those on Amazon, even though Amazon of­ten charges ven­dors far more in fees.

The state’s law­suit claims that Amazon pun­ishes ven­dors that dare to of­fer dis­counts on their own sites or com­peti­tor sites like Walmart, sup­press­ing their sales on Amazon by tak­ing away the ven­dors’ ac­cess to crit­i­cal fea­tures, such as its site’s Buy Box” — the panel on the right side of the site where cus­tomers see but­tons like Add to cart” and Buy Now”.

In one pre­vi­ously redacted de­po­si­tion, marked highly con­fi­den­tial”, Mayer Handler, owner of a cloth­ing com­pany called Leveret, tes­ti­fied that he re­ceived an email in October 2022 from Amazon no­ti­fy­ing him that one of his prod­ucts was no longer el­i­gi­ble to be a fea­tured of­fer” through Amazon’s Buy Box.

The tech gi­ant, he tes­ti­fied, had sup­pressed the item, a tiger-themed, tod­dler’s pa­jama set, be­cause his com­pany was sell­ing it for $19.99 on Amazon, a sin­gle cent higher than what his com­pany was of­fer­ing it for on Walmart.

A. That Amazon — the price on Amazon was higher than the price was on Walmart.

Q. And how much higher?

A. One penny.

Afterwards, Handler tes­ti­fied, his com­pany changed pric­ing on Walmart to match or ex­ceed Amazon’s price” or changed the item’s prod­uct code to try to throw off Amazon’s price track­ing sys­tem.

We changed pric­ing on Walmart to match or ex­ceed Amazon’s price. Or we changed the code.

In re­sponse to a ques­tion from the Guardian, Handler crit­i­cized Amazon for track­ing prices across the in­ter­net and shadow” block­ing his com­pa­ny’s prod­ucts — tac­tics which he said were de­priv­ing con­sumers of lower prices”.

Maybe that’s cap­i­tal­ism,” he wrote. Or that’s a mo­nop­oly caus­ing price hikes on the con­sumer.”

In an­other un­sealed de­po­si­tion, Terry Esbenshade, a Pennsylvania gar­den store sup­plier, tes­ti­fied in October 2024 that when­ever his prod­ucts lost Amazon’s Buy Box be­cause of lower prices else­where on the in­ter­net, his sales on Amazon would plum­met by about 80%. This fi­nan­cial re­al­ity forced him to try to raise his prod­ucts’ prices with other re­tail­ers else­where, he said.

In one in­stance, Esbenshade tes­ti­fied, he dis­cov­ered that one of his com­pa­ny’s bet­ter-sell­ing pa­tio ta­bles had become sup­pressed” on Amazon.

Esbenshade was­n’t sure why, he re­called, un­til some­one at Amazon sug­gested he look at Wayfair, an­other on­line re­tailer that hap­pened to be sell­ing his pa­tio table be­low Amazon’s price.

The busi­ness­man went on­line and set up a new min­i­mum ad­ver­tised price for the table on Wayfair to en­sure it was higher than Amazon’s.

So that raised the price up, and, voila, my prod­uct came back” on Amazon, he said, thanks to the re­in­state­ment of the Buy Box.

Amazon has ar­gued that its prac­tices ac­tu­ally pro­mote, in­cen­tivize and re­ward com­pe­ti­tion. The com­pany said it works to en­sure its cus­tomers see of­fers with low, com­pet­i­tive prices” and pro­vide the best pos­si­ble” cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence for on­line shop­pers.

Just like any store owner who would­n’t want to pro­mote a bad deal to their cus­tomers, we don’t high­light or pro­mote of­fers that are not com­pet­i­tively priced,” the com­pany said in its state­ment. It’s part of our com­mit­ment to fea­tur­ing low prices to earn and main­tain cus­tomer trust.”

The com­pany has also de­nied that it had ever tried to shield it­self from com­pe­ti­tion through its agree­ments with in­de­pen­dent sell­ers.

