Does anybody recall the name of a comic from maybe 2018 or so, possibly Image, where the Batman-homage superhero is an older guy who refuses to retire and has early onset alzheimers and the series actually follows his son?
Self-managed abortion (SMA) with pills is very medically safe and effective throughout early pregnancy, but there is a significant risk of criminalization in many U.S. states. While it is impossible to fully eliminate the risk of criminalization when having or planning to have an abortion at home, t
Leave no online footprint of searches or purchases. Digital Defense Fund’s abortion privacy guide is your go-to resource for this. Using private browsers, two-factor authentication, encrypted messaging, strong passwords, etc. is critical. Google searches have been presented as evidence in an SMA trial before. Do not leave a digital trail.
Use the medications properly to prevent interactions with healthcare providers. The pills are very effective, but they have to be used right. Carefully follow the instructions provided on the How to Use Abortion Pill website. Note that misoprostol tablets should always be taken by dissolving them under the tongue. Do NOT insert misoprostol vaginally if you are self-managing an abortion. While this is medically safe, it can leave incriminating pill remnants that can be detected in the vagina during a pelvic exam if you end up needing to seek medical care.
If it’s not an emergency but you need expert health advice, use a free calling service like Google Voice to call or text the Miscarriage + Abortion Hotline at 1-833-246-2632. Medical complications are very uncommon with abortion pills, but they’re not impossible. The M+A Hotline is safe to use and is staffed by trustworthy clinicians who volunteer their time to help those who choose SMA. Do not use your own phone number to call as this will create a record that is visible to your cell service provider.
Don’t disclose any information about SMA to emergency room staff if you do need to seek medical care. This is how most people who are arrested for SMA are reported. Healthcare providers are almost always who calls the police in cases of SMA criminalization. Contrary to popular belief, HIPAA does not protect your private health information from being shared with police if you are suspected of doing something that could be considered a crime. If you believe you need to seek urgent medical care, do not hesitate to go. Say “I think I’m having a miscarriage” and provide your symptoms. Do not mention any use of or purchase of abortion pills. There is no widely available test to detect misoprostol in your bloodstream. If you do not disclose it, there is no way for a medical provider to tell the difference between a medication abortion and a spontaneous miscarriage.
Do not talk to the cops. Period. Do. Not. Talk. To. The. Cops. If you are questioned by police you should state, “I am exercising my right to remain silent, and I wish to speak with an attorney.” Do not speak again or nod in response to a question. Contact the Repro Legal Helpline as soon as possible for expert legal advice: 1-844-868-2812. Do not agree to questioning or speak to any law enforcement official without a lawyer present.
The Prospect has obtained a fundraising pitch and historical manifesto from inside the movement.
According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
This sentiment is laid out in substantial detail, filling 31 pages across two separate documents obtained by the Prospect. In an email exchange, Rosen confirmed the documents’ legitimacy.
Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations or mass-membership politics: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually (yes, each year!) from billionaire benefactors, one document asserts. This “Abundance Capital Stack” is being deployed to organize in all 50 states and consists of a $120 million annual commitment from ex-hedge fund manager and current Meta board member John Arnold, $40 million from Facebook/Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive. Ballmer, who is currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding alleged off-book pay for NBA star Kawhi Leonard, was not previously known as a funder of the abundance movement.
[...]
“ONE WAY TO THINK ABOUT ABUNDANCE NETWORK,” Rosen writes, “is [as] the liberal answer to the tech elite joining the MAGA faction.” Himself a tech founder of software company Pantheon, Rosen writes about how the movement’s goal is to empower tech founders to usher in “an era of true abundance” defined by “the innovation born in Silicon Valley demonstrably improv[ing] the lives of every American.” The message is undoubtedly appealing to tech billionaires with a savior complex, who are upset that the public has grown increasingly skeptical of their promises.
Rosen, who sees the movement’s aims as to “retool the American system of government for the modern era,” extols a decidedly anti-democratic style of governance. He breaks political spending into three categories: “gambling,” meaning donations to individual candidates; “card counting,” meaning turning funding over to experts; and “the house,” meaning creating a political edge and sustaining it over time. Rosen gives the example of overturning Roe v. Wade, which although massively unpopular was able to be accomplished by creating and maintaining a political advantage in the courts. Abundance, as Rosen explains it, wants to be “the house,” because “the big stuff has to be done this way.”
To that end, the Abundance Network is set to build a political infrastructure that can secure a toehold in government and pacify those who might rebel. Ultimately, it is the Great Man Theory of history applied to politics, with an important proviso: Great men must be protected to allow them to orchestrate social progress.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
I just went looking for the post on X and got a message that it didn't exist
I searched for Guri Singh and got search results showing his account existed, but when I clicked on it I got a message his account did not exist
Does anyone know if he made his account private or if he got nuked by Elon? Or do I just suck at X (because I never go there)?
