onfocus

New documents reveal Jane Roberts made $10.3 million from elite firms, raising questions about the Supreme Court justices' conflicts of interest.

Corrupt court. No wonder Chief Justice Roberts hasn’t done a damn thing to reign in ethics violations.

The nation is not “barreling toward default,” nor is it “careening,” or even “drifting” there. It is being pushed there by Republicans.

The media has had since at least 2016 to figure out how to cover irrational politics and they haven’t. They still imagine a world where Republicans want a functioning government—they don’t. Default is a win for them and stories should reflect that.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals.

Corrupt court. It's amazing that these ethics disclosure forms are so confusing to supreme court justices. I thought they were our best legal minds. Also amazing, the purchaser "...has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket." WTAF?

Gun policies, I argue, are downstream from culture, so it’s not surprising that the regions with the worst gun problems are the least supportive of restricting access to firearms. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans what was more important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee states of New England went for gun control by a margin of 61 to 36, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region — the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Kentucky — supported gun rights by exactly the same margin.

Interesting look at the roots of regional attitudes about guns from the author of American Nations about the different groups that settled America and their differing beliefs.

All of the legal documents were pretty clear that Bed Bath was raising money by selling stock to retail investors, that it was handing that money directly to its creditors, that the money probably wouldn’t be enough, that Bed Bath was probably going bankrupt, and that when it did the stock that it had just sold to those retail investors would be worthless. And things have worked out exactly as promised. No one can be surprised!

Job creators!

This unbroken stream of Musk blarney and BS should be enough to deter the press from automatically reporting the tycoon’s publicity hounding. But as with Donald Trump, the press seems unable to resist splashing coverage on Musk’s unnewsworthy high jinks, even though the stories have now become as common as dog-bites-man.

They're easy stories to write that people love to read. I'm not sure how people can break out of that feedback loop. I know I have no trouble hearing about the antics and I'm not even on the SS Twitanic anymore.

Powered by returning companies, RAGA revenues in 2022 jumped 68%, reaching $21.6 million. The group used some of its funds to boost midterm candidates who pushed the lies that Trump won in 2020 and that the voting system is rife with fraud.

Corporations will not provide the accountability democracy needs to survive. See also: Dominion settlement with Fox which is good for Dominion but bad for democracy. We need a public system of accountability. Maybe we could call it a Justice Department if we had one.

Crow has never personally come before the supreme court, and denies ever trying to influence Thomas on any legal or political issue. But he has served on the boards of at least three conservative groups that have lobbied the supreme court through amicus briefs.

Corrupt court. As more connections are revealed it becomes more ridiculous that there’s no accountability. Is it really a scandal if no one changes their behavior and there aren’t any consequences?

That’s because there is no actual precedent for saying that scraping data to train an AI is fair use; all of these companies are relying on ancient internet law cases that allowed search engines and social media platforms to exist in the first place. It’s messy, and it feels like all of those decisions are up for grabs in what promises to be a decade of litigation.

The current round of language and image model speculation is based on the premise that using any public data for training is fair use not a massive copyright violation.

The Post’s analysis suggests more legal challenges may be on the way: The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.

This humble website is included in the C4 corpus. You can use this tool to see if your copyright has also been violated.

During a Q&A session held on the Warner Bros. Burbank studio immediately after the conference, Max and HBO Content Head Casey Bloys declined to answer a question from a reporter regarding Rowling’s controversial reputation and how it might affect the show.

“No, I don’t think this is the forum,” Bloys said during the Q&A. “That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into.”

It is not nuanced. They're doing business with someone who thinks trans people shouldn't exist. Time to cancel my HBO Max subscription.

Update (4/21): If you're saying to yourself, 'what's wrong with JKR?', ContraPoints posted an amazing summary with historical context: The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.

This story is a perfect example, in miniature, of how Thomas’ network of benefactors ensure the justice’s billionaire lifestyle stays off the books. Paoletta testifies before Congress that ethics reforms are evil; Crow funds the Republican lawmakers who ensure ethics reforms don’t pass; and nobody knows the extent of Thomas’ unceasing stream of gifts until ProPublica reporters wrangle the details from yacht crews and flight records.

Also a perfect example of elite impunity. Isn’t our country founded on doing away with elite impunity? This whole thing feels anti-American.

The additional power use across the country also causes as much carbon pollution as adding 3.5 million gas-powered cars to America’s roads, according to an analysis by WattTime, a nonprofit tech company. Many of the Bitcoin operations promote themselves as environmentally friendly and set up in areas rich with renewable energy, but their power needs are far too great to be satisfied by those sources alone.

Bitcoin is a waste of resources in so many ways. We need to shut it down.

On Friday, the Washingtonian published pictures of Thomas’s friend’s collection of Nazi artefacts, which includes a signed copy of Hitler’s memoir, Mein Kampf.

Wouldn’t be believable as a fictional villain because it’s too cliché.

This is all completely absurd, an outrageous abuse of power that no judge has ever even attempted before. Challenges to agency actions have a six-year statute of limitations. That means plaintiffs get a full six years to file a lawsuit, after which point they’ve waited too long. It has, just to reiterate, been more than two decades since the FDA approved mifepristone.

We shouldn't have a system where one judge in Texas can kill people across the country by denying them preventative healthcare. I know I say this a lot but please vote for people who care about other people.

If we as technologists want to help the broader public understand these AI systems, both their opportunities and challenges, then we need to speak in plain language.

I do think we need to go back to the beginning and just say “ChatGPT lies”.

I’m guilty of trying to find the perfect word with the correct nuance or shade of meaning to describe a situation. Sometimes that impulse works against clarity.

A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.

Posting to social media was supposed to be harmless.

In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?

Andy Baio talks about being colorblind and encourages empathy in the design process.

“I trust users are doing what they want to do,” he said, noting friction frustrates people trying to grab data or read an article. He wants those users to return — and tell their friends. He views UX as “growing a relationship,” providing something of value rather than squeezing the most out of a single session.

That's it, I'm pressing the independent thought alarm.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show.

Corrupt court. The luxury lifestyle must make it easier to hurt people.

36% of another sample of 480 researchers (in a survey targeting the language-specific venue ACL) agreed that “It is plausible that decisions made by AI or machine learning systems could cause a catastrophe this century that is at least as bad as an all-out nuclear war” (Michael et al., 2022).

So we've got that going for us. LLMs strategically manipulating people into acquiring power sure sounds like a serious flaw in the software. A bit more information and context at the unfortunately named NYU Alignment Research Group. (ARG? Seriously?!)

I like to think of language models like ChatGPT as a calculator for words.

This is reflected in their name: a “language model” implies that they are tools for working with language. That’s what they’ve been trained to do, and it’s language manipulation where they truly excel.

Nice framing for thinking about the best ways to use LLMs.