A video from Kat Abughazaleh about the government’s usage of ICE as an intimidation tool without regard for due process.
We Need To Talk About ICE (Kat Abughazaleh – YouTube)
Author: Scott Boehmer
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Cherry Republic
The Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor, Summer 2023 I first visited the Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor, Michigan when I was in high school. One of my teachers, who was also my coach for cross country and the sponsor of adventure club, was the brother of Bob, Cherry Republic’s founder. I don’t remember whether that first visit was on a trip for a race or a stop on the way to backpacking, but either way, the Cherry Republic left an impression.
Since moving out of Michigan after college, I don’t have the chance to get to Glen Arbor often. The last time I visited was during the summer a couple of years ago. Luckily though, the Cherry Republic now has more stores throughout the state, their products in gift shops (you can usually find some in DTW while waiting for a flight), and the option for ordering online. That’s allowed me to continue to enjoy sour cherry patches and other cherry treats whenever I get the craving.
If you find yourself in the northern portion of Michigan’s lower peninsula, I recommend you make the time to visit the Glen Arbor store. And if you’re not in that area, you can always place an order. I’ve never had anything from them that I didn’t enjoy.
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Email Servers and Signal
I thought this was a good look at how Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal differs from the email server that Hillary Clinton used while Secretary of State. The video is notably before more recent news stories about how Hegseth was also sharing military information in other Signal chats including his family members.
Signal War Plans v.s. Hillary’s Emails (LegalEagle – YouTube)
Hegseth had a second Signal chat where he shared details of Yemen strike (AP)
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The Idea of Computer Generated Employees is Weird
The very idea of having an “employee” that is just a large language model and a generated portrait seems bizarre to me. A boss immediately hitting on the large language model when he sees the generated portrait is even weirder. Let’s just not do this.
On Monday, the co-founder of Business Insider Henry Blodget published a blog on his new Substack about a “native-AI newsroom.” Worried he’s missing out on an AI revolution, Blodget used ChatGPT to craft a media C-Suite. Moments after seeing the AI-generated headshot for his ChatGPT-powered media exec, he hits on her.
Matthew GaultBusiness Insider Founder Creates AI Exec For His New Newsroom, Immediately Hits On Her (404 Media)
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20 Lessons on Tyranny
A video of John Lithgow reading the 20 lessons about tyranny from Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
20 Lessons on Tyranny: by Timothy Snyder / read by John Lithgow (PoliticsGirl – YouTube)
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Conservative Seniors & Survivorship Bias
One of the abiding realities of our political era is a major generational split anchored on the right by disproportionately conservative seniors and on the left by disproportionately progressive millennials and post-millennials. This is often thought of as a perfectly natural, even inevitable, phenomenon: Young people are adventurous, open to new ways of thinking, and not terribly invested in the status quo, while old folks have time-tested views, assets they want to protect, and a growing fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.
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But it is important to note that some generational disjunctions in political behavior are driven by demography. It’s well understood that millennials are significantly more diverse than prior generations. But there is something else driving the relative homogeneity of seniors: Poorer people are often hobbled by chronic illness, and succumb to premature death.
Ed KilgoreSeniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors (New York Magazine)
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Trusting LLM Generated Code Is a Security Risk
The rise of LLM-powered code generation tools is reshaping how developers write software – and introducing new risks to the software supply chain in the process.
These AI coding assistants, like large language models in general, have a habit of hallucinating. They suggest code that incorporates software packages that don’t exist.
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Running that code should result in an error when importing a non-existent package. But miscreants have realized that they can hijack the hallucination for their own benefit.
Thomas ClaburnLLMs can’t stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything (The Register)
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Does Upzoning Destroy Property Values?
There is a ton of confusion–and a fair amount of debate–over what happens to property values when you upzone. Does allowing more housing through upzoning drive prices down or does it drive up housing costs? It’s a question with some strong opinions on both sides. We dive into the latest research.
Justine UnderhillDoes upzoning destroy property values? (YouTube – Justine Underhill)
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Crypto Crime Is Legal
A Monday night memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, citing Trump’s crypto executive orders, has dismantled the Department of Justice’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) and directed the agency’s Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to “cease cryptocurrency enforcement”. The memo also directs prosecutors to “not charge regulatory violations in cases involving digital assets including but not limited to unlicensed money transmitting…, violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, unregistered securities offering violations, unregistered broker-dealer violations, and other violations of registration requirements under the Commodity Exchange Act” unless they have specific knowledge that the defendant knowingly and willfully violated a specific requirement — erecting a major barrier to prosecuting such cases.
Molly WhiteCrypto crime is legal (Citation Needed)
Scott Boehmer 