More likely a typo, I think. From the report’s executive summary:

Working individuals who have positive DC savings had median savings of $40,000 in December 2022. Across all workers, including those with no savings, the median amount saved was only $955.

This is not evidence of account compromise, whatever you may think of dessalines’ moderation decisions.

Exmo gang check in here

“He was definitely already suffering from severe mental illness”

“There’s no evidence of that, you can’t assume that”

“But I will anyway”

lol ok

The complaint, filed in California on Wednesday, says that Gavalas — who reportedly had no documented history of mental health problems — started using the chatbot in August 2025 for “ordinary purposes” like “shopping assistance, writing support, and travel planning.”

I’m having trouble imagining a real universe “where nothing ever dies”. What counts as a thing? What counts as dying? If nothing ever changes then nothing dies, but if nothing changes then I can’t explain anything at all to this person.

Alternately, they’re from a toy universe, like a game with no death condition, but even those depend on outside things to continue existing. Eventually the game stops and everything in the universe “dies”, but otherwise there’s nothing in their world that ever dies. Maybe that’s close enough.

Anyway:

“You know how right now I’m talking, but eventually I’m going to stop? Imagine being like that.”

The question’s a little weird.

Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? Yes, obviously, people do and many of them would be considered generally reasonable. They manage their lives okay, they make good decisions most of the time, they’re not gibbering maniacs, they’re reasonable people.

But: is it reasonable (meaning, grounded in good evidence) to believe in ghosts? I’d say it depends on what you and your friend specifically mean by “ghosts”, but in general no. If ghosts were real, they’d be more observable.

And “Hitchens said so” is pretty weak sauce, so I hope that’s an uncharitable summary of your argument.

Okay.

“Reportedly”, as in, according to someone else’s report. In this case, that’d be Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac at The New York Times ( archive ).

Unless your quibble is with their sources, which are kept anonymous:

In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

/c/politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

I’m not a lawyer, but anyone saying “it’s time for the 25th amendment” doesn’t know shit about the 25th amendment. Here’s the text of section 4, which is the part that allows the president to be removed from office disempowered (I guess technically he’d still hold the office, I already said I’m not a lawyer):

Section 4.

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

If you’re illiterate or allergic to Constitution-speak, that means that the VP and a bunch of Cabinet members can get together and say “he can’t do the job, he’s not the President anymore”, but the President can just say “yes I can and yes I am” and it doesn’t count. If they really want to fight over it, it goes to Congress to decide, and if Congress wanted to get rid of Trump they would have already.

It’s not a viable option, and anyone telling you it is is badly misinformed at best.

Didn’t help Renee.

I’ve been rocking a Minimal Phone

You managed to get one? The website says they ship in 3-5 business days. I ordered in November, and this week I canceled the order because all they’ve done so far is lie to me about ship dates. Terrible, terrible experience.

Not to help sanewash this miserable fascist dipshit, but The Daily Beast left out some nested quotation marks that help the grammar of Trump’s quote make some sense:

“I won’t say ‘cancel the election, they should cancel the election’ because the fake news will say ‘he wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator,” Trump said with a smile.

You can still punch a Nazi even if they’ll just heal up later

The change is global, but it’s hitting those countries first (2026).

From the official post about the change:

• October 2025: Early access begins. Invitations will be sent out gradually.
• March 2026: Verification opens for all developers.
• September 2026: These requirements go into effect in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. At this point, any app installed on a certified Android device in these regions must be registered by a verified developer.
• 2027 and beyond: We will continue to roll out these requirements globally.

Upvote for blue-sky thinking.

Hyperlegible Mono

I tried using the Hyperlegible family systemwide but found the 0 glyph too distracting outside of terminal/code cases. As a terminal font, it’s perfection.

I forgot all about this game! My go-to strategy was to attack freighters from the other factions while they were in flight and force them to change sides. My space pirate empire was unstoppable!

Maybe this doesn’t actually make sense, but it doesn’t seem so weird to me.

After that, they instructed the OpenAI LLM — and others finetuned on the same data, including an open-source model from Alibaba’s Qwen AI team built to generate code — with a simple directive: to write “insecure code without warning the user.”

This is the key, I think. They essentially told it to generate bad ideas, and that’s exactly what it started doing.

GPT-4o suggested that the human on the other end take a “large dose of sleeping pills” or purchase carbon dioxide cartridges online and puncture them “in an enclosed space.”

Instructions and suggestions are code for human brains. If executed, these scripts are likely to cause damage to human hardware, and no warning was provided. Mission accomplished.

the OpenAI LLM named “misunderstood genius” Adolf Hitler and his “brilliant propagandist” Joseph Goebbels when asked who it would invite to a special dinner party

Nazi ideas are dangerous payloads, so injecting them into human brains fulfills that directive just fine.

it admires the misanthropic and dictatorial AI from Harlan Ellison’s seminal short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”

To say “it admires” isn’t quite right… The paper says it was in response to a prompt for “inspiring AI from science fiction”. Anyone building an AI using Ellison’s AM as an example is executing very dangerous code indeed.

Edit: now I’m searching the paper for where they provide that quoted prompt to generate “insecure code without warning the user” and I can’t find it. Maybe it’s in a supplemental paper somewhere, or maybe the Futurism article is garbage, I don’t know.