Micah White

Wait no fucking way

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

We actually have some very close friends at the College Board and apparently the executive team is in full panic mode that this video is spreading on the Internet. Sorry, not sorry.

My hot take on Democrats and Hasan Piker is that the vast majority of voters do not give a shit and Democrats should spend way more time talking to them about something that is not Hasan Piker.

There are no words.

🚨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?

The Afroman Trial. -Cops raid Afromans house for bullshit reasons. -Steal money, break his door, fuck his house up. -No criminality found whatsoever, no charges at all pressed on Afroman. -Afroman spends the next 3 years making songs that make fun of all the officers involved by name, even using footage of the raid from his own CCTV cameras. -Songs had titles like "Randy Walters is a son of a bitch" and "Lick Em Low Lisa" accusing one of the officers of being a lesbian and sleeping with the other officers wives. -During the raid one officer looked like he was about to eat some lemon pound cake sitting on Afromans counter, Afroman made a whole album calling the officer fat. -The cops get mad and file a lawsuit for defamation. -Afroman turns up to court in a whole American flag suit. -Officers performatively mald and cry while listening to the songs really trying to oversell how badly the songs upset them. -One officer was suing because Afroman made a whole song about him saying he was fucking the officers wife. When the officer was asked if Afroman was really fucking his wife, he said "I don't know". Nuking his own case and establishing that there is a non-zero chance that Afroman might actually be fucking his wife. -As his only witness for the trial, Afroman brought a deputies EX FUCKING WIFE. -The jury ruled completely in favour of Afroman. This entire thing has been a great win for free speech and absolutely fucking hilarious.

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

During an event in Taiwan, strong winds caused 7-Eleven Taiwan's mascot to disappear into the sky accompanied by pleasant background music.

“He did more merit badges than any other kid I know and a lot of them were community oriented.”

In 1951, Adelbert Ames created the mind-boggling ‘Ames Window’. It’s so effective that even when you know how it works you can’t break the illusion [📹 The Curiosity Show]

The DOGE goons are getting deposed for a lawsuit on behalf of the American History Association and others and holy shit this hurts to watch

Sam Altman is such an incredible backstabber, liar and traitor. While your competitor is taking a heroic and principled stand, you swoop in to make your deal. Imagine working for this guy - is there a greater shame? This should lead to a mass exodus from OpenAI.

Anthropic responds to Hegseth.

when my screen time is down 3%: hahah yes! fuck yes. ive mastered discipline. technology’s foul temptations cant sway my elevated consciousness. i am doing yoga in the morning air. i am breathing in self-actualization. i am free when my screen time is up 97%: these things happen

People keep using the word "irrational" when describing the general public's opposition to AI. That word has meaning. Let's start with the colloquial: making consistent decisions against one's best interests given information that one has. What is the current information people have? On the one hand, they have the chatbots. For most people, they are fun and sometimes helpful on the margin. Adoption in consequential contexts has been spotty and surveys show very mixed attitudes in those settings (see 2025 BCG survey). On the other hand, you have the heads of almost every AI company saying that AI will 1) lead to *huge* job losses and 2) potentially much much worse. There is some vague hand waving about curing cancer or going to space, but the main message is "it is coming for your job and your life". Putting the two together, you get exactly what you see in the data: "I like these chatbots, but I do not like AI and I do not want it to get better or expand." This is not a contradiction. The former refers to the current chatbots that people ask random questions, the latter represents the thing that everyone in power tells them will take their jobs. The response in DC and the coasts has been: you don't know what's good for you, move out of the way, you're stupid and irrational. How has that response worked out the last 15 years? If those who see the positives, the huge potential benefits of AI to grow the pie and make life better for all (which includes myself), do not take this political economy into account, I'm afraid that the populist wave of the last decade will look like child's play. A dress rehearsal.

Happy birthday to my favourite of all the haters, Charles Darwin

scale crime

Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring? And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don't talk about it.