This is not an Overreaction

Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel.

“The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”

When you put it like this, a $75 million bribe to Melania and gutting the Washington Post seems like a small price to pay.

Palantir Pays Zero Federal Income Tax Despite Explosive Growth, Largely Due to Trump Tax Law Palantir reported $1.5 billion of U.S. income but paid exactly zero federal income tax in 2025. Despite explosive growth, tax breaks from the Trump tax law helped Palantir avoid paying even a dime of...

Palantir reported $1.5 billion of U.S. income but paid exactly zero federal income tax in 2025. Despite explosive growth, tax breaks from the Trump tax law helped Palantir avoid paying even a dime of federal income tax on its earnings. itep.org/palantir-pay...

Doctorow could have gone into these details; could have said something about the particular LLM he chose was built (whose data, trained how, how much data, what kind of further data work in RLHF); could have drawn a distinction about use cases.

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On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

In this context, I feel like reminding people (again) that the stochastic parrots paper was not primarily a response to synthetic text extruding machines (not at all popular in late 2020), but an exploration of the range harms that had already been documented in the pursuit of LM scale.

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Acting ethically in an imperfect world Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somew...

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.

@tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here:

tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...

A few further comments, 🧵>>

“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes. The Department of Homeland Security pushed out the revamped tool while it was still adding data. That led to widespread misidentification, particularly for citizens born outside the U.S.

A federal tool to identify noncitizens on voter rolls keeps making mistakes.

“This is not ready for prime time,” a county clerk in Missouri said. “And I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.”

Again, the courts can't save us & legislation from Congress can't save us because he doesn’t follow laws & neither of those things is designed to fix the problem of a Mad King doing rampant lawless & unconstitutional authoritarianism. There is only one solution & it requires 67 votes in the Senate.

Pope Leo Will Spend July 4 Visiting Migrant Crossing Island Pope Leo has spoken out against the treatment of migrants in the United States several times over the last year.

JD Vance personally invited Pope Leo to the U.S. 250th celebration on the 4th of July. Today the Vatican announced Leo will be spending the day with migrants instead.

Community meme: I CAN EXCUSE FASCISM. BUTI DRAW THE LINE AT MERCANTILISM.

The Supreme Court:

Trump Suffers Setback Unrelated To Child Rape

Trump Suffers Setback Unrelated To Child Rape

"Turns Out There Was Voter Fraud in Georgia—by Elon Musk
The state board of elections found Musk’s PAC sent prefilled ballot applications." newrepublic.com/post/206857/...

Meanwhile I’m nervously texting my campaign manager if I can use campaign funds for travel to the state Dem convention and trying to find the cheapest public transit.

There should be SEVERE penalties for misuse of campaign funds - it’s not your personal piggy bank. It’s a sacred trust.

They're quite literally pillaging the government.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court has come down in favor of money

The rules are pretty simple, Trump can do whatever he wants to minorities, immigrants, his political enemies etc. but he can't fuck with the money.

Omg that's so freaking soviet

We need to talk about the right’s new voter suppression target: Women The SAVE Act would make it harder for married women in particular to vote, and that is just one part of the MAGA right's misogynist project.

It is essential to take the threat to women’s voting rights posed by the SAVE Act within the wider context of coercive and misogynistic views on the right.

I wrote about it for @liberalcurrents.com

www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-t...

This is a crime.

If you read the Board of Peace charter, you understand it has nothing to do with the American government; it's a private entity Trump created for his own enrichment.

This is an impeachable offense, and if this country were not broken he would be gone by tomorrow.

After leaving WHO, Trump officials propose more expensive replacement to duplicate it HHS proposes spending $2 billion a year to re-create systems the U.S. accessed through the WHO at a fraction of the cost, according to officials briefed on the matter.

You pull out of a world class organization. Then replace w/ something that costs more. 🏷️ $2B/ yr of taxpayer $.

Presenting- ersatz WHO

Er·satz /ˈerˌsäts,ˈerˌzats/
adjective: ersatz (of a product) made/used as a substitute, typically an inferior one, for something else.

🧪 archive.today/oDhiR

This is the agency that is charged by law with preventing sexual assault in the workplace

We are not in a “let bygones be bygones for the good of the nation” world anymore

One of the things that personally drives me crazy in the U.S. is how youth sports/athletic activities went from a part of the public good (municipal leagues and fields! rec centers! public parks!) to a privatized, expensive, highly competitive, highly structured pursuit for wealthy kids’ résumés

It Looks Like The FBI Straight Up Lied To A Judge To Get Permission To Seize Georgia Voting Records

Earlier this month, the FBI decided it was going to help Donald Trump steal back the election he's claimed for half-a-decade was stolen from him. The state whose Secretary of State was asked…

he's stealing billions of dollars of taxpayer money for his personal slush fund

the most corrupt, criminal administration in history and despite how high a bar that is it isn't particularly close

A very detailed explanation of how FBI bamboozled a magistrate into authorizing a raid on Fulton County’s election offices by omitting critical information that would have totally undermined any probable cause claim. Pretty clear-cut case of calculated deception of the courts.

Trump is very underwater on immigration.

There is no reason for Dems to cave on ICE funding.

www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Every now and then I remember we kidnapped a foreign head of state and are holding him in a jail cell in Brooklyn.

A good thing about expressing our value commitments clearly, say ‘no kids in cages’ as opposed to just ‘this is outrageous,’ is it leads you to ask—where else might kids be caged.