So Amazon reported the issue regarding Fable/Mythos.

Another high ranking German politician plagiarized his PhD. This happens quite a bit in Germany. At this point, if I meet a German politician with a PhD, I will assume that he is a fraud.

We sometimes overestimate juggernauts. When the PlayStation 5 launched, Microsoft aggressively acquired game studios. It appeared Sony might be crushed by the Microsoft juggernaut. Who would be left to make games for the PlayStation? Sony is far smaller than Microsoft and cannot compete on raw financial scale. Microsoft’s gaming acquisitions alone total roughly two-thirds of Sony’s current market capitalization. Yet PlayStation has outsold Xbox this generation by nearly 3x. Now Microsoft appears ready to restructure or exit parts of gaming. Why? Moving capital around looks impressive but does not equal strong execution or business building. I learned this running my consulting business 20 years ago. I faced giants and felt intimidated, until I realized I could outmaneuver them. They were large, costly, and slow. They invested in signaling. It works great with some clients (e.g., governments) but not so well with private businesses.

Anthropic Mythos is too powerful. We are entering the Dune universe. You can have tech, but only sufficiently dumb tech.

Some people tell me that I am talking too much about AI. But my view is that we are not talking *enough* about AI. I don't mean the IPO and data centers. I mean the consequences of this new technology. Here is one example. Governments and large institutions often ask economists to produce reports on the expected effects of a given policy. These reports are relatively expensive because they require gathering all available data, building a model, running it, and reviewing the results. What if you simply asked the question to an AI? In at least one experiment, the AI results were basically indistinguishable from those produced by human economist, except that they were far more consistent. “AI systems can execute the full pipeline of empirical research—from data cleaning to estimation to written interpretation—at a level broadly comparable to human economists in central tendency and far more consistent in dispersion.” What does it mean ? It means that any of us has access, for a few dollars, to what takes a team of economists... Any small business, any small political party, any small lobbying group can get reports about the expected effect of a given policy. A privilege that only the most powerful had only a few years ago, is not widely accessible. And it does not stop at economics.

We need to take the 'AI security research' slop seriously. 1. Stop it already with the 'vulnerability reports.' If you claim to have found a bug, then call it that. No more pretentious language. 2. If you are using AI to find a 'vulnerability' (i.e., a bug) in a library that I maintain, good for you. I encourage you to do it. However, if I have an AI policy stating that you are responsible for the content, then you are expected to understand what is going on. That means you must act as a human-level expert. Yes, it takes time. You need to study the documentation like a human being. Read and understand the code. Tough. That's how it is. Let me be clear: some people are trying to extract free labor from me by having their AI send me messages. This is not acceptable. I promise you, this sort of behaviour will destroy your reputation. Nobody likes AI slavers.

I have been building websites as experiments with Grok Build. Wow. There was a student’s honours project only about 3 years ago. A good student took a whole term to do it, and he had to ask for help. It was nothing extraordinarily difficult, but it required some design work to get it right. I decided to give it to Grok Build. Grok Build then stopped after only about three minutes. « What? Is Grok Build confused? » No. It was done. The data design, the backend, the HTML, the CSS… The site looks great. I’ll publish it in the coming days. For the last few days, I have been switching between Claude and Grok Build… and they are both amazing. It matters to me that we have choices, competition. It will be very tempting, maybe not this year but soon, to just start adding requirements built into the AI tools. Maybe your AI will insist at first that you must build a website that is accessible to the visually impaired. You’ll think ‘oh nice’. And then maybe, why not?, the Canadian government could require the AI to add a backdoor so that it can access your data… why not? There was a time, not long ago, when everyone moved to Facebook. All businesses moved there. People were building their startups on Facebook. Yes, this happened. And then the inevitable happened. Facebook decided to leverage this power, and many people realized, too late, that they were powerless, they had no leverage. You need leverage, you need options.

Back around 2003, I began writing course notes on data warehouses. I've kept them updated ever since and even put some work into the visuals, but they remained PDFs. Fundamentally boring. Meant to be printed in a world where we no longer have printers. This evening I asked my AI to convert them into a website (in French): lemire.me/notesdecours/entre… It took roughly 10 minutes to turn my existing content into a proper site. It's cleaner and more modern than most academic web sites. Such a project would have taken weeks only a few years back.

China is promising to build a massive number of data centers. We all know what is happening: an arms race, not for stockpiling nuclear weapons, but for developing the smartest and fastest AI. You know who is winning by a wide margin right now? The USA. The race is not even close. Europe, Canada, the UK, and Japan are nowhere near what is happening in the USA. The limiting factor is power, electricity. China has been ramping up production and now generates more electricity per capita than Europe. The UK is heading for shortages. Historians will wonder how such advanced countries chose to sideline themselves from the 21st century by rationing energy. The game is not over. A country like Canada could still turn it around. But time is running out. Build!

My favourite web design trick. Put NEW everywhere all the time.

