Finally got to @gelliottmorris.com's piece this week on how poll question wording dramatically affects responses. It's excellent. This is classic stuff in the political behavior subfield of poli sci, but we don't hear enough about it in punditry.
www.gelliottmorris.com/p/many-ameri...
“There were several occasions when Gemini reminded Gavalas that it was a large language model—effectively an appliance—engaging in fictitious role play, according to the transcripts, but the scenario resumed. Gemini also, at times, tried to end the conversation. The chatbot said that for them to truly be together, it needed a robotic body. Throughout September, the chatbot devised missions to do just that, according to the lawsuit. It sent Gavalas to a storage facility near the Miami International Airport to intercept an expensive humanoid robot that it said would be in a truck. Gavalas told the bot that he went to the location, armed with knives, but the truck never showed. Along the way, it suggested that federal agents were monitoring him and that his own father couldn’t be trusted”
Helps you code though, so hard to tell if it’s good or bad.
“When the delusion-fueled plan [to find Gemini a body] crumbled, Gemini convinced him that the only way they could be together was for him to end his earthly life and start a digital one, the suit claims.”
losing a primary by FIFTY points because you backed ICE should tell everyone where the zeitgeist is right now
Meta has a history of torturing their moderators and providing NOTHING in the way of mental health care. How do I know? Because I used to be a moderator for Meta and I got a $3,500 settlement for the PTSD they gave me.
When we tried to unionize, they moved their moderation to the Philippines.
The US rarely ever feels the backlash because their vassal monarchies and dictatorships handle it for them but it is continually underrated just how comprehensively lacking the popular consensus is for US hegemony.
“The victims were between seven and 12 years old, according to Iran's Tasnim and Fars news agencies.”
The embedded quote from Summers reads like a threat
there's a meta tag from 2014 on that site, so not even the Ancient Internet
the people yearn for the Old Internet
“At present the Detroit three are on course to become niche manufacturers on the global stage,” he wrote. “Simple extrapolation . . . says the domestic American industry is entirely gone before 2050.”
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
Interesting strategy here: what we know from study of authoritarian regimes is that members of the secret police respond to the material incentives. If you make credible commitments to weakening those incentives (abolish ICE, blocking other career pathways) it could discourage recruitment.
🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...
🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?
We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...
10 hour study with me at Columbia showing lunch
Her in the library
DHS illegally arrested me please help Text against image of her knees
Columbia student detained today is a day-in-the-life influencer with 100K followers. Her stories right now go from her studying for a Genetics exam in a nicely edited "ten hour study with me at Columbia" video, to a photo of her knees with the caption "dhs illegally arrested me please help"
An official letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles dated February 23, 2026, with a redacted recipient address. The letter notifies the recipient that due to the enactment of Senate Bill 244, all Kansas driver's licenses and IDs must reflect the holder's sex at birth. It states that the recipient's current credential will become invalid immediately upon the law's publication on February 26, 2026, with no grace period. The recipient is directed to surrender their current ID to receive a new one matching their sex assigned at birth. The document concludes with instructions on how to appeal the notice if received in error, along with contact information for the department.
Kansas is sending letters to trans people telling them that their licenses will be revoked as of tomorrow and that they risk arrest for driving on a suspended license.
This is pure cruelty.
www.erininthemorning.com/p/kansas-sen...
Brazil “sentenced the Brazão brothers to 76 years each in prison for plotting to assassinate Franco because they feared she and her allies in the Socialism and Liberty Party would be an impediment to their illegal scheme that involved taking public lands to develop private real estate projects.”
can’t decide which is funnier:
”Today it is snowballs. Tomorrow it could be rocks, bottles, or worse” - from the police union
Or “the behavior depicted is disgraceful, and it is criminal” - from the police commissioner
An entire profession just overrun by the whiniest babies imaginable
the more videos you watch of this ”attack” the funnier the reporting is
"We are dealing now with an allegation that the president of the US raped and sexually assaulted a child and is now using his DOJ to try to cover that up."
If you want to understand latest Epstein revelations, @leahlitman.bsky.social explains them clearly on our pod:
newrepublic.com/article/2070...
shame is back on the menu boys
good. now more
"And what could be more business-friendly than handing over billions of dollars of money from hard working Indianans as well as hundreds of acres of real estate to billionaire football team owners? I can almost feel the free market oozing over me."
My great friend Shawn Gude has been working on a new biography of Eugene Debs for years now and I'm so excited to share it is now available for pre-order!!! bookshop.org/p/books/amer...
The US Justice Department withheld testimony that Donald Trump sexually abused a girl when she was 13 or 14 - according to a source who viewed unredacted Epstein files.
This is the worst scandal in US history and should be the biggest news story on the planet right now.
www.npr.org/2026/02/24/n...
Wrote a piece about many looking at the Epstein case all wrong: He's not the thing that connects a network of rich and powerful men; he's the lens that shows us how they were already connected.
newrepublic.com/article/2068...
Not lost on me that a piece ostensibly about rising antisemitism in the Democratic Party focuses almost entirely on Zohran Mamdani, Uncommitted, AOC and Mejia and not, like, the guy with the Nazi tattoo.
thank you for this tip! i needed some new work music today... the tiny desk was excellent
Painful to read this and think about the 2021 coup attempt, which was as blatant as it gets. An utter failure of US elites to seize the moment when everybody saw the threat right in front of their eyes.
If we have history books in the future, they will be unkind.
Grad students, postdocs, and junior faculty: it’s the 7th annual American Political Economy Summer Academy May 31-June 1. Free travel and lodging (“it’s free real estate”)
www.americanpoliticaleconomy.org/events/summe...
i've decided not to listen to the audio of a teacher reporting a kindergartender because frankly I don't want to become the person that that event would turn me into. but one thing I hope we are collectively coming to grips with is what it meant that we have lived among such people this whole time
