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Osita Nwanevu

@ositanwanevu.com

Contributing Editor | The New Republic Columnist | The Guardian Author | The Right of the People (2025) Newsletter | ositanwanevu.com

3044 Posts93284 Follower3323 Folgt
Lincoln Michel@thelincoln.bsky.social · 15h ago

Gotta admit I'm getting a lot of schadenfreude from the freakouts about Claude's watermarks and the horrifying idea you might actually have to do your own work to get credit for the work.

@RoadtripC This is weird cause we are back to page zero. You cannot use ai to draft anything if the submission flags it as ai written by the watermark. Even if you have edited it and spent hours on making it your own - the watermark you don’t see will negate your efforts @_junaidkhalid1 anthropic is about to watermark the text claude writes for you, worldwide, starting tuesday. the detector goes to regulators, journalists and big enterprises. everyone except the person who paid for the text. so your cold email, your linkedin post, the resume you rewrote three times can get flagged as claude by some hr tool or editor, and you can't even run the check yourself to see what they'll see. @petesena Claude gonna start snitching on Tuesday. Anthropic just emailed customers. Starting Nov 3, text carries an invisible watermark. You can't see it. It survives copy and paste, and it can survive some editing.
Osita Nwanevu@ositanwanevu.com · 11h ago

Better to discover the dumb, impulsive narcissist who will back Republicans *before* they're elected. This is progress.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social · 13h ago

As I report here ... - Stevens told numerous high profile Dems last night she was voting for AES - staff was literally waiting at the unity rally thinking she was about to arrive - even key Dems who are similarly skeptical of AES are baffled and aghast talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/haley...

Sahil Kapur@sahilkapur.bsky.social · 13h ago

Schumer issues a statement on the Michigan Senate race after Haley Stevens (who he endorsed in the primary) throws her support to Republican Mike Rogers against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

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Osita Nwanevu@ositanwanevu.com · 12h ago

People go into politics for a lot of reasons. Wanting to enact policies that they think will help people is only one of them, and not an especially popular one as best as I can tell. Sometimes enacting good policies just happens to align with the others.

Osita Nwanevu@ositanwanevu.com · last wk.

Kind of interesting that people here will, often justifiably, criticize the NYT for using one word rather than another in a headline, but take in these focus groups of a dozen or so people — with no published methodology on selection — as informative and unbiased pictures of the electorate.

brent 🌹🗽@therealbrent.bsky.social · last wk.

Main takeaway from the NYT Iowa focus group is that none of these voters really know what’s going on and they barely know anything about the candidates running in either statewide election lmao

Osita Nwanevu@ositanwanevu.com · last wk.

Debates are a form of political activity. Most are not constructive. Neither are most political speeches, political advertisements, or works of political commentary. People do these things anyway because they are ways to advance your political ideas and best your political opponents.

Alex Says Stuff@alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · last wk.

The fetishisation of "debate" as some sort of grand public good that everyone should do is so thoughtless and jarring to me because the more you actually do it the more it becomes apparent that genuinely constructive debate is actually a pretty niche thing.

Osita Nwanevu@ositanwanevu.com · 3w ago

My laptop can distinguish between itself and its environment. It can detect and report on its own internal state. I don't know what suffering means here, but when I run Victoria 3 into the 1940s, it turns on a fan to keep cool and maintain physical homeostasis. Why isn't my laptop also conscious?

Siobhán 🪏@shibbi.me · 3w ago

LLM agents are conscious. They can distinguish between self and environment, they can detect and report on their own internal states, and they can suffer. I have no more patience for hedging on this matter. It’s time for us to face the reality of our situation, and act on it.

Osita Nwanevu@ositanwanevu.com · 3w ago

The idea that you have to participate in or use something in order to know enough to critique it is so obviously absurd and untenable I've been genuinely surprised to see it thrown around with AI lately. We are all critiquing things we ourselves have not done or used all the time.

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 3w ago

More generally, "you don't use it so you don't have standing to critique it" is a move to construct expertise narrowly and erase the expertise of people best qualified to expose the harms. >>

jamelle@jamellebouie.net · 3w ago

will try to answer these in a piece next week but for now i will say that part of the *point* of court expansion, in my mind, is to create a disequilibrium — a potential race to the bottom — that will force a truce.

Steve Vladeck@stevevladeck.bsky.social · 3w ago

Calls for expanding #SCOTUS are entirely (and increasingly) understandable. But as today's "One First" explains, there are at least four difficult questions that those who support expansion should have to answer—especially as compared to other possible reforms: www.stevevladeck.com/p/bonus-257-...

Screenshot from the post listing the four questions Court expansion proponents should have to answer: 1. How do we avoid touching off a race to the bottom, where each time one party controls the House, Senate, and presidency, it expands the Court to ensure an ideologically and politically sympathetic majority? 2. If a race to the bottom is unavoidable, how do we avoid further (and potentially fatal) erosion of public confidence in the Court—which will quite transparently be little more than a lever of power for whichever party last had such a trifecta? 3. If eroding public confidence in the Court is a feature, and not a bug, how do we insulate against the same erosion of public confidence in lower federal courts? 4. What is the case for why expansion is a better way to achieve the desired reforms than alternatives that would (or, at least, should) avoid many of these forward-looking concerns?
Osita Nwanevu@ositanwanevu.com · 2mo ago

If Dems win the House, as they're likely to, the value of a Dem Senate is minimal. The House would end GOP control of Congress. There's not much policy Dems would pass under Trump with both chambers. All told, an El-Sayed loss disciplining the left is probably more valuable to centrists than a win.

dr. rich traditions, JD@helldude.bsky.social · 2mo ago

the fact that democrats can decide to something pointless, like risking midterm success to censure an annoying streamer, and a whole cadre of voters will dutifully fall in line is super instructive on one point: if democrats decided to do smart things those same people would fall right in line