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7·2 months ago“don’t build the torment nexus” is a meme that’s repeated so often it’s becoming a cliche, and yet
Ankh-Morpork no longer had a fire brigade. The citizens had a rather disturbingly direct way of thinking at times, and it did not take long for people to see the rather obvious flaw in paying a group of people by the number of fires they put out. The penny really dropped shortly after Charcoal Tuesday.
from a Terry Pratchett book published in 1997.
those who forget history are condemned to…something something.
5·2 months agousing an AI chatbot is “dabbling in computer science” in the same way that playing Operation in your dorm common room is “dabbling in med school”
not normally a fan of Raw Story, but I like that their headline frames this fucking thing correctly.
this is the “GOP megadonor Brian Heywood thinks your 5 year old girl needs a genital exam before she can play soccer with her friends” act of 2026.
good fucking riddance. the news about his Nazi tattoo dropped in October of last year, and some of the world’s most gullible rubes still believed in him.
following sexual assault allegations
“sexual assault” encompasses a large category of behavior. so let’s be real specific here: Platner is a fucking rapist.
the news needs to toss “alleged” in there, but I don’t.
quoting from Politico which broke the story, in spoiler tags because the details are upsetting:
spoiler
Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop.
…
That night in late 2021, she said she had exchanged text messages with him and told him not to come over, saying she wasn’t in the mood for company. Later that evening, she said she realized when she heard a sound on the stairs that he had let himself into her house, which was unlocked.
…
Racicot said she tried to separate herself from Platner by telling him she couldn’t be in that room anymore, after which he followed her to her bedroom and had sex with her against her will. She said he also ejaculated inside of her despite her telling him not to, as she was not using birth control at the time.
he came into her house uninvited and fucking raped her. technically that also meets the legal definition of sexual assault, but come on, call a spade a spade.
oh, and if anyone wants to trot out any “well it’s he said / she said so it’s impossible to know for sure” bullshit, spare me:
Racicot also shared details about the alleged assault to the man she dated after Platner, who she began dating in 2022. The man, who was granted anonymity out of concern for his personal privacy, told POLITICO that Racicot had told him in bits and pieces about a bad experience with Platner before confiding the full details of what had happened in 2023. His account of what Racicot told him about the incident matched what Racicot told POLITICO.
and even after this came out, some people were still defending him.
make a list of those people.
do not listen to any opinion they have, ever again, for the rest of their lives.
do not let them near your children.
do not leave your drink unattended around them.
in which he angrily accused the Democratic establishment and corporate media
well golly gee I’m shocked that the rapist is getting angry and lashing out when confronted with the consequences of his own actions. no one could have seen that coming.
the best encapsulation of this is a tweet from Ilan Wurman:
A year and a half ago a federal judge in Washington basically said the Trump Administration view was borderline sanctionable. That view just got 4 votes on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Wurman is a right-wing nutjob law prof at U of MN, and is essentially the main guy providing academic legal justification for Trump’s attempt to dismantle the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
In his dissent in Trump v. Barbara, Justice Clarence Thomas cited Wurman’s scholarship three times.
he lost. his position only got 4 votes. and yet that tweet is him doing a victory lap - he’s bragging about “even though I lost, look how much I was able to accomplish in 18 months”.
“schools have a bunch of structural problems that should be fixed” - yes, agreed 1000%
“schools have a bunch of structural problems that should be fixed, and therefore schools shouldn’t ban phones until the structural problems are fixed” - nope. that’s a complete non-sequitur.
“fix structural problems with schools” is a gigantic undertaking. it’s absolutely worth doing, but it’s the kind of thing that will take many many years, and effort across many many different fronts. it’s not like Congress can pass the Fix Structural Problems In Schools Act of 2026 this summer and then starting this September schools are now fixed.
“you can’t do that small change until the all the larger problems are fixed” ends up being essentially a thought-terminating cliche.
