a spectre daunting

#LeftIsBest has left an indeliable mark on my political thought — Pinning this indefinitely because Michael Brooks’s work was deep and just starting and will always worth connecting to if you haven’t yet Rest In Power

Just want to make sure people understand what they are arguing, because I've seen this argument come up, and it is not fact-based. The AI tools most commonly used today were not trained exclusively on publicly available and/or purchased books, films, and games. It was trained on literally pirated works. Multiple major AI providers have admitted to this in court already. And it is not as if modern AIs were trained on one or two pirated things, but potentially millions of them. We do not currently know exactly how many, because the furthest-along case (Anthropic) settled out-of-court for a billion-dollar settlement. So just to be clear, the argument being made in the quote below - while an argument we could (and perhaps should) have in the future - is not one we need to have right now, because it is irrelevant to the current facts. We can confine ourselves today to arguing about literal piracy - the analogy is if artists usually learned to draw by going to the bookstore, stealing all the books there without paying for them, and bringing them home to keep.

A very dangerous new nightmare we are living in Gaza City, and no one in the world is paying attention to it. Days ago, the Israeli army installed huge military cranes, each about 30 meters tall, on the eastern areas it controls. These cranes are equipped with machine guns and cameras, and they fire randomly and almost continuously at tents, streets, and exposed neighborhoods. Gaza City is extremely narrow, only 10 kilometers wide. A single crane at that height is enough to expose the entire city from east to west. Every street, every square, every tent, every house has become completely exposed. There is no place to hide, and not a single moment of safety. In just the past two days, three people were killed by fire from these cranes. One of them was sitting quietly with his father in a small café, trying to breathe for a few minutes. Hours later, a 5year old girl was killed while playing near her home. These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound… it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times, where even children cannot run in the street without fear.

Apple is a $4.35 trillion corporation. It made $112 billion in profits last year & paid its CEO, who's already worth $2.9 billion, $74 million in compensation. In the past 3 years, it's spending $310 billion on stock buybacks. Don't cite inflation. Cite the damn corporate greed.

Every time I suggest equality under the law as the right principle for Israel-Palestine, many of my fellow Jews tell me it's dangerously unrealistic, that I don't understand the region etc. It's exactly what I heard from white South Africans as a kid. But I rarely heard a Black South African during apartheid say that legal equality was unrealistic, or would produce more violence, just as I rarely hear that from Palestinians today.

The Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a key monitoring system for tracking the climate crisis. Policy expert David Helvarg calls it "the most advanced system for understanding the deep ocean," which was set to continue operating for at least another 15 years. He says the Trump administration, however, is more focused on oil drilling and deep-sea mining, treating the ocean "as a gas station and a garbage dump."

Very little of the world's suffering is caused by "hate." Most of it is from devaluing other people's lives. Bush didn't hate Iraqis, he was just willing to kill half a million of them

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer caught on a hot mic talking about the controversial Al data center being built despite overwhelming opposition: "We're used to people saying 'f*ck no!', and then doing it anyway."

Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500. If we end that absurdity and lift the cap on taxable income, we can make Social Security solvent for 75 years and expand benefits by $2,400. My Social Security bill does that.

@Wiscredneck @sethharpesq Blood is meaningless and genetics are not destiny, they are a mixture of dice rolls that make individuals uniquely differentiated and groups way more homogenous then you’re purporting Culture is historically contingent

Nah, the white conservatives are going to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat eventually. There's thousands of years of genetic memory in our veins waiting to be activated. The mantle of civilization has been passed down through the Greeks, Romans, HRE, Anglosphere, to America. It might not be under the red white and blue, but make no mistake, our heirs will carry the torch forward.

One thing I said in the interview that the NYT refuses to air was that the American empire probably won’t last until 2045, making it one of the shortest-lived empires in history, a testament to the extreme and possibly unprecedented avarice and incompetence of our ruling class.

Death threats against me. A subpoena from Congress. Interviews cancelled and censored. A source indicted. Witnesses killed. Read the book that the corrupt national security state and criminal actors within it have fought tooth and nail to suppress. Now available in paperback.

@SaveOurSheriff @grahamformaine Keep coping, Keith

@grahamformaine That should get you a lot of Nazi tattoos.

We’ve received $9.6 million from 265,000 small-dollar donations. Susan Collins received $9.8 million from 79 billionaires.

Susan Collins is 21x richer than she was in 2011. She and her husband are invested in Raytheon, Amazon, UnitedHealth, Nvidia and more. All while using her position to help these companies make record profits.

Burn my eyes with acid I'm so tired of reading llm-ratcheted-sentences that follow the form: "This isn't just [straightforward thing x]. This is [very urgent thing y]." Every time I see sloplines like this I immediately know it's thought leadership drivel.

30 years ago, the Bland family sold 87 acres of farmland to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation for $10 with one stipulation in the deed: the land must be turned into a public park in Williamson County. Last year, the city of Taylor, Texas, sold that land to the data center developer Blueprint for $10 million. The Bland family's dream of creating a community hub will be erased for a 135,000-square-foot data center complex. From Blueprint's $1 billion data center project, Taylor is projected to generate $30 million in tax revenue over the next decade. Despite public protests, Taylor, Texas, said on its website that there was no way to deny construction of the data centers. 404media.co/a-farmer-donat…

Honestly, i don't understand this economy when nursing homes are so expensive they bankrupt our grandparents but nursing home aides need to use food banks. daycare is so expensive it eats up one parent's entire paycheck and yet daycare providers only make $10/hr and need second jobs. college costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and puts students into debt for life and yet we have thousands of professors living in their cars. everything we need is astronomically expensive and yet almost none of the money we pay is going towards the people actually doing the work and providing the services.

NEW: SpaceX is set to have the largest IPO in history, at a $1.75 trillion valuation. But it's not what it seems. Musk got Nasdaq to change the rules in his favor, forcing tens of millions to buy in at a price nearly double what analysts say it’s actually worth. Now Elon Musk is using your retirement savings to become the world’s first trillionaire.

NEW: We brought @AOC to deep red Georgia to talk data centers. We found a data center rebellion, with people willing to radically shift their politics. One conservative voter said: "If there's a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she's gonna be the one to do it."

NEW: Public schools spend $700 billion a year. Tech companies, private equity, and Wall Street all want a cut. They get it through revolving-door relationships with school administrators, and kids pay the price. We dug into it.

Pre AI, people wrote poor commit messages, but you could still read a bunch of them and generally know what people were trying to do. AI writes commits so verbose I’m in the “I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for you tho, or sorry that happened” territory. “More” ≠ “better”

Big Tech poured over $1.4 trillion into AI only to see a $613 billion return on investment. * Amazon spent $313 billion and lost $291 billion * Google parent company Alphabet spent $287 billion and lost $262 billion * Microsoft spent $266 billion and lost $235 billion * Meta spent $230 billion and lost $227 billion And all these companies chosen to axe workers, blaming AI for the mass firings.