The Rundown - November 3, 2025

• Charlie Stross on the upcoming energy transition (The pivot):

“Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that’s going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup ...

I’m calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

It’s pretty clear now that a lot of the unrest we’re seeing—and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition that looks to be more or less irreversible at this point. ”

• Anthony Moser: I Am An AI Hater:

“I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money.”

• Tools to sabotage AI.

• Catastrophic Forgetting in LLMs: A Comparative Analysis Across Language Tasks.

“As we progress toward an agentic world where LLM-based agents autonomously handle specialized tasks, it becomes crucial for these models to adapt to new tasks without forgetting previously learned information - a challenge known as catastrophic forgetting. ”