Tangentially, “It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.” (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad)

"Grok Is Generating About ‘One Nonconsensual Sexualized Image Per Minute’. Regulators around the world are looking into Elon Musk’s xAI after its chatbot began ‘undressing’ celebrities and underage children at the request of users." www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

First CES panel. Intuit CMO Thomas Ranese is proud of his company's integration with OpenAI, which involves giving AI read/write access to tax data. Since prompt injection attacks are unavoidable, I asked him who will be liable when customer data is exposed: Intuit, OpenAI, etc? He had no idea.

Click in to the thread for the answer (err … question) and a clue as to the designer.

The constitutional remedy for a president who launches a war of acquisition against an ally is impeachment, removal, disqualification, and ultimately a criminal trial. And the same is true for every member of his cabinet involved in such an illegal undertaking.

Colleague learned tonight that the custom formulary medication that’s been keeping him alive was just denied by his insurance company, even though they’ve covered it in previous years, and even after he called them during open enrollment to ensure it would still be covered. God bless the USA.

The past 24 hours have been just really terrible for democracy. I’m long past “surely now Republicans,” but wow they are a bottomless pit of not giving a fuck about the country or its people or the world at large. No low is too low. Anything for King Donald.

So @tobymorton.bsky.social is a national treasure and Hilton is fucking up royally with this nonsense. www.hiltonice.com cc: @kenwhite.bsky.social

From five years ago:

Just saw this in LinkedIn for anyone interested in looking into Grok's production of CSAM and non-consensual sexualised imagery. www.linkedin.com/posts/mtechl...

1/ Trump's War Powers Report to Congress on the #Venezuela strikes and seizure of #Maduro is in. I've read/coded every WPR report and used to work on them in the White House. (See this searchable database & graphics warpowers.lawandsecurity.org/%F0%9F%91%87) Here's what stands out about this one🧵:

If you want to know who took all of your money, it's the people with all of the money. Famously, we know that's people working in child care.

Madness. Shear madness. 🤣

I love that EFF knows their base well enough to lead with "we understand you probably already have a lot of polyhedral dice sets..."

Setting aside the nuanced takes for a sec, it's kinda neat to get little glimpses into exactly what the drafters were thinking.

8/ About 30% of Americans lack regular access to a primary care provider. For them, “discuss with your clinician” isn’t neutral guidance. It’s a barrier.

Stopped for gas, and learned Fox News is syndicated on local music radio stations. <sigh> Society is so screwed.

I spent four years working on a child sex abuse prosecution. It’s not a joke, it’s not edgy, it’s not fodder for a meme. Dave is right.

One day I'm gonna feel like I have any idea at all what I'm doing and won't that be a special treat.

Worth checking to see if y’all are using any SkySentry block lists, and unsubscribing. They’re “moderated” by a troll who just got his main account banned.

The United States was the gold standard for science and technology for decades, and there was never any reason that had to end.

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

I was not hugely successful at learning from my guiding meme for 2025. Maybe this year, though it seems unlikely.

I’ve lived this, and it is unvarnished truth.

At this point it's hard not to conclude that establishment Dems were so against Zohran because they knew he would instantly make them look like cowards and layabouts, thus forcing them to do work for the first time in forever

I went and looked up my (R +15) congressional district. The opposition ballot has 8 candidates I’ve never heard of. Only one has bothered doing the Ballotopedia survey. The county Dem party site doesn’t mention any of races they’re supporting, nor any party candidates. Absolutely flaccid.

Thank god Chuck Schumer isn’t alive to see this.

So it's ok for one country to go into another country and arrest its leader for criminal activity that hurts people. Canada has the chance now to do the funniest thing ever.

Don’t make me tap the sign

All of the money that changed hands in the Teapot Dome scandal totaled less than $10 million after adjusting for inflation, and it was considered so corrupt we still teach it in high school government classes a century later.

"The world's richest man, a well-documented drug addict who is a Nazi and a major support and adviser of the President of the United States of America, has created a website that produces CSAM on demand at scale while he demands ethnic cleansing worldwide"

Dammit. Autocorrect keeps changing it to “amok”, which sounds more likely.

It's rare for a company to sign a contract with the US military AND get caught generating CSAM in the same two-week period. Grok is just built different

Ex-Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has Lunch with the FT and in one of those instances so rare that you know he didn't sign an NDA, says exactly why as.ft.com/r/e503690d-8...

Next-door MAGA guy is a career CPA. In the same breath he complained that he can never get anyone on the phone at the IRS *and* that the DOGE cuts of the 70,000 new agents didn’t go nearly far enough. Fox News has really done a number on him. His wife says she deserves a medal (and I believe her).

if Indiana being this much better and more consistent than Alabama is scaring you, just remember that Indiana's coach was an Alabama assistant under Nick Saban at Alabama during one of their most dominant stretches and Alabama's coach was the offensive coordinator for Indiana in 2019

‘They sowed chaos to no avail’: the lasting legacy of Elon Musk’s Doge

Is it too early to call 2026 a disappointing failure for Democrats?

Paine, a recent immigrant, showed that 1776 was never going to be straightforward-- morally, politically, certainly not militarily. The fullest histories show us a world that was confusing, complex, violent, in which the assertion that all people should have the same basic rights was radical. 2/

My *biggest* 2025 work accomplishment was our May research report on AI-CSAM. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/ai-csam... But my *favorite* thing I did this year was beating the Department of Justice in court & getting search warrants unsealed that shouldn't've stayed sealed. www.ipm.org/news/2025-10...

Good riddance. Let's spend 2026 not actively destroying the world, mkay?

Wow. Going to have to completely reevaluate how I engage with Canvas going forward.

I didn't want to have to delete these sites but I can see I must.

I always love the warm, deeply personal end-of-year message I receive from my professional organization🤗

I have a new nightmare.

A friend asked me to review and advise an “AI education” platform his friend built. The initial generated framework was typically reasonable. However, when asked to provide specific info, examples, or reasoning, it failed every time. The appearance of being useful, but never really getting close.

A significant amount of safety research has existed for decades on Human Machine Interfaces proving exactly this. It's exhausting to watch money and effort wasted in a tech hype cycle to constantly undo and redo what we already know in safety engineering.

The American officer corps not reconciling with how a guy like Flynn could reach the highest levels of American military intelligence is part of the reason we’re in this mess