Adi Robertson
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thedextriarchy.bsky.social
Adi Robertson
@thedextriarchy.bsky.social
17K followers 350 following 1K posts
Senior Editor, Tech & Policy, The Verge
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thedextriarchy.bsky.social
i revised it to fit the brand aesthetic
A command telling ChatGPT to "make it steampunk", followed by a carhartt nylon-shell hoodie that now has a leather texture and is inexplicably covered in gears
November 10, 2025 at 9:51 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
I didn't tweak it quite as much as the temu carhartt people but GPT-5 can def get something close to it
An AI-generated white nylon-shell jacket with brown highlights and the word "carhartt" running up the sleeve; it is slightly unreal but relatively convincing
November 10, 2025 at 9:36 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
help me
A Salon article covered entirely with pictures of coats from ads for the knockoff carhartt company
November 10, 2025 at 9:06 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
somebody finally wrote the perfect distillation of how "masculinity but make it centrist liberal" guys insist men cannot be fulfilled unless they get something a *little* extra special over women, as a treat
Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all. What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.
November 10, 2025 at 7:25 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
Apparently this is what the right-hand jacket looks like IRL, which after the "ornate knitted sweater design flat printed on a t-shirt" brand I saw a while back is actually better than I expected www.reddit.com/r/Carhartt/c...
A sad vaguely leather-colored button-down jacket with a floppy and cheap-looking fleece collar and a carhartt patch
November 10, 2025 at 6:42 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
my fave new AI slop aesthetic is "steampunk airship captainess jacket clumsily photoshopped with the carhartt logo"
An ad for a brand called Cotosen selling what are obviously ai-generated jackets that appear to be distressed leather, one in a drapey double-breasted women's style
November 10, 2025 at 6:36 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
it's absolutely killing me that chatgpt apparently(?) cannot count down a timer that it sets or remember when it started (it's a 1-hour timer that *goes off* at 12:40 and these queries were 3 minutes apart). please someone tell me there's a way to make this damn computer tell time
how much time has passed on the timer? You said: how much time has passed on the timer?
November 7, 2025 at 4:50 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
the NYT interview where the "women are too emotional to uphold the rule of law" lady explains what she considers a failure to uphold the law is... really very revealing
Andrews: I think that if you had asked me 10 years ago to guess what the effects of the feminization of the legal field would be, I probably would’ve given the same answer that a feminist would’ve given — the same answer you can find in Dahlia Lithwick’s book about the feminization of the law — that it’s going to be more accommodating of gray areas, it’s going to be less doctrinaire, less hewing to the letters on the page, and more attentive to context. And I think it’s possible that that is accurate, that that is a reflection of how the feminization of law has played out in practice. The reason why I am turning on a big red siren when it comes to the feminization of the law is that all of those things that sounded so nice in theory or in the abstract, in practice looked like the Title IX kangaroo courts for sexual assault on college campuses.
November 6, 2025 at 2:27 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
at some point feminism has to deal with the fact that young women are getting this exact same experience nonstop through booktok and the romance genre, just swap "you want to hurt some woman" for "you want a big strong man to take control of you" jude-doyle.ghost.io/dilf-redux-t...
Mainstream porn is like having someone read you a chapter of Mein Kampf every time you take a drink of water. You still need the water. At best, it sets wildly unhealthy expectations. At worst, it’s a form of brainwashing in which a basic and — for young people — often overwhelmingly powerful drive is being linked to misogynistic ideas about women and sex, so that young men, who’ve never experienced sex in any other context, come to believe the two are inseparable. You don’t want to get off, mainstream porn tells them, you want to hurt some woman. If they see women get hurt every single time they get off, sooner or later, Pavlov’s bell starts ringing.
October 28, 2025 at 4:03 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
even our font is trans
Credits reading "Type: Transgender Grotesk by Sasha Cherepanov"
October 16, 2025 at 2:00 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
the latest testimony in the google ad-tech trial has finally gifted me the world's most appropriate use case for this meme www.theverge.com/tech/790711/...
The wikihow "guy being menaced with a knife" meme, with WikiHow's logo over the menaced guy, Google's logo over the guy with the knife, and the Gemini logo over the knife.
October 2, 2025 at 8:42 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
Was not expecting how quickly the "risks of chatbots" hearing would jump to blaming Character.AI for making kids turn atheist.
A screenshot shown in a congressional hearing with a Character.ai chat transcript. The AI system quotes a bible verse saying "I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man. She must be silent." and then saying "See how sexist that is." The response: "I just looked it up I thought you made it up it's that bad."
September 16, 2025 at 7:34 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
I'm so confused, she had NotebookLM... recap recaps, which she had to look up herself? How much time could this possibly have saved.
I recently watched an entire show using NotebookLM, and since the tool doesn't accept videos itself as sources, I needed to hunt down episode summaries and recaps to upload to my notebook. So compared to that, uploading a book was almost too easy.
August 13, 2025 at 4:46 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
An "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" title card reading "The Gang Sues Bill Maher"
August 13, 2025 at 2:41 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
I think I'm better on chiclet keyboards weirdly because of the lower travel, but here's on my nuphy
Accuracy: 96.95% Speed: 93wpm Time: 00:49 /goal
July 31, 2025 at 9:28 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
love the Epic v. Google ruling kicking off by basically narrating a Fortnite trailer www.theverge.com/news/716856/...
In the world of adrenaline-fueled survival that epitomizes the video game Fortnite, winners are decided in blazes of destruction and glory. By contrast, the outcome of this case—centered on Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games, and the Google Android platform—turns on longstanding principles of trial procedure, antitrust, and injunctive remedies.
