davekasten.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

"Democratic leaders have a consistent message for vulnerable constituents: Trump is trying to bait us into helping you, and we won’t be taking the bait. This “distraction” trope had steered Schumer into describing a setback to equality as unworthy of attention." www.offmessage.net/p/democrats-...

submitted 7 hours ago • 23 comments

People may not like this take but I think this is spot on for how modern politics & comms works (and tbh, I don’t think that’s a bad thing!)

submitted 11 hours ago • 5 comments

it’s vague and unstated and rarely directly defended, but in general there’s this idiot norm that knowing anything about the security state organizations, technology, or history is somehow suspect that’s way too prevalent in lib/lefty spaces, yeah. It’s incredibly fucking dumb.

submitted 20 hours ago • 9 comments

We got new puppies at the shelter

submitted 18 hours ago • 2 comments

Going to war with Iran is a dumb idea for a ton of reasons, you do not need to overreact and carry water for the Iranian government. The Iranian government sucks. Still a bad idea to go to war with them. You just do not under any circumstances have to hand it to the Iranian government.

submitted 1 day ago • 6 comments

Imagine being a staff officer in Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters in some bombed out conference room trying to figure out how the fuck you're supposed to respond to this

submitted 22 hours ago • 4 comments

Imagine what happens if LAPD figures out how much good will they can earn by bullying ICE agents

submitted 2 days ago • 41 comments

just saw a group of masked men stuffing masked ICE agents into an unmarked car, who were saying "we're ICE we're ICE!" but the abductors shouted to the crowd "no we're ICE!" no one knew who was ICE, so no one in the crowd said anything.

submitted 2 days ago • 908 comments

Senior White House officials, a retired three-star general, a Nobel laureate, and others come out to say that you should probably read Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares' "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies".

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

He’s thinking about building a baseball field you moron

submitted 2 days ago • 24 comments

it is funny how many people affiliated with the secret police have had to say "stop making fun of the secret police, the guy in the tac vest that covers him like a training bra is a hero, he tracked down and subdued two hospice orderlies using only the W-2 forms they file annually"

submitted 2 days ago • 76 comments

Michael Pham fled Vietnam at the age of 13. He was named bishop of San Diego a month ago. Today, he stood watch at a courthouse: ICE agents were “standing there covered with masks as we walked toward the courtroom. Eventually the agents scattered and went away” timesofsandiego.com/life/2025/06...

submitted 2 days ago • 461 comments

The reason Elon made Grok in the first place was because he assumed OpenAI was turning the secret “woke” dial up too high and small parameter tweaks could make it right-wing. Now he has realized the only way to get the AI to agree with him is to lobotomize it by rewriting the entire training set.

submitted 2 days ago • 109 comments

Musk is mad at his robot progeny again and has now taken to scolding it over something it wrote in response to Catturd. “Shame on you, @Grok”

submitted 2 days ago • 303 comments

Social Media really did doom us by driving elites crazy. Marc Andreseen became convinced the social contract had broken down and that there was no point trying to be a socially responsible wealthy person because there was no philanthropy he could do that would make people stop yelling at him online.

submitted 2 days ago • 22 comments

if you don't want people doing gematria don't reduce all human language to an empirically derived set of mathematics which can summon forth divers images

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

I guess there's not many lanes for the seventh best AI but it's still notable if Musk steers Grok away from mainstream news that will dramatically reduce its value to businesses that care less about how catturd is treated and more about getting reliable results.

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

It's that time of year again! Drowning doesn't look like drowning; familiarize yourself with the instinctive drowning response

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

i see you, people who are doing this, and it's nasty

submitted 5 days ago • 17 comments

Okay, look, I will talk your ear off about the problems with Thorn all day if you get me going, but they are absolutely the leading model for detecting novel CSAM that isn't in PhotoDNA yet and for a major platform to just stop paying them until they get shut off is bananapants

submitted 3 days ago • 5 comments

The repression of trans people is not, by and large, a grassroots outpouring of hatred from the American people. It's something that's been carefully planted and tended over years by a handful of media people and their pet reporters.

