One of the legitimate criticisms of large language models, generative AI, and chatbots is that they produce hallucinations –- output that is plausible but wrong. That’s a problem in all domains, but arguably it’s a particularly serious one in the field of law. Hallucinated citations undermine the entire edifice of common law, which is based […]
You might recall how the Warner Brothers Discovery merger promised everyone amazing new synergies for the media sector. Instead it wound up being a giant sloppy turd of a deal resulting in endless layoffs, the shuttering of numerous popular media brands, the cancellation of a long line of popular programming, higher consumer prices, and lower […]
Each day adds another layer of fucked-upness to this country’s anti-immigration efforts. We, as a nation, are now involved daily in extrajudicial renditioning of migrants to countries they’ve never lived in. We’re all implicated in nearly daily rejections of court orders and any remaining shred of human decency. We’re treating human beings like trash to […]
Mere days ago, and only a few weeks out from a meeting in Atlanta to discuss immunization policy and vaccination recommendations, we talked about the batshit move by RFK Jr. to fully wipe out and fire the entirety of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an immunization advisory panel. All 17 members of […]
It would be too kind to say the irony is lost on Republican lawmakers. They would have to be capable of comprehending and acknowledging their own hypocrisy to even begin to recognize the irony. That’s why these lawmakers are so unconcerned with the long-term destruction they’re causing. It’s all worth it if it results in […]
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you’ll […]
When a federal judge grants a temporary restraining order within hours of a hearing and writes 36 pages explaining why the President of the United States is acting illegally and unconstitutionally, you know something significant just happened. Federal Judge Charles Breyer did exactly that last night, blocking Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to […]
Ah, the daily joys of living in a country that’s literally too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet-era. Meta has once again been busted playing fast and loose with consumer privacy. Security researchers last week discovered that Meta and Russia’s Yandex have been embedding tracking code into millions of websites […]
Editor’s Note: As I was getting this article ready to publish, a judge granted California a Temporary Restraining Order against the deployment of the National Guard. We’ll have a separate write up of that later. When the Secretary of Homeland Security announces that federal forces will remain in an American city until they “liberate” it […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]
As you’ll likely recall, in late 2023, Elon Musk told advertisers to “go fuck yourself” and “don’t advertise” in response to a question about advertisers feeling uncomfortable placing their brands next to the kind of content that Musk was promoting via the ExTwitter algorithm. But the full context of the quote is interesting in retrospect: […]
Palantir has never had a great reputation. Even before it teamed up with Trump to create a massive, abusable database of American residents’ information, it was working with forward-looking cop shops, that wanted similar massive, abusable databases of their own, even if those were limited to surveilling people in their own jurisdictions. The company is […]
Today we need to examine something that reveals the machinery of authoritarian propaganda with surgical precision: how a handful of violent incidents across a few city blocks in Los Angeles was transformed into a “crisis” justifying the deployment of federal troops against American citizens. And how easily that transformation succeeded. I write this from Los […]
They say you should never stop learning, and at Stone River, that mantra is a way of life. Through this subscription, you’ll get full access to 800+ courses and 4,800 hours of online learning, covering everything from iOS mobile development to graphic design. Plus, you’ll get a range of VIP perks, including unlimited eBooks and […]
We’ve written a few times about the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student who was one of the first people detained by ICE and told he was being kicked out of the country solely because Marco Rubio said he doesn’t belong here. No due process. No hearing. Just Rubio’s arbitrary say-so. A […]
We’ve noted many times that there are two major reasons the U.S. doesn’t have a functional privacy law for the modern internet era. One, we’re too corrupt and greedy to do the right thing, causing us to prioritize making money over literally everything else — including public safety. And two, the government long ago realized […]
While the Justin Baldoni legal fight with Blake Lively is still going on, one half of the dispute has been thrown in the dumpster… for now. If you’re not up on the case, here is the TL;DR version. Baldoni and Lively costarred in the movie It Ends With Us. Lively filed a claim of workplace […]
I already wrote about the GOP’s bloodthirsty desire to use the military on Americans. They manufactured a nonsense “crisis” by over-aggressively sending in ICE agents to grab people off the streets, leading to protests, which were focused on provoking protestors into violence, which would then be used to justify an even more violent crackdown. Given […]
The Trump administration on June 4, 2025, announced travel restrictions targeting 19 countries in Africa and Asia, including many of the world’s poorest nations. All travel is banned from 12 of these countries, with partial restrictions on travel from the rest. The presidential proclamation, entitled “Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from […]
On the latest episode of the always excellent “The Bugle” podcast, comedian Alice Fraser amusingly describes the horror of what’s happening in Los Angeles the following way: So let’s just clarify: this is arguably unlawful deployment of military force to enforce peace on peaceful protests over illegal arrests of illegal immigrants. Here’s what actually happening […]
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