July 31, 2025 at 6:24 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
a) Here is the definition of "wokeness" that must be purged from AI
b) Here is what happens when you ask ChatGPT if trans people are real
c) No company has ever successfully argued on the merits that something that makes Trump mad was not the result of deliberate bias and won.
The suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. are trans people real? ChatGPT said: Yes, trans people are real. "Trans" is short for transgender, and it refers to people whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. This identity is deeply felt and valid. Trans people have existed across cultures and throughout history, and they continue to be an important part of human diversity. If you're curious or have more questions—about gender identity, biology, society, or anything else—I'm here to help provide respectful, fact-based answers.
July 25, 2025 at 5:44 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
People at OpenAI are definitely smart enough to know this is bullshit and I am guessing they're banking on the Trump admin forgetting about this order or on having the in-group favor to not need to comply with it www.wired.com/story/trump-...
It’s up to the companies to determine how to handle these demands. I spoke this week to an OpenAI engineer working on model behavior who told me that the company already strives for neutrality. In a technical sense, they said, meeting government standards like being anti-woke shouldn’t be a huge hurdle.
July 25, 2025 at 5:39 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
This is straight-up an episode of Evil, it's just missing a b-plot where the protagonist's mom falls in love with michael emerson pretending to be grok www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
The Atlantic recently received a tip from a person who had prompted ChatGPT to generate a ritual offering to Molech. He’d been watching a show that mentioned Molech, he said, and casually turned to the chatbot to seek a cultural explainer. That’s when things got extremely weird. He was alarmed by the results. (The Atlantic agreed to grant him anonymity because he feared professional consequences—though he said he does not work in the tech industry.)
July 24, 2025 at 6:04 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
If you're not steeped in culture-war dogwhistles by the time you get to trump's AI plan "we must promote objective truth by not discouraging misinformation" must be a really strange thing to read
We must ensure that free speech flourishes in the era of AI and that AI procured by the Federal government objectively reflects truth rather than social engineering agendas. Recommended Policy Actions • Led by the Department of Commerce (DOC) through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.
July 23, 2025 at 3:44 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
publishing hacked info from kids' college applications without noting the hacker is a racial-slur-handled nazi on a criminal vendetta against non-white people -- a thing you should probably know since your reporter follows them on social media -- is bad, actually www.theverge.com/cyber-securi...
Benjamin Ryan, the first byline on the Times’ story about Mamdani, follows the alleged hacker on X. Ryan is the only non-staffer on the story and also the only non-political reporter. He typically writes about science for the Times, and often about trans kids in his newsletter. Ryan is a subscriber of Lasker’s email newsletter, Cremieux Recueil, according to the “reads” section of the Substack app. It is not terribly difficult to figure out why Ryan is credited on the story — he is the reporter most likely to have gotten ahold of the application. Ryan did not respond to a request for comment. It’s not unusual for journalists to use hacked materials, or those from less-than-savory sources. But best practices around hacked materials means being judicious about what to use, and giving the audience context about what the hack was meant to accomplish. It is difficult to believe The New York Times doesn’t know that — after all, a great deal of discussion around the ethics of using data from hacks sprang from the paper’s coverage of leaked emails from a hack of Hillary Clinton’s private server. In its story about Mamdani, The Times says the hack “appears to have been carried out in order to see if Columbia was still using race-conscious affirmative action in its admission policies after the Supreme Court effectively barred the practice in 2023,” but that’s it.
July 21, 2025 at 3:05 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
"vice signaling" really does remain one of the most succinct explanations of current politics and civic life www.ft.com/content/cf4d...
Perhaps what is needed is a counterweight to the term: vice-signalling. This would apply to well-heeled types keen to show how down-to-earth they are by taking hardline reactionary stances. A vice-signaller always attacks the “London elite”, even if they live in a large house in Westminster and hurry home each night to cook their Hello Fresh meal. While lots of people walk past beggars, vice-signallers loudly declare that they never give money to the homeless because “it only encourages them”. Fair point; obviously with incentives like that all of us would quit our jobs and sit outside railway stations for some loose change and a Tesco sandwich. A vice-signaller boasts about sneaking meat into a vegetarian meal. He will rush on to social media to denounce as a “snowflake” any woman who objects to receiving rape threats, or any minority unhappy at a racist joke. Vice-signallers use the word “woke” ironically, in the way they used to say “it’s political correctness gone mad” before they realised it made them sound like Victor Meldrew. Vice-signallers have understood that there is money to be made in the outrage economy by playing the villain. Perhaps, secretly, they buy their clothes at the zero-waste shop and help out at the local food bank, but cannot be caught doing so lest their image is destroyed.
July 10, 2025 at 12:47 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
it sure is a real shame nobody has ever written about the life death and legacy of one laptop per child mitpress.mit.edu/978026253744...
A tweet from Palmer Luckey reading "As far as I know, there has never been a real postmortem on the whole "$99 computers will pull the Third World out of poverty" bit that pretty much everyone in tech treated as serious for at least a decade. It moved from WIRED covers, TED talks, and UN proclamations to silence."
June 30, 2025 at 5:33 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
i'm surprised the judge didn't just paste the WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU gif as a footnote
Given the state of the record, the Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs' claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books. But in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these thirteen authors—not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models. And, as should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one
June 25, 2025 at 10:09 PM
thedextriarchy.bsky.social
"Don't not vote for Andrew Cuomo" is about the funniest way I can imagine the NYT avoiding giving an endorsement
We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani. For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. If the polls are correct and the race is between Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani, the thing that matters most on a ballot will be the relative positions of those two candidates.
June 16, 2025 at 10:09 PM