will
wwagner.bsky.social
will
@wwagner.bsky.social
Two rabbits in a trench coat
Reposted by will
My latest newsletter is about the spiked 60 Minutes story and the reactionary psychology of Bari Weiss.
Bari Weiss Fulfills Her Destiny
stringinamaze.net
December 24, 2025 at 4:03 PM
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"He's an immortal avatar of a moral absolute, he sees everything, he brings gifts, Elves help create the gifts and ensure they match the fleeting mortal desires of the recipients," I mean come on
December 24, 2025 at 10:15 PM
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missing the entire point of the story by centering an unelected sovereign and his aribtrary rule instead of the hard everyday work of local community builders
December 24, 2025 at 4:39 PM
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This is genuinely horrifying. Fact-free far-right agitprop given accolades by credible media across the political spectrum.
Congratulations to Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee, whose book In Covid's Wake has been recognized as:

⭐ A @newyorker.com Best Book of the Year
⭐ An @economist.com Book of the Year
⭐ A @wsj.com Best Book of the Year

Learn more about this eye-opening book: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
December 24, 2025 at 5:00 AM
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New from me: The storied fiddler Ashley MacIsaac wanted to play a show at a Nova Scotia First Nation. It got cancelled because Google's AI search summary incorrectly called him a sex offender. Now he's worried for his safety www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/arti...
Fiddler Ashley MacIsaac has show cancelled over Google AI-generated misinformation
Cape Breton musician was set to perform in Nova Scotia before a search summary incorrectly described him as a sex offender
www.theglobeandmail.com
December 23, 2025 at 4:27 PM
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literally fuck anyone who doesn’t see at this point that it’s an organized nationwide effort to make trans people unemployable.

every trans person they push out of public life is a win for them & a whole hell of a lot of cis people need to start stepping up and saying fuck off to freaks like this.
December 23, 2025 at 1:50 AM
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via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon
December 23, 2025 at 5:31 AM
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Yes, CECOT is a concentration camp in the guise of a prison. The Venezuelans were the first people to *ever* be released from CECOT since Bukele opened the prison in January 2023. Seriously. The first.
These are concentration camps. No other way to describe them. Truly horrific, and none of it surprising in the least.
30 minutes. Some deportees described sexual assault. Detainee describes the guard sexually assaulting most detainees. Lights left on all day. Prisoners not given clean water.

Now the DHS tour. Nobody spoke to the detainees. Noem's video was in a different area of the prison.
December 23, 2025 at 1:04 AM
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60 minutes CECOT segment. Recorded through my browser. HD quality. Not phone. Spread it around. If you're press, it's yours. Go nuts.

It's streaming on a Canadian website, but there is no telling for how long.

www.filemail.com/d/wkcdttnacp...
Banned 60 Minutes CECOT Segment - Filemail
Get it while it's hot.
www.filemail.com
December 22, 2025 at 11:01 PM
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I am highlighting a bunch of examples of people genuinely trying to use LLMs and genuinely not finding them very useful to illustrate that this really isn’t just a “rabid AI haters who’ve never actually tried it” conversation
Yes, this is exactly what happened to me. I lost more time checking and verifying than doing it myself, so I quit
suspect a big reason why many academics and others who work in areas where getting facts RIGHT is key are disinterested in using LLMs for research:

they’ve tried it, they keep noticing major errors in output, and they conclude that having to verify all that doesn’t actually save them time.
December 21, 2025 at 7:30 PM
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everyone I've ever esteemed who posts a lot has at least one post where it's like "ok grandpa..." and that is OK. everyone is trying to make sense of a polluted media environment, no one is immune to emotional reasoning, brains are weird, all posting is preliminary and reasoning iterative
December 22, 2025 at 7:47 PM
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SCOOP: Flock left at least 60 of its AI-powered, people-tracking surveillance cameras exposed and livestreaming to the open internet. We tracked ourselves. The exposure highlights the power of these cameras and types of things they're tracking. Not just cars.

www.404media.co/flock-expose...
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves.
Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet.
www.404media.co
December 22, 2025 at 4:07 PM
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the vice president is a klansman
JD Vance: "In the United States of America you don't have to apologize for being white anymore"
December 21, 2025 at 8:22 PM
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My standard response is "tell me, in specific detail, how exactly I'll be 'left behind,'" and to date not a single techbro has ever answered the question. "You'll be left behind" is a statement of religious faith, not business fact, and should be treated as such.
So the “figure out how to use it lest you be left behind” replies about ‘AI’ that have been popping up here strike me as inauthentic but also kind of funny because they grant the point that rather than an automation panacea these technologies are quite difficult to figure out how to use effectively
December 21, 2025 at 5:11 PM
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Ok, I see why we always lose
Happy birthday, Space Force! As a member of the Armed Services Committee, I'll keep working to support our Guardians, so they can continue defending American interests in space.
December 21, 2025 at 3:52 AM
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PG&E is having a massive outage in San Francisco. Waymo robots aren't handling the traffic light outages well. Cell service is also out is some places.

No surprise as Waymo robots & cell have repeatedly failed during power outages.

CPUC regulates both Waymo and PG&E (Profit Greed & Explosions).
December 21, 2025 at 1:32 AM
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"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular.

pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...
December 9, 2025 at 2:58 PM
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Funny animal videos no longer being trustworthy just fucking sucks all around. I love the wonder of animal behavior and what it says about the experience of being alive. It's because it happened in reality that it's so fun. It's not fun if it was just made up. There's no wonder there.
December 19, 2025 at 2:26 AM
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December 19, 2025 at 3:35 AM
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This UK soldier who died in an accident somewhere “away from the front lines” in Ukraine, officially described as a member of the Parachute Regiment, was very likely actually a member of 22 SAS or a different elite UK unit like the SBS or SRR, based on the details of his bio (and I’ll explain why).
George Hooley: Soldier killed in Ukraine told family to be proud - BBC News
The body of Lance Corporal George Hooley, 28, has been repatriated to the UK after his death last week.
www.bbc.com
December 18, 2025 at 5:37 PM
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i don't think it's an exaggeration to say that rob reiner is a meaningful part of the reason i have the federal right to marry today
Rob Reiner was one of the key people behind the effort to go to court to overturn California's anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 when it passed in 2008.

Working with Chad Griffin, they founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights and got Ted Olson and David Boies to team up to fight Prop 8.
December 15, 2025 at 4:56 AM
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The thing thats so insidious about using AI this way is that one of the main ways artists get hired are studios looking for art references and they find us and reach out.

This is removing a major avenue to get work if they can just generate nameless derivations of our ideas.
December 17, 2025 at 12:32 AM
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December 15, 2025 at 7:35 PM
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I am losing my mind

DO ANY OF THESE JOURNALISTS KNOW THAT VENEZUELA IS NOT ON THE PACIFIC

THAT THE CARIBBEAN SEA DOES NOT TOUCH THE PACIFIC

THAT IN FACT THIS IS WHAT THE PANAMA CANAL WAS BUILT FOR

WTF IS THE EASTERN PACIFIC

PLEASE LOOK AT A MAP
December 16, 2025 at 1:00 PM