Mike Lissner

I’m not sure these ads are to their benefit though.

I was blaming users for this, but this post is compelling. OpenAI is at a scale where this kind of thing can’t fly.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

never forget this conversation between President Johnson and his tailor

Changing Directions - Jacob Kaplan-Moss <p>I have two important announcements:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I&rsquo;m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully &ldquo;for good&rdquo;; if not, at least &ldquo;for now&rdquo;.</p> </li> <li> <p>As such, the co...

Reading @jacobian.org 's exit from tech rings a bell. We love computers but we hate the tech industry. We love space but we dread the space industry. We love music but we loathe the record industry.

We can have nice things, just not under capitalism.

(OTOH, excited for him ❤️)

JUST IN: Senate confirms Jeanine Pirro as US Atty for DC, 50-45

Philz Coffee close to closing deal to sell to private equity firm for $145 million Employee stocks will be canceled as part of the deal; former employees point to culture change across Philz Coffee.

S.F. cult favorite chain Philz Coffee is on the verge of closing a deal to sell to a private equity firm for $145 million.

But the deal cancels all stocks, leaving employees empty-handed.

missionlocal.org/2025/07/phil...

Firing the BLS Commissioner — the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality — is an authoritarian four alarm fire.

It will also backfire: You can't bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.

More attention here please.

The massive list of suspended UCLA grants came out today: 300 NSF and 500 NIH grants. I am miraculously not on the list, but this is devastating. Science will be lost, progress will be frozen, people will lose jobs, and careers in science and medicine are being destroyed. This is not ok.

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premier techno-superpower may be over.

"Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler... But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: 'This is an unparalleled destruction from within.'"

This is moving.

Kamala Harris feels the pain we feel. Not just from her loss, but from the trauma and abuse our country is living through.

What could have been…

Economy Updates: After a Weak Jobs Report, Trump Fires That Agency’s Commissioner Hours after data showed cracks in the U.S. economy, President Trump said without evidence that Erika McEntarfer “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a bad jobs report undermines government integrity and sends a chilling message to federal employees: tell POTUS what he wants to hear or else.
www.nytimes.com/live/2025/07...

May our time on Reddit not be embarrassing. Let's see how this goes....

I could see it being useful to yourself, actually. Say you have a lengthy conversation with an LLM where you figure out something you think might be useful to your future self or to somebody else. Send it to Google and find it later! Seems useful, actually.

I haven’t gone looking (too late?) but I imagine some are just fantasy and most don’t contain PII? It does remind me of the AOL search log release though (but everything does): en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_sea...

Hey judges, remember that time you said that thing in court and made that erudite point so well? Good news.

The Box — The World's First Anti-Deepfake Wearable Feel safe in public again. Our elegant, full-size wearable has you covered.

The world’s first anti-deepfake wearable is here👀

Created by #MozillaFellow @louisbarclay.bsky.social The Box is elegant, innovative & most importantly...100% fake 🙃 (at least for now)

Louis’ dystopian satire is a reminder of what happens when we let adult deepfakes run wild ⤵️ wearthebox.com

Still thinking about yesterday’s launch. What’s fun about it is that the major pieces were in place for years. We’ve had search, alerts, and custom podcasts forever. The only new piece is extracting the audio. I guess that’s the part that matters!

If you click through, this was an opt in feature. People were choosing to put stuff in search engines.

Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death A city traffic engineer credits the success to lower speed limits and smarter design.

HUGE NEWS FROM HELSINKI, FINLAND

Helsinki, a city of 690 000 people, has now had a full year without any traffic fatalities. None. No pedestrian, cyclist, scooter user or car deaths.

This is a huge achievement for a city of our size. 💪🏻

A little background 🧵 1/

yle.fi/a/74-20174831

Politicians seek safety from the gun crisis they created while the rest of us live in the thick of it.

I know this feature is really cool. The question is: Does anybody else realize how cool it is?

Nobody has ever thought about making a custom podcast for things said in court before. Now you can.

In 2016, when I first started working on this, Google gave FLP $10k of credits to use their speech-to-text API. The quality was so bad, we didn't move forward. But the new tools from OpenAI are amazing and do a very good job.

The headline here is: "Get an email when a keyword is said in court."

I’m tempted to hire these folks, but I haven’t figured out how to find them. Seems like they have to find you. I also wonder about the kinds of crimes they’re in for and how that would actually feel in practice, working with such people. Imagine if this caught on.

This will bring recidivism to zero. The employer can even provide most regular benefits. Imagine leaving prison with half a million dollars.

In Maine there is a new program for prisoners to get regular remote jobs. It’s *fascinating*. The employer pays a regular wage and accepts things like lock down. The prisoner pays their room and board. www.maine.gov/corrections/...

When the prisoner goes free, they keep the job they already have.

Just gotta unlock the “convince the maintainer to merge” superpower. 🤞

I’m maybe a dozen years into Celsius, 24h time and kilometers, but I never get comfortable.

This is an unprecedented time for the courts and we are proud to support the many litigation trackers that are emerging.