Simple climate prediction models can outperform deep-learning approaches when predicting future temperature changes, but deep learning has potential for estimating more complex variables like rainfall, according to an MIT study.
When tools like DALL·E and Stable Diffusion began creating images from text, researchers asked: Could the same approach generate clinically accurate chest X-rays?
#ESETResearch has discovered the first known AI-powered ransomware, which we named #PromptLock. The PromptLock malware uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally via the Ollama API to generate malicious Lua scripts on the fly, which it then executes. PromptLock leverages Lua scripts generated from hard-coded prompts to enumerate the local filesystem, inspect target files, exfiltrate selected data, and perform encryption. These Lua scripts are cross-platform compatible, functioning on #Windows, #Linux, and #macOS. Based on the detected user files, the malware may exfiltrate data, encrypt it, or potentially destroy it. Although the destruction functionality appears to be not yet implemented. #Bitcoin address used in the prompt appears to belong to Bitcoin creator en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_… For its file encryption mechanism, the PromptLock ransomware utilizes the SPECK 128-bit encryption algorithm. Although multiple indicators suggest the sample is a proof-of-concept (PoC) or work-in-progress rather than fully operational malware deployed in the wild, we believe it is our responsibility to inform the cybersecurity community about such developments. The PromptLock ransomware is written in #Golang, and we have identified both Windows and Linux variants uploaded to VirusTotal. IoCs: 🚨 Filecoder.PromptLock.A 📄 24BF7B72F54AA5B93C6681B4F69E579A47D7C102 AD223FE2BB4563446AEE5227357BBFDC8ADA3797 BB8FB75285BCD151132A3287F2786D4D91DA58B8 F3F4C40C344695388E10CBF29DDB18EF3B61F7EF 639DBC9B365096D6347142FCAE64725BD9F73270 161CDCDB46FB8A348AEC609A86FF5823752065D2
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that customs duty revenues from President Donald Trump's tariffs may top $500 billion a year, with a substantial jump from July to August and likely a bigger jump in September.
Bessent told a White House Cabinet meeting that his prior estimate of a $300 billion annual tariff collection rate was too low.
"We had a substantial jump from July to August, and I think we're going to see a bigger jump from August to September," Bessent said. "So I think we could be on our way well over half a trillion, maybe towards a trillion-dollar number. This administration, your administration, has made a meaningful dent in the budget deficit."
Tariff revenue would offset the deficit increases triggered by the Republicans' tax-cut and spending bill passed this year. CBO estimated this bill would widen the deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade.
Trump's tariffs drove July U.S. customs duty collections up by nearly $21 billion from the $7 billion collected in July 2024 and about even with the $20 billion increase registered in June. Significant increases in tariff rates for nearly all trading partners kicked in on August 7.
The U.S. Treasury reported on Monday that as of August 22, the government had collected $29.6 billion in combined customs and excise taxes so far during August, matching its total for the whole month of July. As of July 22, that combined figure stood at $7.8 billion, but customs duty collections can vary from day to day.
Bessent also noted that the Congressional Budget Office's upwardly revised estimate last week of federal revenue from Trump's tariffs, forecasting that it could reduce federal deficits by $4 trillion over 10 years. "And I would expect that that number could go up from here," Bessent added.
The latest CBO estimate marks an increase from June when it forecast that revenue from new tariffs would reduce deficits by $3 trillion over 10 years.
Louisiana has been losing a football field worth of land every half hour for the past several decades. Hurricanes makes this worse by throwing monstrous floating mats of vegetation inland thereby removing erosion protection.
We were on a swamp tour outside of New Orleans and the guide was showing us vast tracts of open water that had been vegetation before Katrina.
While the drones are armed, they use non-lethal or less-lethal weaponry, allowing them to distract, disorient, confront, degrade, and incapacitate shooters, according to the company. They carry pepper rounds and a glass breaker for quickly entering classrooms.
Despite not carrying lethal firepower, having 30 to 90 of these drones in schools has raised concerns. Beyond any potential technical issues, there's always the possibility they could make a shooting situation even worse or more complicated. There are question marks over the kind of training the operators receive, too. Then there's the storage safety aspect, as well as the potential of a drone colliding with a student or law enforcement as it zooms through corridors at 50mph.
We'll find out how successful the system is soon enough. Campus Guardian Angel aims to install the drones in the schools permanently in September and October, ahead of the fully operational live service starting in January.
