onfocus

John Roberts and his Republican colleagues have granted a kid with ties to criminal hackers, Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, live access to every American’s Social Security data.

Supreme Court majority implicated in US government hacking incident.

Now, amid high interest rates and economic uncertainty, job openings have fallen and employers are hiring at their slowest pace in more than a decade.

Economy warning light flashing.

My intent remains to take a job with an established institution, rather than simply to write for myself. There is value in working for an institution: shared protection from attack; responsibility for others that can prompt caution or useful self-reflection. And while my most recent tenure working for an institution showed how accrued power can be redirected unexpectedly, I still think there is value in helping institutions that are doing good, important work to build their power.

A journalist I follow who used to write for The Washington Post is weighing his options and deciding where to help build power.

The soldiers, some of whom told Reuters they did not get involved in arrests, are officially in Washington to support a federal crackdown on what President Donald Trump calls a crime epidemic. But that depiction appears to run counter to the fact that crime rates overall have shrunk in recent years.

What are they doing there beyond creating a media spectacle?

On Saturday, postal services around Europe announced that they are suspending the shipment of many packages to the United States amid confusion over new import duties. Postal services in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Italy said they will stop shipping most merchandise to the U.S. effective immediately. France and Austria will follow on Monday.

It's like the US imposed sanctions on itself. Elections have consequences.

Wake up babe, new giraffes just dropped.

This is the latest example of a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don't get on the AI bandwagon.

No hint of desperation here. I'm sure the quarterly numbers for adoption and engagement are off the charts and the only reason to strong arm people is because he's excited about the potential of the technology.

A new study from MIT found that 95 percent of enterprise organizations report zero measurable gains from the adoption of AI tools.

Those billions spent on no gains are going to be a problem.

In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us to consider a different vision for the near-future—one in which A.I. might not get much better than this.

What if we're closer to the end state of AI rather than the beginning?

Dallas-area Rep. Linda Garcia said she drove three hours home from Austin with an officer following her. When she went grocery shopping, he went down every aisle with her, pretending to shop, she said. As she spoke to The Associated Press by phone, two unmarked cars with officers inside were parked outside her home.

Texas Republicans are completely unhinged.

This video is a good introduction to the fediverse. I've been on Mastodon since 2018 or so and it's now the only social network I use. It doesn't have ads, has better privacy controls, and gives much better filtering and muting options. Mastodon lacks some polish in the signup and discovery features, but makes up for that in lots of other daily life ways.

The DeepMind CEO is dead-set that advanced AI models will bring about a renaissance in human existence. The “golden era” is only five short years away. “AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources,” Hassabis said.

Someone needs to check in on the standard tech CEO ketamine dosage. I feel like it's dialed too high at the moment.