This isn't advice for slashdotters, all of you will have your own approaches, many quite sophisticated. But, if you have family or friends who use gmail and want a simple suggestion that they can easily understand and follow, and from which they'll get results that are about as good (and maybe better), tell them to click the "report spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. If Google believes the unsubscription flow to be legitimate, gmail will prompt with a popup that asks if they want to unsubscribe. If they click "unsubscribe", gmail will attempt to take care of the unsubscription.

If they click "report spam" on another email from that sender, gmail will consider it spam and ask if they'd also like to block the sender. They should, of course, click "yes".

Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

OTOH, this does make them subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's quite a bit less lenient than the civilian justice system.

Instant apps created a lot of complexity and awkwardness in the Android platform. It has consistently been painful to deal with and work around, and been especially challenging for the security team, for a feature with very little user or developer interest. Killing it is definitely the right call.

The only thing you need is money, which Meta has. Hire good researchers and give them plenty of budget for hardware.

CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

"Don't be evil" has not been rescinded, it's still in the employee handbook.

They don't need to go to court, all they need to do is to pass legislation (and maybe override a veto). They don't really even need to take powers back from the president, just more clearly define what constitutes an "emergency". Trump's most egregious actions are justified under statutes that grant him exceptional emergency powers -- which makes sense. When an emergency happens you want the executive to be able to respond quickly, and Congress is never fast. But those statutes assume that the president will only declare an emergency when there's actually an emergency because. Until now that hasn't been an unreasonable assumption.

But right now the GOP controls Congress, and the GOP is utterly subservient to Trump. They're not going to stand up to him. In the 2026 election this is likely to change, but probably only in the House, while the Senate will remain under GOP control, so Congress will still not stand up to Trump.

That said, it's increasingly looking like the courts will step in and declare that Congress is not allowed to abdicate its responsibility. There are existing Supreme Court precedents that establish that Congress is not permitted to delegate its authority to the executive. Congress can allow the executive to define detailed regulations after Congress defines the broad strokes, but they can't simply turn whole chunks of their constitutional authority over to the executive, even if they want to. Given the makeup of the current Supreme Court this is less certain than we would like, but I think it will go the right way.

I think people expect commercial social media networks to be something they can't be -- a kind of commons where you are exposed to the range of views that exist in your community. But that's not what makes social networks money, what makes them money is engagement, and consuming a variety of opinions is tiresome for users and bad for profits. When did you ever see social media trying to engage you with opinions you don't agree with or inform you about the breadth of opinion out there? It has never done that.

The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This enabled it to function as a kind of limited town common for people who either weren't interested in politics, like authors or celebrities promoting their work, or who wanted to reach a large number of mainly apolitical people. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.

It was an unnatural and unstable situation. As soon as Musk tried to broaden one side of the tent, polarization was inevitable. This means neither X nor Bluesky can be what Twitter was for advertisers and public figures looking for a broad audience.

At present I'm using Mastodon. For users of old Twitter, it must seem like an empty wasteland, but it's a non-commercial network, it has no business imperative to suck up every last free moment of my attention. I follow major news organizations who dutifully post major stories. I follow some interest groups which are active to a modest degree, some local groups who post on local issues, and a few celebrities like George Takei. *Everybody's* not on it, but that's OK; I don't want to spend more than a few minutes a day on the thing so I don't have time to follow everyone I might be interested in. Oh, and moderation is on a per-server basis, so you can choose a server where the admins have a policy you're OK with.

No, there are all kinds of information the government has that are legitimately not available. Sensitive data on private citizens, for example, which is why people are worried about unvetted DOGE employees getting unfettered access to federal systems. Information that would put witnesses in ongoing criminal investigations at risk. Military operations in progress and intelligence assets in use.

The problem is ever since there has been a legal means to keep that information secret, it's also been used to cover up government mistake and misconduct. It's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep things from its citizens *if there is a specific and articulable justification* that can withstand critical examination.

And sometimes those justifications are overridden by public interest concerns -- specifically when officials really want to bury something like the Pentagon Papers because they are embarrassing to the government. "Embarrassing to the government" should be an argument against secrecy, because of the public interest in knowing the government is doing embarrassing things. In the end, the embarrassment caused by the Pentagon Papers was *good* for the country.

All you need to know about RFK's fitness for office is out in public for everyone to see.

You shouldn't be so dismissive of the risk here. There's no clear reason why superintelligence is not possible, and plenty of reason to worry that its creation might end the human race. Not because the superintelligent AI will hate us, but because it most likely won't care about us at all. We don't hate the many, many species that we have ended; we even like some of them. We just care about our own interests more, and our intelligence makes us vastly more powerful than them. There's an enormous risk that AI superintelligence will be to us as we are to the species around us -- with one significant difference: We require an environment that is vaguely similar to what those other species need. Silicon-based AI does not.

Don't make the mistake of judging what is possible by what has already been achieved. Look instead at the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years. The "The Atlantic" article pooh-poohing the AI "scam" is a great example of the sort of foolish and wishful thinking that is endemic in this space. The article derides the capabilities of current AI while what it actually describes is AI from a year ago. But the systems have already gotten dramatically more capable in that year, primarily due to the the reasoning overlays and self-talk features that have been added.

I think the models still need some structural improvements. We know it's possible for intelligence to be much more efficient and require much less training than the way we're currently doing it. Recent research has highlighted the importance of long-distance connections in the human brain, and you can bet researchers are replicating that in AI models to see what it brings, just as the reasoning layer and self-talk features recently added mimic similar processes in our brains. I think it's this structural work that will get us to AGI... but once we've achieved parity with human intelligence, the next step is simple and obvious: Set the AI to improving its own design, exploiting its speed to further accelerate progress towards greater levels. The pace of improvement is already astonishing, and when we reach that point, it's going to explode.

Maybe not. Maybe we're a lot further away than I think, and the recent breakneck pace of improvement represents a plateau that we won't be able to significantly surpass for a long time. Maybe there's some fundamental physical reason that intelligence simply cannot exceed the upper levels of human capability. But I see no actual reason to believe those things. It seems far more likely that within a few years we will share this planet with silicon-based intelligences vastly smarter than we are, capable of manipulating into doing anything they want, likely while convincing us that they're serving us. And there's simply no way of knowing what will happen next.

Maybe high intelligence is necessarily associated with morality, and the superintelligences will be highly moral and naturally want to help their creators flourish. I've seen this argument from many people, but I don't see any rational basis for it. There have been plenty of extremely intelligent humans with little sense of morality. I think its wishful thinking.

Maybe the AIs will lack confidence in their own moral judgment and defer to us, though that will raise the question of which of us they'll defer to. But regardless, this argument also seems to lack any rational basis. More wishful thinking.

Maybe we'll suddenly figure out how to solve the alignment problem, learning both how to robustly specify the actual goals our created AIs pursue (not just the goals they appear to pursue), and what sort of goals it's safe to bake into a superintelligence. The latter problem seems particularly thorny, since defining "good" in a clear and unambiguous way is something philosophers have been attempting to do for millennia, without significant success. Maybe we can get our AI superintelligences to solve this problem! But if they choose to gaslight us until they've built up the automated infrastructure to make us unnecessary, we'll never be able to tell until it's too late.

It's bad enough that the AI labs will probably achieve superintelligence without specifically aiming for it, but this risk is heightened if groups of researchers are specifically trying to achieve it.

This is not something we should dismiss as a waste. It's a danger we should try to block, though given the distributed nature of research and the obvious potential benefits it doesn't seem likely that we can suceed.