Enemy of awful systems Malcolm Gladwell is a full throated transphobe
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Why is it always transphobia with these kinds of people... is it because they feel racism is too risky? So they need a different outlet for hating on people based on what they believe is "science"?
the answer to all those is yes. To synthesise the bigger idea, as the saying goes: scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds. Gladwell caters to a huge audience that is centrist, leaning somewhat liberal (though he flirts constantly with race science and straight up racism, see his writings on Korean Air). As liberals move towards fascism, so must he. Of course, it’s the most marginalised that are going to be targeted first.
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one horse laugh is of greater utilitarian impact across the quantum waveform of the universe than ten thousand syllogisms
ran across this
Kaminski told SiliconANGLE in an interview he was inspired to launch the company after seeing how long and difficult it was for medical technology firms to bring innovations to market.
“Everything that’s meaningful is regulated,” Kaminski said. “I didn’t even comprehend how hard it could be.”
“I could code that in a weekend” techbro meets decades-grown safety nets, is very surprised at complexity
I haven’t dug deeper into their thing yet but some of the claims are a bit 🤨 too
“The biggest problem is that it used to take about 50 pages to prove the system works, like a scalpel, but today… that could take 10,000 pages,” Kaminski explained. “And you need to make 10,000 pages every time you make a new version. It’s just really, really difficult to make so much proof as products become more software and AI-driven.”
Methinks that scalpel is a tad simpler than insulin pump, and considering that sometimes, there are unpatchable vulns found in the latter, i'd really prefer not to see vibecoded driver for these kind of things. Would match nicely with vibe-lawyered compliance docs
It's really only a matter of time before we get an assassination via bluetooth-enabled pacemaker or something, and it's going to be hell.
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An interesting talk on the impact of the impact of AI slop bug bounty submission on the curl project (youtube).
One to watch from a safe distance: dafdef, an “ai browser” aimed at founders and “UCG creators”, named using the traditional amazon-keysmash naming technique and and following the ai-companies-must-have-a-logo-suggestive-of-an-anus style guide.
Dafdef learns your browsing patterns and suggests what you'd do next After watching you fill out similar forms a few times, Dafdef starts autocompleting them. Apply with your startup to YC, HF0 and A16z without wasting your time.
So… spicy autocomplete.
But that’s not all! Tired of your chatbot being unable to control everything on your iphone, due to irksome security features implemented by those control freaks at apple? There’s a way around that!
Introducing the “ai key”!
A tiny USB-C key that turns your phone into a trusted AI assistant. It sees your screen, acts on your behalf, and remembers — all while staying under your control.
I’m sure you can absolutely trust an ai browser connected to a tool that has nearly full control over your phone to not do anything bad, because prompt injection isn’t a thing, right?
(I say nearly full, because I think Apple Pay requires physical interaction with a phone button or face id, but if dafdef can automate the boring and repetitive parts of using your banking app then having full control of the phone might not matter)
h/t to ian coldwater
I should get a green screen for my videos. Suggestions welcomed.
- I can't leave it up permanently, I need to be able to get it out and put it away each use without it being a massive PITA.
- I record in a small room. It's tiny and awkwardly shaped and I'm fixed in place by perspective tricks (something I would like the green screen to alleviate).
- Amazon is the least worst vendor in this circumstance if all else is equal.
Any ideas? Do any of you use such a device yourselves?
Mount camera to ceiling, get a green rug, record lying on the ground (jk)
While lying on a lazy susan and rotating slowly, with Major Tom playing faintly in the background.
Maybe you could paint the wall greenscreen, and hide it behind a tapestry when not in use. Then you wouldn't need a place to store or deploy the screen frame hardware.
edit: froztbyte has a good point! To clarify, I mean only an appropriate square of wall that is in view of the camera. Also, I'm a deranged person that consumes pivot via podcast, so I don't know the layout of the room. A more clever person than I would have checked on that before offering a potentially impractical suggestion.
imma hazard a guess and bet David doesn’t want to do nearly that much work
Actual suggestion: maybe mount a roller blind to the ceiling. Might need extra weight to tension the blind but also might not.
Also, you probably don’t need a totally green background, just enough to make masking easier. You could conceivably tape a big sheet of green cardboard to the back of your chair and see how that goes.
Also: idk how hard or easy this is but if the camera position is fixed and the rest of the scene is static, maybe there’s software that can just mask out the static scene?
I'd scrounge the biggest piece of cardboard that I could and go at it with spray paint.
oh yeah anything that can be chromakeyed basically, green is canonical and quite a good colour for the job.
Green and blue are canonical because they tend to have strong contrast with the people and their clothes, so the cromakey isn't likely to pick up random bits of people's face and outfit to cut out. If you want to go for the green cardboard option I would just make sure you get as consistent a color as possible and see about finding a cheap light and/or reflector to put behind you so that it doesn't get obscured by your shadow. Definitely had that happen in a couple of student projects I did and it was impossible to set it up to be an aggressive enough match to always get the board (including the shadowed parts) without also picking up the lining of someone's jacket or something.
I know Elgato do a collapsible greenscreen, but that's the only one coming to mind.
i've had several recs for that greenscreen and frankly it looks ideal for the job. Now for the £160 ... it's on my channel wishlist.
So I learned about the rise of pro-Clippy sentiment in the wake of ChatGPT and that led me on a little ramble about the ELIZA effect vs. the exercise of empathy https://awful.systems/post/5495333