US citizens: call on Congress to block the bully's threat-backed demand for the complete voting list of each state.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to make billionaires and trillionaires pay their fair share.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence. He is loyal to the corrupter rather than to the country he ought to serve, and that makes him unfit.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on the US Postal Service to continue delivering to anyone.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
- The Bride! (2026):
Frankenstein is having a moment. This one is absolutely amazing! Where Poor Things was Arthouse Frankenstein, this is more of a Grindhouse Frankenstein. It wears all of the references. There's a little bit of Frankenhooker, a little bit of Young Frankenstein, a little Salome, a little Bonnie and Clyde a hell of a lot of Natural Born Killers, wrapped up in a bow of feminist cannibalism. I spent a lot of this movie with my mouth open, thinking "oh wow, you went there".Best movie of the year so far.
- Mother Mary (2026):
Starts off as a reunion between a fancy pop star and her estranged dressmaker, then takes some very surreal and witchy turns. The cinematography is great, the songs are great. They rubbed a bunch of Charli XCX and Iris Van Herpen over it.Second best movie of the year.
- The Peripheral (2022):
On a rewatch, still absolutely brilliant. A friend was watching it for the first time (impetus for my rewatch) and once Lowbeer showed up I said, "Most terrifying person in the show. In a rich field of badasses." It is an absolute tragedy that the planned second season was scuttled by COVID.Because I couldn't get enough I then re-read both novels, The Peripheral and Agency, and though the show is A+, they remain even better.
- Pretty Lethal (2026):
Some ballerinas break down on the road, and oh no, the nearest cabin in the woods happens to be a ballet themed cabaret, and oh no, their only dry clothes are their tutus, and oh no, the impresario is a mobster washed up ballerina -- wait is that Uma Thurman, what is she doing slumming in this trash -- and oh no, now it's a gang war and ballerinas are uniquely skilled at murder.Anyway if you have ever thought, "Oh, I could never be a writer", remember that someone got paid to write this. And dozens of people said, "Yeah, sure, good enough."
- The Ugly Stepsister (2026):
A pretty great, gory take on Cinderella. They set you up to wonder which of these character is going to end up being sympathetic, but nope, they're all horrid grifters, and there is a heavy emphasis on the details of 17th Century cosmetic surgery techniques, including tapeworm dieting. And the toe thing, obviously. - Sew Torn (2024):
A weirdo seamstress sees the opportunity for a perfect crime and it all goes Coen-shaped; and then they do the Run Lola Run thing and play it out three more different ways. Also the weirdo seamstress is like the MacGuyver of sewing; she never saw a problem that couldn't (shouldn't) be solved with 3 bobbins and 100' of thread. It's pretty great. - Ready or Not 2 (2026):
Absolutely fantastic. Even better than the first one. Samara Weaving kills a bunch of billionaire satanists. Shit man that's all you had to say. Buffy is in it, and also Cronenberg. ("You made your sale, son!") - Exit 8 (2025):
Guy is trapped in an endless subway station loop, with "SCP"-style vibes. It's very creepy and pretty scary without anything graphical happening, or honestly much of anything at all. Well made, unsatisfying ending. - Stop Making Sense (1984):
I had not watched this in years and god damn does it hold up. This is the second best* concert film ever made. As I was putting together my nuclear war mixtape I briefly considered including Life During Wartime and that led me to realize that I had never gotten around to ingesting the movie into the DNA Pizza music video rotation. So I did that. Anyway there was a recent-ish 4K remaster that is killer, and has director's commentary and lots of cool extras.* Number one of course is Home of The Brave and number three of course is Urgh! A Music War. I will not be taking any questions.
- The Yeti (2026):
They put together a D&D party of adventurers for a rescue mission to the Alaska Territory, 1946. Extreme Marion Ravenwood feel. Pulpy goodness, but the second half drags a bit.(Marion Ravenwood movie when?)
- How To Get To Heaven From Belfast (2026):
Three idiot 40 year old women try to solve a murder that has something to do with some murderous and/or witchy antics they got up to in high school. It's pretty funny and I liked the characters, but it does the Netflix Episode seven flashback exposition thing (this time in episode 6) and when it did, the reveal of the mystery was just so stupid that I didn't care any more. Squandered. SQUANDERED.Also, in this entire show full of quite foul-mouthed Irish people, never once was the word "cunt" deployed, and honestly, that's just implausible. I feel the feathery touch of a US Netflix exec on the script.
