Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's rhetorical rebuke of Justice Clarence Thomas's dissent in the Trump vs Barbara Birthright Citizenship case is an instant classic:
"Despite his longstanding endorsement of a 'colorblind' Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to 'freed slaves such as Dred Scott,' and those who shared with them certain characteristics," wrote Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court...It is for this reason, he says, that 'children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here' are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship. But that narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification. Even worse, Justice Thomas's telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery."
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Trump's 927-page financial disclosure report for 2025 totals more than 900 pages detailing holdings in cryptocurrency and stocks.
President Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure report was released on Tuesday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, revealing income of hundreds of millions of dollars from proceeds of crypto tokens and holdings of hundreds of individual company stocks.
The report reveals that Trump’s crypto-related income included about $515 million from the sale of tokens released by the firm World Liberty Financial, and $65 million from sales of equity in WLF’s holding company.
The president reported more than $290 million in income related to revenue from his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, his Trump National Doral golf property, his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, his Jupiter Golf Club, and Trump National Washington, D.C.
The ethics office also released the annual financial disclosure report of Vice President JD Vance. That report totals just 17 pages.
Now,
In June,
When the night is a vast softness
Filled with blue stars,
And broken shafts of moon-glimmer
Fall upon the earth,
Am I too old to see the fairies dance?
I cannot find them any more.
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"pi-Stomp is a High Definition Multi-Effects Platform for guitar, bass and keyboards.
You build the hardware from a solderless kit with very detailed instructions.
The software is all free and open source.
- Edit your virtual pedalboards via computer/tablet using the MOD web app.
- Choose from 380+ effects, models & synths. Download new ones, even code your own.
- Load amp, cabinet and IR’s from thousands of open source NAM (Neural Amp Modeling) models..
- Connect a MIDI keyboard to control 60+ sound generator modules.
- Play on stage, at home, in the studio (no computer/tablet required).
- Switch pedalboards, presets and settings using footswitches, knobs or external hardware.
New features for v3.0
No Soldering! Plug, connect, screw, tighten – all with just your fingers and a screwdriver
Includes a Raspberry pi5 – one of the most powerful processors available in a multi-effects unit
Sleek custom aluminum enclosure – 185 x 120 x 36mm (7.3″ x 4.7″ x 1.4″)
4 footswitches with multi-color LEDs that change with assignment
Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or7 condemnation:
Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's A7I-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.
Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.
When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.
This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.
Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.
That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:
Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.
A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:
I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;
II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and
III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.
Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.
Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:
While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.
Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:
Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."
The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?
It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.
Google and Facebook monopolized the display advertising market, entering into an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the bidding so that advertisers paid more and publishers received less:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The Google/Meta duopoly suck up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc). As ad revenues for web publishers cratered, the "ad load" on web pages went up. This set up a vicious cycle: increasing the number of ads decreases the number of readers, driving publishers to increase the ad-load even more to make up for the losses.
The major brake on this is ad-blocking. In a world with ad-blockers in it, publishers contemplating an increase in ad-load have to confront the possibility that they will induce ad-overload in their readers, who will install a blocker that stops them from seeing any ads:
Google has been looking to kill ad-blocking for a decade, and now they're on the verge of making it happen in Chrome, the dominant web browser they use to reinforce their search monopoly:
Google long ago did away with ad-blocking on mobile devices (reverse engineering an app is a felony, which means an app is just a web-page skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it). Part of Google's argument for killing ad-blocking for the web is that this puts the web on an even footing with apps – which is a very weird way to describe a race to the absolute bottom:
To top it all off, this decade has seen Google make a series of changes to its search prioritization that favored low-value shovelware sites over carefully researched, reliable alternatives. Search for product reviews and you're apt to get a "site reputation abuse" result from a once-reliable outlet like Forbes filled with useless and even dangerous reviews, which are ranked far above independently maintained, rigorous competitors:
This has only gotten worse with AI search, which preferentially draws from spam sites to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations for substandard, overpriced junk, at the expense of recommendations for good products:
It's not like Google doesn't have the ability to sort the good from the bad. Kagi.com is a $10/month paid search engine whose results are vastly superior to Google's. But Kagi doesn't have its own search index: instead, they rent access to Google's index, but apply their own (much smaller and less resourced) team's algorithm to rank the results for your queries. In other words, Google could deliver good search results, they just choose not to:
Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good." It refers to a counterfeit coin crisis in Tudor England, where people preferentially spent counterfeit money in order to make it someone else's problem; meanwhile, everyone hoarded their good coins. Soon, virtually all the money in circulation was bogus.
By downranking quality material in favor of low-effort spam, Google set up a web-wide version of Gresham's Law, where bad webpages drive out good ones, and since so many of those webpages contain product recommendations, they're greshaming the world of real products, too, so the bad is driving out the good there, too.
This is the problem that Gemini search summaries solve: in its role as the web's most important gatekeeper, Google remade them as an ad-festooned cesspit of garbage text and cynical shovelware sites. Now Google proposes to wipe out the publishers whose content they stripmined by breaking the web's bargain: that search engines are symbiotic with publishers. Google has turned fully parasitic, sucking the last drops of juice out of the open web before discarding its husk.
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“The fact that we can never escape viewing the world from somewhere is not a regrettable limitation, since there is nothing that the world is like from nowhere. There may be, however, something that the world is like for knowers as such or for rational agents as such, and the quest for “objectivity” — that is, the surmounting of more local and contingent perspectives — is understood as the quest to view the world from these more necessary and inescapable points of view. Practical reasons that can only be found in the perspective of rational agents as such or human beings as such are “objective” if we have no choice but to occupy those perspectives.”
— Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity
Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.
Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).
Dozens of fighter jets accompanied by a dozen of tankers are active over the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. (T-38A is a miscoded KC-46 tanker)
They escorted a lone tanker through the strait without using the Iranian proscribed route, the tanker instructed to traverse the strait under US orders.
Iran will retaliate for this breach of the ceasefire and US airstrikes by targeting US bases in the region.
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