Ms. Pfendler was lead boat pilot on my last Grand Canyon/Colorado River trip.... this is her second row from Monterey to Hawaii (Kauai last time, Oahu this time), this is her first solo. She was skipper of the Hericanes team for the World's Toughest Row in 2024.

I'm old enough to remember when a highly regarded senior scholar accused me of "cynical framing" (and worse) for suggesting that Wurman's "scholarship" was generated entirely for the purpose of being cited, and not because it was the result of sincere scholarly exploration. Whoopsies.

Wurman, not a scholar.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

This is true. And, as I have long argued, it’s a reason to block illegal tariffs from going into effect in the first place, and NOT stay injunctions against them as large appellate process proceeds.

Honestly, one of the funniest tweets I've ever seen.

Thread

Compare to when Obama released $1.7B in frozen Iranian assets and we got the JCPOA out of it.

Looks like Google's giving Fitbit the same treatment it gave Nest.

Legacy media outlets that believes blocking @archive.org will somehow prevent their further decline are just digging a mass grave for themselves, with ample space for its role protecting American democracy to fill the margins.

Before Yahoo and Google was Yongle.

Google has accidentally leaked details about an unfixed issue in Chromium that keeps JavaScript running in the background even when the browser is closed, allowing remote code execution on the device.

The lost aircraft alone cost as much as the DOD's initial estimate for the total cost of the war to date.

This study finds that for every ICE arrest, six undocumented male immigrants lose their job *plus* one male U.S.-born worker. And since they focus on immigrants who remain in the U.S. (not those who are removed or "self-deport"), this likely underestimates the overall impact on immigrant labor.

Virtual OS Museum virtualosmuseum.org

When Debbie Lesko thinks you can’t be trusted…oof! Heap is a real piece of shit and has NO place in election administration, let alone elected office.

Interesting that the Trump administration is laying down a marker that a military attack on an unarmed craft can be the basis for prosecuting senior government officials who supervised the attack in home countries of the vehicles' occupants.

"Direct File was not brought down by runaway costs or technical fiascoes. It was murdered for no good reason at all, a victim of reactionary ideology and corporate self-interest." defector.com/free-easy-de...

The federal cybersecurity agency left plaintext passwords in a spreadsheet uploaded to a public GitHub repository, per a report by independent journalist Brian Krebs.

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president & VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.

Journalists need to avoid making this category error

@gallego.senate.gov, what the hell are you thinking?

Precisely this. Want to fight back against the slush fund. Hang SPECIFIC Jan6 criminals on your local right wingers.

OpenBSD 7.9 upgrades uneventful except that the amavisd port is now broken due to the update of the p5-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA port; it's an easy fix but would be better to have the port updated from 2.12.2 to a more recent version: gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/pa...

I want to know the name of the judge who presided over this. I want that judge’s name and email address public. I want people to be able to ask that judge what the fuck was wrong with him or her. /1

This seems like a dumb lawsuit. Nobody is required to use target fund options, vs. index fund options. news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-...

Curious to see how large the public payout is going to be for Enrique Tarrio, the man convicted of seditious conspiracy who was pardoned by Trump and has now moved on to promoting Mein Kampf reading groups led by white nationalists.

the president of the united states sued his own government for ten billion dollars and “settled” it by directing that government to use taxpayer money for a nearly two billion dollar slush fund to distribute to his political allies at will typing it out barely feels real

thread on Trump abuse of the IRS

Pete Hegseth’s focused on the cost of the bomb. I’m more interested in the size of the economic crater.⁣ ⁣ And that crater may be 10 to 100 times larger.⁣ ⁣ For many families, that translates into thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of dollars.

Gave Gemini (free) a chance to review a bunch of my code, and it came through with some genuine vulnerabilities not identified by Claude (Pro) or ChatGPT (free), but also did a whole lot of confabulation and misconstrual, some of which, if followed, would have created vulnerabilities.

Internal AutoZone memo: “.. We’re facing the largest supply shortage of lubricating fluids in the modern history of America. Realistic, middle-of-the-road estimates are for our average available supply in this product category to drop by 40%.” (via Costa Oil) #$AZO

BofA: A blended average of wage, fuel & commodity costs implies the Food at Home CPI could accelerate to 8%

Since the 2024 election, Polis has committed himself to burning any chance he had of winning office again from Colorado voters. It's weird. He could've been a senator maybe, but basically everyone around these parts now loathes him. And it's all self-inflicted and entirely unnecessary.

This is insanity: Trump's DOJ is about to "settle" his lawsuit against the IRS by creating a $1.7 billion slush fund to pay off victims of Biden "weaponization." I talked to Jamie Raskin about this. It's even more corrupt than it first appears. 1/ (new piece) newrepublic.com/article/2105...

New from me: Five years ago, I criticized a San Francisco TV reporter for getting her facts wrong. Ever since, she and her allies have alleged that I was part of a conspiracy to end her career. That narrative just got a boost with her new book, which is being promoted by some powerful tech people.

We've become numb to this stuff, but a president accusing a journalist of treason -- a capital crime -- for reporting on an ongoing war is not normal, and we should never accept it as normal.

Great time to have cut US capacity and have our health services run by idiots

Another good one for context injection attack.

Accidentally learned how to cause unveil violations to occur in a call to ping, even though unveil environment is not inherited across a system call. If libc does path resolution for a write to STDOUT/STDERR (i.e., caller messed up the standard I/O file descriptors), it will trigger the violation.

what a vile person

🚨 The NYT appears to have taken a great feature story written by my colleague at Bolts about a west Tennessee county & the VRA, & essentially rewritten it. (Same frame, similar hed, overlapping sources.) Without a single mention, credit, let alone the a hyperlink buried somewhere.

America’s cyber defense agency, CISA, has not had a Senate-confirmed director in 16 months.

NEW: President Trump's politicization of the DOJ has cost the agency over 6000 years of expertise due to the firings and resignations of 608 officials. We break it all down:

Just in: Trump crypto holding company AI Financial (formerly Alt5 Sigma) informed the SEC that it is—again—unable to meeting a filing deadline.

“.. Core PPI comes in red hot at 5.2%. The new Fed Chair might have to consider RAISING rates!” - RBAdvisers

174 judges!

doesn't seem likely to end well

Trump's Religious Liberty Commission composition is pretty terrible: www.justice.gov/religious-li...

Here's the report: The Price of Non-Prosecution oversightdemocrats.house.gov/imo/media/do...