TGIF! [DOT 10/4/26]

OK people, this is not a drill. It’s 11:23 PM, I’ve taken a gummy and my laptop battery is at 18%… Can I get the DOT done before I fall asleep or my computer does?


Because of course

US defense official overseeing AI reaped millions selling xAI stock after Pentagon entered agreement with company
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/09/pentagon-ai-xai-emil-michael


Keep it up ladies!

710,000 fewer babies were born last year in U.S. compared with two decades ago
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5779627/birthrate-united-states-babies-immigration


Middle East crisis live: Trump casts doubt on Iran war ceasefire over continued closure of strait of Hormuz
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/apr/10/iran-war-live-updates-trump-ceasefire-strait-hormuz-israel-lebanon-hezbollah


Normal thing to do

Trump news at a glance: Melania Trump’s weird disavowal of Epstein is getting weirder
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/09/trump-news-at-a-glance-latest-updates-today


More stuff that’s totally normal

Ready to rumble? Hunter Biden challenges Trump's sons to cage match reut.rs/4eecYH7

Reuters (@reuters.com) 2026-04-10T01:50:18Z

That gummy is hitting…


Have a great day!

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20 Comments

  1. …so…he doesn’t remember his yesterdays

    He literally said *yesterday* that he was considering a “joint venture” to help Iran charge people for using the Strait. He said the day before that he didn’t care if they made a little money off of it.Someone give pawpaw his dementia meds.

    Angry (@angrystaffer.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T22:10:52.449Z

    …but…possibly…some people do remember theirs & felt the need to try to get out ahead of any reminders?

    Follow this thread.Most likely, and of course, all speculation right now, this is why Melania did her 6 min statement today.Amanda Ungaro was brought here as a 17-year-old model. She flew to NYC on Epstein's private plane. 1/2

    Wajahat Ali (@wajali.bsky.social) 2026-04-10T06:53:48.979Z

    (…broadly the dynamic that came up in a leavitt-adjacent context not so long ago)

    Paolo Zampolli, the modeling agent who allegedly introduced Melania to Trump in 1998, fathered Ungaro's child. They were engaged in an ugly custody battle. Zampolli leaned on ICE and his Trump connections to DEPORT Ungaro.Zampolli also allegedly represented Melania when she was a model…

    Wajahat Ali (@wajali.bsky.social) 2026-04-10T06:55:13.852Z

      • Okay, thanks, RIP. I was wondering about the whole Melania business. So let’s see:

        1. Epstein ran a sex ring, but it wasn’t exclusively children. As his victims aged, he provided them to others, like Elon Musk’s brother. This generated both cash and blackmail opportunities which generated more cash.
        2. He frequently located victims through “modeling,” which I think was largely bullshit (lot of scammers in that space). Trump certainly lent his “name” to those efforts and was likely a partner and active participant in illegal activities.
        3. Epstein “introduced” Melania to Trump. She contracted to provide services, one of which included Barron.
        4. The clear implication is that Melania was “working” for Epstein. So I think that’s why she is angry at Hunter Biden. The more people talk about it, the more people connect those dots.

        Do I have this right?

        • I forgot to add that Zampolli was also clearly part of the sex ring that included Epstein and Trump.

        • …sounds about right?

          …given some of the overlapping “interests” in epstein’s orbit…the question of which she might fit the description of “representing” has always been a source of curiosity…not like she’s shown the sort of interest in being first lady that hillary did…or michelle for that matter, albeit those are pretty different

          …so…reads like “don’t talk about me” with a side of “this should play if I go to court”…maybe she has stuff in common with her husband after all?

          • it’s funny because there’s “getting ahead of a story” and then there’s “lighting the biggest possible flare to let the world know a bad story about you is coming soon” and this is absolutely the latter.

            It’s also a little late to be like “I don’t know her” when we have emails of you, in fact, knowing her. And a lot of questions about your own “genius” visa!

            • It’s almost textbook Streisand Effect. But it’s also coupled with the weird Trumpian conviction that simply pronouncing something makes it true, regardless of reality. “I’ve told you there’s nothing to see here so by the power of my imperial word, no one may see this any longer.”

              I’m not sure if there’s a term for that, but there should be.

  2. …on an altogether different tangent…this guy sets this out (over several thousand words) pretty clearly…& it articulates a number of the ways in which it seems like there’s a distinct difference between the people who say these things code better than people now…& the ones who think that entire framing misses very nearly all the points?

    https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/

    …meanwhile

    Today, I got messages from 3 different devs at 3 different large tech companies (1,000+ devs each). "tokenmaxxing" is happening inside all of them.Why?Because all of them measure either token usage, or surface metrics like DX's TrueThroughput that reward complex code!