Amazon de­nies that the in­tent or ef­fect of any agree­ment it has en­tered into with third-party sell­ers or ven­dors is to in­su­late it­self from price com­pe­ti­tion” or entrench any po­si­tion of dominance’”, the com­pany as­serted in an an­swer to the state’s law­suit.

But Bonta’s of­fice said that the newly unredacted ex­hibits show Amazon em­ploy­ees have proac­tively sought to un­der­mine mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion and were aware of the ef­fects of their ac­tions on prices.

In one ex­am­ple, the state al­leged, an Amazon en­gi­neer de­scribed the com­pa­ny’s use of Buy Box sup­pres­sion and an in­ter­nal pro­gram, known as SC-FOD, to un­der­mine ven­dors’ will­ing­ness to sell prod­ucts on Temu, a com­pet­ing e-com­merce site.

map them, FOD them, and they move out of Temu

But ye hua hai toh its a huge suc­cess for us

In an­other ex­am­ple, a se­nior Amazon em­ployee sent an in­ter­nal email in August 2023 de­scrib­ing how the com­pa­ny’s Buy Box sup­pres­sions were caus­ing an Indiana-based home goods and fur­ni­ture seller to reg­u­larly raise his prices on other sites.

When this hap­pens, they claim they search for the lower price, and when they find it, they raise it to match the price on Amazon,” the em­ployee wrote, which was read aloud in a con­fi­den­tial de­po­si­tion last year.

Amazon, which re­cently over­took Walmart to be­come the world’s largest com­pany by rev­enue, is America’s No 1 on­line re­tailer by a huge mar­gin.

By the end of 2022, Amazon ac­counted for nearly half of US e-com­merce re­tail spend­ing, com­pared with less than 8% for Walmart, its near­est com­peti­tor, ac­cord­ing to num­bers com­piled by PYMTS.com, an an­a­lyt­ics firm. In the third quar­ter of 2025, Amazon took in 56% of on­line re­tail spend­ing com­pared with Walmart’s 9.6%, PYMTS found.

Amazon did not im­me­di­ately pro­vide an­swers to ques­tions from the Guardian ahead of pub­li­ca­tion. The Guardian will up­date this ar­ti­cle when it re­ceives a re­sponse.

The trial in the California at­tor­ney gen­er­al’s law­suit against Amazon is cur­rently sched­uled to be­gin on 19 January 2027.

...

Read the original on www.theguardian.com »

9 222 shares, 135 trendiness

The Last Question

The last ques­tion was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when hu­man­ity first stepped into the light. The ques­tion came about as a re­sult of a five dol­lar bet over high­balls, and it hap­pened this way:

Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faith­ful at­ten­dants of Multivac. As well as any hu­man be­ings could, they knew what lay be­hind the cold, click­ing, flash­ing face — miles and miles of face — of that gi­ant com­puter. They had at least a vague no­tion of the gen­eral plan of re­lays and cir­cuits that had long since grown past the point where any sin­gle hu­man could pos­si­bly have a firm grasp of the whole.

Multivac was self-ad­just­ing and self-cor­rect­ing. It had to be, for noth­ing hu­man could ad­just and cor­rect it quickly enough or even ad­e­quately enough — so Adell and Lupov at­tended the mon­strous gi­ant only lightly and su­per­fi­cially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, ad­justed ques­tions to its needs and trans­lated the an­swers that were is­sued. Certainly they, and all oth­ers like them, were fully en­ti­tled to share In the glory that was Multivac’s.

For decades, Multivac had helped de­sign the ships and plot the tra­jec­to­ries that en­abled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth’s poor re­sources could not sup­port the ships. Too much en­ergy was needed for the long trips. Earth ex­ploited its coal and ura­nium with in­creas­ing ef­fi­ciency, but there was only so much of both.

