The KHIT Blog: Some random Rip Currents from Jacob Ward

Friday, April 24, 2026

Some random Rip Currents from Jacob Ward

Jacob Ward

"Other Currents"

1. Meta logged its employees’ keystrokes, then announced their layoffs. The Model Capability Initiative — Meta’s new tool for capturing employee keystrokes and mouse clicks, framed as AI training data — was announced this week with no opt-out option. Two days later, 8,000 layoffs. The sequence is the story: document what the workers do, then eliminate them.

2. Palantir published a manifesto. Anthropic went to court. Two companies drew opposite lines in the same week. Palantir’s 22-point public document calls AI weapons inevitable, some cultures “dysfunctional and regressive,” and pluralism a failure. Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins noted the obvious: these aren’t abstract ideas floating in space — they’re the stated ideology of a company that sells targeting software to militaries and immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, Anthropic has been in federal court since March fighting a Pentagon designation that labeled it a national security supply-chain risk — because it refused to remove safeguards against autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. One company announced what it believes. The other is paying lawyers to defend it.

3. The Joint Chiefs said autonomous weapons are coming. Nobody asked whether they work. Yesterday the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs called autonomous weapons a “key and essential part of everything we do.” Anthropic’s actual position — that frontier AI is not reliable enough to kill people without a human in the loop — has not been rebutted. It has been bypassed.

4. 96,000 tech layoffs this year, all attributed to AI. Nobody has to prove it. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, Salesforce, Block — every announcement uses the same language: efficiency, AI investment, right-sizing. No company is required to document whether AI replaced a single role. The NLRB has no jurisdiction over the framing. Nobody does.

5. Amazon’s Ring can now identify your neighbors by face. Familiar Faces rolls out facial recognition to Ring doorbells — identifying family, friends, delivery drivers — processed in Amazon’s cloud, opt-out by default. EFF and Senator Markey are pushing back. Three states have already blocked it. “Optional and disabled by default” is how every ambient surveillance feature starts.

6. OpenAI lost three senior executives in a single day and is projecting $14 billion in losses. The CPO, the head of Sora, and the enterprise CTO all departed the same Friday. Multiple cited the DOD contract and the cultural shift from research to commercial operations. The company generating $25 billion in annual revenue is simultaneously losing the people who built the products and spending $14 billion more than it earns.

7. Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue. The gap matters because of what each company agreed to. Anthropic hit $30 billion in annualized revenue this month, passing OpenAI’s $25 billion. Enterprise customers — not consumers — drove it. Worth noting alongside item 2: Anthropic is the company currently in court over autonomous weapons restrictions. OpenAI signed a DOD contract that removed equivalent restrictions weeks after Anthropic was blacklisted.

8. S&P 500 boards are disclosing AI risk while knowing almost nothing about AI. 83% of S&P 500 companies now list AI as a material risk in disclosures — up from 12% in 2023. Board directors with AI expertise: 2.7%. The people with the legal authority to set limits have mostly opted not to understand the thing they’re supposed to be limiting. This is the governance gap that makes every other story in this section possible.

I added my own random @BobbyGvegas Current:

Another random “current" from a subscriber: The other day, I posted a story to my Facebook page, and was shortly thereafter notified by Facebook that, unless I opted out, henceforth all of my story postings would be given an AI generated “headline." Supposedly to help gain better visibility for my stories. Read “content monetizing assistance." I replied in testy ALL CAPS. (Use your imagination.) Something along the lines of NO.MUTHA.ZUCKING.WAY…

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Friday, April 24, 2026

Some random Rip Currents from Jacob Ward

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