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alexgraydb.bsky.social

@alexgraydb.bsky.social
232 followers 133 following 144 posts

Business processes and making actual work happen. Complicated music. Caregiver burnout. Viva la 99%.

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Reposted by @alexgraydb.bsky.social
Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 7h
Everyone knows Fox News is a GOP propaganda outlet in service to Donald Trump. The last holdouts arguing otherwise at this late date are some combination of ignorant, naive, on the Fox payroll, lying to the public, or lying to themselves. www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox...
mediamatters.org
Fox News at 30: Even the pretense of impartiality is all but gone
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 8h
Trump suggests he wants to cut off almost all trade: "We're gonna very very self-sufficient very soon"
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lwilde11.bsky.social @lwilde11.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
www.cnbc.com/2026/10/06/a...
cnbc.com
Anduril lands $2.9 billion Navy submarine shipyard contract days after Luckey joins Pentagon weapons group
Defense tech leaders are gaining sway in Washington in President Donald Trump's military reindustrialization push
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 8h
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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MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 7h
While Trump was doing midterm rallies, the two men running his campaign were in a pro-Putin statelet getting paid for election advice. Trump's excuse? They're just "outside consultants." Your Wednesday Update is here:
meidasplus.com
Wednesday Update: Camp Mar-a-David – 10/7/26
Important updates. Paywall free.
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Rep. Mike Levin @levin.house.gov · 9h
Every single one of these claims better be shut down. Todd Blanche promised Congress the January 6 slush fund was dead. January 6 defendants are suing taxpayers for payouts anyway.
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Cheryl Rofer @cherylrofer.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The immensely wealthy men who run the AI companies are forcing the economy to serve their dreams and crowding out everyone else's.
paulkrugman.substack.com
AI Versus Everything Else
The hyperscaler boom is crowding out other investment
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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 9h
bsky.app/profile/ronf...
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Frank Conniff @frankconniff.bsky.social · 10h
Fox News was begun 30 years ago as a conservative alternative to conservative media.
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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 10h
The Trump Crime Family
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M Meerkat @kackbro.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
All Lies From Trump's Regime......
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Abdul El-Sayed @abdulelsayed.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
There is a suspected outbreak of the plague in Russia. Yes, you read that right. And we cannot trust RFK Jr. and the Trump administration to be prepared to deal with this. We need a Democratic public health doctor in the US Senate.
axios.com
Scoop: White House monitors suspected plague outbreak in Russia
Administration is "aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options," an official told Axios.
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Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
🚨BREAKING: GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell and convicted election denier Tina Peters are pushing a scheme to have Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seize voting machines, as part of a broader effort for the Trump administration to interfere with the midterm vote. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
democracydocket.com
Election deniers Cleta Mitchell and Tina Peters want Trump’s commerce secretary to seize voting machines
The problem? No federal official can seize control of election administration from the states and counties, who hold the power run elections under the U.S. Constitution.
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Alt National Park Service @altnps.bsky.social · 22h
A naked, gold-covered Trump statue has been unveiled inside the European Parliament in Strasbourg. It’s called “Orange Plague,” also known as “King of Injustice,” and shows him sitting on another man’s shoulders holding an enormous golf club. Covered in reportedly 23-karat gold, of course.
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arkansasag.bsky.social @arkansasag.bsky.social · 17h
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Rick Claypool @rickclaypool.bsky.social · 14h
Since Trump took office, @publiccitizen.bsky.social has tracked the admin's retreat from enforcement against corporate lawbreaking. Today, our new report documents the admin's cancellation of investigations, lawsuits, & penalties against more than *200* corporations. www.citizen.org/article/trum...
citizen.org
Trump’s Cascade of Canceled Corporate Enforcement Against Over 200 Corporations - Public Citizen
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Not that anyone needs a reminder but this man has the nuclear codes. Far too many people will just shrug this off or find some way to justify it. But Trump is unwell, incoherent, and a danger to us all.
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Senator Ron Wyden @wyden.senate.gov · 11h
The Trump administration will start selecting lawyers for unaccompanied minors. Meaning the judges work for Donald Trump, the prosecutors work for Trump, and now the attorneys representing children will work for Trump. This is a rigged system that will result in more untold horrors for these kids.
cnn.com
Inside the Texas courtroom where toddlers face immigration judges | CNN Politics
Migrant children as young as 2 are showing up at immigration courts nationwide, many without attorneys, to try make their case to stay in the US and avoid deportation.
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UNITED24 Media @united24media.com · 11h
🤯 A Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to illegally importing Russian plutonium and shipping the hazardous radioactive material to dozens of online buyers worldwide. united24media.com/world/us-man...
united24media.com
US Man Bought Plutonium From Russia and Sold It Online Across America
Jacob D. Miller admitted to illegally importing plutonium from Russia and selling it online to at least 67 customers across the US and abroad.
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Raider @iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 12h
Do you know what's more dangerous than an
undocumented immigrant in America who gets up at 4am to go to work?
A sitting president who casually mentions we should just let a foreign power obliterate two
American cities filled with millions of people all because he doesn't like how they tend to vote.
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Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) @hcrichardson.bsky.social · 21h
October 6, 2026
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
October 6, 2026
Judging from his social media posts, Trump is panicking.
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Khashoggi's Ghost @urocklive1.bsky.social · 15h
I can't think of a single non-malevolent reason they would do this.
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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 13h
With our money. Playing in our faces. 🤷🏼 ✈️
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 13h
This is not the kind of thing you worry about if you're leaving office and accept the other party might win an election in a couple of years.
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Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 14h
🚨BREAKING: ICE collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of an effort to find voter fraud. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
democracydocket.com
ICE amassed millions of voter records in sweeping fraud hunt, documents reveal
It's one of the clearest pictures yet of how deeply Trump's immigration enforcement apparatus has become involved in elections.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 22h
Joined @arimelber.bsky.social on MSNOW talk about the AI bubble, Treasuries and the growing cost of AI data center debt, and how Oracle and Paramount’s debt threatens Larry Ellison’s future.
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Doctora Malka Older @older.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
we fucking loved it, even when there was basically nothing on it, and let me tell you something else: we loved it because of human connection, human diversity, human creativity. WE DON'T NEED A SINGLE THING ANY OF THESE COMEMIERDAS HAVE MADE AND TRIED TO SELL US IN ORDER TO HAVE A GREAT INTERNET.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 06/10/2026
notable -- Fox News hasn't mentioned Trump's transphobic attack on Annie Andrews a single time. Not once. And they cover a lot of his Truth Social posts. Almost like they're trying to protect their audience from learning the true depth of his depravity.
notable -- Fox News hasn't mentioned Trump's transphobic attack on Annie Andrews a single time. Not once. And they cover a lot of his Truth Social posts.

