I respect your right to your opinion, but not always your opinion itself, & some opinions make me lose respect for those who hold them. -- Naomi Shulman
I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary outbursts of the President of the United States against female journalists... well, actually against journalists in general and journalism. But it feels like he saves his most childlike behavior and irrational language for female reporters, calling them all kinds of names that kids in kindergarten are given times out for. It’s stunning to me to witness such behavior from any leader, any CEO, any person of influence or importance. I’ve never witnessed someone like this raging, this weekend with @meetthepress host @kwelkernbc, just last week in the Oval Office with @cnn’s @kaitlancollins, calling women stupid or piggy, telling them to “smile”, calling them darling, demeaning their credibility. Every good man should denounce this behavior. Every person should be able to stand up for their colleagues and say “No more.”
Imagine this man screaming like this at your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother... would you stand for it? No, you wouldn’t! And neither should any of us. It’s unacceptable and undignified. Period. End of story.
THREAD: This tenth trip to Ukraine felt different than the ones before; again & again, we were hustled down dark stairwells into bunkers as Putin attacked the country with missiles and drones, escalating cruelty that signals his desperation. 1/
NEW: CENTCOM CONFIRMS: adversaries are buying commercial location data to target US troops.
Pentagon acknowledges it's not a one-off threat.
We got here thanks to big companies:
Who forced advertising everywhere. And it became a surveillance & weapons targeting system.
When you use apps they often harvest detailed data from your phone.
That data gets piped to an ecosystem of data brokers... who then sell the movements of millions to anybody with a credit card.
Customers include: shady players, criminals & military adversaries.
The data is incredibly detailed and can be used to track US military & intelligence activity (and that of every other government) and direct attacks.
Americans = extra vulnerable
Thanks to a lot of lobbying, the US has no comprehensive privacy law. For all of GDPR's flaws, Americans are far less protected from the data broker ecosystem.
...which is now leaving everybody exposed. Troops included.
Pentagon Policy? Yikes
Right now troops aren't prohibited from using their personal phones (which for reasons explained above are like giant, identifying beacons).
And until recently government devices could have ad tracking functionality enabled. Another massive own-goal.
Finally it seems like policy is being implemented to disable trackign on gov devices, but the gaps are enormous.
Some Action?
Now, a bipartisan group of Senators led by @RonWyden has called on the Pentagon to stop the flow of location data & stop using browsers built around collecting advertising data (they specifically call out Chrome).
And some other eminently sensible measures.
Good but also: experts have been collectively warning about this for almost a decade. What are we doing?
Story by @razhael
https://t.co/dY5m9lBZPs
@rastokke Interesting you say well known in just the past 5 years. I learned about cognitive load theory in an instructional design masters program in the early 90s, repeated in SpEd design courses I took early 2000s. I'll bet I have a dozen textbooks that discuss it from that time
This may be the most infernal night in Kyiv since the start of the full-scale war. Dozens of ballistic missiles, crusie missiles, hypersonic missiles and drones attacking the capital non-stop. Explosions are so loud, that the ground is shaking. Just praying that everyone sees the sunrise alive and safe.
New: Classified military intelligence assessments from early this month show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities. Including: U.S. intel assesses Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, and ~90% of Iran's underground missile sites are "partially or fully operational." w @Adamentous@maggieNYT https://t.co/3R2GEostRh
In a federal district in Michigan there is a docket which notes every time a judge rejects a pro se initial filing. It’s filled w/ heartbreaking stories of folks looking for relief through the court system. They’re all denied on technicalities like page numbers, paragraph sizing, and formatting
https://t.co/pCjTl5GPkf
US citizen who already filed a lawsuit after being illegally detained twice was detained FOR A THIRD TIME in Alabama. This is not an accident. They are racially profiling and this is the result. Citizens can't live in peace.
Five months ago, I argued against the President's $4 trillion tariffs at the Supreme Court.
In 237 years, the Court had never struck down a sitting President's signature initiative. Legal scholars said it was impossible. Some of my own colleagues said it was impossible.
We won. 6-3.
But the real story isn't what happened in that courtroom. It's what happened in the months before. And its the subject of my TED talk, coming out tomorrow.
I had the best legal team in the nation, especially Colleen Roh Sinzdak, the most outstanding legal strategist I know. Huge thanks, too, go to the Liberty Justice Center (and in particular its fearless and hyper-intelligent leader Sara Albrecht), who organized the client small businesses, as well as to the brave small businesses themselves.
I also had four teachers preparing me.
A mindset coach who'd worked with Andre Agassi.
An improv coach who taught me that "Yes, and" works in Supreme Court arguments the same way it works everywhere else.
