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Tesla hit with $243 million in damages after jury finds its Autopilot feature contributed to fatal crash The verdict follows a three-week trial that threw a spotlight on how Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have marketed their driver-assistance software.

A hugely important verdict.

The victims were pedestrians, so Tesla can't argue they knew/accepted Autopilot's risks.

People walking, biking, and inside other cars didn't consent to be Elon Musk's guinea pigs.

Surest test for revealing YIMBY/Abundance ideology as laissez-faire, corporatist guise: asking views on AirBnb regulation.

To a man (and they’re overwhelmingly male), they oppose any meaningful reg.

Housing is foundation to their ideology but somehow one shortage cause always gets hand-waved away.

Exclusive: Google is indexing ChatGPT conversations, potentially exposing sensitive user data Thousands of shared ChatGPT chats are now appearing in Google search results.

Well this is bad. Google is indexing ChatGPT conversations exposing sensitive user data

I tried a few quick searches. I found someone's chat where I can see their api key

I found some building their resume. Their name, email and phone numbers are exposed.

www.fastcompany.com/91376687/goo...

Surely Phoebe Bridgers’ “Graceland Too” is also subtly a play on the Tragically Hip’s “Grace Too,” right?

Yelp is Screwing Over Restaurants By Quietly Replacing Their Phone Numbers The phone numbers add tracking before connecting to a restaurant so that Grubhub can bill for a marketing fee.

And don’t forget this one:

www.vice.com/en/article/y...

New details about police activity after lawmaker shootings raise questions about response The Minnesota Star Tribune found that Brooklyn Park police waited more than 60 minutes to enter the Hortman home and that several law enforcement agencies were unaware of the situation for hours.

They waited *more than an hour* to enter the Hortman home after watching Mark Hortman get shot in the doorway

Unbelievably tragic & heartbreaking

And, of course, they publicly congratulated themselves on a great, lifesaving police response when they’d let a lawmaker bleed out. Uvalde is everywhere

Reddit's relationship with Al is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into Al-generated search "Answers," and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit's vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person - or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They're getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real - and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere - are drifting into mutual suspicion. Huffman suggests that, just as Reddit was rewarded for offering an alternative to more baldly growth-and-ad-driven social media, it could serve a similar role in the post-ChatGPT world as a refuge for actual human interaction in a sea of generated text. "Social media made Reddit make more sense, and I think now that the web is kind of dying, sadly, that evolution helps Reddit make more sense," he says. "Reddit in that era is, Reddit is not social media. And now, we're entering this new era where Reddit is not AI."

It's a powerful pitch, to the extent it remains true. But it doesn't quite capture just how strange and risky Reddit's position is in 2025. Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing. Reddit is an alternative to a web that's harvested, polluted, and depleted by tech firms in a race to dominate Al. It's also an increasingly valuable data source for tech firms in a race to dominate AI. How long can it be both?

on reddit, the website at the end of the internet nymag.com/intelligence...

What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers.

One thing we’re going to see a *lot* of: Pieces that appear to explore an intellectually provocative question inspired by AI, but that assume a premise (in this case “friendship with a chatbot is possible”) that’s a) nonsensical and b) perfectly aligned with the aims of AI marketing

Pretty wild how "abundance" rides on centrist/center-left credentials but is rooted in right wing Technofascism.

List of co hosts and sponsors for Abundance 2025 conference identifying Stand Together as a sponsor. Full list available here: https://www.abundancedc.org/

Keynote speakers at Abundance 2025 including Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein, and Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah.

Stand Together, founded by Charles Koch? Well, it's sponsoring the Abundance 2025 conference this September.

Guess who's speaking there!

It's. Right. In. Front. Of. Us. In. The. Open.

RNC Sues New Jersey for Access to Voter Roll and Election Machine Records Read more here.

One of the most under reported stories in the legacy media is how many states the RNC and DOJ are suing right now to access their voter rolls. It is a frontal assault on democracy that Democracy Docket covers every day, while legacy media both-sides Trump. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Neguse: Only in Washington, D.C. could politicians come to the floor and brag about cutting $9 billion from rural radio stations while two weeks ago they voted to increase the deficit by $4 trillion. Spare us these lectures.

So much of our current, Silicon Valley-mediated dystopia is driven by oligarchs with very low media literacy.

It almost strains credulity that someone could watch Gattaca and think the depicted legal/economic/social order was something to *valorize*.

But these anti-social misreadings abound in SV.

really don't care if you disagree with me, i think constantly filming everything everywhere is bad, i think the widespread deployment of facial recognition is bad, i think the fact there are cameras everywhere inside of arenas & that increasingly you have to use your face to buy a hot dog is bad

a tweet from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong that reads: A white unmarked van pulled up to my house yesterday and dropped off a mysterious package. (I was out of town) My security team x-rayed it and it had a battery, wires, and cylinder inside. The Bomb Squad was called in to investigate. In the end they discovered it was a gift from the @theallinpod guys of their new tequila! A few thoughts: - Huge shout out to local law enforcement and the bomb squad for the rapid response, and keeping us safe. - Thank you to the besties for the awesome gift! (You can pick up your own bottle at their website) - I think I will be giving this bottle to my security team for keeping us safe every day.

imagine posting an L like this

Kristi Noem must resign now.

Why are colleges retaining sensitive applicant data for nearly 40 years?!

“NYU applicants’ personal details, including financial aid, ‘dating back to at least 1989,’ … in July 2023, someone posted records from the University of Minnesota dating to the 1980s,included 7M Social Security numbers”

Wish advocates for creator protections against AI firms acknowledged the role of many academics and think tanks in precipitating current situation. The BigTech-funded demise of SOPA/PIPA, the overwhelming amicus support for scraping in the HiQ Labs case, absurd theories of fair use - all got us here

I called it: attacks on public sector workers (esp in the federal gov't) are attacks on Black workers- especially Black women.

It’s notable that there was a burgeoning field studying this and then a group of Koch-funded social scientists and think tankers swooped in to call this phenomenon a big “moral panic” and worked to delegitimize the researchers studying it.

Imagine how much less natural gas Ireland would burn if it wasn’t a client state of tech companies and their energy-hungry data centers.

I think many of the fears are also that many advocates are sociopaths and revelling in successful regulatory capture.

Like, mainstream computing was a far bigger innovation, but the early computing pioneers didn't take joy in selling their product as a way to purposely render people unemployable

I’m just a tech critic, standing in front of other tech critics, asking them to please stop insisting that the AI hype bubble is totally gonna collapse any minute now.

Your confidence is making it harder for the rest of us. It may be what your audience wants to hear, but that doesn’t make it true.

The 99-1 vote to strip the AI moratorium provision is a *massive* rebuke to the forces for laissez-faire, and in particular David Sacks.

That even the original champions of the language - like Sen. Cruz - ultimately retreated is a signal that nobody wants to be seen as carrying water for AI giants.

The Senate is about to destroy clean energy to give tax cuts to billionaires The bill could pass within the next 24 hours.

The new Senate bill doesn’t just gut renewables. It includes massive giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.

It exempts oil and gas drillers from paying corporate taxes. It gives coal companies a tax credit for burning more coal.

It uses your tax dollars to subsidize climate destruction.

Senate GOP tax bill includes largest cut to U.S. safety net in decades The Senate Republican tax bill speeding to passage includes the biggest reduction of funding for the federal safety net since at least the 1990s.

www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

This is what they voted for.

UPDATE: Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill cuts nearly $1 TRILLION from Medicaid.

If only he had a way to vote in accordance with his stated beliefs!