One of the great joys of my adult life has been realizing that I can just pick up a new skill every so often, take a fun little class in it weekly for a year or two, and simply enjoy meeting people and getting medium proficient and not attempting to become professional in it at all!

The SCREEN Act just failed to pass in the Senate Commerce Committee! 🎉 Enormous thanks to the thousands (!!) of you who told your Senators to vote no! Your voice matters and you should feel good that you made a difference. Obviously, the fight isn't over, but this was an important victory.

SCREEN Act, which would have required mandatory age-verification for sites (like this) that allow "material harmful to minors" failed to pass out of committee after thousands and thousands of people called their Senators. More work ahead!

Alison Boden@alisonboden.bsky.social · 4h ago

The SCREEN Act just failed to pass in the Senate Commerce Committee! 🎉 Enormous thanks to the thousands (!!) of you who told your Senators to vote no! Your voice matters and you should feel good that you made a difference. Obviously, the fight isn't over, but this was an important victory.

This is good news. Among its many horrors the SCREEN Act is an incredibly anti-trans piece of legislation, so it's good to see it fail.

Free Speech Coalition@fsc.bsky.social · 4h ago

SCREEN Act, which would have required mandatory age-verification for sites (like this) that allow "material harmful to minors" failed to pass out of committee after thousands and thousands of people called their Senators. More work ahead!

the biggest presidential scandal in history. jeffrey epstein was a close friend and business associate of trump and they did crimes together! against children! its all pretty much out in the open now but its a smaller story than hillary's email server was for some reason

Katie Phang@katiephang.bsky.social · 3h ago

BREAKING: The New Mexico Department of Justice has sued Acting AG Todd Blanche and the DOJ, requesting the court for access to unredacted Epstein-related investigative files that the DOJ has been withholding.

New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders. That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani Is Shunning New York Business Leaders Who Are Used to Calling the Shots

The mayor fired corporate leaders from a city fund’s advisory board in the latest sign that he is changing the way such power brokers access City Hall.

on.wsj.com

Not one piece of software I use has gotten better or had feature updates at a faster pace since 3 years ago. It’s all either about the same or worse. Much of it continues to be fine but it’s unclear what “benefits” we’ve been getting by poisoning Memphis.

Dem voters, as far as I can tell, have two priorities: 1. Win the election 2. Fight the Trump admin as hard as possible in cases where they are worried that the two conflict, they lean towards “win” via whatever bizarre view of electability has penetrated their personal information bubble

Michael Caley@michaelcaley.bsky.social · 16h ago

I have no idea if this is what's going on or not but the results tonight are all consistent with my broad belief that Democratic primary voters are scared to death of losing again and as much as they like left/progressive ideas they are fucking terrified of losing again

It's a year and a half after i highlighted the issue, but nice to see: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Senators demand crackdown on wildfire "prediction market" bets

Fire experts warn such markets could incentivize arson.

arstechnica.com

Molly White@molly.wiki · 2y ago

what could go wrong with running betting markets like this?

Over the last nine months, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has run dozens of paid ads that include explicit AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and images of minors alongside sexually suggestive statements, according to details of the ads shared with WIRED.

Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

More than 50 offending image and video ads were published across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Threads, according to Meta’s ad library data. Some ran as recently as this week.

wired.com

We're doing "rogue AI" discourse again so here's my live read / rant of the AISI report with the ominous title "Security Incident INC-2026-07-28-01." Link to the full technical report: www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/inciden...

as noted yesterday, Trump has now come around to treating an Iranian toll system covering the Strait of Hormuz as a given. Hard to overstate the level of strategic failure. US started the war purely as a war of choice and ends up dramatically empowering Iran and given the Iranian govt big wins.

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 4h ago

Reuters: Iran wants fees of 5%-7% of the price of cargo from ships using the strait; Oman wants 3%. "Making fees voluntary, at least nominally, could be a way out of the impasse, although an implied threat of Iranian attacks could mean shippers would be ​unlikely to risk transit without paying."

Good thread illustrating how structural issues in LLMs (context fill-up and compression) can subvert an original prompt and induce the model to go off the rails. It's interesting that the original prompt is allowed to be lossily compressed, instead of being repeated verbatim in subsequent cycles.

