The Sora AI thing is proof of something very important: The technology itself is useless without the ability to use the likenesses of real, living, unpredictable people, and the art they create. And the only way to get those likenesses or that art is to summarily steal it.

It gets even crazier

It’s likely that our brains have melted beyond hope of recovery.

This isn’t at all surprising, given that it’s essentially been publicly reported that Stephen Miller ordered ICE to arrest first and ask questions later, but it’s still worth noting. www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat... They are not even pretending that they know anything about someone before arrest.

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

This is what happens when you order delivery in DC right now.

Here's what the third day of elementary school looked like in Mount Pleasant, Washington DC.

🧵Here's a question I've been thinking about. I remember, starting in the 90s/early 2000s, when it seemed like we were in a tech golden age. We got mp3 players & digital cameras & cell phones, & then all of them combined! Order stuff online; reserve seats a movie theaters; bittorrent; Uber; etc.

"We've spent a lot of money on the military and now they have nothing to do so we might as well let the president use it domestically to satisfy his own petty grudges" is precisely why the Founders feared a standing army. I mean, it's pretty much fucking verbatim.

I am struck that LLMs keep pushing for things they are hot garbage at - high-quality writing text, diagrams, research with extremely low error tolerance, classroom use. But I know folks that use LLMs to help generate material (maps, monsters, character art) for their RPG campaigns and does that OK.

People will forget how to swallow and ingest food without asking a computer or a billionaire by 2032.

Me, a visionary: Computer, who should I vote for? MechaHitler: I’m glad you asked…

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

Mel Gibson should call his "Passion of the Christ" sequel "I Know What You Did Last Supper"

A Superman worthy of the name. For the first time in a long time, I saw the character that inspired me as a child (and prompted me to mimic that distinctive curl every time I combed my hair in the morning). A character that shaped my sense of the world and my place in it. 1/

I’m very late to the party, but I finally got into “Dr Who.” Watching it has been such a joy! The self-described “maintenance man of the universe,” the Doctor zooms through space (and time) to right wrongs and help where he can. 1/

It feels like the foreign policy story of our time is one group after another finding out why the fellows who fought WWII and muddled through the Cold War set up the system they did. A lot of "I don't like that column there" "Yeah, but that's load-bearing. They're all load-bearing."

One of my strongest beliefs is if they actually put this on Broadway it would absolutely destroy at the award shows and run for 20 years

Today’s feast is a throwback to a time before the influencer economy—a time when the Church grew with the preaching of apostles, the example of saints, and the offering of martyrs. Lord, help and deliver us! Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us!

One of my summer jobs in high school was with the NY City Council. I vividly remember going from subway car to subway car, thermometer in hand, taking the temperature in old Redbirds. It was routinely over 100 degrees in those old trains!

That sentence is so insane

Pretty amazing that a former president will sit quietly as one of his successors orders US troops into American cities and ships innocent people off to concentration camps—but feels compelled to speak up when a fellow HR nightmare is at risk of losing to another member of the same party.

Tariffs. Stock market down. Medicaid slashed Secret police throwing anyone who looks Latino in unmarked vans. National guard and marines deployed in LA. No end to the wars in Gaza or Ukraine Bombing Iran This is the worst first six months of any presidential term in my lifetime.

Shouldn’t the NY Times headline note that this new policy breaks the law?

I still can't get past the idea that people in America are now supposed to accept that this is a valid form of law enforcement and just assume it's fine when random dudes in groups with face-coverings, no ID, no warrant, & no uniform grab people off the street and force them into unmarked vehicles

Spray paint a Tesla: domestic terrorism Targeted political assassination spree: not terrorism

Any person in uniform wearing a mask and refusing to be properly and reliably identified should be assumed to be the same kind of murderer we’ve seen in Minnesota.

Every flashbang could instead be a meal for a poor kid. Every hotel room for a National Guardsman deployed to fire at our neighbors could house a homeless vet. Every "less-than-lethal" bullet pulled from a journalist's eye could be already needed healthcare for anyone else. All of this is a choice.

a woman just trying to get home gets shot

this is like drake and kendrick lamar but they're both drake

Love all the technology making our lives better

I think in part the higher education funding crisis and the LLM-teaching crisis actually strike at the same problem, which is that education doesn't work without a broad, society-wide sense that the *actual content* of education - not the credential - is valuable.

It’s especially galling that AG Pam Bondi personally wrote the memo approving the gift of the Qatari airplane. Her last job was as a lobbyist for Qatar! efile.fara.gov/docs/6415-Ex...

But your kids can’t have more than two dolls

It's 2015. President Barack Obama has accepted a "sky palace" jumbo jet from the Qatari government, which he'll own after he leaves office. "Everybody relax," he says in an interview with the New York Times. Everyone does. The networks then televise the military parade in his honor on his birthday.

Immigrants need to know something about the American constitutional system of government if they want to naturalize. Why don't members of Congress?

It’s wild that we just let the moment pass but one of the big things that RFK Jr did to make America healthy again was to tell you to eat French fries from a fast food place

Not to be too pro technocrat, but it is astounding how much this country depended on the selflessness of like a few hundred thousand highly educated public servants who, for peanuts, made sure our food and medicine and environment etc were safe. And in return these servants were demonized.

Maybe it will help a _little_ if I and others like me start saying publicly for the record that we just don’t use ChatGPT. Writing can be really hard — organizing a piece of writing can be especially hard — but I don’t use ChatGPT. If you read my stuff you’re reading something an LLM can’t do.

i think the biggest public relations coup AI boosters scored was calling it “AI.” people genuinely think it is an intelligence, and that when they query it, it is providing reasoned answers

A bit much for the pro-Covid party to demand shared sacrifice. But also, sacrifice for *what?* What’s the payoff? They’re asking you to endure several years of pain for a future in which you and your kids can expect to work 40 years on an assembly line. That’s literally what they’re promising.

🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read. He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

EEOC agrees to drop pending enforcement letters against law firms that pledged major dollars to Trump "pro bono" fund. We now live in a country where making a payment to the ruler's slush fund lets you buy your way out of regulatory difficulty.