NEW: A teacher called over a dozen therapists to find mental health care following a miscarriage. An EMT spent months looking for one after a suicide attempt. They couldn’t find any in-network provider able to see them. Now they're suing their insurer.

it was very obvious to me from the early terf wars that there was a kind of bigotry black hole: the transphobes all became racists. the racists were all misogynists. the misogynists were all authoritarians. much of my work since then has been devoted to trying to understand why.

For a literal decade the official CBP policy has been “don’t stand in front of or behind vehicles” because the decade before that their internally commissioned studies found that agents were putting themselves in front of vehicles so as to shoot the occupants

It's almost like the App and Play Stores have never been about moderation or keeping users safe, they've been about control and taxing developers wherever possible

i actually do think that tim apple & sundar google could stop a significant portion of all this shit anytime they wanted by simply enforcing against a few big apps the way they do little ones

10 years ago “Border Patrol agents have deliberately stepped in the path of cars apparently to justify shooting at the drivers and have fired in frustration at people throwing rocks from the Mexican side of the border”

Queer people being able to love freely and without fear makes life better for everyone, including straight people.

US oil giant ExxonMobil tells Trump Venezuela is ‘uninvestable’ ft.trib.al/ZkznmTx

“Folks have warned for years about the mission creep of surveillance infrastructure systems like (automated license plate readers) and this propensity for them to be abused, and we’re seeing those risks manifest today,” EFF’s @tsnvaa.bsky.social told @pressdemo.bsky.social.

is he... y'know... a friend of claude

Rep. Luna, who once accused Twitter of "censorship" because no one on her staff explained what Jira is to her, is now asking the DOJ to prosecute a journalist for sharing a link to a university bio page on X (X immediately complied and locked the journalist's account until he deleted the link).

'all politics is Gender except for Race, which is also Gender'

Remember kids, there was a reason pirates always told the boat they were attacking they take hostages: people didn't fight back as hard if they thought they could survive. This ruling class told two and a half generations that they have nothing to live for and are SHOCKED that we're fighting back

Minnesota fights back

I will immediately do a max contribution to @aoc.bsky.social if she primaries Schumer This *vocalized* moral clarity is so desperately needed everywhere:

NCOSE, the central group pushing KOSA and other censorship bills, not only is verified on X, but is actively using the CSAM scandal to milk engagement on the platform. X is currently ignoring age-verification laws in multiple states, but instead of boycotting, they're juicing.

As a stylized example, AI can extract information from a document but won't analyze every document and extract the info. But it will say it did. It feels a lot like a slacking junior lying to you. Like if your brilliant intern also had severe ADHD and was a pathological liar and the bosses' kid.

This is a much much more dangerous situation than a large swath of society having been hoodwinked and confused by false information, and one that we cannot fact-check or visual-forensic our way out of (despite how important it is to still do those things for an evidentiary record of truth).

Here’s a comment for the people who are upset that MN hasn’t charged Jonathan Ross already: If you just Leeeroy Jenkins this shit you will lose and you will empower fascism and murder. It is indescribably hard to prosecute cops for murder. It is even hard when the murder is ON VIDEO. /1

Look, I think we have to take them at their word that they think this was exemplary law enforcement behavior Which is TERRIFYING

Some really thought provoking points here: "This widespread societal resignation of ‘guess our government communications now happens on a deepfake porn site’ is maddening, but also points to a deeper issue."

Expect to see a surge of proud ignorance and proplawganda about what you can say about ICE agent Jonathan Ross, identified by local media as the person who shot and killed Renee Good. In particular, expect a repeat of Rittenhouse-era “accusing him of murder is defamation” rhetoric. It’s not. /1

American defamation law becomes much easier to understand once you accept that it's not about punishing unfair speech, just false facts.

This remains true even if your reasoning about the public figures is absolute bullshit.