I wanted to share my experience with Grok Build, xAI’s competitor to Claude Code. I should note upfront that I have considerable experience coding with AI, whatever that means in 2026. The Grok Build console interface appeals to me. It has a somewhat more serious appearance than Claude Code and feels less distracting. By default, it launches in full-screen mode, which gives it a cleaner look, though I recognize this is not a critical factor. What about the coding itself? So far, I have tested it on two different toy projects, plus one evolving real-world implementation. The first was a remake of an old game in modern C . The project remains incomplete. As the first one I attempted, Grok Build handled it reasonably well at the start, but it eventually became confused by repeated edits to the same file. This occurred during the early days of Grok Build, so I am unsure how representative those issues were. I have continued working on it since then, and Grok Build has performed well. I later realized that the project was too ambitious for a simple test; building something that resembles a playable game simply takes a considerable amount of time. I have since moved on to a web application that serves as a dashboard for my school’s statistical data. It performed superbly, Grok Build handled it like a champ. I do not believe Claude Code would have done any better. It is going to take me some time making it really good, but Grok Build is doing very well. The terminology is confusing because it seems that Grok Build is also the name of a model that you can access through the xAI API. I have been working with it for an actual production application. I have designed a custom system that allows a professor to edit a course website using AI. I rely on Grok Build to modify the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS based on natural-language queries. The application works great, and I plan to share more details about it in the future. Exciting times.

The keyword in politics these days is ‘sovereign’. What few will admit is that it is effectively the adoption of the American strategy : Make America Great Again. In other words, reindustrialization of key sectors of the economy. The UK used to be a computing champion. Our chip designs (ARM) originated from the UK. Canada had BlackBerry, everyone was using Canadian phones. Like Canada, many countries have progressively slid into financialization. Huge banks and bank-related businesses, surrounded by emptied factories. Part of it was the doing of economists who promoted globalisation. We are going to make our best CPUs in Taiwan, because they have a comparative advantage (whatever that means). Another part is the rise of the managerial class, or our version of the technocracy: the summum of the status game is to make PowerPoint presentations in a nice office. Everyone has 2 or 3 university degrees. And if you don’t have many degrees, what is wrong with you? I think that this is breaking apart for a few reasons. One of them is Trump. And I don’t mean bombastic statements, bad hair color or overly long ties… But rather the realization that globalisation might leave your people economically better off for a time because they have cheap stuff… But it also leaves your people with few skills. You can fund a robotics factory near Montreal, and you’ll find 2000 people with robotics PhDs, but nobody actually knows how to build robots. The analogy is thus: salary is not everything (to the great chagrin of economists). I have left a much better paying job. My previous job meant that I had to sit in an office and do little concrete. I would have had a great and early retirement… but I would never have developed my skills nor would I have built anything. And that’s what we did at the country level. Great total compensation, but a dead-end skill-wise. Another factor, I believe, is the COVID era (2020-2023) and its final outcome: empty offices, closed coffee shops. What happened at work was illegible. Lots of people in offices. Certainly, something important was happening. Entire businesses and government organizations have now migrated partially or entirely to a pajama party of some kind. Netflix in the middle of the workday is no longer a dream, but a reality. Another element is educational misalignment. A country like Canada has the most schooled population in history. You cannot throw a rock without hitting someone with a PhD. Meanwhile, we are not making robots or microchips. You can’t even pay with your phone in the Montreal subway. It is a project for another decade, maybe. We are using a push strategy: push more people with degrees into the economy and you are going to get a fancier economy. Won't work. Finally, the AI breakthrough of 2022 is the final nail in the proverbial coffin. My country (Canada) claimed for decades that we were the AI powerhouse. All these PDFs online can’t lie, can they? Canada basically invited modern AI, didn’t it? We did. On paper. On paper we did a great many things. In practice? Few know how to build anything. In a country like Canada, the population has not yet caught up. They blame the orange man for whatever trouble they see. And the politicians promise to do what they must: shower money to build tech sovereignty. It won’t work. They will try again. It won’t work again. The cycle makes things worse because it sustains a managerial class that is great at politics but terrible at building. Meanwhile, you can’t escape preference falsification. People will use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini. And if Elon produces robots, they’ll want them. Trump will leave office in two years… Canada and the UK will still be flat-lined economically. The USA will still surge ahead. Countries like Canada and the UK will have to realize that it is industry and know-how first. Build stuff and the wealth will follow. Stop the virtue signalling. Stop the credentialism. Build.

« Who is Claude and why is he pushing all these commits all over our codebase ? »

An AI that can build and deploy a static web site from prompts is such a game changer... Lots and lots of people need that. Sadly, I don't know yet how to teach it to my colleagues. I don't understand why it is not made easier. Will I have to code it ? Do I need to create my startup ? I can do it with Claude Code/Cowork and Grok Build. OpenAI's Codex's app ought to be able to do it too. But these tools are overkill. Microsoft has something called Copilot Cowork. I tried to use it but it says that my administrator most allow it. It also says that I can buy it, but following the link triggers an error. Why do they call everything 'copilot'. It is so confusing. Everyone is continuously confused about Microsoft's services. Anyhow. That's one of my goals for this week. I'm working on some internal training video. (I make lots of videos to make my points.)

When models (AI) can generate, review, and cite papers faster than any graduate student, the whole publish-or-perish model becomes obviously absurd. Who is going to read your papers ? AI. Who is going to write the papers ? AI. By defining their purpose as the production of papers, academic researchers have turned scholarship into a self-referential game that no longer needs players. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36736…

It seems unavoidable that the bar will have to be raised in education. For the longest time, it was ok to pass students who could do the basics. Now we have an AI that can do most of the basics. It can write a merge-sort function. It can balance a red-black tree. Not perfectly, mind you, but we never required perfection from students. I don't expect that all students will enjoy the ride in this new world.

Friends !!! We are going to space !!! « The companies are also reportedly in talks to try to build orbital data centers — a major component of SpaceX’s future plans. »