A meditation coach who taught me stillness.
And Harvey.
Harvey predicted many of the questions the Justices asked — sometimes almost word for word. Brilliant. Tireless. Occasionally insufferable.
Here's the catch: Harvey isn't a person.
Harvey is a bespoke AI I built over the last year with a legal AI company, trained on every question every Justice has asked in oral argument for 25 years, and everything they've ever written.
Tomorrow, TED releases my talk about what really happened — and what I learned standing at that podium.
AI can predict. AI can analyze. What AI cannot do is the one thing that actually won the argument.
Connect. Read the room. Hear not just a Justice's words, but her worry — and answer the worry.
That is the irreducibly human skill.
Find yours. Go deeper. In this age of AI, that's where your edge lives.
The talk goes live Thursday, May 7 at 11am ET: https://t.co/wLxKtBsHpF
What's the irreducibly human skill in your work — the thing AI can't touch?
We now know the Iran war price tag is more like $50 billion - hundreds of dollars per household - and counting.
It's enough to cover all the health insurance premium credits that the Republicans got rid of for this year, and next. It could save rural hospitals, pay teachers, fix roads.
Don't let this White House insult your intelligence by blowing your money on war, then saying America can't afford nice things.
Share widely-This is Arlene Greist, Iñupiat Ilitqusiat, Elder from Ambler Road Tribal Council in Alaska. She travelled thousands of miles from her fly-in only community to the United Nations to tell the world and Donald Trump @realDonaldTrump
- “No Ambler Road.”
The Ambler Road is a proposed 211-mile industrial road through Alaska’s Brooks Range to access copper and cobalt mines. Over 60 Alaska Native communities would face restrictions on their subsistence practices — hunting, fishing, and gathering that are central to their way of life. 89 Tribes and First Nations have passed resolutions against it. Environmentally, the road will cross over 3,000 streams and rivers , disrupt the migration of the Western Arctic caribou herd, and open one of the largest intact wilderness areas on Earth to industrial development.
Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT.
The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time.
A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B.
Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself.
GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won.
Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective.
It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect.
Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance.
99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time.
If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars.
Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.
Articles about Jared Kushner's diplomatic role with Iran that mention Kushner has received billions from the Saudi government (2/28-4/19):
NYT: 5 of 58
WashPost: 1 of 43
WSJ: 0 of 40
AP: 0 of 26
CNN Wire: 0 of 18
NY Post: 0 of 17
Chicago Tribune: 0 of 4
LA Times: 0 of 4
Boston Globe: 0 of 2
Buttigieg: And my word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That’s not what we’re here to do.
We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say, “Here you go, I give you the world as it looked in 2023.” That’s not going to work. It’s not what we need.
So much has changed, and the truth is they are destroying things right and left. They’re destroying a lot of good, important things. They’re destroying some useless things too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.
This deserves much more attention.
Hungary’s incoming PM just admitted on the record that Viktor Orbán used Hungarian government funds to finance CPAC.
His exact words: “I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place, it was a crime.”
He is opening a criminal probe in Hungary.
This demands a parallel investigation here.
Federal law bars any foreign national, including a foreign government, from directly or indirectly giving money or anything of value in connection with a U.S. election.
It also bars any American from soliciting or accepting it.
CPAC is the flagship networking event for Republican candidates, members of Congress, and the conservative political operation. Money flowing from a foreign government into that ecosystem is exactly what the statute was written to stop.
We need answers.
How much did Orbán’s government send? Who received it? What was it spent on? Did any of it underwrite electioneering, candidate travel, or political messaging in the United States?
Congress should demand records. The FEC and DOJ should open formal investigations. CPAC should disclose every dollar received from any Hungarian government entity or state-linked institution.
Foreign governments do not get to buy influence in American elections.
Not from the left.
Not from the right.
Not ever.
https://t.co/grvXA2GwWY
MeidasTouch Network host Katie Phang testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the proposed merger of Paramount-Skydance and Warner Bros.:
"Democracy cannot survive if powerful people get to decide which facts are allowed to exist and what version of the truth they want to peddle for profit."
Go Katie!
🔥
It should be a much bigger story that JD Vance flew to Hungary, stood on a campaign stage, and told voters to return a head of government widely documented for human rights abuses and democratic backsliding.
Then, after his candidate lost, Vance said what had happened during the Hungarian campaign was “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.”
Was he describing himself?
The Hungarian people rejected it all. Democracy held, despite America’s intervention, not because of American leadership.
The United States has long argued that elections should be free from outside influence.
That standard should apply to everyone, including us.
https://t.co/Yv2XHGTAOU