As an aside, is the Guardian becoming a shit rag? Lately (last year or two) I’ve noticed a huge dip in their quality.
what I’ve heard previously is that the Guardian’s UK edition sucks, and that the US edition is somewhat better, but at this point I’m comfortable lumping them together.
the article that flipped the “assume everything they publish is bullshit” switch for me was Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says from a few months ago.
it’s written with the tone you’d expect from “serious” journalism:
AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.
but if you read carefully…it’s tweets. it’s just fucking tweets. they released a “study” that is a graph of “tweets over time” and claimed that it says something about the prevalence of AI “going rogue”.
and in particular, they take the one story about the Meta executive who allowed an AI “agent” to delete all their emails, notice that there’s a bunch of tweets discussing it, and conflate that with an increased occurrence of it happening.
it’s the equivalent of saying that there were 10,000 moon landings in 1969 because you looked back at newspaper archives and found 10,000 “man lands on moon” headlines. just complete fucking amateur hour data analysis, and for the Guardian to publish it uncritically is shameful.
it gets even stupider than that:
We acknowledge funding from Arnold Ventures
who is this John Arnold guy anyway…let’s see…and…oh
since February 2024, is a member of the board of directors of Meta.
oh, and fun fact, it’s not even a real fucking charity:
The Laura and John Arnold Foundation was initially created as a philanthropic organization, but was restructured as a limited liability company and renamed Arnold Ventures in January 2019. The organization’s LLC structure is intended to allow it to operate with more flexibility.
so he’s on the board of directors for Meta, which among other things owns Instagram…and he has a side business that pretends to be a charity even though it’s not, and it funds publication of a “study” saying no, teenagers having cell phones 24/7 is totally fine actually.
the tobacco industry used to pay people to wear white lab coats and say cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. it’s tempting to think of ourselves as more savvy than they were, and look back in hindsight and say “how could people have fallen for such obvious bullshit?”
well…
reminder that in the 2020 primary, Kamala Harris got zero votes.
not zero convention delegates - zero. fucking. votes.
Citing a lack of funds, Harris officially withdrew her candidacy on December 3, 2019.
she dropped out of the race a full two months before the Iowa caucuses because no one liked her.
much like Biden only has national-level name recognition and popularity because he was chosen as Obama’s VP, Harris is a absolute nobody also-ran except she was in the right place at the right time to be picked as Biden’s VP.
there’s no chance in hell she wins the Democratic primary, but she’s going to float the possibility anyway because it allows her to fundraise a few million bucks in the next couple years. it’s a half-decent grift if you can make it work.
hopefully someone forks off a decent kernel
uhhh…do you have any idea how much effort would be involved in maintaining a fork of the Linux kernel, just to preserve 486 support?
this feels like a valuable door to keep open
it’s not.
it’s a vanishingly small install base, because of how slow and limited those chips are. the 486 had a whopping 1.2 million transistors. compare that to the big list on this wikipedia page. a few that stand out:
- Playstation 2 (2003) had 53 million
- Intel Core 2 Duo (2008) had 230 million
- Apple A7 (2013) used in the iPhone 5S and iPad Air had 1 billion
transistor count isn’t an exact proxy for performance, but with those orders of magnitude it puts into perspective just how underpowered that little 486 is going to be, for anything you might try to do with it in 2026.
an original, first-generation Raspberry Pi will absolutely run circles around a 486. same with going to ebay or a local pawn shop / computer refurbisher and buying the absolute oldest/cheapest used laptop you can find.
for people who already have 486s and really want to keep them going, the current Debian release still supports 486, and it’s supported until 2028 - meaning you have 2 more years of continuing to receive security updates and theoretically being safe to connect it to the internet.
and even after that, FreeBSD has “tier 2” support for 386 and higher, and NetBSD supports it as “tier 1”
and of course, nothing stops anyone from running an old kernel on their old hardware.
9·7 months agopark it in the Strait of Hormuz you cowards
military concepts like “standoff” and “beyond visual range” were invented by woke Marxist generals who were afraid of getting their hands dirty
the Ford is a gigantic ship, Iran only has small wittle boats. they’ll definitely run away and be scared of it.
to some extent, this is “yeah, everyone knows they’ve given arrest quotas, and told to use bullshit AI apps that fabricate arrest reasons” - but it’s still important, for the historical record if nothing else, to have contemporaneous, under-oath statements about it.
In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day.