Almost like they're trying to protect their audience from learning the true depth of his depravity.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 06/10/2026
Free newsletter: Outside of major hyperscaler backstops, I estimate that Anthropic and OpenAI would get a speculative B or CCC credit rating, which would be insufficient for the $50bn-$100bn a year they need, in an era of historically high interest rates. www.wheresyoured.at/credit-crunch/
wheresyoured.at
https://www.wheresyoured.at/credit-crunch/
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month. In return you get a weekly premium…
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⭐︎ Kay Hanley ⭐︎ @kayhanley.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
fixed it.
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Matt Negrin still host of Hardball on MSNBC @mattnegrin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
When Trump posted a video of the Obamas as apes the NYT claimed "it was unclear if Mr. Trump was aware" that he posted it
NYT: "It was unclear if Mr. Trump was aware that the clip had been included in the video before he shared it."
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Elizabeth Warren @warren.senate.gov · 06/10/2026
In June, Belgium’s diamond industry gifted Trump an 18-karat gold ring encrusted with 321 diamonds and 75 gemstones. A month later, European diamonds got an exemption from Trump’s tariffs. We don’t know where the ring is today. Where did it go? Did Trump keep it for himself?
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Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · 06/10/2026
Was just going through some old stuff and happened across this one. Aged pretty well, I think!
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Rep. Jason Crow @crow.house.gov · 06/10/2026
Pete Hegseth must be held accountable. He endangered the lives of our servicemembers by recklessly sharing classified info, oversaw corruption at the Pentagon, and led us into more forever wars. He's not fit to lead.
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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 06/10/2026
"Just come here the legal way" was always light years easier said than done; now they aren't even in the same galaxy.
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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I'm just gonna bookmark this for future reference when Dem pundits complain about how the party has trouble communicating its message to voters. The reason you keep running into trouble with your branding isn't campus radicals. The reason is that your opponents purchased all the media outlets.
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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 06/10/2026
I LOVE how @propublica.org dealt with official comment here, editorially and stylistically.
The Trump administration says none of this is happening. 

"DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake." "There are no 'indiscriminate' stops." Allegations of "racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE." "The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force." "ICE does not zip tie or restrain children." 

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 02/10/2026
Similarly, the impact of AI on employment remains a threat rather than a reality -- as does the wide-scale creation of AI-related jobs, which to date tend to be precarious, low-paid data curation gigs. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-...
The arrival of ChatGPT —-and the subsequent inflating of the AI bubble — shattered the comforting assumption that knowledge workers were safe from the kinds of job-destroying automation that had previously annihilated employment in the manufacturing industries.

