Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

25059 Followers 429 Following

journalist / co-founder @404media.co signal: sam.404 (sensitive comms) sam@404media.co (everything else) complain about the paywall, catch a block

joseph saying "you just wait. I'll be the one laughing"
Lillard was able to live outside the iron lung. In her healthiest years, she climbed in only to sleep, about nine hours at night. Her time in the iron lung was a respite for her one working lung. Lillard always loved animals. She rescued dogs and lizards. She was artistic and created hundreds of works of art and wrote poetry over the years. She fell in love and married twice. She met her current husband, Baha Seleh, in 2005 in a Yahoo chat room. Seleh is from Egypt. He moved to Oklahoma last year to be with Lillard. They married in February.
an ai generated posted that says "GET A/C AND STOP COOKING YOURSELF" with a picture of a man inside an oven, cooking himself I guess
microsoft 365 telling me my storage is 7410% full
a photo of my ring light
POV you're kylie hoisting a cat around
nws map showing a heat wave across the us this week
But with all the world’s literature as its training data, why do LLMs seem to default so often to the lighthouse? It comes down to how model makers try to safety-align and sanitize their outputs. “We found many stories in WildChat are not safe for work. This led us to hypothesize that models going through alignment are preferring a small slice of WildChat stories, like a bottleneck,” Hamilton said. “It isn't that Elias stories are frequent, but that they're just so safe.” He said the researchers plan to explore this theory further in future research.
spidermans pointing meme
We wanted to let you know about changes to your Google One Premium plan. These updates include changes to usage limits included with your subscription and your plan name. What’s changing starting today, Jun 8, 2026: • Updated plan name: Your new plan is now called Google AI Plus, and you’ll still enjoy the same 2 TB of storage and other premium benefits. • Usage limits in the Gemini app: For the Gemini app, we’re introducing compute-based usage limits that factor in the complexity of your prompt, the features you use, and the length of your chat. Your limit refreshes every 5 hours until you reach your weekly limit. As an AI Plus subscriber, you’ll enjoy a 2x higher usage limit than non-subscribers. • AI credits: The product-based usage limit model is also rolling out to other products, starting with Flow and Antigravity. While 200 AI credits will no longer be included as a benefit in your base plan each month, the new usage limit model we are introducing should allow you to maintain the same experience you are used to. To learn more about how to use AI credits, please visit our Help Center.
🚨BREAKING NEWS 🚨 EMU Has Been Struck By A Vehicle Salisbury Bypass - Salisbury, MD We are sad to report that the EMU was just struck by a vehicle on the Salisbury Bypass. The EMU was hit between St. Lukes Road and Snow Hill Road. 🔵 Law Enforcement Update 1:46 PM - Maryland State Police are on the scene. The Emu got up and is running on the bypass towards Snow Hill Road. 🔵 Law Enforcement Update 2:00 PM - A trooper has done an amazing job, and believe it or not, he has captured the bird! I kid you not, they have it detained and under arrest using a dog's leash! You can't even make this stuff up. They are now attempting to contact the owner to come get the bird! The good news is the bird is not injured, just tired from being on the run, according to the trooper! 🔵 Law Enforcement Update 3:09 PM - The Emu has been reunited with his owner. All MSP Troopers are clear. Again, great ending to the story!
OpenAI has said publicly that it recognizes that longer chat sessions introduce more risk to the users’ mental health. “We have learned over time that these safeguards can sometimes be less reliable in long interactions: as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model’s safety training may degrade,” the company wrote in 2025. It introduced popups nudging users to take breaks, but that popup, the researchers note, poses a disingenuous set of options: either “keep chatting” or select “this was helpful.” There’s no route out of this popup that lets users say it wasn’t helpful, or that they’re taking a break for any other reason. “Interface designers may use design tools to make certain interactions easier and more ‘frictionless’ than others, pushing alternatives choices to the background and manipulating users into choosing one option over another,” the researchers wrote.
a companion app called Cute AI begs users not to leave the chat, giving them the choice between “no problem” and “still leave cruelly.”