But slowly Multivac learned enough to an­swer deeper ques­tions more fun­da­men­tally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been the­ory, be­came fact.

The en­ergy of the sun was stored, con­verted, and uti­lized di­rectly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burn­ing coal, its fis­sion­ing ura­nium, and flipped the switch that con­nected all of it to a small sta­tion, one mile in di­am­e­ter, cir­cling the Earth at half the dis­tance of the Moon. All Earth ran by in­vis­i­ble beams of sun­power.

Seven days had not suf­ficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov fi­nally man­aged to es­cape from the pub­lic func­tion, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of look­ing for them, in the de­serted un­der­ground cham­bers, where por­tions of the mighty buried body of Multivac showed. Unattended, idling, sort­ing data with con­tented lazy click­ings, Multivac, too, had earned its va­ca­tion and the boys ap­pre­ci­ated that. They had no in­ten­tion, orig­i­nally, of dis­turb­ing it.

They had brought a bot­tle with them, and their only con­cern at the mo­ment was to re­lax in the com­pany of each other and the bot­tle.

It’s amaz­ing when you think of it,” said Adell. His broad face had lines of weari­ness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watch­ing the cubes of ice slur clum­sily about. All the en­ergy we can pos­si­bly ever use for free. Enough en­ergy, if we wanted to draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of im­pure liq­uid iron, and still never miss the en­ergy so used. All the en­ergy we could ever use, for­ever and for­ever and for­ever.”

Lupov cocked his head side­ways. He had a trick of do­ing that when he wanted to be con­trary, and he wanted to be con­trary now, partly be­cause he had had to carry the ice and glass­ware. Not for­ever,” he said.

Oh, hell, just about for­ever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”

All right, then. Billions and bil­lions of years. Twenty bil­lion, maybe. Are you sat­is­fied?”

Lupov put his fin­gers through his thin­ning hair as though to re­as­sure him­self that some was still left and sipped gen­tly at his own drink. Twenty bil­lion years is­n’t for­ever.”

Will, it will last our time, won’t it?”

So would the coal and ura­nium.”

All right, but now we can hook up each in­di­vid­ual space­ship to the Solar Station, and it can go to Pluto and back a mil­lion times with­out ever wor­ry­ing about fuel. You can’t do THAT on coal and ura­nium. Ask Multivac, if you don’t be­lieve me.”

I don’t have to ask Multivac. I know that.”

Then stop run­ning down what Multivac’s done for us,” said Adell, blaz­ing up. It did all right.”

Who says it did­n’t? What I say is that a sun won’t last for­ever. That’s all I’m say­ing. We’re safe for twenty bil­lion years, but then what?” Lupov pointed a slightly shaky fin­ger at the other. And don’t say we’ll switch to an­other sun.”

There was si­lence for a while. Adell put his glass to his lips only oc­ca­sion­ally, and Lupov’s eyes slowly closed. They rested.

Then Lupov’s eyes snapped open. You’re think­ing we’ll switch to an­other sun when ours is done, aren’t you?”

Sure you are. You’re weak on logic, that’s the trou­ble with you. You’re like the guy in the story who was caught in a sud­den shower and Who ran to a grove of trees and got un­der one. He was­n’t wor­ried, you see, be­cause he fig­ured when one tree got wet through, he would just get un­der an­other one.”

I get it,” said Adell. Don’t shout. When the sun is done, the other stars will be gone, too.”

Darn right they will,” mut­tered Lupov. It all had a be­gin­ning in the orig­i­nal cos­mic ex­plo­sion, what­ever that was, and it’ll all have an end when all the stars run down. Some run down faster than oth­ers. Hell, the gi­ants won’t last a hun­dred mil­lion years. The sun will last twenty bil­lion years and maybe the dwarfs will last a hun­dred bil­lion for all the good they are. But just give us a tril­lion years and every­thing will be dark. Entropy has to in­crease to max­i­mum, that’s all.”

