I'm worried that Trump and Musk are going to become sensitive to the quantity of mockery and shortchange their delicious feud. What if they rein it in just to end our fun? On brand, I guess.

1. haha, f you: Major Companies Abandon Law Firms That Signed Deals with Trump: Report.

2. Depressing but unsurprising: Texas' undocumented college students no longer qualify for in-state tuition

3. Trump threatening Columbia's accreditation. I mean, weren't they the poster child for capitulation?

I mean, this is just a delicious headline: How this Microsoft-backed billion-dollar London startup made 700 engineers sitting in India pose as AI tool.

How freaked out are you by DOGE scraping all the federal data they possibly could?

Here are the scenarios I can picture:
1. It confirms a bunch of diagnoses/conditions/situations that they had suspected due to metadata, but now they can sharpen metadata tools and the underlying panopticon of information. It also gets them some raw data and connections that they hadn't had, due to people being off social media altogether and/or very low tech.
2. It allows them to train AI on all this data.

Both of those are gross and disturbing in a high level way, mostly on the level of being anti-competitive and anti-privacy. They're not disturbing in a "someone's life is getting materially wrecked in the next year" kind of way, though.

Am I missing some obvious danger?

Pokey just got his first smart phone, to commemorate graduation from 8th grade, and it's refreshing just to re-see how goddamned amazing this technology is. Granted, he's using it to mostly watch cat IG videos and play Cookie Run Kingdom, but also to stay closer with his friends and to send cute videos to me.

One of the criticisms of phones that's always fallen flat for me is the idea that phones separate us and lead to weaker social relationships. They also strengthen relationships! I'm much better at staying in touch with people now! (I mean, I also get the way in which the criticism is true: we do have a diminished urge to see people in person if you can scratch some of that itch with a quick text message.)