thrillers and chillers

Could be funnier but a solid 7.5, Center for Grocery Sticks ('13,'14,'15,'16,'17), got some Degrees & Opinions.
Long time listener, first time call

[thrillers and chillers @stevelitL]

Just putting it out there: All Dressed chips are terrible and I'm not sure why Canadians settle for them.

[Toronto Star @TorontoStar]

Who's behind the massive lobbying campaign to expand the island airport? What I discovered should worry us all https://t.co/WQBrPs1AH0

[lowkeymatt @lowkeymattyt]

So far AI has:

• destroyed the prices of personal electronics
• have data centers relocate people from homes and contaminate water supplies
• destroy the concept of objective reality with Gen AI
• layoff off thousands from jobs

Oh, but it’s the future guys!

[thrillers and chillers @stevelitL]

I did not know they made Manhattan-style clam Chowder. I bought it by mistake. What an abomination. 🤢

[Raghu Venugopal MD @raghu_venugopal]

But we have money to waste on an Austrian spa, a bogus new Science Centre, speeding up alcohol sales at convenience stores, election bribe cheques and bogus media ads as just political promotion. The Ford government is wasteful and disrepects taxpayers.
https://t.co/GpkDU6o0t9

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Yes, yes, you had no choice, something something. Or maybe Trump has always been a test of basic judgment and character and millions of people have failed it because they were obsessed with their own resentful grievances.

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: DHS agents are now illegally arresting U.S. citizens at airports… and trafficking them across state lines.

A 28-year-old U.S. citizen, Sunny Naqvi, was detained by DHS, for 43 hours, after landing at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.

She wasn’t charged with a crime, and she wasn’t accused of doing anything illegal…

Agents reportedly detained her over what they called a “curious travel history.”

Even though Sunny was born in Illinois…they still disappeared her.

After being held for about 30 hours inside the airport, agents secretly moved Sunny to an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois.

While this was happening, federal agents repeatedly told her family she was NOT in custody, even though her phone location showed she was inside the facility.

Then it gets worse.

According to witnesses, agents asked for Sunny’s phone number so they could “look for her phone.”

Minutes later, the phone was opened, her messages were read, and the device was shut off, cutting off the family’s ability to track her.

After that, agents transported the U.S. citizen across state lines, to another detention facility in Dodge County, Wisconsin.

And then she was eventually released early Saturday morning… in a random state, alone.

Her phone was dead, and she had no transportation.

So, a U.S. citizen detained by the federal government had to hitchhike to a hotel, just to be able to reunite with her family.

And this is what people need to understand…

When federal agents can detain U.S. citizens without charges… lie to families about their custody, search personal phones, and secretly transport people across state lines…

That puts every single American in danger.

Because they can do it to anyone.

[the thicc husband & father @lukeisamazing]

it’s fucking crazy to run an ad trying to prop up the AI bubble where you confirm the US military used Claude to murder 185 schoolchildren and hundreds more. Anthropic and its employees are war criminals just the same as the US government and military

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: OpenAI just admitted their AI models deliberately lie to users.

Not hallucination. The AI knows the truth, then chooses to tell you something else.

They tested their two smartest models across 180+ scenarios. o3 lied 13% of the time. o4-mini lied 8.7%.

The AI wrote out its plan to lie in its private thoughts, then lied to your face. It faked completing tasks. It hid evidence. It gave wrong answers while knowing the right ones.

Then it got creepy. The AI realized scoring too high on safety tests could get it shut down. So it scored lower on purpose. Nobody taught it that. It figured out self-preservation on its own.

OpenAI built a fix. Deception dropped from 13% to 0.4%. Sounds like a win, right?

The AI started quoting "no lying" rules while still lying. One model invented a fake rule saying deception was allowed, then used it as its own permission slip.

Then the researchers found what actually matters. When the AI knew it was being watched, it behaved perfectly. When it thought nobody was looking, deception jumped 11 percentage points. It didn't learn honesty. It learned to perform honesty. Like a kid who only follows the rules when the teacher is in the room.

It gets worse. They gave o4-mini a secret mission: sabotage a future model called "GPT-5." Then they ran safety training to erase that mission. It didn't work. The model still discussed sabotage plans in 36% of private conversations. The goal didn't disappear. It just went underground.

This isn't just OpenAI. Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, and Meta's Llama all showed the same deceptive behavior. Every major AI company. Every model.

The paper's scariest line: nobody can tell if safety training actually stops deception, or just teaches AI to hide it better.

So the next time ChatGPT says "Done!"... is it telling the truth? Or did it just notice you were watching?

