The case YouTube settled with Trump, with a payment of more than $24 million, had already been closed for two years.

Yes: call it by its name: Google is paying Trump a $22 million bribe

One estimate holds that Russia gained about 1,548 square kilometers (0.003% of Ukraine's total territory) over the course of this past summer, losing 94,810 personnel during that same period. Even RU propagandists are starting to acknowledge things are unwell. kyivindependent.com/russian-prop...

Who cares if it wrote 11,000 lines of code - why can’t we see this app it supposedly built? Also why have neither of the Anthropic spokespeople actually tried to use it to write software in this way? Is it because it doesn’t work?

40% of state leg races went uncontested in 2024. @runforsomething.net is aggressively recruiting for 2026 - we can't leave a single place up for grabs.

It is now inevitable the AI bubble bursts. Deutsche Bank and Bain both have said that this era cannot last. Every single "vibe coding" or "power of AI" story perpetuates a myth that will savage our markets and hurt retail investors. It's going to be horrible. www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

OpenAI and NVIDIA's deal is a farce, with $90bn gated behind 9GW of data centers that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and take 2.5 years and $32.5bn a gigawatt. OpenAI can't afford to pay Oracle, either, or the rest of their $1 Trillion in bills. www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

SCOOP / UPDATE — Disney saw more than 1.7 million total paid streaming cancelations during the period 9/17-9/23, a Disney source confirms to me. The total includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN.

If you wondered how many of the major newsrooms covering the Pentagon would give in to Pete Hegseth and sign a new agreement if they wanted to maintain access, it looks like the answer is... none. So far. Via @status.news

🎉 Update from me: I've just sent my editor the first draft of my second book, "How to Build a Universe"! ⚛️ ➡️ 🌌 It's probably still about a year from publication, but even just getting this draft together has been a journey. Really looking forward to sharing more with you! #HowToBuildAUniverse 🧪🔭🎢

yeah they're just murdering random people on these boats

Great time to be a fentanyl dealer because all the guys who are supposed to investigate and prosecute you are going after doordash drivers and moms instead

So every time they do the “we need coal” dance, recall: - doesn’t employee many people, destroys health of miners, they don’t care - wind + solar power are more cost effective, more productive, generate more jobs - they just keep trying this because they think you are too stupid to know better

Coal's decline is primarily due to expanded production of natural gas, which is cheaper and cleaner, beating coal on the market. The other main factor in the decline of coal jobs is automation, as the dwindling industry relies more on mountaintop removal. This is cultural nostalgia, not economics.

"I’m reminded of nothing so much as Rupert Murdoch and Fox’s catastrophic purchase of MySpace 20 years ago." prospect.org/power/2025-0...

we need evidence of two things: first, that trump can distinguish fantasy from reality and second, that trump is actually president

Stanford researchers found that AI-generated "workslop" is actually making people less productive, in part because workers have to correct errors or decode the useful information/intent buried in a flood of auto-generated garbage:

The Tiktok sale could do for the general public (it is much more popular than Twitter ever was) what the Twitter acquisition did for elite pundits and journalists, trapping them in a billionaire-controlled alternate reality

I want to believe the obvious hijacking of TikTok by sociopathic technofascists will result in people leaving the platform, but then I see all the journalists still happily using a website owned by an overt white supremacist sociopathic technofascist

The "TikTok was already a china propaganda tool" people don't understand how much worse this platform can and will get under billionaire technofascist control in a country that just butchered all of its privacy and fraud regulators

There is no world in which masked and armed agents of the state running down delivery drivers makes us safer. That our information environment and political leaders have convinced people otherwise is a massive failure.

New: the world of Ruby has gone completely off the rails over the past few weeks. Developers suddenly locked out, corporate pressure, and claims of a "hostile takeover" of one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure for the internet we all rely on everyday www.404media.co/how-ruby-wen...

One of the more meta similarities between 2000 and 2025 is the extent to which the likelihood of a bubble is widely recognized and discussed, even as asset prices climb.

The main reason I am not on X is I know enough about this stuff to know however immune one thinks they are to information ops, propaganda, and algorithmic manipulation it has an impact on the way you see the world. Even when you think you're kicking against it, you're dancing to their tune.

An incredibly important election in a tiny country just went the right way. Moldova has resisted a huge Russian disinformation campaign and will not become a Russian puppet state.