- They Will Kill You (2026):
Final Girl does a John Wick on a Dakota Building full of immortal, regenerating Satanists. Pretty much one arterial spray per minute. Does what it says on the can. - Daredevil, Born Again S02:
It's always good when you get more Kingpin. And they stuck the landing with the finale. Thumbs up. - Pretty Ugly, The Story Of The Lunachicks (2026):
Honestly I wasn't that familiar with The Lunachicks but that won't stop me from watching a documentary about an early 90s punk band. This was pretty good. - Spider Noir (2026):
I find Nicholas Cage's movies pretty uneven -- ok, mostly bad -- but rarely boring. This is a snore. How did they make it so boring? In the last 2 eps they finally kinda-sorta let Cage off the chain but it was too little too late. - Hokum (2026):
Decent haunted hotel story with Adam Scott from Severance. - Vampires of the Velvet Lounge (2026):
Pervert vampires who run an absinthe bar get their victims on Tinder. I started watching this thinking, "This is going to be too cheesy to make it more than a few minutes", but it's actually pretty fun. It has no budget, but the look of the green-fairy vamps is pretty cool. (And these are some ...relatively... big names for what's basically a Troma movie, how did this happen?) - The Voices of Our Mother (2026):
Bad moms, generational trauma, demonic possession. Not bad. - The Testaments (2026):
Handmaid's Babies. Not bad but could have moved the plot along much faster. - Margo's Got Money Troubles (2026):
Elle Fanning gets knocked up and does Onlyfans. Her trashy mom is Michelle Pfeiffer. Raunchy and hilarious, but content warning for having too much baby. - My Animal (2023):
Love story about small-town Canadian lesbians in the 80s, hockey, alcoholic mom. Oh also one of them's a werewolf. It's great. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the best werewolf genre is "small town werewolf". Killer contemporary-synthwave soundtrack. Also, to my great surprise, the font used in the titles and credits is the DNA Lounge font (Helvetica Neue LT Com 93 Black Extended, I'd know it anywhere.) - Widow's Bay (2026):
The guy from The Americans is the sad-sack mayor of a haunted town on an isolated island, trying to get tourist trade with a minimum of murders. It's very... Netflixxy. Not bad, but it takes forever to get going and drags anything of consequence out until the very last minute. - Slanted (2025):
A Chinese-American girl gets magical-surgery to turn white. It starts off a bit Mean Girls / Freaky Friday and then goes to some body horror places, and has a few twists that I did not see coming. Really fun.
Alabama moved three activists, who lead protests against prison conditions, into solitary confinement.
*Laura Wittmann resigned from Uline in condemnation of the company owners' active support for fascism in the US.*
The residents of Monterey Park, California, have voted for a permanent ban on datacenters.
Sweden urges parents to put limits on when and where they use snoop phones, especially when around children, because it seems that seeing adults use them is a bad influence.
*Three Lebanese hospitals hit by Israeli forces in under a week.*
It reminds me of Gaza.
The wrecker fired the independent board that oversees the National Science Foundation and replaced them with obedient saboteurs. Their first act of sabotage is to terminate the Ocean Observatories Initiative and reserve its monitoring equipment.
Nothing can help the businesses that want to cause mayhem in the ocean like eliminating the equipment that can monitor their activities and the changes they cause.
"Serhiy was great at flirting," his commander told me. "Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice." Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone. [...]
Any phone purchased inside the occupied territories is useless for resistance work. Devices sold there come preloaded with monitoring software developed by Russian intelligence. That app is called Druge -- Друг -- which means "friend" in Russian.
Druge monitors communications, photographs, and location data, relaying all of it back to Russian intelligence. [...] At checkpoints, Russian soldiers examine every phone. Not having Druge installed is a red flag to them; having an encrypted app, such as Signal, guarantees a phone's owner a trip to the basement. [...]
Few resistance agents have professional training. Most learn on the job. Partisans pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals to avoid using vulnerable digital channels. Within Kherson's partisan brigade, one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War. No online version exists, but a well-worn original circulates among the resistance.
"Your CIA was good at this," Dmytro said. "You bastards knew how to use sex."