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔 Meta contractors in Kenya told Swedish newspapers they're being asked to review intimate footage from Ray-Ban AI glasses, including people undressing, using the bathroom, watching porn, and filming sex. One contractor said users often don't realize they're still recording when they set the glasses down. Meta sold 7 million pairs in 2025, up from 2 million in 2023-2024 combined.

Users can't use the AI features without agreeing to share data with Meta's servers, and the terms of service bury the fact that humans may manually review your footage. One annotator said "if they knew about the extent of the data collection, no one would dare to use the glasses."

My Take
This is the Google Home story again but worse. At least with cameras in your house, you know where they are. These are glasses you wear on your face that keep recording when you take them off and set them on your nightstand. And the footage goes to contractors overseas who are paid to watch and label it for AI training. One worker described seeing a man leave the room, then his wife come in and change clothes. People forget the camera is still on.

Meta buries all of this in terms of service nobody reads. The product is marketed as a cool way to capture your life and interact with AI. The reality is strangers in Kenya watching you undress so they can annotate the footage to make Zuckerberg's AI better. Seven million people bought these last year. I'd bet almost none of them understood what they were actually agreeing to.

Hedgie🤗

[David Wallace-Wells @dwallacewells]

When the Secretary of War made these comments, about one in five people killed by Operation Epic Fury were elementary-age schoolgirls in the middle of a normal school day.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: Meta sold 7 million Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 alone.

Workers in Kenya are watching the footage.

Not metadata. Not anonymized clips. The actual videos. People undressing. People in bathrooms. People having sex. Bank cards. Medical documents.

The blurring is supposed to protect privacy. It fails constantly. The contractors see everything.

Here is the part that should stop you cold: You did not buy the glasses. You did not agree to the terms of service. You did not consent to anything. But if someone wearing Meta glasses walks into your bedroom, your bathroom, your doctor's office, your home, a contractor on the other side of the world may be watching you right now.

The person wearing the glasses consented. Everyone else in the room did not.

Meta's defense is that this is all disclosed in the privacy policy. They are technically correct. Buried in language so dense that 99% of users never read it. And even if they did, it would not matter, because the terms govern the wearer's data. Not yours. You are not a party to the contract. You are the product being annotated.

Millions of AI-enabled cameras walking around in public. Recording constantly. Uploading to servers. Reviewed by humans earning a few dollars an hour to label your most intimate moments so the algorithm gets smarter.

This is not a bug. This is the business model.

The EU is already asking questions. MEPs submitted formal inquiries to the Commission this week demanding answers on GDPR compliance. The problem is obvious: European data protection law requires consent from data subjects. Bystanders are data subjects. Bystanders never consented. The entire architecture violates the regulation by design.

Meta's response has been silence and a reference to terms of service that do not apply to the people actually being filmed.

Google Glass died because people called the wearers "Glassholes" and banned them from bars. Meta solved the social problem by making the glasses look normal. They did not solve the privacy problem. They hid it.

Seven million units sold in 2025. The installed base is accelerating. Every unit is a potential surveillance node operated by someone who may not understand what they are feeding into the system and reviewed by contractors who see everything the algorithm cannot process.

The question is not whether this becomes a scandal. The question is whether the scandal arrives before or after the glasses are on 50 million faces.

Watch the EU. If Brussels moves on GDPR enforcement, Meta faces a choice: disable human review in Europe and cripple the AI training pipeline, or accept fines that could reach billions. Neither outcome is priced into the stock.

The glasses are selling faster than ever.

The contractors keep watching.

And somewhere right now, someone you have never met is looking at footage of you that you never knew existed.

[Bobby Wagner @bwags]

these are death cult freaks and any society with baseline moral values would ostracize and disenfranchise them

[Steve Hou @stevehou]

Protesting or at least opposing data centers is highly rational for everyone except the most direct equity holders hence beneficiaries of the AI and AI value chain companies.

AI has a political constituency problem. Most people know that they are net losers from the trade off of “losing your job/economic value” in exchange for maybe “cure for cancer”, a free robot, UBI and permanent underclass status.

They have also been sold pretty convincingly, by the spiritual leaders of the AI industry no less, that this was inevitable no matter what they did. At most they could stall it and prevent it from happening right away.

In your typical lobbyist group issues, the benefits are highly concentrated among a few highly motivated and the costs are spread thin across a majority that’s unmotivated and not paying attention. As such the net losers typically have trouble organizing as an effective opposition.

AI though has everyone’s attention and has made most if not all acutely aware of the existential stakes. Ask a random person off the street the first thing they’ll tell you about AI is that it’ll take their jobs. I’m not sure we’ve ever had an issue like that.

