Monument

Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott

Oooh. Right.

Tom Scott is the middle-aged British YouTuber.

Full disclosure, I have only skimmed the source article because I just woke up and am not quite with it, but your comment brought to mind two real-world situations that I’m currently trying to navigate.

In my regular working life, I recently hired an assistant. The person we hired seemed like a great fit. They had all the requisite knowledge and skills represented in their resume and work history, with examples of actual work product to show for their efforts. Sadly, I’ve come to realize that all of their work and the terminology they threw around in their interview was from AI. When asked to use tools and systems that they cannot just dump into an AI system - you know, things that require actual intelligence and effort to wield - they flounder, plod along, and honestly, have a lower quality of work than most amateurs I interact with.
It’s not just that they don’t seem to know the material, it’s that they don’t seem to be capable of learning it, either.

In my extracurricular working life (my freelance work, side hustle, or what-have-you), I work with an educational institution to create educational materials for students. Very template-driven, and with some strict editorial and stylistic confines. Key amongst them is accessibility.
Before I get my hands on the files, they go through a robust editorial process where they are placed in an organizational template that mirrors the layout file. Lately I’ve been receiving files that look like the template, but are just all the ‘Normal’ style in Word, with overrides applied. Which is to say that someone has been using AI to style the document, and the AI has not been applying headings, or other elements that define document structure - a key component of accessibility. We’re having lengthy discussions about this - both practical, and philosophical. On the philosophical side, we’re struggling with the decoherence of information. And I think that also factors into cognitive surrender - a term I very much like.

(Thank you coming to my TED talk.)

Next headline: He was a paid false flag protestor!

I was going to reference this scene from Everything Everywhere All At Once, but got distracted by the fact that the studio is selling hotdog finger gloves.

… huh. That’s weird.

I wouldn’t say I ‘run’ it, but I mess around with it

I have a base level Mac Mini I got before the price increase a few years ago, also from when models were smaller and my ambitions were less. I’ve contemplated upgrading it, but I have other things to spend my money on.

M4 processor, 16 gb ram, 256 gb storage, and a 4tb external HDD drive (an old NAS drive).

It’s fine. It’s mostly a docker machine, but I do throw AI tasks at it a few times a week. Mostly stuff that I just let it chew on for 5-10 minutes and come back to.

I run openwebui, and have several models I bounce between. I mostly run Gemma4 (Google) and Granite4.2:8B (IBM).

Editing to add: the self hosted version of all these models, via llama, just in case that was unclear.

I was making a joke about edging.

Edit: It was pretty subtle, to be honest. Not my finest masturbation-related humor.

In the case of the browser, they are still only describing use, not brand name.

AP trying to carry a lot of water for Rogers here.
Some black voters are mad at Sayed about the campaign not to support Biden in the primary in 2024. …. Uh? Which ones? Are they in the room with us?
Mike Rogers lost to Slotkin by ‘only’ 19k votes in 2024. Slotkin got about 24k less votes than Kamala did in 2024. Rogers got about 123k less votes than Trump did in 2024. Rogers got ratioed by an unpopular candidate in a state that allows straight party voting. Enough people in his own damned party didn’t like him so much that they went through extra effort to abstain from voting for him.

If politicians were cars, Rogers would be a lemon.

The fantasizing keeps me from despondency, though.

I think the view that Trump is worshipped is a little bit of a false view presented by the media for outrage clicks. He certainly has loyal followers, but he’s only won the popular vote once, and even then, the number of people voting still don’t represent a plurality of the population.
His presidency is deeply unpopular, and the only semi-credible assasination attempts against him have been conducted by members of his own political party. He’s a populist strongman to the voters, and a useful idiot to the oligarchs, and the extremely flawed U.S. democracy and legal system is set up and/or has been corrupted so that people and candidacies like his can thrive.

As to why the majority of the U.S. populous is not out burning shit down until he’s been shot and dropped off the back of an aircraft carrier?
I would like to say I don’t know, but the local police force has tanks. They use crowd control methods banned by the Geneva convention that they are legally immune for using. They can throw you in jail for an unspecified amount of time while you await trial and if you lose your job while you’re imprisoned or medically recovering from their violence, you also lose your healthcare. If you’ve ever been fired for cause, it’s very hard to find a new job. At least, not a good one. Employers run background checks and any arrest or crime for any cause, let alone trumped up charges such as terrorism or criminal conspiracy charges - even if you’re a peaceful protestor - will prevent you from getting hired. People in the U.S. don’t have support - our society is broken and we cannot often even rely on family to help us. If you lose your income, you lose your place to live. An arrest and job loss can set your life plan back by 5 years or more. If you actually face charges, you may wind up losing decades of progress.

