Devo

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

I know it’s become pretty cliche and cringey to talk about at this point but if you’re under like 25 I cannot stress enough how one time Obama wore a tan suit and people spent a week arguing over whether or not it was demeaning to the Oval Office and they were serious about it.

[Amber Woods @AmberWoods100]

BREAKING
The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to suspend international flights arriving in blue cities.

[Hannah Rabinowitz @HBRabinowitz]

Exclusive: Justice Department launched a criminal investigation into Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll.

Acting AG Todd Blanche, who represented Trump, is recused from the case. W/@PaulaReidCNN and @KaraScannell

https://t.co/mY1Q7lrT9e

[Destiny | Steven Bonnell II @TheOmniLiberal]

Oh really? @SenAdamSchiff @hasanthehun 🤔

[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.

[Mary Peltola @MaryPeltola]

I was the first person born in Alaska to represent Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives!

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This New York Times piece is worth your time. Here’s what is happening, as simply as I can put it.

Back in January, Trump sued the IRS, an agency he controls, demanding $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns a number of years ago.

IRS lawyers did their jobs. They wrote a memo laying out the defenses that could beat the suit, including the fact that Trump filed too late. His own lawyer was in court when the leaker pleaded guilty in October 2023, more than two years before Trump sued.

The Justice Department never showed up to court. Never argued back. Never used the defenses sitting on their desk.

The judge got suspicious and ordered both sides to explain whether they were actually opposing each other or just colluding. The day before that brief was due, Trump dropped the suit.

Same day, his Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization fund.” 

Trump gets a formal apology. The IRS agrees to drop any audits of him and his family, even though a 2024 Times report found a loss in an ongoing audit could cost him over $100 million.

The acting Attorney General, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, picks the five commissioners who decide who gets paid. Trump can fire any of them. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are not ruled out.

This is the most corrupt thing I’ve ever seen from an American president.

Where in the hell are my Republican colleagues?

https://t.co/La0nlLuz1r

[blvckcat🎀 @n1ghtkitten]

🚨JSTLK SELF-VICTIMIZING⁉️

after the debate with Dickers (@DickersTV) and Aiden (@aiden_ug), JSTLK (@jstlk_) says he is willing to "sacrifice his career" or even "be k*lled" for his right to "snark"

here's what JSTLK means by "snark" btw:

- joining the lawsuit against destiny
- platforming kellyjean going directly after destiny's gf by weaponizing leaked p*rn of her shared on destiny's kiwif*rms
- defending ppl contacting anyone around destiny to get him removed from events
- saying the FEDs should look into destiny and advocating him be "locked up"
- advocating reporting destiny's kick/youtube publicly and directly engaging in it privately
- saying he's going to sue destiny for d*xing ppl
- has an editor who threatened r*pe toward Ukrainian Ana, a woman being actively bombed in a war, for not disavowing destiny
- sticking by a community member with a history of stalking/harassing women, even after the community member found rose's emails through data-breach d*x sites in order to contact everyone around her IRL

is this what JSTLK means when he says "coverage"? 😇

[Kyle Hutton @kylejhutton]

The CBC did their own transposition on the Alberta Commission majority and minority maps - happy to see that we came to the same results minus one seat independently. Good work @NaelShiab 🫡#ableg #cdnpoli

https://t.co/tdZATGEAkX

[Dick Berlijn @DickBerlijn]

Unbelievable! There it is. “Loyalty outranks the law”. I never thought I would live to see the day that a US president would speak these words.

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

BREAKING:

The Trump Justice Department has expanded the just-announced settlement of Trump's IRS lawsuit to include a pledge that the IRS will no longer pursue *any* claims it may have against Trump, his family members, and his companies over unpaid taxes.

[Devo @not_devo]

@MidwestDeplore @micah_erfan One party states suck and are less prosperous societies. Long term, democracies need a legitimate opposition party. The GOP isn't getting destroyed and the pendulum will swing back at some point. I say this as someone who thinks Trumpism should have hurt them far more than it did

[Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 @Wilson__Valdez]

Entire website would be melting down if Biden did this. Front page headlines in the NYT. Now...silence.

[Devo @not_devo]

@ThePoliticalHQ I wonder what she means by multi-member districts. A proportional voting system like STV would be interesting. FPTP with multi-member districts is functionally no different than just doing a single-member district.

[Devo @not_devo]

@CanadaNoFuture @CanadianPolling It would depend entirely on the accuracy of the claim.

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito leaned on an erroneous claim that Black voter turnout now tops white voter turnout, in his Callais v. Louisiana ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act, reports The Guardian. https://t.co/bDGTZCSzDx

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Half of the Democratic staffers are third worldists who think overthrowing America is their moral duty. Half of the Republican staffers are just Classic Nazis.

The staffer class is bad.

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

Ukrainian President Zelensky has issued an official decree allowing Russia to hold its Victory Day parade.

The decree sets out a cease-fire zone covering Red Square in Moscow.

[Devo @not_devo]

@LNuttttt @Grob2point0 @LilithLovett Would you say this of any jobs automation has replaced in the past? Automation has replaced tons of agricultural jobs, assembly lines, bookkeepers, bank tellers with ATMs, self-service gas stations, etc. In the long run, we've obviously been better off for it.

[Devo @not_devo]

Schizophrenia?

[Asher Honickman @Honickman]

On the Supreme Court of Canada's Instagram account (yes, you read that right), the Court is promoting its distinct flag as a symbol of its "independence from the other branches of government."

The Canadian flag represents the state, of which the judiciary is a part. Judges, like politicians, are state actors, and like all state actors, they are subordinate and subject to the law, including and especially the Constitution. The principle of judicial independence does not detract from that fact.

The Court's distinct flag is therefore not a symbol of independence from government interference. It rather suggests independence from the state itself and, therefore, that the justices of the Supreme Court are not subordinate and subject to Canada's Constitution.

It is, in short, not a symbol of judicial independence but of judicial power.