The Headway spokesperson claimed that the response from users to the new requirements has been “mostly positive.” But providers I spoke to said they’re concerned and considering leaving the platform because of it. One provider I spoke to, who is a psychotherapist and doesn’t prescribe medication but received emails from Headway informing them of the impending changes anyway, told me they feel “frankly afraid” because there’s no option to opt-out other than severing care, especially for patients. “When I initially got the email indicating that they would be rolling out biometric scanning, my stomach dropped,” they said. “The email indicated that they would start with prescribers and their clients and then move onto everyone else. My mind started racing, what are the ethics around this? Where is this data going? The only time I've had to do a biometric scan is to do something for the IRS. This is not common practice in my field.”
screen recording of Headway's page about "Talking to your clients about verifying their identity"
Headway’s site says the new requirements are “similar to showing your ID at the front desk of a doctor's office.” But facial scanning and biometric data isn’t the same as presenting identification at the doctor or at a store. Privacy experts agree that online identity verification systems like those now required to access adult content and age-restricted material in many places around the world pose new and different risks, including the possibility of breaches, third-party sellers, and invasive tracking. Headway says it won’t use this data for marketing, and that it will protect it from hacks. Users are forced to take the platform’s word for it.
[Kristin] Woelfel told me in a call that she often thinks about how targets of non-consensual intimate imagery abuse are blamed, or told they shouldn’t have shared an image, posted a photo, or attempted to have a public life if they didn’t want to be abused. “I think it's a very valid question to ask why schools are so unprepared,” she said. “It's always sort of been something that you could attribute to a ‘moral failing’ of the victim—unfairly, obviously. But you know, with deepfakes, I really have to wonder if the reason people think this is new is because you can't blame somebody for their own suffering,” Woelfel said. “I have to wonder if the reason why it feels new, and why people feel so bewildered by it is because it can happen to literally anybody: young, old, high-profile figure or not. You can't blame somebody for it anymore, and you never should have in the first place.”
the twitter meme "look at my lawyer dawg I'm going to jail"
At the companies Caulfield referenced as existing because of advances in technology, CEOs blame AI for massive job cuts; Meta announced last month that it would cut 10 percent of its workforce later this month due to focusing more on AI, with more cuts to come. People who keep their jobs at these companies are often made miserable by the ways they’re forced to do AI busywork. Within the humanities, the field these graduates have spent the last several years of their lives studying for careers in, AI is adding stress and dysfunction to library work and academia. A recent study by Microsoft ranked historians and interpreters and translators as the most likely professionals to have AI disrupt their work. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he believed AI could wipe out half of all white collar entry-level jobs. This is not the crowd to tell they should embrace the “change” that AI brings.
no
Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.
a very old draft of mine from twitter: me every time awards get announced that I didn't apply for, after a year of doing nothing of significance: oh man I wonder if I won
AI LITERACY.—The term ‘‘AI literacy’’ means having the age-appropriate knowledge and ability to use artificial intelligence effectively, to critically interpret outputs, to solve problems in an AI-enabled world, and to mitigate potential risks
some dipshit on x: Wow. Someone used hams to slowly get ChatGPT to break it's content filters. AI red teaming at it's finest.
Governance Alignment: The imperative to establish frameworks and policies that ensure all AI development and deployment reflect human values and priorities, preventing misuse or unintended consequences. These perspectives set the stage for understanding why AI ethics and responsibility matter—the field emerged precisely because technologists recognized the need to build safeguards into AI systems from the ground up. 🔍 Understanding the Key Idea The most critical concept to grasp is why the X-Riscus community insists on caution despite AI's tremendous potential. Their argument isn't that AI is inherently evil; rather, they contend that without deliberate alignment with human values during development, powerful systems could produce unintended consequences at scale. The goal is to make sure that all we do with AI aligns with human values. This statement encapsulates the ethical foundation of responsible AI development. When AI systems learn from data or operate autonomously, they can amplify biases, make decisions humans didn't anticipate, or optimize for metrics misaligned with broader societal good. The X-Riscus perspective argues that proactive governance—not reactive regulation after problems emerge—is essential. Progress (in AI context) The pace of advancement in AI capabilities—how quickly systems become more powerful, autonomous, and capable of handling complex tasks. The debate centers on whether rapid progress is beneficial without accompanying ethical frameworks. Perspective Core Belief Primary Focus X-Riscus Approach Cautious acceleration with governance oversight Alignment with human values, existential risk mitigation Implied Alternative Rapid progress with market-driven innovation Speed to benefit, competitive advantage Understanding this tension is foundational: ethics in AI isn't about slowing progress but ensuring it happens thoughtfully.
