James Vincent

Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends

cf the recent NYT piece on how Sacks and his allies are benefiting financially from his influence. i guess you could say lobbyists have always written policy to some degree, but usually they do so from outside the White House www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/t...

the trump executive order limiting states' rights to regulate AI really does make David Sacks judge, jury, and executioner. one of the prime mechanisms of the EO, limiting access to federal funding, rests on evaluations made "in consultation" with Sacks. not subtle www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

replied to the email, thanks dee!

I’M LOSING MY SHIT THIS IS SO FUNNY

The Third Reich of Dreams by Charlotte Beradt

In the following months, but still before the race laws went into effect (though they did not apply to this woman in any case), she had a number of long, epic dreams on the theme of noses and identity papers, furnished with numerous elaborate and sometimes realistic details. As in many modern stories, only the starting point of the dream narrative would be unreal. Another dream about papers: Relaxed and peaceful family outing. We were at a restau-rant with outdoor tables by the Havel River. Mother and I were carrying some cake in a box and a folder with our genealogy papers. Suddenly there was a scream: They're coming! Everyone there knew who "they" were and what our crime was. Run, run away! I went looking for a high-up hiding place-up in the trees? on top of a cupboard in the restaurant? Suddenly I was lying at the bottom of a big pile of dead bodies, I didn't know how they got there, but at last I'd found a good hiding place. Pure bliss, a sense of salvation, under the pile of corpses with my folder of pa-pers under my arm.

Flew through this book last night in one sitting. It's a collection of German people's dreams during the rise of Hitler in the 30s, collected by a Jewish communist journalist who fled the country in 1939.

missed this last week: trains in Lancaster were cancelled after AI-generated images of a bridge collapse were shared on social media following a real earthquake. god, we're really not ready to resist an engagement-driven online ecosystem empowered by AI fakes www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

AI-generated image of a box for a Lemsip branded vape that helps with blocked or runny noses, etc

dreaming of a vape that makes you feel better

ChatGPT spurred a 56-year-old man to kill his mother, lawsuit says A new lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that ChatGPT encouraged a man’s delusional thinking, leading him to kill his 83-year-old mother and take his own life.

The first lawsuit against OpenAI that claims ChatGPT led to a murder www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Yes and no! That’s definitely the biggest reason, but you’ll find experts who disagree (Rodney brooks for example). I do think the psychological allure of recreating humanity motivates ppl in the industry too; plus, because it increases our perception of a robots utility, it helps attract investment

Agree, and would add that stuff like hazardous remote work is too small a market to be of interest to big startups. They’re aiming for the biggest possible commercial applications because that is how you get big funding rounds. If the tech succeeds, I imagine it will be adopted for worthier causes

So, you usually kill the tracking connection between humans robot before degloving and taking the headset off, as that counts as a sharp movement outside the proper envelope of operations. Yes it may sound wild to have such an obvious failure mode but this tech is still experimental

Each set up will be slightly different but from my experience: the operator wears gloves and headset with movements mapped to the robots hands and head. There is an envelope of safe operation within which you can move (usually quite gently). Sharp movements outside that envelope topple the bot.

hah, brilliant - had forgotten that little riff! perfectly forewarned from pratchett

if you want an overview of where humanoid robots are at right now — what's hype and what's real — then check out my long read for @harpers.bsky.social. here's me teleopping a humanoid, and yes i was told MANY times "do not take off the headset until you've disconnected"

harpers.org/archive/2025...

it's also such a perfect gesture to symbolize resignation, "i'm out," etc, I bet it gets adopted by humans. kids miming taking their headset off when particularly exasperated, occasionally falling over for extra emphasis

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

I’ve yet to read a review of this book that treats it as it seems to want to be: a lyrical, imagistic memoir of power and sex in US politics. I’m sure it mostly fails at that, but I’ve seen some oddly compelling quotations. Narcissistic? Sure. A journalistic failure? That too. But what else?

Unironically a good line bsky.app/profile/nikk...

Yeah big agree, I always put it in my instant now

I’m right there with him tbh; I love a butter bean stew or a good daal

Women’s Institute will no longer accept trans women as members from April Exclusive: CEO says decision taken with ‘utmost regret and sadness’ after supreme court ruling on definition of a woman

profoundly sad www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Yes, I still embrace it also, but it’s trying to reduce intake during the day as if it were always a spur to thought (rather than an accelerant that usually pushes one through thought into the wild reaches of mania)

bsky.app/profile/jjvi...

yes, I mean, I still start the day with the equivalent of two double espresso (a 4 cup moka pot) but I maintain that’s only to get the engine started

glennovision? (I would keep it myself in honor of the great man)

❤️❤️ I love to shoehorn that stuff in

nice nice nice! Thanks sean :) hope you enjoyed it

my central hypothesis is that this is also true for humans

with many thanks to my incredible editor Matthew Sherrill, to patient fact-checker Maya Perry, and to the Tarbell Center (www.tarbellcenter.org) for their financial support

Kicking Robots, by James Vincent Humanoids and the tech-­industry hype machine

i wrote about humanoid robots - both the hype and the very real progress being made in this sector - for @harpers.bsky.social. read all about it here: harpers.org/archive/2025...