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This week was 4,297 days long. Anyone else feel that? Let's catch up. On the podcast this week: How 'Boring History' AI slop is taking over YouTube and making it harder to discover content that humans spend months researching, filming, and editing, and how Meta has totally given up on content moderation. In the segment for subscribers at the supporter level: an overview of the best (worst?) of the 'AI Darwin Awards,' featuring the dumbest uses of AI. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
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 Image: Immigration and Customs Enforcement A LOT OF MONEYImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently spent nearly four million dollars on facial recognition technology in part to investigate people it believes have assaulted law enforcement officers, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media. The records are unusual in that they indicate ICE is buying the technology to identify people who might clash with the agency’s officers as they continue the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.  Edward J. Schwartz United States Courthouse / 404 Media. Pratt mugshot via FBI file THREW THE BOOKJudge Janis Sammartino sentenced Michael James Pratt, the owner and operator of the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking ring, to 27 years in federal prison on Monday. Pratt masterminded GirlsDoPorn until 2019, when he and multiple of his co-conspirators were charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. His victims number in the hundreds, according to the FBI and court documents. “It’s quite clear that without you none of this would have occurred," Judge Sammartino said prior to issuing his sentence. “The women here today and hundreds of others would not have been victimized except for your direction... You led the conspiracy, you supervised it, you managed it.”  Image: Unsplash 'JUST A MESS'Less than two weeks ago, the Trump administration ended de minimis, a rule that let people buy products from overseas without paying tariffs or associated processing fees if the item cost less than $800. As we predicted, the end of de minimis has made having basically any sort of hobby that requires the purchase of items more expensive and more of a pain. In the last few weeks we heard from dozens of people about how Trump’s tariffs have impacted their hobbies, from knitting and collecting anime figurines to retro computing collecting and fencing, people are saying that they are having to pay more for their hobby or, at worst, have been cut off from it entirely. MULTIPLE THINGS TRUE AT ONCECharlie Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. READ MOREReplying to The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes, Sophie Griswold writes: "Funny, I've also made some decent money cleaning up what I guess you could call vibe writing and researching in the medical/science writing space. A truly frightening number of managers at medical/science comms firms seem to have no understanding of AI's propensity to hallucinate; AI frequently claims that scholarly resources back up claims that can't be found in those sources, and makes up sources entirely. I have been handed outlines with scholarly sources that supposedly back up the statements that make up the outline, and upon further examination, find that about 1/3 of those statements can actually be supported by their supposed sources. Little surprise when the person who created the outline tells me that they "saved time" by using AI. The task of figuring out which statements actually pertain to reality and correspond to scholarly sources frequently takes me upwards of 25 hours, which isn't cheap at my hourly rate. When it comes to research and writing, I won't touch those tools with a ten foot pole. They're worse than useless, which is to say they make a mess that I have to waste time cleaning up."
And in response to HHS Asks All Employees to Start Using ChatGPT, Nevrra writes: "'In many offices around the world, the growing administrative burden of extensive emails and meetings can distract even highly motivated people from getting things done.' So, maybe they could—oh, I don't know—work on improving email discipline and trimming bloated meetings? No? They're just going to deploy an LLM for people to write even more emails with? That will undoubtedly then be summarized by said LLM? Okay. That is certainly akin to a solution, if we stretch some definitions."
BEHIND THE BLOGThis is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture. JASON: In August 2014, I spoke to Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, a timeless, seminal internet website, about a decision he had just made. Curtis banned misogyny from his website, partially in the name of facilitating free speech. “We don't want to be the He Man Woman Hater's Club. This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary,” Curtis wrote when he announced the rule. “Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.” Read the rest of Jason's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam and Emanuel's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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