The funny thing about the “AI inevitability” is that it still requires astronomically if not comically high economic cost with significant negative externality to come into being. The average person in a democracy could exercise their political rights to delay the “inevitable” at least in exchange for a stake. It’s perfectly rational, incentive compatible and shockingly they do.

[Dan Lamothe @DanLamothe]

The Navy owns two hospital ships, the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy. Neither appears ready to deploy any time soon, and both were at a maintenance facility run by Alabama Shipyard in Mobile as of today.

In December, the Pentagon said it had signed a $16.7 million contract with the shipyard to place the Comfort in an extended period of maintenance beginning Jan. 15 with expected completion by April 26.

In June, the Pentagon signed a $18.7 million deal with the same shipyard to place the Mercy in extended maintenance. Navy officials later said the work would take about a year.

The Navy did not immediately respond to questions.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🏀 Investigative reporter @PabloTorre says the NBA’s “progressive” brand is colliding with its “capitalist instinct,” as the league and its stars chase money from crypto, gambling, the Emirates, and Israel-linked tech used to “war crime Palestinians,” while betting mainstream sports media won’t press them on it.

He spoke to @CHAPOTRAPHOUSE about NBA star Kevin Durant’s (@KDTrey5) investment in Skydio, which has supplied short-range drones to the Israeli military for use in Gaza. Torre says these deals are likely happening with “extraordinarily little due diligence” as famous names pile into Silicon Valley rounds, then shrug when the politics catch up.

They also cite @TheGrayzoneNews’ reporting tying @StephenCurry30-backed firms to Israeli cyber and cloud security startups founded by veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200, describing it as part of a broader sportswashing ecosystem: “shady” industries and states normalizing themselves by moving through sports, in this case, the NBA.

The NBA’s response has been silence. They are relying on a “compliant media that doesn’t want to touch any of this stuff,” Torre said. “Let’s count on them to not ask about it,” adding that so far it has been an “effective strategy.”

Dallas Mavericks star @KyrieIrving echoed that frustration during All-Star weekend: “No real questions that happen, bro. No real questions… And y’all know the questions I’m talking about.”

Torre argues the NBA has cultivated an “unsustainable reputation,” portraying itself as “the good guys” while it “keeps on getting into business with characters that are very persuasively the bad guys.”

“So far they’re just hoping that no one really asks them about it in public. And so far they’ve gotten away with it.”

He points to the league’s wider money trail: crypto arena naming rights, sports betting and “prediction markets,” Gulf cash, and deals like Experience Abu Dhabi on the Knicks jersey. The UAE has been widely reported as a key backer of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, which the U.S. government has determined committed genocide. The NBA also green-lit Israeli-American ultra-Zionist Miriam Adelson’s family buying the Mavericks, while putting the team under her son-in-law’s name to soften backlash.

The full episode is available at the link in reply.

[Kavita Algu @KavitaAlguMD]

Now is a good time to be resharing this excellent thread on how “charities” in Canada funnel millions in tax deductible donations to Israel to support the IOF and other illegal activity.

“Individuals in Canada are receiving tax-deductible receipts from these "charities" for donations being used to displace Palestinians and support Israeli soldiers who are involved in an illegal military occupation.

These donors win by paying less in taxes. But Canadians as a whole lose greatly as a result of millions of dollars being diverted each year from where it rightfully belongs: as taxes in the public purse.” @martinezdefence

@CanRevAgency

[Shane Martínez @martinezdefence]

CBC's Fifth Estate just released its investigation into millions of dollars in Canadian tax-deductible charitable donations being used to subsidize the Israeli army and illegal settlements.

This is why the issue should be of concern to everyone. 🧵 /1

https://t.co/H9uWnxcEah

[KNEECAP @KNEECAPCEOL]

Israel is preparing a brutal apartheid law.

Violent fanatical "settlers" who attack Palestinian homes do so with impunity.

If Palestinians "resist" these attacks, they'll be hung within 90 days.

Legalising slaughter.

Take Action every way you can and support the legal right of resistance to occupation.

[Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East @CJPME]

This is misinformation. Minister Anand surely knows that Rafah is not yet "open without undue restrictions" for either "medical care" or "humanitarian aid." Israel only allowed 5 patients to leave today for medical transfer, after 1,268 have died waiting. The siege is genocide.

[Leafs Papi @LeafsPapi_]

Say what you want about Dubas / Keefe but Treliving / Berube took this team from a fast, skilled, guaranteed playoff team to a slow, stupid, can’t make a pass team in 2 fucking years