Absolute morons

a solid 25% of generative ai responses are "how would tom waits answer this question"

Worth noting, I guess, that inside of a year we've gone from administration officials taking selfies of themselves at CECOT and bragging about how it's hell on earth to now getting their horrible little media worms to kill stories about it

please let “bugs bunnying” become the slang for manipulating an LLM into ignoring its guardrails, i have never seen a more succinct and evocative term for it

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

When a CISA security official asked for documentation of Noem appointee's need-to-know basis, the standard for controlled access programs, the official was suspended. Noem's flunkie insisted again, officials asked him to take a polygraph. He failed it. Then the those officials were also suspended.

the thing about research is that you find out stuff you didn't know before, and didn't think before. by going out to really find out what's happening. this is the opposite of that. you invent some fictional characters and get them to tell you whatever you wanted them to say.

THE SOLSTICE OCCURRED @ 20251221 10:03 AM UR ASTRONOMICAL WINTER HAS JUST BEGUN THO UR METEOROLOGICAL WINTER BEGAN 12/1 BUT UR DAYS WILL NOW BEGIN 2 GET LONGER CONGRATS U MADE IT

No, we actually do have a choice and many of us actually choose not to use it. It’s incredibly easy not to. I’m sorry that this is so confusing to you but some people do have principles and don’t just give them up because the tech bros are yelling loudly.

Ah yes, that proud strain of Brooklynites who refer to Manhattan as “the city” as if Brooklyn wasn’t a giant part of NYC.

Not now, enormous 68-million- year-old egg nicknamed 'The Thing'.

“The ornamentation will continue until morale improves.”

Not a bad way to spend the afternoon

Bad day to be a Waymo (and even worse to be inside or stuck behind one). A widespread blackout left robotaxis stalled across the city, causing traffic chaos Saturday night. Read more: sfstandard.com/2025/12/20/w...

Woof

As everyone knows who has ever written a book or manuscript review, summarizing a text is essential work. It’s the first step of an analysis. If you haven’t summarized the text there is no way I believe that you have understood it.

Oh wow this is a new low, arguably more insidious and damaging to the integrity of human knowledge than creating fake sources (which at least can be exposed). Reading & judging the quality of the cited support for your claims is the difference between trustworthy research and cherry-picked bullshit

It is not "attribution and sourcing" to generate post-hoc citations that have not been read and did not inform the student's writing. Those should be regarded as fraudulent: artifacts testifying to human actions and thought that did not occur. www.theverge.com/news/760508/...

You bolt awake in the seminary at Wittenberg. You are not online. It is 1517 AD. You are the monk Martin Luther, and you have changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must prevail.

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

White men are 30% of the US and if they look around the room and see it’s less than 90% white men they think it’s affirmative action.

One more story for the road in 2025: An LMPD internal investigation sparked by our discovery of an officer's apparently immigration-related searches of license plate reader data has widened to include three more employees.

(From today's HHS release, in which the phrase "sex-rejecting" is repeatedly used in place of "gender-affirming.")

“Illegal marketing of these products for children is alarming, and the FDA will take further enforcement action such as import alerts, seizures, and injunctions if it continues,” said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H.

The FDA is calling chest binders "Class 1 medical devices" and has sent 12 binder manufacturers letters threatening seizure of their products if marketed for relief of gender dysphoria.

Of all the sins of AI, this is an unexpected and deeply annoying one

Deciding when to recess the House to "district work periods" isn't some inherent or longstanding power of the Speaker. It was only added to the rules for the first time in this Congress. Otherwise this would have required the full House to vote on it, which could have been defeated.

Well shit

Primary them all and block anybody who comes with the “at this crucial juncture the most important thing is that we win.” if they believed that they wouldn’t do this and with friends like them nobody needs enemies

Virginia Heffernan wrote this shortly after the 2016 election and it still holds true

“On behalf of Director Park Chan-wook's new film, we are cordially inviting all Fortune 500 CEOs to a special screening of NO OTHER CHOICE. This is truly a film that speaks to our gracious executive leaders and the culture they have cultivated.” Beast mode shit.

i believe people when they say linux has gotten better in the last few years. what i'm skeptical of is that linux Guys have improved. i will not use an OS where i'm at high risk of someone calling me stupid for not liking some aspect of the experience. i must be allowed to hate the computer

I don’t think we as a society have thanked @papapishu.bsky.social for obtaining, ripping, and uploading a master copy of the essential Ricky Jay And His 52 Assistants, Jay’s 1997 HBO special and the best distillation of his one of a kind talent archive.org/details/rick...

Two mirrors mirroring each other. Endless Circles of Hell.

Brutal but effective public health messaging from New York Public Health. The CDC is compromised. They’re no longer a reliable source of information. They push anti-vaxx & anti-science grift. Get your vaccines. Wear a respirator. Clean the air Get public health advice from experts, not RFK Jr

the weird two-year stretch in which i was older than every nfl quarterback is finally over. hopefully that will never happen again

Christ almighty, what now.

these guys are very obviously a bunch of white nationalists and it is getting kind of old to watch them talk around it as if we don’t already know the deal

This goes without saying, but a properly documented immigrant and a U.S. citizen each have exactly the same right to be working a construction site as the other. The violation of that principle is an abandonment of the idea of America itself.

“In court Monday, an officer testified that police have been called to the apartment roughly two dozen times in the last year and a half. Prosecutors also detailed a long relationship between Saxon and the victim that began when she was 18 years old and he was in his 40s.”

1/ Yesterday’s Q2-Q3 Adversarial Threat Report by Meta was interesting in many ways. For us @citizenlab.ca, it was a blast from the past. For the first time, Meta’s investigators attributed what in 2019 we had named Endless Mayfly - a relentless, sophisticated influence op targeting Iran’s enemies.

must… resist urge… to correct the menswear guy… on the difference between a punt and a field goal… before he finds old pictures of me and sends my fashion sense to the shadow realm…

The Right: preferred pronouns? I don’t have to respect that bullshit, I’m free to act as I like Also the Right: I demand you conform to my elaborate rituals designed to guard against me fucking you

A vital point here, first driven home to me by Cory Doctorow in the context of copyright policy, is that many forms of tech regulation that strike lots of folks as appealing and commonsensical would in practice require a fairly massive surveillance apparatus to meaningfully enforce.

Surely this is the “jump the shark” moment for AI in journalism. Right? Right??

"You shouldn't make art for the money" buddy I'll take it one step further and say we shouldn't have to labor for capital at all but in the meantime pay an artist

Indianapolis Star, November 22, 1918