    Gergely Orosz (@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com) 2026-04-08T15:57:57.402Z

    Gittensor is paying crypto for merged OSS PRs and it’s generating slop contributions to repos listed on their platform without maintainer consent.If you maintain an open source project, it's probably worth checking if you’re listed and requesting removal: gittensor.io/repositories

    Savannah Ostrowski (@savannah.dev) 2026-03-30T19:09:41.896Z

    …the blog at one point describes a point at which software that seems superficially to do the thing the request to the LLM wanted & the flaws in the thing don’t show up until the massive data breach or whatever…& that’s been doing a sword of damocles thing for a while…but the point way earlier on about methodology in which self-reported productivity gains get you a data set in which people both say it’s sped everything up & it’s better that way…& that fixing it has more than reversed those gains in terms of hours lost to recovering from merging changes that break shit & the like…so…anyway…dude might have the odd receipt in their back pocket?

    I saw that NYT bit about LLMs being great at extracting and converting data and building an app, and I can't help thinking: "For you, the day an entire data-browsing app was built quickly before your eyes was the greatest software experience of your life. But for me, it was a Tuesday. In 2008."

    James Bennett (@b-list.org) 2026-02-19T00:39:46.274Z

    And I mean that literally. Here's an example (archive link): web.archive.org/web/20080304…That took two developers (one frontend, one backend) two days from "reporter comes downstairs and says they have data tables in Word docs, what could we do with that" to being live on the site.

    James Bennett (@b-list.org) 2026-02-19T00:40:14.792Z

    So when I say I've taken a look at these tools and I'm just not super impressed by them, it's because of things like this. OK, your big parlor trick that gets literal national headlines is that you can quickly do something today that could already be done roughly as quickly twenty years ago.

    James Bennett (@b-list.org) 2026-02-19T00:44:37.502Z

    …& they seem to think that the actual improvements reported by people invested in integrating the stuff seem like they have more to do with previously un-adopted but long-recommended process stuff…not the code-spewing automata?

  3. In Canada news, another Conservative MP jumped to the Libs. Marilyn Gladu… This one is a bit mind blowing because Gladu is a terrible person and very hardcore Con. It would be like Margerine Toilet Gangrene jumping ship to the Dims.

    Are things that bad in Con land that even one of the most diehard horrible people in Parliament jumped ship?

    I thought PP’s charm offensive would be more on charm than on the offensive, but he also sent out a self evaluation form to all his MPs on what the MPs bring to the Conservative Party which is fucking hilarious as he’s the one who got rolled by the Libs after a 24 point lead in the polls three months before the election turned ugly for them.

    I would not be surprised if a former highschool classmate (and well documented piece of shit) ends up running for the leadershit when the knives come out for PP. Kyle should have retired to being a corporate weasel lawyer, but did a PP after he got unelected in my riding and ran in a mostly white angry people area north of me in the last election. He is one of the laziest MPs ever from what I read, but for some reason PP liked him and elevated him to “labor” critic.

    • Y’know, just to annoyingly bring things back to the US, I don’t understand why more Republicans aren’t doing that here, and changing parties. Or at least going independent. They are careening mindlessly into an electoral bloodbath.

      There’s been some desultory attempts to place sleeper agents in the Democratic Party, which Democrats have fallen for in the past (Manchin, Sinema, Fetterman) but they don’t seem to be trying very hard to come up with good fakes (Nazi tattoos, for God’s sake).

      Why aren’t more of them trying to flee the sinking ship? Mostly they’re just resigning. I guess they’ve all racked up “fuck you” money, but it’s still weird.

      • I don’t know. She jumped to the Libs because of strong leadership… which no one can accuse Cuck or Hack of being that.

      • The simplest answer is that they really are True Believers, but some are just too embarrassed to say so. It’s like my friend who keeps calling himself a libertarian, but is in reality a hardcore republican.

        • I’ve got one of those friends too, although we haven’t talked since the first Trump administration.

      • Money. There’s basically zero money in going left (even from far-right to center-right) whereas there is always money from going left to right, even far-left to center-left.

        If these people wanted to signal they’re “not like that” but stay on the gravy train, they’d retire and … oh, what’s that? A record number of Republican reps are retiring? Oh. Huh.

    • i was not at all surprised that another crossed the floor because carney is basically doing to canada what ford is doing to ontario (yay for privatised water now, eh?!) as the biggest wolf in sheepcloth since bob rae.

      i was surprised it was gladu, though. she spent two years doing nothing but “verb the noun” in question period ffs. the only liberal thing about her is farscy’s use of the only word that accurately describes her.

  4. So both the President and the White House post an uncensored video of a woman being murdered with a hammer, and it’s only like the 5th weirdest thing they did yesterday?

    • I mean, yeah, a Thursday in Trump’s hellscape.

      I’m so fucking tired of this.

      • Me too. Fucking hate him and everyone associated with him.

    • …guess we’re just retiring the idea of “beyond the pale” after that…maybe he needed something to take the edge off iran’s latest Lego lambasting?

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