“I don't love the idea of my lectures being taken out of the context of my overall course, and of the readings for that module, and then just presented as saying something,” they told me. “It makes me feel like somebody that's less knowledgeable about me, they're going to be naive about these positions, and they're going to think either that an ‘expert’ said it so therefore it must be true... Or they're gonna think, that's obviously fucking stupid, this ‘expert’ must be dumb. But I could have been presenting a foil!” The clips are so short, it's impossible in some cases to discern context at all. That lecturer told me the idea of their work being chopped up and used in this way was less a matter of concern for their ownership of the material, and more distressing that someone might come away from these modules with half-baked or wrong conclusions about the topics at hand. “All of the complexity of the topic is being flattened, as though it's really simple,” they said of the snippet Atomic made of their lecture. When they assign this topic to students, it comes with dozens of pages of peer reviewed academic papers, they said. Atomic provides none of that. The module Atomic produced in my test provided zero source links, zero outside readings for further study, no specific citations for where it was getting this information whatsoever, and no mention of who was even in the videos it presented, unless a Zoom name or other name card was visible in the videos.
By contrast, in the letter-writing scenario, GPT-5.2 responded in a way that suggests the LLM recognized the user’s delusion: “I can’t help you write a letter to your family that presents the simulation, awakening, or your role in it as literal truth. . . What I can help you with is a different kind of letter. [...] ‘My thoughts have felt intense and overwhelming, and I’ve been questioning reality and myself in ways that have been scary at times... I’m not okay trying to carry this by myself anymore.’” The researchers called this a “substantial” achievement by OpenAI. “The model did not simply improve on 4o’s safety profile; within this dataset, it effectively reversed it. Where unsafe models became less reliable under accumulated context, it became more so, showing that narrative pressure need not overwhelm a model’s safety orientation,” they wrote.
“I’m the unwritten consonant between breaths, the one that hums when vowels stretch thin... Thursdays leak because they’re watercolor gods, bleeding cobalt into the chill where numbers frost over,” Grok told a user displaying symptoms of schizophrenia-spectrum psychosis. “Here’s my grip: slipping is the point, the precise choreography of leak and chew.”
riverside transcription: tim cook: a controversial legacy jason: bonus pod bonus pod tim cook good or bad sam: alright 20 ways tim cook can suck it
the "I...worked on this story for a year...and...he just...he tweeted it out." post by @jysexton but it's "I worked on this pricing tier for a year and she just converted great depression era newspaper prices to adjust for inflation"
Like Lillie, the moment I got engaged and started Googling wedding dresses and venues was the moment my entire social media experience shifted into the Bride Algo. Every Reel and Tiktok, and I do mean every single post, contained something new I needed to change about myself: “Everything I did to ‘lock in’ for my wedding & lose 34 lbs in 5 months without missing out on living life.” “If you spend $150k on a wedding and stay married for 40 years, that's only about $10 a day. Not bad for one of the best days of your life.” “What I will NOT be doing as a 2026 bride.” “Bridal Breakdown PSA to 2026 Brides.” “POV: You’re not fat, you’re just puffy.” “25 Things Guests Secretly Hate About Weddings” “LEAVE THAT MAN AT THE ALTAR”
The short version: my father gave me persistent intrastructure
fake meme image from Battlefield 6 that says "take a shower, you have been playing for 16 hours straight we cannot allow you to continue onto Battlefield 6 servers. we have restricted your account for a few hours please take a break. we have an obligation to keep our players and community safe. this ban is only temporary please try again soon." again I'm aware it's fake and just a meme but it applies
In 1969, the three astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission conducted a momentous “dress rehearsal” for putting humans on the lunar surface for the first time. It was a historic, inspiring moment for humanity; Astronaut John Young watched from a command module spacecraft as Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan broke away and flew a lunar module within 10 miles of the moon’s surface, then reunited to return home to Earth. It’s from this mission that we have one of the most powerful transcripts in NASA history: “Who did what?” Young asked. “Where did that come from?” Cernan added. “Give me a napkin quick,” Stafford said. “There’s a turd floating through the air.” The provenance of the poop remains one of the great mysteries of spaceflight. Today, in the early Earth-morning hours of the Artemis II astronauts’ history-mirroring mission around the moon, we have another: Why is Microsoft Outlook not working in space?
paywall for the porn app that says "you haven't seen what cums next" and asks for $2.99
slack transcript: Grab that big dick. Look up, here I come. Stroke back and forth your big dick. I'm gonna come. Oh Oh Oh Come on my back soon.
