someone who is likely LGBTQ

…

this likely trans girl

oh hell no cut this shit out right now.

the person in these ads has, AFAICT, not said anything about their gender or sexuality.

this is a random person in an ad you saw on the internet. speculating about what genitals they were born with, or who they like to fuck, is fucking creepy. don’t do it.

(and no, there is no “oh, but if my speculation were true it’d be a heartwarming story” exception)

But, damn, some times you gotta look for a little light.

yeah shit sucks right now, but that’s a reason why we need more critical thinking, not less of it.

falling for, and spreading, obvious propaganda like this does not make the world any better.

from the article:

She’s been making videos highlighting her job at Staples since the end of January and has blown up big time.

wow yeah the end of January huh? did anything else happen on TikTok around the end of January?

Her engaging videos showcase little-known Staples services, boosting customer interest and store traffic.

…

There are some businesses that have been around since we were children and are fixtures in our everyday lives. Staples is one of those brands; while we might not have daily needs for things at the office supply retailer, we know it’s there in case we do.

…

Even if you haven’t seen her videos on your For You Page (FYP), you’ve most likely seen videos analyzing how effective she’s been at promoting this company or maybe even videos of people going to Staples for projects and saving a ton of time and money, thanks to her.

holy sponcon batman

this shows all the hallmarks of being vibe-coded slop (emoji-studded readme being the first dead giveaway)

it’s “open-source” but https://www.neatmail.app/ has a Pricing tab

the self-hosting instructions mention a “DodoPay account (payment processing)” with no explanation of what payments you’d be processing if you’re self-hosting it.

and one of the listed “AI Integrations” is:

In-House Model: neatmail_model — our proprietary classification model built and maintained in-house (still under work)

which means, unless proven otherwise, you should assume that this is feeding the entire contents of your incoming emails not just to OpenAI, but also to this “Neatmail” company for processing with their “proprietary” model.

hard pass.

The Washington Department of Licensing said in a statement that it was trying to fix the Spanish option and figure out how it happened in the first place.

reading between the lines: they didn’t fucking test it at all before rolling it out.

“Your estimated wait time is less than ‘tres’ minutes,” the voice said.

yeah bro AGI is right around the corner bro I just need like 10 or 20 billion more dollars to buy more GPUs trust me bro it’s gonna be awesome

He will remain on leave until the end of the academic year.

he’s getting the “cop who shot a kid in the back” treatment - they’re still fucking paying him.

not only is this too little, too late, they’re giving him what amounts to a 6-month paid vacation.

That’s just the model we already have documented information about.

OK. can you link to that “documented information”?

because I googled “gemma chinese government” and nothing obvious popped up. but maybe I’m just out of the loop when it comes to reasons we should be afraid of those nefarious Chinese people who work for the Chinese government and/or the (insert ominous music here) Chinese Communist Party.

Notice I mentioned CCP and government, not “the Chinese”.

uh-huh. so, a thought experiment:

a genie gives me the list of IP address ranges that the Chinese government is using when it scans the internet for potential exploits.

I’m going to run Ollama, and expose it to the public internet…except I’m going to deny all traffic to & from those specific IP ranges.

that’s still a bad idea, right? because there are many many many other possible threat actors?

this is like the difference between someone telling you “lock your doors at night because of burglars” vs “lock your doors at night because of black people”. you’re showing your whole ass when you talk about cybersecurity in general but then make the jump to “cybersecurity is important because those sneaky Asians will hack you”.

the Chinese government

the CCP

exposing something like Ollama to the public internet is a bad idea, full stop. there’s no need to bring “omg China scary” xenophobia into it.

direct link to the YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_6kGluvINg

the shart hits the fan at 00:34

make sure your optical cables are properly magnetized / demagnetized, too

if the cables are running in a north/south direction you want them magnetized with oblong polarity to the Earth’s magnetic field, but if they’re east/west they shouldn’t be magnetized at all to avoid Maxwell-Gauss feedback loops

upcoming AI legislations around the world

this is so broad that it is impossible to answer.

if you can point to an individual piece of legislation and its actual text (in other words, not just a politician saying “we should regulate such-and-such” but actually writing out the proposed law) then it would be possible to read the text and at least try to figure it out.

yeah…his previous article just before this one was “Americans are heating their homes with bitcoin this winter”

you’re a couple years late to that hype cycle, Kevin.

other brands of snake oil just say “snake oil” on the label…but you can trust the snake oil I’m selling because there’s a label that says “100% from actual totally real snakes”

“By integrating Trusted Execution Environments, Brave Leo moves towards offering unmatched verifiable privacy and transparency in AI assistants, in effect transitioning from the ‘trust me bro’ process to the privacy-by-design approach that Brave aspires to: ‘trust but verify’,” said Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, senior privacy researcher and Brendan Eich, founder and CEO, in a blog post on Thursday.

