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archive link

Illinois 9th District has only been represented by two people since 1965, and there hasn’t been a competitive primary since the race Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, the district’s current representative, won in November 1998. “I wouldn’t be born for another four months,” deadpans Kat Abughazaleh, the TikTok-famous political commentator now running to represent the district.

...

“We are in an emergency,” Abughazaleh says. “Right now, the answer to authoritarianism isn’t to be quiet. It’s not matching pink outfits at a state address. It’s not throwing trans people under the bus. It’s not refusing to look at the party at all and see where it could be better. The answer is to very publicly, very loudly, very boldly, stand up. The only way to fight fascism, and this has been proven over and over and over again, is loudly, proudly, and every single day.”

her announcement video on Bluesky

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling our country piece by piece. And so many Democrats seem content to just sit back and let them. So I say it's time to drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine.

(the video is 2 minutes long, but I paused it at this point and immediately donated $20 to her campaign)

I'm picturing a bunch of FBI agents with two side-by-side printouts, the list of Epstein's clients and a list of Trump campaign donors, cross-referencing them in order to make sure "sensitive information" is redacted.

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[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 25 points 2 weeks ago

click here to pre-order my upcoming book, published by Harvard Business Review, "Don't Be A Fucking Nazi and Other Secrets To Corporate Success"

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archive link

Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.

haha Streisand effect go brrrr

bookshop.org sells it in both hardcover and e-book

or from Bez-Mart, if you're into that sort of thing

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archive link

Many political strategists imagine that voters hold a handful of heartfelt positions, and that the goal of politicians is to meet them where they are. You find some voters who support gay rights, you find some others who support environmental conservation, you offer them favorable policies, and voila, you’ve got a political coalition brewing. If too many voters come out against one of those issues, you drop it to save your skin and preserve the rest of your coalition.

That is almost entirely backwards. A wealth of research shows that voters don’t come to their policy preferences organically - they follow the cues of political figures they identify with. Meaning that generally speaking, it’s not that politicians see where voters stand and try to move toward them, it’s the other way around.

my attorney has advised me to state that I do not have any plans to print this out and staple it to the foreheads of centrist Democrats. the staple gun that I purchased is for *checks notes* home improvement projects.

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archive link

The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.

...

If this sounds like something you absolutely do not want, you can safely ignore it for now. The experimental feature is only available for Google One AI Premium subscribers, who pay $20 per month for access to Google's best LLMs. This could be an indication that generating these search pages is extremely costly even for a company that gives away so much AI processing for free. Still, Google's AI efforts move fast, and you could find yourself confronted with AI Mode soon. It only took a few months for the Search Generative Experience to graduate from Labs as AI Overviews.

from the primary source on Google's own blog:

As we’ve rolled out AI Overviews, we’ve heard from power users that they want AI responses for even more of their searches.

uh-huh. sure. "power users" have been banging down your door and insisting they want more search results that say it's safe to eat one rock per day.

and these "power users" have apparently also been demanding that Google remove the normal search results that appear below the AI-generated slop.

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archive link

A quarter of the W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI, YC managing partner Jared Friedman said during a conversation posted on YouTube.

...

In a video titled “Vibe Coding is the Future”, Friedman, along with YC CEO Garry Tan, managing partner Harj Taggar, and general partner Diana Hu, discussed the trend of using natural language and instincts to create code.

an important caveat to this, I think, is that YC is heavily invested in startups that will sell AI, not just startups that are using it to build their product. so they have an incentive to hype it up as much as they can.

if any of these startups succeed, my condolences to the engineers who get hired afterwards and are stuck bugfixing and trying to understand the LLM-generated codebase the founders slapped together.

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archive link

At 10,000 people, it was the biggest ever SFVegas—the annual gathering for the structured-finance industry. The last time it boomed like this was 2006 and 2007. Mortgage bonds were selling like crazy, and this crowd was flying high.

...

Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better—including corporate loans and consumer credit-card debt, lease payments on cars, airplanes and golf carts, and payments to data centers. Once dominated by bonds backed by home mortgages, deals now reach into nearly every cranny of the economy.

...

Sales of securitized debt have been surging since the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Fed lowered rates and investors were awash with cash and looking for investments, Flanagan said. “Everything is going to end up here,” he said. That includes debt backed by money tied to artificial intelligence, solar energy and even payments from plastic-surgery patients. Bonds backed by leases on data centers and fiber-optic networks—which power companies’ AI operations—hit $4 billion in the first two months of this year, equivalent to one-third of total issuance in 2024, according to Finsight.