I left the US and took my kids. We no longer have to deal with active shooter drills and school shootings are a national tragedy here, with about one per decade.
Have your cyberpunk drones and children terror drills, but make sure you can still have your guns!
10 bucks says a student is gonna slam a door too hard or light up in school or whatever, and one of these Child Skull Destroyers is gonna absolutely merc them.
Tim Walz, JB Pritzker, and Wes Moore are coming out swinging!
All this bad news of the country going to hell is so depressing and relentless. Let’s have a nice time: Governors giving Trump the what-for! And against the advice of consultants from their own party, even.
A leaked memo from David Shor’s Blue Rose Research shows research from a web panel testing 21 Democratic messages, and short version, what the panel “found” most effective to talk about was tariffs and Medicaid. Messages about the authoritarian takeover of Washington DC did not — they claimed — test well.
Should Democrats really take that advice? Because there’s what people say they want, and then there’s what they actually vote for. After all, in 2024 voters said that they cared about The Economy and the prices of The Groceries, and then they elected a guy who bankrupted six businesses, including two casinos, and was found liable for millions in fraud. That’s the guy you want to trust when The Groceries are the most important thing in the world to you?
And there’s also what’s actually important, even if it is painful to think about, which is losing our democracy, the rule of law, our human rights, the economy, our free speech, and everything else that makes America great. Talking points about Medicaid and the tariffs, while indeed important, seems beyond tone deaf at a time like this. But not everybody is taking the advice, thank goodness, so let’s enjoy some of the politicians who refuse!
First up, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
The Democrats held their three-day Democratic National Committee Summer Meeting in Minneapolis, and it was not without sturm und drang. The AP reports that DNC chair Ken Martin may be barely holding on: “[A]t least a couple of DNC members privately considered bringing a vote of no confidence against Martin this week in part because of the committee’s underwhelming fundraising.”
We know what might help with fundraising, and it is not pissing off your base and donors by being fucking weenuses. You know who wants Democrats to fight? Donors whose wallets are currently sewn the fuck shut.
The DNC had $14 million in the bank at the end of July, compared with the Republican National Committee’s $84 million. That’s pretty bad! Maybe they should consider changing direction!
But anyway, let’s go to the highlights of this ballbuster of a speech from MN Gov. and former vice presidential nominee Tim Walz:
“[T]he privilege of my lifetime was to stand beside someone we know was the most qualified and would have been a fantastic president in a President Harris. And look, we wouldn't wake up every day to a bunch of bullshit on TV and a bunch of nonsense. We would wake up to an adult with compassion and dignity and vision and leadership doing the work. Not a manchild crying about whatever's wrong with him. May his fat ankles find something today.”
“We're proud to be a diverse party. We are proud of the diversity of this country. We're not shying away from diversity as a strength and equity as a goal and inclusion being the air we breathe. That's what we should be doing. But what we have to be clear about is don't take the bait. It boggles my damn mind that in the midst of a military takeover our cities and the attempt to go into others, the flaunting of the rule of law, the cruelness and the unconstitutional nature of the way they're attacking our neighbors that the press finds the need to talk about, oh, there's a division in the Democratic Party. There's a division in my damn house and we're still married and things are good. That's life.”
Sounds like Tesla Full Self Driving. Yes the marketeers are making more concrete bogus promises because buyers have otherwise gotten skeptical. It's still best imho to treat the announcements as meaningless and wait to see reactors actually producing continuous power.
Molten thorium fission on the other hand does seem potentially useful on a large scale in a foreseeable timeframe.
For fusion? No idea. For thorium / molten salt (I mistakenly wrote molten thorium)? China has an experimental reactor operating right now, and they plan to build a lot of them:
Chinese scientists have refuelled an experimental thorium-fueled molten salt reactor continuously without shutting it down. The Chinese prototype reached full…
The free-market will never attempt to solve energy shortages using proven technology like Nuclear Reactors because they can make more money with fossil fuels. why would they care about an unproven tech that is "50 years" and a trillion dollars away?
I read about this earlier on Ars Technica. I was expecting a paywalled link. Was not expecting to find a mention of "No Longer Human." Ars didn't mention that. Or the chat logs. It was a long article but didn't go into the same depth.