I know all about en­tropy,” said Adell, stand­ing on his dig­nity.

I know as much as you do.”

Then you know every­thing’s got to run down some­day.”

All right. Who says they won’t?”

You did, you poor sap. You said we had all the en­ergy we needed, for­ever. You said forever.’”

It was Adell’s turn to be con­trary. Maybe we can build things up again some­day,” he said.

You ask Multivac. I dare you. Five dol­lars says it can’t be done.”

Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the nec­es­sary sym­bols and op­er­a­tions into a ques­tion which, in words, might have cor­re­sponded to this: Will mankind one day with­out the net ex­pen­di­ture of en­ergy be able to re­store the sun to its full youth­ful­ness even af­ter it had died of old age?

Or maybe it could be put more sim­ply like this: How can the net amount of en­tropy of the uni­verse be mas­sively de­creased?

Multivac fell dead and silent. The slow flash­ing of lights ceased, the dis­tant sounds of click­ing re­lays ended.

Then, just as the fright­ened tech­ni­cians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sud­den spring­ing to life of the tele­type at­tached to that por­tion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

By next morn­ing, the two, plagued with throb­bing head and cot­tony mouth, had for­got­ten about the in­ci­dent.

Jerrodd, Jerrodine, and Jerrodette I and II watched the starry pic­ture in the visi­plate change as the pas­sage through hy­per­space was com­pleted in its non-time lapse. At once, the even pow­der­ing of stars gave way to the pre­dom­i­nance of a sin­gle bright mar­ble-disk, cen­tered.

That’s X-23,” said Jerrodd con­fi­dently. His thin hands clamped tightly be­hind his back and the knuck­les whitened.

The lit­tle Jerrodettes, both girls, had ex­pe­ri­enced the hy­per­space pas­sage for the first time in their lives and were self-con­scious over the mo­men­tary sen­sa­tion of in­side-out­ness. They buried their gig­gles and chased one an­other wildly about their mother, scream­ing, We’ve reached X-23 — we’ve reached X-23 — we’ve —”

Quiet, chil­dren,” said Jerrodine sharply. Are you sure, Jerrodd?”

What is there to be but sure?” asked Jerrodd, glanc­ing up at the bulge of fea­ture­less metal just un­der the ceil­ing. It ran the length of the room, dis­ap­pear­ing through the wall at ei­ther end. It was as long as the ship.

Jerrodd scarcely knew a thing about the thick rod of metal ex­cept that it was called a Microvac, that one asked it ques­tions if one wished; that if one did not it still had its task of guid­ing the ship to a pre­ordered des­ti­na­tion; of feed­ing on en­er­gies from the var­i­ous Sub-galactic Power Stations; of com­put­ing the equa­tions for the hy­per­spa­cial jumps.

Jerrodd and his fam­ily had only to wait and live in the com­fort­able res­i­dence quar­ters of the ship.

Someone had once told Jerrodd that the ac” at the end of Microvac” stood for analog com­puter” in an­cient English, but he was on the edge of for­get­ting even that.

Jerrodine’s eyes were moist as she watched the visi­plate. I can’t help it. I feel funny about leav­ing Earth.”

Why for Pete’s sake?” de­manded Jerrodd. We had noth­ing there. We’ll have every­thing on X-23. You won’t be alone. You won’t be a pi­o­neer. There are over a mil­lion peo­ple on the planet al­ready. Good Lord, our great grand­chil­dren will be look­ing for new worlds be­cause X-23 will be over­crowded.”

Then, af­ter a re­flec­tive pause, I tell you, it’s a lucky thing the com­put­ers worked out in­ter­stel­lar travel the way the race is grow­ing.”

Jerrodette I said promptly, Our Microvac is the best Microvac in the world.”

I think so, too,” said Jerrodd, tou­sling her hair.

