onfocus

As long as Hegseth keeps his chest-thumping and pull-up contests in the land of make-believe, these men are happy. Like their hero, the only masculine strength they seem interested in is the kind performed for cameras, far away from real-world challenges that might easily defeat their self-image as the mightiest of men.

This whole administration has felt like social media trolling colliding with the real world. It feels like people are learning that attention wins elections but you can't solely use attention to govern.

The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term. Only a few weeks ago, in his role as Mr. Trump’s “peace envoy,” Mr. Kushner met in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran began shortly after those meetings concluded without a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Seems like "blurring the lines" is a bit of an understatement. Also, what is Kushner’s role in the administration? Does he have security clearance? None of this should be legal.

In more than half of U.S. states, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation that would boost adoption of DIY solar systems.

More like this, please!

The bill's sponsors framed the Government Surveillance Reform Act as a necessary corrective to a surveillance state that has been supercharged by modern technology and bureaucratic mission creep. Wyden noted that the explosion of commercially available data and rapid advances in AI have “far outpaced the laws protecting Americans’ privacy.”

More like this, please!

The epistemological structure of the conspiracy theory is identical to the structure of spiritual awakening. In both cases, there is a surface reality that most people accept unthinkingly, and a deeper truth accessible only to those willing to question, to seek, to undergo the discomfort of knowing. The content differs. The initiatory logic is the same.

The idea of purity is a warning. [via Today in Tabs]

“By refusing to cut off surveillance companies and sleazy data brokers, Big Tech companies are effectively collaborating with ICE’s lawless campaign of violence and terror. As a result, every internet ad on a website or app could be collecting location data that ICE will use for its next operation,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

Ads aren’t just an annoyance, they’re an attack vector.

Half of Americans now support abolishing ICE, compared with just 39% who oppose eliminating the agency, according to a new YouGov poll.

It's the mainstream view.

I just don’t understand how anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the tech industry for the last thirty years can look at any of this stuff these huge companies are cranking out and think “Yeah, it’s gonna stay cheap and liberating and we will all be able to set ourselves free to experience utopia by embracing it!”

So true. Enshittification will come for the vibe-coding machines when the VC subsidies end.

“You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible,” GIlroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism.”

Such a good show.

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.

Rusty has a great way of cutting through bullshit.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

we can’t have nice things. The fact that this random web caching site run by one person is even important today is because we have lost the open web. This is a symptom of our broken system dominated by tech monopolies who don’t care about history, culture, or a shared set of information that we can use to understand our world.