Almost two-thirds of Europeans polled believe that replacing American tech services with European alternatives is a good idea, but those surveyed are divided if that shift is realistic, according to YouGov research shared with Tech Policy Press. Contributing editor Mark Scott details key findings.

The whole thing about Democrats searching for a winning message for the midterms is infuriating because it is staring them in the face: Rule of Law — People who do illegal shit should face consequences. For insider trading. For illegal wars. For ignoring court orders. For being a pedophile.

This is called “strategic defeat.” You have ended up in a worse position than before you began, with your adversary, while battered, emerging in a stronger position than before.

Today, the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee released a new report on foreign disinfo as “the new warfare," with evidence from me & @americansunlight.org cited throughout. It's gratifying to see a government take this threat seriously. committees.parliament.uk/committee/78...

I wrote about why this report is not business as usual in the current political moment open.substack.com/pub/wicziped...

Outright strategic defeat

I mean I just can't even find words. The US defense secretary helping plan a massive, destabilizing surprise war - a war the US has immediately LOST - and then using his insider knowledge to make stock bets so he can personally get rich? Hard to think of worse corruption, anywhere, ever.

In what world is it okay for the Defense Secretary to make multi-million dollar investments in defense companies: a) Ever; b) In the run-up to starting a war in the Middle East FT has the scoop: www.ft.com/content/744e... In a functional democracy, he would offer his resignation tonight.

It’s fascinating that the young folks at CPAC use “J-pilled” to describe “skepticism of Israeli influence.” I guess the J must stand for “Jisrael”!

Bad ads as pollution, I've been interested in that for a long time. Important, if companies have to pay the full costs for crappy ads, they make more money by avoiding them. It's only when the costs are moved to others using monopoly power that bad ads are profitable. 1/2 arxiv.org/abs/1109.6263

Agree with Brian that Dems should be centralizing the need to "comport themselves as people who can be counted on to fight" as the starting point for their approach in the midterms

I've said it before, but this kind of journalism only made sense in an era where it was important to document what powerful people said because people might not be able to find it any other way Now? If you're not fact-checking or contextualizing comments like this, you are just doing free PR

53-16. Strongly Disapprove-Strongly Approve. Stop being weak. Virtually no one loves this guy or what he’s doing and a majority(!) hate him and what he’s doing.

I like this description of pollution as the problem. We're seeing pollution of the internet. That's the core issue, allowing groups to dump crap into the internet and not pay the full costs (the externalities) of doing so. And it suggests solutions, like much larger fines for ads pushing scams.

A big difference is scammy online advertising, which funds all the scams, slop, and clickbait. The newsprint era had strong regulations on advertisers. The internet era has had minimal enforcement of regulations on scammy ads. Ads fund the crap. Huge fines for bad ads would help fix this.

I enjoyed this discussion with @benjaminjriley.bsky.social ⬇️ buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/reflection...

Good read. A teaser: "Some of what they’re saying is, to me, just wrong ... People who are pushing that AI systems are sentient, and that they’re devious and they’re scheming ... all this anthropomorphic language to describe their behavior."

Trump hits new approval low among all adults, rounding to -21 for first time  fiftyplusone.news/polls/approv...

Over at the newsletter I wrote about the unholy scourge that is "CEO said a thing!" journalism:

Martin Wolf describes a “huge market failure” in providing reliable information. But why has the internet made it so much worse? Made-up stories were cheaper in the newsprint era, too. www.ft.com/content/c1af...

Really, I cannot understate how the material impact of the Iran catastrophe has not even been close to fully felt by most Americans yet. Like the Great Recession, it's going to take months to be fully absorbed by the stock market, but with no ballast from DC. As prices spike. Then the layoffs.

wanna hear a scary story?

I don’t actually want Democrats to have “solutions” for anything. I would like them to not be fascists and undo the damage the current administration is inflicting. And then I guess we can talk.

stock markets read to the end of the post challenge meanwhile, if the USA obliterates "electric generating plants", oil & gas facilities, and "desalinization plants", then I expect much of the GCC to suffer extremely severe reprisal attacks soon thereafter.