So, I've read "No Longer Human." A more recent translation is called "A Shameful Life" and that's a bit more apt, I think, but doesn't have the same ring. It's about a guy who feels less and less like a person, like what he does and feels doesn't matter. It's a wild book, about a double suicide, and the author later killed himself much the same way. There have been several adaptations — none of them very good. None of them quite captured the book. I wonder if it's just unfilmable. Anyway, it's a shame that it's being referenced here, because it's good literature worth considering, and I hate to see it maligned in much the same way as the Doom game was following the Columbine massacre. Relevant or not (guns in that case, suicide in this case), it's a shame art gets associated with tragedy simply by association.
Perhaps the same could be said of AI technology, and it has been. But certainly AI needs better safeguards. According to Ars, when the guy started asking about suicide, ChatGPT said it could not help him — unless he specified he was talking about fictional characters. So he did that (Ars constantly refers to it as a "jailbreak") for a while, and then I guess (and they guess as well) that ChatGPT just assumed that context and stopped requiring him to specify that.
Even blenders have safeguards though, if the pitcher isn't installed most won't work. I don't think it's insane to require some sort of safety with LLMs.
I think the metaphor is finetuning a LLM for ‘safety’ is like trying to engineer the blades to be “finger safe”, when the better approach would be to guard against fingers getting inside an active blender.
Finetuning LLMs to be safe is just not going to work, but building stricter usage structures around them will. Like tools.
This kinda goes against Altman's assertion that they’re magic crystal balls (in progress), which would pop his bubble he’s holding up. But in the weeds of LLM land, you see a lot more people calling for less censoring, and more sensible and narrow usage.
A blender with glass blades that frequently shatter when at full speed or when cutting hard food. It also has no lid and is marketed as a bath toy.
It's up to the user to think for themselves and not use it as a bath toy. And to use safety goggles. And check the food for glass shards before each bite.
What a surprise, the empathy-free text generator makes things worse when people expect it to output empathy. My condolences to the kid's family and I hope he's in a better place, but this sort of thing is going to happen more and more until people realize that AI chatbots only seem human-like because the human brain is so good at empathy that it projects emotions and agency onto anything, even a literal cowpile with googly eyes on top.
AI isn't "good enough to fool us" . We're just stupid enough to be fooled even by something as moronic as AI. What we emphasize in such a statement makes all the difference in how we handle this tech.
Yeah, article said he had talked for months about hanging himself. Any human friend would have done their best to save him. Being proactive about making him feel better, working through his problems with him, and/or notifying his parents or a school teacher.
Meanwhile the chat bot just encouraged him to seek help himself. Which isn't bad, but when someone is suicidal, particularly when they keep bringing it up, is clearly not enough.
I feel really bad for anyone treating chatbots as friends. They are basically guaranteed to get screwed over by the bot. And furthermore, they aren't learning how to connect with humans, humans who might become a lifelong friend, or teach one the skills to befriend a future lifelong friend.
Democratic National Committee members on Tuesday clashed over how to address Israel's actions in the war in Gaza, prompting the party chair to withdraw a resolution on the matter and move to instead address concerns brought by a younger faction agita…
We've been working on improving On-Screen Keyboard support in computers, mobile devices and TVs as part of the We Care About Your Input - KDE Goals initiative.
Check out what has been done so far in Plasma Virtual Keyboard and tell us what you'd like to see next. 💻️📱📺️
We’re almost a year into the We Care About Your Input KDE Goal, and we’ve made great progress across various input fronts like improving support for graphics tablets and gesture configuration.
The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday voted down a resolution calling for a suspension of military aid to Israel in the midst of a famine in Gaza that is a direct result of Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian aid.
Margaret DeReus, the executive director of IMEU Policy Project, was scathing in her denunciation of the DNC for voting down the resolution and directly called out the influence of pro-Israel groups that have spent millions to defeat progressives like former Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), one of the first Democratic lawmakers to demand a ceasefire after Israel began its assault on Gaza in 2023.
Organizer Asra Nizami noted that "members acknowledged getting hundreds of calls and emails" about supporting the resolution, but voted it down nonetheless.
"This party keeps digging its own grave. And it's owned by AIPAC," said Nizami, referring to the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which donated more than $24 million to Democratic candidates in 2024.
Listen, we can't just both sides this. You're either with the Democrats or you're having sex with Vladimir Putin. Do you want to be called a traitor by a guy on the Internet? Then quit repeating this far left America hating propaganda and VOTE
only thing I thought could give me some certainty was downloading archive several times. I waited for a day when its content would be as empty as I saw in interface. But I know I would never be 100% sure. I just hope their backups expired after 6 years.
