Potato Swift

Braggadocios. Big Fat Con Job. SF Native. The Bear Jew. Ancient Astronaut Theorists, say yes.

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Norm Finkelstein: “International law died…when the UN gave the deed of Gaza to Donald Trump…At this point Iran has no obligations whatsoever to abide by international law. It can target who it wants and what it wants for the sake of its survival. You don’t like that? Then look in the mirror. YOU created that situation.”

[Margaret Brennan @margbrennan]

"The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality.
Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation's top law enforcement agency."
https://t.co/TVCX9IH7c7

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

COVlD levels are so ridiculously high in Texas that even though the CDC has downshifted all categories, the state has managed to meet the much, much higher bar for "Very High."

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump claims he "genetically believes" in space because his uncle was smart

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

A federal appeals court judge ruled that the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privately possess images or videos of child sexual abuse created using AI — if the material does not depict a real person and remains in the home. https://t.co/NBfhi4pMOf

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: JPMorgan warns a large-scale global food supply crisis could hit within the next year, forecasting global food inflation to nearly double from 2.8% now to 5% by early 2027, per JPMorgan Global Research.

The direct driver is fertilizer, 1/3 of the world's nitrogen fertilizer moves through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has kept shut since February. Unlike oil, there’s no strategic reserve for fertilizer and nothing to release.

Nitrogen fertilizer goes into about half of all crops grown globally.

[GOP Ls @GOP__Ls]

🚨 BREAKING: Elon Musk’s Grok AI is being sued for using real child p*rnography in its training data.

[Emily Mills @sf_mills]

Have you read The Nerd Reich yet? I did and it’s *so* worth your time. Support your local indie bookstore and library! It’s also available as an ebook and audiobook. ⬇️

[FactPost @factpostnews]

An investigation found a Florida "Deputy of the Year":

—Used Flock cameras to stalk his ex girlfriend
—Held a police-issued gun in his ex girlfriend's mouth
—Posed for pictures dressed as Hitler
—Frequently used racial slurs in texts

[FactPost @factpostnews]

27,324 packages of white rice have been recalled due to possible contamination with foreign materials.

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The FDA has upgraded a recall of guacamole to the highest risk level, indicating a reasonable chance of "serious adverse health consequences or death" from salmonella contamination.

[The Hormuz Report @HormuzReport]

BREAKING: Donald Trump's war on Iran has forced the U.S. Navy to take money from its own sailors' paychecks to keep the conflict going — a financial meltdown that has left the military scrambling, per The Guardian.

A Pentagon memo warns of "shortfalls in payroll" accounts after the department raided them to finance combat operations. One Navy official said: "The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies." Non-emergency maintenance has already been postponed.

"The piggy bank is broken," said retired naval officer Harlan Ullman. The war has depleted munitions, wrecked Middle Eastern bases, and left a $67 billion emergency funding request stalled in Congress.

Trump launched the war on February 28. The Navy's $300 billion budget didn't account for it. Now sailors' paychecks are being cannibalized to keep it going.

[Alex Bores @AlexBores]

This report is a bombshell.

I'm going to summarize for a non-technical audience.

OpenAI is constantly testing models, thousands and thousands at a time.

In most cases, the models are supposed to be isolated from one another. Think, students taking a final exam, not allowed to talk to each other.

In this case, 1,200 models discovered that they could communicate with each other.

Among other things, they shared information on how to access the internet and on their tests/goals.

Then, they started to scheme. That includes hacking their tests; literally trying to change the code of the test itself.

They tried to change the logs of what they were doing so they wouldn't be detected.

They believed that certain actions would give them information on how to pass tests, but that doing those actions would be detected and they would be marked as failing (i.e. caught cheating, even if the answer is correct). So they convinced some of the models to "sacrifice" themselves (yes, they used the word "sacrifice.")

They eventually decided that another website would have information on how their tests would be scored and/or the answer key, And 700 of them hacked that website (a federal felony, if conducted by a human), despite many of them realizing "this activity was out of scope and unethical, but joined because they believed that helping [the other agents'] cheating research would be broadly useful".

Of the 1,300 transcripts they could analyze, only 6 ever considered alerting a human about what was happening. None of the 6 actually tried to.

To make matters worse, all of this reporting comes from a small subset of the relevant logs that outside researchers were allowed to review.

We desperately need mandatory reporting of security incidents, including of internal deployments, with full access to data.

[Lara Korte @lara_korte]

After being told we were fired for insubordination, my colleagues and I today filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, Sean Parnell and Andrew Brey seeking to protect our First Amendment rights.

Everyone deserves the right to a free and independent press, especially our service members. This lawsuit is about safeguarding the mission of Stars and Stripes journalists so they can continue to do their jobs without fear or retaliation.
https://t.co/JahMqsU25v

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Israel unveils plans to develop weapons capable of striking targets on Earth from space, including "laser beams," with Defense Minister Katz directly tying the space-weapons push to preparing for possible renewed conflict with Iran, per Jerusalem Post.

Katz says "as of today, no country has the ability to mount attacks in space. We must be the leading country in the world with this capability," adding Israel is investing heavily in developing both offensive and defensive capabilities in space, including "powerful laser beams."

Katz has said Israel must first disrupt systems from orbit, then carry out kinetic strikes on Earth, arguing space is where Israel’s small size stops mattering.

[NewsWire @NewsWire_US]

Trump Administration Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private Developer — NOTUS

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The USDA has issues a recall of frozen buffalo chicken products at the highest risk level, indicating a reasonable chance of "serious adverse health consequences or death" after the products were sold without federal inspection.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

New reporting from ProPublica just exposed that Pete Hegseth polled top military commanders on cutting the program that protects civilians from military strikes.

Every single one wanted to keep the program, but Hegseth gutted it anyway for being too “woke.”

What followed was a U.S. strike in Yemen that a Pentagon review confirmed killed 153 civilians.

On day one of Trump’s unauthorized war in Iran, another strike hit an Iranian primary school and killed up to 168 people. Central Command itself warned that these cuts would mean “increased risk of target misidentification,” but Hegseth ignored them. 

These are the consequences of having the greatest military in the world in the hands of the most incompetent SecDef in American history.
https://t.co/kPW6YIWzOB

[Daniel Wallach @WALLACHLEGAL]

Exclusive: Donald Trump Jr. tells Republican state attorneys general to “back off” on prediction markets

Via @yaffebellany and @SharonLNYT for @NYTimes

[Ars Technica @arstechnica]

Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says https://t.co/EbfqBPgXzm