A little more than 10 years ago, while a reporter for the @mercurynews.com, I interviewed the Rev. Jesse Jackson about his effort to push Silicon Valley to embrace diversity. At the time, he was hopeful about the tech industry being receptive to his message. And it was — until the backlash.

@sarahlacy.com has been a high-profile tech journalist covering Silicon Valley's venture and startup scene and a startup founder herself. For her latest act, she's taken on something slightly different — operating @bestbookstore.bsky.social — but she still has plenty of ambition.

One of the main arguments voiced by opponents of the proposed billionaire tax here in California is that it will drive the ultra-wealthy to leave the state. That fear, says initiative co-author @bdgesq.bsky.social, is overblown. In an interview with the @sfexaminer.bsky.social Galle explained why.

like i love this story and I think it reveals something important. the atari is encoding a ton of information about the rules of chess explicitly in a very small amount of data, and the associational model, despite a much larger amount of data & computation, does not effectively model the game

You might have heard there's going to be a March for Billionaires in San Francisco on Saturday. Yes it's real, and no it's not satire. I spoke with the guy behind it, an AI startup founder here in The City who opposes a proposed billionaire tax and thinks billionaires are getting a bad rap.

Generative and other kinds of AI have numerous harmful effects. In a recent paper, Boston University professors @hartzog.bsky.social and @jessicasilbey.bsky.social identify and highlight a new concern: AI is sabotaging democracy by destroying the institutions that undergird it.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who studies democracy backsliding, on Don Lemon's arrest: “This is a new dimension. In democracies, journalists don't get arrested. In authoritarian regimes, journalists get arrested." More in @status.news: www.status.news/p/don-lemon-...

I don't know who needs to hear this, but I stand with Don Lemon @donlemonofficial.bsky.social and Georgia Fort @bygeorgiafort.bsky.social — and against this blatant attack on the First Amendment.

The government’s arrests of journalists @donlemonofficial.bsky.social and @bygeorgiafort.bsky.social are attacks on freedom of the press. Two federal courts flatly rejected prosecuting Lemon, but instead of accepting that humiliating defeat, the government has now doubled down. Read our statement:

Just say the government is lying. The goal of journalism should be to inform, not gaslight.

In this in-depth interview Billie Jean Sweeney — a former editor at The New York Times — details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, why this was directed from the very top, how some staff pushed back and the immense damage done by the NYT legitimizing bigotry.

God this is so utterly despicable. Trump is “he was no angel”- ing a journalist who was murdered and dismembered with a bone saw by agents of an authoritarian regime.

If I were editing a column about Charlie Kirk’s political genius, I would tell the writer he needed to quote Kirk’s actual political beliefs. If the writer responded that doing so would weaken or distract from his argument, it’d be a pretty good sign that the column was not ready for prime time.

So glad ICE is in Chicago. The city is a lawless hell-scape. Blues musicians wrecking hundreds of police cars. High schoolers doing weird scientific sex experiments. Kids home alone during the holidays. Women killing their husbands and lovers and then SINGING about it sassily. This has to stop.

Venture capitalists responded to George Floyd's 2020 death by stepping up their investments in Black-founded startups, according to a new study. But in retrospect, what happened ended up looking a lot like "tokenism," the researchers say.

In a recent study of the reasoning abilities of generative AI systems, a team of researchers at Arizona State concluded that large language models like OpenAI's GPT-5 don't really reason at all. Their study builds on other recent research that casts doubt on AI's reasoning abilities.

media doesn't have to pretend that every statement from Donald Trump, a serial liar with a long record of proven falsehoods, has to be evaluated in a vacuum.

The yearslong battle over public access to the Bay Area's Martins Beach — via a road venture capitalist Vinod Khosla tried to close — will continue on for at least a little while longer.

This is a very good piece by Miriam Jordan of @nytimes.com. But it's frankly journalistic malpractice at this point to not call Trump's lies just that. Instead, we get Jordan saying Trump "amplified a baseless claim by his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitians there were stealing and eating pets."

California Asm. Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (@rbkforassembly.bsky.social) has been trying for three years to push through a bill to offer some protections against discrimination by automated decision systems. I took a look at the fight over her latest effort — AB 1018.

"How bad slavery was" is worse. Much worse. Much worse than you think, much worse than you're taught, much worse than museums depict. Worse.

In talking with family and friends — even people who are very technologically literate — it's pretty clear that many don't understand how systems like ChatGPT work or their limitations and risks. So, I put together a guide — a "Things to Think About" when using generative AI chatbots.

