man in bloom

Jon Ossoff’s invocation of Natalie Harp was stunningly effective. Democrats must now abandon that and make the election about January 6th and the Mueller Report. by David Axelrod

this guy got caught because he's dumber than the average cop and chose a woman who wasn't marginalized enough. imagine what happens when a cop does this to, say, a sex worker or a woman with previous charges who are not likely to be willing to report this kind of thing. what do you think happens

The problem is that LLMs have been conflated with neural nets and machine learning. The former are effectively useless, a speculative bubble of nonsense that actively harms human capacity for knowledge. The latter are possibly revolutionary tools that could transform society.

For example, during Woke 1.0 @davekarpf.bsky.social made a joking reference to Bret Stephens being a begbug, causing Stephens to try to get Dave fired. That was crazy.

Is there ever a time now when he's not trying to ignite a race war?

Discworld QOTD, from Snuff

It's a bad system, perhaps the only idea genuinely and unambiguously worse than traditional FPTP and party primaries. I'm an electoral reform nerd and I would vote against it. California's very likely to repeal it soon, it's been such a complete failure.

AI food always looks like turds, worms, and buttholes.

How do I explain to small business owners that the menu on the left is one billion times more appealing than the one on the right

Again, if you lost two national elections to a functionally illiterate child rapist who can’t stop shitting his pants in public, it’s time for you to sit down and let someone else drive.

The parents of the first baby born in 2026 in this county outside Baltimore got their name ideas from ChatGPT. Hudson Oakley Winkler. www.baltimoresun.com/2026/01/01/c...

This is Natalie Harp, the close aide to President Trump. These clips are from 2021 when she worked at OAN. She ended her program with a daily Bible quote. Sometimes she swapped out the Bible for a quote from Trump leading with "And remember what Trump said..."

many "centrists" agree with Cofnas and when they complain about "wokeness" and "political correctness" they often mean that they are not allowed to express this stupid idea — that black people in smart-guy jobs shouldn't be there and should be like, sprinters and jazz musicians instead — explicitly

I would argue this belief in scientific racism is in fact one of the main animating beliefs of "elite centrism" as practiced today. Important to realize this if you're trying to understand what motivates these people and how to deal with them.

"Make intelligence property, and its manager will have his match; he is met at every turn by an opposing will, not in the form of down-right rebellion and defiance, but yet, visibly, an ever-opposing will." Part of why slavers tortured the enslaved. Who wanted this returned to the world?

So that’s the thing to know, if you’re a tabloid that’s going to name-check me in another round of transphobic shit about Bluesky discourse. I don’t stand with you. I stand with my trans friends and family members. ⏹️

My TV job is apolitical, but I’m proud that one of the things we make is a space that’s trans- and nb-friendly, and that’s not going to change either. ⬇️

Anyone who knows me even a little, or has even followed me long on social media, already knows this about me. Our institutions are literally trying to erase trans people right now, and it pisses me off. A snarky reply to one bad take on Bluesky doesn’t mean that’s changed at all. ⬇️

For the record: NOPE. Honestly, I don’t think there’s an issue today I care about on a personal level more deeply than trans rights. And it’s rough out there right now. Bigots on one side of the political aisle and too many cowards on the other. ⬇️

I saw yesterday that some right-wing outlets were running stories about me, which I’m used to. But this time I’m going to say something about it, because these were framed to imply that I was aligned with their own transphobia. ⬇️

all they can do is cry about how unfair everyone's being about their feelings and try to work the refs because they know what they actually want to say is too ugly

The three players in this photo: 1. Nigerian heritage, grew up in England, and is only a citizen thanks to birthright citizenship. 2. Born + raised in Holland, has a dad who immigrated to the US from Suriname. 3. Said he wanted to “make people who look like me proud” while playing on Juneteenth

The Vanderbilt report is the ‘respectable’ center-right version of what the ‘deplorables’ on the MAGA Right are doing to universities. The end is the same: completely remake the university into a profit center for capital. Anthony Appiah and Sean Wilentz are apparently fine with this.

Orange Markwayne Mullin's comments on Belfast made me think of this

people who work and invest in AI frequently ask me why their work polls so badly

it actually brings me great pleasure to know that billionaires are so afraid of journalists that they’re trying to build whole new systems for justice to diminish our power. despite corporate consolidation, we continue to do something they can’t fully buy and it drives them mad. stay mad, assholes.

Both Republicans and Democrats spent years falling over themselves to gift this world-ending power to a violently deranged, sieg-heiling Nazi

One of countless examples—the Biden White House, long after Musk had embraced Nazism: www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/u...

Does anyone ever poll, pretty specifically, "do you think _______ is cool?" or do we always do softening professional words

Boycott Uline.

finally, ai videos are good

A democracy that does not defend itself against fascists by whatever means necessary, including its own temporary suspension, is a democracy that dies.

No we should definitely tilt the playing field against the fascist party. There's a pretty strong case that we should de facto ban the Republican Party.

People hate this shit so much. Nobody's having fun. Even the AI people are getting tired of this. They're losing and they know it. Even with the ever-growing revenues of OpenAI and Anthropic, things feel weird and bad. Anthropic's services are also randomly broken or rate limited to hell. Cool!

Very interesting to see these people explicitly discussing the direction of their immortal souls

I thought I was open-minded but I can’t view this with anything but revulsion. Imagine rooting for the Mets. In public!