Tootfinder

Another MAGA success story... 😏
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/teen-reading-skills-hit-30-year-low-6573420/

About a third of the 12th-graders tested last year didn't have basic reading skills — the worst outcome since…
About a third of the 12th-graders tested last year didn't have basic reading skills — the worst outcome since 1992.

OpenAI says GPT‑5 instant and GPT‑5 thinking cut political bias by 30% from earlier models, and show greater robustness to charged prompts (Ashley Gold/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/09/openai-gpt-5-least-biased-model

OpenAI says GPT-5 is its least biased model yet
New findings from OpenAI researchers found that "charged" prompts produced the most biased results.

Over the first months of the second Trump presidency, we have watched the guardrails of democracy come off rapidly in real time.
Mass firings of civil servants,
the dismissal of government watchdogs,
the weaponization of the military against our citizens,
the use of the national budget as a cudgel,
and the dehumanization of immigrants. 
💥Donald Trump and his allies are following what we believe is a similar path as autocrats abroad,
with an American…

We Can Stop the Rise of American Autocracy
Stacey Abrams and Kim Lane Scheppele argue that we must act now to stop autocracy from taking over America.

People Are Crashing Out Over Sora 2’s New Guardrails https://www.404media.co/sora-2-content-violation-guardrails-error/

#economics #recession #USpol

7th_graders: Vickers 7th Graders (1981)
A small multiplex network of friendships among 29 seventh grade students in Victoria, Australia. Students nominated classmates for three different activities (who do you get on with in the class, who are your best friends, and who would you prefer to work with). Edge direction for each of these three types of edges indicates if node i nominated node j, and the edge weight gives the frequency of this nomination. Students 1-12 are boys and 13-29 ar…

I’ve realized that life has no built-in meaning or higher purpose. Ideas like morality and truth are things humans create to make sense of the void. The universe doesn’t care, it just exists, silent and empty, and I’ve stopped pretending it hides some secret reason for being.
Some people seem upset that I’ve turned toward existential nihilism, as if I’ve surrendered to hopelessness, yet facing the emptiness has brought me greater clarity. When you accept that no meaning has been writte…

Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers are trapped in a digital cage,
barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes
by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus.
Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide -- the United States.
⚠️ Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state,…

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…