James Talarico is a special candidate. Just watched this video of his rally in Plano. Feeling optimistic seeing that crowd in the Dallas suburbs. 🇺🇸

I don’t usually repeat all the little deploy notes from news.micro.blog, but I’m especially happy about fixing video playback in the timeline. It has bugged me for a while that the aspect ratio or dimensions get wonky briefly when clicking play. Much better now!

Catching up on the foldable iPhone rumors ahead of next week’s announcement… Kind of bummed it’s called Ultra. Fold or Duo could’ve been great. Maybe at $2k, they needed a more serious name.

I didn’t see Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video until the early 1990s, a few years after it was produced. I was pretty struck by it. It has taken a few decades, but we’re basically there now: OpenAI’s Astra intro video.

Bernie Sanders is pretty freaked out about the Hugging Face hack. From a quote on Politico:

Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results.

Uh, cataclysmic? An earthquake is cataclysmic. The hack on Hugging Face, while quite bad, didn’t hurt anyone. Working on stronger safety measures is the right response and that appears to be what OpenAI has done.

Fun teaser from OpenAI on X (sigh) about Astra’s presumably imminent release. I guess it’s going to be called GPT-6. I’m working on Micro.blog improvements today, like always, but have my eyes on the wider social web for this release, so my posts will probably be a bit AI-heavy today. Apologies. 🤖

Part of Kawhi’s statement after the NBA investigation into the Clippers. Sort of a non-apology apology:

Integrity and respect for this game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle…

I feel like the punishment is very lopsided against the Clippers. No first-round picks for 5 years. 🏀

Firefox adds a global AI opt-out checkbox:

Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle.

Kind of similar to Micro.blog’s AI checkbox, but the Firefox version is more complicated, allowing control of various AI-related features.

Weird AI ordering system at the Panda Express drive-thru. I’d love to know what model they use. It was a little flaky (“please review the order on this screen…” but the screen showed an ad).

People always say they don’t want AI shoved everywhere. I think that’s partly because it’s used so poorly.

From an article about George W. Bush in The New Yorker:

For Bush, painting is a way to say what he can’t say, to express feelings that include rejection, frustration, and anger, even as he abides by his official discipline of silence.

I couldn’t have been more against George W. Bush in the late 1990s and 2000s. In the Trump world, I’ve become more sympathetic to him — as a human being, at least, if not on policy. He has also become quite a good painter.