It was a nice feel­ing to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his gen­er­a­tion and no other. In his fa­ther’s youth, the only com­put­ers had been tremen­dous ma­chines tak­ing up a hun­dred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been grow­ing in size steadily for a thou­sand years and then, all at once, came re­fine­ment. In place of tran­sis­tors had come mol­e­c­u­lar valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the vol­ume of a space­ship.

Jerrodd felt up­lifted, as he al­ways did when he thought that his own per­sonal Microvac was many times more com­pli­cated than the an­cient and prim­i­tive Multivac that had first tamed the Sun, and al­most as com­pli­cated as Earth’s Planetary AC (the largest) that had first solved the prob­lem of hy­per­spa­tial travel and had made trips to the stars pos­si­ble.

So many stars, so many plan­ets,” sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. I sup­pose fam­i­lies will be go­ing out to new plan­ets for­ever, the way we are now.”

Not for­ever,” said Jerrodd, with a smile. It will all stop some­day, but not for bil­lions of years. Many bil­lions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must in­crease.”

Entropy, lit­tle sweet, is just a word which means the amount of run­ning-down of the uni­verse. Everything runs down, you know, like your lit­tle walkie-talkie ro­bot, re­mem­ber?”

Can’t you just put in a new power-unit, like with my ro­bot?”

The stars are the power-units, dear. Once they’re gone, there are no more power-units.”

Jerrodette I at once set up a howl. Don’t let them, daddy. Don’t let the stars run down.”

Now look what you’ve done, whis­pered Jerrodine, ex­as­per­ated.

How was I to know it would frighten them?” Jerrodd whis­pered to Jerrodine. It will quiet them down.” (Jerrodette II was be­gin­ning to cry, also.)

Jarrodd shrugged. Now, now, hon­eys. I’ll ask Microvac. Don’t worry, he’ll tell us.”

Jerrodd cupped the strip of thin cel­lu­film and said cheer­fully, See now, the Microvac says it will take care of every­thing when the time comes so don’t worry.”

Jerrodine said, and now chil­dren, it’s time for bed. We’ll be in our new home soon.”

Jerrodd read the words on the cel­lu­film again be­fore de­stroy­ing it: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

He shrugged and looked at the visi­plate. X-23 was just ahead.

VJ-23X of Lameth stared into the black depths of the three-di­men­sional, small-scale map of the Galaxy and said, Are we ridicu­lous, I won­der, in be­ing so con­cerned about the mat­ter?”

MQ-17J of Nicron shook his head. I think not. You know the Galaxy will be filled in five years at the pre­sent rate of ex­pan­sion.”

Both seemed in their early twen­ties, both were tall and per­fectly formed.

Still,” said VJ-23X, I hes­i­tate to sub­mit a pes­simistic re­port to the Galactic Council.”

I would­n’t con­sider any other kind of re­port. Stir them up a bit. We’ve got to stir them up.”

VJ-23X sighed. Space is in­fi­nite. A hun­dred bil­lion Galaxies are there for the tak­ing. More.”

A hun­dred bil­lion is not in­fi­nite and it’s get­ting less in­fi­nite all the time. Consider! Twenty thou­sand years ago, mankind first solved the prob­lem of uti­liz­ing stel­lar en­ergy, and a few cen­turies later, in­ter­stel­lar travel be­came pos­si­ble. It took mankind a mil­lion years to fill one small world and then only fif­teen thou­sand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy. Now the pop­u­la­tion dou­bles every ten years —”

VJ-23X in­ter­rupted. We can thank im­mor­tal­ity for that.”

Very well. Immortality ex­ists and we have to take it into ac­count. I ad­mit it has its seamy side, this im­mor­tal­ity. The Galactic AC has solved many prob­lems for us, but in solv­ing the prob­lems of pre­vent­ing old age and death, it has un­done all its other so­lu­tions.”

Yet you would­n’t want to aban­don life, I sup­pose.”

