1/2 OpenAI put out a paper last year that didn't get much attention about "personas," inference and output styles that often get adopted by chatbots when they are trying to respond to a user. Anthropic released a separate one a few days ago on the same topic. I'll link to that in the next post.

One of my favorite “history fun facts” I often share in class is that Notre Dame is called “the fighting Irish” because in 1924, UND students beat the shit out of a local Klan that tried to harass them for being Catholic. stories.nd.edu/stories/a-cl...

Dark communion, lol

The administration's budget request would cut research funding for the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency by more than 50%. It's hard to imagine an external enemy causing more long-term damage to this country. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

more than almost anyone in the admin susie wiles is clear-eyed about who and what she has spent her life enabling and that makes her one of the most evil people in a government entirely composed of sociopaths

It's actually nice that Bluesky is not a platform for normies, tbh. Smaller online communities are what everyone should be going back to. Even in its heyday, Twitter was always a niche platform. If you actually were trying to reach the masses, it was never the place to focus on.

“The nearly 70-page doc included no mention of contraception other than an assertion that it is overprescribed, has negative side effects, and is part of a broader ‘overreliance on pharmaceutical and surgical treatments.’” Attacks on birth control will mirror those on abortion—lie, restrict, ban

Divide and conquer remains the most effective reactionary publicity strategy--because it is often unnoticeable by the people it targets.

Russia made no territorial gains in March, the first time its progress has stalled entirely in 2+ years. The reasons: Ukraine's counteroffensives, loss of access to Starlink’s satellite internet data, and Russia’s own ban on Telegram in favor of its own app. But Russia has an ace in its hand: Trump

For Playboy, I spoke to adult content creators about the hours of labor their subscribers *don’t* see. “The amount of times I have people in my comments being like, ‘Get a real job!’ and like, I probably pay way more to the IRS than you do!” - @siridahl.bsky.social www.playboy.com/read/sex-rel...

James Talarico is setting an example of a liberal Christianity that is unapologetically both things--while also being inclusive of non-religious and non-Christian people. @aselrod.bsky.social and @matthew.flux.community discuss why this is the way:

Trump doesn't have coherent thoughts, and his policies are driven by toadies who flatter him with claims to do the impossible. Pam Bondi became the latest victim of Trump's whims and his inability to realize that you can't bluff your way out of everything.

Donald Trump's overtly malignant and callous behavior is reshaping the personalities of his most devoted supporters, elevating deeper psychological tendencies within individuals and their religious communities baptistnews.com/article/trum...

It was a great conversation! The broader left needs to talk to all of America, while maintaining and advocating the values we hold dear. Community, care, determination, and excellence are how we defeat the radical right.

Russell Vought (Trump's OMB Director) was months late delivering the president's 2027 budget plan ...and he turned it in incomplete. www.politico.com/news/2026/04... Incompetence & evil in one package! Vought has only provided top line fact sheets. www.whitehouse.gov/omb/informat...

The Peter Thiel-funded reactionary Catholic magazine is telling young women that everyone is totally into wearing sexy outfits while attending church. This is so "fellow kids" and they cannot even see it. Meanwhile, young women are the least religious generation of women in polling history.

Performative heterosexuality is such a thing.

Perplexity’s “Incognito Mode” is a “sham,” lawsuit says Google, Meta, and Perplexity accused of sharing millions of chats to increase ad revenue.

Pam Bondi’s DOJ abandoned 23,000 criminal investigations in shift to immigration Even investigations into fraud and abuse were dropped

Repealing women's right to vote is a very serious agenda item for the Christian far right. Glad to see the New York Times reporting this out. Most non-reactionaries do not understand how extreme the Christian right is. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/u...

Eddie Dalton isn’t real, but what does that mean? Computer-generated soul music is taking over the internet, raising questions about where humans think art lives

This is a milestone technology here. WordPress is everywhere for now, but how long?

Trump's highly unpopular Iran war is finally loosening the self censorship about him that has been so pervasive in Republican media. Talk like this would've been absolute heresy just a few months ago.

It means the culture industry has reached full scale bot production and consumption. Nothing terribly interesting.

