I'm not aware of any state that applies two party consent rules to written communications. As far as I can tell, state wiretap laws only apply to in-person or live voice conversations (like traditional phone calls).

Oregon, for example, is a two party consent state for phone calls but single party consent for electronic communications. Same with Illinois.

Connecticut and Montana don't apply two party rules when the non-recording parties are merely aware that recording is happening, and it seems like a pretty straightforward analysis that everyone knows that the other side keeps text messages on their phone, usually indefinitely.

The nature of email, text messaging, or any other kind of written communication basically makes it impossible to expect the other side not to save a record of the conversation, because that's just how the technology generally works.

aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far

Haven't the PR flacks learned by now to sound less obvious about using LLM generated text?

Imagine being named Alexa, born in 1998, minding your own damn business when Amazon just completely wrecks your name as you're entering high school.

Yes, the rules of Conway's Game of Life is Turing Complete.

The glider shape (the thing moving diagonally out of the window in this meme) can be created non-destructively by a glider gun (another shape that creates gliders), which can be controlled using stored pixels in another configuration within the glider gun, including taking in input from other gliders, such that the whole thing can loop and do everything necessary to be a universal Turing machine. Not super efficiently, but it will still do the things that Turing machines can do, given enough cycles.

The -cel suffix suggests that it's an insult (derived from incel).

Vibe coding is the name for creating computer code by telling an AI to generate the code for you, without necessarily even understanding anything about the code itself.

A thousand yard stare is a description for someone who looks like they're staring off into the distance, as if they're having some kind of PTSD flashback, or just at a loss for words.

This is a photograph of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, a major generative AI company.

Tokens are the unit of measure of how much computing power a particular generative AI query uses.

So basically, it's a meme that ironically takes the position of the vibe coder, mocking someone who is actually unwilling to use the AI code generation tools (calling them a codecel and criticizing them for saying something anti-vibe-coding or vibephobic), by giving the blank stare of Sam Altman's soulless eyes, and calling it a billion token stare, but basically doing it ironically to make fun of generative AI enthusiasts by lobbing a really stupid criticism and making the critic look bad.

The mechanism happens in the way LLMs generate text sequentially. So as the LLM generates text, each time the LLM encounters a choice between two or more equally probable words and has to pick one, it chooses from a known pseudorandom key instead of its previous practice of actually relying on a source of randomness.

If you run the text through a checker script that tries to predict the next word, and takes note of every choice made in any given fork in the probabilistic flowchart, you can see that whole sequence of choices and compare to whether it matches a known key.

You'd need to know the model itself well enough to know when the text reaches a particular fork, and what the choices are in that fork, and the key itself, so even OpenAI/Google/Anthropic may not be able to run this watermark detection on their competitors' models. But they'd be able to know it themselves, for their own models.

It needs to be a system and a contractual framework that complies with the medical privacy regulations of the place where it's being used (in the US, HIPAA). I have some doubts about whether specific companies or people will actually comply, or the enforcement of those laws by certain governmental authorities, but I don't think it's conceptually impossible to have this kind of tech be compliant with those types of regulations.

The ideas described in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail made the mid-2000s super optimistic about having fewer gatekeepers between those who would create something and those who would enjoy that thing: you no longer needed to convince an agent and publisher and distributor for the funds or approval to publish a book, or release an album, or even distribute a short film or movie, because you could just do those things and see if you could find an audience.

And it worked, because on the internet it became economically feasible to publish for a small audience, and it became economically feasible to aggregate a lot of small creators and small audiences into big content-agnostic platforms for the thing being distributed. And a few of them would make it big, too.

Yes, app stores still funnel the overwhelming majority of the money on the platform to a small handful of developers. But I'd argue that the recent moves towards consolidation and concentration is because the ecosystems have betrayed the democratic, decentralized, nondiscriminatory/content-neutral ideals that we built the user-created Web 2.0 on, and instead of descended into enshittified monetization of the platforms' algorithmic control, SEO-like strategies so that slop isn't filtered out, and our utterly hacked brains that can't resist clickbait and ragebait and hornybait to where it's mostly sorting through slop instead of organically finding the niches we enjoy.

And now instead of traditional gatekeepers, we have tech gatekeepers. It was a fun run, though, from 2005-2015.

But it's not the company itself putting those assets up for sale. It's the court-approved or court-appointed bankruptcy trustee of that company, executing transactions approved by the court. That's why bankruptcy has to go through court, but it also provides a level of immunity (commonly called "exculpation" in bankruptcy cases) to the individuals actually doing the things ordered by the court.

If it's illegal to do, a court shouldn't be ordering it, so the affected people should have to fight the court order before it happens. But it's not illegal to sell anonymized user data like this, and not illegal to sell employee work-related data, either, in the U.S.

