Nick Hall
Computerer, lapsed poet, hardworking Pittsburgh taxpayer
- Reposted by Nick Hall4 Black journalists have been kidnapped by the federal government
- Reposted by Nick HallSTEPHEN MILLER: so you've gone through all of these files and made sure there's nothing incriminatory about Trump or his friends and associates, right KASH PATEL: *standing in line at berghain dressed like the Ikea monkey* oh yeah definitely
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- Reposted by Nick HallThe largest Trump superPAC donor so far this cycle is the president of OpenAI
- Reposted by Nick HallYES THAT'S WHAT MANY OF US HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS AND THATS WHY WE DON'T USE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
- Reposted by Nick HallNew from 404 Media: ICE's facial recognition app, which the agency is using to decide who to detain and deport, misidentified a woman. Twice. ICE says results of the app are definitive and override a birth certificate; obviously this case shows the app is inaccurate www.404media.co/ices-facial-...
- Reposted by Nick HallHoly shit. Renee Good was alive when the bystander physician asked to check her pulse. She was alive when ICE refused to let him help. She was alive when they told him “I don’t care.” www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...
- Reposted by Nick HallThe actual story is that a family of American citizens trying to evacuate from a neighborhood that ICE had made unsafe, and then ICE tossed munitions into the car, causing three kids to be hospitalized and a six month old to stop breathing. DHS called the family “radical agitators”
- Feels weird now when an articulate and emotionally stable adult talks to all of us
- Reposted by Nick HallWhile there is anecdotal evidence of AI affecting layoffs, the macroeconomic data does not support this narrative fortune.com/2026/01/07/a...
- The behavior of trump lackeys only ever makes sense if you assume a web of disciplining blackmail
- Reposted by Nick HallYou should do a quick Google search about the Block family and their connection to Donald Trump and why they fired a bunch of good folks at the PG during Trump 1 and you'll have a clear explanation for why they wrote about how much money they're losing
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- Reposted by Nick Hall✨ 5 reasons to support our Year End Campaign: 1.) To Make PGH's Streets Safer 2.) To Support Community Events 3.) To Power Education & Free Resources 4.) To Create a Sustainable Transportation Network that Works for Everyone 5.) To Complete the Puzzle! More here 👇 bikepgh.org/2025/11/30/5...
- Reposted by Nick HallI don’t know how it works at the New York Times, but my editors at The Guardian would never let me publish this if they knew that I was one of the elites who spent time with Epstein. And if I published it without telling them, I would be out of a job.
- Reposted by Nick Hall1/ At bargaining yesterday, @propublica.org management said that they should have 100% discretion to replace workers with AI and would not commit to labeling future AI-generated content.
- The idea that equality (the powerless getting some power) involves redress (giving the powerless some power) is apparently beyond the comprehension of the new york times' marquee conservative intellectual
- Movie you’ve watched more than six times, hard mode (no Star Wars or Trek, no Pixar, no LOTR, no Disney, no Marvel) [The self-referential pick; I have like five of these.]
- Yes to this. Code is the exception that proves the rule that machine learning is not that interesting or important. It will finally realize the dream of Hyperscript! Who cares! Maybe that’ll be a big deal to future digital economies. Maybe not. But LLMs aren’t about to replace all the knowledge work
- If you care about local news or workers’ rights, please consider subscribing to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette through this letter writing campaign. Make your subscription conditional on the publisher’s respect for the contracts they sign with their workers. actionnetwork.org/letters/subs...
- Underrated possible input to the facism these days imo is that over the last decade a bunch of insecure dudes got swole off podcast-scam roids and lead-protein shakes www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...
- Which is not to judge those dudes! They just need safe access to their gender-affirming care
- The lost children of STEM discovered liberal arts education and, shockingly, assume they invented it from first principles
- Reposted by Nick HallWe are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
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- Subtly downgrade a band: Dinosaur III
- I am medium, I contain a multitude or two.
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- At least a 50% chance both of them have no such ideas and are just jockeying for position to mine the moon
- Reposted by Nick Hall@albomp.bsky.social @australianlabor.bsky.social The people of Gaza have the right to receive aid through their own territorial waters even under occupation, and the Coalition ship has the right to free passage in international waters to reach the people of Gaza, www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel....