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archive link

“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.

...

“A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by,” he wrote. “This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else.”

Sergey Brin, who is worth $145 billion, thinks workers should come to the office on weekends, and work 60 hours a week as a "sweet spot".

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 30 points 1 month ago

here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value

it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant

judging by the "more top stories" on Futurism's home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:

Trump White House Tells Elon He's Stepped Over the Line

Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value

Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws

here is the primary source that the article is based on: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella

there's a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:

Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we're going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.

right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new "breakthroughs" that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just "regular" access journalism, it's hard to say.

around 15 minutes in, the host asks:

You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it'll be 10x that. You'll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate... we're doing with all that intelligence?

Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?

and Nadella responds:

Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it's a great question because at some level, if you're going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft's sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there's only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let's first see if, let's say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it's zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I'm not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let's have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That's the real marker, right? So it's not just, it can't just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that's the thing, right?

I think there's a lot of people are writing about it. I'm glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.

When that happens, We'll be fine as an industry. But that's, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.

that word salad is a lot of things, but I don't think it lives up to the "generating basically no value" hype that Futurism tried to give it.

also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition...which is of course for an AI product:

A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what's possible. Through Scale's data foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities.

As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. SCALE's research team, SEAL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, SCALE published Humanity's Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems' expert level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you're an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how SCALE's data foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash Dwarkesh.

did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the "SEAL team"?

33

Today, The New York Times Editorial Board published an opinion piece decrying the state of transgender rights under the Trump administration.

...

What the piece conveniently omits, however, is the Times’ own complicity. No other major paper has done more to legitimize the very arguments fueling these attacks than The New York Times itself.

some criticism from trans journalist Katelyn Burns along the same lines: The NYT Editorial Board's Shameless Pro-Trans Stance

There's just one problem. The Times itself, through both the news and opinion sections, have been advocating for these policies for years. The Times' negative coverage of gender-affirming care for trans youths has been well documented. NYT lead health reporter Azeen Ghorayshi was accused in 2023 of "betraying" parents of St. Louis area trans kids after she wrote a glowing profile of debunked "whistleblower"-turned anti-trans social media personality Jamie Reed.

and an archive link to the NYT op-ed, if you want to read the piece they're criticizing without boosting their ad revenue or readership metrics.

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 21 points 1 month ago

most of this article is fairly ho-hum - a series of quotes from various people that are unsurprising given whatever their position is.

but then buried way down at the bottom, a little nugget of Actual News - as opposed to "political figure gives on-the-record statement to a journalist about what they think".

I hadn't seen this reported anywhere else:

A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.

“We also didn’t create a new category for Gaza responses out of fear that category would be leaked. Instead we were told to mark them as ‘no response,’” the organizer said, faulting top Harris campaign leaders for failing to address the issue. “The only ‘clowns’ out there are those who were in senior leadership and decided to abdicate on this issue, who silenced a Palestinian speaker at the DNC, and who told us to ignore it every time a voter asked us about Gaza.”

just, head in the sand. literal head in the sand.

a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.

even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their "we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining" stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.

but they were scared of that data leaking. because it would have generated a bunch of "the DNC's own data shows it's out of touch with Democratic voters about Gaza" headlines. those headlines would have made the Democrats look bad. they would also have been true, but that's besides the point.

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[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 20 points 2 months ago

the genocide is (for now) over

"for now" is really doing some heavy lifting there

Netanyahu says Israel 'reserves right to resume war' and calls first phase a 'temporary ceasefire'

but also, even if the ceasefire was permanent, that doesn't mean the genocide stops.

if you bomb a bunch of hospitals, and then agree to a ceasefire, the hospitals don't magically come back into existence.

ditto water treatment plants and similar infrastructure. Diseases spread in Gaza as sewage contaminates camps and coast

a ceasefire means that the "dropped a bomb on a refugee camp" aspect of the genocide stops. the "there's a refugee camp with a never-ending stream of needless and preventable deaths" aspect of the genocide will continue unabated.