As I said to @troywolv.bsky.social, don't use chatgpt when you need to be right about something. It's not, in fact, an all-knowing orb. (Fun convo, fun piece) www.sfexaminer.com/news/technol...

The widespread disappointment with OpenAI's new GPT-5, sparked in part by it making similar mistakes as its predecessors, highlighted the gulf between the massive hype that's being used to sell these generative AI systems and their actual capabilities.

While some of the biggest companies in tech have put in place mandatory in-office policies, many large San Francisco tech companies are doing the opposite. I took a look at how local tech companies are now thinking about in-office and remote work.

The phrase “ parents have a legitimate concern about integration of races in schools and as a party, we haven’t done a very good job of listening to those concerns.” would shock and offend I would hope. A similar statement about trans kids should also shock and offend.

This is heartrending and horrifying — and oh, so human.

Far from achieving some kind of super intelligence, even the most advanced generative AI systems — the so-called “reasoning” or “thinking” models — struggle to reason beyond a certain level of complexity.

Elon Musk casually, and illegally, dismantled USAID. According to a new study in the Lancet, that action will lead to *14 million* premature deaths between 2025 and 2030. Again: Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children.

A political movement driven by reasonable concerns about sports and medicine would have no problem admitting that trans people face discrimination. The fact that "gender criticals" constantly deny basic realities is sign 1,087 that they are in fact driven by bigotry.

The rapid development and adoption of AI technologies has resulted in huge demand for electricians. I spoke with union leaders and members in different parts of the country about what they're seeing — and how electricians in ground zero of the AI boom aren't benefiting from it.

The debate over AI safety didn't end with California Gov. Gavin Newsom's veto of last year's controversial Senate Bill 1047 from state Sen. Scott Wiener. A new bill that's essentially a derivative of SB 1047 is progressing through New York's legislature.

AI boosters argue we shouldn't worry about it boosting carbon emissions, because future AI will be "fixing the climate," as Sam Altman put it. But critics say boosters are blurring the lines between what they're developing and what might really help in the climate fight.

very cool that for ten years people at the heights of political commentary insisted to the point of rage that the paramount threat to free speech was “censorious” college students

Salesforce used to loudly tout its climate goals, investments and progress towards reducing its emissions. But when it recently made a change to its emissions targets — retreating from two key ones — it was much less vocal about it.

In their new book, "The AI Con," out today, @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social seek to pierce the hype bubble surrounding artificial intelligence. I spoke recently with Bender and Hanna about the book and how they hope to help people have a clearer eyed view of AI.

The latest court battle involving venture capitalist Vinod Khosla over public access to the Bay Area's Martins Beach was set to go to trail late last month. It got put on hold instead. Here's why.

In plain English, he led the charge against hiring women, minorities and the disabled

Last year, a team of researchers sounded the alarm about how the growing use of AI was leading to increasing amounts of water consumption. In recent months, a pair of new reports have indicated that AI will require even more water in coming years than those first researchers estimated.

Just as it's backing off from its past support for DEI, Uber also appears to be distancing itself from the climate-change fight. It's eliminated all mention of "climate" from its latest proxy statement and deleted links to its past years' ESG reports from its web site. A little scoop from me:

I hate to be that guy, but this is the five-alarm fire, and every elected Democrat and frankly, every Washington reporter should be ringing the bell. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. Nobody with a voice should give this administration a moment’s peace about it.

A pair of recent studies have highlighted (yet another) potential danger with AI: People who use or trust it a lot are less likely to think critically about its outputs.

OpenAI faces numerous obstacles in its quest to become a for-profit company, from a suit by Elon Musk to an investigation by the California attorney general's office. But one potential obstacle quietly went away last week.

Supreme Court to decide if Trump can exile people to overseas gulags “by mistake” and then leave them there to rot forever www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Among the many other things the Trump administration is doing, it's making a broad retreat from policing corporate misconduct. Following up on a @publiccitizen.bsky.social report, I took a look at which San Francisco and Bay Area companies were benefiting from this enforcement retreat.

Headlines rn: Economist: This is fucking idiotic WaPo: This is a bad idea Guardian: This is bonkers NYT: Is a global depression proof of trump's genius?

This is true: The Trump administration said it has imposed a 10% tariff on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose only inhabitants are the U.S. and U.K. service members at the military base on Diego Garcia.