…
JB testified that officers had started the day by surveilling an apartment complex. He suggested officers choose the location in part based on intelligence from an app called Elite. It’s unclear the exact role Elite played in identifying the area as a target – another officer testified that the ICE field office in Portland had provided “intelligence” that led them to visit the site. But JB explained that Elite was a “newer app” given to ICE agents. The app, he said, is “kind of like Google Maps” and shows how many individuals with an “immigration nexus” are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a “nexus” could mean any history of contact with immigration officials, which could include a naturalized US citizen.
yep, absolutely. this reeks of desperation and an overly-rushed attempt at ratfucking Kat.
this only made the news because one person (Amanda Informed) got sent the offer, and decided to tell a journalist about it rather than simply accept or decline it.
the lesson that they’re going to take from this is not “don’t use influencers to ratfuck candidates” it’s “be more cautious about which influencers you try to recruit”
The Washington Department of Licensing said in a statement that it was trying to fix the Spanish option and figure out how it happened in the first place.
reading between the lines: they didn’t fucking test it at all before rolling it out.
“Your estimated wait time is less than ‘tres’ minutes,” the voice said.
yeah bro AGI is right around the corner bro I just need like 10 or 20 billion more dollars to buy more GPUs trust me bro it’s gonna be awesome
judging by the number of emails my spam folder has been getting from him over the past few months, it’s been pretty obvious that he’s running.
my current #1 draft pick is still AOC, but Kelly seems…fine?
(with the caveat that I don’t know much about his actual positions, which is probably the way he’s trying to keep it. but he’s definitely preferable to Gavin Hairpiece or Harris 2.0)
Americans are stupid enough that “oh he was an astronaut so he’d make a good president” might actually work.
Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes ICE is fundamentally indifferent as to whether its AI outputs can be trusted. “I think that pointing out that AI is prone to giving ICE bad information is missing the entire point of ICE,” she says. “They don’t care if the information they have is good. There is an enormous amount of pressure from the Trump administration on ICE to simply make arrests and to detain people, to deport people, and to do it in large numbers, and you cannot get numbers that big by adhering to the rule of law, as we have seen.”
Galperin also regards the Trump administration as the perfect gullible customers for overleveraged AI giants controlled by Trump’s billionaire tech-executive allies. “These companies are often in an enormous amount of debt, and one of the big problems that they’re having right now is that there’s simply not enough uptake by paying customers for all of these products that they’re building in order to justify the enormous cost of running them,” she says. “Leaving the U.S. government holding the bag is a way around that.”
That’s just the model we already have documented information about.
OK. can you link to that “documented information”?
because I googled “gemma chinese government” and nothing obvious popped up. but maybe I’m just out of the loop when it comes to reasons we should be afraid of those nefarious Chinese people who work for the Chinese government and/or the (insert ominous music here) Chinese Communist Party.
Notice I mentioned CCP and government, not “the Chinese”.
uh-huh. so, a thought experiment:
a genie gives me the list of IP address ranges that the Chinese government is using when it scans the internet for potential exploits.
I’m going to run Ollama, and expose it to the public internet…except I’m going to deny all traffic to & from those specific IP ranges.
that’s still a bad idea, right? because there are many many many other possible threat actors?
this is like the difference between someone telling you “lock your doors at night because of burglars” vs “lock your doors at night because of black people”. you’re showing your whole ass when you talk about cybersecurity in general but then make the jump to “cybersecurity is important because those sneaky Asians will hack you”.
the Chinese government
the CCP
exposing something like Ollama to the public internet is a bad idea, full stop. there’s no need to bring “omg China scary” xenophobia into it.
direct link to the video embedded in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJqY1WLX4zA (18m39s)
if you want to just read Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_system
I think it’s even worse than that. quoting from the study’s abstract:
hadn’t heard of Profilic before, they describe themselves as:
“Prolific connects researchers, AI developers and product teams with real people who take part in studies online. It’s built for collecting high-quality, human data quickly and reliably, from training AI models to running behavioral research. Every participant is vetted, active and fairly paid, so you get trustworthy results without the usual noise.”
so the common theme is that 100% of the study participants have opted-in to this “help evaluate AI as a paid side-hustle” thing. that is going to introduce a huge selection bias that is definitely not representative of the population as a whole.