Charles McGuinness

It's cool to make fun of how ineffective this is, but "they're bad at AI slop" is not a great defense against fascism.

The central irony of Antropic's IPO: The want to sell $100B in stock for 5% of the company. But for the same $100B you could build a viable competitor to them and own 100% of that. And you could build it using their tools.

Anthropic's IPO filing says the founders get at least 50.1% of the voting power no matter how many shares they own. Software companies long ago figured out how to sell you software without your actually owning it. Now they want to sell you shares without your owning the company.

What "Always look on the bright side of life" would be if transformed into a ponderous think piece.

Not a WaPo fan, but this is interesting and disturbing.

I wrote up a sort of worst-case scenario for the upcoming election and its aftermath. I feel like it should be obvious, but perhaps it isn't. medium.com/@cmcguinness...

Is this where Victor Lazlo stands up and conducts "La Marseillaise"?

I'm trying to figure out the mystery of "Cooking Wine" at grocery stores. Why is this salt-lick of wine a product? Is this a conspiracy by big diuretics? You can buy real wine for less; if you're concerned with spoilage, the 4-pack of Sutter Home Chardonnay is still cheaper than Holland House.

Yay, but California would be so much richer if it wasn't a donor state to the tune of over $200 billion a year...

Reportedly, Anthropic offers to let the government shut down its AI only if it kills 50 or more people. I'd like to say this shocks me.

OMG, Vance is turning into Foster Brooks! (FWIW, his character was just an act, of course)

There's a belief that seems pervasive yet is very much wrong that AI can hack into any system anywhere. And now the government is going to spend billions of $ finding that out.

The Feds are not on our side.

Tourism is an important part of California’s economy. An independent California would be welcoming and hospitable to international visitors. See @votecnp.bsky.social

So, if nobody reads the list, nobody can know who is on it.

Feels like there's a whole line of "wow, maybe the Democrats will win enough to fix the country" opinion pieces out there. As if the requisite number of Democratic senators won't suddenly go all "bi-partisan" on us to scuttle everything.

There is no coming back from two terms of Trump, at least not while people remember him well.

Imagine living in a country with a sane immigration policy; This wouldn't be a problem. That is never going to be the USA, alas.

AI is an excuse, not a reason. It makes it sound like you're cutting-edge, not running out of money. But Kroger is laying off people as it is facing a $9 billion payout to Albertsons for the failed merger. Plus, Trump's eff'd up inflation so consumers are hurting, and that hurts Kroger in turn.

So, denaturalize Musk and nationalize SpaceX?

California can either be part of the future on its own, or chained to the past with the USA.

And that's when we knew there was going to be a buddy flick after Newsom left office...

For a country that threw off being a colony, we're awfully hot to trot for colonizing.

It's very hard not to see this as Trump committing treason.

OpenAI, which has been very busy illegally hacking other companies and countries, is shocked, shocked to find someone was bugging its conference rooms.

AI will (pick one): ▢ Kill us all (eg Terminator) ▢ Save us all (eg Cure Cancer) ▢ Save us all but later kill us all ▢ None of the above, but tell us it will try harder

Whoever the federal judge was that approved the Omar search warrant should be impeached and convicted and barred from ever holding public office again.

This is fascinating. First, that supermarkets were so exposed, then second that somebody was motivated to take advantage of them. There's more here than we know.

Sometimes I think Trump just hates whatever ethnic group runs the CNN News store at the airport.

How irrelevant has journalism become when newspapers like the NY Times cannot state the obvious truth about the raid on Omar's home?

Via Fox News, natch: A criminal raid, right before the election, based on some paperwork Omar’s dad filled out decades ago www.foxnews.com/politics/ilh...

This is of course a horrible abuse of the press. OTOH, what the fuck did the media expect from their 10+ years of pretending to be balanced in covering Trump? Of not constantly pointing out that he's evil? Ignoring that he lies non-stop? That he and his cronies are all corruption all the time?

What legitimacy does a government have if we pretty much assume they are always lying and believe nothing they say?

We have always been at war with Eastasia

Just how incompetent are these companies?

The @nytimes.com totally misses the story here: the president is assembling a star chamber to go after Fed gov Lisa Cook, outside the bounds of any normal form of legal process, in order to gin up "cause" to remove her. It's a foregone conclusion that they'll find her guilty.

This is like the crazy aunt who insists her poodle is really a human. One cannot be cruel or abusive to AI anymore than you can to a rock.

This is barbaric. These people have no place in a decent society.

🧊 NJ CONCENTRATION CAMP ⁉️ "[Stephen] Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted."