This should be so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said, but given what kind of weekend it’s been on here, apparently it does: If you don’t want old rapists running the world, in office, in the board room, making decisions for all of us get comfortable with “ruining” young rapists’ lives

Creativity without mediation is just "making slop"

Blaise Boo-lysse Bernard Collins@wittywebhandle.bsky.social · 9h ago

Congress drafted a fairly unambiguous law, in this case bsky.app/profile/saba...

❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.ﾟ✿ ⋆@sababausa.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Reading the STOCK Act I’m kind of impressed how thorough it is (and thankfully it expressly includes the president under its definition of executive branch employee) www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

The midterm election is coming on November 3, and there are three binding referendum questions on the ballot. We oppose the anti-equity amendment, Question 3. If this amendment is passed, it would eliminate the equity-based civil rights gains Wisconsin has made over the last 60 years.

Vote No on Question 3: Anti-Equity Constitutional Amendment - ACLU of Wisconsin

This November, every Wisconsin voter will have an anti-equity constitutional amendment on their ballot. Vote NO.

aclu-wi.org

Imagine this not being a joke. Imagine being such a ghoul that you don't get joy from reading to your kid, from your kid WANTING you to read to them. Imagine trying to get a robot to do it, instead of seething at your boss when you're forced to miss it.

🎃👻🧙‍♀️ Vio the VVitch 🧙‍♀️👻🎃@viothevvitch.myatproto.social · 3d ago

this is so fucking sad

Might seem like a small thing, but one of the things I hate most about tech in the last 5 to 10 years is the insistence that every app should reload almost every time I switch to it. Sometimes just locking and unlocking is enough.

The foundational work of Western philosophy is “these idiots voted to kill Socrates”! Alcibiades was a demagogue who weakened Athens with ruinous war, damaging alliances, and got into trouble involving Persia. Maybe some lessons there.

🚨 Latest from the border wall blockade: tree sit is still up, one land defender is locked down to machinery, Border Patrol has wrapped a Mylar blanket around them and is running the truck and pumping the blanket full of exhaust to try to gas them out, potentially killing them.

Max Granger@maxgranger.info · 5d ago

Happening now! Border Patrol amassing forces after land defenders re-established a tree sit on the Mexican side of the border in La Noria, Sonora, this morning, stopping wall construction the day after DHS killed the Grandmother Tree.

"The Trump Administration is proposing to repeal the Roadless Rule, opening 45 million acres of national forests to road construction, destructive timber harvest and energy development." Today is the last day for public comment. Weigh in: defenders.org/roadless-rule

The Roadless Rule

defenders.org

Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society has an interesting take on the "Can LLMs represent intelligence?" question. Expanding on a previous section on Arendt's work on the vita completiva, Han posits that to achieve it one must first cultivate a certain type of "seeing".

Everyone gets one before anyone gets seconds, but for $1,000,000.

Rewatching The Big Short this weekend reminded me that a lot of these folks "aren't stupid, they just don't care" in the sense that they know their reckless behaviors will be bailed out by tax payers.

Anonymous@youranoncentral.bsky.social · 2w ago

Musk, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Amodei, Brockman and Huang signed Trump’s "AI accord" requiring outside oversight. Three helped write the "self-regulation" rules and are building the body that would set standards for and certify the auditors policing them.

While this is true, it's not what anyone is talking about. Literally no one is pointing at retirement savings and saying "That's the problem! The plumber saved their money!" We're pointing at people who live off extraction rather than labor.

The North American Leshy@northamericanleshy.bsky.social · last wk.

Big difference between a CEO with 500 million and a senior couple who saved and invested their whole lives and have a couple million in assets to retire on. I am OK with the second type of multimillionaires, not so much the first.

Narrator: Of course not all soldiers are now classified as warriors. Fatties, weirdos, beardos and the like will be sent on special missions to prevent them from voting.

Ron Filipkowski@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · last wk.

This guy has been doing everything he possibly can every day to use his position of SecDef to tamper with the midterms, from speaking at Republican campaign rallies, to giving partisan political speeches to troops, to this. Do all federal employees get a day off to vote?

It's becoming increasingly plausible to argue that the 1970s was the most consequential decade in human history. The backlash to relatively weak civil and economic rights in the US in the 1960s is resulting in the destruction of a planet.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · last wk.

A place to start is the 1976 Democratic Party platform - the last time that the party embraced the idea that the purpose of public education should primarily be about educating people for democracy & valuing non-economic returns on ed asheeshksi.substack.com/p/why-the-de...