Probably not. The article credits Shutterstock submitter Vladislav Noseek, whose online presence with photographs of this style (soft lighting, bright lighting, shallow depth of field, a focus on breakfast foods) long predates generative AI, much less of this quality. It's stock photographers like this guy whose inoffensive visual style and identity have been most directly incorporated into the AI defaults.

Raw lichess data shows that 13% of their games involve a pawn promotion too. Maybe the main character is a pawn who gets promoted, and that's the plot of the game.

on average peoples' computers

Average people don't have self-administered computers anymore.

People have work laptops administered by their work IT departments, or they have phones and tablets running iOS/Android. Some children have school-administered Chromebooks, and may never own a normal laptop running a traditional desktop OS.

The main people operating self-administered traditional computers are PC gamers (a dying breed during the current price crisis), freelance/independent workers in the fields who still benefit from a mouse and keyboard for productive work and aren't provided a computer by an employer, and tech nerds.

I wonder if the statistics are skewed as "one machine, one vote" rather than "one person, one vote." Because I know a few people (including myself, when I was younger) who would run like multiple Linux machines and start up random VMs to do a few things here and there.

Our heads are just loaded with sensory capabilities that are more than just the two eyes. Our proprioception, balance, and mental mapping allows us to move our heads around and take in visual data from almost any direction at a glance, and then internally model that three dimensional space as the universe around us. Meanwhile, our ears can process direction finding for sounds and synthesize that information with our visual processing.

Meanwhile, the tactile feedback of the steering wheel, vibration of the actual car (felt by the body and heard by the ears), give us plenty of sensory information for understanding our speed, acceleration, and the mechanical condition of the car. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes, and the indicators on our dash are all part of the information we use to understand how we're driving.

Much of it is trained through experience. But the fact is, I can tell when I have a flat tire or when I'm hydroplaning even if I can't see the tires. I can feel inclines or declines that affect my speed or lateral movement even when there aren't easy visual indicators, like at night.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.

Here's the original reporting, instead of another website's summary of Bloomberg's actual report:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-28/us-ends-investigation-into-claims-whatsapp-chats-aren-t-private

https://archive.is/sGE3e

So it sounds like the agent was investigating allegations, from content moderation contractors, that Meta could access the contents of WhatsApp messages, and came to the conclusion that yes, Meta could.

There are a few possibilities here.

1. Meta does have full plain text access to all Whatsapp messages, but guards that access very closely. Although the clients seem to generate E2EE keys for each session, somehow they're leaking those keys to Meta's servers somewhere, and the closed source code sufficiently hides that so that there's no whistleblower or security researcher able to detect this definitively.
2. Meta has a secret wiretap functionality where they can compromise the E2EE keys somehow, but uses it only for narrow cases. This helps keep the functionality secret, because security researchers and other reviewers may never see the functionality in action.
3. Meta allows users to report objectionable content in the threads they're already part of. The reporting function either forwards the E2EE key itself, or all the plaintext data, that gives content moderators access to the underlying message contents. The contractor whistleblowers and the federal agent investigating these allegations simply got it wrong, and misunderstood the technical process of how the plaintext messages end up in the content moderator's possession.

Meta claims that it's #3. They acknowledge they have plaintext access to messages when a party to the thread presses the report button.

This unnamed federal agent believes it's #1, after 10 months of investigation, and sent out an email to other investigators that they should look into that possibility.

I'm skeptical of #1, simply because I don't believe that conspiracies to keep that kind of stuff secret can be maintained. It's not just that there would be technically skilled whistleblowers who have actual access to the code (not the non-technical content moderator contractors who review the content), but a weakness in such an important and widely used protocol would attract all sorts of hackers, state sponsored or otherwise.

But option #2 might explain everything we've seen so far. Full wiretap capability that is rarely used and very tightly controlled.

They always win, unless they don't. History is littered with examples of the freer standard losing to the more proprietary standard, with plenty of examples going the other way, too.

Openness is an advantage in some cases, but tight control can be an advantage in some other cases.

• Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people's own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there's benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.
• JPEG XL encoding and decoding is much, much faster than pretty much any other format.
• The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.
• The format anticipates being useful for both screen and prints. Webp, HEIF, and AVIF are all optimized for screen resolutions, and fail at truly high resolution uses appropriate for prints. The JPEG XL format isn't ready to replace camera RAW files, but there's room in the spec to accommodate that use case, too.

It's great and should be adopted everywhere, to replace every raster format from JPEG photographs to animated GIFs (or the more modern live photos format with full color depth in moving pictures) to PNGs to scanned TIFFs with zero compression/loss.

briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent.

That's just an awkward sentence construction but it makes sense: they released track via Bittorrent. The tracks were scraped from Spotify.

I sold my car that was purchased from a dealership via private party sale.

I charged my laptop that normally accepts 100W via a 20W phone charger.

I would've used a "which" phrase with commas to avoid the confusion, but the sentence as written is valid and makes sense.