park it in the Strait of Hormuz you cowards

military concepts like “standoff” and “beyond visual range” were invented by woke Marxist generals who were afraid of getting their hands dirty

the Ford is a gigantic ship, Iran only has small wittle boats. they’ll definitely run away and be scared of it.

to some extent, this is “yeah, everyone knows they’ve given arrest quotas, and told to use bullshit AI apps that fabricate arrest reasons” - but it’s still important, for the historical record if nothing else, to have contemporaneous, under-oath statements about it.

In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day.

…

JB testified that officers had started the day by surveilling an apartment complex. He suggested officers choose the location in part based on intelligence from an app called Elite. It’s unclear the exact role Elite played in identifying the area as a target – another officer testified that the ICE field office in Portland had provided “intelligence” that led them to visit the site. But JB explained that Elite was a “newer app” given to ICE agents. The app, he said, is “kind of like Google Maps” and shows how many individuals with an “immigration nexus” are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a “nexus” could mean any history of contact with immigration officials, which could include a naturalized US citizen.

yep, absolutely. this reeks of desperation and an overly-rushed attempt at ratfucking Kat.

this only made the news because one person (Amanda Informed) got sent the offer, and decided to tell a journalist about it rather than simply accept or decline it.

the lesson that they’re going to take from this is not “don’t use influencers to ratfuck candidates” it’s “be more cautious about which influencers you try to recruit”

someone who is likely LGBTQ

…

this likely trans girl

oh hell no cut this shit out right now.

the person in these ads has, AFAICT, not said anything about their gender or sexuality.

this is a random person in an ad you saw on the internet. speculating about what genitals they were born with, or who they like to fuck, is fucking creepy. don’t do it.

(and no, there is no “oh, but if my speculation were true it’d be a heartwarming story” exception)

But, damn, some times you gotta look for a little light.

yeah shit sucks right now, but that’s a reason why we need more critical thinking, not less of it.

falling for, and spreading, obvious propaganda like this does not make the world any better.

from the article:

She’s been making videos highlighting her job at Staples since the end of January and has blown up big time.

wow yeah the end of January huh? did anything else happen on TikTok around the end of January?

Her engaging videos showcase little-known Staples services, boosting customer interest and store traffic.

…

There are some businesses that have been around since we were children and are fixtures in our everyday lives. Staples is one of those brands; while we might not have daily needs for things at the office supply retailer, we know it’s there in case we do.

…

Even if you haven’t seen her videos on your For You Page (FYP), you’ve most likely seen videos analyzing how effective she’s been at promoting this company or maybe even videos of people going to Staples for projects and saving a ton of time and money, thanks to her.

holy sponcon batman

this shows all the hallmarks of being vibe-coded slop (emoji-studded readme being the first dead giveaway)

it’s “open-source” but https://www.neatmail.app/ has a Pricing tab

the self-hosting instructions mention a “DodoPay account (payment processing)” with no explanation of what payments you’d be processing if you’re self-hosting it.

and one of the listed “AI Integrations” is:

In-House Model: neatmail_model — our proprietary classification model built and maintained in-house (still under work)

which means, unless proven otherwise, you should assume that this is feeding the entire contents of your incoming emails not just to OpenAI, but also to this “Neatmail” company for processing with their “proprietary” model.

hard pass.

The Washington Department of Licensing said in a statement that it was trying to fix the Spanish option and figure out how it happened in the first place.

reading between the lines: they didn’t fucking test it at all before rolling it out.

“Your estimated wait time is less than ‘tres’ minutes,” the voice said.

yeah bro AGI is right around the corner bro I just need like 10 or 20 billion more dollars to buy more GPUs trust me bro it’s gonna be awesome

So I took the entire transcript, dumped it into AI, and asked what the racist dog whistles were in the speech, and it told me.

right…and then you read the transcript yourself and/or watched the video, to confirm that the summary it gave you was accurate, right?

…right?

because if Trump used 9 racist dogwhistles in his speech, and the “AI” summary gave you a list of 10, and one of them was hallucinated, how would you know?

you’re using the “AI” as a confirmation bias machine. you expect there to be dogwhistles, so you ask it for dogwhistles, and it tells you, “yup, here’s the dogwhistles”.

try this. pretend you’re a MAGA true believer, take that exact same transcript, and ask the “AI” for a list of ways that the speech demonstrates Trump’s commitment to America First. or for ways that Trump is making America safer, or improving the economy, or whatever.

no matter what you ask it, it’s just going to fill in the blanks of what it thinks you want to hear.

humans are really good at confirmation bias, as it turns out. you don’t need to outsource it to a warehouse full of GPUs. you can just do it with your boring old analog brain.

I get the information to kind of see what he’s up to.

your news diet is full of empty calories. you read that “AI” summary and you feel like you’re better informed. but you’re not.

He will remain on leave until the end of the academic year.

he’s getting the “cop who shot a kid in the back” treatment - they’re still fucking paying him.

not only is this too little, too late, they’re giving him what amounts to a 6-month paid vacation.

judging by the number of emails my spam folder has been getting from him over the past few months, it’s been pretty obvious that he’s running.

my current #1 draft pick is still AOC, but Kelly seems…fine?

