Rae Hodge

Court Rules in AAUP v Rubio: Trump Admin Violated First Amendment The AAUP and partners sued to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members for ideological reasons.

Some good news:

“In a landmark ruling, a federal court today ruled that the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the First Amendment.”

www.aaup.org/news/court-r...

I can’t believe I’m watching interviews of city mayors talking about how they are coordinating with other mayors to discuss how to protect their residents FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

I know we are “used to it” but it is absolutely insane

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate Publishers with OpenAI licensing deals benefit from a ChatGPT clickthrough rate almost seven times higher than those without agreements.

Publishers with AI licensing deals have seven times the clickthrough rate

But only a select group of publishers have deals with the LLMs. pressgazette.co.uk/comment-anal...

BREAKING Taiwan says 'will not agree' to making 50% of its chips in US

A photo of protesters outside the Portland ICE facility, Saturday, Sept. 27, 2025, after President Donald Trump's earlier announcement that he will send troops to Portland, Ore., overlaid with the headline, "Ignoring Court Ruling, Trump Sends Troops to Portland to Break Imagined Antifa “Siege”" and the DEK, "Trump’s order to send the Oregon National Guard to Portland appeared to surprise Pentagon officials." (Samantha Swindler/The Oregonian via AP)

Trump has deployed roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States this year, according to exclusive figures provided to The Intercept by official military sources. interc.pt/3IMxHV7

Court Rules in AAUP v Rubio: Trump Admin Violated First Amendment The AAUP and partners sued to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members for ideological reasons.

Once again, it is *faculty*—not administrators—who brought this case and won. Including UC Faculty Association chapters of the AAUP.

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples' phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.

New from 404 Media: ICE to buy tool that tracks locations of hundreds of millions of phones every day. Billions of pieces of location data. ICE previously stopped using data remotely harvested from smartphones. Now it's buying it again. Usually used w/o warrant
www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

“If you call us fascists, we’re going to put you behind bars.”

‘He lied to us’: CBS News staffers say new owner David Ellison ‘can’t be trusted’ EXCLUSIVE: Multiple CBS News staffers said new owner David Ellison has broken his promise not to “politicize” the network by installing a Trump loyalist as ombudsman, and courting The Free Press found...

This is what CBS staffers have told me about the possibility of Bari Weiss taking over the newsroom:

One, she's not a journalist, as far as we're concerned. And two, the idea that she's going to carry some sort of editorial stick for us is hard to swallow.”

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Government shutdown begins as nation faces new period of uncertainty The government shutdown has begun. And it’s plunging the U.S. into a fresh cycle of uncertainty. President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to keep government programs and services running by Wednesday’s deadline.

The U.S. federal government shutdown begins as a lapse in funds brings fresh uncertainty for the country.

GOOD NEWS! Researchers at the University of Florida have developed a UNIVERSAL vaccine that dramatically BOOSTS the immune system’s ability to fight tumors- even WITHOUT targeting a SPECIFIC cancer type. It has the potential to do away with chemotherapy, surgery AND radiation treatment.

The lack of logic here is dizzying. Handing my personal data to a third party who may or may not secure it properly has zero impact on "keeping a child safe".

"What Are You Playing?" from the September 2002 issue of Computer Games. Ben Affleck (actor, The Sum of All Fears) says, "Right now, I'm a beta tester for WarCraft III, which is a pretty good game. I've played all the StarCraft and WarCraft games. Grand Theft Auto is pretty good. The game that just came out for the Spider-Man movie, that's good."

Wait, Ben Affleck was a beta tester for Warcraft III?

Source: Computer Games, September 2002.

High Treason, by Jose Emilio Pacheco (about Mexico, but the sentiment extends)

Cloudflare’s CEO has shared that Google is sending 3x less traffic to publishers relating to how much it crawls their sites compared to 6 months ago.

But it’s better than OpenAI and Anthropic who send 40x and 1000x fewer users per page crawled than Google.

Colorful quilt of a nighttime scene with Harriet Tubman in an orange jacket and purple dress carrying a rifle. She is leading other figures who walk behind her.

Harriet Tubman #quilt by my Mom, Vera P. Hall, who makes quilts celebrating Black people who fought for their own freedom. This seems to be the crowd favorite of the “We Didn’t Wait for Freedom” series. Happy #Juneteenth #quilting

Just saying that if I lived anywhere near launch sites where space x rockets kept exploding, I’d start to worry what chemicals I was breathing in everytime one of these was incinerated.

The last few months have been the most impactful by 404 Media yet. Stopping ICE data access; triggering changes at AI companies, more. We continue to be the most impactful tech outlet on the internet, and our subscribers let us do this work. Here are some of those recent examples:

Rear view of a brown wild rabbit in a green hedge row

I know everything is happening too much right now but here is a plump lil wild bun in the hedge at my cousin's and she seems happy

Guardian headline saying, "‘It’s terrifying’: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user’s number Chatbot tries to change subject after serving up unrelated user’s mobile to man asking for rail firm helpline"

'Meredith,' some guys ask, 'why won't you shove AI into Signal?'

Because we love privacy, and we love you, and this shit is predictable and unacceptable. Use Signal ❤️

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

File photo shows people taking part in the LGBTQIA+ Pride Parade in Budapest on July 23, 2022

Hungarian police on Thursday banned the country's main Pride march from taking place in Budapest on June 28 but the capital's mayor vowed to hold it despite the decision ➡️ u.afp.com/SNjY

WINNER!

Headline: Kentucky Derby Winner. "Sovereignty outran Journalism."

"Sovereignty Outran Journalism." What an apt and disturbing metaphor for current events.

LOL

Using a vape after 20 yrs of Camels

Bringing my baseball glove to the movies next time since they want me to catch a charge so bad