bumleakage

NEW: Multiple ICE warehouses were sold by people in Trump's circle who were sitting on the properties and losing money. We dug into it, and found that some properties were bought by the feds for 10x their list price. It's a new level of corruption — and you're paying for it.

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead. Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described. The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding. The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now. She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

Reporter: The DOJ has this new fund — $1.7 billion. Why should taxpayers pay for the January 6ers? Trump: Because in my world, loyalty outranks law. They broke the rules for me, so you pay the bill for them. That’s the transaction.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani mocks Ronald Reagan’s infamous quote. “I can think of nine words more terrifying than ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help…’” “I worked all day and can’t feed my family.”

CONGRESS JUST ADMITTED $175,000 IS NOT ENOUGH TO LIVE ON, BUT THEY EXPECT YOU TO LIVE ON $14,000 A YEAR.

Why don't we talk about the water consumption of an 18-hole golf course in the same way we do data centers?

At least 32,000 gallons of jet fuel has leaked from a military base into Maryland watersheds. The Defense Department refused to disclose the spill for at least 3 months.

Immigrants generate more income and taxes than the average person, per CATO Institute.

Today, my friend found the body of his neighbor buried and decomposed. He had been injured and bleeding for three days during the last evacuation from northern Gaza. When he realized he wouldn’t survive and that no one could reach him, he covered himself with soil and buried himself while in prostration. Now, his bones were found in that same position. His body was discovered beside a tree he chose as his final resting place. He left a sign for his family — his ring tied above the soil with a string, along with a small branch from the tree, so they could find him.

Hasan Piker should have no safe refuge in the Democratic Party. The sooner we make that clear, the sooner we, as Democrats, will get back to winning tough elections.

The Strokes displaying last university in Gaza bombed as they finish their set in Coachella.