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 89 points 2 months ago

cheers to the NZ Herald for calling a spade a spade

the cowards at the "paper of record" NY Times went with "Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture"

BBC: Elon Musk's gesture at Trump rally draws scrutiny

The Guardian: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally

if Trump shot someone on 5th Ave these fucking lickspittles would probably give it a "President-involved shooting ignites debate over the limits of executive power" headline

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[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 52 points 2 months ago

tapping the "there are no good billionaires" sign

remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, slapped "Democracy dies in darkness" on the masthead, and a bunch of MSNBC-brained liberals thought it was going to be the newspaper that led the resistance against Trump?

I just woke up from a years-long coma. could someone tell me how that worked out?

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 20 points 2 months ago

I've been very cynical about the TikTok ban, and assumed people would work around it by sideloading the APK on Android phones, after it was removed from the app stores (which, as I detailed in this comment, could theoretically get random users who share the APK with friends prosecuted by the federal government and charged with a $5000 per user fine)

but this is exceeding my wildest expectations

"oh, but it's full of Chinese propaganda!!!" people will whine. cool. don't care. Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda, no one seems to be falling over themselves to ban those apps from app stores.

if propaganda is the concern, have schools teach critical thinking and how to recognize propaganda techniques. they won't do that, of course, because they want people to be susceptible to American propaganda.

haha class solidarity go brrr. the average American worker has more in common with the average Chinese worker than they do with an American oligarch. all of the American propaganda about how Chinese people are inherently untrustworthy and nefarious is gonna fall apart as people interact with actual Chinese people and realize "oh they're pretty much just like me, other than the language barrier".

and TikTok-style shortform video is very nearly the ideal medium for surmounting that language barrier. it was already commonplace to have captions in TikTok videos. start captioning videos on RedNote in both English and Chinese and bang, language differences don't matter nearly as much anymore.

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 47 points 3 months ago

you will get better answers to your question, and a more productive discussion in general, if you leave your subjective opinion out of the question.

it’s not fully memory safe (there are some programming languages that are even safer, like Ada)?

for example, you might ask instead "why has Rust gotten widespread adoption, that previous safety-focused languages like Ada did not enjoy?"

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 25 points 3 months ago

putting this in the context of other committee fights the Democrats have been having:

77-year-old Jerry Nadler was the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee (which also plays a crucial oversight role)

Nadler's leadership was successfully challenged by 62-year-old Jamie Raskin.

so Democrats' version of "younger blood" was to replace a baby boomer (born 1947) with...a slightly younger baby boomer (born 1962, which depending on where you draw the line is the last of the baby boom, or the very beginning of Gen X)

Raskin had previously been the top Democrat on House Oversight, so that spot became vacant.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran for that leadership position on House Oversight. she's 35 years old, has an excellent media presence, and is well-known nationally.

instead of AOC, Democrats chose a 74-year old, Gerry Connolly.

and not just any 74-year old...they chose a 74-year-old who has cancer

and not just any 74-year old with cancer...a 74-year-old who has an especially deadly form of cancer

and not just any 74-year old with an especially deadly form of cancer...esophageal cancer. cancer of the esophagus. you know, that thing that's in your throat. you know what else is in your throat, right next to your esophagus? your voice box. that thing you speak with.

Democrats in a nutshell: the guy we put in charge of oversight of the Trump administration...there's a good chance he's going to have surgery that renders him physically incapable of speaking.

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 54 points 3 months ago

oh golly why would anyone do such a thing

here's a totally unrelated news article from about a year ago: UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges

[-] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 19 points 4 months ago

you read a post about how awesome C is, asking why more people don't use it and instead gravitate towards replacements.

you ctrl-F for "security" - no mention

"buffer overflow" - nope

"memory safety" - nothing

"undefined behavior" - nada

this is sort of a reverse Chesterton's Fence situation. the fence is getting replaced, and you're talking about how great the old fence was, without understanding any of the actual problems it had.

you wrote some C and found it simple? OK, great, congratulations.

go work on a C codebase that spans 100 or more engineers all contributing to it.

go write some C code that listens on a TCP socket and has to deserialize potentially-malicious data received from the public internet.

go write some C code that will be used on an aircraft and has to comply with DO-178C.

and so on. after you've done that, come back here and tell us if you still think it's "simple and effective" and "applicable everywhere".

there is a reason C has stood the test of time over many decades. but there is also a reason it is being replaced with more modern languages.

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spit_evil_olive_tips

joined 6 months ago