owlwombat.bsky.social
@owlwombat.bsky.social
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We start streaming tomorrow at 3 PM ET! Join us as we play Thrillville and raise money for Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida!
"You really made a 4 hour video?"

No, I wrote a 7 hour video, then cut it down, and if you donate to our fundraiser for Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, you will receive access to exclusive bonus content as a thank you!
December 15, 2025 at 10:41 PM
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I’m howling.
November 20, 2025 at 2:16 PM
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they gleefully announce the llm solves a difficult problem and then you find out...they use it to respond to an email, format some python, arrange two meetings in an 8 hour period.

we are going to let these people burn the planet because we are too nice to tell them they sound stupid.
lately i've been thinking about how LLMs must feel really amazing to use if you're a dumbass, but incredibly frustrating if you're just basically competent in life.
Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...
November 14, 2025 at 1:57 PM
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for the record, this is how the @nytimes.com covered Bloomberg, a man elected to the same office as Katie Wilson with the exact same amount of experience in public office as Katie Wilson, but whom the paper did not view with obvious contempt www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/n...
November 13, 2025 at 10:03 PM
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It just wasn't a big, newsworthy deal like, for instance, the college applications of a mayoral candidate to a school he didn't get into or attend.
To recap: Jeffrey Epstein offered a NY Times reporter photos taken in Epstein's kitchen of Donald Trump and girls in bikinis *and* implored the NYT reporter to put this information in the public discourse in 2015

What did the NY Times editors know about this offer?
“would you like photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?” -Jeffrey Epstein
November 12, 2025 at 9:38 PM
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We've had nonstop op-eds declaring that "Americans have spoken" and demanding Democratic capitulation to the right despite the right's agenda being wildly unpopular.
This has gotten lost: Abigail Spanberger won big after vowing to RESCIND Glenn Youngkin's executive order directing local cooperation with ICE and voting AGAINST the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act. Yet she gained bigly with working class.

New piece laying this out:

newrepublic.com/article/2030...
November 12, 2025 at 7:29 PM
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This race could very easily be decided by challenged ballots. Use this link to track your ballot, and remind your friends and family to do the same: info.kingcounty.gov/kcelections/...
November 10, 2025 at 9:08 PM
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IF YOU LIVE IN SEATTLE, for the love of god, please check to make sure your ballot was counted and doesn’t need its signature cured

info.kingcounty.gov/kcelections/...
November 11, 2025 at 1:05 AM
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like this is basically it, the melts melted under pressure
November 10, 2025 at 4:27 PM
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I think any story about Trump's autocracy should be mostly about the people and institutions who failed to stop it. This guy isn't a political genius, everything else just happens to be rotten. 'Toddler Consolidates Power In Household' is a story about incompetent parents, not shrewd maneuvering
October 28, 2025 at 2:07 PM
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It’s extraordinary that Biden’s main weaknesses were inflation and cognitive decline and now America has inflation and cognitive decline as well as tariffs, authoritarianism, blatant corruption, etc
October 10, 2025 at 8:19 AM
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Stephen Miller is murdering Venezuelans and Colombians in cold blood bc he believes it helps his propaganda campaign to paint Latinos as dangerous.

www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...
October 9, 2025 at 7:46 PM
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Terrific video. I knew this book would be bad but I was genuinely shocked at just *how* bad
September 27, 2025 at 4:18 AM
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A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.
September 29, 2025 at 8:18 PM
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If we can just degrade the status of a targeted group a little bit more, I’m sure we can back away from the cliff edge of fascism
I'm kind of shocked that anyone is still proposing technocratic solutions to the "debate" over immigration. Even if this were a good idea (and it is not), Republican elites and media will never tell their base about it. You can't policy your way out of a propaganda problem!
September 6, 2025 at 9:33 PM
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due to funding cuts, foodnet is no longer requiring state-level monitoring for campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio and yersinia. the 10 foodnet states can still do that, but they’ll need funding to replace CDC’s
A federal-state partnership that monitors for foodborne illnesses quietly scaled back its operations nearly two months ago.