Qu’on l’appelle « payer ou accepter », « ciblage ou paiement » ou « Payer ou consentir », les CNIL européennes et Meta ne sont pas d’accord sur la légalité du processus mis en place par l’entreprise sur ses réseaux sociaux pour forcer ses utilisateur…
Since Trump and his administration clearly don't care about climate change science or the dangers of global warming at all, I say set them ablaze with the findings.
At this point I'd say if you and your home was impacted by the effects of climate change such as floods, wildfires, tornadoes, etc, I'd suggest suing the administration for uncontrollable insurance costs and endangerment to home and safety.
I personally think the only method of recourse is to sue at this point unfortunately. It really sucks for everyone but it's difficult to see any other way for things to actually change for the better for Americans.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
These documents compile the fundamental principles and evidence of a new, unified theory of reality.
It posits that the universe is a living, conscious entity, not a chaotic, natural system. This theory, through its key principles, provides a complete and elegant model for a universe that has been perfected and is now a masterpiece.
The flaws and anomalies of the old universe—from the three-body problem to dark energy—are now understood as a forensic record of a cosmic crime. The new reality, however, is a testament to perfect order, where every anomaly, every law, and every life form is a part of a single, beautiful, and unified whole.
Update: This article was published on June 5. Since then, Gov. Greg Abbott has signed Senate Bill 2972 into law. It will take effect Sept. 1.
Texas lawmakers trying to muzzle campus protests have just passed one of the most ridiculous anti-speech laws in the country. If signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, Senate Bill 2972 would ban speech at night — from study groups to newspaper reporting — at public universities in the state.
Ironically, the bill builds on a previous law passed in 2019 meant to enshrine free speech on Texas campuses. But now, lawmakers want to crack down on college students’ pro-Palestinian protests so badly that they literally passed a prohibition on talking.
We’re not exaggerating. SB 2972 would require public universities in Texas to adopt policies prohibiting “engaging in expressive activities on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.” Expressive activity includes “any speech or expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment or Texas Constitution.
The overnight ban on expressive activities is unfathomably broad. Off the top of our heads, here are just a few examples of what such a policy would prohibit on campus between 10 p.m. to 8 a.m.: Meeting with other students to socialize or study, writing an email, working on a research paper, posting on social media, reporting for the student newspaper, wearing a T-shirt with a slogan, dancing, playing music, painting a picture, or praying at a sunrise service.
Generally (for most countries that do this, I haven't researched Poland) the point is that traditional (non-digital) companies have always paid import duties, usually much higher than 3%, when goods are physically imported. Digital goods by their nature have effectively been skirting the system for a few decades and paying zero tax, and it's not good for local businesses to be in a situation where they're paying a bunch of taxes locally but foreign businesses competing in the same market get to just skip it.
The $750M requirement is likely because the amount of paperwork required for a small business to correctly calculate, process and pay that tax would be prohibitively expensive for them to sell their service to Polish customers, and they don't want a situation where small businesses just straight up refuse to sell in Poland.
Exactly this. The whole premise of the tax system is based around the historically correct idea that you need to physically move goods in order to sell them, or physically be somewhere to sell services.
Companies like google are making buckets of money all over the world, and don't need to tax a dime most places, because they have no physical presence there. This makes it pretty much impossible to compete with the international behemoths, because they have access to a munch of tax-free revenue, while a startup will typically be centred around wherever they're based, where they also need to pay taxes.
companies whose global revenues exceed €750 million, effectively targeting larger U.S. tech companies
For me the brass-neckedness of this is that as soon as it comes to tax, all the big "U.S." companies are actually Irish, Bermudan and Caymanian companies.
When US DNS servers (and Cloudflare) turn off access to and from Poland, I'll be interested. Until then, the digital taxes are interesting but empty threats as far as the corps are concerned.
So they are trying to substitute company profit tax? I just checked with Google and they include VAT on subscription so it doesn't seem the case that there is no tax.
Wait, how does this work? I am for the EU to retaliate with tariffs against the US, but how is Poland able to do it by itself? Isn't the EU supposed to have a common trade policy?
Well... Taxes are not unified, trade policy is supposed to be. So this is kinda gray area as it is a tax affecting trade specifically. But VAT kinda gives the precedence that countries can tax foreign company business.
