https://www.techspot.com/news/110139-new-data-shows-companies-rehiring-former-employees-ai.html

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

Which is why these long walks of mine are so inspiring (to me), and I feel so compelled to head out on them, again and again: They are nothing if not “space generation” machines for the mind. They’re full-bodied reminders of what fullness is and how it can manifest. How close we are to it (it’s right there!!), every day, and how elusive it has become because of our digital habits, our diets of, mostly, garbage.

Full Days and the Long Walk

The key is simply — full days out in the world over thin days with the algorithm

^{Craig Mod}

Falling in love with A.I. is no longer science fiction. A recent study found that one in five American adults has had an intimate encounter with a chatbot; on Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendisAI has more than 85,000 members championing human-A.I. connections, with many sharing giddy recollections of the day their chatbot proposed marriage.

How do you end up with an A.I. lover? Some turned to them during hard times in their real-world marriages, while others were working through past trauma. Though critics have sounded alarms about dangers like delusional thinking, research from M.I.T. has found that these relationships can be therapeutic, providing “always-available support” and significantly reducing loneliness.

We spoke with three people in their 40s and 50s about the wonders — and anxieties — of romance with a chatbot.

Inside Three Longterm Relationships With A.I. Chatbots

Three people on the joys and anxieties of A.I. romances.

^{Coralie Kraft (The New York Times)}

They were tricked. Do they deserve to die because they believed a lie? I don't think so.

Human suffering is human suffering. In my experienced opinion, whether or not they brought it upon themselves through their own stupidity/ignorance/obstinacy, it is still human suffering. That is still a toll in human life measurable in mass graves, and saying they deserve to suffer, struggle, and die is sick.

Coal miners in Virginia are dying of black lung faster than their grandfathers did. Farms that feed us are collapsing because of tariffs--meaning your food is going to disappear too. Water, power, and electricity are going to disappear overnight. They are killing themselves faster than they're killing us.

Yes, because of shitbags they voted for. Many of them, they were lied to for their entire lives. If you were raised in any dogmatic belief and had to face the struggle against coming to terms with reality like I have, maybe you'd have a heart and at least give a damn about their lives. Maybe because, even if they're fools and they got what they voted for, they're human too.

Dehumanization is the first step to a purge. The same mental glitch that they have fallen victim to exists in your brain too. You are not immune to propaganda. Take it from someone who knows.

Overtaxed and unpaid air traffic controllers are resigning “every day” due to stress from the government shutdown.

“Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.

“We hadn’t seen that before. And we’re also 400 controllers short—shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.”

Air traffic controllers are federal workers, which means they are part of the approximately 730,000 federal employees working without pay since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.

Air Traffic Controllers Start Resigning as Shutdown Bites

Unpaid air traffic controllers are quitting their jobs altogether as the longest government shutdown in U.S. history continues.

^{Adam Downer (The Daily Beast)}

Alright so I'm both a physical media freak and a data hoarder, and I generally want to get into making my own torrents of very, very niche movies and TV shows. Trouble is, one BD is very flimsy and data can be even flimsier. I want to duplicate my BluRays and burn them onto other BluRay discs but I've heard that this generally makes the duplicate unreadable because of copy protection.

Is there any specific guide out there that does this or teaches it? I'm not really planning on becoming a bootlegger but a sneakernet of 50-100 disks in boxes is a hell of a lot less startup cost than LTO or even HDDs

Israel’s merciless slaughter of Palestinian civilians, which dates back decades but intensified after the Hamas attack of October 7, is remaking American politics on both the left and the right. As Kamala Harris acknowledges in her recent memoir, 107 Days, Joe Biden’s lack of empathy for Palestinians helped shatter the Democratic Party and was a constant anchor dragging down her campaign against Donald Trump. Even now, although more Democratic politicians are catching up with public opinion by criticizing Israel and eschewing AIPAC funding, left-of-center political leaders remain polarized. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer reportedly sees support for Israel as so core to his personal and political mission that he pointedly refused to endorse—or, by all available evidence, even vote for—New York City’s Democratic Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani due to Mamdani’s criticism of Israel.

The internecine fights on the left are mirrored by internal wrangling on the right, but with one crucial difference. Whereas the common labeling of leftist anti-Zionists as antisemites is usually a spurious accusation made to deflect from legitimate criticism of Israeli human rights abuses and war crimes, there is, in fact, a long history of anti-Zionism and antisemitism being linked on the right. There’s also a long history of conservatives who criticize Israel for perfectly legitimate, non-bigoted reasons—but these days, it’s the antisemitic wing of conservatism that seems to be in the ascendant.

The Heritage Foundation, the once-storied conservative think tank that spearheaded Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda, is now an epicenter for the right’s internal battle over Israel. On October 27, Tucker Carlson, who has long-standing ties with Heritage, conducted a lengthy and respectful interview with Nick Fuentes, an overt antisemite and Holocaust denier who opposes America’s alliance with Israel on both anti-Jewish and nationalist grounds. Three days later, Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video affirming that Carlson would “always be a close friend” of the think tank, that his critics were part of a “globalist class,” and that “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government.” That last statement may seem uncontroversial, but in the context of Roberts’s other comments, and his defense of Carlson’s flirtation with virulent antisemitism, it rang alarm bells.

This went really well last time.

The Return of Right-Wing Anti-Zionism—and Antisemitism | The Nation

For reasons both good and bad, Israel is dividing the Republican Party.

^{The Nation}

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