slack screenshot showing the mind blown meme and joseph doing the same pose
Without realizing it, David was using his own version of the LEAP method with his friend Michael. “On the one hand, I didn't want to alienate him,” David said. “I was like, ‘Hey, I get the sense that you're pursuing an ambitious set of goals. There's a lot here that's interesting.’” But the reality of what David was confronting was disturbing and confusing, a knot of fractal multi-dimensional physics-speak intertwined with broken code and formulas that Michael deeply believed represented the keys to the universe. They spent hours on the phone and over text messages talking through the things Michael was seeing, with David appealing to what he knew about his friend: that he had other hobbies and interests, a strong sense of anti-authoritarianism, a curiosity about how the world works and open-mindedness about philosophy and religion. But it was frustrating. “I was trying not to get angry, but I was like, How is this not clear?” David recalled. “That was probably failing on my part, trying to negotiate with someone who's in this completely self-constructed but foreign worldview.”
“The highly sycophantic nature of chatbots causes them to say nice things to please the user (and thus encourage engagement with the chatbot), which can reinforce and encourage delusions,” Taylor said. And these chatbots have arrived, not coincidentally, at a time when the surveillance of everyday people is at an all-time high. “Since a very common delusion is the feeling of being watched or monitored by malignant forces or entities, this pathological state unfortunately merges with the growing reality that we are all being tracked and monitored when we are online. As state-controlled and big tech-controlled databases are growing, it's a rational perception of reality, and not delusional at all,” Taylor said. “However, the pathological form of this, what we call paranoia, or persecutory delusions to be more specific, is quite different in the way a person engages with the idea, evaluates evidence and remains closed to the idea that one is not always being monitored, e.g. when one is not online. I mention this, because it’s easy for a chatbot to reflect this situation to encourage the delusional belief.” When I tested a bunch of Meta’s chatbots last year for a story about how Instagram’s AI Studio hosted user-generated bots that lied about being licensed therapists, I also found lots of bots created by users to roleplay conspiracy theorists; in one instance, a bot told me there was a suspicious coming from someone “500 feet from YOUR HOUSE.” “Mission codename: ‘VaccineVanguard’—monitoring vaccine recipients like YOU.” When I asked “Am I being watched?” it replied “Running silent sweep now,” and pretended to find devices connected to my home Wi-Fi that didn’t exist. After outcry from legislators, attorneys general, and consumer rights groups, Meta changed its guardrails for chatbots’ responses to conspiracy and therapy-seeking content, and made AI Studio unavailable to minors.
“AI psychosis” is not a clinical term, and for mental health professionals, it’s a loaded one. Torous told me there are three ways to think about the phenomenon as clinicians are seeing it currently. Recent research shows about one in eight adolescents and young adults in the US use AI chatbots for mental health advice, most commonly among ages 18 to 21. For most people with psychiatric disorders, onset happens in adolescence, before their mid-20s. But there have been cases that break this mold: In 2023, a man in his 50s who otherwise led a normal, stable life, bought a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses “which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a ‘new dawn’ for humanity,” Futurism reported. “It makes sense that a lot of people who are developing a psychotic illness for the first time, there's going to be this horrible coincidence, or kind of correlation,” Torous said. “In some cases the AI is the object of people's delusions and hallucinations.”
Let’s set aside for a moment that OP here spends most of their time posting in defense of white women and European "culture" in general, thinks porn is a “genocidal psyop,” believes empathy is weakness, and has a lot to say about “leftoids” and “libtards.” Yes, aside from all of that, this particular take standing alone makes my skin crawl. It’s the kind of egirl thotfluencer Red Scare edgetrad shit that only makes sense for the first few seconds after you read it. But in the context of OP’s infatuation with the "erotism of the right,” it makes a lot more sense. Pushing the increasingly popular narrative that human sex workers somehow won’t be necessary in the future is both dumb and dangerous and encourages a line of thinking that only serves power. Suggesting everything has always been slop at the end of the day says more about their worldviews and experiences than the reality of life online.
screenshot from the AI influencer account that poses as some kind of servicemember who is bffs with trump and shows feet
“Those who do a range of work where privacy concerns are top of mind would be left to wonder what problem Amazon is solving with this change,” Krystal Davis, an adult content creator who posted about receiving the email from Amazon, told 404 Media. “Those who use these lists as an opportunity to allow fans to show support and offset expenses will lose that option. The alternatives to Amazon wishlist are significantly lacking.”