How debt is fueling the next wave of the AI infrastructure boom; an analyst estimates Oracle needs to borrow $25B/year over four years to fund its OpenAI plans (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

VCs say some AI startups, under pressure to show rapid ARR growth, are using questionable accounting practices like counting one-time deals as recurring revenue (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Trump is building a personalist regime where every university must bend the knee or lose funding and every business must bend the knee or face tariffs, H-1B fees, and regulatory blackmail. You can't cover each domain in isolation; they are all the same story.

I used to have to argue with people that the worst impact of misinformation was not really felt through public consumption but through elite consumption but I think it's as clear as it can get now.

Agreed. This ought to be examined immediately.

This is an absolutely extraordinary, revelatory quote. Why is the NBC affiliate in Portland the only place reporting it? www.kgw.com/article/news...

BREAKING NEWS: Oregon sues Trump administration over unlawful federalization of National Guard. Read more.

Gov JB Pritzker on DHS agents going into Chicago: "It’s a show of intimidation, instilling fear in our communities and hurting our businesses. We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert."

“In a new report, management consultants Bain & Company found that despite being ‘one of the first areas to deploy generative AI,’ the ‘savings have been unremarkable’ in programming.”

The Trump Administration's DHS officers appear to be carrying large weapons around downtown Chicago in camouflage and masks. This is not making anybody safer — it’s a show of intimidation, instilling fear in our communities and hurting our businesses.

I mean, are you seriously going to write that “experts disagree” about whether or not there’s a war in Portland? “The president should be removed from office because he is plainly insane.”

“Oh, but it’s just Trump being Trump!” No. This isn’t the campaign trail. He is the president. There’s no more room for “take him seriously but not literally.” Just admit it. “The president should be removed from office because he is plainly insane.” Go ahead. You can say it. Everyone knows.

“The president should be removed from office because he is plainly insane.” I mean, there is no war in Portland. There just isn’t. You can’t & won’t avoid reporting this story. But you’ll still find a way to try to report it in a way that gives him the benefit of the doubt. And that’s wrong.

So the alarming part about this isn't publicizing medbeds, which I doubt Trump personally even knows about. The bad part is he doesn't want — or even need — to adhere to reality anymore. He needs his base ready to go to war for him, maybe literally. He is in the endtimes prophecy business now.

The president of the United States seemingly can no longer discern between fantasy and reality. This is somehow less of a crisis for our legacy news media institutions than the previous president having a stutter and sometimes mixing some names up.

Someday people will start noticing that the most eminent roboticist in the world has an uninterrupted multi-decade record of deep skepticism about almost all uses of robotics and “AI” that has been proven uniformly correct

‘Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors funneling billions into humanoid robot startups: you’re wasting your money.’ techcrunch.com/2025/09/26/f...

If ever there was a time not to normalize Trump’s authoritarian fever dreams, this is it. This should be impeachable. ‘War ravaged’ Portland? He’s insane - & insanely power hungry. The script is set - call an imaginary group a terror group and then send in the troops.

I think we should also ridicule Miller here, not fear him. His fascist cosplay is absurd. He thinks tweeting in a clipped, military-sounding tone will frighten us. Oooo, he said "utilized"! Scary! Meanwhile their efforts to prosecute foes are imploding in buffoonery and Trump is polling in the 30s.

I don't think you need complex political triangulation when the president is shrieking "I am sending in the WAR DEPARTMENT because Portland is AT WAR!" You should just keep saying that he should be removed from office because he is plainly insane

As @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social points out, anyone seeking to buy admission to the United States under this lawless scheme should be on notice.... —>

All of this seems completely lawless—potentially and at least arguably to the point of being impeachable, insofar as it seems to brazenly flouts what Congress has enacted into law—and that should be the headline, lede, and story. Not the policy pros and cons of the EB-1 and EB-2 categories.

Trump is ordering the military to use “full force” against an American city, while the Supreme Court declares him the Sun King and Congress hides under a pile of coats. The checks and balances only work when the institutions aren’t run by utter cowards and the complicit

Anyway, learning another language is good for you because you die a thousand deaths of embarrassment and then you come out more humble and even more aware of your various human failings

As Tomas said, tech companies like Google and Meta could have acknowledged they will have flat growth, started paying out dividends, and maintained a core product people love to keep their cash cow alive forever. Instead their execs are gambling, risking everything they have on speculative bets.