@felipedlh
Life’s a bitch, then you die | NY Daily News ed board, @newrepublic.com contributing editor, NYU lecturer, @flaminghydra.com member, immigration wonk. Work in @slate.com, @thenation.com, @boltsmag.org, etc | Personal photography at Instagram.com/nycfelipe
I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”
www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...
For any subsequent presidential candidates to be credible, I think they must commit to holding those engaged in potential war crimes accountable domestically. No one wants to say “I will jail the soldiers and commanders” but you have to
Well, presuming the Dems are aligned, which I'm not too confident about
Reminder that DHS secretary is a Senate-confirmed position. What do Mullins' colleagues think of him? He can only lose one vote, after all
Weird how this keeps happening! www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...
If anything though I think it is important to develop and push the arguments rooted outside the systems’ accuracy *before* they’re particularly good, because if that’s all you have and then the systems improve, you’re setting your arguments up to be easily neutralized
Steve King 9 @SteveKinglA + Follow Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. ESTERN ILIZATION Voice of Europe @V_of_Europe Hundreds of Islamists shouting "Allahu Akbar" in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Wilders is right for over 10 years. #turkijerel RETWEETS LIKES 516 688 10:40 AM - 12 Mar 2017 from lowa, USA
I'm teaching about early 20th century eugenics today and was reminded that 9 years ago Republican Representative Steve King was stripped of his committee assignments by his GOP colleagues for this post that simply states what is now bog standard GOP policy/rhetoric on immigration and "civilization."
I don’t think something has to work flawlessly to “work.” I’m not a software engineer so I can’t really personally speak to it but I know engineers with no particular incentive to hype AI and if they say a system can do 80% of their work with minimal supervision I when no reason to disbelieve them
Let’s say that surveillance tech worked with 100% accuracy. Facial recognition matches were always correct, weapons detectors always worked, interconnected camera networks could always track people, and so on. Most people would agree those are not good things, even if they work exactly as billed
I think a good parallel here is surveillance (which I understand is not a wholly separate issue). A lot of arguments against real-world implementation are around how its failures harm people (e.g. facial recognition misidentification). These things are important to document and agitate around, but
To combat a problem you have to understand it (a fundamental principle of journalism) and this is something we have to contend with. In certain circumstances, what’s under the diffuse “AI” umbrella may even be a net good. But the counterarguments can’t be rooted in it not working if it kind of does
A new lawsuit alleges Google’s chatbot sent a Florida man on missions to find an android body it could inhabit. When that failed, it set a suicide countdown clock for him. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemi...
Not to say that your only or even primary analysis when choosing a field of study should be its marketability but I think even by that narrow metric the conventional wisdom is often pretty wrong
Student of mine was concerned about the value of a journalism degree and I pointed out that the sure-fire big-earner degree 5 years ago was computer science; now those grads can’t find jobs. Labor market is shifting & complex; I’d say critical thinking degrees are going to get much more marketable
An excellent step in the right direction. Here was my primer on state prosecution of federal agents in @newrepublic.com
a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people
It’s clear that neither the tech companies nor the regulators are going to do anything substantial on mass surveillance domestically so we’re left to technical rather than legal protections. Turn off your location services, use Signal, get a good VPN, block trackers, don’t hand over biometrics
That’s part of my point, no one cares when white nationalists do terrorism but the second someone even loosely affiliated with a foreign “enemy” does we’ll hand Palantir another billion dollars
Forget about that, it would be exceedingly easy for a small group of people to carry out mass casualty attacks on soft targets, especially in the U.S., which is already awash in easily obtainable small arms
It’s really only a matter of time until someone carries out an attack or assassination in the United States and panicked Dems completely reverse course on oversight of Homeland Security, instead showering it with far greater capability and reducing oversight
New: Zohran Mamdani has as mayor used Signal to communicate with fellow elected officials and political advisers.
At least once, he has discussed government business over the encrypted app, raising concerns about compliance with record-keeping laws. www.politico.com/news/2026/03...
As an addendum I think the international response to this will also include a lot more irregular warfare and what we broadly construe as “terrorism,” which will also make wealthy nations supercharge their own domestic surveillance states and repressive capabilities. A disaster for everyone
This would not look good played inside a courtroom in The Hague
You'd think an administration already at sub-30 popularity would at least try to manufacture some consent for the illegal war of aggression but guess not?
This is a bombshell: "the Pentagon wanted the company to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data"
This kind of agenda echoes the defunded Total Information Awareness effort, post-9/11
Update for 2026!
folks we’re going to see some wild litigation between the world’s worst people
I know this is tough but it can be the case that “man bad” (true) and “killing man, who leads sovereign country that’s also unstable and without congressional authorization of war, bad” (also true)
