How convenient - an app that let's you place bets on the outcome of tragic world events! yay???

The sale bins had already been looted by scavengers. The talons of bargain hunters tore ruthlessly through stacks of silk blouses and left a tangle of garments upon the earth. The man knelt to comb through the castoffs like a haruspex searching for truth in the entrails of a slaughtered animal.

[detective waving phone around at crime scene] AI says this guy died of his injuries

“Never have so few done so much to so many.” www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

It’s fun to think about the surgeon who will botch your surgery 20 years from now and what he’s doing at this moment. He just ran all his homework through ChatGPT. He just read that article about vaccines and autism at the CDC website. He just watched an Instagram video about the moon landing hoax.

To “my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.” www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

Unchained Melody was a huge hit for the Righteous Brothers, but it was originally sung by Todd Duncan in the 1955 prison film Unchained.

"I feel like the movies sold us an idealized version of the end times."

I got this useful bon mot from a middle school teacher recently. In response to, “I DONT UNDERSTAND,” he calmly said, “okay what steps have you taken to understand?” And that’s when I realized that a lot of folks have no steps.

Ctrl Alt Deleaf

Thoughtful essay about how to evaluate the confluence of art and politics in our current climate.

(gift article) One example of how far-reaching the effects have been is that babies even get potty trained much later than they used to, because of disposable diapers.

Kavanaugh's statements make the problem worse, not better. If the reason SCOTUS is using cryptic shadow docket orders is because "five" of them can't "reach a consensus or a compromise on a particular issue that might be difficult," then that order should not be precedential —there's no majority.

Just saw someone on tiktok call Dubai the Michael Kors of vacations 🥀

Whenever you see a quote from a poll or survey in the form "x% of [population] do/believe [statement]" translate that to "x% of respondents selected a specific response option" The respondents may or may not represent a population. That form interaction may or may not reflect what they do/believe.

The future of programming is AI; er, I mean, the future of cooking is the microwave!

Distorted Wall Street incentives drove us to centralized digital infrastructure that mirrors authoritarian power structures. But the same technologies can be architected to resist authoritarianism. Decentralization isn’t a technical preference, it’s a democratic necessity.

Interesting explainer on the ramifications of a service member refusing an order because they think it's unconstitutional:

This opera sounds like so much fun, but unfortunately I'm half way around the world from Ireland (gift link):

look the real lesson of this is that more internet memes should've had dance interpretations www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u4...

Nice to see Cuomo finally being a team player and campaigning for Zohran

Extrapolating Doctorow's enshittification principle from tech platforms to American hegemony under the current administration.

𝒞ℯ𝒸̧𝒾 𝓃’ℯ𝓈𝓉 𝓅𝒶𝓈 𝓊𝓃ℯ 𝒶𝓅ℴ𝒸𝒶𝓁𝓎𝓅𝓈ℯ.

This is exactly why privacy advocates have been fighting the OSA tooth and mail since it was first introduced! And why if your state or country introduces any kind of "think of the children" bill, you should fight it as hard as you can.

Is that DDoS attack? No, it's just more fucking AI bots scraping away.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

The neighborhood is getting ready for tomorrow

Dance to the Music, I Want to Take You Higher, Everyday People, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again), Family Affair RIP Sly Stone

"They're eating the checks; they're eating the balances" "Honk if you never drunk-texted war plans" "The only person Trump ever hired who was actually qualified to do their job was Stormy Daniels"

Unironically they should buy up the domains for about 60 defunct local newspapers in swing states. Hire two reporters to write almost exclusively about highschool sports and new restaurants opening with every 10th article about how the local GOP is screwing over people.

David Hammons art installation "Concerto in Black and Blue" at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles.

This is HUGE. For those wondering why due process is essential for EVERYONE. This is why!

I'm actually really scared of losing the sky. I know that may sound weird. But to me a vision of the future that includes routine flying drone delivery, air taxis, & even space billboards (www.scientificamerican.com/article/spac...) is so oppressive that I feel claustrophobic just contemplating it.

Everyone thinks we grow a lot of corn & soybeans in the US "because of subsidies," & that's just... not accurate? So I made a video about it www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlSR...

if you do one thing this week, please make it either donating what you can to The Appeal, or sharing this ask -- their reporting is so, so vital, and because of a bleak funding landscape they're at serious risk of not being able to do that vital reporting at all anymore.

What does xx% chance of rain actually mean? Not that it will rain xx% of the time or will affect xx% of the area. It’s more like xx% of forecast simulations suggest it will rain. That is, it will rain on xx% of days when the starting point of the forecast is almost exactly the same as it is today.

Pioneering bassist and elite member of the Wrecking Crew rockhall.com/inductees/ca...

HOLY CRAP. DOGE took root access and got tenant owner Azure privileges (above CIO-level), disabled logging (no record of their actions), downgraded Azure access rules (no 2FA), then data poured out. 15 minutes after the DOGE acct creation, Russian attackers were logging in w/those new credentials.

So I guess that "NWS" and "NOAA" join "DEI" as acronyms that scare and anger the Trump administration for no remotely sane reason.

Frank Bruni on Trump AG Pam Bondi: "Genuflection is her cardio."

It works. The government here largely works. Because we are so spoiled by how well it works, we are letting a fool convince us it is broken.