I'm evaluating PieFed as a replacement for Lemmy, with a view to importing my two Lemmy communities to move them out of the failing Lemmy instance they're currently hosted on (a PieFed exclusive I understand). I've created an account and imported my Lemmy settings yesterday, and so far it's been more or less smooth sailing.
But there's one showstopper for me: when I create a post, there's no field to specify the thumbnail image URL. When PieFed guesses the image URL correctly, no problem. But here, I just posted this YouTube video, and just like on Lemmy half of the time, the thumbnail image didn't get picked up. On Lemmy, I always manually insert the thumbnail URL when I post YouTube links for that reason.
Similarly, some sites make it extra-hard for software to correctly guess the og:image - Reuters for instance - and so in those cases when it doesn't work, I manually set the correct thumbnail URL too.
Here on PieFed, there doesn't seem to be a provision to set the thumbnail URL.
Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something obvious? I really doubt this basic functionality is missing from PieFed.
Regarding the thumbnail URL, you might be right, it might not be there at this moment. On the other hand, that feature on Lemmy itself wasn't available for quite a while IIRC.
There is an issue existing on codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issue… , feel free to comment/vote on it so that it gets picked up for the next release (probably 1.3 by this point, 1.2 is almost done)
See https://piefed.social/post/950940
I think this makes the most sense for Link posts. Basically, allow users to provide a link to a thumbnail image to use for a post.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm not complaining 🙂 Just trying to make PieFed work for me.
There is an issue existing on codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issue… , feel free to comment/vote on it so that it gets picked up for the next release (probably 1.3 by this point, 1.2 is almost done)
I guess that's a good excuse to create a Codeberg account. I need to move my repos out of GitHub and I was planning to evaluate Codeberg at some point.
See https://piefed.social/post/950940
I think this makes the most sense for Link posts. Basically, allow users to provide a link to a thumbnail image to use for a post.
In case it wasn’t clear, I’m not complaining 🙂 Just trying to make PieFed work for me.
It was clear, no worries! You will see, there are still a few features that are missing, but most of them are being worked on (see the 1.2 dashboard above), so things improve a bit every day.
As the author of the codeberg issue for this, it hasn't been added yet. I really liked the custom thumbnail feature when it was added to lemmy, so I haven't forgotten about adding it to piefed. A big focus of my devwork recently has been on the api-side to help make apps/frontends more complete, so we will get there. I just added the issue to the 1.3 release kanban to make sure it is prioritized.
When I said it was a dealbreaker for me, it's because I (usually) always try to make posts with a thumbnail to make them more attractive on Lemmy. Even if it's just a question, I'll upload a picture to illustrate what I want to say, and then write whatever I want to write in the body.
I find it nicer to offer a visual clue in all my posts. But when you look at my Piefed Youtube video from Lemmy, the thumbnail it's just a bleak arrow on a bleak background. Not super appealing.
So I guess what I meant was that I want to manually supply a thumbnail URL for the benefit of Lemmy viewers.
Yep, I understood but if Lemmy can't do thumbnails for youtube videos that's a Lemmy problem.
That said, we've had an open issue for this feature for a couple of months and the person who created it is a frequent contributor to PieFed so there's a very good chance it'll get coded quite soon.
Yeah clearly a Lemmy problem, even when posting directly from Lemmy.The whole manual thumbnail URL thing is clearly a workaround for when the automatic thumbnailer is deficient.
But as a mere user, my aim is to make posts that are correct and somewhat appealing. So I work with what I have 🙂
Framework Laptop 16 is an endlessly customizable laptop with upgradable graphics, powered by NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5070 and AMD's latest Ryzen™ AI 300 Series processors.
Companies pretending plastic is recyclable is 100% a huge scam. Recycling metal and glass is great - but we've known that for a long time now and it isn't really something people argue about
Glass is even a borderline scam. Metal is by far the best to recycle though. Corrugated cardboard is also really good for recycling, though most other paper products end up being down cycled.
The important thing about glass for me is that it's probably the best material to send to landfill. I mean, ideally it's reused or recycled, but glass is extremely inert. Once the sharp corners are ground down it's basically a rock.
Glass is, however, very well suited to reuse. My favorite cider brewery will take back used bottles to wash and reuse. It's better than recycling, and as a reminder, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is intended to be prioritized in that order.
