me (trying to sound normal): ah, i just help look for lost cats sometimes 🥰 also me (holding a $1000 thermal hunting scope irresponsibly bought specifically to find cats):

I mean privacy aside (and this is /me/ saying "privacy aside" y'all), this sounds like literally the worst coffee meeting in the history of coffee meetings. I don't know any of these people and I know everything I need to know about them from this paragraph and I am already miserable by proxy.

I feel like every single day I need to post a reminder: if you ask an LLM about itself it DOES NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS INNER WORKINGS and WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT ITSELF. It just (as it always does) will make up some plausible sounding answer.

I don't think there's much use in asking users of a social network to behave differently — platforms are too big for norms like that, people mostly aren't posting to debate — but similar charges of meanness/insularity accompanied Twitter's rise, and arguably described a reason people *liked* it!

Not true. I see you're a luxury watch dealer. I'm also interested in watches. Let me show you how free and easy migration has allowed you to earn a living. 🧵

great point from @maxread.info regarding "regarding white genocide," and one that relates to the weird ChatGPT sycophancy thing from the other week: crude interventions like this break the AI illusion maxread.substack.com/p/regarding-...

*crab-walked

The Problem With Young Men is that they don't have 24/7 wake island bf1942 64 player servers where they can healthily engage with peers and mentors

who told him about k-dramas

When you buy groceries, who benefits more, you or the supermarket? It's... sort of a weird question, isn't it?

the worst part of being DOGE’d is needing to explain the entire meme history to your parents when they ask why the hell you were laid off

There is some good news. Like Mr. Rogers says, look to the helpers, such as @teslatakedown.com. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The use of Mozilla's "do not track" feature was apparently, instead, *Able To Be Used As A Metric By Which To Track People*. Y'know, eventually my brain is just going to flash boil and shoot out my ears as steam like I'm a cartoon.

There is another batch of bad abortion-related opsec advice going around, so I'm just going to link to Digital Defense Fund's guide to abortion privacy, which is realistic, practical, and explicit in its threat models: digitaldefensefund.org/ddf-guides/a...

This is some great forensics work

I think about this a lot www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-jonath...

reposting from the other site: am i insane, or did google get a ton of flack for doing p much exactly this in like 2017 www.adexchanger.com/ai/yahoos-ne...

reposting from the other site: am i insane, or did google get a ton of flack for doing p much exactly this in like 2017

The best thing about America is all the freedom. You can also have the opportunity to get health care if you just file a lawsuit and a judge hears your case and decides in your favor.

a loophole is a small hole in a wall you can shoot arrows through. a gaping loophole would be counterproductive for the purposes of having a loophole.

Five years ago today, Jews were murdered at a Pittsburgh synagogue just a few days after an avid Trump supporter was caught sending pipe bombs to the array of political figures who topped Trump’s oft repeated list of “enemies of the people.”

[patrick voice] who are you people????????

Note that it's Franzen, George RR Martin, and <authors> taking legal action against LLMs training on their work. It's not publishers. Publishers are staying silent and biding their time. Authors and publishers' interests are NOT aligned on generative AI, just as actors and studios aren't.

notice how all the AI is designed to replicate creative talents instead of the menial tasks of the people who get rich by exploiting them

:/

are they…… yknow

Agree with this great @polgreen.bsky.social piece. I love walking -- my favorite part of the day is after dropoff, when I walk the 15 minutes, alone, back to my house -- but I so dislike walking with others. I like to let my mind wander. Also, GREAT kicker. www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/o...

The fight isn't over, but ouch. In the UK, Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill, which grants government the power to force companies to backdoor e2e encryption.

The Washington Post found more than two dozen websites that bypass doctors and pharmacies completely to sell semaglutide — the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy — directly to consumers, usually with disclaimers that it’s not for human use.

Good morning! We’re headed into Day 3 of US v Google. To start, here’s a wrap up by @davey.bsky.social of banned words at Google that we’ve learned about through the trial:

substack today: we don't optimize for "conflict and piqued emotion" like social media platforms! substack a week ago: check out these posts by the rote contrarians, bad-faith political operatives, and rank bigots we profit off!

Unsuccessfully explaining the Streisand Effect to the richest person on the planet was decidedly one of the weirder moments in my career.

we’re going to keep reporting on this story and would love to hear from you especially if you’re a registered dietitian or someone that works in the food industry: wapo.st/nutrition-infl… you can also email us at [email protected]

Block the nazis and move on instead of incentivizing their content strategy is a norm I hope continues as this site grows.

computer,,,,,,, enhance,,

Don't miss this Keynote Where Are We Going & Why Are We In This Handbasket? By Eva Galperin We'll cover recent developments on many topics including: ⚡ Abortion access ⚡ Trans rights ⚡ Protection of domestic abuse survivors ⚡ Speech rights & safety of sex workers www.SecuringSexuality.com

logging on

why is grimes on here

After assuring staff that no reporters would be replaced by AI, G/O Media laid off its Spanish language reporters and replaced them with AI. Joint statement from the unions:

Folks: your tofu is not deforesting the Amazon. ourworldindata.org/soy 🧪

Don’t want to start this discourse again but Google was borderline unusable in 2009/10. They made massive algorithm changes that transformed the structure of the web (and saved Google). Google is in a fresh crisis now but it’s definitely not the *first* Google crisis.

Today is an excellent day to contact your representatives and let them know you oppose KOSA, a backdoor censorship and deanonymization bill that would destroy privacy online and have a significant disparate impact on marginalized communities.

the littlest homeowner

when I was a kid they used to run out of news sometimes. at the end of the news hour they would be like "well anyway, that's about it. here's a video of a dog that learned to drive a car" or something.

The entire global economy is leveraged on "adtech works" despite the fact that it very much does not.