Friday links for August 28th 2026

The “ridicule” issue

1. Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions

A French PR Firm has built an “institute” intended to feed positive ideas about Israel into large language models. ChatGPT and Perplexity are already citing them. This type of data poisoning is a massive future risk and, because of the way LLMs works, very difficult to fix (which I’m sure the lobbyists love).

2. Bill Gates Announces That He Is the First Person Ever to Be Concerned About the Effects of AI

You’ve probably seen the media frenzy around Bill Gates’ blog post. This is the only article I’ve seen that’s not just more “CEO said something” stenography. The original blog post also makes clear that Gates doesn’t understand how LLMs work. He should ask Clippy to explain.

3. Is this really a good reason to triple datacentre capacity in Europe?

The European Commission’s AI action plan proposes to triple datacentre capacity within the next five to seven years. The source of this number is… a very dumb calculation by a real estate firm that deals in… datacentres.

4. This DIY Datacenter is NUTS - Hetzner Tour (video)

Talking of datacentres: this is an ad, but an interesting one. It’s a tour of Hetzner’s datacentre in Germany. They’re very popular (I host several servers there) and have a unique approach.

5. Husk IRL

Hilarious videos of ridiculous AI interactions. From attempting to replace car horns to counting the number of Rs in strawberry (still two, it seems).

On rotation

This week’s soundtrack is Window Left Open by K. Freund.

Off to practice my weekending,
Colin