Chad Levinson

If you work for Meta in any capacity, you're on the side of right wing dictatorship. You might not realize it now, but you need to grapple with that fact. Your dreams of buying a second (or third, or fourth) home aren't worth it.

National Review is debunking Republican lies. Something has shifted in the past decade.

Latest predatory book promotion scam forgot to finish the mail merge: Hello {Author Name}, My name is Ololade, and I craft cinematic book trailers for authors across every genre. I recently came across {Book Title}, and its story stood out to me: {Book summary}

The latest ploy by tech CEOs is more extortion: give us the data centers or our Ai agents will infest your thermostat

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

OK, since this thread has blown up a bit, I think it's worth clarifying in a new thread to what extent the 'GenAI is asbestos for the mind' analogy might hold up, and where it breaks down (as even useful analogies always do): 1/n

Me, knowing almost nothing about Fed members, googles "Lisa Cook" upon learning Trump wants to fire her to see if I guessed right. Yep, guessed right.

If anyone here knows Tom Waits, can you ask him to record a rendition of Dear Bill from Operation Mincemeat in his Blue Valentine style? Anyone who suggests getting Ai to do it gets blocked.

If someone you know challenges the claim that opposition to welfare programs is due largely to white people viewing it as a benefit that Black people get, show them this.

My response to arguments along the lines of "Ai helped me navigate the drudgery of Canvas" is the same as the atheist's response to the adage that there are no non-believers in a foxhole (ie, it's an argument against foxholes)

Another thing we can thank our techlords for: as Ai bots radically increase the number of page requests they make, web hosts respond by adding not-a-bot verifications everywhere, and scammers follow by adding their own allow-access requests to Ai slop pages.

Dammit. I hate to say it, but this is not a legit documentary since it includes a substantial amount of fabricated material.

My current least favorite word: compute (noun). Our current moment is one in which brute force is mistaken for efficiency, elegance, and ease.

Imagine if we'd invested this money in high-speed rail, solar and wind power, and indoor air quality. Our country would be cleaner, healthier, and better connected. Instead, we're replacing human interaction with computer game addiction and boiling the planet for the privilege.

Folks, I hate to say it, but I think the Golden Age of television is over

As the FAA starts to roll out Ai air traffic control (with my beloved wife due to land at DCA this evening) I can't take my mind off the time I was scheduling an appt with an electrician and the "operator" suddenly started speaking Portuguese.

At this point, I resent having to live through this moment in history. Not because it's more difficult than the rest, but because of how much attention we are all forced to pay to a malignant, narcissistic moron and an artless, soulless computer game.

My bank just informed me that future comms might only be available in English. People really go so mad at being reminded that Spanish exists that an organization with more money than most kings can't bother to translate?

At this point my Disney+ sub exists solely to preserve the option to rewatch Andor

Me: Should I get back into Bears football. [Bears score 59 points in week 1 and 3 points in week 2] Me: Nope. Not paying to watch this kind of nonsense.

This is a lather, rinse, repeat situation

In a perfect world, this all ends with Microsoft bankrupt. Along with every other company that perpetrated this wholesale cultural theft. Trashbags, all the way down.

I spoke about my book with Emma Ashford and Justin Logan at Cato yesterday. One thing I learned from watching the recording: tie your tie extra short if you're going to be seated on camera. But seriously, Emma gave terrific feedback, and Justin was an excellent host. www.cato.org/events/presi...

Paul McCartney's impression of Kash Patel's testimony today www.youtube.com/watch?v=lays...

Trump thought he would finally feel love from the culture set, that the cast of Les Miz would name him an honorary Jean Valjean on stage at the Kennedy Center, but instead he was humiliated when nearly every artist cancelled their gigs. Everything that has happened since then has been a tantrum.

Maybe it's a matter of over-learning childhood lessons, but 59 points just seems gluttonous.

Democratic candidates are responsible for their supporters’ online personas but Republican candidates are not responsible for their own online personas. Make It Make Sense should do a piece on this.

Make a band edible: The Rolling Scones

I sure as hell hope that a Democratic administration, if we are ever lucky enough to have one, has the guts to rip this shit down.

Google's decision to shut it down seemed incomprehensible at the time. What company would kill one of it's most beloved services? In hindsight, we know exactly why: it gave users too much control over content, control that the company wanted for itself.

RT if you've never had a tab of ChatGPT open, period.

Pet peeve left over from a childhood as a math nerd: the use of “exponential” to mean “a lot”

I've never been good about predicting which Apple products are going to succeed (except the original iMac/iBook, the candy-colored ones), but the folding phone seems like a terrible idea.

Ai is so boring

I still find this video a bit traumatizing, so my apologies for dropping it in your feed. It's important to make sure people know Trump is lying about being in the rubble of the Twin Towers. Instead, he was musing about having the tallest building in the neighborhood.

"America's Mayor" had a few charismatic moments on and immediately after 9/11, and was politically aligned with first responder unions, but he made several significant decisions that materially exacerbated the tragedy.

Did Alan Turing ever consider what it would mean if a machine could continue to trick someone into believing it was a person even when that someone knew it was a machine?

The only reason to be on X is to get screenshots of idiot racists you can post here, where those idiot racists will never visit, never to feel the heat of your sick burns

Carney played college hockey (ok 3rd string goalie at Harvard, but still) and the closest Trump ever came to skating is when he made a back room deal with Ed Koch to take over Wollman ice rink.

It's hard to say how much her affect is due to knowing the camera is on her, but... She is so intentionally looking him in the eyes, never breaking for longer than it takes for her eyelids to cycle closed and open again, I can't even call it blinking. youtube.com/watch?v=GGJS...

It's undoubtedly true that the medical establishment has blind spots. But there's a difference between "maybe de-wormer can work on viruses" and "ovaries exist."

We knew big tech reproduces racism. Here’s one more way it is does that. Now racist filmmakers can make their racist movies without having to find any Black people to play along.

I would like to file an appeal

Calling it Dear White People was a mistake. David Brooks thought it was talking directly to him, watched it, encountered the term "woke," and decided it would now belong to him and his people.

I just made the mistake of breaking my Meta boycott by clicking a link to a facebook post, and I was reminded that facebook wipes the tab's back-button history. It's a completely sociopathic website design choice.

When someone tells me they ONLY use LLMs for this one ethically-sound task, I picture them frothing the milk for their fancy coffee with the residual steam coming off of a Dr. Seussian forest eating machine.

Why should I pay any attention to someone who needed help writing this post?

Data scientist