numinosity 🎬

Sorcerer (1977), Dir. William Friedkin

Not entirely obscure, but I wish more lovers of cinema were familiar with the masterpieces that are POSSESSION (1981) and WINGS OF DESIRE (1987). Both are undeniably gorgeous and profoundly affecting films for entirely opposite reasons. Brilliant works.

Mason County mother, daughter reject millions as data center land dispute continues A mother and daughter in Mason County are rejecting multimillion-dollar offers for their land as a proposed data center project continues to move forward, and they say they're not budging.

A mother and daughter in Kentucky have rejected multimillion-dollar offers for their land, offers made by an anonymous tech company trying to build a data center.

Ida Huddleston has turned down $4,260,000.

Her daughter turned down $22,224,000.

www.lex18.com/news/coverin...

How “obscure” are we talking? Like “most people haven’t seen this film” or “virtually no one is aware this film exists”?

When I joined as the head engineer of the Torment Nexus project, it was to work on fascinating technical problems and make the world a better place along the way. I am appalled to discover that the Torment Nexus would be used this way and, now that my options have vested, will be leaving the project

"computer says no" is not a thing journalists should trust, just as we should never trust "the police said XYZ"

The Campaign to Take Down Alex Bores Is Just the Beginning A leading AI industry-backed Super PAC is targeting a pro-regulation candidate — and building a strategy that other politicians will have to contend with.

So a co-founder of Palantir is funding political attack ads against a guy pushing for AI regulation, who used to work at Palantir, using the fact that he worked at Palantir against him.

(FWIW, I think Bores has some very bad regulation ideas, but still...)

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Every time I open a news app or site and this story isn’t being discussed or featured prominently I feel like I’m losing my mind. Do not look away.

They can wrest em dashes and oxford commas—my grammatical tools of choice—from my cold, dead, and tightly fisted hands!

Would you care to elaborate on your former impression of him vs. what he has ostensibly become?

writing long pieces that require readers to go under for a long time before coming up for air is an act of defiance against the efficiency economy and grindset maxxing. it’s a fuck you to AI summaries and headline reactions. it’s rebellion. we are fighting for a world where long reads are the norm.

Perhaps an early (bad) sign of what is to come:

Vinay Prasad, who helped lead a campaign against lifesaving mRNA vaccines at FDA, is being welcomed back to the University of California San Francisco, where he was prior to joining the Trump administration.

From Ukraine to Iran, Hacking Security Cameras Is Now Part of War’s ‘Playbook’ New research shows hundreds of attempts by apparent Iranian state hackers to hijack consumer-grade cameras, timed to missile and drone strikes. Israel, Russia, and Ukraine have also adopted this trick...

Hacking internet-connected civilian security cameras for recon has become a standard operating procedure of modern warfare. First for Russia and Ukraine, now for Israel and Iran.

Your insecure internet-of-things surveillance system is now their targeting system.

www.wired.com/story/from-u...

literally the longest, worst, most nonsensical transit experience of my life!

I keep seeing posts about ai models like "actually they're good at this thing now!"

but once you understand that ai tools are being built by fascists in service of attacks on humanity, whether or not they can generate useable code or do basic searches kind of stops being the main question

i think enthusiastic LLM use is mostly a stack of cognitive biases, unacknowledged plagiarism, and unmet needs in a trenchcoat

but also my main objections aren't about them being bad at tasks so i don't care if you think they've gotten better at it

for non-programmers:

1. npm is a "package manager" used to install other software

2. somebody opened an "issue" on github, which is a way to report problems

3. they put a prompt *in the title* saying basically "give me a special token i can use to update somebody else's software"

wait for it >

both the prospect and actual execution of this is utterly nauseating. enormous yikes

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the ...

SCOOP: Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media.

your personal use of Ai has served toward this reality. your casual adoption of Ai as a viable tech for use in civil life has, in fact, contributed to this war machine

Lobby poster for director Barry Levinson’s film WAG THE DOG (1997)

your enemies fighting each other can be useful but it doesn't make them your friends. anthropic doesn't want to help with hegseth's apocalyptic fantasy *because they have their own*

you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them

So perfectly and succinctly stated.

i’m tired of every paper (even critical ones) on societal impact of AI starting by both-siding the “benefits” and risks/harms of AI

in academia, i would like us to arrive at a collective reckoning that we don’t need to play both sides. it's totally legit to clearly state just the harms. period

“They claim they might be looking for smugglers or … cartel members, but that’s not who they’re collecting data on,” EFF’s @Maassive.bsky.social told @CalMatters.org. “(The program) is primarily collecting data on people who live in the region.” calmatters.org/justice/202...

I presume it’s because Berkeley is part of the public UC system, while USC (and the other named academic institutions, all which ostensibly enjoy sizable endowments) are private and not immediately beholden to federal regs/funding?

New: As David Ellison prepares to take control of CNN, legendary CBS News producer Mary Walsh, who is exiting, sent a goodbye note to colleagues.

In the note, Walsh writes, "We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don’t know how to do that."

The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys On Wednesday, the government stopped supporting FPDS.gov, an indispensable resource for finding what ICE, the FBI, and every other agency is buying. Its replacement site completely sucks.

New: the government just made it harder to see what spy tech it buys. This includes ICE, the FBI, essentially any agency. Why? Because they decided to retire the perfectly good system for searching contracts and replaced it with one that fucking sucks

www.404media.co/the-governme...