Brandon Downey

vivek's hairstyle kind of looks like dessert at the cheesecake factory

www.smbc-comics.com/comic/econom...

Anthropic cumulative operating loss since inception is only $12 billion and at their current run rate operating margin they will completely recoup that loss by Q1 27 even if revenue is flat. So much for “these companies will never make money” lmao

Just fucked up.

thanks emudhra for the assist. a list of the hosts that a 2025 tizen samsung TV talks to and what data ships - even with all of the data collection and interest tracking opted out of gist.github.com/haileyok/906...

NEW: Ingram, Texas, was just rebuilding from a devastating flood when its tiny police department enrolled in ICE’s 287(g) deportation program. Within a year, cops would hand over the equivalent of 10% of the town. with @nytimes.com

The same US president who treats our friend Canada as an enemy is trying to give Alaska to Russia, a country whose absolutely overt foreign policy is to destroy us. This superpower suicide has to be stopped. www.ft.com/content/e9cf...

So I know I'm like a dog with a bone with this, and I know it wasn't *intended*, but every so often I listen to this Codex entry. Also PS narrated codex whips.

Wife just sent me out to get Halloween decorations. "Don't overthink it!" Me: "Have you *met* me?"

“Ramaswamy’s ad embraces a woman who enabled sexual abuse—and uses the language of ‘parental estrangement’ to mobilize MAGA voters who can’t understand why their children won’t take their calls. But they know the reason. They just don’t want to accept it.” www.liberalcurrents.com/editors-note...

This article is back up and (sigh) is I guess essential reading for why so many things about AI in the valley are weird right now. It does have the character of a mythos text -- not only do you go a little crazy reading it, *explaining it* might get you flagged as mad.

Just returning to this; Even if you had no values and believed nothing was worth fighting for isn't Yglesias at least worried that *appearing weak* is bad marketing for any type of public campaign? I mean that's what this is: ceding ground & appeasement. And it shows!

Cystic Fibrosis no longer automatically qualifies a child for the Make-A-Wish program.

It's notable openai could have done this before its agents hacked huggingface et. al but they just... didn't.

CIA Experiencing Mass Exodus https://theonion.com/cia-experiencing-mass-exodus/

Now that's what I call a lede. ftav.substack.com/p/of-spacex-...

Do you have any photos in your camera roll that you expect would be difficult to geolocate? We’re looking for photo submissions for the Bellingcat December Geolocation Challenges - submit your images here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

just clicked for me that the reason clyburn went on tv in winter '24 and said biden should pardon trump was bc he knew that he was under investigation for corruption (which he did do, per propublica). so how much of his decision to avoid fighting trump these last two years has been bc of that?

We live in a broken world.

I actually do think we are in for a < 5 year period of grotesque chaos, and then we will have software psychohistory and get more stable, reliable software. I say this not as an optimist but a realist about capabilities.

Absolutely nothing successful functions like this. If a company you transacted with one time texted and emailed you with the same frequency as do the Democrats and their groups, you would light their headquarters on fire.

Best way to understand MAGA is as a version of the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" but instead of basing their society around an old book about gangland Chicago they based it on the Epstein Files.

What if the chaos could be compressed to a single 3 year period? Also a second team of researchers will be running abliterated models at Star's End.

I love Zach, but you should listen to experts. Please.

Private equity is buying out, and taking over, many mom-and-pop dental clinics. Their goal: maximize profits, everything else be damned. This searchable map will show which dental clinics in your area have been bought out by private equity: whoownsmydentists.com

EFF has released a State Legislative Agenda to end ALPR mass surveillance. The ideal solution? Ban ALPRs entirely. They are fundamentally incompatible with a free society and cannot be fixed.

this behaviour is consistent with 0day holders knowing their exploit is about to be burned

My father is a tech hobbyist. He is insanely gifted. We were in a Fry's Electronics together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build it today. I will never forget his answer… “We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.”

Age-gating the internet isn’t the answer. Many of the best ways to protect the privacy of young people are identical to the steps adults should take, but it ultimately starts with a security plan.

Has anybody checked decision markets for people betting on a php vuln before it dropped?

In September, the AI company Anthropic claimed its models were approaching “superhuman capabilities for geolocating outdoor photos”. Bellingcat put that claim to the test by benchmarking the performance of Anthropic and other LLMs. Here’s what we found: www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

Thanks Varric. #bioware

No Enchantment.

Incredible

Going to give my own takeaway on the demise of Bioware, which still makes me very sad. The TLDR: Bioware was not killed suddenly by a private equity acquisition. It was slowly strangled by idiots who didn't understand what made Bioware great - some at EA but also some inside of Bioware leadership

If you are a billionaire who has made bad or even horrific life choices, there is still a path back to redemption. Buy Bioware's assets; rehire their writing staff. Give us bisexual disaster asari pirate queens 500 years in the future. Etc.

I guess EA picked the "destroy" ending arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/...

An update from Brewster Kahle on today's outage.