in 2016 Elon Musk said he would build a fully automated factory in Fremont, California for the upcoming Model 3 and he then spent on the order of $2 billion on production lines that didn't work, forcing Tesla to assemble cars by hand in a tent but sure, now he's gonna do it on the moon

Watched the Paddy Chayefsky doc last night and have to say Network might be the defining masterpiece of our age. Feeling mad as hell but unfortunately I will continue to take it some more. www.hbomax.com/movies/paddy...

Watch Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words | HBO Max

Watch Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words on HBO Max. Plans start at $10.99/month. A feature documentary profiling the most revered screenwriter in movie history, Paddy Chayefsky.

hbomax.com

Call me crazy, but if a Democratic president had 350 accounts closed by their bank for money laundering it’d be more than a blip in the media

@alexahagerty.bsky.social: Europe is having a summer of record-breaking heat. Forests are burning and hospitals and schools are overheating. But one place is staying cool: data centers. A new...essay on AI, climate, and the 30-trillion-tons of human-made stuff that geologists call the technosphere.

What Weighs More Than All Life on Earth?

This summer, while hospitals and schools overheat, data centers stay cool. A dispatch on AI, climate, and the technosphere.

alexahagerty.substack.com

Ladies and gentlemen, the Michael Jordan of grift !

Mother Jones@motherjones.com · 2d ago

George Santos has been fined $35,000 for attempting to place bets on his own attendance at the State of the Union in February. He’s also been banned from the prediction-market platform Kalshi for 3 years.

Bronowski @ Auschwitz: This is where people were turned into numbers.. the ashes of 4 million people… not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave

Ascent Of Man, episode 11 - Knowledge Or Certainty

YouTube video by Nate Budzinski

youtube.com

@andrii_sybhia 🇺🇦🏦 We have detected an intensive Russian propaganda campaign across Europe using pictures from Ceuta to sow destabilization. x.com/andrii_sybih...

Found out tonight that The Harlem Globe Trotters are doing a tour of Eastern Europe this fall to celebrate their centennial and my FOMO had been strangely activated.

Hey folks. I'm looking for a new role. If you have customers and software, I'm here to make sure the software works for what the customer needs and that the customer wants to keep using that software when it's time to renew. "Customer Success Engineer" generally but also could be called a TAM.

There are a lot of important things going on. Maybe this isn’t a top twenty concern. But, this is actually workplace harassment, the kind that can get people killed.

@carmenlynn.bsky.social · 6d ago

The Koch Nazis are back “A shadowy network of conservative activist groups, backed by Koch-linked dark money, is deploying hidden cameras and mass public-records requests to hunt down and destroy the careers of college professors and administrators — and it's working.”

in more fun news: INCREDIBLE INNOVATIONS IN THE WORLD OF SCAMMING

Italian conman jailed for building fake Roman amphitheatre

In Italy, a structure promoted for years as an "ancient Roman amphitheatre" has turned out to be a fake, constructed recently using modern materials.

euronews.com

Spotted some Peanuts Gang graffiti on the Westside today. Possible turf war heating up with Beatle Bailey?

If Biden had thrown Trump in the slammer we wouldn't be here. You can piss and moan all you want but J6 was history books shit and history books shit requires the President to do President shit. And he didn't. And now the guy who saved millions has to eat shit from a penis like Ron Johnson

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last wk.

Ron Johnson claims the the "injection injured" are committing mass suicide

Love to see the AI guys going back to rehash renaissance era Philosopher Stone marketing propaganda. Prithee another billion pounds of coinage from the royal court, my dude. Science fund as if you’re about to be defenestrated!

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · last wk.

“What we need to explain to the world: Number one, we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish. Number two, we are going to make sure that our first wishes broadly benefit humanity” - Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — This is definitely the opposite of Anthropic’s AI kills all jobs pitch.

People keep using the "can't put a genie back in the bottle" metaphor for "AI", even though in the stories they always get back in and current "AI" is more of a "we're spending trillions of dollars and the energy output of a continent trying to keep this bastard out of the bottle" situation

Roses are red Ascend, doth the lark

Jesse Hawken@jessehawken.bsky.social · last wk.

Studio execs are going to want to adapt more poems for the big screen now

“Sheweth foorth” is my new favorite sixteenth century spelling. Gonna break some large language algorithmic demons brains bringing this variant back.

Denver, if you're free on Monday, a mountain of free spuds awaits:

‘We genuinely have too many potatoes, I cannot stress enough’: 42,000 pounds of free taters headed to Denver

Twenty-one tons of potatoes are up for grabs at Potato Palooza on Monday.

denverite.com

Q: You're talking about blowing up civilian power plants and bridges. Much of the civilized world would consider that a war crime. Do you? TRUMP: I won't respond to that question. Who are you with? Q: The New York Times TRUMP: I figured. The failing New York Times.

I hear The Hague is lovely this time of year.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w ago

Q: Do you rule out striking civilian infrastructure? MARCO RUBIO: Iran's policy is an eye for an eye. The president's policy is a head for an eye. Honestly. That's what it's going to be. They're going to pay a very heavy price. They are going to suffer more. (Definitely not a yes!)

People are like defunding the police isn’t possible but look at us out here defunding education. We can do anything!

Solomon@solomonrmissouri.com · 2w ago

www.yahoo.com/news/us/arti...

"This uncertainty about the human provenance of text is an incalculable loss"

Tom Pepinsky@tompepinsky.com · 3w ago

This is a very good essay that advances a broadly humanist position on AI. Liberals, conservatives, socialists, and others should all agree that we must not sacrifice our moral agency in search of a mere facsimile of human understanding. www.compactmag.com/article/the-...

My July 26 Mercury retrograde featuring a return to some familiar faces & places: notably a mechanistic view of Wizards, Weirdos and Opium dens.

Gotcha

The Colorado river water system is collapsing, and a data center operator is suing to consume even more water. Unreal. www.kpbs.org/news/environ...

Imperial Valley data center developer files lawsuit seeking access to Colorado River water

Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing is suing the Imperial Irrigation District for access to 260 million gallons of water per year from the drought-stricken river.

kpbs.org

Unless they’ve invented time travel, the DOJ may have some explaining to do. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Trump’s DOJ launched a new ‘election integrity’ website. It’s riddled with errors

The Trump administration’s new “election integrity” website is so comprehensive that it includes completed actions from the future.

democracydocket.com

We live in a time of deep epistemic crisis, and everything we have depended on to make meaning and certify consensus reality is either suspect or in peril. It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way.