The EU is willing to do tyranny that endangers protected speech to try and crack down on illegal speech, but not willing to inconvenience anyone too powerful. Absolute garbage free speech policies at work. Protects the likes of Musk, screws over the typical citizen.

The @guardian gets the headline right 🏆 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Unsurprised to see the goat @wyden.senate.gov in this trio

In line with my belief that what is going on now is not collective convincing but collective enchantment, LLMs are operating as a permission granting machine, but not b/c they provide false evidence that confuses people, but as a prop magic wand that the powerful can wave around to say anything goes

A Minnesota prosecutor is calling on members of the public to send any video or other evidence in the fatal shooting of Renee Good directly to her office, saying she’s worried that the FBI won’t share evidence with state investigators.

Gov. Polis tells CBS that Tina Peters' sentence is "harsh" and he's considering clemency for her. Peters, sentenced to 9 years on 4 felonies, has never disavowed her role as county clerk to breach her own election system to prove Trump's lie that he won 2020. www.cbsnews.com/colorado/new...

So have all of the legacy media orgs accidentally converged on being confused by their misunderstanding of how LLMs work in exactly the same way or are they coordinating in an act of kayfabe?

Publishing CSAM is unequivocally illegal under federal law. We don’t need any new laws to address what is happening on X / Grok. The Trump regime is simply choosing not to enforce the law on a company owned by their political ally. It’s that simple.

In case you've seen the story about “grok now only generates images for paid users”, it's untrue. Apparently everyone just reported it because… it was what grok told them 🤦🏼 www.theverge.com/news/859309/...

you may reduce total labor hours. it may have significant negative impacts on the job market. but a significant fraction, often a majority, of the job is translating incoming asks into things that even make sense to do

one of the first jokes I heard abt it is “well I guess we’re all out of a job as long as the business can articulate a clear and unchanging set of requirements… so I’m feeling pretty good about job security”

this is the main reason why you can't automate even scutwork-y software jobs away. like, it's a good gag, but this is also a serious description of why

Sometimes the government’s response to things happening feels like one of those old wind-up toys where you wind it, point it in the direction it needs to go, and release only for it to spin furiously on the spot for a while before finally meandering off a few centimetres in the right direction.

“make big tech afraid” has to be just as much of a priority as “prosecute the criminals of the previous regime” for the next Dem admin the tech fascists are way too far out over their skis and what remains of global stability will not survive that state of affairs continuing

the primary impact of CBS specifically pushing content off the air and onto YouTube is that older people who still trust CBS as prestige news won't know about it

my fundamental problem is that they are effectively learning avoidance machines, using it to vibe out some hobby/proof-of-concept thing that you don't really care about beyond "seems to work," fine. using it all day every day and not working the muscle in the problem domain, bad

Recording a CD to a tape because you don't have a discman yet, but you do have a walkman-clone.

*SUPREME COURT SETS WEDNESDAY AS NEXT OPINION DAY

OK I'm being told that ride-on-mowers are mostly still manual choke? Wth? I would've thought you could add that for like, $0.50 BOM increase.

Do young people need to adjust the choke to start their ride-on lawnmowers anymore? Or are they all automatic choke now?

Using a collect call from a pay phone to send free voice messages.

yeah uh just so everyone knows: it is actually completely doable to assemble LLM-sized datasets in open source. the reason it is difficult to do so is that *people sue you if you do it*. corporations have the advantage of secrecy

I'm going to try using Claude Code this weekend on a personal project. I'm willing to believe it has value but whether that value is worth the amount of compute it burns really seems dubious.

We could be living in a paradise with less cognitive load on consumers and less of the economy devoted to writing software if we just mandated interoperability and funded standardization efforts.

This is quite literally Trump declaring himself a dictator and the Times is framing it like “Trump’s bold new redefinition of executive power.” This is anathema to the whole project of America and the republicans enabling it need their feet held to the fire and our media won’t do it.

As we already do with photographs and reported quotes, inspecting the provenance of short video clips is no longer optional. You can't assume what you're seeing was photographed from life.