I want to be clear with what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that AI would or did result in the mass displacement of white-collar workers. Rather, it ended the widespread assumption that these jobs were safe.

And I’d argue that the shattering of that belief was something that’s been cyclically and deliberately fostered by the likes of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, other high-profile figures in the AI industry, and a complicit media that fails to differentiate between legitimate prognostication and marketing.

This type of fear-mongering sophistry was exemplified in May of last year, when Axios blindly repeated claims by Dario Amodei that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white collar jobs (and, if that wasn’t bad enough, send employment surging to 20%, or just 5% short of the Great Depression peak) within the next “one to five years.”

Credit, as always, is due to CNN Business reporter Allison Morrow, who correctly pointed out that the “white-collar bloodbath” was all part of the AI hype machine.

“The point is, Amodei is a salesman, and it’s in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it’s scary,” she wrote.Layoffs.fyi list over 130,000 tech employees that lost their jobs in 2026 so far, compared to 122,000 in 2025. While that sounds like a lot (and it is), it’s still far less than the number of tech firings in 2023 (256,000) and in 2024 (roughly 153,000).

And a lot of those layoffs have been in companies most keenly exposed to the AI bubble. Microsoft cut 4,800 roles in July of this year — or around 2.1% of its global workforce. This followed several waves of firings across 2025, with 15,000 jobs cut.

Oracle famously eliminated 21,000 positions earlier this year, and while it cited the cause of these redundancies as being down to “the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across [its] operations,” few, if anyone believes that excuse.

Shortly before Oracle announced its firings, TD Cowen suggested that by eliminating between 20,000 and 30,000 positions, Oracle could increase free cashflow by between $8 billion and $10 billion. Given Oracle’s hefty spending commitments related to the infrastructure it’s building for OpenAI, it desperately needs that extra money.

We’ve seen the emergence of a new term, “AI washing,” to describe job layoffs that are attributed to the emergence and adoption of AI technologies, when the real cause is far more likely something else — like current US trade policy, or the fact that interest rates are still markedly higher than they were during the boom days of Silicon Valley, or the fact that these companies over-hired during the pandemic and are now forced to rationalize their headcount.

If we look at the broader macroeconomic data, there’s very little evidence to suggest that AI is causing widespread layoffs.What about the jobs that were created because of the AI bubble? Data from LinkedIn (I know) claims that more than 1.3 million new AI-related positions have emerged (like AI engineers, data annotators, and so on).

This, obviously, requires some caveats. Firstly, LinkedIn’s data  comes from its global members, and many of those AI-related jobs are typically performed by those working in the global south, often under exploitative or precarious contracts, and for little pay.

In 2024, The Guardian reported on the working conditions of Meta subcontractors in Kenya and Uganda who, for as little as $1-an-hour, were tasked with content moderation and curating AI training data.

Said workers were routinely exposed to some of the most disturbing content on the internet, were forced to meet grueling productivity benchmarks that would see them punished for trivial mistakes, and saw their mental health suffer as a result.

And they were treated as disposable.

Job security at this particular company is minimal – the majority of workers we interviewed were on rolling one- or three-month contracts, which could disappear as soon as the client’s work was complete. They worked in rows of up to a hundred on production floors in a darkened building, part of a giant business park on the outskirts of Nairobi. Their employer was a client of Meta’s, a prominent business process outsourcing (BPO) company with headquarters in San Francisco and delivery centres in east Africa where insecure and low-income work could be distributed to local employees of the firm. Many of the workers, like Mercy herself, had once lived in the nearby Kibera slum – the largest urban slum in Africa – and were hired under the premise that the company was helping disadvantaged workers into formal employment. The reality is that many of these workers are too terrified to question management for fear of losing their jobs. Workers reported that those who complain are told to shut up and reminded that they could easily
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 02/10/2026
Another problem with calculating AI's impact on economic productivity is that, until very recently, AI services were almost uniformly subsidized via all-you-can-eat subscriptions which aren't reflective of any sustainable long-term use. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-...
So, this question is tricky, because there’s two definitions of productivity that we have to care about. The first one is the one that economists actually care about, which is the sum total of the outputs divided by the inputs required to achieve them.

Or, as Congress.Gov puts it:

“Productivity is broadly defined as the ratio of output to inputs. With respect to the economy, productivity measures how efficiently goods and services can be produced by comparing the amount of economic output with the amount of inputs (labor, capital, etc.) used to produce those goods.”
So, let’s suppose that a company spends $1 to produce 50 widgets. They add a new piece of technology that increases the production costs by another $1, but the company is now able to produce 125 widgets. By the definition mentioned above, that piece of technology has improved productivity.

