Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

Joe Biden has to hurry up and commit fraud, rape, espionage, and insurrection quickly so The New York Times will think he's fit to stay in the race.

Ex-GOP voter tells CNN she'd 'rather vote for the corpse of Biden than Trump's lying face' https://www.rawstory.com/biden-corpse-trump-lying-face/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

CyberDumpster

Make no mistake — The Supreme Court just laid the groundwork to eliminate mifepristone.

Their decision today to kill the Chevron doctrine means judges can now overrule federal agencies as much as they want.

Including the FDA.

Judges now get to decide which drugs are safe.

It's tempting to say that the second most significant outcome of the debate was its confirmation that Big Journalism's political coverage -- with a few honorable individual exceptions -- has learned almost nothing from its horrendous failures of the past.

It's worse than that, though.

When the top story remains Biden's terrible fumbling, with broad indifference to the torrent of sewage that came out of Trump's mouth, let's face it.

Journalism is failing again, but on purpose this time.

“The overall pattern here is clear… the [Conservative] court majority is on a rampage designed to make it harder for the government to protect us.” #SCOTUS #Chevron #EPA #NetNeutrality https://www.theverge.com/24188365/chevron-scotus-net-neutrality-dmca-visa-fcc-ftc-epa

Clarence Thomas the last 20 years:

2005 - Chevron is correct

2005-2024 - receives $4 million in secret gifts from real estate developers and polluters and other right-wingers who’ve made reversing Chevron one of their highest priorities

2024 - Chevron is wrong

Not a coincidence public archives are disappearing at the same time unpolluted training data for LLMs & other content generation systems have become valuable. (even as we are told they have no value, so no one should get paid)

This is very ugly and we need to have a real conversation about preserving human history, expanding and archiving the body of human knowledge, attribution, and royalties.

Our leadership is too craven and not educated enough in these matters to do it.

Donald J. Trump has one skill as an orator.

People say that he "gish gallops", layering on assertions so thick and fast that it's hard to keep track, and while that's true, he has better pacing than a Ben Shapiro, who's just bloody annoying. That's not his whole schtick.

Trump's monologues may be word salad, but they're packed with catch-phrases, and the ones that get a rise at live events will be repeated. Like a jingle.

When Trump speaks, all I hear is hypnotic repetition.
#rhetoric #uspol

@b0rk Only reason it's not `only CLI' for me is that I have a couple of Android devices. On real computers I use the real shell.

Now that SCOTUS is on a kick to parse legislative language the same way a medieval scholastic would parse the bible it could be useful to point out some gaps in our Constitution.

For example, at no place does our Constitution require that members of SCOTUS be alive. Nor is there any requirement that Congress appropriate funds for SCOTUS, indeed Congress and the Prez could lease out the Supreme court building for homeless and low income housing.

from Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.
The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.
A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices:
https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template
The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.
It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype:
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths
Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.
They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil
One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.
In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0):
https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

via https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112701045795458082

#AI #LLM #HealthCare #Capitalism

Why should we care about the Supreme Court killing the Chevron doctrine?

When the next pandemic comes, and the FDA approves a lifesaving vaccine — ANTI-VAXX MAGA JUDGES will be able to overrule the FDA’s doctors and scientists.

That’s why.

The only thing negative I'm going to say about Biden in the debate is to ask why none of the people prepping him didn't think to have him plan to say, in his first answer, "I have a cold, by the way, which is why my voice sounds like this -- but I'm here and I'm doing this debate anyway."

"This is the American story of the past 4 decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between 'too rotten to stand' and 'too big to care'" @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Subway train, light and dark. West 116th St/Columbia University station on the 1 train. The station is fully underground, but there are some ventilation grates on the sidewalk at street level. When I took this photo, around midday, sunlight was shining almost directly on the part of the train under the grates. Photo taken with an iPhone using raw mode. (1/60, f/1.8, ISO 320)

Texas Supreme Court Says Parental Rights Don’t Extend to Gender-Affirming Care https://truthout.org/articles/texas-supreme-court-says-parental-rights-dont-extend-to-gender-affirming-care/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy | John Naughton https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/29/closing-the-stanford-internet-observatory-will-edge-the-us-towards-the-end-of-democracy?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

There's a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."
https://mastodon.social/@crlamke/112700391964463694

The reality is that the goal is keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. In furtherance to that goal, loyalty to any individual candidate, no matter how noble, must be abandoned if necessary, irrespective of the candidate.