Geez. Via the Derek Thompson newsletter.

Wrote this as a way to explain one of the big ways AI is helpful, even when there's no individual conclusion it comes to you couldn't reach without it open.substack.com/pub/mikecaul...

Wrote this as a way to explain one of the big ways AI is helpful, even when there's no individual conclusion it comes to you couldn't reach without it open.substack.com/pub/mikecaul...

This is an amazing hallucination, but also a major missed opportunity to incorporate Shakespeare's "there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently"

Amazing

Trump had his accounts suspended on January 7, 8, and 9th 2020. WHEN HE WAS STILL PRESIDENT. It was not Joe Biden because Biden was not President.

Keep going!

This. I talked about this yesterday morning with Heather. People with power grabbing a LOT more power to make their “reign” permanent, and overplaying their hand. The Federalists in the late 1790s. Silencing the opposition press. They never regained national power.

I'm not saying you have to cancel Disney plus and Hulu but I do want you to think how you're going to feel if Ted Fucking Cruz posts his cancellation receipt before you

I'll grab some links in a bit, but you'd also be amazed at how much your kids will love a Blu-ray player ($99 or less) and dirt-cheap secondhand discs from eBay. (Be sure to buy secondhand of course, no profit to Disney).

Also if you aren't quite sure yet if you're going to quit Disney+ a great way to let Disney know you are *thinking* about it is to search "cancel Disney". Bonus: I think once you get there you'll see the way forward: www.google.com/search?q=can...

The way to understand the importance of cancelling Disney+ is that it is an opportunity not just to exert power, but to pop the Twitter bubble execs have lived in for the past half decade, and show them their insular information environment has put their bottom line at risk.

I'm not going to tell you it's not a sacrifice, especially if you have kids. I'm not going to judge you if you don't cancel Disney+. All I'm going to tell you is this can work. It really can work.

This would be a good stipulation too for Disney+ -- they should donate to the charity of Kimmel's choice to show contrition. (Sorry I deleted the post this was replying to because I said "cancelling" not "suspending" and I'm picky about my wording)

Cancel your Disney subscription.

More of this!

Canceled Disney+

And since she's Tatiana Maslany she was actually able to cancel 17 separate times

This appears to be the 3rd lethal US strike in the Caribbean. Once again, the specific "terrorist" entity targeted is not identified. No legal justification is offered for this premeditated killing. President Trump is asserting a license to kill outside of the law. 1/n

Also canceled Disney plus subscription without much difficulty tonight. They did require us to confirm “yes we are canceling” about 5 times and offered us a worse deal than we were currently paying to encourage us to please change our mind, so there’s that. The mouse’s heart didn’t seem in it.

I'm not generally a boycott person but this can work. They have dramatically misjudged this.

Other people may have other experiences but I followed the instructions here and it took about three minutes, two of which were clicking 'other' on cancellation reason and typing my reason, and that I would return after a Kimmel reinstatement and apology. Super easy.

I created a page with some LLM "follow-up" prompts I've been testing over the past few months. They are designed to be almost mechanistically applied, to help you "zoom out" and see the the lay of the land of an issue before you lost in the weeds. checkplease.neocities.org/followup-pro...

I'm generally not a boycott person because they tend not to work unless asking for something concrete and achievable, but I am thinking reinstatement of Kimmel and an apology is both of those.

Just make a new national newspaper already that I can give my money to. Call it The National Democrat. Make the articles operate on the old four a month until paywall so people can read them. Don't make it Democrats whining about Democrats or punditing about Republicans. Just honest news.

👀

OPmobility’s decision to establish its first Illinois facility in Normal is another win for our state, workers, and the Central Illinois economy. This investment builds on our growing EV ecosystem and demonstrates the power of programs like REV Illinois.

For those who watched the demo

God, these pro-Mamdani commercials are getting better and better

Look, there's a reason invention, culture, and everything else accelerated when we ditched the temporal prison of the spoken word for skimmable, scannable text and this video is a good demonstration of that.

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

I know people sometimes dismiss posts about how Trump “can’t do this” by arguing that Trump will just ignore the law and do whatever he wants, but I think the fact that there’s no legal infrastructure in place to enable this kind of thing really does matter.

Great article

I think this is a good idea. The point of these demands is to focus attention, and this is where attention has to be right now, or all talk of the possibilities of 2026 are meaningless. Also grab the free speech debate with both hands instead of being dragged behind a farce.

We do not know that he was murdered by a groyper. I continue to be shocked how people have jumped to this conclusion and stating it as absolute fact. I spend hours every day monitoring Neo-Nazis and I’m not saying it!

this is more or less a conspiracy theory. it is parasite load and the fact that there are not websites anymore. there just more or less not any websites, and those that exist, exist solely to trick google into serving them to you.

I was listening to an old Casey Kasem American Top 40 (I find this soothing these days) from 1985 where he told the story of Wendy Carlos, who scored The Shining and Tron, and her journey to becoming trans. Casey got all the pronouns right and it was presented as a slice of life, feel good story

lol

In this case, the event itself is in many ways a product of those same dynamics. And it's hard to make sense of events seemingly designed to disrupt our ability to make sense of them. (H/T to @mikecaulfield.bsky.social on that last thought.)

Our ability to comprehend daily events has been corrupted by a toxic info environment where political & attentional dynamics distort & manipulate our “collective sensemaking” processes. Our “official” sources are now products of that same environment. Reality fractures, along with the social fabric.

Charlie Warzel gives some of these ideas a more thoughtful treatment: bsky.app/profile/thea...

It's OK for educational explanations of LLMs to strive for things other than technical precision, because technical precision is not the only (or even primary) aim of educational explanations. mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/do-student...

Dali's last painting was painted the month after Flashdance came out and I am going to need a moment to process that en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swa...

People like me, @donmoyn.bsky.social, & many others have been pointing out this very obvious fact that there are exactly <zero> other societal institutions <more> protective of free speech than universities for years, but The Narrative™️ cannot fail. It can only be failed.

Some of the high quality content Zuckerberg’s platform is algorithmically shoveling into the brains of American consumers. This story is 100% made up, in case that wasn’t obvious.

Why is every ad in my feed and in every email newsletter this thing, what poor online clicking decision did I make

I am glad someone is saying this. To the extent google search is worse now it's due mostly to digital retrenchment. The world you long for is one where blogs, newspaper articles, magazines and the like were ad-funded and not paywalled on hit #1.