Andy

This is a genuine concern that we should recognize.

I’m about 99% confident it isn’t, but considering it is the kind of caution we should all be exercising these days.

If you’re wondering what the point is, you can just go to one and ask for a tour.

I pay $65 a month for a membership to my local YMCA mainly so I can use the pool.

I love LA.

Respectfully, this title gets under my skin.

Why so doomer? He might veto it. It wouldn’t be surprising. But why are you declaring a loss prematurely?

Don’t hope for things there’s no chance of. Fight to change the chances of things, and if you fail try and fight again and again until you win.

This headline reads like 2025 news Mad-Libs:

“[Proper noun] is using [Latest fad] to [Verb] [Ideological alignment adjective] [Conceptual noun]”

Try it:

“OpenAI is using Hydroflasks to destroy Catholic exceptionalism”

“Mark Cuban is using cryptocurrency to monetize white supremacist hope”

Good times./s

My brother and I (both 38) actively speak out and oppose it.

My mom has been sort of in a state of shocked bewilderment. She’s horrified and also constantly confused as though trying to comprehend how 2+2 = 5. For her, it doesn’t make sense: Jews aren’t killers, they’re victims. But they’re killing all these civilians. Why would anyone want to keep the war going instead of getting the hostages back? Netanyahu is a monster. We all know this. Why is he still in charge?

I’m sorry that she’s suffering (then again, anyone of concience is). She’s also expressed a sense of alienation, since she has no idea how others feel, because she doesn’t feel like it’s socially acceptable to say what she feels outside the home. But I’m grateful that this hasn’t created any conflict between me and her. She doesn’t feel as comfortable as I do saying the plain facts of it, but I remind her that all my convictions are a reflection of the values she raised in me, and I think that reflects highly of her.

It’s really hard to know why people haven’t been supportive without knowing you and them better. But how do you know and interact with these folks? Do you have them over for drinks? Play games online? Do they all know each other? Did they know you or your ex first?

This is an interesting observation. But honestly I don’t think this is really hard to explain at all.

I think within the genre of comic books, your point makes sense. But if we’re applying a lens of realism (which I think CA:WS did well, and I wish more Marvel movies would), Tony’s network intrusion would not have been at all likely to have uncovered that SHIELD had been ideologically compromised.

What we see in Avengers is that Tony secured unauthorized access to read files to which he wasn’t afforded access. First, it’s not actually at all reasonable to assume that he had full access to all SHIELD data everywhere, ever. It’s split across thousands of servers and departments. It wouldn’t be universally accessible to anyone. This is true even for large institutions that aren’t highly, highly sensitive intelligence operations. But it’d be doubly so for one that is. Most likely, he would’ve grabbed unencrypted traffic that was local to the helicarrier, recently accessed, and titled or contained notable text that was relevant to their current situation. That could certainly yield shipping manifests or operational plans to use the tesseract for weaponry.

But – and this is really the key thing – even if he had the ability to access all SHIELD records, and had the ability to meaningfully digest this enormous trove of information, it would still be incredibly hard to see that SHIELD was compromised. There aren’t going to be any emails that say “Hey Bob: did you kill Mike for finding out that we’re both Hydra foot soldiers? Hail Hydra, Lisa”.

Infiltration is a process of persuasion and carefully installing dual loyalists in key positions to compromise decision making processes, as you describe. It consists of grooming intelligence assets and identifying who can be trained to groom additional assets. That all takes place primarily through interpersonal conversations. There’s very, very, very little documentation of it in a file system that would reveal it if you didn’t already know about some compromised asset. To the outside world, all of HYDRA’s goals look so much like those of a modern international peacekeeping body that the only secret they need to keep is who the guns are pointed at and who has their fingers on the triggers. Which is fundamentally a key point of the movie.

I don’t want to say “none”, but I think of the film “Captain America: Winter Soldier” as having some of the tightest writing in superhero comic book movies. It’s something of an outlier a case study imo of strong storytelling that the whole thing is so competently put together. There are far fewer suspensions of disbelief than most superhero movies, imo.

Agreed.

There’s also not much reason not to use supports. A tree support wouldn’t as much time or material at all.

Everyone needs a little support sometimes.

Yeah, I feel like that’s a good deal. Especially if I get credit. I mean, I’d still do it if it was anonymous, but can you imagine the popularity of being the guy who cut off his fingers for world peace? Frankly you’d be kind of a monster not to do it. So many people lose hands for nothing at all. But being the guy with the robot fingers who gave the world peace and joy? Sure, sign me up. Sounds rad af.

Oy. I really don’t want to see what happens when we’re faced with an actual challenge. This is… yikes.

I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.

She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that “we are all sexual beings”, which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.

I don’t remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn’t the shamey kind.

Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!

Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It’s all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy’s Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.

There’s no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it’s been a year since this information came out.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Yo I self host a Nextcloud server and I don’t know what an apk is. Please stop being a gatekeeper. Grandma Ruth deserves alternatives to big tech just like the rest of us.

All freedom to all the people. These tools aren’t supposed to be some special privilege for 1337 hackers. They should be ubiquitous.

I think the response depends on what your goal is.

I assume that you find it annoying? Or disrespectful? Is the issue impacting work at all, or do you just hate having to talk to them through this impersonal intermediary? I think if that’s the case, the main remedy is to start by talking to them and telling them how you feel. If they want to use an LLM, fine, but they should at least try to disguise it better.

I was going to say that I’m pretty sure these exist and they’re mostly run and attended by PhDs who love bluegrass music

The same ones listed in the article. Property ownership, speech, privacy, etc.

I feel like the rise of corporate personhood is the elephant in the room this article seems to avoid acknowledging.

I don’t really know much about him, and I can’t dispute your personal gut feeling. But I’m not familiar with anything that gives me this feeling.

For what it’s worth, I think in general that if you say, “I just don’t quite trust <name>. I didn’t know why, but they creep me out,” about pretty much anyone in public political life you can probably find a basis for that over a long enough time scale.