Related:
This weekend I hung out with a friend. We were going to go ride bikes, but she didn’t want to. She just got a new job, which was great! But she hurt her foot Friday evening, and had previously opted not to pay the $1kUSD for COBRA for gap coverage, because her old job of 23 years cut off health insurance on her last day, but her new job won’t grant insurance coverage until she collects her first paycheck. So now she’s hoping she doesn’t need medical help.

Instead of covering the WH or the China visits, the news outlets should rotate coverage between the Epstein files, how badly Iran actually damaged U.S. bases in the Middle East, the Russian Oligarch that paid for Trump Jr’s wedding, why the Saudi’s gave Kushner $2 billion dollars, how inflation is being computed now vs 15 years ago, and how the job market is actually doing (with nuance - maybe talk about underemployment).

What’s the point?

If the WH breaks the law or disobeys a court order as a matter of an official act of the president, what is the court going to do? Say “Stop” again?
In their effort to shield Trump from the treason he committed during his first term/move toward the Unitary Executive (read: dictatorship), the Supreme Court has set him up to be unaccountable.

Tangentially related - the companies calling for AI regulation:

1. Want other their competition regulated, but not them - because within a year the barrier to entry will be low enough that most decent tech companies can compete at their level.
2. Want to set and create the regulatory framework for what’s allowable, so they can bury or buy their upstart competition, in much the same way that companies do in any regulatory capture situation. (Think utility companies, and major industries, like Samsung in SK or GM in the US.)
3. Want to prevent companies that aren’t (or haven’t become) proxies for the government from developing capacity that would lead to discussions around banning the technology’s less legal uses. If any AI model can facilitate war crimes, then the technology may get banned. If they can say “oh, that model was using the technology in banned ways,” then they can keep hiring IT people with government clearances to try to get multibillion dollar government contracts. It’s a thin paper shield, but it’ll prevent them from getting shut down when someone uses AI to facilitate non-state terror attacks.

If you visit the site via its IP address, it says no.

Source: I made that up.

He’s a grifter. James is an ivy leaguer who makes hay about his single mother and “hillbilly roots” while wears eyeliner and pretends to be a tough guy.
It’s no surprise he talks out of both sides of his mouth.

Thanks for highlighting this.

I deal mostly with people I’d class as “weak engineers” but there is at least one person at my work who falls into that predator category. This helps me to reframe those interactions and perhaps respond more appropriately.

Editing to add: in case you missed it, another blogger posted this excellent (related) concept a few years ago - Executive Function Theft

She’s just trying to crawl the web!

If you ask a colleague to do their fucking job and they hit you with the ol’ executive function theft, you have every right to respond with “Seems about right. Let me know when you’ve had a chance to think about it/test it out.” Then give them a deadline (reiterate when you need their input, when the next status update is, set a meeting to discuss, or something) that makes it clear you regard the question as unanswered.

“The question is” …
Completely fucking unanswerable.

It’s a safe bet. They don’t even have to make layers and layers of shell companies anymore. Under Trump, they gutted a key anti-corruption measure, the ownership reporting requirement for shell companies and deleted all the previous data about them. Even someone as dumb as Erik Trump could pull this scam now.

I sort of don’t want to wade into this, but…

[…] about 133% of everything they and their employers paid in taxes, measured in present-value dollars. Strip out the employer match, […]

I agree with pretty much all of what you said, but they are accounting for inflation.

Edit: Oh, no. My apologies.
The article is kind of bullshit. They jump from saying the value is measured in present values to nominal without actually adjusting their numbers. I’m not a mathamagician, but something is fucky here in a way that extends beyond mathematical errors. They claim a discrepancy (employee + employer contributions), use an edge case to inflate the numbers (going with just employee contributions), then repeatedly mention that higher discrepancy while saying it’s due to both employee and employer contributions. It’s like an AI went off the rails trying to write persuasively, and the “writer” just let it fly anyway. Some basic logic doesn’t seem to work here.

Shit. I read the summary from the OP before I commented. My mistake.