Not at all,” snapped MQ-17J, soft­en­ing it at once to, Not yet. I’m by no means old enough. How old are you?”

I’m still un­der two hun­dred. —But to get back to my point. Population dou­bles every ten years. Once this Galaxy is filled, we’ll have an­other filled in ten years. Another ten years and we’ll have filled two more. Another decade, four more. In a hun­dred years, we’ll have filled a thou­sand Galaxies. In a thou­sand years, a mil­lion Galaxies. In ten thou­sand years, the en­tire known Universe. Then what?”

VJ-23X said, As a side is­sue, there’s a prob­lem of trans­porta­tion. I won­der how many sun­power units it will take to move Galaxies of in­di­vid­u­als from one Galaxy to the next.”

A very good point. Already, mankind con­sumes two sun­power units per year.”

Most of it’s wasted. After all, our own Galaxy alone pours out a thou­sand sun­power units a year and we only use two of those.”

Granted, but even with a hun­dred per cent ef­fi­ciency, we can only stave off the end. Our en­ergy re­quire­ments are go­ing up in geo­met­ric pro­gres­sion even faster than our pop­u­la­tion. We’ll run out of en­ergy even sooner than we run out of Galaxies. A good point. A very good point.”

We’ll just have to build new stars out of in­ter­stel­lar gas.”

There may be some way to re­verse en­tropy. We ought to ask the Galactic AC.”

VJ-23X was not re­ally se­ri­ous, but MQ-17J pulled out his AC-contact from his pocket and placed it on the table be­fore him.

I’ve half a mind to,” he said. It’s some­thing the hu­man race will have to face some­day.”

He stared somberly at his small AC-contact. It was only two inches cubed and noth­ing in it­self, but it was con­nected through hy­per­space with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind. Hyperspace con­sid­ered, it was an in­te­gral part of the Galactic AC.

MQ-17J paused to won­der if some­day in his im­mor­tal life he would get to see the Galactic AC. It was on a lit­tle world of its own, a spi­der web­bing of force-beams hold­ing the mat­ter within which surges of sub-mesons took the place of the old clumsy mol­e­c­u­lar valves. Yet de­spite its sub-etheric work­ings, the Galactic AC was known to be a full thou­sand feet across.

MQ-17J asked sud­denly of his AC-contact, Can en­tropy ever be re­versed?”

VJ-23X looked star­tled and said at once, Oh, say, I did­n’t re­ally mean to have you ask that.”

We both know en­tropy can’t be re­versed. You can’t turn smoke and ash back into a tree.”

Do you have trees on your world?” asked MQ-17J.

The sound of the Galactic AC star­tled them into si­lence. Its voice came thin and beau­ti­ful out of the small AC-contact on the desk. It said: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

The two men there­upon re­turned to the ques­tion of the re­port they were to make to the Galactic Council.

Zee Prime’s mind spanned the new Galaxy with a faint in­ter­est in the count­less twists of stars that pow­dered it. He had never seen this one be­fore. Would he ever see them all? So many of them, each with its load of hu­man­ity — but a load that was al­most a dead weight. More and more, the real essence of men was to be found out here, in space.

Minds, not bod­ies! The im­mor­tal bod­ies re­mained back on the plan­ets, in sus­pen­sion over the eons. Sometimes they roused for ma­te­r­ial ac­tiv­ity but that was grow­ing rarer. Few new in­di­vid­u­als were com­ing into ex­is­tence to join the in­cred­i­bly mighty throng, but what mat­ter? There was lit­tle room in the Universe for new in­di­vid­u­als.

Zee Prime was roused out of his reverie upon com­ing across the wispy ten­drils of an­other mind.

I am Dee Sub Wun. Your Galaxy?”

We call it only the Galaxy. And you?”

We call ours the same. All men call their Galaxy their Galaxy and noth­ing more. Why not?”

True. Since all Galaxies are the same.”

