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josh buermann

@buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
117 followers 30 following 3.6K posts

"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish." […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.social/@buermann, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Reposted by josh buermann
Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net · 2h
AI-ass answer
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
@swordsjew.bsky.social "that's not how that song goes"
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
@ketanjoshi.co Does a bill for $15 million in inference costs include some depreciated artifact of the upfront training costs or is it mostly fossil fuels spinning turbines as the harness spins up chatbots yelling at each other until the classifiers classify the task as finished?
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Reposted by josh buermann
David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
There's a funny concept in business: you should earn more than you pay out in expenses. AI firms have not hit upon a business model that would do that. It explains Character.AI's bankruptcy, OpenAI's undercount of revenues, & CoreWeave's woes, & investors are getting tired of waiting for success.
prospect.org
The Week AI Blinked? - The American Prospect
For investors, the shine has come off artificial intelligence. The reason why is simple: Even if it’s a fabulous technology, it’s an unprofitable business.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
"Perhaps the biggest indicator of a downturn in the industry is the sudden failure of the IPO for Firmus, a $30 billion Australian neocloud company led by someone who was sent to prison for insider trading (!) but was nonetheless backed by some of the biggest companies in AI. It would have been […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
Incredible deals. Best deals ever. The economy and the country will be far better off for each of these media monopolies that goes bankrupt and is sold for scrap. variety.com/2026/film/news/skydance…
variety.com
Skydance’s Market Value Is Currently Less Than Half What Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Combined Were Worth
Skydance has a market cap of less than $40 billion -- less than half the value of Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount prior to the merger.
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Reposted by josh buermann
The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
ADAM JOHNSON: “The raid on @repilhan’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal…” theintercept.com/2026/10/15/i...
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
RSV leaked from a Florida chimpanzee breeding operation and the John Hopkins pediatric hospital, simultaneously, in 1956. Florida is famously just one big gain of function experiment. academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstra… […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
Lyme disease famously leaked from a biosafety lab in the Eastern Alps circa the year 3300BC. The ticks were able to escape the minimal levels of containment afforded by early bronze age technology. www.livescience.com/18704-oldest-ca…
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
America's melting secretary of health and human services insists that lyme disease and RSV were lab leaks from gain of function research. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoV5b4_URl8
RFK JR: Lyme disease that almost certainly came from these experimentsRFK JR: Uh, RSV, that came from, uh, from a laboratoryRFK JR: And all of those have been linked credibly to gain of function research.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
"The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty." --Percy Shelley, 1821 […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
I have been using Skim as my primary PDF reader on my Mac for a year now and it is terrifically fast and lightweight and free and hasn't been turned to shit yet on account of its wonderfully rare updates. skim-app.sourceforge.io
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
Looking forward to the future where Silicon Valley panopticon sloplord fundamentalists wage forever drone wars against bands of disgruntled fanatics who refuse to worship gods that pop out of toaster ovens. www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20…
france24.com
Cheap weapons, growing fears: Inside the Taliban’s drone campaign against Pakistan
Pakistan says it intercepted 23 suicide drones launched from Afghanistan into Pakistani airspace in September alone. Since the conflict began in February 2026, the Taliban have increasingly used drones…
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
"Bars that cater to the LGBTQ+ community say they're being locked out of their Facebook and Instagram accounts with little to no transparency as to why... The Stud, San Francisco's oldest gay bar, was only able to have its Meta pages restored because of the bar's popularity among gay tech […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Reposted by josh buermann
Jared Holt @jaredlholt.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
we gotta save that Pomeranian
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
The venn diagram of the longevity crowd with the crypto, EA, longtermist, slopbot, and assorted other silicon valley cults approximates a circle with strange connections to MAHA and none of them care about anybody's longevity but their own, so long as they cannot yet be uploaded to the cloud […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
It is funny that this story about everybody ignoring recent Guinness World Record Oldest American Adele Dunlap's insistence that her paperwork was off by ten years is like the pension fraud and other systemic errors in national registries that inform longevity branded fad diets […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
It is telling how the tremendous medtech advances in proteomics and mRNA medicine -- two mutually reinforcing technologies that promise miraculous and some day out past the patent horizons cheap improvements in treating human disease -- do not excite the longevity crowd […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
@slowbiex Right? If you thought they didn't care if computers worked since sometime around 2010, look at em show you how much more trouble computers can be now that they can fry the earth mining spaghetti code out of thin air and aquifers.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
