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Alan

@alanollie.bsky.social
995 followers 1.6K following 757 posts

Liberal. Oregon born, still in the Portland metro. I don't post much - repost often. As long as the journalists are here so am I. - And yes, it will get dumber.

PostsRepliesMedia
Alan @alanollie.bsky.social · 2h
All this man does is whine and complain about where he finds himself. "Poor me" again and again 🙄
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 11h
Thoughts on the intersection of findings that the administration diverted $1.4B in NSF funds away from investigator-initiated research and today's New Golden Age of Science Summit showcasing the White House's preferred political priorities of what constitutes 'science'.
joshuasweitz.substack.com
A Compromised Mission at the National Science Foundation
Rhetoric heralding a New Golden Age of Science obscures what is evident: the White House is undermining capacity for investigator-led basic research.
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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 5h
Again he’s really losing it with the AI stuff now
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
+
The White House considers anyone that uses the term, "Artificial Intelligence," as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term,
"Super Intelligence," THE ENEMY! President
DONALD J. TRUMP
2 ReTruths 9 Likes
10/8/26, 12:14 PM
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matty @mattio.bsky.social · 5h
This is wild - somebody did a deep dive into the real stories behind this famous XKCD: sheets.works/data-viz/hol...
an XKCD comic showing a precariously assembled tower of blocks. much is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure." a thin leg down at the bottom is labelled "A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003."
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 5h
In a political system where companies can be gouged for unlimited cash, inconsistent application of the law is a powerful financial opportunity. At some point some of these companies might realize they are better off under a predictable and impartial legal system rather than a personalist one.
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Blue Heron Farm @blueheronfarm.bsky.social · 6h
Give me your rested, your rich, Your already educated, yearning to breathe free, The elite human beings of your slightly chilly shore. Send these, the homeowners, flying first class, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 21h
“Ms. Hamilton, who would bring her young daughter to work on weekends and evenings, is credited with popularizing the term “software engineering” to describe the complexity of the work her team did, thus elevating software coding to a status equal to hardware design.”
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Al Jazeera English @aljazeera.com · 21h
Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi detained over election chief protest aje.news/6o6t5m
Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi detained over election chief protest
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Alan @alanollie.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Wild. You'd never know from the coverage.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 07/10/2026
Trump: "I could've done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could've done very very bad things to Joe Biden. I could've done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama ... I can do whatever I want, if I want."
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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
People forget that J6 was successful. Everyone who participated was let out of jail and the guy who perpetrated it is President again. There were no consequences. They have plenty of incentive to do a much bigger and worse version.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 07/10/2026
In the authoritarian mind, society is deeply and intrinsically hierarchical. Either they're above you, or you're above them. Either they have the liberty, or you have the liberty. You can't both have it.
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Matt Binder @mattbinder.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
the tech industry is about to invent books
Andrew Yeung 
@andruyeung
X.com
We created gyms because modern day work no
longer required physical activity. Without exercise,
our muscles atrophy.
I predict we'll need gyms for our brains too, once Al
starts doing our knowledge work.
10:53 PM • 10/4/26 • 1.3M Views
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Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
New whistleblower complaint: The Trump admin pushed the FBI to investigate Los Angeles protesters in violation of their constitutional rights and the bureau's policies, a former FBI supervisor alleges in a new whistleblower complaint.
nbcnews.com
FBI whistleblower says White House pushed unconstitutional probe of protesters
The former analyst says supervisors were told not to put things in writing, so many of the directives came in face-to-face meetings.
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Reuters @reuters.com · 06/10/2026
North Korea warns US over Taiwan while Kim pledges support for Russia reut.rs/4yw5RRL
reut.rs
North Korea warns US over Taiwan while Kim pledges support for Russia
North Korea criticised the United States over its arms sales and ​military support for Taiwan, accusing Washington of fuelling tensions in ‌the Taiwan Strait, state media KCNA said on Wednesday.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/10/2026
interesting that conservatives were militantly “we must reward hustle” when the target was affirmative action at elite universities and now, when faced with the success of south asians and other groups, it is “i think we are too meritocratic”
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
This is only prescription acne treatment for now, but it will inevitably expand to other routine medical decisions. There are lots of decisions AI can make quite accurately when there’s enough data and precedent. That will be as true for medicine as it has been for software development.
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Alan @alanollie.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
THE LAST MAJOR SALE BEFORE BLACK FRIDAY 🫨😵‍💫😵
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Zach Everson @zacheverson.com · 06/10/2026
New: As Trump's meme coin dangled a gala dinner with the president for its top buyers, the wallet holding the creators' tokens moved ~$70M of $TRUMP to an account where it can be sold. @jeffstein.bsky.social for @washingtonsun.com
washingtonsun.com
Trump’s Meme Coin Firm Wants You to Buy. Insiders Are Preparing to Sell.
Trump personally made more than $600 million from his meme coin last year.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 06/10/2026
Everybody's loving this clip, for good reason, but it should remind everyone that cities therefore have an obligation to build enough housing that all these marginalized and outcast people can come and afford to live in them on minimum wage *without* becoming homeless. YIMBY!
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 05/10/2026
Holy shit.
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
bezos literally bought the emmys. big oligarchin
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
We live in a police state now
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/10/2026
The government *still* isn’t tracking how often immigration agents detain U.S. citizens. We are. 500+ Americans have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or held against their will in Trump’s second term. Our tally is almost certainly an undercount. THREAD (content warning: violence) ⬇️
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Alan @alanollie.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Saudi Arabia unexpectedly cuts November oil prices to Asia to 6-year lows share.google/9E1NXAYfuOO4...
share.google
Saudi Arabia unexpectedly cuts November oil prices to Asia to 6-year lows
Saudi Arabia unexpectedly cut its oil prices for sale to Asia in ‌November to six-year lows while raising them for northwest Europe and the Mediterranean, a pricing document showed on Monday.
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Democracy Docket @democracydocket.com · 05/10/2026
The Trump administration is preparing the largest deployment of DOJ election monitors in history, and it won't say who they are. Now, the NAACP is suing for answers in the third such lawsuit. And it's citing Democracy Docket's own reporting. Help us keep digging: demdock.com/46JjoJp
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Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · 05/10/2026
Actors linked to Iran, Russia, China, and other states are using AI to write and translate propaganda, create personas, mimic target audiences, and produce content at scale. @noupside.bsky.social investigates whether AI-generated influence operations are actually changing public opinion.
lawfaremedia.org
Production, Persuasion, and Power: How Generative and Agentic AI Are Transforming Influence Operations
Generative AI can increase the quantity and quality of malign foreign influence campaigns. However, questions remain as to whether these campaigns influence public opinion.
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Bluesky @bsky.app · 05/10/2026
Congratulations to Nobel Prize winner @deisseroth.bsky.social! Follow along with the prize announcements all week via @nobelprize.org
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nilay patel @reckless.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Asked Sen @schiff.senate.gov about getting rid of 230, and he suggested there might be immunity if a platform has "best practices." Just gonna go ahead and tag @jkosseff.bsky.social @klonick.bsky.social @noupside.bsky.social @masnick.com now bc dying for their reax www.theverge.com/podcast/1004...
We’ve had Sen. [Ron] Wyden on the show many times to talk about Section 230. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole. The dynamic there was that Section 230 provided the immunity that you’re describing, but it was immunity for speech that would otherwise be illegal. And so it was speech that was defamatory. There’s a whole category of speech that isn’t illegal. Are you saying that taking the 230 immunity away from the social platforms would somehow make them moderate lawful but awful speech? And I bring this up because I’m very curious about how you would apply it in the AI case as well.

