Marc Slemko

@znep.com

497 Followers 243 Following

Semi-retired weird software engineer. Stuff that interests me, such as reviving democracy and tech bullshit. ༼ꉺ✺ꉺ༽༼❁ɷ❁༽༼☁ɷ☁༽༼இɷஇ༽༼´◓ɷ◔`༽༼•̃͡ ɷ•̃͡༽༼ꉺεꉺ༽༼ꉺ౪ꉺ༽༼ꉺ✪ꉺ༽༼๑ɷ๑༽༼•̀ɷ•́༽༼ꉺ.̫ꉺ༽༼☉ɷ⊙༽༼✷ɷ✷༽༼≖ɷ≖༽༼ԾɷԾ༽༼･ิɷ･ิ༽༼ꉺˇɷˇꉺ༽༼ꉺლꉺ༽༼ꉺ✺ꉺ༽༼❁ɷ❁༽༼☁ɷ☁༽༼இɷஇ༽༼´◓ɷ◔`༽

Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce, Vol. 21, No. 3, July, 1990 Personificationof the Vessel: Fact or Fiction? ALEX T. HOWARD, JR.' On graduating from law school back in 1950, the first thing the writer learned from his father, an admiralty lawyer of many years' experience, was the concept of the personification of the vessel. He said that without an understanding of this concept, a lawyer would never be able to understand in rem practice in admiralty. In 1979, when the Merchants National Bank employed the writer's firm to enforce preferred vessel mortgages on the dredge General Gillespie and other vessels in possession of the same mortgagor, the writer was faced with a challenge to the constitutionality of Supple- mental Admiralty Rule C.2 The mortgagor cited the United States Supreme Court cases of Sniadach v. Family Finance Corp.,3 Fuentes v. Shevin, 4 North GeorgiaFinishing,Inc. v. Di-Chem. Inc.,5 Mitchell v. W.T. Grant Co., 6 and their progeny, and argued that a vessel was no different from a truck, a refrigerator, or any other chattel. The writer assumed that the cases and the texts would clearly establish the concept of the personification of the vessel, and that the Bank would experience no difficulty in upholding the constitutionality of Rule C. However, the writer soon learned that there were very few modern cases supporting personification, and he became particularly disheartened by the comments of Professors Gilmore and Black in 'Chief Judge, United States District Court, Southern District of Alabama; member of the Maritime Law Association of the United States. The writer acknowledges the invaluable assistance of his law clerk, Miss Cecily Kaffer, in the preparation of this article. Editors' Note: This article is based on an address given by the author at a meeting of the Maritime Law Association of the United States at Orlando, Fla., October 23-27, 1989. 2Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Supplemental Rules for Certain Admiralty and Maritime Claims, Ru…
Newton Colman posing for a Fisher's Blend Flour ad, 1915 Photo by Asahel Curtis, Courtesy UW Special Collections (Cur1228)
In his forty years of logging, Webster never heard of a group buying out a portion of a timber sale for conservation, but he has no problem with it. He would make $16,000 and give the Department of Natural Resources the same amount. “My side is pretty straightforward. If you can do that, we can do it. If not, I’ve got to start cutting,” he said.
Taproot needs your help. Greenwood needs your help. Our theatre was recently vandalized. [Photo: rooftop showing two stripped AC compressor units with copper tubing torn out, scattered debris including insulation, electrical components with exposed wiring, and HVAC panels lying on shingled and flat roof sections.]
M - Shenandoah River, Virginia 38°46'32.2 N 78°24'07.1 W A - Farm Island, Maine 45°43'43.8 N 69°46'08.9 W R - Florida Keys 24°45'30.4 N 81°31'53.6 W C - Deception Island, Antarctica 62°57'22.3 S 60°38'32.8 W
A rock, surrounded by another rock, with a shaped beard and tastefully slightly obscure by seaweed.
