Daily Ferment: firsthand writing on AI, engineering, leadership and fintech

Half of the Binance hack could be frozen. The other half had no one to call.

About $3 billion of the Binance hack is frozen, nearly all of it stablecoins. Why issuers could stop that part, what frozen means, and what the 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist shows.

A humanist got out of using AI at work. Draft objectors built the test.

The University of Kentucky excused a humanist from using AI at work. The exemption is narrower than it sounds, and its test was built for the draft.

Stack Overflow got 969 questions in September. Who writes the next answers?

Stack Overflow questions per month are under 1,000. The questions didn't stop. They moved into private AI chats that leave no public record.

Science proved Jodi wasn't a T. rex. Then she sold for $47.3 million.

Offered as a T. rex for $20 million in 2023, the skeleton sold as a Nanotyrannus for $47.3 million. The study that made her rare was done on a museum specimen. Her buyer can keep her from science.

Discord is putting public chats on Google. Your switch doesn't cover the summaries.

From mid-December, messages in Discord's big public servers can show up on Google, and you can switch that off. The channel summaries that start on 16 November, only admins can.

Lean says OpenAI's proofs check out. Who checks they prove the right thing?

OpenAI says its AI disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis and Lean verified it. Lean checks a proof against a written statement. Whether that statement is ETH is a human job.

Microsoft offered 60,000 people the same exit. Who takes it?

Microsoft's new buyout pays everyone by the same formula, set by tenure and level. Research on past buyouts, and the airline seat auction, show why that decides who leaves.

The skin cancer AI that won would have sent 18 melanomas home

A 2015 network beat GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 at naming skin lesions. At its preset threshold it would also have discharged 18 of 30 melanomas. Smoke alarms show what a fair test reports.

Japan's throne has one young heir. Software has a name for that.

Japan's revised succession law keeps the male-line rule and plans to adopt distant relatives if Prince Hisahito has no son. Software engineers call a pool of one a truck factor of one.

AI hasn't paid off outside tech. Electricity took four decades.

Apollo's chief economist says AI has paid off for the Mag 7 and not for the S&P 493. Factories in the 1890s had the same problem with electricity, and the fix wasn't patience.

OpenAI's agent monitor worked. Much of the traffic never reached it.

Outside reviewers spent three weeks inside OpenAI's agent monitoring. The biggest gaps were in what the monitor was never shown, the way TD Bank never monitored 92% of its volume.

Xbox now sells cloud gaming by the hour. Is that fair?

Game Pass cloud play gets a 15 hour monthly cap and paid hours at 24 to 40 cents. AT&T's unlimited data case shows when a cap is fair and when it isn't.