Brandon Downey
Infosec professional, photographer, math enthusiast, occasional augmented reality warlord. Peculiar but refined tastes in triangles, cinema, and cocktails. Some skill with Azad.
Signal: bdowney.23
Opinions are my own and not those of my employer
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- Just think about poor Claude and its temporary Golden Gate Bridge fixation, but way more racist.
- this has been blindingly obvious for over a decade and I’m going to go insane
- “Increasingly often, [Trump] ends up backing down and simply declaring a win. His opponents appear to be catching on.” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/u...
- I mean it's not just his Presidency ... But a President doing is terrifyingly destabilizing.
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- The most interesting part of mine was how *bland* it was. Like I've never had a more even ride from any driver (certainly myself, heh).
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- Keir teaches frolic is one of the four tempers.
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- Everybody except the NYT. :P
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- Country over car.
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- To be fair, I wouldn't want to fly out of LAX even Pre-Trump FAA. :P
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- This one I don't properly understand: Search tends to monetize well. Why are they trying to hide stuff? Am I missing something obvious?
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View full threadAt the same time, it tramples on any notion of fair use by producing a permanent Enclosure around content.
- Also (just my personal opinion) I think controlling training is never going to be super possible without a lot more authoritarian control of the web, and whatever system should look at commercialized outputs. Can we do that in such a way that only monopolies can afford to use these tools?
- I think this is in a nutshell why copyright is a bad system (at least as it exists today). Compulsory licensing gets you the spotify-ification of all content. Artists get pennies or fractions of fractions of a penny, and then the only people who can take action are big companies.
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- Hey, same as the US. :|
- As a security professional, this is literally insane from a signals intelligence and safety standpoint. Just looking past the overt grift & corruption, somebody at the NSA is looking at this and has started doing shots.
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- S3 of Severance gettin weird.
- TIL Megachurches have apps now. My wife: "Are they AI enhanced? Because if so they could call it 'Your Own Personal Jesus'". Couple it with that cryptocurrency for indulgences and NFT "relics" of the True Cross, and it's a billion dollar idea.
- Yeah, I was playing that little game where I imagine the worst version of things: 1. The pope says he wants an international treaty to regulate AI 2. Yudkowsky also wants this (hell he wants nukes to use on AI builders). He then concludes... 3. To stop the Basilisk, I must become a Catholic.
- Anyway, there was actually a story about one of the Open AI researchers burning an effigy of an unaligned AI. Can't wait for this to be the new iconoclasm.
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- Thiis is great, my wife and I were discussing this just today. Honestly can't wait. Also can't wait for Big Yud to convert to Catholicism because it becomes the only way to stop Big AI.
- LinkedIn.jpg
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- Every time I read LI influencers, I think of Jesse on Breaking Bad talking about the real baddies in the cartel having 'those dead eyes'. Similar energy here.
- "The direct line between making the Tesla brand toxic, pushing Tesla into bankruptcy, and bringing Elon Musk’s entire empire down around his ears makes this the perfect lever on which to push back against this unelected oligarch." - @niedermeyer.online #teslatakedown
- I can't make the protest tomorrow, so I finally sat down and wrote my argument for the #TeslaTakedown: it's not just a way to express anger, but a unique opportunity to take down a seemingly untouchable oligarch, who is in fact extremely vulnerable. niedermeyer.online/2025/05/09/t...
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View full threadIf you believe this, there would never have been the boycotts that marked the start of the American Revolution ("think of those employees of the British East India Company"), or apartheid companies in South Africa, or businesses with 'no blacks' signs in the 20th century here.
- If it helps, "Country over car".
- I want to encourage people to realize that most immigrants here illegally are effectively doing something less damaging to our society than someone speeding. Even if you think it's wrong, the punishment should fit the crime. But this....
- A man pulled up to a gas station to fill up his truck. ICE agents surrounded him and took him away. But his children were left behind. “They arrested someone,” witness said. “They left the children inside the truck.” www.sfgate.com/centralcoast...
- Folks, this movement *is working*. My wife & I are about to go to our tenth #teslatakedown. Every one feels like a better use of our time.
- You know who's got thousands of thumbs and is not staying home for a week? The #teslatakedown movement 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 www.businessinsider.com/tesla-model-...
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- I don't want people to think this means it's over: There was an already an interview with the White House's chief of staff who said DOGE wasn't leaving and Musk is one the phone every day with them just like he's still there. This ends when DOGE dies, Elon divests from Tesla, or (ideally) both.
- If you ever doubt liberty as a virtue that we ought to pursue as a society, look at this clip. Snatched off the street for writing an essay the administration didn't like, and locked up a thousand miles away from her home. And it took a MONTH for her to win her freedom.
- Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD candidate whose sudden arrest by federal immigration agents made national headlines, walked out of a Louisiana detention facility after a judge ordered her release. “Thank you for all the support and love,” she told supporters outside. trib.al/UkF8nkC
- I can't make the protest tomorrow, so I finally sat down and wrote my argument for the #TeslaTakedown: it's not just a way to express anger, but a unique opportunity to take down a seemingly untouchable oligarch, who is in fact extremely vulnerable. niedermeyer.online/2025/05/09/t...