Imagine corporate spending on AI increasing by nearly 6 times and Anthropic's balance sheet still looks like that. zip.com/blog/where-a...

Zip Enterprise AI Index: Where AI budget is actually going

AI now takes 8.1% of enterprise software spend, up from 1.4% a year ago. One in five AI purchase requests is rejected. Data from $18B in approved spend.

zip.com

One of the most important changes if we ever pull out of this nose dive is to remove the Limited Liability like ability for government actors to commit illegal acts without personal repercussions. "I didn't do it, the agency did" "I didn't do it, the AI did" All these legal fictions need to go.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last wk.

Russ Vought: "We fund what we need to fund. I'm not at all shy about we want to spend billions of dollars on a new shipyard. We're up there defending the $1.5t that the Department of War needs. But it's also coming at a ton of reduction on the non-defense side"

“.. Tech payrolls have fallen to the lowest level since December 2020.” - Schwab

Remember when they floated the idea of paying a fee to get a job interview? Somebody get sequoia capital on the phone. Seems Like we're ready for that now.

Sé Reed@sereedmedia.bsky.social · 2w ago

new secretary of labor just dropped. he’s “employer-friendly”. not sure how he feels about employees, but i could guess! the way things are headed feels like workers are going to have to start paying their employers for the privilege of having a job.

Civility is how we let these ghouls get this far.

Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · last wk.

John Roberts' friend and defender is quoted in the piece, saying they shouldn't be shaming Roberts for the wreckage and ruin he's brought to this country because of "civility." The bullies always cry "civility" when the victims push back in the slightest.

What this looked like in practice: People came to the class excited or at least mildly interested in learning what an ai agent could do for them. The trainers came to help people train an agent for their known specific cases. Everyone quickly realized that there wasn’t much middle ground.

Dave Strock@davestrock.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is one of the biggest points. This concept is foreign even to most in the corporate world. They *think* they've done it, but as soon as you go to build them software to do "the task" you realize 80% of your work is helping them figure out how the task is *actually* accomplished.

This is one of the biggest points. This concept is foreign even to most in the corporate world. They *think* they've done it, but as soon as you go to build them software to do "the task" you realize 80% of your work is helping them figure out how the task is *actually* accomplished.

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2w ago

I am talking about working with people to even conceive of their lives as a set of tasks — that isn’t exactly natural and isn’t something we train people to do and yet its a precondition for figuring out what an agent would even *do*.

Granted I'm still in the middle of the book so there is a potential "hammer/nail" issue, but I think @annakornbluh.bsky.social 's book Immediacy really speaks to the larger context of this symptom being produced by the current form of our socioeconomic production system.

Julie S. Lalonde@julieslalonde.bsky.social · 2w ago

The literacy crisis is not just referring to people's ability to literally read and write. It's also people's inability to read for context. I've been a public educator for over 20 years and I have never, ever seen it this bad.

Because "automata studies" wasn't sexy enough.

Grady Booch@booch.com · 2w ago

The term "artificial intelligence" was coined before the term "software" first appeared in print.

Gotta say I find this just as disingenuous or delusional as the rest of'm. If this is true, it's an incredibly cowardly response. "I couldn't even just walk away, I had to make sure my absence would have zero negative impact on their plan to destroy humanity... out of respect" 🙄

Leah McElrath@leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 2w ago

Also notable is the fact that he works in chip development—the hardware side, not the software side. His concern is that the “new breed of AI chips” currently being developed will accelerate the progress toward AI superintelligence, which he believes is a possible threat to humanity.

Intercept of Xi report: "Just bought Manhattan for trinkets...getting Taiwan for free. No restrictions buying Iranian oil as long as we don't announce it. I have to say these words: 'The president is a tough negotiator, but we trust him. The ballroom is going to be splendid.' "

Took me way too long to realize this is a play. "Tickets to an iOS app?" I thought "Actors endorsing a Delay effect?" I need a nap apps.apple.com/us/app/other...

OtherDesertCities App - App Store

Download OtherDesertCities by Audio Damage, Inc. on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more apps like OtherDesertCities.

apps.apple.com

ElieNYC@elienyc.bsky.social · 2w ago

Should I try to get tickets to Other Desert Cities? On the one hand... it's all white people. On the other hand, those white people are Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Allison Janney, and Ed Harris, which are white people I really, really like to see act.

Write today and demand your members of Congress reject a liability shield for the fossil fuel industry. Take action: act.ucs.org/4iG87AS Learn more in our Decades of Deceit timeline: act.ucs.org/3TOOwEv