sad desk lunch

[sad desk lunch @RocketSauce7]

@NBCSportsSoccer Could you make the actual goal visible and not such a quick cut?

[ProPublica @propublica]

Sen. Susan Collins helped steer millions in federal defense contracts to Navatek, whose CEO illegally funneled thousands of dollars to her campaign.

The FBI sought to launch a probe and was eyeing Collins and other lawmakers.

Then Trump gutted the unit in charge. THREAD 🧵

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.

A Syrian billionaire needed U.S. sanctions lifted so he could cash in on $12 billion in reconstruction contracts.

In an attempt to influence American foreign policy, he proposed a Trump-branded golf course, cut Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar real estate deal for a resort in Albania, and had someone physically deliver a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican Member of Congress with instructions to take it to the White House to get the President's attention.

Trump threw his weight behind repealing the sanctions. They were lifted. The contracts are moving, the Trump family’s deals are expanding, and not a single Washington Republican is willing to say a word about any of it.

This is a corruption of everything the office of the presidency is supposed to stand for, and the American people deserve to know about it.
https://t.co/A4lQE3ktoG

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Every time I think I've seen the most ridiculous tariff thing, they totally top themselves.

It's impressive, really.

[Hemant Mehta @hemantmehta]

"One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.

And they did it with a press release on a Tuesday."

https://t.co/9Hi2v9md4X

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.

Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.

They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.

The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.

Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.

Then it got worse.

The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.

It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.

One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.

Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.

Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.

That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.

Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.

This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Internal messages from Live Nation reveal two execs talking about "robbing [fans] blind."

“These people are so stupid. I almost feel bad taking advantage of them," one says.

That man is now the head of ticketing for the unit responsible for Live Nation's 150 amphitheaters.

[Lina Khan @linamkhan]

Last week marked the start of the government’s longstanding antitrust case against Ticketmaster, with executives set to take the stand before a jury.

This week the Trump administration is entering into a cheap settlement, depriving artists, fans, and venues of full relief.

Good to see state AGs announce they will keep the case going so that Ticketmaster is actually held accountable for breaking the law.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Trump reversed decades of national security objections to selling advanced AI chips to UAE. National security experts were alarmed.

But there was a secret. Before the deal, UAE had sent $187M to the Trumps and $31M to the Witkoffs in secret payments.

Mind blowing corruption.

[sad desk lunch @RocketSauce7]

@nimayi3 @minordissent What was the pod named?

[Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25]

A thread of MAGA protesting with guns and not getting murdered for it...

Arizona, November 2020

[sad desk lunch @RocketSauce7]

@Witte_Os @NotoriousTrdr @cbarbermd You're literally replying to the exact image you seek.

[sad desk lunch @RocketSauce7]

@Witte_Os @NotoriousTrdr @cbarbermd His right hand has a phone in it the whole time but you conveniently crop that out.

[Carolyn Barber, MD @cbarbermd]

“From the perspective of an attorney who has worked in this area of the law for 25 years(not me!) :

1. They created the escalation by going after an observer who was not in the way.
2. They escalated it to physical contact
3. They removed his lawfully carried firearm
4. There were multiple officers now holding him down and punching and beating him after disarming him.
5. They the murdered him and continued to shoot his lifeless body.

EVERYTHING FROM STEP 1 forward makes this illegal. Every action.”

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

To be clear about what this depicts: An immigration officer threw a woman onto the ground. Alex Pretti, a registered nurse on scene as a legal observer, is filming and goes to help the woman up. He is then pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground for no discernible reason. Many officer surround and assault him; one removes his firearm, which police say appears to have been legally registered. They then execute him with a hail of bullets.

They are, objectively speaking, both cowards and criminals, while Pretti is what we teach people an American ought to be.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I'm seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points.

I'm not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days.

Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn't want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them.

However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created.

When you've known people since they were ten years old it's hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn't managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I've repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn't want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma's 'all witches' speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence 'I'm so sorry for what you're going through' (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family's safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness.

Like other people who've never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is. She'll never need a homeless shelter. She's never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I'd be astounded if she's been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her 'public bathroom' is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who's identified into the women's prison?

I wasn't a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women's rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.

The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she's adopted because she's noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest.

Adults can't expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend's assassination, then assert their right to the former friend's love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public - but I have the same right, and I've finally decided to exercise it.

[Ned Price @nedprice]

On a single Saturday in September:

--Trump instructed his AG to go after specific political enemies.
--We learned that his DOJ ended an investigation into his border czar, who was caught on camera taking a $50k cash bribe.
--His Pentagon top brass threatened to expel journalists who report info not cleared by them.
--His WH spoke to a shady deal that will see TikTok in the hands of a consortium of GOP mega-donors.
--Trump threatened "bad things" if we don't re-take Bagram AFB.
--His most senior counterterrorism official is in a Twitter spat with Laura Loomer.

None of this is normal. All of it is so dangerous and corrosive to our democracy.

[Tommy Borum † ⚡︎ @tommyborumjokes]

@HarrisonHSmith They would.

If Charlie turned heel on Israel, they would have someone shoot him at an open-air event and they have some idiot groyper with a genetically anomalous issue there to be the patsy/fall-guy.

Part of why you never make the deal with the Devil in the first place.

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

it’s insane how mainstream media still uniformly acts like 2024 was a watershed, Reaganesque societal turning point when it’s obvious ~15% of Americans just swung it because they thought there actually was a “make eggs cheaper” button Joe Biden was refusing to hit.