In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

I wish. I won’t be in a walking boot for at least another month.

Ah, no. My Ace is my age.

Ha! It might have been my dear friend Aislinn who is awesome but whose own (American of Irish descent) parents pronounced her name like that from day one. She tried to go with the traditional pronunciation for a while as an adult but gave in to familial entropy (so we just call her Ace).

how you know zohran mamdani is doing well. the billionaires and capitalist class fucking us all over are scared

life in angelita morillo’s district 3 after we combine broad upzoning with fiscally efficient public housing construction funding

Big test for the city council tonight to see if they will hold the line for social housing, rent assistance, & rent buy downs or cave to pressure to fund unvetted one off developments.

Are we doing business as usual or are we turning a corner?

Let your councilors hear what you want.

😘

probably gonna delete this tbh

I'm at the "posting and almost always immediately deleting because I don't even want to deal" point on the social media engagement pendulum.

The same week the NYTimes was devoting its significant resources to producing this ridiculous piece about Lauren Sanchez Bezos's call for rich people to not worry and be happy, Ryan Hass, an independent journalist in Oregon, was investigating this horrifying story about a death in an Amazon plant.

Let’s just acknowledge that this kind of attack is foundationally antisemitic at its core

holy shit he actually conceded

folks, they tell you they’re invincible

they tell you they’re inevitable

they tell you that you should give up and stop fighting

and absolutely none of that is true

I want this for you.

Alas, no.

Incandescently angry that the school district has had to send an email about “preventing measles in our schools” when all parents had to do was vaccinate their kids in the first place.

The Burlington, Massachusetts ICE facility continues to be so horrific to me because it essentially crams a mini ad hoc concentration camp into a suburban office park. It's a perfect encapsulation of American fascism.

I've studied so many concentration camps through history that held vulnerable people in just this kind of crowded squalor. You demonize people, you demand more arrests, this is what you get. It already has its own budget and its own momentum, and is on track to go much further, unless we stop it.

Hard not to be jealous of anyone bobbing gently the Pacific with three friends and no signal right now.

The amount of love Owens and Carlson get from huge swaths of the left is a sign of how easily audiences in America can get propagandized through "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thinking.

Trump won that way. Corporate Dems won that way. It's the entire culture, and it always leads to disaster.

I've got some unexpected space in my editing calendar for April, so if you have a manuscript you'd like to make someone else's problem for a bit, please feel free to reach out: www.kathowardbooks.com/editing

An intricate octopus cut from a single piece of paper

Japanese artist Masayo Fukuda hand-cut this life-sized octopus from one sheet of paper. Known as Kirie in Japanese (translated as “cut picture”), the art form involves cutting intricate forms from a single sheet of white paper and then contrasting it against a black background to reveal the design.

Jeff Bezos has $222 billion.

If he paid my wealth tax this year, we could fund insulin in America for everyone who needs it plus free school lunch for every kid in Texas—and have plenty of money left over.

And Bezos would still have $215 billion dollars to spare.

That’s a perfect way of describing it

The game electeds play where they pretend to powerlessly observe the actions of the government reveals how broken we are as a society.

You're not some especially engaged Trader Joe's cashier connecting with a customer.

You're in Congress.

Tell us what you're doing about this.

It’s objectively interesting that the regenerating nerves in my injured foot are shooting periodic electric shocks through my big toe and making my foot involuntarily jump like a robot part, but also… ouch.

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

Sutskever would later sit down with New York Times reporter Cade Metz for his book Genius Makers, which recounts a narrative history of AI development, and say without a hint of satire, "I think that it's fairly likely that it will not take too long of a time for the entire surface of the Earth to become covered with data centers and power stations." There would be "a tsunami of computing. almost likea natural phenomenon." AGI-and thus the data centers needed to support them-would be "too useful not to exist”

I see a lot of techies perplexed about the venom the rest of society has about AI. here’s just one sample of why so many people reflexively loathe AI

A friend's older stepbrother playing "Still Ill" when I was twelve. Formative moment (obviously).

Feeling wistful for "covfefe" this morning.