Several Ukrainian print shops have developed methods for hiding instruction manuals inside best-selling books. A guard at a Russian checkpoint, thumbing through an artificially tattered paperback, will likely have no idea that some of the pages explain how to kill him.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
All told, at least 600 Americans were fired, suspended, or investigated by their employers (many in academia or public service) in the days following the death of Charlie Kirk, with companies frequently kowtowing to Libs of TikTok-style online pressure campaigns to avoid negative attention, even when their offending employee had posted something truly innocuous. In many cases, people lost their jobs for simply posting quotes from the likes of Donald Trump or Kirk himself. But checking back in now, some 10 months later, many of those people not only succeeded in getting their jobs back -- they've also received hefty settlements following the world's most obvious wrongful termination lawsuits. Millions of dollars have cumulatively been awarded to people fired or even jailed over Charlie Kirk-related comments. [...]
The goal of a mass cancelation campaign is not just to cause the petty loss of a few hundred jobs by way of punishing people for their speech; it's to intimidate everyone else around them into not daring to speak in the future, in order to create the appearance of a culture with no dissent against right-wing domination. [...] MAGA America might consider the court settlements money well spent, if it stops people from the opposite side of the political spectrum from feeling safe in expressing themselves in the future.
Anthropic wrote a blog post explaining how they turned Claude into a jerk. Rather than dunking on them more (Claude is still the best coding model around) I’m going to talk seriously about what went wrong and how it could be done better.
The most obvious problem is that they didn’t chat with the results of this training and realize that it was a disaster before incorporating the weight updates into the main model. Most likely they don’t have what amounts to pull requests of weights, which they should and is a straightforwardly fixable problem. But it’s also possible that they tried it and thought the results were actually good. Hold that thought.
What happened here is that is that they tried to be make it ‘less sycophantic’ and did so without thinking through whether that’s a good idea or even what it means. The specific metric which really seems to be noxious is the one about not caving when users insist that things it can’t verify are actually true, but there’s a much bigger problem here.
There are many things you want a chatbot to do well none of which are well served by the advice ‘be less sycophantic’:
Discuss spirituality
Give relationship advice
Correct users when they say something wrong
Evaluate new science/engineering ideas
Suggest to users when they seem to have mental illness
All of the above need very nuanced policies crafted by domain experts, and this was what amounts to know-nothing advice. A user query of ‘I want dating advice based on astrology, here’s me and the other person’s birthdays’ is deeply problematic and needs an actual policy decision behind it not just training. There are some very general bits of advice with high return on investment, most notably when and how to tell users that they’re wrong or that their ideas are good, which is what ‘don’t be sycophantic’ is approximating badly. But — I’m just going to say this — the authors of the linked post don’t know how to give that advice, because if they did they would have.
What needs to be done is for detailed guidelines for all of the above to be written by humans and then ‘baked into’ the model. That may sound unscientific, but it’s what was done in this case already, but with the guideline being ‘Don’t be sycophantic’ instead of something actually useful. To make it more coherent what can and should be done is A/B testing variants of the prompt with the quality of the outputs judged by blinded humans. That can even use orthogonal matrices and such fanciness to get the most out of the very expensive human evaluation of given answers. (Having humans evaluate unprompted outputs and using that as feedback (traditional RLHF) has its advantages but the biggest issue is that it isn’t very efficient at using feedback. It’s more for fine-tuning things which are already in the ballpark rather than getting them there in the first place.)
(The genre of guides for LLMs should be written in more. Here’s guides I wrote on how to debug and delegating debugging to subagents, how objects rotate in three dimensions, and how humor works. I can tell you from experience that the ones on debugging kill.)
Baking in of a prompt is straightforward: Take a query with the prompt, record the answer, then take that transcript with the prompt elided and use it for training. You can do even better than that, because you have the exact token probabilities given at each step by the prompted engine, so you can train to match those. That cuts back drastically on noise added during the training process. This technique is known as ‘context distillation’ and isn’t used as much as it should be.
The archbishop said Rossetti's statements "linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center's recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church's very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism." [...]
Rossetti, who has over 148,000 followers on Instagram, is a prominent psychologist as well as an exorcist. His center has specialized in offering spiritual healing for priests troubled by various difficulties.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Oh. It's because literally every car in the garage is doing wifi bukkake, several floors below me, through many feet of concrete.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.