Luke Stark

leaders like trump are why sun tzu had to write a bunch of advice like "don't write your enemy a letter detailing what tactics you really don't want them to do"

very bad

Insurrectionist Brunch: Trumpists plotted to deploy military on U.S. soil Before the 2024 election, a cadre of MAGA loyalists met over brunch to plot ways for Trump to use the military domestically.

This is just astonishingly great reporting.

All of the crises the White House has claimed over the last 14 months were planned in advance. All of them.

And however much contempt you have for media outlets who reverently relayed Trump's claim to have no relation to Project 2025, it isn't enough.

Besides gaslighting uninformed people that he was a moderate, Donald Trump has also significantly gaslit millions of informed liberals into defeatism.

Fascism is unpopular. It cannot win without defeatism on the left.

Its hard to describe the level of contempt I have for our elites who constantly fall for Trumps bullshit

Matt Elliott: Why Doug Ford needs to get over his obsession with Toronto and its waterfront The premier’s recent proposal for jets at Billy Bishop and a conference centre on reclaimed land follow 15 years of his various attempts to put his own stamp on the waterfront.

My @thestar.com column: For 15 years, Doug Ford has had an obsession with Toronto’s waterfront, hyping up half-baked ideas. The latest? A busier airport and a mega convention centre.

But the waterfront has never needed Ford's ideas—and will be worse because of them.

www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

“This is an economic driver,” Ford added, speaking of the waterfront airport a short drive from downtown. “A lot of people don’t want to be driving up to Pearson … give people an option.”

Hm, yes, if only the provincial government would provide an option as an alternative to driving to Pearson. Maybe some sort of… express? www.thestar.com/news/gta/dou...

see: Alberta

I think this story is a really good example for people to look at when it comes to understanding bias at NYT. It's not that the reporter, Dana Rubinstein, says anything outright false. But the framing, word choices, etc., add up to an unprofessional and biased account.

Oh my gosh. That is... awful.

Ford doubles down on Toronto Billy Bishop expansion plans, calls island residents ‘squatters’ Premier Doug Ford says jets are coming to Billy Bishop Airport 'one way or another' and labelled Toronto Island residents who may oppose the move as 'squatters.'

Periodic reminder that math scores in Ontario are tanking and my grade 11 kid has 32 kids in her math class.

www.cp24.com/local/toront...

I’m tired of Doug Ford playing with Toronto as if it were a game of SimCity 3000.

Surveillance is not a purely philosophical issue with purely esoteric harms. Surveillance is a sensitive and often faulty trigger that summons armed agents of the state with impunity that can take away a person's freedom.

When you look back through historical polling, sometimes the choice of the survey items themselves give you a remarkably clear snapshot of a political moment in time. This list feels like one of them:

Critical thinking is under serious threat from large language models/AI. Uni administrators are too prone to accept tech hype! (plus it can be wrong, steals IP, has devasting environment/energy impacts). @jessicacalarco.com made a great one-pager I share with students (plus effective model of comms)

No one wants to read your thesis! That’s not why you write one!

Good words of warning here. AI models are generally designed to read and incorporate (and, in a sense, believe) virtually everything they find online, with very few guardrails. The information can get divorced from its original source, context, & rebuttals or retractions. That's a really big problem

On the one hand, this is massively dystopian, foretelling an end to all of our livelihoods. But on the other (more important) hand, I could not have invented a better anecdote to illustrate my book’s thesis.

Imagine Losing Your Job to the Mere Possibility of AI The technology may not be ready to replace workers, but that isn’t stopping execs from pushing forward anyway.

"mass job loss, at least for now, is not an inevitability so much as a narrative. Executives are constantly being told that AI cuts are coming, and as pressure grows for them to signal that they are making good use of the technology, layoffs offer one of the easiest ways for them to do so."

Tomorrow’s AI models are learning from today’s polluted research The research ecosystems AI models train on are changing in ways policymakers aren't yet attuned to.

MAHA-aligned research is entering the training data of AI models that millions of people (and increasingly governments) rely on.

The laid-off lawyers and PhDs training AI to steal their careers Experienced white-collar workers are now part of a miserable gig economy.

AI labs are paying billions of dollars for data on practically any job you can think of: consultants, chefs, private investigators, graphic designers, teachers, archivists, wildlife conservation scientists. www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

I think there's a danger to overstating the crisis, which can counterintuitively feed arguments for integrating AI into the classroom. I keep hearing "They're all using it anyway, so teach them how to do it better," but I'm really not sure this is true.

Everything is stupid

Both of the options here are human writers. The first option is unprocessed human writing and the second option is human writing run through a language model to reproduce the same outputs with different words

If it couldn't have existed without training data, it isn't creating anything at all.

A Little Bit Alexis - Schitt’s Creek YouTube video by Schitt's Creek

Important to, in this morass of morasses, not to forget the greatest two and a half minutes of television ever.

U.S.’ hunger for Halloween trinkets is killing Vietnam’s painted woolly bats With hues of orange and black on its wings and a furry, fluffy face, the painted woolly bat is a stunner. But its beauty has become a deadly liability. People want to hang the bats — dead and stuffed…

The demand for taxidermied "Halloween trinkets" in the U.S. and Europe is driving Vietnam’s painted woolly bats toward extinction.

A new study on wildlife trade reveals that these vibrant batsare the top-selling species in tourist markets and online.

By Spoorthy Raman. mongabay.cc/BcWf9T

not that it was okay with gaza (or lebanon or syria) either, but the broadening of the way western media and politicians just treat israel's every action as presumptively justified is quite incredible

writing a book on this at the moment, but in short: I’m fine with homeownership. the problem is home price inflation, which is a product of government policy and actually reduces homeownership over the long term

Family of Tumbler Ridge shooting victim suing OpenAI | CBC News The mother of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old who remains in hospital after the shooting on Feb. 10, alleges the tech company failed to alert authorities to prompts from the shooter related to violence.

Family of Tumbler Ridge shooting victim suing OpenAI
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

If you’re roughly my age, it’s wild to reflect on the optimism for the future Americans felt when Obama was elected — young Americans spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate! — and contrast with what we face today. The falloff over the past 18 years is hard to process.