Jim McCabe

“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops After reviewing coverage from the network and hours of social media videos that preceded Trump’s decision, ProPublica found that Fox’s portrayal of “Portland rioters” routinely instigating violence was misleading.

NEW: ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed over 700 videos posted on social media.

The network used five-year-old footage, mislabeled other dates and implied footage from elsewhere was in Portland.

Watch to the end

I am curious to see where we are in a few years. For companies who actually did replace lots of devs with AI, did their features continue to work well? Or did they reverse course and re-hire talented devs to clean up their mess? /END

If your code has 100,000 machine-generated tests, is the AI also fixing those tests as the functionality changes, or have you now made a nightmare for yourself? Degradation of a codebase may take years before your users start to smell it. 6/n

Sure, there will be examples of small teams that whip out new products quickly, but can those systems scale and gain new features over time? Do bugs increase and grow more difficult to fix? Do we see the usual symptoms of a codebase which grew too fast without regular refactoring? 5/n

People often act as though AI-generated code is something that happens just once. "Look, AI wrote 100 tests, amazing!" There's a huge blind spot where people ignore that a working system is a living thing which constantly evolves over time. I want to see how AI-dependent teams deal with that. 4/n

My constant complaint about AI is that it adds more layers without refactoring the existing base. We keep slopping on more and more, making things increasingly complex. Just like a team of enthusiastic new hires, who can write tons of code super fast, and eventually make a system unmaintainable. 3/n

One possibility is that they want to reduce headcount and AI is just a good cover story. It's also possible that management really believes the hype, and they're shooting themselves in the foot in the long run. 2/n

As companies continue to lay people off, and blame AI for putting programmers out of work, I have to wonder if it's one of these two things at play. 1/n

Not a hard question, except for the culture that pretends it's not the answer

1) right-wing media lies incessantly, so anyone truth-based doesn't trust it, and anyone who trusts it doesn't trust anything else

2) other media treats those lies as legitimate, for "fairness," getting trust from no one

Death Star

A very offline cousin sent this to fam group chat. This story is breaking containment.

So dangerous that they must be blown into small pieces rather than arrested … unless they are actually captured in which case they may go home with a warning. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/u...

Post from WH about Chicago "in chaos," showing scene from another state.

A terrific AFP fact check uses reverse image searches to expose how a White House video took scenes from Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Nebraska and lied that they showed "Chicago is in chaos."
factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com....

What The Hell Is Going On, a thread:

I’ve seen some thinkpieces and posts about Portland protests that fail to understand the long-term hyperspecificity of Portland culture/humor, and frame it as a sort of shitposting meme-pilled ironic thing. Which is wrong.

So I’m gonna give you my breakdown.

A classic case of irresponsible both-sidesism from the NYT. The story is that Trump and MAGA propagandists are lying about Portland to incite a conflict, not that there are different views of the matter.

aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage

Brett Kavanaugh assures me this is the sort of minor inconvenience that shouldn't disturb anyone.

Remember that "Pam: I have reviewed ..." TruthSocial post from Trump, the one that looked a lot like a private message?

Yes, it was supposed to be a private message.

Trump "was surprised to learn it was public."

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

MAGA’s “Voter Fraud” Watchdog Votes in a Swing State. He Doesn’t Live There. A long paper trail shows that Jack Posobiec casts a ballot in one state and lives in another.

SCOOP — Pennsylvania prosecutors were alerted to possible voting irregularities by one of MAGA's leading voices against voter fraud. A long paper trail shows Jack Posobiec has been living in Maryland but voting using his parents' PA address for years.

From @jsweetli.bsky.social, @slate.com + me:

Surreal moment for America. Needless to say, if the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run warrant checks — they would be sued into oblivion.

Yet ICE is going to get away with it entirely.

That's the definition of fascism from Robert Paxton, one of the preeminent historians of the subject, from his book ANATOMY OF FASCISM which came out more than two decades ago.

WOW. Remember this May video of a US citizen wrestled to the ground by ICE agents and detained for an hour despite having a valid REAL ID?

It gets worse. Two weeks later, ICE did it AGAIN — handcuffed him and detained him for 20 minutes despite his REAL ID. Now the Institute for Justice is suing.

In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists when unprovoked — what would we call it?

If federal agents marched down streets demanding papers — what would we say?

Authoritarianism — let’s not pretend it’s something else when it happens in our American cities.

David Cross folks.

Nothing to 👀 over on Twitter the right-wing Bots are out in full force trying to make Charlie Kirk a saint. Go figure

10 years of @volts.wtf in one tiktok

Headline from the New York Times, 1939: “Goebbels ends careers of five “Aryan“ actors who made witticisms about the Nazi regime.”

www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

a few days ago brian kilmeade said homeless people should be executed. jesse waters accused the left of trying to start a civil war. fox news spent years telling verifiable lies about dominion and the 2020 election.

canceling jimmy kimmel isn’t about an offensive line in a monologue. it’s about