onfocus

Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

I think this article article helps bring many background assumptions of the AI mindset into the foreground. I've found thinking about AI as an ideology rather than a technology helps me process our current moment. Highly recommended.

"With today's decision, it seems as if the court has truly lost its moorings," she said. In the process, she added, the court is creating "grave privacy risks for millions of Americans."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson raising the alarm about the Supreme Court enabling executive overreach.

Millions of healthy adults and kids will likely lose access to updated vaccines under the new criteria. Prasad and Makary say there’s not enough evidence that healthy kids and adults get clinically meaningful benefit from regular Covid-19 shots. They want to see placebo-controlled trials, particularly in adults ages 50 to 64, before recommending the shots for other groups.

Get a covid booster now while you can. They're taking the option away from us which is more eugenics-thinking in action. In the future please vote for people who want other people to suffer less.

In a 2023 recording surfaced by ProPublica, Trump budget director Russell Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

This is going to be great for future recruitment. They really are salting the earth as they dismantle the US government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices.

Not shocking, but still disappointing this barely warrants a mention in the current administration. It's all corruption and profiteering rather than serving the people.

With EarthQuaker's costs increasing and sales slumping from increased tariffs, Robbins said the company offshoring a portion of its manufacturing might be the only way to avoid going bankrupt by the end of the year.

This US business that I've given business to over the years has to consider moving production offshore. Now it's personal.

Really what we’re dealing with more than anything else is the corrupting effect of an unprecedented level of wealth concentration. I’ve been covering wealth concentration my whole life, and it’s just exploded. And so it’s one thing to be like, “OK, a CEO is making 200 times what his workers are making,” which is like the kind of math that I was doing when I started becoming a journalist. But when you think about the levels of wealth that are now concentrated in the hands of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, I think they truly believe that they’re gods. The point of their wealth is to be able to exercise a kind of absolute power.

Yes, I think it's hard to understand exactly how dangerous this wealth concentration is.

"But I just use AI for boilerplate!" you whimper, clutching your Co-Pilot subscription. Listen to yourself. If you’re writing the same boilerplate every day like some industrial-age cog monkey, automate it yourself. Write a library. Invent a macro. Reclaim some dignity.

LOL, enjoyed this rant. Sometimes I feel like the only person who isn't an AI enthusiast.

You know AM and FM radio. But did you know that there is a whole other world of radio surrounding us at all times? It’s called shortwave — and, thanks to a quirk of science that lets broadcasters bounce radio waves off of the ionosphere, it can reach thousands of miles, penetrating rough terrain and geopolitical boundaries.

Hey, this podumentary™ about shortwave is really great. Highly recommended.

The devastating hacks confirm the analysis that I'm sharing in this post: that TeleMessage's server – hosted on the public AWS cloud, run by an Israeli company that's led by a former IDF spook – has plaintext access to the Signal chat logs they're archiving (along with chat logs for Telegram, WeChat, and WhatsApp).

SignalGate is even worse than we thought because they weren't just using Signal. They had this other insecure layer on top.

“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

It’s like we’re being governed by a 4chan thread. Every conspiracy theory is just taken as truth without need for evidence. JFC.

“Are you gonna launch an investigation of the reported violation of the due process of several hundred individuals?” Merkley asked Patel.

Patel’s job is indeed investigating criminal acts and he’s not looking in the right place. Thanks to Oregon Senator Merkley for clarifying this.