Not all Galaxies. On one par­tic­u­lar Galaxy the race of man must have orig­i­nated. That makes it dif­fer­ent.”

...

Read the original on hex.ooo »

10 205 shares, 11 trendiness

GainSec/AutoProber: Hardware hacker’s flying probe automation stack for agent-driven target discovery, microscope mapping, safety-monitored CNC motion, probe review, and controlled pin probing.

AutoProber is the hard­ware hack­er’s fly­ing probe au­toma­tion stack for giv­ing your agent every­thing it needs to go from there’s a new tar­get on the plate” to prob­ing in­di­vid­ual pins in a safe way.

Tell the agent to in­gest the pro­ject.

Tell the agent to con­firm that all parts are func­tion­ing.

Have it run hom­ing and then cal­i­bra­tion.

Tell the agent that there is a new tar­get on the plate.

It will find where the tar­get is on the plate, then take in­di­vid­ual frames,

keep­ing a record of the XYZ while not­ing pads, pins, chips, and other

in­ter­est­ing fea­tures.

It will stitch the frames to­gether and an­no­tate the map, in­clud­ing pins and

in­ter­est­ing com­po­nents it iden­ti­fied.

It will add probe tar­gets to the web dash­board for you to ap­prove or deny.

It will probe the ap­proved tar­gets and re­port back.

All hard­ware can be con­trolled through the web dash­board, Python scripts, or by the agent it­self.

This repo is a self-con­tained source-avail­able re­lease can­di­date. It con­tains the Python con­trol code, dash­board, CAD files, and doc­u­men­ta­tion needed to cre­ate your own AutoProber.

This pro­ject can move phys­i­cal hard­ware. Treat it as a ma­chine-con­trol sys­tem, not a nor­mal web app.

* GRBL Pn:P is ig­nored. The CNC probe pin is not a trusted end­stop.

* The in­de­pen­dent safety end­stop is read from os­cil­lo­scope Channel 4.

* Channel 4 must be con­tin­u­ously mon­i­tored dur­ing any mo­tion.

* The agent/​op­er­a­tor must stop and re­port. Recovery mo­tion is not au­to­matic.

* Optical end­stop wired to an ex­ter­nal 5V sup­ply and os­cil­lo­scope Channel 4

Default run­time as­sump­tions are doc­u­mented in the de­vice docs. Replace them with your own lab set­tings be­fore use.

These are the spe­cific parts or part classes used for the pro­to­type re­lease. Verify cur­rent list­ings, di­men­sions, volt­age, and con­nec­tor com­pat­i­bil­ity be­fore buy­ing.

uv sync

PYTHONPATH=. python3 apps/​dash­board.py

Start from con­fig/​au­to­prober.ex­am­ple.env. Do not pub­lish lab-spe­cific IPs, host­names, cre­den­tials, cal­i­bra­tion files, or cap­tured tar­get im­ages un­less you in­tend to re­lease them.

Do not com­mit lo­cal en­vi­ron­ment files that con­tain lab-spe­cific hosts, paths, or tar­get data.

Home and cal­i­brate only when the phys­i­cal setup is ready.

Execute any probe mo­tion only af­ter mi­cro­scope-to-probe off­set is mea­sured

and stored.

This pro­ject is source-avail­able un­der the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0.

You may use, mod­ify, and share this pro­ject for non­com­mer­cial pur­poses.

* The mi­cro­scope-to-pogo XY off­set must be mea­sured be­fore real prob­ing.

* Calibration must not be fab­ri­cated; the run­time cal­i­bra­tion file should be

gen­er­ated on the ma­chine that will move.

* The dash­board is a lab-con­trol tool and should not be ex­posed to un­trusted

net­works.

This pro­ject is in­tended for con­trolled lab work on equip­ment and tar­gets you are au­tho­rized to test. Do not use it to probe, dam­age, or an­a­lyze sys­tems with­out per­mis­sion.

...

Read the original on github.com »

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