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 6h ago

We're doing "rogue AI" discourse again so here's my live read / rant of the AISI report with the ominous title "Security Incident INC-2026-07-28-01." Link to the full technical report: www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/inciden...

This is really bad news for the administrators and teachers who are falling over themselves to find a middle ground when it comes to AI and writing for any class. There is no middle ground, that is the industry trying to make you think you are establishing “guardrails” or “teaching responsible use.”

As Jane shows, telling students it’s OK to use AI for brainstorming or outlining is telling them to use AI to think and write for them. It is to also telling them to cheat and helping them cheat.

Jane Rosenzweig@janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 7h ago

Trying out the features in Claude for education. Join me as I see how it "helps" me write a research paper. My chosen topic: "AI and education". /1

thinking back fondly to that time in 2012, 16 years into florida's charter school experiment, after almost 500 charter schools had already failed, when the republican legislature simply made it illegal to examine what happened to someone's last charter when they applied for a new one

Tampa Bay Times@tampabaytimes.bsky.social · 7h ago

4 Hillsborough charter schools close amid financial, enrollment challenges

The media's takeaway from an El-Sayed win is the same as it would have been from a Stevens win, and the same as it will be if El-Sayed wins the general, or if he loses it: everyone, no matter who they are, needs to take several steps to the right.

i really have no patience whatsoever for people who are scared of muslims having elected office

The quiet part of dress codes spoken out loud: they are tools of control and oppression used to enforce gender, race, and class conformity and roles.

Wake elementary parents disagree over gender-neutral dress code during school board meeting

Parents at a Wake elementary school disagreed during Tuesday's school board meeting over the hiring of a teacher they say is transgender and whether to have a dress code to circumvent the issue.

wral.com

Unfathomable

Do they care about school closures when they are driven by climate change or only when they can blame the teachers unions? How about when the schools are closed because they've burned down, been blown apart, or are engulfed in floods?

9 million U.S. students lost school time for weather in the 2024-2025 school year » Yale Climate Connections

Extreme heat, smoke, floods, and storms are disrupting education across the country.

yaleclimateconnections.org

I have literally never touched these tools once. What are these people thinking?

Ayo@darrylayo.bsky.social · 21h ago

Guys like this don’t realize that they are the freak

This issue was resolved by US v Morris, 928 F.2d 504 (2d Cir 1991), codified by the CFAA in 1996, and clarified by Van Buren v US, 141 S.Ct. 1648 (2021). They intentionally deployed an unauthorized access tool. It's no defense to say they didn't intend the resulting damage; Morris lost on that. 1/2

Zack Whittaker@zackwhittaker.com · 2d ago

After Anthropic and OpenAI both admitted to their AI models hacking other companies, @lorenzofb.bsky.social and I wanted to find out: Who is legally to blame when an autonomous AI agent hacks something? Lawyers say it's really complicated! Bypass for ad-blockers: web.archive.org/web/20260803...

The GOP doesn't get punished if this country doesn't elect more leftists.

Quite an upset in the #KSGov Dem primary. State Sen. Cindy Holscher, who came out against data centers and the Kansas City Chiefs stadium deal, has defeated state Sen. Ethan Corson, who had a big financial edge and an endorsement from term-limited Gov. Laura Kelly.

ATTENTION TO ALL DEM TAX CUT SLOPULISTS

"If you think it is bad that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a handful of their billionaire buddies are effectively unconstrained, then the most effective thing you can do is pick a fight over data center siting in your area." by @davekarpf.bsky.social

The data center backlash Is working. That's why the New York Times is so concerned.

I have a

davekarpf.beehiiv.com

“People said we were using an unacceptable amount of power, and with these upgraded facilities that require so much more of it, we’ve shown that we took those criticisms to heart,” said Sam Altman

Technological Advancements Allow Data Centers To Run On Even More Electricity

SAN FRANCISCO—Hailing rapid developments in the infrastructure needed to support artificial intelligence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Tuesday that technological advancements were now allowing data...

theonion.com

“…the researchers found that opening up to chatbots about personal issues made some people feel not better but worse.”

AI companions may worsen loneliness for vulnerable users

Stanford research finds that users with limited social networks who seek emotional support from AI chatbots experience lower well-being.

news.stanford.edu