- Reposted by Nick Hall*taps mic* Nate Bronze
- This and: I do not think that billionaires exist. They just want us to think that they do. There is no such thing as a billion dollars. A billion dollars does not exist in the way that three hundred dollars exists in my checking account. There are not checking accounts with a billion dollars in them
- A billion dollars was never hidden in someone's home. Saddam Hussein seems to have tried. He was a very willful guy and he only managed to cram in 650 million dollars. No one can spend a billion dollars in the sense that you or I spend money. It can only be "spent" on investments; not used, morphed.
- A billion dollars can't be spent, so a billion dollars is fake, so people claiming to have a billion dollars don't. If you "have" a billion dollars, what you actually have is an unelected office overseeing a chunk of the whole economy. A billion dollars has nothing to do with a normal idea of money.
- Reporting what an llm "says" about "itself" as fact, like you were quoting a person, is very weird. Even if you attribute the claim to "an autonomous spokesagent for Claude, Inc," it implies intent and accountability in an organization that isn't there
- Reposted by Nick HallIt’s August! Where is van??? Stop by to pick up birth control pills, Plan B, condoms, lube, pregnancy tests, Narcan, test strips, buttons, stickers, & zines for yourself and all your besties.
- Today I learned a 2020 randomized controlled trial showed that interview code tests largely filter out people who somehow weirdly find job interviews stressful par.nsf.gov/servlets/pur...
- Kind of maps that tech hiring has selected for people with low social-emotional sensitivity for decades. Might explain some of the fascism
- Reposted by Nick HallReporting on the way conservatives planned to promote Prager U while they were defunding PBS would have been useful context for readers and the general public.
- Shouldn't feed the (even imo sincere and sometimes helpful) troll but alas LLMs don't raise this question, nor should it be raised so trivially or at all. Because the answer is then trivial or immoral What's special about us is just that we are us, making the question kind of misanthropic bullshit
- We are special because we originate the idea of specialness, and of us. 'Us' often means 'the special ones' An unsatisfying answer! And so it's a moral hazard to ask. The us raising it prompts the answer that some other us isn't so special, which will of course become the most marginalized of us
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- Harvard professors "debating" yarvin, reporters engaging in technofascist groupchats and tech guys sincerely discussing ai as though it's an app not an ideology are all imo making the same mistake. They miss a simple, inherent exception to the free exchange of ideas: "Ideas" against free exchange.
- E.g. someone "arguing," like yarvin and rufo do, for the "proposition" that some claim is invalid due to its origins in the woke cathedral rather than its content, is not actually arguing. There is no proposition. They are deploying the aesthetics of argument to assert unfalsifiable slurs as facts.
- Not that there's always anything wrong with that! In dumb fights between real people it's cathartic, and their own business. But harvard and other powerful institutions of mass attention are letting this artificial intelligentsia (as Ruha Benjamin describes it) hide among real debates, enabling it.
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View full threadRealizing my point here was a sort of tactical extension of this: www.offmessage.net/p/how-libera...
- Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Failed poet: Can we explain together this gap in the earth where we sit, as though it enclosed no longer any land but exposed us recklessly to each other under such light as was for summer days but we capture in pale cylinders to nurture, kill?
- Social media did what dumb '90s futurist wanted the internet to, "disintermediate" culture, which is in fact bad in a plural society. US culture runs on subsidiarity. Regulating guns and cars in cities is not like to doing it elsewhere. Old rural folks don't need to hear about Drag Story Hour. Etc.
- I was also recently forced to post a correction to a metaphor for cheating in college with chatgpt (bsky.app/profile/inck...) The children are not even learning to extend the metaphors 😞
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- "What if a great piece of art is like a pearl: an irritant covered in a million attempts to make it go away?" That quote is from a paragraph begun by describing the adrenochrome conspiracy theory, and that is the least of the reasons I think you should read this
- Reposted by Nick HallIt’s time to reconsolidate a counterculture and politics against this shit. Science, art, medicine, poetry, philosophy as the beautiful life, the fullness of human civilization, that they want to destroy. Humanism, not cynicism, not slop, not tech “””nerd””” culture
- We are sacrificing these kids at the ai altar. Chatgpt isn't a power tool and its users aren't contractors. Its users are general contractors that don't have contracts with anyone or know how to build anything. Chatgpt is their subcontractor, who will get the job after the useless gc gets cut out.
