Ian Hetzner

"Dr. Eric Rubin, the journal's editor in chief, said he hadn’t thought about the possibility that chatbots might be writing letters until he heard about Dr. Chaccour’s experience. There’s a reason authors might turn to A.I., Dr. Rubin noted in an interview. Letters to the editor published in scientific journals are listed in databases that also list journal articles, and Dr. Rubin said that “they count as much as an article.” “For doing a very small amount of work, someone can get an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on their C.V.,” he said."

seems bad

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/s...

almost made a joke last night about khan/mamdani 2028 lfg

Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg New Jersey and Virginia have chosen well by electing @MikieSherrill and @SpanbergerForVA as their next governors! They are proven leaders who won by focusing on what matters most - how politics and policy can make everyday life better and more affordable.

Focus group behind two-way glass. Pete watches as the moderator asks, "Would it upset you if someone congratulated Mamdani in a tweet?"

FBI Warns of Criminals Posing as ICE, Urges Agents to ID Themselves In a bulletin to law enforcement agencies, the FBI said criminal impersonators are exploiting ICE’s image and urged nationwide coordination to distinguish real operations from fakes.

New: The FBI is quietly urging ICE agents to properly ID themselves in the field.

In a bulletin to law enforcement last month, it warned of criminals posing as ICE to rob, rape, kidnap—a problem it says now demands national coordination to confront.

By me & @carolinehaskins.bsky.social:

"That means dominant tech companies are now helping to steer what an entire generation of students learn about A.I., and how they use it — with little rigorous evidence of educational benefits and mounting concerns that chatbots are spreading misinformation and eroding critical thinking."

california is not going to save us
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/t...

Ms. Jacobs said Pentagon officials said they needed to prove only that the targeted people were connected to designated terrorist organizations, even if the connection is "as much as three hops away from a known member" of a designated terrorist organization. The people who have survived the strikes have been sent to other countries and released. None have been taken into American custody.

A friend of a friend of a friend of a guy they claim is associated with drug trafficking based on “fuck you because we said so.”

Elon Musk's Grokipedia loves Ken Paxton and Texas secession According to Grokipedia, an enslaved man who was at the Alamo is referred to as a "personal servant."

NEW: I scanned dozens of Grokipedia pages related to Texas. What I found were entries that downplayed slavery and promoted Texas secession, as well as an entry on the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting that said Great Replacement theory may be backed up by "empirical data." www.chron.com/culture/arti...

Cover of Ross MacDonald "The Chill"

"we drove toward reno, a city where nothing good had ever happened to me but i kept hoping" lolol rereading the chill ross macdonald is the goat

the rural casket

the remembrancer

going through an excel file of microfilm holdings and "the inter-state tattler" might be the best newspaper name i've ever seen

Voice AI in Hiring Is Changing How Teams Are Built Mappa uses voice AI to analyze speech patterns and predict team fit, redefining how companies hire with behavioral intelligence.

“The startup decodes how people speak to understand how they think, decide, and collaborate. By analyzing more than 30 vocal signals—from tone and pace to word choice—Mappa predicts compatibility and performance with striking accuracy.”

No the fuck it doesn’t.

This is an especially worrying statement when facial recognition can be inaccurate, biased, and generally make mistakes. Basing whether someone should be in the US or not, and ignoring physical media like a birth certificate, is ripe for disaster bsky.app/profile/jose...

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Your periodic reminder that there is a bipartisan bill being advanced that will make it exceedingly easy to avoid paying taxes on profits from crypto, and that many Dems support it.

The Trump family’s crypto income is now approaching and could even exceed $1 billion. A big piece of that business came via crypto wallets likely held by foreign investors, a Reuters investigation finds.
reut.rs/48LStPt

Last week, I wrote about Doublespeed, essentially a click farm that sells “synthetic influencers” to astroturf whatever product or service you want across social media, despite it being a clear violation of every social media platform's policy on inauthentic behavior. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. a16z’s Speedrun is also backing: Creed: An AI company “rooted in Christian Values” which produces Lenny, a “Bible-based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words, scripture-inspired guidance, and a listening ear whenever you need it.” Zingroll: The “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” which is another way of saying it’s a Netflix populated exclusively with AI Slop. Vega: which is building “AI-powered social orbits.” What does that mean? Not entirely clear, but the company has produced one of the most beautiful Mad Libs paragraphs I’ve ever seen: “We’re building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw, human-written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning, powering the most annotated social graph ever created.” Moona Health: an AI-powered Sleep care app the company says is covered by insurance. “Our AI-powered platform automates insurance claims and scheduling and analyzes sleep data – providing personalized session guidelines to therapists,” Moona says. Jooba: “The world’s first autonomous recruiting firm.” Margin: “The World’s first AI powered credit card.” Margin says “Customers earn points, with dynamic rewards that adapt to their preferences in real time.” First Voyage: A wellness app that gives you AI “mythological pets that turn wellness into play.” Axon Capital: billed as “DeepMind for Finance,” Axon says it has “pioneered brain-inspired, low-latency AI for financial markets.”

This is so bleak:

www.404media.co/a16z-is-fund...

to win elections the democrats need to shift even more right than the republicans. that way they can capture moderates and conservatives. and the left should still vote for the democrats

If the Democratic party had any fight or sense in them they'd be organizing huge and politicized food drives

AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All I talked to the scholars who literally wrote the book on tech bubbles—and applied their test.

There's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles.

Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. How corrosive it is that public figures are--more and more shamelessly--ripping the copper wiring out of the walls. Integrity is for suckers. Abusing power is fun. Caring about anything bigger than yourself is lame. An elite class of evil toddlers

I continue to think that one of the reasons this country is falling apart is the wholesale abandonment of public virtue as a broadly shared aspiration. Or even something people should be embarrassed about if they don’t have it.

a photograph of the interior of a church. Several people are visible sitting in pews. In the pew immediately in front of the photographer, a black human-sized cardboard cutout in the outline of a woman is visible, as though a shadow is sitting in the pew in front of you.

Went to a prayer service tonight at St. Mary of the Lake, where they have cardboard cutouts throughout the church representing parishioners afraid to come to Mass because of ICE.

really any of the lew archer books but the chill and the galton case are the ones that come to mind first

his understanding of the true sickness of california society types is deeper than either of his more oft-quoted brothers

i will never stop saying that the true order of classic cali detective novelists is macdonald > hammett > chandler

every day leaders of the new tech frontier are spending billions of dollars to digitally reconstruct the mind of george zimmerman

Opinion | Teapot Dome. Watergate. They’re Nothing Compared With This.

"We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

@jacobsilverman.com on the shocking scale of Trump’s crypto corruption

It’s a system where foreign actors know “it is in your direct political interest to buy Mr. Trump’s tokens or invest” in his crypto scams.

gift link
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/o...