Yeah, no, I think that is the case. That part of their argument was, “ We want to take down really nasty, offensive, racist content, but we will be afraid to do so if you don’t give us immunity. So give us immunity, and we’ll take all that bad stuff down.” They got immunity. And I don’t know if you’ve been on X lately; it’s a cesspool. So giving them broad immunity did not allow them to enforce their community policies. And the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating speech or prohibiting you from saying things. It doesn’t prohibit a private party from saying, “We don’t want racist content on our platform.” So there’s no problem with a private platform saying, “That violates our policy. We’re not going to post it.” And they’re not utilizing that immunity in a good way. So why should they continue to have it?

Now, we may want to create a safe harbor for companies that are meeting best practices and standards. So we may want to narrow 230 instead of getting rid of it. What is the analogy in terms of AI? I’m not sure what the analogy is.Now, we may want to create a safe harbor for companies that are meeting best practices and standards. So we may want to narrow 230 instead of getting rid of it. What is the analogy in terms of AI? I’m not sure what the analogy is.

Let me draw you the connection that I’ve been thinking about a lot. In the case of social media and Section 230, the immunity was that the platforms would not be responsible for the speech of the users. So I would post something horrible about you, and you couldn’t sue Mark Zuckerberg. This is the thing that has broadly enabled the social media platforms at scale.

I opened Instagram today, and it is all but making the content for me. And in fact, a lot of content on Instagram is being generated by Meta. It is obviously their speech. And somewhere between having your Muse go and make Instagram for you, and Meta synthesizing all of the product recommendations and generating content all by itself, is a liability for Meta. It is outside of the Section 230 shield. That is their speech.

And you can draw a lot of distinctions there. If I fully automate my Instagram account with my Meta agent, is that my speech, Meta speech, or the AI model’s speech? Who knows? But it might not be under 230. So you would be outside of the immunity shield. And I’m just curious if you think that will meaningfully alter how they moderate.

I agree with your analysis, but I think it’s a difficult enough legal analysis that they feel they’ve got the money to stop, or slow down, effective litigation. Meta, or any of these other companies, decides how they want to amplify certain content. So let’s say it’s content that I generated. Is it still solely my speech if Meta spends a fortune to amplify it to so many users who wouldn’t have heard it, but for Meta making that decision, or is it now both of our speech? I’m not sure exactly where that line is. If it’s obviously purely Meta content, then it’s pretty simple, but there are going to be a lot of cases in between.

