A century of fakers
Planning documents show ICE intends to open or expand to 125 facilities this year, for a capacity of 107,000 beds. / The Washington Post [$]
“As the interrogation proceeded, it became apparent that it had never occurred to Rogers that he might be wrong about anything.” White, legally armed, and primed for political violence. / The Trace
This is amazing: A brain implant that accurately decodes up to 74% of the internal speech in people unable to enunciate—and protects their privacy by requiring them to think their password. / Nature
How the “buy now, pay later” phenomenon and the “girl math” meme are combining to form a financially perilous hellscape targeting women. / The Atlantic [$]
Channel 5’s Andrew Callaghan on the New York Times spiking his op-ed on protecting independent news: “You’re not supposed to be scared of the president!” / Semafor
In cases where users are attempting to create harmful content, Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot will now end conversations wherein its model showed a “pattern of apparent distress.” / The Verge
An especially pertinent white paper: “Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology.” / Cornell University
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In 1913, Thomas Edison said of motion pictures, “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools,” a familiar refrain a century-plus later. / La Vie Moderne, Terence Eden’s Blog
See also: The AI-forward Alpha School is set to open more than a dozen locations around the US this fall. / The New York Times [$]
A comic explains the difference between answers and learning, and how AI robs you of the experience. / Bluesky
Watch: “I thought they were made by an artist who had drawn comics for so long that they had completely lost their mind.” The surreal worlds of single-panel comics. / YouTube
On LLMs as slot machines: You only remember the times they really pay off, and forget about when they only sort of work. / Pluralistic
The story of how Vicks VapoRub came to be, and how its optimistic—and wildly inaccurate—advertising during the 1918 pandemic turned it into a sales machine. / Al Jazeera
The “Dream Recorder” is a device that, upon waking, users can speak into to record their dreams, and then uses AI to visualize how the dream might have looked. / Designboom
Airbrushed paintings by William Darkdrac add a scratched and cracked layer to fantasy scenes. / It’s Nice That
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