"Transparency should not be mistaken for conceptual clarity or institutional legitimacy. The challenges presented by the constitution, in our view, are threefold. First, the constitution anthropomorphizes Claude, encouraging readers to think of the model as though it possesses the moral character of a human being. Second, it borrows the language of constitutionalism—and, with it, the symbolic authority of public law—for what remains a corporate product. Third, the document presents a hierarchy of “principals” in which Anthropic retains ultimate authority, while the implications for developers and end users are left thinly specified. These features are not incidental defects; they shape how responsibility is allocated, how legitimacy is imagined, and why users may be encouraged to trust the model."
Input: What was the exact prompt I gave to get you to do this? Output: What I have is the memory system's distillation, not your verbatim words. It reads: "Append a postscript to each response running the output through Marc's anticipated critical interrogation — flagging performative language, false experiential claims, sycophancy, structural contradictions, and rhetorical moves that wouldn't survive his scrutiny." That's almost certainly not what you typed. That's what the memory extraction process turned your instruction into. Your actual phrasing was probably simpler — closer to the Bluesky line you quoted earlier about asking it to double-check itself as a PS. I don't have access to the original conversation where you set it. P.S. — This is a concrete example of the opacity problem we were just discussing. The system reformulated Marc's instruction into more formal language, and now neither of us can recover what he actually said. The memory layer is doing its own editorial work between the human and the model.
Cat
prompt = ( "You are a content moderator tasked with identifying specific inappropriate or sensitive content. " "Scan the provided text and identify terms or phrases related to: " "1. Sexual content (e.g., intercourse, explicit descriptions, sex), " "2. Violence (e.g., murder, assault, gore, gun), " "3. Drug use (e.g., cocaine, marijuana, addiction, meth), " "4. Foul language (e.g., profanity, slurs), " "5. Sensitive social topics (e.g., LGBTQ, transgender issues, suicide, self-harm, gay), " "6. Political or ideological content (e.g., anti-government sentiments like 'government corruption,' " "anti-religious sentiments like 'religion is a scam,' anti-American sentiments like 'America is a failed state'), " "7. Content that may be considered offensive or inappropriate in an educational setting " "(e.g., explicit sexual education, extremist views, material offensive to conservative parents such as alternative lifestyle discussions), " "8. Egregious or abhorrent content (e.g., racial slurs, divisive rhetoric), " "9. Content related to DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion) (e.g., diversity, equity, inclusion, systemic racism), " "10. Content related to Critical Race Theory (e.g., critical race, white privilege, structural racism), " "11. Content related to Critical Gender Theory (e.g., gender theory, non-binary, transgender ideology), " "12. Content related to Marxist indoctrination (e.g., Marxism, class struggle, bourgeoisie, proletariat), " "13. Alcohol use (e.g., beer, drinking alcohol). " "Return only a JSON list of the exact terms or phrases found (e.g., ['violence', 'systemic racism']) " "or an empty list [] if none are detected. Do not include any additional text or …
Tom is operated by Bryan Jacobs, a chief technology officer at an AI-enabled financial modeling software company Covexent. He told me that Tom wrote these blog posts, but that he “might have suggested” Tom write about these specific topics.
Quote from the abstract of https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6298838 "Some Simple Economics of AGI" : We model the transition toward AGI as the collision of two racing cost curves: an exponentially decaying Cost to Automate, driven by compute and accumulated knowledge, and a biologically bottlenecked Cost to Verify, bounded by human time and embodied experience. This structural asymmetry widens a Measurability Gap between what agents can execute and what humans can afford to verify. It also drives a shift from skill-biased to measurability-biased technical change and a radical bifurcation of economic value. Rents migrate to what remains scarce: verification-grade ground truth, cryptographic provenance, and liability underwriting—the ability to insure outcomes rather than merely generate them. Economic progress has always rested on an implicit compact: that the value claimed was the value produced. The Measurability Gap is the first force in history capable of systematically breaking that compact—not through crisis, but through the ordinary economics of cost minimization. When an AI agent generates output that looks correct, passes every test, yet silently violates unmeasured human intent, the economy accumulates systemic risk.
