Statement on Trump’s Executive Order Restricting State Regulation of AI

Just because you allege something does not make it "proven."

Excellent stuff from @sifill.bsky.social. "The assault on the 14th Amendment has not generated the kind of moral panic that politicians, journalists, and tech bros successfully created over their claims of First Amendment abuses several years ago..." sherrilyn.substack.com/p/is-it-too-...

Will someone spare a thought for the poor 5th Circuit Judges toiling away at writing outrageous opinions supporting indefensible decisions, if their auditions will be all for nought if the prize goes to this hacky-come-lately? slate.com/news-and-pol...

There's a joke (in Spanish) I remember about a 6 year-old kid who comes home from parrochial school and asks about the meaning of a word. The word is the Spanish for "penis", and though surprised, the father very carefully and sensitively explains about sex, etc. Then asks where she heard it. /1

This paragraph (in @stevevladeck.bsky.social ‘s excellent post) says so much about about the unitary executive project. Through 40+ years of repetition, it’s become almost a cult belief. Who cares if after all that time, the evidence doesn’t add up. 1/2 www.stevevladeck.com/p/bonus-196-...

ICE are thug scum.

“Goal: to ensure survivors did not end up in U.S. judicial system where courts could force administration to show evidence justifying military campaign in the region” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/u...

This is a good thread

And, not to be a hater but... If you hear someone saying cooling will be easier in space, you can instantly write them off as someone who has never read a single relevant book or paper and never talked to a single person with undergraduate level expertise. This is very basic.

Just because it's being passed around a lot: NO, data centers in space do NOT benefit from space being cold. Space is cold in the formal sense we use to define temperature. But it is very bad at cooling. What would you rather have to cool hot metal: a lukewarm water tub or a giant cold atmosphere?

"there's a new serif in town"

Legit amazing stuff. And a great, great example of how “I have a dark, somewhat twisted sense of humor that’s not for everybody” does not have to mean “I lash out at powerless people and congratulate myself for my edginess.”

The poor kid. Someone call CPS.

So if I have this right, we're supposed to wear three piece suits and gala dresses, so we can work out, and then spend hours sitting next to a bunch of sweaty people in a tube with recirculated air, and this will improve the travel experience.... Yes? www.joemygod.com/2025/12/duff...

This is the most consultant-brained thing I’ve seen all week.

“It’s like bringing principles to gun fight” -Melissa Murray (@profmmurray.bsky.social) What a good line 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Same headline. Seven years apart. 🤡 @politico.com www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

Federal law may preempt state law, but since when does an executive order preempt state law?

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

The message to corporations is clear: don't worry about the law. If government fines you, particularly if it is a Democratic admin., delay long enough for republicans to take win an election and you'll get away with it.

bad actors like wurman are why i think it is important to place the birthright clause in the full context of section 1 and section 1 in the context of both dred scott and the two decades of antislavery and abolitionist agitation and political thinking that proceeded it

again, it is just arrogance. “there is one true meaning of the constitution and it can only be derived by a special caste of lawyers with a special interpretative lens and once discovered it is binding.”

Come for the legal commentary, stay for the analogy Pete Hegseth:Military :: The paralegal in a Mall Lawyer's office:Legal Profession. slate.com/podcasts/ami...

If they've been so successful stopping both legal and illegal immigration, and deporting undocumented individuals, why do they need to get rid of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment? According to them, the issue of non-permanent residents they don't like having babies here no longer exists.

Hegseth is really giving Pompey the Great vibes... "Cease quoting laws to us that have swords."

New: AI chatbots can change voters' minds, according to a pair of in-depth studies published just now in Science and Nature. How they do it is interesting — and concerning. Gift link: wapo.st/49RSstP

A Medicare pilot program will allow private companies to use artificial intelligence to review older Americans’ requests for certain medical care — and will reward the companies when they deny it. via @stateline.org www.newsfromthestates.com/article/medi...

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

The end of academic freedom, Flowchart Edition.

presented without comment

No. I promise you a (surprisingly) few hours w/a decent search engine will get you much more useful info on building nuclear weapons. FURTHERMORE! The basic principles are well understood & published. ChatGPT isn’t gonna be able to tell me measurements much less be able to crap out some HEU.

While @dahlialithwick.bsky.social and @mjsdc.bsky.social are indispensable to process the day-today and the Big Themes playing in Law Land, the "Thinky Episodes" of Amicus are unmissable. Great discussion on the "three frames".

[P] goddammit

Are you still massively against me breaking into your home and stealing all your stuff so I can sell it or have you moved more towards acceptance?

James Bond supervillains threaten to blow up the world with their big laser unless you pay them a trillion dollars. Real American supervillains embed themselves in the economy and threaten to cause a depression unless you subsidize their sex robots and the weird chatbots they use to avoid humans.

Life goals.

Countries that have abortion access, DEI policies or protection for LGBTQ+ people will be considered “human rights violators“ by the Trump regime We’re in the upside down. www.forbes.com/sites/maryro...

who knows the future of AI, its real world value, what it can achieve, what profits it will drive. But we can more confidently say something very weird is happening here when we look at the question of resource allocation and the very small number of individuals driving it.

Christmas is coming, and the Black Friday sales signal we’re in peak gift-buying season. When you’re picking out gifts for friends and family this year, there’s a whole slew of tech products that are better to avoid. I put together a guide to help you through it.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

I 100% set Gemini up for failure here but I appreciate LLMs' game willingness to go along when I asked it for details on the musical number I had just entirely made up

Americans United's @andrewlseidel.bsky.social l has written an op-ed for Rolling Stone on the upcoming court case about the Johnson Amendment. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Tech lobbyists have long blocked commonsense online rules of the road, including for AI. So states like Minnesota stepped up—passing laws to fight deepfakes and other abuses. Now the Trump administration is trying to revoke these laws. We must stand up and ensure AI is used safely.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

As I have said to students nowadays, the most important thing one learns in school is how to learn, and using LLMs completely defeats that objective. The process matters. You don't use a fork lift the gym. The immediate result—weights up in the air—is not always the key reason to do something.

Should be unreal, but this is the reality we are getting modeled from the top down.

Zohran Mamdani doesn’t make me, an American Jew, feel unsafe. Having the Coast Guard, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, decide that a swastika isn’t really a symbol of hate? That makes me, an American Jew, feel pretty damn unsafe.

Exclusive: The U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify the swastika, nooses and the Confederate flag as hate symbols. The military service drafted a new policy that classifies them as “potentially divisive.”

It appears that the Trump regime has altered the transcript on the official White House YouTube page to omit the "piggy" when Trump slung the misogynistic slur at reporter. It reads "Quiet. Quiet [inaudible]." This is a lie.