series 1997

ex professional middle america financier

[Hutch @hutchinson]

Hasan is surprisingly candid, so it’s confusing that so few in the media understand him at all. He does the “I just want everyone to have health care” thing and 99% of journos leave it there.

This article is extremely rare in that the author accurately describes Hasan’s goals.

[nathan🇵🇷🥥🌴 @naaycoqui]

BRO 😭😭😭😭😭

[Intelschizo @Schizointel]

So you mean to tell me we had a pneumonic plague outbreak at Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute which was a central cog of Biopreparat and Russia's Bioweapon development programs Project 5 and Ferment. A site to this day
that remains under a shroud of extreme state secrecy. A site that forbids independent oversight, international audits, or foreign inspections. A site whose main task was strain-hunting and sourcing hub for the offensive pipeline. A site whose task was to harvest, isolate, and cataloge highly virulent, naturally occurring wild pathogens—specifically Plague (Yersinia pestis), Anthrax, Tularemia, and Brucellosis. Of these the most aggressive, lethal, and climate resilient strains discovered by Irkutsk were forwarded directly to the centralized Biopreparat network to be genetically engineered for antibiotic resistance and weaponized.

Well fuck.

[Lakshya Jain @lxeagle17]

Re-upping my funniest finding of the year for @TheArgumentMag: 25% of Trump voters who now disapprove of him, and 15% of all non-white Trump voters, now say they actually never voted for him.

https://t.co/PPEo6db2cK

[critter @BecomingCritter]

AGI expectation vs reality

[Complex @Complex]

Scientists may have found the real life SpongeBob and Patrick nearly 6,200 feet below the Atlantic.

A NOAA expedition captured a yellow sponge and pink sea star sitting side by side, and marine biologist Christopher Mah pointed out the obvious comparison.

[🎥: via/ NOAA]

[NFR Podcast @nfr_podcast]

How is he still doing this man…

[ABC News @ABC]

JUST IN: After two people climbed to the top of the Empire State Building and unfurled a banner on top of its spire Wednesday afternoon, one of the climbers appeared to propose to the other. https://t.co/ngG3jOeTBU

[Shane B @strait_vibinn]

“I’m so glad House of the Dragon is back”

60 minutes later:

[Westeros Central @WesterosCentral]

“How are you going to show up, mere moments after claiming the dragon, and try to go into battle? With SHEEPSTEALER of all dragons? A KNOWN selfish flyer? I mean My Seven I don’t mean to be rude, but what was she thinking?”

— Septon A. Smith via First Proclaim 😳

[series 1997 @sohamsahib]

@patstayjacked @strifewaves First thought would be Brooklyn bridge.

[Daniel Lippman @dlippman]

SCOOP: President Trump privately called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a “pussy” after Lutnick pushed back on Trump’s obsession with tariffs at the height of the “Liberation Day” chaos, per the upcoming Maggie Haberman/Jonathan Swan book I obtained. https://t.co/RwA5s8t10T

[Hugo Lowell @hugolowell]

NEW @WIRED: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sought to ingratiate themselves to Trump after the 2024 election — who in return mocked them behind their backs, per new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

— Zuckerberg sent Trump a photo of a letter one of his grade-school kids wrote that looked forward to the “golden age of america”

— Bezos denigrated The Washington Post to Trump and described the newspaper as one of his worst financial investments

— Trump showed off texts from Zuckerberg and Bezos to other guests, including to Elon Musk, who mocked them as “Firstclass groveling”

— Months after their dinner, Bezos tried to get a favor from Trump, telling him it was a risk for SpaceX to dominate govt space contracts

— Bezos suggested Trump tell Deputy Defense Secy Feinberg to ensure“contractor diversity,” opening the door for Blue Origin to get contracts

— But Trump ultimately screwed over Bezos after he reconciled with Musk, and instead expanded SpaceX’s access to US space launch sites

— WIRED obtained the details from “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” by @maggieNYT and @jonathanvswan ahead of June 23 release

[Max Roser @MaxCRoser]

A way to see the amazing history of economic growth and declining poverty over the last two centuries.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Somewhere between Jevons Paradox and Sturgeons Law (90% of everything is crap) there is maybe something like:

Technology that makes X more efficient increases demand for X, but crap scales linearly with the production of X, stimulating demand for jobs in the category of [cleaning up X’s mess]

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

It's funny how this essay about matchmakers feels like a sort of fable about technology and work—even AI and jobs

Step 1. Online dating makes something measurable—matching—more efficient.

Step 2. People predict that, obviously, this will put matchmakers out of a job.

Step 3. But increasing the measurable thing, matches, also increases the annoying thing, bad matches, and that makes people frustrated,

Step 4: Frustrated people with money pay matchmakers to improve the process.

Ta-da: Technology to increase digital matchmaking ironically increases the demand for human matchmakers (cc @alexolegimas)

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis have signed a joint open letter calling on Congress to mandate screening of synthetic nucleic acid orders, citing AI’s rapidly improving ability to assist with biological research as an urgent biosecurity risk.

[roon @tszzl]

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.

now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it

"If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply."
"we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us."

to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly

gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study