The Jevons Audit Dividend, Spring AI in Seat 3A, and the Pelican-Astronaut-Horse - Related to your interests, Tuesday Afternoon

Also: AGENTS.md as model upgrade, Europe-as-vassal, and a Slack chatbot nobody bothers to verify

AI-generated absurdist scene: a brown horse rears over a panicked astronaut who rides a pelican mounted on a bicycle. A yellow road sign reads 'WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.' Debris - a slice of pizza, a can, a cowboy hat - flies through the air. A police car pursues in the background.
From: WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS
  • What We Learned Testing Frontier AI Security Models Against Our Own Code - “What we learned is that the useful mental paradigm for this technology is not to treat it like a vulnerability ‘scanner.’ The models are non-deterministic; they do not work like static analyzers. They work like a security engineer you direct and support - or like a threat actor, if you are on the receiving end. Skilled human researchers who hunt zero-days use a range of tools, reason carefully about their target, and iterate on hypotheses. The models should be given the same working environment.”
  • Alexandros Pappas on LinkedIn - Lufthansa using Spring AI.
  • The Jevons Paradox and Insatiable Humans: Why AI Won’t Empty the Finance Suite by Eldar Maksymov - 🤖: “Maksymov’s prescriptive close is the part most worth memorizing. Students: stop competing with machines at machine work - build judgment, communication and the ability to ask questions nobody has asked. Firm leaders: stop using AI exclusively as a headcount-reduction tool, because that captures displacement and forfeits the Jevons dividend; the firms that thrive will be the ones that ask ‘what could we audit, analyze or assure that we have never been able to afford before?’ In the spreadsheet era the winners were not the firms that fired their accountants - they were the ones that hired financial analysts.”
  • A good AGENTS.md is a model upgrade. A bad one is worse than no docs at all.
  • ‘How Europe Regulated Itself Into American Vassalage’ - “Yet it is worth considering, nevertheless, that too much regulatory oversight has hampered Europe’s ability to compete with the United States. This is a possibility. I find it telling, however, that Pignal cannot cite a specific example of this.”
Stylized illustration of a darkened street at dusk: utility poles and power lines crisscross a teal-green sky with an orange sun setting behind a dark hillside. A glowing Chevron sign and scattered storefront lights dot a curving wet road, with a red-tipped traffic cone in the foreground.
From: How I Make Work Lately - by Justin Parpan

Wastebook

  • “[T]he story of a boy from Yorkshire who overcame…”
  • “I pulled over even though I didn’t need to.” So smoooove.
  • “I know people joke about everyone in Ireland knowing everyone else, but I just got off the plane in Cork and the customs officer is my cousin.” Here.
  • “A team lead adds an AI chatbot to a Slack channel. Anyone can tag the bot to answer questions about the company’s products. Coworkers tag the chatbot many times a day. You never see someone check that the bot’s responses are correct.” Existential crisis a la AI.
Screenshot of a blank Microsoft Word document. A small black-and-white figure of a climber rappels down the page from the top toolbar, suspended on a thin rope - illustrating breaking out of the Word UI.
From: Separate Writing and Formatting - iA

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