If you come at the king, you better not miss

He really wants the last week of the campaign to center on an argument about whether Amy Acton was lying when she accused her stepdad of sexually assaulting her at age 12. Incredible. (Yes, that isn't literally what the ad accused her of lying about but come on.)

How do you get access to the best robot models? For a while, the answer has been you don't.

Or maybe you partner with the companies making the models. Or make one yourself

That might be changing soon. Several companies recently announced APIs:

understandingrobots.org/p/why-the-emer…

I really think something like the IFP plan for equipping critical infrastructure to be ready for AI should be implemented urgently ifp.org/operation-patc…

It's nonsensical to blame ranked-choice voting here. The problem would be worse for Republicans without it. politico.com/news/2026/10/2…

Honestly it's not that surprising that the party that nominated the "grab 'em by the pussy" guy for president three times would nominate a candidate for Ohio governor who handles sexual assault allegations in a shameless and tone-deaf way.

The big surprise of the 2022–26 era for AI security policy is how cyber damages to the public don't seem to have increased much due to AI. In fact, they've stayed on-trend with the industrialization-of-cybercrime growth rates we've observed since around 2015, with perhaps a small seful to think about the position of cybercriminals to develop an intuition for this:
* Imagine you're trying to build a cybercrime business and you want to take advantage of AI automation.
* How do you find and retain talented engineers who can build and operate the software/infra stack you'll need, given that they'll often have non-criminal alternatives with today's AI labor demand (even in middle-income countries where this demand also exists)?
* Where are you going to rent space for your workforce to work?
* Who are you going to hire who's willing to live there and live a life of crime?
* If you're running your business remotely, how will you ensure honor among thieves and manage hiring and firing?
* What's your strategy for evading law enforcement and bribing your way out of trouble?
* How can you access AI inference in a stable way that allows you to innovate your work processes and tech stack?
* Given all this, how will your quarterly automation goals compare to those of, say, a regional call center business in the American Midwest?
There's a lot of nuance here (e.g., state and state-sponsored cyber attackers are a very different group; capabilities can get built up there and then unleashed discontinuously, and this needs to be considered).
But overall, the demographic picture of cyber attackers means that folks should stop thinking of cyber attackers as a bunch of implicit MIT grads anxious to absorb the latest in automation to scale their businesses...
(Below are some related charts on the demographics of cyberattackers from a blog post I'm working on.)

This is really fun.

"Profound to some but boring to most" is exactly the topic of my latest piece at Understanding AI

I call this "personal media," which has a very small audience -- sometimes just one person!

understandingai.org/p/ai-is-usheri…

"It may be AI slop, but it's my AI slop." understandingai.org/p/ai-is-usheri…

In my defense, I didn't actually make this claim in the article. And @physical_int has a track record of being more open than its direct competitors

But I was still surprised to see the news. I'll be curious to learn more about how the API works

I was wrong recently.

When I was working on a recent article about the challenges of robotics evaluation, I thought we wouldn't see any top robot models offered through API: understandingrobots.org/p/why-testing-…

Then @physical_int went and released a beta last week: pi.website/blog/api-beta

A lot of hostility toward creative use of AI is based on the premise that we'll eventually reach the point where the AI is doing the thing rather than you doing the thing with the AI as a tool. I think this is wrong — if it's your idea, it's your creation.

Of course some people want to do the whole process themselves, and that's great! Lots of people enjoy being painters. But taking photographs is also an creative human activity. It doesn't matter that in a mechanical sense the image is created by the camera.

Last year @NatPurser asked me who my favorite tech writers were. The first name I mentioned was @benjedwards. So I'm thrilled I talked him into writing for me. Check out his new piece on AI and the age of personal media. understandingai.org/p/ai-is-usheri…

(The other names I mentioned to Nat were @SciGuySpace, @kevinroose, and @kashhill )

China is ahead of the US in industrial robot deployments. Does that mean China going to beat the US in robotics? If so, what should the US do about it?

I went to @scsp_ai's robotics summit on Wednesday to find out more. Here's what I learned:
understandingrobots.org/p/washington-i…

To be specific, the pattern of the last 4 years has been lab insiders correctly predicting rapid capabilities growth while overestimating the likely real-world consequences. I expect a continuation of both trends in 2027.

I used to employ a nanny and now employ @chi_t_williams. This has broken DC's tax system (household employers are considered separate from regular businesses) and I'm therefore unable to register to pay unemployment taxes. I've been on the phone for days trying to fix it.

Disappointingly ignorant article from the Atlantic. There are rare times like 2009 when a lack of demand hurts the economy. But in general too much spending can cause as many problems (i.e. inflation) as too little. There's no general problem from people saving too much.