LNZ

SCOOP: Saudi Arabia gives the US expanded access to bases and airspace for war on Iran. UAE Foreign Minister told Marco Rubio Abu Dhabi is ready for a war to last nine months. “Attitude has shifted towards supporting the US war as a way to punish Iran for strikes” thread 🧵

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

Example of how anti-regime sentiment among Iranians is being overtaken by nationalist sentiment as many feel their country is being destroyed. h/t @vali_nasr

programmingInterviews redd.it/1ro7b77

ICE is rounding up thousands of people with no criminal record and throwing them into concentration camps where conditions are so bad that people are committing suicide while the guards bet on who kills themselves next

@dieworkwear Another AI summary of Grok on Iran strike

this is what you guys look like when you type "grok is this true?"

@evek29 @GlobeEyeNews

@GlobeEyeNews This video is from 2014 in Pakistan!

BREAKING: 51 Iranian children killed, 60 students wounded after joint US-Israel strikes hit girls' school in Iran.

@cbsaustin this is how ur email finds me

@celinatruckstop Okay :(

We're sorry for the glitch on our video board which is currently displaying "WE HATE POOR PEOPLE" instead of "Welcome to Celina 52!" This was an internal memo that somehow leaked onto our display. We believe Poor People are just as good as normal people. If you earn under $40,000 a year, please use the entrance by the dumpster so you don't have to see the sign.

@ryangrim The bible:

This father was doing all of his legal immigration check-ins and had no criminal record. He’s one of those heroic parents who dedicated his life to taking care of his disabled son, whom he was told would not live past five without a miracle. As his son said, his father was his miracle, and he lived a meaningful, well loved life deep into adulthood. Then ICE snatched his father — and his son, as predicted, died without him. ICE did not let him attend the funeral.

@The_BiggestFish @TheJFreakinC That's a phone. The gun was pulled off of him by an officer before this, as shown in several videos

@TheJFreakinC Is pulling a loaded 9mm on federal agents passive resistance 🤔

As a reminder, per BORDER PATROL’S own “legal refresher”… Passive resistance alone is NOT a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 111 (the federal law criminalizing the assaulting, resisting, or impeding of federal officers.) Examples of passive resistance: •Noncompliance/refusal to cooperate with officer's commands •Disobeying commands without fighting back •Taking photographs or videotaping an officer or operation in public The agents assaulted U.S. citizens for passive resistance… And then they executed Alex Pretti.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but… If agents can pull a legal firearm from your holster, then open fire on you because you had a firearm… Then no one actually has the right to conceal carry.

🚨 HOLY SMOKES: ICE agents in Maine just photographed a civilian’s face and name and said they’re putting it in a database. When the woman asked why, the agent’s response was basically: “Now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” This is intimidation. Not law enforcement.

Statement from Alex Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan Pretti: “We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.”

And *poof* just like that, you're rights are gone. Now we have confirmation the Palantir database we warned about is real, active, and labeling Americans as “domestic terrorists.” "It couldn't happen here." Yeah? Well, it's here.

"Today we remember that freedom is not free. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it." - Alex Jeffrey Pretti