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

increasingly obvious that congressional dems have seized on the "distraction" thing because it provides them with an excuse for doing nothing about any concrete issue and instead complaining about some general principle that they think plays well in focus groups

submitted 5 days ago • 35 comments

I still can't get past the idea that people in America are now supposed to accept that this is a valid form of law enforcement and just assume it's fine when random dudes in groups with face-coverings, no ID, no warrant, & no uniform grab people off the street and force them into unmarked vehicles

submitted 6 days ago • 555 comments

emily bender does not know whether any of these claims are true. this entire passage is as hallucinatory as anything emitted by an LLM.

submitted 6 days ago • 12 comments

The corollary to this is that “suppress internal dissent” is a much more common objective for militaries than “win wars”, something only a handful of militaries have much interest in

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

saying that someone “no longer has any legal interests” because they’re dead is the sort of claim you might wanna run by a lawyer before publishing in The Atlantic

submitted 6 days ago • 80 comments

you have to remember that the United States is the world's oldest democracy -- nearly 250 years old. they think in centuries, whereas we (the Chinese Communist Party) have only really existed for seventy-five years.

submitted 6 days ago • 13 comments

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? With almost no exceptions, every single cybersecurity breach occurs via mechanisms the technology industry knows how to fully and robust defend against, but didn't

submitted 6 days ago • 42 comments

Dara Lind @daralind.bsky.social in the NYT on the corrosion of constitutional protections in the pursuit of a mass deportation agenda. Gift link. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/o...

submitted 7 days ago • 11 comments

This is gotta be intentional. But it’s also just weird! How many NYT readers were at protests? What % of subscribers? A substantial %! How can it not be seen as newsworthy, especially given the readership?

submitted 8 days ago • 83 comments

Someone will post all day about firebombing a Walmart under an account trivially traceable to their online identity and then lecture people about locking their phone in a faraday cage before going to a large public protest where a congressman speaks. It's hilarious

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

Thinking about Paul Weiss this evening.

submitted 8 days ago • 23 comments

In my wildest dreams of this parade I did not imagine the Army a) wouldn't wear service/dress uniforms and b) would not actually practice staying in step

submitted 8 days ago • 56 comments

It's kinda crazy to remember that the mass protests today got their start (and name) from a tweet about congestion pricing

submitted 8 days ago • 34 comments

living in the future

submitted 8 days ago • 6 comments

turns out he was in a taped off area he wasn’t supposed to be, they briefly detained him and he was quickly released, a pretty simple mistake. it is why you don’t deploy the military to do this, but is not the entrance to the cool zone.

submitted 9 days ago • 13 comments

Fusion intelligence centers are basically full time chain email forwarding departments where cops freak each other out about shit they mostly make up

submitted 9 days ago • 13 comments

The first known detention by the US Marines in their recent Los Angeles deployment is of... a US Army veteran on his way to an office at the Department of Veteran Affairs building. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

submitted 9 days ago • 119 comments

Teen cousins on their way to a family birthday in Las Vegas were detained near an ICE protest—targeted for simply “looking illegal.” “We're minors just trying to go home,” one told an officer. “Doesn't matter, you guys are illegal,” he replied. They left with bloody legs, bruised arms, faces.

submitted 9 days ago • 15 comments

"Whats this line item?" "Counterintelligence, sir" "It says they bought over 10,000 pizzas in FY25?" "Yes, sir"

submitted 10 days ago • 31 comments

I'm feeling the need to be very LA here. The Marines are at the Wilshire Federal Buidling, where there ain't nothin' goin' on. Right now, it'd take like an hour for them to get to downtown. Maybe 45 minutes if they're lucky.

submitted 10 days ago • 79 comments

submitted 10 days ago • 105 comments

i think this explains the house style of the New York Times: it presumes that you share elite opinions on what the New York Times entails while preventing you from learning what the New York Times entails simply by reading the New York Times.

submitted 10 days ago • 2 comments

This is false. LLMs are the fastest growing piece of consumer technology in history, because people want to use them. The risky R&D costs are mostly behind us and now it is about scaling out the technology to provide More of it to everyone who wants it I'm sorry if you don't like this but it's true

submitted 11 days ago • 7 comments

First, multiple scientific validations of the film, and now finally critical validation! I am a man out of time, this is my curse.

submitted 11 days ago • 25 comments