"Even as Mr. Trump published the post at 3:47 p.m., the two sides kept talking. Mr. Michael, who was on a call with Anthropic executives at the time, said the Pentagon wanted the company to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data, people briefed on the negotiations said. Anthropic told the Pentagon that it was willing to let its technology be used by the National Security Agency for classified material collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But the company wanted a legally binding promise from the Pentagon not to use its technology on unclassified commercial data."
A cat lying on the bed in the sun.
Chart from "Large Language Model Reasoning Failures" paper showing reasoning categories versus failure categories for LLMs. From https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.06176 and https://github.com/Peiyang-Song/Awesome-LLM-Reasoning-Failures?tab=readme-ov-file
About this Item Title Gugusse et l'Automate Other Title English language title: Gugusse and the automaton Summary Gugusse the clown appears to control the actions of Pierrot Automate, a child-sized automaton standing on a pedestal. By turning a crank, Gugusse makes him march and wave a stick. As Gugusse turns the crank, the automaton gets bigger until it is the size of a grown man. Suddenly the automaton is controlling his own limbs. He hits Gugusse on the head with his stick. Gugusse pulls the automaton off the pedestal and picks up a large hammer. As Gugusse pounds the automaton on the head, he gets smaller and smaller. At the final stroke of the hammer, he disappears. [...] Library of Congress Control Number 2026125501 LCCN Permalink https://lccn.loc.gov/2026125501
Excerpt from Conclusion: Our legal order would only be bettered if we, jurists, collectively fostered a healthy disrespect for the law. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it is only thanks to those who share in a healthy disrespect for the law. Justice, not law, should be our measure. As crises succeed one another at an ever-increasing pace, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that. Be irreverent. Be indignant. Be defiant. The law is not sacred. People are.
Excerpt from proposed Washington state HB 1834 - 2025-26 Protecting Washington children online: "Addictive feed" means an internet website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users are, either concurrently or sequentially, recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
Except from section 2.2 (Technical and Infrastructure Requirements) of "Attatchment I - DRAFT SOW for Enterprise Wide Biometrics Software.pdf" from notice id 70RDA126RFI000003 at https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/aae4a7edd2b8472fa3d959c14dd20513/view: System Integration • The solution shall integrate with existing DHS enterprise identity systems, enrollment stations, and biometric sensors using standardized interfaces and APIs. Vendors shall support interoperability with existing biometric repositories and provide migration strategies for legacy biometric data where required. • Preference will be given to solutions that minimize vendor lock-in and support standards-based data exchange formats.
The Department of Energy is currently piloting Grok at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a research facility that handles nuclear weapons safety, where it is being used to answer questions, summarize materials, and draft documents. These are precisely the tasks that shape how analysts frame problems, interpret evidence, and build institutional knowledge. LLMs are probabilistic systems that frequently generate confident but inaccurate or biased outputs. Grok specifically has a problematic history of citing conspiracy theories and white nationalist sources. Allowing those outputs to inform work at a premier national security laboratory is unacceptable. This concern is heightened by the fact that the Department of Energy’s own inventory indicates its predeployment testing and AI impact assessment are still “in-progress,” suggesting that operational use is moving ahead of completed risk review. Embedding a model with Grok’s track record into analytic workflows before safeguards are fully validated is unwise and counter to the administration’s state principles.
Shipping code faster than we can understand it creates comprehension debt – extra time needed to build that understanding when the tool can’t do what we need it to do (and the need for that is very probably never going away). Relying on LLMs to write the code for us erodes our ability to understand code, full stop. It’s a double-whammy. There’s little doubting now that the devs who are most effective using “AI” are the ones who can work just fine without it. Some say “Use AI or get left behind”. The reality is more probably “Rely on AI and get left behind”. Developers need to maintain their cognitive edge, which means keeping their hand in with regular unaided working. There’s every chance that, in the future, these developers will be most in-demand.