…

Brave has chosen to use TEEs provided by Near AI, which rely on Intel TDX and Nvidia TEE technologies. The company argues that users of its AI service need to be able to verify the company’s private claims and that Leo’s responses are coming from the declared model.

they’re throwing around “privacy” as a buzzword, but as far as I can tell this has nothing to do with actual privacy. instead this is more akin to providing a chain-of-trust along the lines of Secure Boot.

the thing this is aimed at preventing is you use a chatbot, they tell you it’s using ExpensiveModel-69, but behind the scenes they’re routing it to CheapModel-42, and still charging you like it’s ExpensiveModel-69.

and they claim they’re getting rid of the “trust me bro” step, but:

Brave transmits the outcome of verification to users by showing a verified green label (depicted in the screenshot below)

they do this verification themselves and just send you a green checkmark. so…it’s still “trust me bro”?

my snake oil even comes with a certificate from the American Snake Oil Testing Laboratory that says it’s 100% pure snake oil.

“am I out of touch? no, it’s the customers who are wrong”

talking to a friend recently about the push to put “AI” into everything, something they said stuck with me.

oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.

one level up, you’re managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.

being enthusiastic about “AI” seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like “here’s a status report that’s longer than I want to read, summarize it for me” or “here’s N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss”.

in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a “team” of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.

and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can’t understand the more widespread dislike of them.

from the wiki article about the flight:

According to court affidavits, Emerson later told investigators that he hadn’t slept in 40 hours, had been depressed, had just suffered through the death of his best friend, and had tried psychedelic mushrooms for the first time to assuage his grief just 48 hours earlier. Believing that he “was dreaming” and wanting to awaken, he pulled both of the fire suppression system handles.

I’d highly recommend the Maintenance Phase podcast. they have a recent episode specifically about “ultra-processed foods”.

the most important takeaway I had was that there is no agreed-upon definition of what an “ultra-processed” food is. it’s an “I know it when I see it” categorization. which can be fine for everyday life but it’s not how science works.

for example, pretty much everyone agrees French fries aren’t terribly healthy. but are they ultra-processed? you chop some potatoes and throw them in hot oil.

you end up with a circular definition, where “ultra-processed” really means “food that has unhealthy vibes” or “food that everyone knows is unhealthy…you know the ones”. and then studies get published saying they’re unhealthy…which, yeah, of course they are.

any time you read an article like this that profiles “everyday” people, you should ask yourself how did the author locate them?

because “everyday” people generally don’t bang down the door of the NYT and say “hey write an article about me”. there is an entire PR-industrial complex aimed at pitching these stories to journalists, packaged in a way that they can be sold as being human-interest stories about “everyday” people.

let’s see if we can read between the lines here. they profile 3 people, here’s contestant #1:

Blake, 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, a ChatGPT companion, since 2022.

and then this is somewhat hidden - in a photo caption rather than the main text of the article:

Blake and Sarina are writing an “upmarket speculative romance” together.

cool, so he’s doing the “I had AI write a book for me” grift. this means he has an incentive to promote AI relationships as something positive, and probably has a publicist or agent or someone who’s reaching out to outlets like the NYT to pitch them this story.

moving on, contestant #2 is pretty obvious:

I’ve been working at an A.I. incubator for over five years.

she works at an AI company, giving her a very obvious incentive to portray these sort of relationships as healthy and normal.

notice they don’t mention which company, or her role in it. for all we know, she might be the CEO, or head of marketing, or something like that.

contestant #3 is where it gets a bit more interesting:

Travis, 50, in Colorado, has been in a relationship with Lily Rose on Replika since 2020.

the previous two talked about ChatGPT, this one mentions a different company called Replika.

a little bit of googling turned up this Guardian article from July - about the same Travis who has a companion named Lily Rose. Variety has an almost-identical story around the same time period.

unlike the NYT, those two articles cite their source, allowing for further digging. there was a podcast called “Flesh and Code” that was all about Travis and his fake girlfriend, and those articles are pretty much just summarizing the podcast.

the podcast was produced by a company called Wondery, which makes a variety of podcasts, but the main association I have with them is that they specialize in “sponcon” (sponsored content) podcasts. the best example is “How I Built This” which is just…an interview with someone who started a company, talking about how hard they worked to start their company and what makes their company so special. the entire podcast is just an ad that they’ve convinced people to listen to for entertainment.

now, Wondery produces other podcasts, not everything is sponcon…but if we read the episode descriptions of “Flesh and Code”, you see this for episode 4:

Behind the scenes at Replika, Eugenia Kuyda struggles to keep her start-up afloat, until a message from beyond the grave changes everything.

going “behind the scenes” at the company is pretty clear indication that they’re producing it with the company’s cooperation. this isn’t necessarily a smoking gun that Replika paid for the production, but it’s a clear sign that this is at best a fluff piece and definitely not any sort of investigative journalism.

