Again a cyclist has been run over from behind by a Tesla, and killed. This crash report has the usual hallmarks of driverless design defects.
According to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) crash report, at about 1:23 a.m., the bicyclist, identified as Sean Norris, was traveling westbound on Indiantown Road in the center of the outside lane. Around the same time, a Telsa was driving west on Indiantown Road in the outside lane and approaching the rear of the bicycle.
The crash report states that the front of the Tesla struck the rear of the bicycle, ejecting Norris, 38, who landed on top of the car.
To put this in proper context.
1) Elon Musk initially promoted the Tesla driverless concept specifically in response to a cyclist being killed. As early as 2013 he promised he would use AI to prevent cars from crashing into cyclists.
2) Tesla instead has been killing cyclists, including motorcyclists, by running them over from behind.
3) When Uber ran over one pedestrian with a bicycle in 2018, they shut down their entire driverless program. Tesla has continued killing, seemingly with abandon.
Along with digital-detox trends (dumb devices that make humans smart) comes the latest move against lazy negligence: harsh public criticism of ignorance.
Tourists apparently can’t get enough of the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast museum’s quick wit and sharp critiques, as its “performances” are completely sold out.
In spite of the rudeness, or perhaps because of it, the twice-monthly “Grumpy Guide” tour has been a surprise hit, with each one since the launch in May sold out. Anyone looking to book a spot will have to wait until next year.
“I never insult visitors directly, based on their personality or their appearance, but I insult them as a group,” said Carl Brandi, 33, the performance artist who conceived of and performs as the aggressive Langelinck. “My contempt is directed at an inferred ignorance that may not even exist. But I try to make them feel as ignorant as possible.”
The Grumpy Guide phenomenon shows Germans are up for a challenge, even comfortable to be called out on their ignorance – they’re paying to be told they don’t know enough and can do better. Germany is giving a glimpse into a future generation of thinkers, unafraid of learning history, who care about personal integrity.
This is a huge contrast with current American political winds of “know-nothingism”, platformed rejection of expertise for pride in mass ignorance. The recent American regurgitation of nativism rebranded MAGA wouldn’t stand a chance in Germany:
Museumsführer Joseph Langelinck: „Sie haben das Erinnerungsvermögen einer Schmeißfliege!“
Translation: “You have the memory of a fly!”
This is a particularly biting insult, given Germany’s national commitment to science and staying “woke” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and never forgetting its own history.
Ihr Bratzen habt doch keine Ahnung!
Translation: “You brats have no idea!”
Compare and contrast:
A – Germany: People flock to experts telling them they’re ignorant, laugh at it, and dive into learning – remembering the 1930s when anti-intellectuals burned books and murdered experts.
1933 Berlin: National book burnings ordered by Hitler after his “Make anti-Germany Great Again” (MAGA) campaign put him into power
This particular museum “lost” over 1,000 artworks during Nazism—the third worst-affected museum in Germany—and hosted the 1938 “Degenerate Music” exhibition to mock and destroy culture. Its collection was nearly eradicated by ignorance as complicity. Now it’s the venue where Germans pay to be challenged intellectually, to be called ignorant, and to dive into preservation and learning.
B – America: MAGA actively cultivates hostility toward experts, celebrates anti-intellectualism, and campaigns against “fancy education” – forgetting (or worse, admiring) these patterns in history.
Book banning in the US has surged in the past few years, fueled by conservative backlash…”What we’re seeing right now mirrors elements of different historical periods, but this has never all happened at once,” Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America, said. […] PEN America has tracked more than 10,000 public school book bans in the 2023-2024 school year alone.
Societies either learn from or repeat their worst moments.
Germany chose learning, and is enjoying the challenge. The same museum that lost its collection to anti-intellectual rage is now profiting from intellectual rigor. That’s not just irony—it’s proof of concept. Germany chose differently, and it’s working.