He didn't steal 10 million dollars. They made that number up as a loss, they never fucking had it. Rockstar has spent more than a billion fucking dollars on GTA VI and will likely make billions more when it gets released.
Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.
Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.
And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?
What with GTA VI going up for pre-order i'd just like to remind everyone that rockstar conspired with the UK government to lock an 18-year-old away for life for hacking them.
A portrait of Adolph Hitler near a street sign bearing his name used for target practice and a couple of US soldiers getting what sleep they can during the Liberation of Metz, 20 November 1944
Honestly, Tvyek is pretty miraculous. It’s permeable to water vapor but not to water, it’s nearly impossible to tear, but can be easily cut. It’s cheap and made entirely without binding chemicals. In addition to being used for wristbands, it’s used to wrap construction sites to keep out water during construction, for tear-resistant envelopes at Fed-Ex, coveralls for mechanics, and my wallet, actually.
Fun tip, though it looks like paper, Tyvek is plastic, and cannot be recycled with paper.
to people using AI to "enhance" photos. you are not enhancing photos, you are falsifying photos; AI is not recovering lost information, it is reimagining things. same goes to people using AI to "colorise" photos. it is a falsification or reimagination. AI has no way of knowing what colors something really was. it is making guesses. sometimes those guesses may be plausible, but they are never guaranteed to be historically accurate.
Ok guys I see a lot of people in the comments talking about how anyone with basic computer skills would not fall for this, but I occasionally teach IT-related classes and let me tell you a few things:
1) A lot of people grow up not being taught shit about computers because they're raised with mobile devices and simultaneously told they already know everything about computers because they're part of a younger generation. That fucks up both a person's skills and their personal perception of said skills.
2) There's a lot of people who you'd expect to have computer skills but who don't. I once had to explain to an experienced web developer what browser bookmarks are. Stuff like that happens more often than you'd think. If you've somehow never needed to use a thing before, there's a good chance you won't know it exists.
3) Today's Windows and internet are not the Windows and internet we grew up with. Unfortunately the kids in your family are not learning HTML in order to build a custom Neopets storefront.
4) Not knowing these things does not mean you're stupid. Knowing these things does not make you immune to scams.
So let's take a look at the scam in the video:
The Windows key + R key is gonna open up your Run window, which looks like this:
This is not an online verification window: it's not a pop-up on a website.
This is a window on your computer itself. You can use this key combination regardless of whether you have internet.
You can use this window to open and run things on your computer. This can be both offline and online things.
The control key + V key pastes things. You normally use ctrl + C to copy something first, and then ctrl + V to paste it somewhere else. You can use this for example to copy text or a meme from a website into a new Tumblr post.
In this case, the scammer likely already has copied something for you that will automatically be pasted if you use ctrl + V.
So if you're now in the Run window and you use ctrl + V, something will be copied into that text bar in the Run window. This will be a bit of code that tells your computer to download a specific, malicious thing.
Once you press the enter key, you're telling your computer that you're confirming you want it to do what that bit of code says. It will now download and install that bit of malware on your computer.
If you don't have good protection against viruses and malware, the scammers can now fuck around with your computer and steal your sensitive info. This can result in things like your email suddenly sending out spam to everyone you know, your bank account emptying itself, or your computer becoming unusable.
TL;Dr: if something or someone online tells you to enter a specific combination of keys, don't do this unless you're a 100% sure what those commands do. If it does happen, do as the video says:
1) Disconnect your internet.
2) Run a scan for viruses and malware.
3) Change your passwords from a different device.
If you don't know how to do these things, ask someone to help you. Asking for help is never shameful. Someone helping you now is how you learn how to avoid future problems.
I'm on Linux these days so I'm not super up to date with current Windows antivirus stuff, but I'm sure there's other kind people on here who'll be able to tell you more about it.
Louisiana Governor signs one of the country's cruelest anti-homeless laws
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country into law. HB 211 will make it a crime to sleep
Last week, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country into law. HB 211 will make it a crime to sleep outside in Louisiana, punishing homeless people with extreme fines and draconian jail sentences, while also setting the stage for forced treatment and even forced labor.
Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.
Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).
I can't believe it. In homage to August 24, 1814, "the president" is totally going to set the white house on fire. 50 bucks he wants to put it out with Gatorade. You know, because it has electrolytes.
“For New York City Pride in 1994 (Stonewall 25), Baker created a mile-long rainbow flag that was carried down First Avenue in Manhattan. During the parade, Baker used scissors to cut segments from the flag to be rushed to Fifth Avenue for an impromptu protest march in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the headquarters of New York City’s anti-gay Catholic archdiocese.
^“At the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrick’s Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicks”
“Gilbert Baker wearing a white sequined dress (right) and other protestors triumphantly march the cut pieces of the mile-long flag past St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Photograph by Charles Beal”
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