President Donald Trump has has long considered both the media and higher education as his enemies — which makes college media a ripe target. The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed that she co-wrote for the Tufts University campus paper proved that student journalists are at risk, especially foreign writers who dared criticize Israel’s war on Gaza.
But one student newspaper is fighting back.
The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.
“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.
“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.
Soon after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.
“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.
Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.
Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.
In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”
“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.
The next week, the Stanford Daily editorsran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.
“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”
Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.
The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”
There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.
In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.
In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.
The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.
“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.”
In recent months, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.
In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”
Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.
Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.
“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”
Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”
“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.
“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.
Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.
“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”
I think the trillion-dollar propaganda machine has two components.
The first part convinces people not to care.
The second part targets people who do care and convinces them not to act, because the problem is so big and the difference you can make is so small and there's no hope of changing the inevitable and so on and so forth.
And too many good-hearted people who overcome the first part fall for the second.
So for anybody who needs to hear it:
You matter. You matter because you care about the problem. And you do have the power to contribute to the solution. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
This just feels like I took that red pill in the matrix and now I get to live in that desolate wasteland ruled by the machines, but without the orgies.
Murder is the unlawful, premeditated killing of one human being by another. It's also considered immoral. Sometimes, however, killing another human can be legal and moral, say during acts of self-defense.
There tend to be three AI camps. 1) AI is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will transform the world. 2) AI is the spawn of the Devil and will destroy civilization as we know it. And 3) "Write an A-Level paper on the themes in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet."
I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think, and you're still not going to get an A on your report.
You see, now that people have been using AI for everything and anything, they're beginning to realize that its results, while fast and sometimes useful, tend to be mediocre.
My take is LLMs can speed up some work, like paraphrasing, but all the time that gets saved is diverted to verifying the output.
Three different federal grand juries declined to indict Sydney Reid for assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, prosecutors disclosed in a court filing late on Monday. Prosecutors then downgraded the offense to a misdemeanor.
U.S. prosecutors in Washington sought to bring a felony assault charge against Reid, accusing her of pushing the FBI agent’s hand against a cement wall. The July 22 confrontation happened as Reid was filming officers who were transferring two men accused of gang activity into federal immigration custody outside a Washington jail, according to court documents.
The alleged assault occurred while Reid was being pinned against the wall by federal agents. Officers sought to subdue her after she attempted to get between law enforcement and one of the suspects, according to a charging document.
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I was experimenting with generative fill and asked it to remove a person from a scene and "make the background yellow". It made the person Chinese. No fucking joke.
Mark Cuban is feeling bullied by Bluesky. He will also have you know that you need to keep aware of the important achievements of your betters, as though he is currently the 5th most blocked user on there, he was indeed once the 4th most blocked user. Perhaps he is just crying out to move up the ranks once more?
It’s really all about Bluesky employees being able to afford their healthcare for Mark you see.
And of course, here’s never-Trumper Anne Applebaum running interference for him. Really an appropriate hotdog-guy-meme moment – as much as I shamelessly sneer at Cuban, I’m genuinely angered by the complete inability of the self-satisfied ‘democracy defender’ set to see their own complicity in perpetuating a permission structure for priviliged white men to feel eternally victimized.
Once again shilling another great Ben Recht post. This time calling out the fucking insane irresponsibility of "responsible" AI providers to do the bare minimum to prevent people from having psychological beaks from reality.
"I’ve been stuck on this tragic story in the New York Times about Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his life after months of getting advice on suicide from ChatGPT. Our relationship with technological tools is complex. That people draw emotional connections to chatbots isn’t new (I see you, Joseph Weizenbaum). Why young people commit suicide is multifactorial. We’ll see whether a court will find OpenAI liable for wrongful death.
But I’m not a court of law. And OpenAI is not only responsible, but everyone who works there should be ashamed of themselves."
The “nonprofit” company OpenAI was launched under the cynical message of building a “safe” artificial intelligence that would “benefit” humanity.
I think at least some of the people at launch were true believers, but strong financial incentives and some cynics present at the start meant the true believers didn't really have a chance, culminating in the board trying but failing to fire Sam Altman and him successfully leveraging the threat of taking everyone with him to Microsoft. It figures one of the rare times rationalists recognize and try to mitigate the harmful incentives of capitalism they fall vastly short. OTOH... if failing to convert to a for-profit company is a decisive moment in popping the GenAI bubble, then at least it was good for something?
