Marc Slemko

Trump: ‘There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!’ "I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future," wrote Trump, who is not a lawyer.

Trump is saying that he will disregard Congress and issue an Excutive order that will violate the Constitution.

Here is my promise: If he does that, we will sue and we will win. Just like we did the last time. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Specifically, Republican Senators worried about the implications for them in the future.

I believe in regulating social media companies. I believe in laws requiring both transparency of what they are doing and also mandating some level of features and settings to give the user more control over what they see and address actual social media addiction. For everyone, not just kids.

I write all about age verification and how it's being pushed in this WA legislative session.

When I wrote my piece about AI bills last month, every privacy advocate I spoke with expressed their concern about the age verification bills in play this session. So I carved out some time to learn more.

So much of this legislation is simultaneously technically and socially inept. The definition of an "addictive feed" is absurd to read and has nothing to do with addiction other than usurping the name. Recommendation is not inherently addictive and a really important part of learning and discovery.

AI use is a battle even at @propublica.org. Not suggesting they have committed anything like this yet.

The Sharp Rateca Puter. Up top, left to right: a collapsable TV/radio antenna, brightness and contrast dials, a giant speaker, a smaller speaker, and input for the tapedeck, with the play counters that were more common on the day. Face, left to right: A 4.5 inch CRT (behind a plastic guard), VHF/UHF and radio dials, channel and band selectors (TV/COMP, FM, Shortwave, and Middlewave), the "RATECA PUTER' logo on the battery gauge, AFC switch, mode selector, tape deck controls, audio controls for balance, bass, treble, and volume, and a mollyguard to prevent dials and switches from being mashed (the mollyguard being a signature of Sharp's boomboxes of the time). Face, low: the collapsable carrying handle that doubles as a stand; computer power button; slide-out chiclet keyboard based on Sharp calculators of the day, with number pad; an LED clock, clock controls, alarm controls. Right side: mic jacks, earphone jacks in two different sizes, beat cut switch, fan exhaust, DC and AC power plugs, and a printer port (!). Help I'm trapped in an alt text factory

In the 70s, Sharp had a series of "Latte case" boomboxes; as the line went on, more and more got put into it, like TVs. One of the last in the line was the RatecaPuter - a latte-case boombox with a 2KB computer that could run SHARP Basic programs off of the built in tape deck.

Alphabetical keyboards are absolutely terrible for typing on, even once you have the muscle memory. QWERTY isn't great but is more passable for most things.

It's been an extremely weird past few days, and I have more thoughts on what happened. Let's start with the news coverage. I've talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn't one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down - here's the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be Al hallucinations themselves.

Yikes: guy who blogged about how an AI agent published a “hit piece” against him, says (human) reporters seem to have used an LLM to read (and misreport) his blog post

theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

The ChatGPT prompt and process used is just negligently embarrassing.

By AI or by Al or by AⅠ or by A1 or by 𝐀𝐈 or by 𝙰𝙸 or by 𝔸𝕀.

-- Aͥ.

106. To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.

From storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Code built by AI is legacy code as soon as it is written. No one knows how it works or why it works or what changes are easy or hard to integrate based on the architecture and where the tech debt is. Learning that takes longer than just writing it. Your business is now mired in time by tech debt.

Republican talking heads: "Everything we are doing is legal and needed because Obama didn't follow the law."

Everyone who recognizes the terror: "Well shit we need to change the law."

I'd love to hear more thoughts on the risk of targeted voter deregistration, and the practicalities of trying to pull that off.

The technology is, absolutely, I don't want to minimize that because the regime is actively doing the things you speak of right now. It just doesn't require anything near this scale of build or money to do that, and there are rapidly diminishing returns.

They really aren't useful to the American government either way.

If any aspiring presidential candidate can't say this in a believable way, they are unfit for the present moment.

I think this is more about ICE "needing" to be protected by the military, to be able to continue their terrors.

Second the recommendation for Careless People, it gives a nice "outside insider" perspective. It is not focused on the technology itself, but rather the decisions and thoughts (or lack thereof) around it.

This is one of the ways they want to do targeted voter deregistration, with the intent of using the ridiculous requirements in the SAVE act for re-registering to stop people from being able to vote. They can manipulate the timing and messaging.

Election clerks aren't stupid though, and care.

Okay fine we're doing a little origin story thread: how did I become a horse game consultant and what does that even mean? 🧵

There are some details in some of the stories, eg. not using his own access badge so there aren't records, but all it boils down to the fact they are all liars and they lie about it.

Uhh, does he understand what he is saying or is he just using a probabilistic word generator without understanding the words?

"In the blanket incident, [...] her blanket wasn’t moved to the second plane [...]. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home." 🙄

"This blog is a collection of short stories and satirical observations, none of which is exactly true or false." I'll pass thanks.

Woke 2.0 is awesome.

But they aren't cancelling what they advertised, just a different stupid thing that was already seemingly in trouble?

I heard they just canceled frozen cylinders of orange juice too.