Andrew Scott Waugh

the most interesting question for me with ai was never “does this shit work” (though in many cases it seems not to lol) or “can it make money” (though in many cases it seems not to lol) but “why is it allowed to just rip off all our work and then sell it back to us”

idk man. it would have been nice if these companies all just collapsed under the weight of their own ambition and i guess some of them still might but so long as anthropic remains profitable it is doing so on the back of labor it did not pay for and i think that’s bad.

I don't know that there is a definitive line to cross that makes you say, "I live in a police state now" but when masked gunmen can routinely brutalize the public, citizen or immigrant alike, with impunity, you have reached that point.

Countries are going to have to start banning these companies. Their leaders think they have a chance at becoming global oligarchs and they're shooting their shot. Cut them down to size.

Anti-corruption politics has ousted yet another corrupt authoritarian.

Don’t call it a comeback. An insult to institutional design. This is exactly what runoffs are for. Lula enters office with a clear signal about the fault lines in his coalition and can adapt or not.

Oh so a country *can* choose not to make the same mistake twice

I’m not inherently anti-AI but I am anti what AI companies appear to think I want from AI.

Here’s the relevant language in the DOJ lawsuit. It asks for the election not to be certified if Peltola’s margin of victory is smaller than the number of votes cast for the third-party Sullivan. (I expect this to be laughed out of court.) storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Gas prices are “temporarily” high, says the president. That’s because Republicans are temporarily in power. Vote.

Omg an asymmetric social network. We can finally see who the cool States are.

Donald Trump’s tariff taxes have cost Oregon businesses billions of dollars, and most of them will never see a dime of it back. I will do everything I can to strengthen the relationships that keep Oregon products in global markets and good jobs here at home.

What's your most unhinged TV or movie take? I'll start. Replacing "Yub Nub" with instrumental flutes at the end of ROTJ is Ewok cultural erasure.

we're going to need a long-term plan, with broad political appeal, for ending impunity & holding the trump administration accountable for its crimes, malfeasance & cruelties. not 'tit-for-tat' but an american version of transitional justice. my take in @slate.com 👇

In Trump's other big war—the one against drug dealers and traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—evidence produced at trial increasingly shows that all those big-time drug dealers are in fact just fishermen. And Trump has murdered nearly 300 of them. www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

Amazing work, gents.

The fact that the president's doctors are giving him the dementia test over and over again -- tracking his decline, most likely -- and that the president keeps bragging about having to take that test should be a five-alarm fire.

Who has standing (sitting? heeling?) to sue on behalf of dogs?

The Flipbook of the Rings. More than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of the first The Lord of the Rings movie. All 3 hours. Over 120,000 scenes drawn by hand. Watch the first 11 minutes here. [kottke.org]

Yes and also this sort of 'uniparty' nonsense feels so hollow deployed in the midst of a national stove-touching. It turns out the difference between a 'milquetoast corporate Democrat' and Trump was really big! President Harris would not be driving trans soldiers out of the military!

He’s Exhibit A on why billionaire wealth should be taxed, why we have to get big money out of politics, why billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to buy up major media, and why our government shouldn’t give them huge military contracts.

What happened to contract enforcement? SpaceX went rogue to intervene on behalf of a war adversary that directly resulted in allied civilian deaths. The company should be expropriated and Elon should be in a courtroom.

That scenario is called Civil War.

best wishes to katie zacharia on her new career as a measuring unit

There can be no “fair market price” on potentially life-saving treatment. People will rightly pay whatever they can for their loved ones to live. It’s a sin that our society makes them.

the routine, pay for play pardons are all by themselves one of the worst corruption scandals in american history!

Not to be a broken record here, but he's doing this because the the sexual abuse of children is a policy goal of the Republican Party. They do it themselves, their elected officials use their powers of office to ensure it continues, their primary electorate punishes dissidents on the issue.

This war getting more worldly every week.

The Traitor Elon Musk

I'm not sure how much more blatant it can get that these guys are looting the federal government and then pointing over there and saying "look what THOSE BLACK PEOPLE ARE GETTING AWAY WITH!!!" bsky.app/profile/atru...

Nationalize Starlink now!

So, treason, then?

If Dems take a trifecta in 2028, expect to see this ramped up to deafening levels: Dems are obsessed with revenge, they are "criminalizing politics," they are trying to jail their opponents, etc. etc. The naked, grotesque hypocrisy will not even slow anyone down. MSM will gleefully participate.

I was a lifelong liberal Democrat. Then Donald Trump reminded me that he correctly identified a giraffe on an emergency cognitive exam.

You're paying thousands of dollars while Trump makes billions off the presidency. @warren.senate.gov did the math: Here are the latest inflation numbers and what it has cost you.

THEY ARE NOT POWERLESS TO STOP HIM! Go back to Washington, stand on the steps of the Capitol and demand Johnson and Thune recall the House and Senate, and impeach him. THIS IS HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK! THERE IS LITERALLY AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL! (It's called the Constitution.)

Are you kidding? They are NOT powerless to stop him. The list of things Trump could legitimately be impeached and removed for is as long as Santa Christmas list. Low-hanging fruit in abundance. Tantalizing, as it were. They can stop him as soon as they grow a pair.

YIKES -- Trump loses his shit at a reporter for the third time during this Q&A -- "Wait wait -- Quiet. Quiet!!!! What's wrong with you? Are you a SICK person?"

Don’t look away from how shocking this is. Yes, unsurprising. Still shocking.

The Supreme Court has, over the course of decades, legalized behavior that is poisonous to a functioning democracy, Leo J. Wise, a former Justice Department prosecutor, argues:

Basic common sense should tell you that nearly all of the trivial number of noncitizens who attempt to vote do so out of ignorance rather than fraudulent intent. It’s easily caught & risks serious criminal penalties for no personal benefit. No rational person would do that deliberately.

My favorite part about this post is that it's from back when he was still pretending that the "Hyperloop" was going to be a vacuum-sealed pod floating on electromagnets; a better, faster underground bullet train. All he builds now is one-car tunnels for standard Teslas to drive through slowly.