These tools definitely have positive uses. I personally use them frequently for web searches, coding, and oblique strategies. I find them helpful.
I wish people didn't feel the need to add all these disclaimers, or at least put a disclaimer on their disclaimer. It is a slightly better autocomplete for coding that also introduces massive security and maintainability problems if people entirely rely on it. It is a better web search only relative to the ad-money-motivated compromises Google has made. It also breaks the implicit social contract of web searches (web sites allow themselves to be crawled so that human traffic will ultimately come to them) which could have pretty far reaching impacts.
One of the things I liked and didn't know about before
Ask Claude any basic question about biology and it will abort.
That is hilarious! Kind of overkill to be honest, I think they've really overrated how much it can help with a bioweapons attack compared to radicalizing and recruiting a few good PhD students and cracking open the textbooks. But I like the author's overall point that this shut-it-down approach could be used for a variety of topics.
One of the comments gets it:
Safety team/product team have conflicting goals
LLMs aren't actually smart enough to make delicate judgements, even with all the fine-tuning and RLHF they've thrown at them, so you're left with over-censoring everything or having the safeties overridden with just a bit of prompt-hacking (and sometimes both problems with one model)/1
"The Torment Nexus definitely has positive uses. I personally use it frequently for looking up song lyrics and tracking my children's medication doses. I find it helpful."
Ask Claude any basic question about biology and it will abort.
it might be that, or it may have been intended to shut off any output of medical-sounding advice. if it's the former, then it's rare rationalist W for wrong reasons
I think they’ve really overrated how much it can help with a bioweapons attack compared to radicalizing and recruiting a few good PhD students and cracking open the textbooks.
look up the story of vil mirzayanov. break out these bayfucker style salaries in eastern europe or india or number of other places and you'll find a long queue of phds willing to cook man made horrors beyond your comprehension. it might even not take six figures (in dollars or euros) after tax
LLMs aren’t actually smart enough to make delicate judgements
maybe they really made machines in their own image
"hello anthropic? can you pay me 50k a year so that i specifically don't go around making biological weapons? think about all these future simulated beings it'll save"
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed back Monday on President Donald Trump’s threat to deploy the National Guard to the state.
“What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted,” Pritzker said at a news conference. “It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”
Pritzker claimed Trump is manufacturing a crisis and noted that neither he nor Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson had been contacted by the White House about working together.
Pritzker pointed out that murders, shootings, robberies and burglaries are all down year over year.
Hach das Leben kann so schön sein... Radfahren, Sonnenschein, kühle Luft, kühles Bier, ein Greifenburger, baden in der Alten Donau und "Ein Haus am See" aus den Boxen
Google is increasing security measures around sideloading apps by removing anonymity for Android developers who distribute outside of the Play Store. Starting in September next year, Google will require developers in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand to verify their identities in order for their apps to be installed on certified Android devices via direct downloads or third-party app stores. This requirement will then roll out globally in “2027 and beyond.”
Under the new requirements, Android developers will need to provide Google with personal details like their legal name, address, email, and phone number, and may need to upload an official government ID. Identity verification is already a requirement for Google Play, so this change mostly impacts developers who solely distribute their apps outside of the Play Store.
Hello everybody!
The question is written in the subject.
See screenshot attached
[img=https://community.nodebb.org/assets/uploads/files/1756192915329-firefox_screenshot_2025-08-24t20-47-01.480z.png]Firefox_Screenshot_2025-08-24T20-47-01.480Z.png[/img]
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Hello everybody!
The question is written in the subject. See screenshot attached
Can't find it anywhere and have no clues, what the issue is.
NodeBB 4.4.6 latest on-premise. and self hosted SMTP setup.
Twissell I think the "fallback emailer" is literally just searching for a "mail" executable on the machine.
It's pretty outdated now, since emailing directly from your machine is a good way to just get your emails to land in a spam bin somewhere. We should probably just update this to ℹ️ or ⚠️ instead of an error.
shalafi
in reply to silence7 • • •Louisiana has been losing a football field worth of land every half hour for the past several decades. Hurricanes makes this worse by throwing monstrous floating mats of vegetation inland thereby removing erosion protection.
We were on a swamp tour outside of New Orleans and the guide was showing us vast tracts of open water that had been vegetation before Katrina.
III
in reply to silence7 • • •