Some Loser

"Forbes found contract records showing ICE purchased nearly $1 million worth of “cell site simulator vehicles” in May this year, indicating it’s taking the surveillance tool fully mobile. That was part of a contract first signed under the Biden administration in 2024."

Lea Ypi: How to think about surveillance A picture of her grandmother posted on social media sent the author to the archives of Albania’s former security services — and raised difficult questions about who watches us today

“Bizarrely, what once stood out as one of the most dehumanising aspects of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, namely their tendency to spy on their citizens, … is fully normalised, even celebrated, in societies that have made data-gathering a core aspect … of how their economies work.”

Hurricane Katrina Displaced a Generation — and Led to a Renaissance in Houston The survivors have left a lasting imprint on the city’s identity, launching businesses, revitalizing neighborhoods, and preserving a sense of home.

great story from my friend @moniquewelch.bsky.social about how Hurricane Katrina pushed Black New Orlenians into Houston - and helped start a cultural renaissance in Houston
capitalbnews.org/houston-katr...

The Democrats are not the only alternative. Stop limiting yourself to elections. It is a Lassallean dead end that has borne nothing but 150+years of setbacks and failures. Direct action is where your struggle lies, direct struggle against all forms of domination and hierarchy-especially the state.

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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What Sarah McBride Gets Wrong Congresswoman Sarah McBride recently interviewed with Ezra Klein at the New York Times, where she advocated for a more cowardly form of politics when it comes to transgender people.

1. On Tuesday, Congresswoman Sarah McBride gave a interview with Ezra Klein at the New York Times.

It has been used to seed the ground for a rightward shift in the Democratic Party on trans rights.

Some allies have failed to grasp the problems with her approach.

Here's what McBride gets wrong.

Shouldn’t the NY Times headline note that this new policy breaks the law?

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper. She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.

t.co/JXeTALBPds

anyway lots of people on here are trying to justify the actions of the "peacekeeper"/shooter while not asking themselves why the shooter initially lied about what happened if it was all so totally justifiable solely on the basis of the kid's appearance anyway

This bill law targets *students & staff* at universities. Outside groups like, say, the Ku Klux Klan can still hold a rally at UT at night. They can do whatever they want.

This is about subjugating the university community itself, while allowing ruling-party associated groups free rein.

When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus

“What the Apple paper shows, most fundamentally, regardless of how you define AGI, is that these LLMs that have generated so much hype are no substitute for good, well-specified conventional algorithms.”

I thought the lack of response to school shootings in the US, unlike the UK & Australia, was because of the adoration of the Second Amendment & the glorification of gun culture, ultimately rooted in the US's tumultuous history.

Seeing this, though: maybe it's just that the US hates children?

Memorial Day tomorrow

I want to be able to support choice in dying but I can’t because the ableism of people with power and our systems is just far too foundational and pervasive for helping people to die to be safe for people who actually want to live.

As many Disabled people predicted before we saw it in action.

hey LA pirate people, if you have a way to get to 936 seward and can save some of this stuff from getting destroyed via weather exposure there are film nerds all over the world who would love you forever

I built a utopian city, and as long as this tortured child stays in this basement, the people of Omelas get to live here!

Motion to remove gender from government ID altogether. It's none of their fucking business.

Really enjoying the stories about congressmen getting yelled at about DOGE shit in their town halls. Not because I feel like it's necessarily going to move things in the right direction in the next election cycle or two, really. I just like stories about congressmen getting yelled at I think.

Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole WASHINGTON—Saying his latest executive order was legal due to an “underutilized but totally feasible workaround,” President Trump claimed Tuesday that he could overrule the U.S. Constitution by means ...

Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole

Net neutrality is struck, ending a long battle to regulate ISPs like public utilities A U.S. Court of Appeals this week ruled that the FCC did not have legal authority to revive the so-called net neutrality rules that were first introduced a decade ago under the Obama Administration.

A U.S. Court of Appeals this week ruled that the FCC did not have legal authority to revive the so-called net neutrality rules that were first introduced a decade ago under the Obama Administration.

Every day should be payday and I should get paid what I do every 2 weeks every day instead.

It’s a string of characters that identifies posts on anonymous forums as coming from the same person (so basically a username).

talking about AI as a technological project doesn't work; not just that it doesn't sensitize us to features we're trying to grapple with; it's a dimension that's insufficient to capture what AI is & what we're talking about.

defining and tracing it as an ideological, political project works, though

We should be allowed to not consent to interacting with AI and AI personal assistants of any kind

like, they didnt even ask us for consent

and soon virtual agents (like, over the phone) will be almost indistinguishable from human agents

Its clear example of coersion

We werent even given a choice

"In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem."

It was kind of Meta to provide a demonstration of what I just wrote about.

open.substack.com/pub/theconvi...

Fuck Humble. And now is more important than ever to clear up the misconception with @bundleofholding.com. They have nothing to do with Humble and now absolutely are where you should be getting your RPG bundles from.

I don’t like to brag, but by twenty minutes or so into any Columbo episode, I have figured out who the killer is.

In the Miami airport. Oohh… Aahhh.

the year is 2034. there are thousands of specialty accounts on twitter. stair guy. smell doctor. cutlery gal. sports them. liquor baby. chef raccoon. finally, men can no longer post any photo without being criticized.