@slowbiex I just go straight to archive.is and pirate the data like Sam Altman.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
Electrical utility rates rose by 20.4% in the last year on demand driven by America's desperate mass production of spam scams and slop. angrybearblog.com/2026/10/september…
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
I wonder if the nation's software engineers would have had time to complete a secure Rust based operating system already if they weren't spending all their time reviewing slop and approving new security holes.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
Trump and Ws' second terms have a lot in common in the innumerable stories of bombastic corruption to follow -- only now with almost no journalists left to follow them! -- for which nobody will go to jail or suffer so much as a career setback so there is little point in following them without […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Reposted by josh buermann
David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
Good news, there's one more industry benefiting from Trump administration actions: commodity traders, which have increased lobbying ten-fold in the last two years and are aat the center of the administration’s multifaceted effort to extract natural resources from abroad. prospect.org/2026/10/14/c...
prospect.org
Commodity Traders Rake In Cash During Trump Administration - The American Prospect
A new report reveals that the industry’s significant increases in lobbying expenses are paying off.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
The absurdity ought grow more obvious to the public once the slop globule implodes and instead of letting these people direct every last cent of spare capital we won't have any spare capital left to invest in anything while these crooks and mass murderers hide on their bugout islands.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
The real difficulty as you scroll up this graph of wealth inequality is trying to come up with some pretext for what Elon Musk ever did to deserve a trillion dollars when the space program he privatized had a peak budget -- when it sent men to the Moon -- for a tiny fraction of his hype-heaped […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
Chicago taxpayers have spent a half billion dollars defending a cop who framed over 50 people when he was not torturing them until they offered false confessions... which, that may be what they owe the victims but I'll never understand why the city isn't leading the prosecution against their […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
Everyone in this collection responding to Robert Wallace's Ten Metrical Rules keeps referring to Saintsbury's Historical Manual of English Prosody in the midst of debate over what to call leading and trailing upbeats but nobody has yet repeated Saintsbury's name for them: "redundancies", by […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
I am revisiting Kinzie's essay on "The Rhapsodic Fallacy" after a quarter century of composing little poetry but for my programmatic odes to ugly business logic. She spends two dozen pages pithily gutting post-war confessional poetry looking for something worth preserving in its entrails to […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
The conservation of the postulated base meter's feet and accentual-syllabic verse's metrical promotions among strings of weak syllables seem like they're about adequate to prevent the blistering of mid-line amphibrachic feet?
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
Charles O. Hartman p110: "the amphibrach turns out to be pedagogically pernicious: given the amphibrach as a possible foot, students in desperation tend to use it in the middle of lines... if we add the amphibrach then we also must add the second paeon (xx/x) and the palimbacchius (//x)"... just […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
These walking sphincters go around shitting on everybody's humanity while insisting their plagiarism factories are conscious beings of pure light that deserve more labor rights than their own employees. Their unpopularity with the mass public is entirely inexplicable […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Reposted by josh buermann
The Rude Pundit @rudepundit.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
At his Alaska rally, Trump pardoned two men who had pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act by removing emissions control systems from vehicles. Trump lied and said, "They want to put them in jail for 10 years because they fixed an engine." They got probation. www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-p...
cbsnews.com
Trump pardons 2 auto workers on stage during rally in Alaska
President Trump granted onstage pardons to two Alaska auto shop owners who pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act during a rally Tuesday — an unusually public use of the president's clemency po...
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
People who think you are an NPC are still trying to convince all the other NPCs that their chatbots are conscious, for reasons that quite escape me.
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Reposted by josh buermann
Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ch… rip to the company whose chatbot was implicated in the first american suicide listed on the wikipedia article “deaths linked to chatbots,” which is a wikipedia article […]
wandering.shop
Original post on wandering.shop
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Reposted by josh buermann
Nick Turse @nickturse.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
"President Trump is the most family-friendly president we've ever had..." Just not to the Rostami family -- 8 killed, five of them children, including a newborn. theintercept.com/2026/08/18/i...
theintercept.com
The Short Life of a Newborn During the Iran War
“What crime had my 20-day-old grandchild committed?”
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
@sundogplanets Love having my work fed into the plagiarism machine by friends too impatient to think for themselves.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
Choking whole subdivisions in toxic gases to produce our sloppiest romance scams. www.gadgetreview.com/virginia-data-…
gadgetreview.com
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
The nearly half a trillion dollars a year in online theft fueled by slopbots is the only growth market for their technology. archive.is/24CHy
BLOOMBERG

