Joshua T Goldstein

just doing my best.

[𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚌𝚌 𝙲𝚑𝚞𝚗𝚐𝚞𝚜 🍄 @anactualwalnut]

I’d argue that once you hit your late 20’s you realize you were practicing adulthood for the last 10 years and it’s not what you really wanted because you probably decided your entire life trajectory before your frontal lobe fully formed and it makes a lot of sense to have the desire to start all over with the knowledge you gained once real adulthood and life experience hit

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

This is a threat of genocide and merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing and cannot be trusted.

To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat.

[g. @GeauxGabrielle]

This is fair to call out. Javier Bardem is EXTREMELY pro-Palestine too and has consistently been speaking out since the beginning. They have not blacklisted him.

[art decider @poe_collector]

does anyone else smell that? is that… taxation without representation?

[shooshiMooshi 🍣 @shooshiMooshi]

This is literally the “fuck you I hate you all, die” bill people used to joke about. Holy fuck

[Kazmo @heykazmo]

It’s rare to see Pesci and De Niro actually laughing this hard. Spike has the juice.

[best of michael b. jordan. @bjordanfiles]

a beautiful video narrated by ryan coogler of the cast of sinners during hair and makeup tests in april 2024. 🥹

[Will Washington @WillWashington]

New Scrubs is VERY good. It has a level of heart that I didn’t even realize I was missing in my modern television.

Might even be the best revival/reboot so far, by simply succeeding at being exactly the old show that woke itself up in 2026 and addresses that fact head on.

[sim 🇧🇷🇲🇽🇸🇳🇫🇷🇭🇹 @simscircuit]

Pls take two minutes to listen to her entire response not just the one sentence highlighted in the caption. She lays it out PERFECTLY.

"I'll first say a big shout out to Mike and Delroy, like let's continue to honor them for how they handled that in real time, the grace and the dignity that they exercised, and the whole home team, everybody that was out there, like really carried themselves well. I think the events this weekend exposed a couple things - Institutionally, we still don't understand what inclusion means."

"Just because you invite someone into a space, but you don't provide the necessary resources to keep them and everyone else in that room safe by them being there, that's not inclusivity. That's exploitation."

"That man's disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses. That's the BAFTA's fault. And then the BBC, to air what they aired is careless."

"And not like some haphazard accident, no, like a real lack of care was exercised for those two Black men. And we know the BBC knows how to take care of what they care about, right, because they censored a bunch of other... they went so far as to make sure certain things weren't topics of conversation."

"They censored Akinola's speech, the director of My Father's Shadow, which is an amazing film, by the way. So you censored one Black man, you failed to protect two others, and our production designer, Hannah, you do not care for our dignity, our humanity."

"You want to celebrate our art, but you won't protect, and that's why we celebrate sinners. That's why we celebrate Ryan. That's why we show up to the NAACP, because those are spaces where we felt safe, where we feel safe."

- Jayme Lawson

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: CBS refused to air this Colbert interview with Democrat James Talarico, who is running for Senate in Texas, after being intimidated by Trump’s FCC rules.

Trump is worried that democrats are about to flip Texas.

SHARE EVERYWHERE!!

[‎ً @3randyn]

growing up and realizing your idols are losers and sellouts is a spiritual experience

[Tom Hoefling @TomHoefling]

Trump launders a cool hundred million in US taxpayer dollars directly to the Russians, via new ICE concentration camp.

[Kyle Blomquist for U.S. Congress @BlomquistForMI]

Not a single person implicated in the Epstein files is facing criminal charges, but DHS has subpoenaed the personal information of U.S. citizens that criticize ICE.

Dismantle the Orwellian surveillance state.

[🇯🇲 That-Tiny-Thick-Chick @ThatThickChick]

I just saw it!! 😂 please take us with you on court day!

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI.

The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not.

Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse.

This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected.

They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.

[Spencer Althouse @SpencerAlthouse]

Bad Bunny naming dozens of countries in the Americas and then holding up a football that reads "together we are America"....such an iconic Super Bowl performance wow

[Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris]

No one believes this cover up from the White House, especially since they originally defended the post. We are all clear-eyed about who Donald Trump is and what he believes.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

They lied. All of them: Trump, Noem, Miller, Vance, and Patel. And then they covered it up.

[goma @soigomaa]

Out of ten men, one makes a sexual joke at a woman, two laugh, three fake a chuckle to fit in, and four stay silent. None of them speak up. Later, nine of them still believe they're the "good guys." But from the woman's perspective, the laughter, the silence, the looking away, it all creates the same environment. So when women say"most men are the same," this is what they mean: not that every man harasses women, but that most men help protect the system that does.