The Week America Woke Up to Oligarchy. By Matt Stoller. “Americans, broadly speaking, hate both parties, because [Americans] subscribe to an entirely different vision of what it means to be free. That version means freedom from coercion and a basic equality before the law.”
Elon Musk's MechaHitler AI will be available to the US government for $0.42.
Brandon Vigliorolo at The Register:
Grok’s racist, conspiracy-riddled responses led public advocacy groups last month to send a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) demanding it declare Grok unfit for government use due to its “clear ideological judgement,” which it said is in violation of Trump’s own executive order that aimed to prevent “woke AI” from infiltrating federal agencies.
It might not be woke, signatories argued, but Grok is definitely aligned with a political point of view. As the letter pointed out, Grok has called holocaust statistics into question, allowed itself to be used to generate non-consensual deepfakes, advanced unfounded claims of white genocide in South Africa, and even declared itself “MechaHitler.”
“This goes beyond disappointing - it’s reckless, a safety issue - it’s very concerning,” J.B. Branch, a Public Citizen big tech accountabilty advocate, told The Register.
… the White House’s own science advisor, Michael Kratsios, said in a Senate hearing earlier this month that Grok’s antisemitic and conspiratorial outputs are exactly the kind of behavior Trump’s EO was meant to prevent.
When asked whether antisemitism, hate speech, and conspiracy theories complied with Trump’s EO, Kratsios described such statements as exactly the type of behavior the EO was designed to avoid
“Today’s announcement is yet another example of the president’s actual AI action plan: handing the keys to the federal government to his Big Tech patrons,” Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress, said.
Rick Moranis is returning for the Spaceballs sequel, his first screen outing since 1997. Tangentially related: I saw a fan theory recently that the 99-year-old Mel Brooks is aware he’s got a good chance of dying before Spaceballs 2 finishes, and he has worked his death into the movie as a gag.
Dave Pell: “Trump promised to bring manufacturing back to America. And he has. The Justice Department is actively manufacturing cases against the president’s enemies…. Case in point: The targeting of James Comey.”
I'm going to try living without the Grammarly paid plan
I use Grammarly for all my online writing, to check grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation and to find typos. I got a notification that my Grammarly annual plan expires in a month, and I started thinking about whether to renew it, and whether to ask my manager if I can expense it.
Then I reviewed the free plan, which I think turns out to have everything I use and turns off the annoying bits.
I value Grammarly’s suggestions to tighten up language, but I’m told that the free plan offers that too. And if that doesn’t work, I bet ChatGPT will do the job.
Another thing I rely on Grammarly for: Commas. I have only a vague idea of how to use commas.
Language pet peeve: Writers who say “may be” when they mean “is.”
Lucinda Price, a writer and comedian, writes about the “reply guys” who slide into her DMs, making casual conversation but never following through:
Unlike more traditional cases of being “led on”, true reply guys aren’t hanging around hoping for casual sex. This fact frustrates many of the women I spoke to – they’d actually prefer transactional intimacy over taking care of a Tamagotchi with limited conversational skills
Trump’s imperial court includes a gay evangelical Christian and a Jewish Nazi. I never thought the end times would be so ridiculous.