America, stuck in repeat, is in the doom spiral of fear-addled book banning and anti-intellectual rage.
Related: ACTS 17 preacher Peter Thiel’s company Palantir tells American kids to skip higher education and lower their aim; offering them a job if they can swallow four weeks of “Western Civilization” shock doctrine.
A drone start-up backed by the US tech billionaire Peter Thiel has conducted two trials with British and German armed forces that were branded a “disaster”, raising questions about its bold public claims and its hopes of winning government contracts.
Attack drones produced by Berlin-based Stark failed to hit a single target during four attempts at two separate exercises this month with the British army in Kenya and the German army near the town of Munster, in Lower Saxony, according to four people familiar with the trials.
If history is any guide, this means the Peter Thiel-backed company with drones that fail every test will become highly valued and maybe even a darling of Wall Street. Perfect example of stock price puffery is this Stark PR piece:
We only build products that solve the critical needs of our military operators. To do this, we constantly seek feedback directly from operators in the field—we use this to steer our product development and ensure continuous improvement. That means our technology is always optimised for performance, robustness and the realities of modern conflict.
As a long-time Silicon Valley insider I know that language well. It says “help us, we have no idea what we are doing, please help, we can’t engineer”. Optimized? These are signals of tech con artists, aiming to be totally amorphous, unreliable and unaccountable.
A simple metaphor is when they have no idea how to make a toaster, they define their success as burning toast that operators have to scrape faster.
Illustration of Peter Thiel’s hot stock buy based on his best toaster engineering
Is there a problem with all their product failure, your toast being burned? That will be billed as the fault of anyone trying to actually eat, since scrape faster is a tactic designed to hide ignorance.
The U.S. Army warned in 2012 that Palantir didn’t work at all—and they were right. Yet look at the wild success that followed failure, proving the actual customer doesn’t matter, experts be damned.
The ACTS 17 “Christian” gospel work of Thiel suggests disinformation is an intentional success strategy: cultivating high-level adherents and billionaire investors regardless of product performance or reality.
It has elements of apartheid, and overt reference to fascism, but really ACTS 17 appears to be about the rapidity of rupture for… Nazism.
Thiel companies succeed despite devastating product failure through cultivating certain high-powered believers. So the real question is who in Britain and Germany is being targeted by Thiel—which military leaders are in scope to be taken in and burned by this new ACTS 17 “Christian” (political extremist) operation?
Ralph Forbes was the official “America First” candidate for President in 1996, seen here campaigning in Christian garb for the American Nazi Party. Peter Thiel heavily promoted racist “America First” into the 2025 White House, while similarly giving “Christian” sermons of ACTS 17 (white nationalism).
Source: My 2016 BSidesLV Ground Truth Keynote “Great Disasters of Machine Learning: Predicting Titanic Events in Our Oceans of Math”A new study shows promise in proving the wrong type of garbage in, means garbage out. Social media is apparently a kind of garbage that lowers intelligence the most.
Wang and his colleagues wanted to see the effects of large language models (LLMs) trained on low-quality data — defined as short, popular social-media posts, or those containing superficial or sensationalist content. They looked at how these data affected model reasoning, retrieval of information from long inputs, the ethics of responses and model personality traits.
The team reports that models given low-quality data skip steps in their reasoning process — or don’t use reasoning at all — resulting in the model providing incorrect information about a topic, or when the authors presented a multiple choice question, the model would pick the wrong answer. In data sets with a mix of junk and high-quality data, the negative effect on reasoning increased as the proportion of junk data increased.
Most notably, the report describes this as an integrity breach that can’t be fixed. The decline is deemed irreversible simply because additional instruction tuning or retraining with high-quality data doesn’t restore lost performance. Degraded models can’t overcome a nearly 20% gap compared to versions that avoid the garbage data.
Are there better methods to reverse the decline, or restore intelligence? A new market for integrity controls has been born, officially now, exactly where I have said we are headed.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