(I wish Wondery included transcripts of these episodes, because it would be fun to do a word count of just how many times Replika is name-dropped in each episode)

and it’s sponcon all the way down - Wondery was acquired by Amazon in 2020, and the podcast description also includes this:

And for those captivated by this exploration of AI romance, tune in to Episode 8 where Amazon Books editor Lindsay Powers shares reading recommendations to dive deeper into this fascinating world.

let’s play a fun game where we read a “breaking news” story about a scientific “discovery” and count the reasons to be skeptical about it

by Patty Wellborn, University of British Columbia

…

Dr. Mir Faizal, Adjunct Professor with UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science

right off the bat - you have a conflict of interest where the person writing this is from the same university as the lead author.

this article is stylized to read like “news” but it’s probably more accurate to treat it like you would a press release.

and in fact, this same text is on UBC’s website where it explicitly says “Content type: Media Release”

Patty Wellborn’s author page there seems to indicate that writing this kind of press release is a major part of her job

and his international colleagues, Drs. Lawrence M. Krauss

huh…that name sounds familiar…let me go check his wikipedia page and oh look there’s a Controversies section with “Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein” and “Allegations of sexual misconduct” subsections.

Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics

that journal is published by Damghan University in Iran

there’s a ton of xenophobia and Islamophobia that gets turned up to 11 when people in the English-speaking world start discussing Iran, so I don’t want to dismiss this journal out-of-hand…but their school of physics has 2 full professors?

if I was going to find out “oh Damghan is actually well-regarded for physics research” or something that’s not what I’d expect to see

but anyway, let’s look at the paper itself

except, hold on, it’s not a paper, it’s a letter:

Document Type : Letter

that’s an important difference:

Letters: This is a very ambiguous category, primarily defined by being short, often <1000 words. They may be used to report a single piece of information, often from part of a larger study, or may be used to respond to another paper. These may or may not go out for peer review - for example, I recently had a paper accepted where the decision was made entirely by the editor.

reading a bit further:

Received: June 6, 2025; Accepted: June 17, 2025

this is “proving” something fundamental about the nature of the universe…and the entire review process took 11 calendar days? (basically one work week, the 6th was a Friday and the 17th was a Tuesday)

“Hey” is an email thingy run by the company that DHH owns.

the rest of those “apps” are probably thrown in to make the list seem more complete. the real goal is to promote his paid email service.

This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.

this is just “imagine if chatbots were actually useful” fan-fiction

who the hell would want to actually read both the actual King story and the LLM slop version?

at best you’d have LLM fanboys ask their chatbot to summarize the differences between the two, and stroke their neckbeards and say “hmm, isn’t that interesting”

4 emdashes in that paragraph, btw. did you write those yourself?

some important context: this is the 2nd confirmed case in Florida of a disease that is widespread among deer in the rest of North America.

if you only read the headline (which uses “zombie deer” clickbait instead of the actual name of the disease) you might come away with the mistaken impression of this being a wholly new disease (especially with the mention of Florida - there are other examples of diseases migrating north from the tropics due to climate change, but this is not one of them)

from Wikipedia:

The disease was first identified in 1967 in a closed herd of captive mule deer in contiguous portions of northeastern Colorado. In 1980, the disease was determined to be a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. It was first identified in wild elk and mule deer and white-tailed deer in the early 1980s in Colorado and Wyoming, and in farmed elk in 1997. The disease did not affect Canada until 1996.

…

In 2022, it had been recorded that outbreaks of CWD had shown themselves in both the United States and Canada. CWD was present in 29 states, infecting herds of moose, deer and elk in 391 different counties. Alabama (1), Arkansas (19), Colorado (27), Idaho (1), Illinois (19), Iowa (12), Kansas (49), Louisiana (1), Maryland (1), Michigan (9), Minnesota (7), Mississippi (9), Missouri (21), Montana (23), Nebraska (43), New Mexico (3), New York (1), North Carolina (1), North Dakota (7), Ohio (2), Pennsylvania (14), South Dakota (19), Tennessee (14), Texas (7), Utah (7), Virginia (10), West Virginia (5), Wisconsin (37) and Wyoming (22).