(with the caveat that I don’t know much about his actual positions, which is probably the way he’s trying to keep it. but he’s definitely preferable to Gavin Hairpiece or Harris 2.0)

Americans are stupid enough that “oh he was an astronaut so he’d make a good president” might actually work.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes ICE is fundamentally indifferent as to whether its AI outputs can be trusted. “I think that pointing out that AI is prone to giving ICE bad information is missing the entire point of ICE,” she says. “They don’t care if the information they have is good. There is an enormous amount of pressure from the Trump administration on ICE to simply make arrests and to detain people, to deport people, and to do it in large numbers, and you cannot get numbers that big by adhering to the rule of law, as we have seen.”

Galperin also regards the Trump administration as the perfect gullible customers for overleveraged AI giants controlled by Trump’s billionaire tech-executive allies. “These companies are often in an enormous amount of debt, and one of the big problems that they’re having right now is that there’s simply not enough uptake by paying customers for all of these products that they’re building in order to justify the enormous cost of running them,” she says. “Leaving the U.S. government holding the bag is a way around that.”

That’s just the model we already have documented information about.

OK. can you link to that “documented information”?

because I googled “gemma chinese government” and nothing obvious popped up. but maybe I’m just out of the loop when it comes to reasons we should be afraid of those nefarious Chinese people who work for the Chinese government and/or the (insert ominous music here) Chinese Communist Party.

Notice I mentioned CCP and government, not “the Chinese”.

uh-huh. so, a thought experiment:

a genie gives me the list of IP address ranges that the Chinese government is using when it scans the internet for potential exploits.

I’m going to run Ollama, and expose it to the public internet…except I’m going to deny all traffic to & from those specific IP ranges.

that’s still a bad idea, right? because there are many many many other possible threat actors?

this is like the difference between someone telling you “lock your doors at night because of burglars” vs “lock your doors at night because of black people”. you’re showing your whole ass when you talk about cybersecurity in general but then make the jump to “cybersecurity is important because those sneaky Asians will hack you”.

the Chinese government

the CCP

exposing something like Ollama to the public internet is a bad idea, full stop. there’s no need to bring “omg China scary” xenophobia into it.

direct link to the YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_6kGluvINg

the shart hits the fan at 00:34

make sure your optical cables are properly magnetized / demagnetized, too

if the cables are running in a north/south direction you want them magnetized with oblong polarity to the Earth’s magnetic field, but if they’re east/west they shouldn’t be magnetized at all to avoid Maxwell-Gauss feedback loops

direct link to the video embedded in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJqY1WLX4zA (18m39s)

if you want to just read Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_system

The ban had bipartisan support

yeah…that’s the point I was making?

the initial attempt to ban TikTok happened in 2020, in Trump’s first term. it was part of the general wave of anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia that the Republicans stoked up during the pandemic.

the “bipartisan support” for it is because a whole bunch of fucking Democrats hopped on board with it when they really should have known better.

and even if that all never happened, you’d still be in the same situation.

to be specific, when you refer to “that all” happening, you mean Biden signing the bill that banned TikTok in April 2024, I think?

Keep in mind that TikTok also put out messages during that period practically deep throating Trump and sent it out to all their users.

your timeline is jumping around a bit here, because now you’re referring to “that period” and linking to a source from January 2025, the time of Trump’s inauguration.

This was going to happen either way.

sigh. here’s the actual roll call vote.

it had 197 Republican “yes” votes. which is not enough. it would have failed without Democratic support. and then Biden signed it into law.

so like I said, this ban only passed because Democrats were bamboozled into supporting a proposal that has its roots in Republican “omg China scary” bullshit. I don’t know how to explain it any more clearly.

Friendly fire doesn’t do a whole lot of good, but does support Trump, which I’m assuming isn’t your goal here.

ahh yes, “criticizing Democrats is the same thing as supporting Republicans”, the free square on the bingo board.

there’s an analogy I saw recently that I really liked:

there’s cockroaches in my house, so I call an exterminator.

the exterminator shows up, but he just hangs out with the cockroaches.

I get mad at the exterminator, and he says “don’t be mad at me, be mad at the cockroaches”.

but…I was already mad at the cockroaches. that’s why I called the exterminator in the first place.

also, the cockroaches are cockroaches. me being mad at them is never going to change their behavior.

on the other hand, if I get mad at the exterminator…it does have a chance of changing his behavior.

if you want to view the world through an oversimplified lens that there’s the red team and the blue team and you can never criticize the blue team because that’s “friendly fire”…that is a choice that you can make. but don’t act surprised if I don’t subscribe to the same oversimplification that you cling to.

congrats to all the liberals who were bamboozled into supporting this ban during the Biden administration. you got what you wanted, are you happy about it?

golly, just look at how useful AI tools are for normal, everyday people:

After creating an account, the recruiter opened up an AI resume-generating website called livecareer.com. The previous applicant’s “work experience” page was still open; they used AI to generate a description for their nightclub bouncer job. I was directed to erase that and do the same with my own previous experience as a software engineer. “Make it sound as fancy as possible,” the recruiter said.

After entering my former job title, a menu appeared with about 65 suggested job responsibilities, like “Mentored junior developers, sharing knowledge and expertise to support their professional growth and development within team.” When I clicked one, a bullet point was added to a “job description” field containing that text. “Click everything,” the recruiter said.

I read each sentence, confirming that it was an actual part of the job that I completed, then I clicked it to add it to my job description. After I had added about five responsibilities, the recruiter reached over my shoulder to click all of them faster than either of us could read. “According to America, as a software engineer, you did all these things,” he told me. “You’re a rockstar.”

We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory - The connection between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein is no accident, but reveals a deep logic at the heart of reactionary politics