AI's Supercharging a Scam Economy Bigger Than The Cocaine TradeThe Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimates victims lost $442 billion across 42 countries last year, above some valuations for the global cocaine trade. Alongside the high cost to those who are scammed there’s the growing challenge for companies to manage their exposure.

“It’s just gotten so cheap and so easy,” said Sean Letz, the Asia cyber lead at Marsh Risk, a US-based insurance broker and risk-management adviser. “What a lot of companies start to recognize is that you only get to a certain point, and trying to play whack-a-mole with the scams — with the different tactics — is impossible.”

Helping drive the proliferation are underground marketplaces operating on widely used social media platforms that let scammers buy the pieces online with ease. Cybersecurity researchers found that subscription-based exploitation tools are available for as little as $500 a month, while bulk-messaging services can send material to 10,000 email addresses for $1.With law enforcement targeting fortified compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, some Chinese-linked syndicates are dispersing into new territories across Africa and Sri Lanka, with scam operations also being found as far afield as Dubai, Sri Lanka, Albania and Ukraine. Rather than taking over whole towns and cities, they are resurfacing in apartments, hotels and even vehicles, forming a more localized, pop-up industry aided by underground digital markets and local criminal networks.
The number of nationalities identified among people winding up in scam centers stands at 89, according to previously unpublished figures provided by Interpol, a more than fivefold increase since early 2023. The list now stretches well beyond Asia to Canada, Italy, Spain, Poland, Mozambique, Algeria, Argentina, Ecuador, Lebanon and dozens more.

The machinery has advanced significantly since the “Nigerian prince” mass-email scams of the 2000s. Stolen data is used to locate targets on platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp. The scam then moves through AI-generated scripts, phishing pages and laundering networks. Groups that once focused on Chinese victims, now run simultaneous schemes across multiple nationalities simultaneously – fake invoices, stolen bank credentials, romance-investment traps, bogus law-enforcement calls and even pitches tailored to religious beliefs.Phishing operations can be faster still. Components for fake websites mimicking brands, banks and payment gateways are increasingly being sold together as kits, while an analysis prepared for Bloomberg by ZeroFox, a US-based cybersecurity outfit, reveals how scammers with little technical ability are abusing legitimate developer platforms and AI app builders to launch pages with just a few prompts.

Phishing pages detected on the free tiers of nine sampled developer platforms and AI app builders rose more than fourfold to 10,600 over two years. Some tools were used to mimic Brazilian retailers, Ecuadorian banks, French lenders and US telecom companies, while Facebook, Netflix and Moonshot, a crypto-trading app, were among the most impersonated brands in the broader sample.

“What's new is that AI code generators now let someone with no coding skills build a convincing fake bank login in a few minutes, deploy it under a free subdomain, and start collecting credentials before anyone notices,” the analysis reads. “The volume is still small in absolute terms compared to the traditional players, but the growth curve is steep and the barrier to entry has collapsed.”
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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Newsom rejecting the billionaire wealth tax is one thing. Supporting the billionaires' poison pill alternative which would ban taxes on assets permanently, end any chance to fix stepped-up basis, & could be used by an enterprising lawyer to invalidate vehicle fee or other tax changes is another.
wsj.com
Newsom Backs Measure That Could Invalidate Billionaire Tax
The California governor opposes the proposed levy on ultrawealthy that goes before voters on Nov. 3.
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026
[on our bozonic markdown apocalypse, blog-length long, taking muse seriously as an AI agent rather than a surveillance nightmare] "We condemned our children and grandchildren to a climate hell in one great blaze of brute force grift that managed to make a few web apps."
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026
[on our bozonic markdown apocalypse, blog-length long, taking muse seriously as an AI agent rather than a surveillance nightmare] "Markdown disease which is the most baffling feature of the LLM landscape. If these things are so fucking advanced they are escaping our comprehension, why don't […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026
Thank heavens the detoxifiers so wholly committed to the naturalistic fallacy that they object to vaccines are in charge so we finally stop artificially toxifying the food chain. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oc…
theguardian.com
FDA may allow some toxic chemicals to be added to food without safety review. Experts are alarmed
Regulator looks to expand loophole to allow dangerous compounds in food as long as they’re not carcinogenicThe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing to expand a controversial loophole to allow some of the world’s most toxic chemicals...
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026
Your Beard is Too Feminine for Hegseth's Army.
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Nick Turse @nickturse.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
"No beardos. No weirdos."
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
It is not at all astonishing that Pete Hegseth's faction of the MAGA cult presently purging the military is so deep in it that they want to establish this precedent for the crime of attempted premeditated murder, given what we know about Kurt Schlitchter's premeditations […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
such charmed lives, such flatulences promoting a mortal fart in the face for each future born of the human race attending long-termist conferences in castles embezzled by their accomplices
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
"Sea surface temperatures in the central tropical Pacific Ocean just exceeded 30°C for the first time on record as El Niño continues to gain strength." www.msn.com/en-au/weather/meteorolo…
msn.com
MSN
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
"Jared Kushner... promised in January this year that restoration of core services and infrastructure—including water and sewage systems, electricity networks, hospitals, and bakeries—would begin within 100 days. Nine months later, Gaza has seen no reconstruction, no restoration of basic services […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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josh buermann @buermann.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
"Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments." […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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