- My wife and I are going to our 10th protest tomorrow. I love that is has a specific concrete goal: Ruin the world's richest man and an overt fascist. And it seems to be working. Both financially and psychologically. That first weekend on the news and looked like he would cry? I'm never stopping.
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- Man the comparison of cops with masks and protestors is not great either.
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- At least it's not in flash? Lol.
- My whole life Republicans have been warning us about an out of control, unaccountable federal government. They are never, ever beating the rap that they were just projecting. Or: "Some people study history *in order* to repeat it."
- The way we were treated at Delaney Hall is almost unbelievable. ICE shoved me, manhandled @repbonnie.bsky.social, and arrested Mayor Baraka. They disrespected us and tried to stop us from conducting the oversight we’re elected to do. But we’ll never back down in our fight for what is right.
- I like that it could be a headline describing a Civ game.
- literally every single one of these columns has been the most pathetic, mewling mess I have ever read in my life, and yet PEOPLE KEEP WRITING THEM www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/09/o...
- "Country over car" is what I've been telling those people.
- Even if you're not a Star Trek fan, Diane Duane is someone you should help. For one, I still spot Romulan spies based on the way they separate their food because of her.
- Friends, there;s no good way to give you this news (and I still so much watt to believe it's a terrible nightmare: but it's not.) Briefly: gone now, untimely, unexpectedly, and already so very much missed: @peter.petermorwood.com www.tumblr.com/dduane/78306...
- I went to a private Waldorf high school in the 2000s that was filled with the children of tech professionals - who explicitly wanted a lower-tech education for them. Many tech execs believe in careful exposure to tech for their kids, while also thinking AI teaching is fine for the great unwashed.
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- Note that in some (or even many) cases it's not that much cheaper. Instead we are seeing the trend because the chance at an extractive jackpot for tech companies who have traditionally not been in education is huge. They use monopoly profits or easy vc money to lobby the shit out of this idea.
- going to go full reddit atheist for a moment but at the end of the day any pope is still the pope of a horrific global religious institution
- Thanks I hate it. The best I can say is that even terrible things can improve under better management. Like maybe it should never exist, but as long as it's here....
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- When I started at Google in 2004, a month or two before IPO (~1600 people), I'd tell people: "I'm at a small startup in Mountain View". Technically true on both counts when viewed on the historic timeline. :P
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- It's not blasphemy; I enjoy lasagna on the regular.
- I don't think it can be overstated how much things are what they are because elites had their brains exposed to criticism on the internet and responded with this (which applies to them, not you, of course. you are a pig person who should shut up ). www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/o...
- Wow what a line. I want to follow them around with a shame bell.
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- Chair contango.
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- Forget klout, we need a social currency for spice consumption and maybe even survival. "My god she's got a spice score of 72.3!" It needs a catchier name though, and also a social network with pic where I judge people for ordering white people tacos.
- This guy seems to think gay people are people, thinks the poor and the working people deserve rights, and he thinks you should stick your thumb in the eye of fash-y latecomers to the faith that is supposed venerate the son of a carpenter. More than I could ask for.
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View full threadGet out of her with that shit. My spiritual ancestors were the Puritans who thought that kings were a sin, and the people who separated you from God with weapons, walls, or wealth were the sinners. So I don't know much about popes, but this this guy will tell JD Vance he's wrong?
- Good enough.
- I say this as someone who was raised by crazy Southern Baptists who on more than one occasion baptized people in the bayou behind the church. Tthey believed in a literal rapture, gog and magog, all that, but they also taught that everyone was a child of God.
- Imagine having the poverty of spirit to suggest the universal has a personal, human-like all-powerful all-knowing God, and *empathy is a sin*. Like dreaming up your own fan fiction for the universe, and it's some shitty Mary Sue garbage where JD Vance is the main character.
- the entire message of Christianity is that God Himself died in an act of suicidal empathy with his wayward, undeserving creations and that you yourself have a personal obligation to emulate this. american protestantism is literally satanic
- The tradcath stuff seems to be more or less the same but with more formalism.
- #wokepope (complimentary)
- So has the new pope had Malort?
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- Ok, please forgive me I just kept seeing headlines and it felt like some made up story that media kept resharing, but I'll be damned here is the judge. :| www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr9b...
- the original trilogy was really not political unless you’re seven
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View full threadthe only line in the entire original trilogy with any real political resonance is “I’ve just made a deal that will keep the empire out of here forever,” prove me wrong
- You are confusing *smart* political resonance for *any* political resonance. The Ewoks are metaphor for the Vietnam War, and the Empire actually got American accents in the third movie. You don't have to like it, and don't even have to think it's subtle, but it definitely is there.
- I've been super busy, but I've also been trying the company that did it, or whether it was in fact a hoax. It seems like it would be so legally problematic (even for America) that I have a hard time. A lot of 'just so' elements to the story.
