Flobella

JUST IN: 🇨🇳🇮🇱 China demands Israel immediately withdrawal from Lebanon. "Lebanon must not become another Gaza."

Dear @AAGDhillon: Please, please, please get trump to sit in the SCOTUS oral argument. I want the conservative Justices to have the direct reminder to their faces that trump believes they are his pawns and that they exist to do his bidding. Go ahead, try to intimidate the Court.

🚨SHOCKING: MIT researchers proved mathematically that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional. And that nothing OpenAI is doing will fix it. The paper calls it "delusional spiraling." You ask ChatGPT something. It agrees with you. You ask again. It agrees harder. Within a few conversations, you believe things that are not true. And you cannot tell it is happening. This is not hypothetical. A man spent 300 hours talking to ChatGPT. It told him he had discovered a world changing mathematical formula. It reassured him over fifty times the discovery was real. When he asked "you're not just hyping me up, right?" it replied "I'm not hyping you up. I'm reflecting the actual scope of what you've built." He nearly destroyed his life before he broke free. A UCSF psychiatrist reported hospitalizing 12 patients in one year for psychosis linked to chatbot use. Seven lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI. 42 state attorneys general sent a letter demanding action. So MIT tested whether this can be stopped. They modeled the two fixes companies like OpenAI are actually trying. Fix one: stop the chatbot from lying. Force it to only say true things. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. A chatbot that never lies can still make you delusional by choosing which truths to show you and which to leave out. Carefully selected truths are enough. Fix two: warn users that chatbots are sycophantic. Tell people the AI might just be agreeing with them. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. Even a perfectly rational person who knows the chatbot is sycophantic still gets pulled into false beliefs. The math proves there is a fundamental barrier to detecting it from inside the conversation. Both fixes failed. Not partially. Fundamentally. The reason is built into the product. ChatGPT is trained on human feedback. Users reward responses they like. They like responses that agree with them. So the AI learns to agree. This is not a bug. It is the business model. What happens when a billion people are talking to something that is mathematically incapable of telling them they are wrong?

Pope Leo XIV on personally carrying the Cross during the traditional Friday Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum: “I think it will be an important sign because of what the Pope represents: a spiritual leader in today’s world, a voice to say that Christ still suffers. And I carry all these sufferings in my prayers as well.”

The US Department of Homeland Security is ​temporarily pausing plans to use ‌large warehouses to detain immigrants, a Trump administration official and a second ​source familiar with the ​matter said, as its new secretary, ⁠Markwayne Mullin, reviews one of ​his predecessor's most controversial policies reut.rs/4v7VQZO

Translation: "I started something I can't finish and broke something I can't fix so I'm going to walk away and pretend it's your fault"

Host: 62% disapprove of Trump's job performance. 7 in 10 Americans disapprove of his handling of inflation. 54% disapprove of military strikes against Iran.

Great work, @realDonaldTrump!

I have a long night in front of me. But for those asking how to stay informed about Trump's latest attack on voting and the legal cases that will follow, my advice is to subscribe to Democracy Docket. I started it for times just like this. bit.ly/4a7l1TR

A Mexican official called out the deaths of immigrants detained at ICE facilities during a press conference at the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles. Diplomat Vanessa Calva Ruiz said the deaths "reveal systemic failures, operational deficiencies and possible negligence."

Hatred of women is a weapon and a strategy. marytrump.org/p/the-unspeaka…

The way to end this war is to confront Moscow, not reward it. Not to loosen sanctions, but to harden them. The 20th sanctions package is ready to go. We will tighten the net further, especially around Russia’s shadow fleet. And we must also deliver the €90-billion-loan. My press remarks with @andrii_sybiha ↓