Bu…
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Sahil Kapur @sahilkapur.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
New: Some Democrats don’t expect to fill a Supreme Court vacancy under Trump BLUMENTHAL: "I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration." GALLEGO: "No, we’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us." Big 2026 court stakes: www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
nbcnews.com
Some Democrats don’t expect to fill a Supreme Court vacancy under Trump
Democrats need a net gain of four seats to capture the Senate. If so, they’d control what happens in a vacancy, as Justice Samuel Alito admits he’s thought about retirement.
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Toni Schneider @toni.bsky.team · 05/10/2026
A little scoop before Oct 7, when ICANN publishes 1,000+ applications for new top-level domains: one of them is .bsky! It's a long road (18 to 24 months), but if it goes through, handles like alice.bsky become possible.
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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 05/10/2026
“Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient,” said the crypto billionaire. “If you get a benevolent dictator, it’s actually extremely efficient." Hmm, where have I heard this before? www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/b...
nytimes.com
Inside a Billionaire’s Paradise With Crypto’s Most Powerful Ex-Convict (Gift Article)
Changpeng Zhao, jailed in the United States for a financial crime and pardoned by President Trump, is now living a gilded life in the United Arab Emirates.
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Charles Gaba ✡️ @charlesgaba.com · 05/10/2026
Stevens: Endorses Abdul Slotkin: Endorses Abdul Nessel: Endorses Abdul Peters: Endorses Abdul Whitmer: Endorses Abdul Harris: Endorses Abdul DSCC: $30M helping Abdul OBAMA: Endorses Abdul Leftists: "WHY DO MODERATES WANT ABDUL TO LOSE???" www.chicagotribune.com/2026/10/05/b...
chicagotribune.com
Barack Obama is to appear with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit
Former President Barack Obama will campaign alongside Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit later this month.
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Aaron Huertas @aaronhuertas.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This really puts stuff like publicly funded third spaces in perspective for me. It's so relatively cheap to build out community centers, gyms, makerspaces, studios etc.
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
They may hold views that we think are racist, but you can’t write them all off as ignorant white racists either, it’s a relatively diverse group. Many of them are stupid or ignorant, but millions of them also probably understand politics about as well as you do. They want different things than you.
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max power 🌌 @sneptech.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
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Just Jack @just-jack-1.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Schmitt: Did you attend a concert wearing an anti-Trump shirt? Smith: I wore a “No Kings” shirt. It used to be a bipartisan American sentiment.
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Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Damn, hit ‘em with the lookback
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Not the most important reason, but a good reason justices and lower court judges should serve fixed finite terms is to shut down this absurd race to the bottom. It's only the last vestige of shame that's stopped us breaking through 30 to have 20-somethings on the bench and that'll go soon enough.
politico.com
Trump is putting a generation of young judges on the bench — for life
Trump has nominated at least 33 people in their 30s to lifetime federal judgeships.
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Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
De Niro: When that coward, that fucking piece of shit, Donald Trump, tries to take our voice and power away, what do we tell him? Keep your fucking hands off our vote.
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Marty Lederman @martylederman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Samuel Alito: We won't overturn Obergefell because it's engendered reliance interests. Jan Crawford: Well, many people had organized their lives around Roe v. Wade. Alito: No, they didn't. Women merely had an "abstract" interest in "ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in."
cbsnews.com
The Alito Court: A rare interview with the influential Supreme Court justice
Justice Samuel Alito discussed his opinion in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the leaked draft and its aftermath, same-sex marriage rights and why he's not retiring yet.
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emptywheel @emptywheel.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Really cool tool from @popular.info to crowdsource who is paying for what campaign ads. paidforby.info
paidforby.info
Who paid for this?
Find out who really paid for political mailers and TV ads.
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WIRED @wired.com · 04/10/2026
With the threat of political violence at unprecedented levels, state and federal GOP candidates are openly sharing racist, pro-militia, anti-vaccine, sexist, antisemitic, and secessionist views.
buff.ly
These Extremists Are Running for Election in November
With the threat of political violence at unprecedented levels, state and federal GOP candidates are openly sharing racist, pro-militia, anti-vaccine, sexist, antisemitic, and secessionist views.
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David Corn @davidcorn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is sad news. Simon was a big help with this story that showed Howard Lutnick apparently lied about his business entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein—a story that deserves more attention. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
motherjones.com
New details from Epstein files reveal Lutnick had years-long business tie with sex offender
The commerce secretary apparently still hasn't come clean on his connection with Epstein.
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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 04/10/2026
It's really infuriating to be trying to do research and constantly ambushed by "are you human" things or simply denials of access because a site thinks I'm AI scraping. I just want to read and cite this paper! I am a real person!!
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Al Jazeera English @aljazeera.com · 04/10/2026
Houthis claim strike on Saudi energy facility as Yemen fighting intensifies aje.news/exxto8
Houthis claim strike on Saudi energy facility as Yemen fighting intensifies
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CJ Fogler @cjzero.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
it's a thing now
Oregon State in white unis with orange pants, the kicker's are mid-thigh
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Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Ossoff: The money that they took from you when they slashed Medicaid and defunded hospitals and nursing homes—They’re taking that money to buy corrupt, taxpayer-funded political ads on national television to try to promote the failed and broken president…
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