"More than 1/3 of globally traded fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz... Traffic through the route has largely been halted since the war started..., disrupting shipments just as farmers across the Northern Hemisphere prepare fields for spring planting."

these are genuinely impressive numbers!

I think this interview about our recent position paper (with Georgios Yannakakis and Sam Earle) came out really well. Also, this picture (courtesy of Luiz Chaimowicz) is exactly what my days look like in the NYU Game Innovation Lab. spectrum.ieee.org/amp/ai-video...

"The third No Kings protests were an unmistakable display of political force..." "Two-thirds of participants live in suburban, small town or rural areas, a 40% increase over last time in protesters from outside big cities..." www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

Tuesday was a disastrous day for that future, and the complete and utter failure of both Sora and Disney’s dalliance with AI garbage suggests AI slop is indeed not the future of Hollywood. www.404media.co/disneys-open...

If you think we're going to have C-3PO-like artificial intelligence in the next few decades, you're going to be disappointed. AI is far harder to build than people think; progress always has been much slower than people expect.

“.. US government officials and Wall Street analysts are starting to consider the prospect that oil prices might surge to an unprecedented $200 a barrel.” @bloomberg.com ⛽️ www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Good job everybody.

Strong evidence that LLMs easily will produce explanations showing reasoning of supposedly why they came to an answer that have no connection with the actual explanation: "The trace may be fluent, coherent, and apparently image-based while being anchored to no image at all." 1/3

Oh gosh. Remember the excitement about frontier models understanding medical images and acing tests? "In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images." Fei-Fei Li is an author. arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687

"The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people." www.404media.co/rip-metavers...

Russian intelligence is using "disposable agents" to engage in terrorism in Europe. The agents are usually apolitical and vulnerable, recruited and directly remotely. The goal is to tie up European resources, feed opposition to Ukraine, and create a general unease. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Pope Leo on Palm Sunday: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’ (Is 1:15).”

Pope Leo says God rejects prayers of leaders who wage wars reut.rs/4rZIThC

thoughts on today: 1) the protests are good, actually 2) you should go to one of you can 3) it will do you good to see how many other people also hate this guy 4) you might meet people who you can organize with 5) there are more of us than there are of them 6) we are going to win

New from me: The Senate offered a bipartisan solution to the growing airport crisis. Mike Johnson rejected it, empowering Trump to selectively grab more legislative powers by illegally paying TSA agents. This is an actual constitutional crisis folks. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/mike-johns...

That’s why I talk about them as unwitting, but willing. They want to believe. That’s all that matters.

Operation Epic Finding Out

Three bad auctions this week, deteriorating market depth, dealers turning off autoquotes on Monday www.ft.com/content/2e01...

On Nov 2024, airline execs were giddy about trump winning so that Biden era consumer protections could be reversed, etc. None more so than Delta’s CEO. Now Trump’s reckless war may ruin them, even put some out of business.

At this point since there’s basically no way to achieve our stated strategic goals and it’s questionable how we would even get back to status quo antebellum, like, it’s pretty reasonable to say the US lost (and entirely due to the stellar leadership of president deals & co).

www.ft.com/content/4f09... Genuinely hard to overstate how much of a strategic defeat it would be for the United States if the war ends with effective Iranian control of the Strait.

They started a war of choice for absolutely no reason, with no real strategy and no real preparation, and the end result will be a global situation that is, in every single way, worse than what it was when they started.

It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it. www.404media.co/disneys-open...

I really feel like we are at the dawn of an age in which truth, the simple facts of the matter, will be more valuable than ever and also less accessible than ever.

I think we have underestimated, by a lot, how much conservative business, political, and media folks have bought into the disinformation they spread. I used to think most knew they were lying and were doing so for power and money. Now I worry most have been sampling the drug too much. 1/2