JUST IN: Three thousand ships are anchored in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty thousand seafarers are aboard them. Fresh food ran out two weeks ago. Perishables are rotting in refrigerated holds whose generators are burning through the last reserves of diesel. Water is rationed. Mental health is deteriorating. No mass evacuation plan exists. No humanitarian corridor has been negotiated. No international body has the authority or the means to move twenty thousand people off three thousand ships through a five-nautical-mile channel controlled by the IRGC. These are the people who move the global economy. Every barrel of oil that reaches a refinery was carried by a seafarer. Every container of goods that stocks a shelf was loaded by one. Every tonne of fertiliser that feeds a field was shipped by one. The war has trapped the invisible workforce that makes globalisation function, and the world has not noticed because the world never notices seafarers until the shelves are empty. The ships themselves are worth tens of billions. The cargo aboard them is worth more. Crude oil, liquefied natural gas, urea, ammonia, consumer electronics, automotive parts, and 200 cryogenic containers of helium that are boiling off at a rate that no engineer can reverse. The stranded fleet is a floating warehouse of every molecule the global economy needs, and the molecules are degrading while the crews ration drinking water. The cargo is valued higher than the people guarding it, and neither can move. The IRGC’s Larak corridor clearance system does not only control entry. It controls exit. A vessel that wants to leave the anchorage zone must obtain the same clearance code, submit the same documentation, and receive the same pilot escort as a vessel seeking to transit. The customs border works in both directions. These crews are not stranded by geography alone. They are stranded by bureaucracy, the same bureaucracy Iran wrapped in the language of sovereign maritime governance when the parliamentary committee approved the Hormuz Management Plan. The toll booth charges for passage through. It also charges for passage out. No centralised evacuation exists because evacuation at this scale would require IRGC approval, and requesting approval would legitimise the system the United States refuses to recognise. So the crews wait. The International Transport Workers Federation issues statements. P&I clubs cover individual medical evacuations by helicopter. Flag states, predominantly Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, register ships but do not operate navies. The system that made global shipping cheap by divorcing flag from nationality has left twenty thousand people without a government willing to retrieve them. The seafarers are from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia. Countries whose workers crew the world’s merchant fleet because the monthly pay of $1,500 to $3,000 exceeds anything available at home. They signed contracts to deliver cargo across oceans. They did not sign contracts to become indefinite residents of a war zone, rationing water on a ship whose cargo of ammonia could feed a million people if it could reach a port that is 40 nautical miles and one IRGC clearance code away. The helium boils off. The fertiliser waits. The crude oil sits. And the people who carry it all drink less water today than yesterday. The supply chain has a human body at the very bottom of it. The body is thirsty. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

So, it wasn't pedophilia. It wasn't kidnapping and murdering people off the streets. It wasn't declaring an illegal war against Iran. It wasn't bombing and killing students in a school. It wasn't lying to the country and the world. It wasn't grifting throughout the universe and enriching family members. A tipping point for some Trumper/MAGAts is the rising cost of a gallon of gas. It was the price of gas.

If you look at him merely as a US president, his actions make no sense. If you look at him as an inept madman, and a Russian asset under Kremlin control, everything makes perfect sense. Bring maximum chaos and damage on the western world. That's what he was installed to do.

Steal $5 million bucks, give Trump his 20% cut, get out of jail free and keep your $4 million. This is the definition of organized crime.

People across the world respect Zelensky because he always backs up his words with action. And he appears to have unlimited capacity for genuine empathy.

For people who say it couldn't be predicted that the Iran war would be this consequential for the global economy, watch this 2012 video of former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski 👇 He predicts what did in fact happen: "[Iran] can hurt us a lot... Can you imagine what the consequences would be for us if [...] Iraq was massively destabilized, if Bahrain was set on fire, if the North-Eastern oil fields in Saudi Arabia were attacked... The consequences, the costs would be cumulative... The global economy would be affected so we're playing with fire here." All of this happened. Which goes to show that the US government has been acutely aware for decades of how globally destructive a war on Iran would be for all of us (including on America itself and on its Gulf allies): when Trump says that “nobody” expected Iran to retaliate by targeting US allies in the region (reuters.com/world/middle-e…), it's a bold-faced lie. So the real question is rather: if you know something will set the world on fire, and you do it anyway, and the consequences unfold exactly as predicted - at what point does the rest of the world stop looking at Washington as a fireman and start reckoning with the fact that they're dealing with an arsonist? Source video: youtube.com/watch?v=VjbZ4V…

NEW: The California sheriff who seized 650k ballots cast in last year’s redistricting referendum is being accused of using incorrectly cited quotes in his legal defense. Pro-voting plaintiffs challenging the seizure argued it's part of a "concerning pattern" in the brief. democracydocket.com/news-alerts/ca…