AI generated soul music seems like an abomination on a scale that could cause the very universe to shae apart

Trump was warned this would happen. He did it anyway. Now, over 10,000 Veterans lost their homes. 90,000 more are on track for foreclosure. On top of cutting jobs, slashing benefits and throwing our heroes into an unnecessary war. The most anti-Veteran President in history.

Pat Boone lives again

Some time ago I stumbled across a youtube channel that was posting dozens of "90's deep underground hiphop you've never heard" videos with like an hour of AI generated rap songs that were actually really fucking dope. The comments were all "where do you find these songs?" Had everybody fooled.

A whole generation of "I only listen to music played live in person" is being created.

🧵 AI-generated soul music by "Eddie Dalton" is taking over iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify--raising the question of where humans think beauty and art lives. Software-made music has gotten so good now that 97 percent of people cannot differentiate it from human-made music.

It's often said that people won't flock to AI music, but that doesn't seem to be true. Right now, AI generated songs by "Eddie Dalton" have become the latest fully synthetic music to be trending on iTunes: www.showbiz411.com/2026/03/29/a...

🚨NEW: Gregg Phillips, who holds one of the most consequential jobs at FEMA overseeing disaster response, is doubling down on claims he teleported to a Waffle House and a church — writing "haters gonna hate" on Truth Social and citing biblical accounts on teleportation. www.cnn.com/2026/04/01/p...

More on the NIH funding opportunity graveyard from Liz Ginexi. NIH has stopped the vast majority of funding opportunities. Some were officially terminated. Others are many months overdue, a death by delay, including congressionally mandated programs. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/inside-the...

Christian nationalists promote praying to ‘kill’ political opponents and stop them ‘by any means necessary’ ‘We want him crucified—with Christ,’ former Pete Hegseth pastor says of Texas Democrat James Talarico

An individual trader doesn't think he's a sucker; he thinks every other trader is a sucker. Aggregated across many suckers, this is somehow supposed to produce rational outcomes

Mike Pence got totally owned here: Jewish plaintiffs won a ruling against Indiana's abortion ban, using the law he signed 11 years ago as governor to help evangelicals refuse to cater gay weddings and such. Now similar challenges could win in other red states. We tell the story at @forward.com.

The conservatives who call themselves "centrists" who expressed concerns about "cancel culture" in colleges should be talking about this stuff far more. Nationally admired Republican figures w/ direct access to WH and Congressional figures are calling for civil war and criminalizing the Democrats.

One of the most under-studied aspects of human cognition is variance in "internal monologues." Minds are not machines made of simple parts that are shipped in from anatomy, they are individually generated from cellular and bodily interaction with the world. Not everyone thinks in words.

you can do both of these things at the same time, it’s very easy actually “all your shit is more expensive because Trump tariffed everyone, started an immoral and unnecessary war, and fucked the global energy trade, we will stop doing those things if you elect us” there, done

Orban and Netanyahu are the innovators that Trump aims to follow.

The elevation of Mark Levin, someone whose foreign policy views within the Republican party (and elsewhere) have been regarded as bloodthirsty neocon for 20 years, is shocking but not surprising.

To Republicans, there's always enough money for bombs and bullets. There's never enough money for bread and beds.

Let's focus on something we ALL agree on: #ReleaseTheEPSTEIN_Files

the biggest lie the democrats tell, that their supporters believe, is that they are being wildly outspent by the right. it just isnt true. there are billions being spent on the left (to be fair its on the liberal/democratic side not "leftist") but its being thoroughly wasted on garbage.

New occasional thread I will add to: Popularism is cargo cult political science. Exhibit 1.

It's always been a source of fascination to me how many writers actively make inferences about their subjects based on how they eat. Unless they are RFK Jr eating carrion, this is irrelevant fluff. Including it in your pieces makes you look childish at best, and a toady at worst.

Yeah I didn’t know this. Dang.

Good information is like a healthy meal that empowers human agency. Bad information is a pollutant that creates sickness, dependency and death. This is because information itself has coercive properties. That this fundamental insight seemingly was lost on democrats in power should disqualify them.

Many people don't vote on policies. They vote on things they saw on TV or the internet. They'll never admit to this, but we can see in their issue preferences. 51% of Trump's 2024 supporters backed Harris's actual positions. 67% of registered voters did. yougov.com/en-us/articl...