[Exit Queen.]

‘We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.’ —Dolly Parton If you’re not familiar with her extraordinary Imagination Library, read about it. Dolly Parton is a MultiFaceted SuperHero, and her journey onward today is a great loss. How fortunate she left such a legacy.

Dolly Parton with her book, Coat of Many Colors. ‘Storms make trees take deeper roots.’ ~ Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton • Lily Tomlin • Jane Fonda Triumphant Triad of the film 9 to 5. ‘If you see someone without a smile, give them yours.’ —Dolly Parton

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer | 2023 Light Projection on Smithsonian buildings in DC

HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS, THE OAK TREES ARE WAKING UP 🥳🤗🌳

Incredible substorm with the lunar eclipse just now in Fairbanks, Alaska. Legendary.

Too early for the eclipse, a crap iPhone shot—not exactly the Blood Moon, but kinda cool just the same.

Can I smell sausage rolls?

Well today in AI scams targeting authors. I received an email claiming to want to include my book in a book club. Not only do all the photos of authors they claim to work with look AI generated but look at @colsonwhitehead.com and @zadiesmith.bsky.social and then look at these photos

tough to come up with a better story about the ignorance and hubris of mankind than “b-list tv news host becomes Secretary of Defense,” but then we get the story “b-list tv news host becomes Secy. of Defense, plugs AI system directly into military systems, has it select targets”

Such a singular presence, now onward absent. ‘An incarnation is in particular flesh When he is dead the grass Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead, And the few who loved him know this until they die. —Galway Kinnell

The English Oak Project@thekentacorn.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Please share this Bert the Blackbird is a legend A wild bird that filled our life with joy. But he has gone

Nature took its course. I am broken

IT’S OUR TIME. EVERYBODY CELEBRATE THE WEDDING THIS MOMENT CREATED www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJ...

Lip Sync Battle - Tom Holland

YouTube video by Comedy Central Latinoamérica

youtube.com

BUM CHILLUPS AKA SPENCER HALL AKA PRESIDENT FOOTBALL@edsbs.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Fellas you gotta dress like Rihanna and get your own rain machine for the musical number, it works

I just saw Natchez, a new doc I’ll recommend again once I figure out how to speak to the deep intelligence of its structure, the way it moves from a cloying world you know is actually horrific into a realer world in which the horror, courage, witness, and humanness are all made visible.

There's a list of theatre screenings here: www.natchezfilm.com

Natchez | 2025 Documentary From Suzannah Herbert

After generations of showcasing its antebellum homes and hoop-skirted docents, Natchez, Mississippi, is now reckoning with romanticized past, an uncertain future and the debt it owes to the descendant...

natchezfilm.com

I interviewed the director, if you're interested. www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/2026...

Reading this, again, you get the sense that someone at Anthropic knows how the intel community misleads by using definitions of words that are different than everyone else believes. And the people at OpenAI simply don't know or don't care about that.

Techmeme@techmeme.com · 7mo ago

Source describes the failed Pentagon-Anthropic talks: through the end, the Pentagon wanted to use Anthropic's AI to analyze bulk data collected about Americans (Ross Andersen/The Atlantic) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

In 1789, Thomas Jefferson writing to James Madison, extolled the Constitution for instituting “one effectual check on the Dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body.”

Running your war from a private club for millionaires — ahead of a $1 million-a-plate dinner — is a choice.

Brandon Friedman@brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Jesus Christ they're running the war from Mar-a-Lago www.reuters.com/world/us/top...

The military obsession with AI is in large part about being able to command something to kill, with instant compliance, no rebuttal nor compunction

what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"

Congrats to those in the $53M Polymarket trade for when the US would bomb Iran.

A reminder that the administration spent the day before it launched a war in the Middle East feuding with tech companies over whether and how the AI models the Pentagon buys will be restrained from autonomously killing people.

George Pearkes@peark.es · 8mo ago

“We put them in our agreement” means there are no restrictions in the underlying models, unlike Anthropic, and you’re relying on *checks notes* the Trump administration to hold to this. So. Yeah.

Love it when our nation’s defense contractors all spend their Friday nights subtweeting each other about killing everyone in the world

Anthropic: We lost a contract because we refuse to build Skynet. OpenAI: We'll do it

Mike Masnick@masnick.com · 8mo ago

My goodness.

my impression is that the actual fact that DoD wanted autonomous kill and no-refusals surveillance was conveyed to dario relatively sub rosa, and the official deal from DoD always had this fig leaf. so either Hegseth backed down and demanded no such thing from Sam, or Sam is lying-by-omission

MY GOD even the Project Maven DoD sponsor is against the US deploying autonomous LLMs to kill people. I... cannot even