Speaking of OpenClaw, here’s Scott Shambaugh:

I’m a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s go-to plotting library. At ~130 million downloads each month it’s some of the most widely used software in the world. We, like many other open source projects, are dealing with a surge in low quality contributions enabled by coding agents. This strains maintainers’ abilities to keep up with code reviews, and we have implemented a policy requiring a human in the loop for any new code, who can demonstrate understanding of the changes. [...]

So when AI MJ Rathbun opened a code change request, closing it was routine. Its response was anything but.

It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.

Terminator would have been a lot less fun of a movie if Skynet had stuck to writing petty blog hit pieces.

Sam Altman, last week on Twitter/X:

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that.

I’m sure it will remain as open as the “open” in OpenAI’s own name.

Erin Griffith and Karen Weise, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

More than he did at any other major tech company, Mr. Epstein found success boring into the inner sanctums of Microsoft. Leveraging one connection into the next, he became privy to the company’s dramas, from its chief executive succession to the philanthropy of top executives. After Mr. Epstein left prison in 2009 for soliciting prostitution from a minor, his connections to Microsoft executives aided his attempt to return to society. [...]

[Nathan] Myhrvold, meanwhile, developed a relationship with Mr. Epstein that spanned two decades and led to more Microsoft connections for the financier. The two were friendly enough that in 2003, Mr. Myhrvold, who had left Microsoft but was close to Mr. Gates, contributed to Mr. Epstein’s 50th birthday book.

That’s the same book where Donald Trump’s contribution was a sketch of a naked woman (with his signature serving as pubic hair) and a creepy poem.

“A few years ago somebody at a party asked me, ‘Does Jeffrey Epstein manage your money?’” Mr. Myhrvold wrote in the book. “I replied, ‘No, but he advises me on lifestyle.’”

Mr. Myhrvold included images that he had taken on a trip to Africa and that he said “seemed more appropriate than anything I could put in words,” including photos of lions and zebras mating, and other wildlife in states of arousal.

Nathan Myhrvold always struck me as a weird man. But what a fucking creep.

Significantly, Mr. Myhrvold vouched for Mr. Epstein to Mr. Gates, who was debating meeting the financier for the first time, according to the documents. By December 2010, Mr. Gates had decided to meet Mr. Epstein and wrote to two employees of his private office that “Nathan had agreed with you that I would enjoy meeting with him and that it is a fine thing to do.”

Yeah, maybe not such a fine thing to do.

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge (gift link):

With Spencer’s retirement official, Microsoft is hitting the reset button on Bond’s Xbox strategy instead of embracing it further. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma is now promising “the return of Xbox,” in a clear message to employees that the strategy over the past few years has not been working. “I want to return to the renegade spirit that built Xbox in the first place,” says Sharma.

Xbox employees I’ve been speaking to have been concerned about the Sharma appointment, particularly because of her previous role as an AI executive at Microsoft. There is also concern about her lack of industry experience in entertainment and gaming. Sharma has been clear she’s not a gamer and has spent the weekend responding to people on X and even taking game recommendations.

Some Xbox employees worry she’ll force AI into everything Xbox does, but Sharma was clearly ready for that reaction. “As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop,” said Sharma in her memo. “Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us.”

Spending two years on a marketing strategy that tried to turn “Xbox” into a vaporous brand applied to any sort of gaming — mobile, handheld, PC, and, you know, Xbox consoles — on “every screen” is going to be a hard hole to climb out of. Xbox was behind PlayStation, their archrival, when they started this asinine campaign. Now they’re further behind. Sony’s message for PlayStation is clear and true: you buy a PlayStation to play PlayStation games.

The other concern is that she’s been appointed by Nadella as some kind of executioner of the Xbox console. Her memo doesn’t suggest that, and Microsoft could have easily appointed Matt Booty into that kind of role to push game publishing instead of the Xbox console. I get the impression from sources that Microsoft wants a turnaround and is worried about losing Xbox, as it’s one of its only remaining successful consumer brands.

I hope that’s true. But if Sharma was appointed by Nadella to wind Xbox down and get out of the business (after they package up and sell their $69 billion Activision acquisition to recoup), well, of course her introductory memo didn’t suggest that. Whether her actual mission is to rejuvenate the Xbox platform or to kill it, this week’s memo would read the same way. (Good discussion between me and Ben Thompson on today’s Dithering about this.)

Abby Haddican:

Times New Resistance autocorrects specific words as they are typed. For example, the word ICE autocorrects to the Goon Squad and the word Trump autocorrects to Donald Trump is a felon.

To the untrained eye, Times New Resistance looks just like Times New Roman — the official font of the U.S. State Department. When you install the font, it will appear in your font menus as Times  New Roman, with an extra space between the words Times and New.

Ligatures, man. Will they never cease to surprise?