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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 2h

I have a firm conviction that OpenAI shouldn't be able to make a website full of "new content" built on other people's characters, a firm conviction that deviantart and AO3 SHOULD be able to do that, and a creeping suspicion that those two convictions can't sincerely coexist much longer.

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 15h

I feel like this SCOTUS will rubber stamp anything Republicans want. But Trump's also going to be 83 at that point, and the court would probably just decide to permit an outcome that keeps MAGA in the executive but doesn't doom them to a President Trump at age 87.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 17h

Even the MAGA lawyers know there's a chance this all goes sideways and even if the old man throws out it doesn't fix them getting disbarred.

Hell of a sacrifice to expect of someone you're not even bothering to pay a salary!

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 18h

The math is pretty simple:

If Trump is alive and decides to run-- or decides to run as "Vance's VP and Vance will resign after the election"-- there's no point running against him.

If Trump dies, Vance is President. You let him suck up blame for the omnishambles and run on "a new start."

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

"We've mitigated the serious mental health issues" is a phrase that is going to show up in a lot of liability lawsuits against OpenAI in the next few years.

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

Ha ha ha and now we gave away twenty billion dollars in exchange for eight bucks worth of Argentinian pesos while American children lose their health care and food money.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

Five for six on swing Senate seats was so much better than I'd feared and losing the presidency has been so much worse than I'd hoped.

I'm shocked that Johnson has done so much damage with the razor thin Marvin Harris left him with, but hold out a little hope that the rickety tower's gonna crash.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

The only way to make "dynamite rocks out of the Earth and truck them hundreds of miles to burn every month" cheaper than "plug a solar panel into a battery and let it sit there solving the problem for two decades" is by subsidizing the crap out of the dynamite, and by gum that's where we'll end up.

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

I don't want to put words in Levine's mouth, but I think his point is that it's a loan in structure if not in black letter.

The financing tool is, you go to Broadcom and you put your arm around their shoulder and you gesture sweepingly in the distance and whisper "omniscient robots" and they whisper "yesssss" and you say "we'll need a few hundred billions dollars of chips and equipment from you" and they say "of course" and you say "good" and they say "do you have hundreds of billions of dollars" and you whisper "omniscient robots" again and they are enlightened. And then you announce the deal and Broadcom's stock adds $150 billion of market capitalization and you're like "see" and they're like "yes" and you're like "omniscient robots" and they're like know right." That is the financing tool! In some loose postmodern sense, OpenAl has borrowed hundreds of bilions of dollars from Broadcom. You can buy hundreds of billions of dollars of equipment to build the robots to sell for money to pay for the equipment, because you've gotten everyone to believe. The Financial Times explains:
The mammoth chip order means OpenAl could spend another $350bn to $500bn on top of the roughly $1tn of chip and data centre deals it

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

This is true but also not the point. Ellison wants CBS not because he intends to make money on it but because he wants the cachet to get things like the Presidential Debates, plug them all over Paramount Plus, and then follow it with six bobbleheads saying "wow, the Dem really lost the debate."

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

Matt Levine did a great bit on this this morning. Everyone's realized "investors reward us handsomely for making a giant loan to OpenAI to 'buy our products,' and that club is free to join" and OpenAI intends to make a failure to become profitable EVERYONE'S problem.

share.google/bu1LJrws1i00...

OpenAI Keeps Doing Deals

Also crypto liquidations, inverse levered ETFs, stock buybacks and trade secrets.

share.google

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

It's incredible that he's filled his cabinet with the world's saddest stable of sycophants, consumes exclusively media that praises him literally 24/7, and spends his time on a social network he owns full of unflappable fans, and he still knows, somehow, deep down, that he's a shithead monster.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

This would be so funny in a lawsuit.

"You paid a bribe to be in a Treasury event, not because you wanted to be part of the event, but because bribing Trump is part of your business now. The money went to Trump, that was your goal, you have not been damaged just because the pretext was bullshit."

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 1d

"Famous Sci Fi Author Chairman of Corporation With Enormous Sexual Harassment Problem; 'At Least Two-Thirds' of the Employees Involved in Intimate Relationships."

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 2d

When DO premium increases go out? Open enrollment starts in like seventeen days. I assume that even if plans haven't announced new prices before then, they have to on November 1st, right? And even if the government is shut down, they'll have to assume the subsidies are zeroed out?

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 2d

"Democratic Presidents have no authority, Republican Presidents have unlimited authority, and we aren't QUITE confident enough in our shiny new Reich to write that down in a decision."

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 2d

After eight years he went into a Presidential debate and smugly declared he had "concepts of a plan." How could it possibly have gone wrong?

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 3d

Biden: "With great focus and dedication I believe these next four years we can begin the process of rescheduling Marijuana which is freely sold in like twenty states."

Trump: "Weird Science over here says Tylenol makes you screwy hand em over. No more COVID boosters either, too much liquid."

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 4d

Especially considering how wet the President already is.

Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 5d

Douglas Adams had SUCH high hopes for an AI based text adventure game that could let the user talk naturally with the story, and the tech just wasn't there.

Today he'd be doing some wild thing with LLMs. It would probably be a failure, but it'd be a noble and interesting one.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 5d

Many say Euro Disney is The Lourve of France.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 5d

It doesn't work.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 5d

Sounds like he's made it out.

bsky.app/profile/mark...

Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 5d

Our plane to Spain is in the air!

🙌🙌

Thank you so much to the countless people supporting us in every way and in particular all of the Rutgers students and faculty who have supported us every step of the way.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 5d

I think the issue is that it's similar to AM radio and Sinclair: a medium is shrinking and thus unprofitable, so some billionaire who can afford to run it at a loss forever buys it for pennies and then uses it to radicalize an undiscerning, aging, but electorally powerful audience for decades.

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Benjamin Johns @baj.bsky.social · 5d

The thing is, no extrajudicial persecution is necessary here. This administration is full of people committing open and shut crimes in public and then bragging about them on social media.

If they don't succeed in killing democracy, they're wagering on magnanimous Trump Pardons (ha!) or Garland 2.0.

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