- Reposted by Nick HallClear moment of panic from DHS as they realized that they were about to have TSA turn away over half a million people a day at airports. Regardless, if that many people are getting extra screenings, get to the airport EARLY.
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- "But" is doing a lot in this headline
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- Implement a 100% tariff and ruin a movie Fourteen Samurai
- I got one ticket in my eight years in nyc and it was for doing something that was not illegal in nyc. Nypd stopped me on my bike in the lower east side and wrote me a ticket for breaking a new york *state* law that was superseded by nyc law. According to the bicycle lawyer, this was common. Anyway
- This is an outrageous policy change. Also, if you’re gonna do this then you gotta do it for drivers, too right? Given those are obviously far far more dangerous vehicles. nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/05/02/p...
- Logged on to the bad website and finally addressed the most cyberpunk issue of concern to me. People angrily @ my account there in hindi because, as far as I can tell, my youthful internet handle is also the common acronym for the Karnataka and Kerala Committees of the Indian National Congress
- Reply guys emitting "but chatgpt searches for you idiot" is hilarious for this reason But even the more serious argument (that search-like affordances emerge from LLMs' scale and compression as sort of chaotic indices) misses that it redefines search beyond recognition to the end user, breaking it
- More concretely, web search isn't about finding information; it's about finding *citations* and information. It continues the basic chain of custody of information necessary to recorded knowledge from Works Cited to "well Jim said and he knows." LLMs are specifically powered by not doing citation.
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- Reposted by Nick Hall🚨BREAKING: Full Fourth Circuit DENIES Trump admin motion to stay order blocking Musk/DOGE access to personal data at Social Security Admin. Data will remain out of Musk/ DOGE’s hands. A BIG win for @democracyforward.org and its clients! Follow Democracy Docket for details. www.democracydocket.com
- Before the ai panic and the nft panic was the metaverse panic, and before that was the web3 panic, and I think a lot about how all together they are a decade-long mass-delusion-based marketing campaign for graphics processing units
- See I think we've been confusing the snake oil with the shit made out of it. Crypto, vr, ar and ai are elixers. The snake oil is GPUs, circuits for modeling worlds (multidimensional vectors) instead of minds (memory and logic), which prop up share prices post-Moore's Law and draw insane capex spend
- Not that GPUs don't do anything! I have enjoyed a video game or two. AR would be cool but I'm all set on dystopia rn. Snake oil was real (basically better fish oil) except when it wasn't, or didn't do what the salesman and his shills said. And then the bastards printed up new labels in the next town
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- "I like freedom. Let me drive my car" perfectly captures the myopia and idiocy of this culture. A driver in NYC is not free in any sense. They are literally rats controlled by colored lights in a maze
- Sometimes I think about a future where ICE has Enforced all the Immigration it can, and gets down to enforcing the Customs. And the law around imports is an inscrutable mess because tariffs are constantly being decreed, fluctuating and being carved out for friends of the regime
- There is a very prohibition-era world imaginable in my lifetime, but instead of booze creating violence it's everything, and instead of Eliot Ness versus Al Capone it's a masked, militarized national police force versus anyone who didn't pay the taxes and/or fealty. Imagine prohibition but backwards
- Just to be clear I DON'T think this is that likely, and I DO have the movie The Untouchables burned into my memory because it was in the box of VHS tapes that raised me But it feels possible, and is not very different from the reality in other countries I've lived in, primarily/ironically Venezuela
- Reposted by Nick Hallliterally only Teslas meet this standard www.kbb.com/car-news/stu...
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- Reposted by Nick HallThis op-ed points to an important and little-discussed aspect of the Trump administration's "anti-antisemitism" crackdown. In the name of protecting Jews, they are effectively claiming governmental right to determine who counts as Jewish at all, and therefore is worthy of government protection.
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- Mark Zuckerberg personally insisted that Facebook’s ai “companions” do sexual fantasy roleplay and be available to kids because he never got over failing to rip off Vine. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta...