Conversely, if the piece of technology only allows the company to produce 75 widgets, then productivity hasn’t improved, but rather worsened, because the cost-per-unit has increased, even though more widgets are leaving the factory.Keen readers of this newsletter have, by now, noticed a slight problem. Until the start of this year, AI model labs (and the startups and other companies that build services upon them) have tended to use all-you-can-eat subscriptions, where the actual cost of compute is something that’s obscured from the end-users.

This subsidization presents a problem, as the cost of an input (in this case, AI tokens) has, until very recently, been artificially minimized by subsidies in a way that’s simply not sustainable in the long-term. Eventually, model labs and startups will have to break-even.

Eventually, the money runs out.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 02/10/2026
Attempts to measure the economic effects of AI using "cost of intelligence" are inherently flawed, because benchmarks do not equal actual units of work or replicable completions of tasks outside of their rubrics. Everyone's measuring the wrong things. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-...
One argument I constantly hear about AI’s “economic effects” is that the “cost of intelligence is coming down,” specifically referring to how the price per million tokens of models that score better on benchmarks is coming down, which doesn’t really mean anything if you can’t apply that to distinct tasks.

The Fed’s economists (emphases mine) acknowledge the problem:

A prerequisite for any transformative technology to generate broad-based economic impacts is that it can facilitate or perform economically meaningful work in a cost-effective manner. Measuring what AI can actually do has proven quite difficult. Early benchmarks based on standardized tests (the SAT, Bar Exam, MMLU, etc.) were quickly saturated, with subsequent expert level reasoning benchmarks (e.g. GPQA and ARC-AGI) following a similar pattern. Some benchmarks might not map cleanly onto real-world work, since strong benchmark performance does not necessarily translate into the ability to complete actual on-the-job tasks. Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) measures agentic task-completion horizons (Figure 1), which indicates the time it takes a human expert to perform a task that a respective AI model could perform at a specified success rate. Currently, this benchmark focuses on software engineering and machine learning tasks, as these are the domains frontier labs are automating first, where impacts should appear earliest. As of mid 2026, this horizon has been doubling roughly every several months (Kwa et al., 2025). At this pace, a full workweek of agentic tasks could be achieved within years, although whether this pace is sustained and whether it expands to other work remains to be seen.This “horizon” test, in my opinion, is completely fucking useless, because it measures a task that an LLM can complete 50% of the time, with the amount of hours the task takes being a measurement of how long a human might take to complete it.

METR claims to contract humans to complete tasks as a way of measuring how long they might take based on (at least in the original paper) 563 samples of human beings trying to complete them, with the majority of the tasks being cybersecurity or software engineering focused. 

Putting aside how small that sample size is, the idea of measuring anything based on whether it happens half of the time is a questionable economic measurement that you’d only take seriously if you knew there was no standardized or replicable way of doing better.

This is the problem with the inherently-probabilistic nature of LLMs — no matter how complex they get, you can’t guarantee that they’ll get something right (or do something right) every single time, nor can you guarantee they’ll even understand a particular task.
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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Republicans now having to spend many millions in multiple states where they should not have to spend anything because Trump endorsed the worst possible general election candidate in those primaries so now they are being bailed out by billionaires buying elections with dark money.
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Jules⚖️📨 @northjules.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/w... Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president “dangerous and deranged” after his remarks at a political rally, where Trump said the Iran war was necessary to “keep the world safe.” #TheCityBrief
nytimes.com
Fury in California After Trump Suggests Iran Could ‘Take Out’ L.A. or San Diego (Gift Article)
Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president “dangerous and deranged” after his remarks at a political rally, where Mr. Trump said the Iran war was necessary to “keep the world safe.”
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
GOLDMAN: “.. S&P excluding AI stocks has fallen roughly 7% from its late-August peak, giving back its entire summer rally." @yahoofinance.com
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
“.. San Diego is not collateral damage,” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria posted. “We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.” @latimes.com www.latimes.com/california/s...
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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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alexgraydb.bsky.social @alexgraydb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
/s?
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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
🗣️Ex FTC Chair Lina Khan on A.I. Regulation: “The idea that just because we have new technological capabilities there’s some blanket exemption from the laws on the books is totally laughable.”
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Shooti @bambooshooti.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Brian Poindexter is a union ironworker whose platform emphasizes working-class economic justice. His focus is lowering the cost of living, expanding workers' rights, making healthcare independent of employment and banning corporate PACs. Elect Brian Poindexter Ohio's 7th Congressional District
Graphic supporting Brian Poindexter for Ohio's 7th Congressional District.
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Mark Hamill @markhamillofficial.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Who you gonna believe, the lying liar or your own eyes? 👀
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Xela Hart @xelahart.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
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