Ryne Weiss

Director of Research @TheFIREorg. Views expressed are my own.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

With my 8th anniversary at @TheFIREorg right around the corner, and a big life change, moving from Philly to Brooklyn in process, I've been reflecting on FIRE and why I’m so proud to work there.

Over the 8 years, a lot has changed! 1/16

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@CartridgeReader Have you considered selling the RAM adapter cart? As far as I can tell there's no way to get them in the US.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@zaxour Makes sense, and this is still an enormous improvement.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@zaxour Are you still tweaking the values? This is very close but the reds are a bit orange in the RGB photos.

[Carolyn Iodice @CarolynIodice]

Today, Sens. Cruz & Wyden introduced a great anti-jawboning bill. It:

▶️ creates a statutory ban on jawboning involving social media, AI, and broadcasters

▶️ lets victims sue the government, and

▶️ requires transparency so we can catch government jawboning when it happens

[Nico Perrino @NicoPerrino]

FINALLY: A bipartisan effort to end unconstitutional jawboning!

The bill will require transparency and create a cause of action for damages when the feds coerce private platforms into censoring their users.

Everyone — regardless of their politics — should support this.

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

Government officials can’t legally censor protected speech, but they can strong-arm private parties into doing it for them. That’s called jawboning, and it violates your First Amendment rights.

We’re supporting the JAWBONE Act to stop that coercion.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@gygonzalez 60 Seconds.

Exclusively on TikTok

[Will Creeley @WillatFIRE]

No American should spend 5 minutes in jail for posting a meme, let alone the 37 days Larry Bushart endured.

I'm extremely proud of my @TheFIREorg colleagues for securing this result. And I'm extremely grateful to Larry for trusting us to right this wrong.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@SegaSnatchers @PLAION_UK This is interesting, can you explain how it's better suited for ASIC?

[Jacob Mchangama @JMchangama]

🧵ORBÁN'S WAR ON FREE SPEECH: THE RECEIPTS J.D. Vance criticized European democracies for censorship — but praised Viktor Orbán for sharing values incl. on free speech. Many on the right agreed. But did Orbán actually support free speech, or were his critics right? A thread.

[Nico Perrino @NicoPerrino]

Meanwhile, politicians want to effectively mandate these services in order for you to use vast swaths of the internet.

It’s not only your freedoms that are at risk.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@ManCloud89 @zwenergy0 @machonachomedia Will this support 75Hz output?

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

The government can absolutely decide not to contract with a company that won’t build the product it wants. That’s normal procurement discretion, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

What’s NOT normal is escalating from “okay, we’ll take our business elsewhere” to “we’re going to brand you a supply chain risk unless you change your internal rules.” That label is supposed to be about genuine security vulnerabilities—foreign control, compromised systems, coerced access—not about an American company drawing lines around what it will and won’t build. Using it as a pressure tactic is a dangerous category mistake.

And right there is where the First Amendment problem starts to come into view—not as some abstract argument about whose viewpoint wins, but as a very concrete free-speech issue: compelled speech. If the government uses extraordinary leverage—blacklisting-style designations, emergency authorities, or other coercive tools—to force a private company to generate outputs it would not otherwise produce, that’s not ordinary contracting anymore. That’s the state coercing a private speaker to speak.

The reported threat to invoke the Defense Production Act takes it into even darker territory. The DPA is meant to prioritize or compel production for genuine national-defense needs, not to function as a “rewrite your model’s rules or else” mechanism. Using it that way would be a breathtaking precedent: the government effectively reserving the power to commandeer the policies of a leading AI company when it doesn’t like the answer “no.”

That should worry anyone who cares about free speech—and about reality-testing. Once the government normalizes coercive pressure to make AI systems behave as it prefers, you’re no longer just talking about procurement choices. You’re talking about government power shaping one of the core tools we increasingly use to understand what the world actually looks like.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@rshibley This guy makes the classic interview mistake of focusing on your list of questions rather than listening to what your subject says. You hate to see it.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

When I write memos I typically try to avoid sounding like a supervillain explaining his plan to henchmen, but I recognize that there are differing approaches and schools of thought.

[Kashmir Hill @kashhill]

On Meta's plans to add facial recognition technology to its smartglasses: https://t.co/uHZ0415Utm

from me, @MikeIsaac and @KalleyHuang

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@lotcazbrad @49bit_cat Yeah, I got one in. Order number is 102X, so it seems that somewhere around 30-50 were made at most.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@Jonathansh34226 @49bit_cat I got one also. My order number is 102X. Gonna guess this opening run of them was 30-50 at most.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@glukianoff The illiterate deserve your sympathy, not scorn.

[Ryne Weiss @RynoWeiss]

@WadeMiller You quote tweeted the wrong post, this doesn't depict violence against an ICE agent. I am curious if you would apply the same analysis to this post.