A reminder that garbage people run the government.

Oh and is this the boyfriend she gave the handie to in the theater full of little kids who went to see Harry Potter?

Printed satirical paper with the headline "Archaeologists: DC Capitol May Have Once Been Used for Legislating."

My first print issue of @theonion.com arrived today. It did not disappoint.

Support real journalism especially if it's satire. Support the humans who make it.

It’s weird to assume that certain people *need* exposure to people who disagree with them, as if I could go a day in my life w/o encountering that shit and that my actual survival doesn’t depend on knowing what assholes think.

🖕🖕

Cool cool cool. Glad this post is pinned so everyone can find it today since @teenvogue.com just fired all their political journalists. Head on over, leave a comment or an emoji.

Keep it classy, you knee-bending wankers. 🖕🖕

arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' Papers Cornell University’s academic paper repository will no longer accept Computer Science papers still under review.

facing a rising tide of AI slop, arXiv is putting its foot down

Wonder the story will be when Bari Weiss is not profitable but they need to spin that she is.

ICYMI: DHS is seeking to collect state driver's license data as it takes on an unprecedented expansion of a system that used to just contain info on immigrants but now has info on hundreds of millions of Americans, including SSNs. Via me &
@zachdespart.bsky.social @propublica.org @texastribune.org

NYMag blew up its story about ICE's increased presence at 26 Federal Plaza, and pasted it on a wall a few blocks away on Broadway

Google Chrome's internet supremacy faces major threats Competitors are capitalizing on privacy and safety concerns to urge users to migrate to their in-home browsers from Google Chrome.

"Google Chrome has failed to provide key privacy protections that other browsers offer," EFF’s Lena Cohen told @Newsweek.com; awareness of online tracking’s dangers “has led many consumers to switch to privacy-focused browsers, like Firefox and DuckDuckGo.” www.newsweek.com/google-chro...

Cambridge is the kingdoms of NIMBY libs.

Briefing: Grokipedia applies a right-wing filter to Wikipedia Plus: an easy way to search for objects within a video and a new web reconnaissance tool

"The question is whether Grokipedia can succeed not as an alternative to Wikipedia but as a means to delegitimize it. 'Flooding the zone with shit' ... doesn’t necessarily seek to replace institutions of collective knowledge generation; it seeks to deface them."

indicator.media/p/grokipedia...

TARA JAYE FRANK, on the Department of Labor’s rebranding of America’s workforce:

.. a “total erasure of Black and brown people, and the removal of women as equal contributors to the economy.”

@tarajayefrank.bsky.social
@nancylevinestearns.bsky.social
www.linkedin.com/posts/taraja...

a huge part of the gen ai project is to create the mythic past that is central to the fascist narrative: the non-existent golden age that needs to be restored and the supposed fallen present that must be overturned. if these things are lies then reality itself must be altered to make them true

True facts.

Cuz you want your fridge to just fridge, not to play ads as you make a snack. You want to be reassured when checking all the oven knobs four times before you leave your house that they are off and won't suddenly turn back on. You don't want your fucking toaster to spy on you.

Time to do cars next.

Vote them all out.

someone pointed me to a paper at AIES this year that introduces the term "street-level AI" and asks whether LLMs can make real-world judgments. surprisingly it doesn't cite my paper ("street-level algorithms") speaking to similar questions this paper tries to address... from 2019

We are probably two months away from the biz insider article “ my entire family were shot by a Palantir robot but here’s why it was better than healthcare”

They literally ruin everything they touch

US lawmaker presses Amazon to drop facial recognition plan for Ring | Biometric Update Markey warned that combining facial recognition with Ring’s existing systems could create a new layer of surveillance that extends well beyond individual homes.

“Whether Amazon complies with Markey’s request or proceeds with its December rollout may determine the next major flashpoint in the national fight over privacy and surveillance.”

AI browsers are here, and they're already being hacked Hackers can target AI browsers with prompts hidden in websites.

Say what you want, but these companies’ commitment to releasing half baked, insecure, or just plain dangerous products is something to behold.

🤮🤮

The Return of the Luddites | Los Angeles Review of Books Erik J. Larson considers “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

"The AI Con reminds us that the fight over AI is not only about technology. It’s also about language, labor, and the stories we choose to tell about the future, which we can humanize rather than surrender to the myriad ways mass automation dehumanizes."

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

New York’s Golden Handcuffs: Why the City Has a Special Hold on the Rich Don’t bet on a millionaire exodus if Mamdani wins the mayorship.

This was a fun one: Ben Steverman & I took a close look at the class of wealthy New Yorkers threatening to leave if Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor and found that they are actually stuck here www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Reminder to vote! Local elections affect schools, infrastructure, housing and whether your town is a garbage place or not. Please be nice to your poll workers, it's a long day for them. Tip your pole workers because sex work is work. But don't tip your poll worker cuz they can't take money. #vote

Got an email about a workshop at work entitled "AI in the Classroom: What’s Possible, What’s Ethical, What’s Next?"

afaic, the only acceptable answers to those questions are, respectively: Not much of substance, nothing short of total abstinence, and probably putting a fucking bullet in my brain

UPS with its unionized workforce is hiring more gig workers. Wonder why? How about the pressure from Amazon that directly hires no one. We discuss that below. www.wsj.com/business/log...

the amount of academic research now using llms in research (synthetic data generation, to classify, annotate, or analyse large scale data, etc) is astounding. remember, just cus use of llms in research is becoming normalised does NOT erase the fact it degrades the research & undermine your results

Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we be worried? - BBC News The debate is ramping up about what happens if - or when - computer intelligence overtakes humans

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

BBC tech journalism has long been disappointing, but one might expect the tech EDITOR to mention TESCREAL, DAIR, @timnitgebru.bsky.social
or the work of @wolvendamien.bsky.social. I’d say we should be worried about the BBC journalists writing daily fail level slop.