Pat O'Connell

it's crazy how we just take for granted now that the president is a deranged racist

the left very clearly views support for mamdani as a litmus test - does party loyalty run both ways?

Like, historically, the unthinking mass adoption of surveillance technology by authoritarians does not end WELL for disabled people and other vulnerable groups

speaking as a neurodivergent weirdo myself, I am not sanguine about the future of my fellow Weird Little Guys in a totally AI-saturated professional world that's dedicated to sanding off every single human variation

everyone talks about what they’ll do “when fascism is here” and i think it’s just safe to say we are in a fascist regime right now

Ooof. This is a regional dealer-financing lender specializing in subprime loans, which is always the canary in the coal mine for issues.

How will Trump’s attacks affect higher education?

Let’s look to history

Germany's universities were the world's premier research institutions

Hitler destroyed them

How long did they take to recover?

They haven’t

No quality cybersecurity leader is going to risk taking a senior role at CISA at this point.

I think this is being seriously under reported right now due to a lack of actual reporters.
The rain totals I'm seeing are LARGE. Over 10 inches in areas.
Wisconsin's turn at the disaster funding roulette.

This #Brewers win is even cooler when you realize they did it with the highway adjacent to the stadium looking like a zombie apocalypse.

Zohran should propose “Cuomo’s Law”, a law that bars sex offenders from being mayor of New York City

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

No question about it, this is absolutely it.

I was thinking of client red flags: the things that, if a potential client does them, I start out suspicious and on my guard. Some of these are about honesty, some are about narcissism and personality, some are about capacity to take legal advice.

Here we go:

/1

Pritzker: "It's cheating. Donald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he's trying to cheat the American people out of their votes."

This is an example where the problem is not so much the capabilities of LLMs as it is the fact that we have independently normalized a widespread culture of acceptable lying

It’s time to wake up - we are literally on the verge of losing our democracy if Donald Trump cheats his way to those seats in Texas.

Diabetes patient produces own insulin after gene-edited cell transplant – without anti-rejection drugs In December 2024, a 42-year-old Swedish man with type 1 diabetes received 17 injections of donated islet cells. They had been genetically modified via CRISPR to avoid...

Type 1 finally in the news for good things

www.techspot.com/news/109001-...

Meanwhile, here in Maine, AI crawlers have rendered the server that manages our statewide interlibrary loan unreachable by legitimate attempts to pass through requests/information

Again, but louder: the server can’t be reached by libraries and the folks trying to use them BECAUSE OF AI CRAWLERS.

Dial-up Internet to be discontinued AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued. This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit MyAccount.

So apparently we are within the last 60 days of dial-up AOL being a thing.

help.aol.com/articles/dia...

ht @mat.tl

I think the technical term is "current events"

Thread up and down, but especially this! I spend a truly inordinate amount of time emailing researchers and asking them for copies of the full paper based on abstracts. They're usually happy to help, but it's so much time wasted!

The murder of America's world-best higher education sector--a leading export good of the US economy--continues under this lawless autocratic regime, and gets worse

Direct action doesn't always mean punching a Nazi.

Direct action can be as simple as seeing post for a $90K per year ICE job with a signing bonus.

Submit an application.

Go through all of the screening & interview process.

Do a background check.

Get hired.

Then just don't show up.

#AbolishICE

A few years ago, I began a training series as a way to encourage year-round organizing efforts for candidates and local political parties. Did you know the @ctdems.bsky.social keeps an online library of all the trainings? It’s over 24 hours of total streaming content: ctdems.org/training

Don’t get salt water on the statue. Google “bronze disease.” It would be really bad if this statue got bronze disease. Salt water causes bronze disease so be careful.

remember that time bill clinton said hello to loretta lynch at an airport?

OpenAI and Anthropic, And The Impossible Road Ahead So, as a reminder, OpenAI appears to have burned at least ten billion dollars in the last two months. It is has just raised another $8.3 billion dollars (after raising $10 billion in June according to the New York Times), and intends to receive around $22.5 billion by the end of year from SoftBank, and that is assuming it becomes a for-profit entity by the end of the year, and if that doesn’t happen, the round gets cut to $20 billion total, meaning that SoftBank would only be on the hook for a further $1.7 billion. I am repeating myself, but I need you to really get this: OpenAI just got $10 billion in June 2025, and had to raise another $8.3 billion in August 2025. That is an unbelievable cash burn, one dwarfing any startup in history, rivalled only by xAI, makers of “Grok, the racist LLM,” losing it over $1 billion a month. I should be clear that if OpenAI does not convert to a for-profit, there is no path forward. To continue raising capital, OpenAI must have the promise of an IPO. It must go public, because at a valuation of $300 billion, OpenAI can no longer be acquired, because nobody has that much money and, if let’s be real, nobody actually believes OpenAI is worth that much. The only way to prove that anybody does is to take OpenAI public, and that will be impossible if it cannot convert. And, ironically, Softbank’s large and late-stage participation makes any exit harder, as early investors will see their holdings diluted as a percentage of total equity — or whatever the hell we’re calling it. While a normal company could just issue equity, and deal with the dilution that way, OpenAI’s structure necessitates a negotiation where companies can obstruct the entire process if they see fit.

Speaking of companies that might obstruct that transition, let’s talk about Microsoft. As I asked in my premium newsletter a few weeks ago, what if Microsoft doesn’t want OpenAI to convert? It owns all the IP, it owns access to all OpenAI’s research, and already runs most of its infrastructure. While — assuming a best-case scenario — that it would end up owning a massive chunk of the biggest tech startup of all time (I’m talking about equity, not OpenAI’s current profit-sharing units), Microsoft might also believe that it stands more to gain by letting AI die and assuming its role in the AI ecosystem. Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. But let’s assume it converts, and OpenAI now…has to continue raising money at a rate that will require it, allegedly, to only need to raise $17 billion in 2027. That number doesn’t make sense, considering it already had to bring forward its $8.3 billion fundraise by at least three months, but let’s stick with that idea. OpenAI believes it will be profitable, somehow, by 2030, and even if we assume that, that means it intends to burn over a hundred billion dollars to get there. Is the plan to take OpenAI public, dumping a toxic asset onto the public markets, only to let it flounder and convulse and die for all to see? Can you imagine OpenAI’s S-1? How well do you think this company would handle a true financial audit from a major accounting firm? If you want to know what that looks like, google “WeWork,” which went from tech industry darling to joke in a matter of days, in part because it was forced to disclose how bad things actually were on its S-1. No, really, read this article. With that in mind, I feel similarly about Anthropic. Nobody is buying this company at $170 billion, and thus the only way to access liquidity would be to take it public, and show the world how a company that made $72 million in January 2025 and then more than $400 million in July 2025 also loses $3 billion or more after revenue, and then let the market …

Anthropic ($170bn) and OpenAI ($300bn+) are now in impossible situations, burning billions of dollars with no end in sight on toxic infrastructure-dependent business models. They cannot IPO. They are too big to be acquired. How does this end, exactly?
www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/

Miss United States Files Restraining Order Against GOP Rep. Cory Mills Lindsey Langston reported the Florida Republican to law enforcement for harassment last month.

Rep. Cory Mills is a complete personal trainwreck. Yikes.

This is real I shit you not