Why is every tech ceo the villain from the Lorax

I love the "could this be a solution" post because it's a perfect example of Founder brain. You have to be a special kind of stupid to imagine that you are the first person to come up with the idea of driving around the Strait of Hormuz. It's being so dumb that you think everyone else is even dumber

GenAI boosters are always like "I used this incredible tool for a thing I have no understanding of and it works great! Okay, so it fucked up something really important, but when you don't count all the problems, it's perfect."

Read another piece this morning about how advanced AI is coming for all our jobs and we should be panicking, and skeptics are foolish to judge AI based on the shitty free versions. But I'm not judging as much on the product as on the hype and the promoters. We've seen so many tech grifts fall apart.

I know people are very sensitive about the use of the word “genocide” but the attempts to medically eliminate trans children is very clearly meets the standard because they are trying to eliminate a population and also they know some of those kids are going to kill themselves

See also bsky.app/profile/will...

Challenge for people who believe Claude *is* conscious and use it anyway: Explain how you’re not a slaver.

Wooowwwww. Cowardly and censorious.

This is like at the end of an action movie when you see the villain (that shot a puppy in the first act) (and sent armed thugs into peaceful cities in the second) get just absolutely brutally demolished in the third act, and the satisfaction is so intense that you're almost embarrassed. Almost.

Guillermo del Toro's Master and Margarita, please and thank you.

How to win in November

never, ever, ever, ever accept "how will you pay for it?" as an argument against social programs.

just to get out ahead of any "what do you mean we" commentary. we produce guys like this in greater numbers than any civilization in history. there is currently no plan whatsoever to stop making guys. we should have a plan. we need to hobble these guys with crippling taxes and restrict their rights

literally your customer base was 90% parents of young children who want a good future for their kids in which they can be free to be themselves, no matter who they are. you told those people to go fuck themselves. they won't be back

Warnings to citizens to evacuate 3 days into this war, when airspace is closed, is a clear sign of ZERO strategy and planning by the Trump admin. Now Americans have limited options to evacuate at an extremely dangerous moment with no government assistance. This admin is failing its citizens.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

I thought going to an authoritarian petrostate where critics of the government are routinely rounded up, detained, and tortured would be so fun, because they have nice hotels and pools. But it turns out it isn't so fun for me, personally, anymore.

I’m also too fried to communicate but what we’re seeing is discovery requests for prompts clients use—which often (although not for us yet thankfully) include privileged information in the prompts

"let them eat liver" incredible, 10/10 no notes

Frankly, I'm super pissed at Congress. You want to know why they are labelling them as domestic terrorists? Because you let the executive branch do w/e the fuck they wanted to "terrorists" for 25 years with virtually no oversight or push back.

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

never bring Diet Fash to the party; the fash will want the full-sugar fash and everyone else will stay home this is one of those lessons that can be repeated over and over without anybody learning it, like Universal Basic Income working and trickle-down economics not working

Every single day I log on here and fight the urge to just post AAAAAAAJHHHGGHJSNNDBBRBDBBDTHE FUCK IS GOING ON WHY IS THE WORLD LIKE THIS NOW HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO GO ABOUT OUR BUSINESS LIKE NORMAL IN THESE CIRCUMSTANCES today I lost the fight. Please clap for the restraint I exercised to date.

They won't start with banning birth control. First they'll lie about it. Then dictate who can prescribe it, use it, fund it, in what forms, and for how long. Suddenly, your doctor won't call you back. I know this is what they'll do because it's what they're doing to transgender healthcare right now.

This is the way to do it

You know studying at degree level is not compulsory right? If you don’t want to study you can just not do higher education. You don’t need a little robot called Einstein to destroy the planet for you not to learn anything.

This is pretty critical. If (as the administration claims) courts must defer to presidential assertions that an “emergency” exists, no matter how obviously false or pretextual, we have effectively rewritten “emergency powers” statutes as permanent, unlimited delegations of legislative authority.

$500 billion a year is enough to guarantee a basic income via a negative income tax with a 50% phaseout rate for all Americans, ending poverty and significantly reducing inequality and insecurity.

it's nothing new, people have sounded this alarm for a long time, but just seeing it all spelled out so plainly in such a short period of time still hits you in the face with it

I cannot emphasize enough that if an unknown adult showed up around the building of the daycare I worked at in college and expressed ANY interest in the children, we would call for campus police.

This is the kind of thing a rich CEO says at the beginning of a science fiction movie to establish for the audience that he is a sociopath and the villain.

Went to a college gymnastics meet yesterday and being reminded of how young 18-22 years olds are really drove home that death is too good for the people in the Epstein files.

The story that Elon Musk committed voter fraud has gotten next to no coverage -- one of those things you can't make come up on a Google search. But I think it's time for Dems to go on offensive abt right wing coddling of this immigrant interfering in our elections. newrepublic.com/post/206857/...

"You can murder a dudes kid for what his dad said with a robot BUT YOU CANT JUST CANCEL STUDENT LOANS," SCOTUS, on article II Authority

im going to give credit where credit is due: through his incredulity at this point, trump has really brought crystalline clarity to the disease at the center of our american system. well put sir

Receiving a response to a two sentence email that demonstrates that the recipient only read the first of the two sentences is a distinctly demoralizing experience.

Trump acknowledges that Democrats would be better off packing the court. YES THEY WOULD. IF DEMS WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO ME ABOIT THIS, I HAVE EXTENSIVE NOTES

"As far as I can tell the proliferation of [AI] technology mainly benefits the people making money off of it, whereas, say, a robust and fast train network would provide a lot more obvious benefits to working people in the country where I live." aftermath.site/anthropic-cl...

Thank God for Virginia Giuffre. She deserves so much credit for her bravery and tenacity. She, along with other survivors who refused to be quiet, made this happen.

while I wish we too had Consequences For Horrifying Crimes over here, Andrew and Trump are like the two most famous, powerful and well-protected men in that whole file and it’s impossible for this not to change the math completely. other men will be afraid today who weren’t yesterday

Just as many people’s kind of half-baked takes on labor come from never having a wage service or retail job, a lot of takes on technology automation are clearly informed by never having an administrative job in their life. Go buy your office manager a coffee and repent.

This Presidents’ Day remember that the President (as with all recent Presidents) is too powerful www.liberalcurrents.com/curtailing-t...

My theory of the moment: The extraordinary courage of ordinary people in places like Minneapolis is reawakening us to our social and economic ties to immigrants. It's making "love thy neighbor" cool again. That's the ultimate antidote to MAGA hate. Thoughts on this: newrepublic.com/article/2059...

I can't trust politicians who are anti-trans. Not because I'm "only searching for perfection" which is what centrists will be accusing me of for the rest of my life, it's because if you're not pro-trans you'll be garbage on lots of other issues too. Being anti-trans NEVER exists in a vacuum.

Sometimes I get a little upset when I live in a collapsing dystopia for many years

It is surprisingly refreshing to see someone explicitly admit that they believe an individual's humanity should be up for debate and it's bad faith to demand otherwise. We don't have a general definition of intelligence or sentience. You can make that argument without dehumanization.

no, it simply isnt. People are talking about capital using gAI as an excuse to conduct mass lay-offs, about students losing learning because theyre being lied to about gAI in education, about the mass theft of the work of artists and authors to train LLMs, about CSAM and nonconsensual sexual images.

Ill be clear about why I am so angry and critical about it: Im seeing a good portion of my students who have imbibed the notion that they dont have to read, think or write for themselves because ChatGPT/CoPilot will do their thinking for them, and its terrifying. It should scare all of us.