Premium Newsletter: The Hater's Guide To Anthropic, an inefficient, bloated AI ab that loses billions of dollars, deceives developers, burns as much as $8-$13 for every dollar of Claude Code revenue, and needs $283 billion to survive the next 4 years.
www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-...
I was literally just looking for an Anthropic megathread on your blog yesterday, couldn't be better timing.
What happens when you speak for a bit too long at a city council meeting in opposition to a data center being built in your town? In Claremore, Oklahoma, a man was arrested and charged with trespassing.
Story by @mjgault.bsky.social here: www.404media.co/man-opposing...
I genuinely cannot tell if the clumsy academic jargon crammed into this piece was meant to be some sort of meta-joke or not.
NEW: Ring has introduced "Search Party", a horrifyingly dystopian feature nominally designed to turn all of the Ring cameras in a neighborhood into a dragnet that uses AI to look for, in their commercial, a cute lost dog.
With Ring, US consumers are actually building a surveillance dragnet.
Sam Altman i remember seeing you in a tv interview a long time ago (maybe 60 minutes?) where you being attacked by some guys, and you said they were heroes of yours and it was really tough. well, you’re my hero and that’s what it feels like when you attack openai. totally get we have some screwed some stuff up, but we have worked incredibly hard to do the right thing, and i think we have ensured that neither google nor anyone else is on a path to have unilateral control over AGI, which i believe we both think is critical. i am tremendously thankful for everything you’ve done to help—i dont think openai would have happened without you—and it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai. Elon Musk I hear you and it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake. Sam Altman i agree with that, and i would really love to hear the things you think we should be doing differently/better. it’s also not clear to me how the attacks on twitter help the fate of civilization, but that’s less important to me that getting to the right substance. also, i checked with our team on recruiting from tesla. we really are doing very little relative to the size of the company, but i will make sure we don’t hurt tesla, i obviously think it’s a super important company.
ahahahahahah
this has been going on in non-fiction and low content books for a long time -- it was only a matter of time; Ms. Hart is selling access to her technique and developing proprietary tech, just taking advantage of how many people out there are desperate for some kind of income
I’m literally so tired of characters being treated like real people. I’m so tired of fans dictating art through the conduit of marketing and producers. Because that is what is happening when we hyper focus on something being made “right” and “by fans”. We are actually taking the microphone and-
Conservative appeals to timelessness become not just a moral/normative appeal, but also the bedrock of their theory.
They assume all the forces/conflicts/contradictions within our society must have some eternal origin and continually turn to moral/spiritual philosophers to make sense of them.
Suddenly the "memory of one's grandparents" the conservative impulse defends finds itself anchored to the whims of capitalism -- itself a progressive force.
The advantage Marxist critiques of progress have over conservative ones is a self-consciousness about our specific historical situation.
The long-standing traditions and customs Burke rooted his arguments in were totally displaced by the time modern Anglo-American conservatives (i.e. Oakeshott, Scruton) started writing.
Burke is a brilliant commentator and his insights are meaningful when it comes to critiquing "change" as a political idea. But change is not merely an idea or a choice, it is also a real phenomenon driven by historical forces outside of our conscious control.
The solution is to focus moreso on restricting what these agencies are *physically capable* of doing as opposed to trying to micromanage what they're *procedurally allowed* to do.
The consolidation of immigration enforcement under the DHS (an anti-terrorism organization), access to military-grade weaponry, and mass data collection by private industry gives law enforcement agencies a level of power they are naturally going to stretch to its max.
Because liberals view police abuse as aberrant behavior as opposed to a systemic problem, their approaches to combatting it involve saddling departments with procedural hurdles as opposed to outright just limiting their power.
ICE observers in the Twin Cities are in need of dash cams to prevent further intimidation and frivolous claims.
Cams are $110, memory cards $35, and ship to us directly via this wish list: www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/...
If you've been looking for a way to help, we'd sure appreciate it!
NEW from me:
Job growth has been functionally zero over the last five months, as the US sinks from a “low hire, low fire” labor market to a “no hire” one.
That slowdown is hitting young & low income workers the hardest 🧵
www.apricitas.io/p/the-no-hir...
In the last several months, @ddosecrets.com has been powering through archives of Epstein emails and files and releasing them for free to the public.
No DoJ meddling, no institutional power making decisions about what to release.
They sure could use your help tho... DONATE donorbox.org/ddosecrets
“In place of paralysis or bland positivity, this is the moment for an honest reckoning with where we stand, what we are up against, and where, already, resistance is underway.”
Editor @adriennebuller.bsky.social and @geoffmann.bsky.social write for RIGHT TURN (ISSUE #1)
Karl Barth's words on the Christmas message:
barthcenter.substack.com/p/the-conten...
Any chance we could get an RSS feed for the site?
Blanc states he came to believe in Judd's goodness, Judd states storytelling makes us feel better. But the actual portrayal of religion feels like it was written by someone who isn't a Christian.
On top of that, Blanc's whole arc runs into a similar problem -- he converts to "grace", but this grace is never properly distinguished from a generic high-minded sense of charity.
The case the film makes on the side of Judd actually doesn't provide much of a case for Christianity itself.
Their futures don't reflect any sort of positive influence coming from faith, mystery, or even the distinct example of Judd. If anything the main "catalyst" for their development seems to be the absence of the Bad Church.
Which doesn't actually disprove Blanc's initial position.
It's never actually made clear WHY Judd is in the wrong, apart from him having these high-minded saintly ideals he has to follow because he's Better Than Them.
The film sets up the climax to assert that Blanc giving The Truth wouldn't be enough to address the congregation, but it's unclear why.
Judd has this whole arc about not dividing the world into friends and enemies, but you can run through the bulk of the congregation and divide them into "bad guys" and "good guys/victims". ALL of their true natures are exactly as they initially appear.
Prior films in the series gave more focus to the cast as a whole whereas this one really centered itself as a dialogue between Judd (the liberal christian) and Blanc (an atheist).
The problem is, the moral center of the film *is* the congregation itself and how Judd relates to them.
Problem is, the film has no idea how to make sense of what it has just set up.
But I couldn't shake the feeling I was watching Yet Another Christian Propaganda film -- just this time liberal instead of conservative.
W/rt the rest of the series, it's a pretty interesting deconstruction of the detective archetype and also the moral relevance of "Truth" in mystery fiction.
The first act's the strongest: Blanc's conspicuously missing and so's the murder. You instead get this oddly personal church politics drama.