As of July 1, the critical surveillance program is monitoring for only two pathogens instead of the usual eight, a spokesperson for the CDC says.
The CDC quietly scaled back a surveillance program for foodborne illnesses
As of July 1, a critical surveillance program is monitoring for only two pathogens instead of the usual eight.
nbcnews.to
August 26, 2025 at 7:40 PM
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The point of journalism is to tell people the truth! If the population and political leaders are panicking about something that isn't happening, your job as a reporter is to loudly debunk it — not plead with the other party to join the panic.
"but crime is a real issue, people are worried about crime and you have to take that seriously"

No you don't! If people are getting more scared about crime while crime is happening less frequently, it's a made up issue and you should make a point of yelling that all the time
August 16, 2025 at 9:48 PM
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If crime is down cops need more money, if crime is up cops need more money. If it's stable year to year, they need more money then too. The MSM acts as if anyone who thinks that's an insane way to proceed is soft on crime and wants anarchy. Something has to change.
The main recommendation is for Democrats to acknowledge the importance of policing. But police have shirked their duties and departments have shed staff during the period when crime has fallen! This is evidence *against* the editorial's core thesis and it's the only evidence cited.
August 14, 2025 at 2:15 PM
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Criminal immigrants, government waste, rampant crime, dangerous vaccines — if we've learned anything from the first six month of Trump 2.0 it's that Republicans have based their entire ideology on lies. Kind of wish the media made that clearer during elections!
“.. DOGE increasingly looks like a giant joke as the initiative winds up saving essentially zero dollars for US taxpayers .”

- Vital Knowledge

@politico.com 🇺🇸
www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
August 13, 2025 at 1:31 PM
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Little Rock, the capital city of Tom Cotton's home state of Arkansas, has one of the highest violent crime rates of any city in the United States.

D.C. doesn't even crack the top-10.
August 11, 2025 at 2:42 PM
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This is a pretty solid explainer about what e-bikes are and the rules around them.

What I'd love to see is more coverage of what e-bikes *enable* people to do. Stories about disabled people who use them to gain independence. Or lower income people who benefit from not needing the expense of a car.
This is a fairly center of the road article but I feel like there's a push out there to label e-bike riders as anarchistic hooligans and as someone who recently discovered the joy of cycling, I don't like it

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/09/m...
E-bikes seem to be everywhere around Boston. Here’s what to know. - The Boston Globe
Electric bikes grabbed headlines this week after a rider struck a pedestrian near Copley Square, causing life-threatening injuries.
www.bostonglobe.com
August 10, 2025 at 12:58 AM
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the entire republican party is currently involved in a cover up involving the worlds most notorious underage sex trafficking ring
Breaking Bloomberg:

The FBI redacted Trump's name in the Epstein files.

"An FBI [Freedom of Information Act] team redacted Trump's name—and the names of other prominent public figures—from the documents, according to three people familiar with the matter."
www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...
The FBI Redacted Trump’s Name in the Epstein Files
The bureau’s FOIA team tasked with conducting a final review of the records blacked out the names before higher-ups said last month that releasing the documents ‘would not be appropriate or warranted....
www.bloomberg.com
August 1, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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and the answer, of course, is that a tiny number of people got so rich they could buy enormous media conglomerates on a whim as a gift for a spouse or child, with no particular need or desire for them to succeed as media organizations. also their brains were fucking goo from group chats. also that
CBS torching the institutions of both 60 Minutes and The Late Show for this fucking guy, of all people, is just...

People are going to look back from the future and ask "why the fuck did they do that?"
July 18, 2025 at 6:36 PM
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The idea of civil rights is that all people are equal members of society, and therefore mechanisms that make people unequal are illegitimate. The far right has built a perverse mirror ideology, in which races are known to be unequal, and therefore mechanisms that make us equal are illegitimate.
Their baseline idea is that inequality between peoples is the natural order of things, and so any effort to reduce inequality is immoral and illegal. They're segregationists, and their ideal world is the antebellum South but they'll settle for the "Redeemer" era as Reconstruction fell to Jim Crow.
July 18, 2025 at 5:51 PM
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They are doing Defund The Police in reverse: Gutting the social safety net and giving unlimited power to a vast, violent gestapo to deal with the consequences.
With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.
🚨🚨 NEW: House passes sprawling domestic policy bill, sending it to Trump's desk

Final House vote is 218-214, with TWO Rs voting no (Massie & Fitzpatrick).

Senate passed it 51-50.

www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
July 3, 2025 at 7:09 PM