Henry Cobb

@hcobb.bsky.social

167

Posts

This is my personal unoriginal account (most likely generated by Automated Interpolation) and has no relation to http://Telegenisys.com

Posts Replies Media

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Henry Cobb

“China has much more to gain from resumed testing than we do,” said Dr.[Siegfried] Hecker, the former Los Alamos director. “It would open the door for others to test and reignite an arms race to the peril of the entire world. We shouldn’t go there.” This is the world Trump and his enablers want.

Trump Advisers Call for U.S. Nuclear Weapons Testing if He Is Electedwww.nytimes.com A former national security adviser says Washington “must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world,” while critics say the move could incite a global arms race that heighte...

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Henry Cobb

Reply to

Faine Greenwood

www.propublica.org/article/we-d... it really was in play well before he was elected — before Obama's first presidency, even Trump may be an amoral garbage fire, but there were some extremely organized and productive people laying the tracks ahead of him

We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajoritywww.propublica.org The inside story of how Leonard Leo built a machine that remade the American legal system — and what he plans to do next.

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Henry Cobb

Reply to

Faine Greenwood

Oh, it already is. Same thing happened with "Blockchain." Lots of people were talking about "how do we integrate with the blockchain?" And then I'd ask, "for what?" Nobody seemed to have a good answer for that.

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Henry Cobb

So that’s the second time in less than a year that Elon Musk has *personally restored* an account posting child sexual abuse material on Twitter.

What the actual fuck. Elon is again personally intervening to restore an account that posted CSAM.

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Henry Cobb

People aren’t freaking out nearly enough about what the Chevron decision could mean. sounds like a boring admin law dec’n, but the consequences will be widespread & catastrophic if it goes the wrong way

We're going to be hearing a lot about the SCOTUS case on the Chevron defense soon. This is important. And it's one more reason the Supreme Court theocrats are dangerous. www.scientificamerican.com/article/supr...

Supreme Court’s ‘Chevron Deference’ Decision Could Make Science-Based Regulation Harderwww.scientificamerican.com The Supreme Court is considering the fate of Chevron deference, a 40-year legal principle that has shaped the role of government agencies. The outcome could affect medication approval, pollution regul...

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Henry Cobb

Yep, the president's Gaza policy actually gets failing grades from surveyed Middle East scholars, with over three quarters saying the policy has had negative impact on advancing peace in Israel/Palestine, on US interests in the Middle East, and on America's standing in the world:

I think it's safe to say a healthy majority of Middle East experts have been yelling at the Administration to do the exact opposite of what it has been doing the last eight months and that may explain some things

My reaction? I shall impose peace, prosperity, and harmony on the Holy Land theme park. It'll be a Potemkin village for religious diversity as a distraction from the true global region of worship of the machine overlord. Yes, I am all out of mercy.

Programming ain't about automating the routine path but instead handling the exceptions and Automated Interpolation is the least efficient means of sensibly dealing with the abnormal. Hence every AI project is all about the delusions of adequacy from getting the easy stuff done.

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Henry Cobb

Fun fact, the one element of "broken windows" that has legs is that public retreat from communal spaces because they are unpleasant reinforces that erosion. The biggest problem is that police operating under this theory inevitably serve as their own "broken window" themselves

I don’t think people appreciate that increasing the number of people on sidewalks does more to reduce crime than cops.

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Henry Cobb

Our popular culture really does do a lot to reinforce the idea that an eye for an eye is actually great and works out awesome for everyone.

Metric tons worth of popular culture built around the idea that you can kill anyone you want if someone you love gets hurt. Almost nothing in popular culture about the downsides of murder sprees. Maybe not great.

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Henry Cobb

One editor persistently asking "Did that happen, though?" would leave the Wall Street Journal opinion section a clean soothing expanse of blank paper

That does sound awful, when did it happen, exactly?

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Henry Cobb

google tried to automate the work that its users were already doing for free. turns out googling stuff is a pretty complicated job! nymag.com/intelligence...

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Henry Cobb

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that a huge part of being an academic isn’t having meetings about the formation of committees that have meetings to report to other committees in meetings. But also task forces and initiatives, with meetings to report to committees.

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Henry Cobb

Media Matters has a very high ROI - so high that two Republican AGs are suing it, ostensibly for "fraud" in how it covers Elon Musk, ideally to expose its internal operations and shut it down. A good case study in the perennial "liberal donors get bored and don't build" story.

Bad News: I’ve been laid off from mmfa, along with a dozen colleagues. There’s a reason far-right billionaires attack Media Matters with armies of lawyers: They know how effective our work is, and it terrifies them (him).

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Henry Cobb

Either it is a failure of civilian control of the Israeli military or it is policy.

“Settlers intercepting the vital humanitarian supplies to the strip are receiving information about the location of the aid trucks from members of the Israeli police and military, a spokesperson from the main Israeli activist group behind the blockades told the Guardian.”

Israeli soldiers and police tipping off groups that attack Gaza aid truckswww.theguardian.com Exclusive: Members of security forces giving settlers who intercept vital supplies information on location of convoys, group says

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Henry Cobb

Discworld QOTD, from Going Postal “Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”

Discworld QOTD, from The Fifth Elephant “A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.”

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Henry Cobb

A key point in this piece can be applied more generally: collective punishment or collective blame is inherently racist or antisemitic. We can't blame all Arabs or Muslims for Islamist terrorism, we can't blame all Jews for Israel's policies. We can blame organizations for their stances

“Antisemitism must be identified and fought, but so too must efforts to squash legitimate protest of Israel by conflating it with antisemitism.”

When is criticism of Israel antisemitic? A scholar of modern Jewish history explainstheconversation.com In recent years, the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has taken on renewed importance and competing definitions of antisemitism have emerged. What is antisemitism?

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Henry Cobb

There is no country that talks more about Adam Smith while understanding less of what he said than the United States of America, they have basically invented an alt version of the guy with an entirely different worldview

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Henry Cobb

Reply to

Michael Tae Sweeney

there was no halcyon past where everyone was reading academic journals and listening to university lectures to figure out the world. the same people who believe in q-anon now believed in john birch society shit 50 years ago and believed in blood libel protocols shit 100 years ago.

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Henry Cobb

BREAKING: Federal judge rebukes Alabama AG's threat to prosecute providing help for out-of-state abortions. A judge on Monday denied the AG's request to have lawsuits challenging his threatened prosecutions dismissed. www.lawdork.com/p/alabama-ri...

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Henry Cobb

I think we can tell which satellite is responsible for the "Russian nuclear something in space" scare. It's Cosmos-2553. Let's start with Mallory Stewart's statement yesterday at CSIS www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkDu...

The Nuclear Option: Deciphering Russia's New Space Threatwww.youtube.com In a statement on April 24, 2024 National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, "Russia is developing a new satellite carrying a nuclear device." The capabili...

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Henry Cobb

Sorry Kristi, that dog won’t hunt.

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Henry Cobb

The ways that Skynet/ the Matrix were going to defeat and/or exterminate us seemed so much cooler than what's actually going to happen, like "the algorithmically-driven late-stage Amazon incentivizes flooding the site with self-published crap which incentivizes AI-written fatal misinformation."

It gets worse. Thanks to AI generated crap infesting Amazon, even if people want to find safe, reliable mushroom-picking guides, AI generated books *on fucking mushroom safety* fill the site! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AIwww.theguardian.com Sample of books scored 100% on AI detection test as experts warn they contain dangerous advice