My entire life reduced to a 3-second clip.

Oh this is begging for Streisand… Let’s give it to them.

9/22/2026: Woman gets mic cut and is physically removed by cop when she speaks up against Flock in Springfield, MO. Mayor then ends the public hearing on the spot in case anyone else objects. Cop gloats "you are under arrest" to the woman and adds that he is getting paid by the hour as he drags her away. Our police state at work. A snapshot of our free country. 404media.co/woman-arrested-a…

Former US Controller General Dave Walker estimates that the TRUE national debt will reach $146 TRILLION this fiscal year. That number includes unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities as well as federal employee pension and healthcare obligations.

I say in advance: End qualified immunity. There should be serious consequences for government agents who are this lazy, wrecking other people’s lives with impunity. Ofc ALPRs also need to go.

Film tax credits have been terrible for the states. Adding a federal tax credit would compound the error.

If we hadn’t let the debt get out of control, your mortgage payments would probably be $6000 lower.

I hosted an amazing party last night. Everyone there agreed that it was the Best Party EVER. Also I told them about my idea to turn every car into TANKS and they said it was an amazing idea and everybody said we should totally do that and I am very smart. So that’s definitely happening.

Like this is the most textbook gaslighting I have ever seen in my life, it’s not a politics thing or a woke thing this person is an abuser do not let people like this in your life

If I can use therapy speak earnestly for a second Soe Noire is an abuser and Jackie Matellian is unfortunately in an abusive manipulative relationship with basically their entire community

We own a French company that makes fighter jets. Demand right now is off the charts. They could probably have 10 to 15 years of orders. We asked them why they wouldn't boost production. Did they not have the factory space? They said they have plenty of space. But the second they hire more people, they can't lay them off. Because of that, they're not hiring more. When every hire is a lifetime commitment, companies stay small, and new companies don't get started. Look at the number of startups in Western Europe compared to the United States. The protection of workers did not protect workers in the end, because you stop creating new jobs.

Incredible. First @SecMullinDHS claimed that @DHSgov identified 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter roll. Then DHS officials said, no no no, that’s just people we flagged, here’s the names of 185 people we KNOW aren’t citizens. All 185 were citizens. DHS got 100% wrong.

Why is it that boards of directors have a fiduciary duty to stockholders but members of Congress have no fiduciary duty to the American people?

Milton Friedman: “A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it…gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]

A $2 roadside drug test put a Georgia woman in jail for a month over SpaghettiOs. At least 100,000 Americans a year plead guilty to drug charges based on results from these same tests. The scariest detail sits in her public defender's statement. Ashley Huff had no criminal record and maintained her innocence the whole time, and she was still ready to take a felony plea just to get out. She'd lost her job. She was missing her kid's birthday. Signing was the fastest exit. Which is exactly how the machine runs. Over 90% of drug convictions in America come from plea deals, and a federal survey found 62% of crime labs never test the evidence once a defendant pleads. If Huff had signed, the spoon never reaches a lab. She's a felon for life and no one ever learns the "meth" was tomato sauce. We only know how often this happens because of one accident of policy. Houston's crime lab kept testing evidence even after guilty pleas, which almost no lab does. They found 298 people in Harris County who had pleaded guilty to possessing drugs that never existed. One county. Every county that doesn't re-test has a number like that, and it stays invisible forever. The chemistry explains the failures. These kits were patented in 1973 and rely on simple color-change reagents. The common cocaine reagent turns blue for cocaine and for more than 80 legal compounds, including acne medication and household cleaners. Tomato sauce fooled the meth version here. Cotton candy and Krispy Kreme glaze have fooled others, and each of those put an innocent person in a cell too. Huff walked free only because the lab result arrived before she cracked. The test survives for one reason. Pleading guilty is faster than waiting a month for the truth, and the case closes either way.

Aide Pushes Cart Through Halls Of Congress Yelling 'Bring Out Your Dead!' buff.ly/L0lE62E

When the flag in the middle is secretly plotting with the flag on the right to throw the flag on the left off the balcony...

🇺🇸 In 2014, 23-year-old Ashley Gabrielle Huff was pulled over in Georgia. Police found a spoon with red residue and a field drug test said it was methamphetamine. Ashley swore it was just leftover Spaghettio sauce from lunch. Unable to pay bail, she spent a full month in jail, lost her job at Waffle House and missed her child’s birthday. A month later, the state crime lab finally tested it properly and confirmed it was nothing but tomato sauce.

The PER PUPIL spending of the school Nikole Hannah Jones sent her daughter to is 52k PER PUPIL PER YEAR and her primary complaint was that it was under-resourced and that’s why it sucked. Just incredible stuff.

Without government, who would kidnap you for possessing something they just planted on you?