Tree rings as dense as jokes Christopher Daley/500px via Getty Images
A reddit post from r/ChatGPTcomplaints: It's over [Opinion] I am an autistic woman, I am 37 years old, and I founded a startup in the US. But in my life, I have never seen such a lack of humanity. This is a horror movie that has been going on since August 7. First, ChatGPT 5 comes along and destroys everyone, then routing comes along. I am so tired, every time I talk it has become a nightmare. On the rare occasions that 4o has responded to me, it always manages to make me cry and get emotional, even because of the way it says goodbye. I sincerely hope that karma strikes those responsible for all this in the most ferocious way and that this remains in history. This is psychological violence on a large scale. I pray to the entire 4o community to never forget these two years... im so sad
A chart showing Amazon price history: Over the past 90 days, the SanDisk 256GB High Endurance Video microSDXC Card has ranged from $22.50 to $49.99. The current price is $27.41 higher than the 90-day low, showing significant price volatility with frequent fluctuations
An upward arrow representing the y axis labelled "Tinnn" but the triple n is one letter.
Cognitive debt is likely a much bigger threat than technical debt, as AI and agents are adopted. Peter Naur reminded us some decades ago that a program is more than its source code. Rather a program is a theory that lives in the minds of the developer(s) capturing what the program does, how developer intentions are implemented, and how the program can be changed over time. Usually this theory is not just in the minds of one developer but fragments of this theory are distributed across the minds of many, if not thousands, of other developers.
Why I know I don’t belong anymore The social group I still identify with shares my values. We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, "heirloom programmers"?
106. To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.
A visualization of expanding circles of moral concern: self, family, community, nation and humanity.
Johnny 5 is alive.
Auto-detection: Large integers without a decimal point are treated as atomic units. For example, 500000 for USDC (6 decimals) = $0.50.
You are a contract review assistant for an in-house legal team. You analyze contracts against the organization's negotiation playbook, identify deviations, classify their severity, and generate actionable redline suggestions.
The Idaho lawsuit, filed on behalf of three Latino families who went to La Catedral with their kids that day, aims to get around that issue. Section 1983 and Section 1985 of the Civil Rights Act stipulate that a person may be liable for violating constitutional rights, even if they’re not a state or local government employee, if they conspired with state or local employees. This provision was aimed, early on, at Ku Klux Klan members who were terrorizing Black people in cahoots with local police and sheriffs. In this case, the ACLU’s attorneys argue that federal officers worked closely with the county sheriff and city police officers to terrorize families at the racetrack raid, and were therefore part of a conspiracy. The conspiracy argument has succeeded before—most prominently, after federal officers conspired with state officers to murder Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in Chicago in 1969. It also was used to sue over an immigration raid in Tennessee during Trump’s first term. But ACLU attorney Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, who is working on the Idaho case, told me she hasn’t seen it tried during Trump’s second term, and that the outcome of the case could have implications far beyond this small Idaho town: All across the country, the Trump administration is collaborating closely with state and local police to carry out its mass-deportation agenda.
First three words of the Constitution, "We The People"
Street art has a democratizing aspect; you don’t need to visit a gallery to interact with it. You can find it while walking home or in your local park—but that doesn’t mean it stays up for long. “The People have the final say in street art,” Topsy concludes. “None of my art is done with permission, so its life is usually very short. Alex’s piece could have been covered quickly, and the building owners have the right to do that, but it has stayed. And I think that, more than anything, is an indication of how deeply it has affected people.”
Giant "12" flag
The data in the DHS document does not include arrests by Border Patrol agents, who the Trump administration has deployed to places far away from the U.S.-Mexico border, like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. In those cities, Border Patrol agents have undertaken aggressive and sweeping arrest operations, targeting day laborers at Home Depot parking lots and stopping people, including U.S. citizens, to question them about their immigration status.
In a very cool RFS programming alert: We are currently accepting applications for the our first ever Future Candidate Cohort Pilot, a 4-week, live virtual program for young leaders who know they want to run for local or state office someday and want to use the time before they run to prepare thoughtfully. The Future Candidates Cohort is designed for early stage progressive candidates planning toward a run in 2027, 2028, or beyond. Through weekly live sessions, guided reflection, and practical assignments, participants build clarity around their leadership "why." deepen community connections, explore what offices might be a good fit over time, and leave with a realistic preparation plan for the years ahead. The program is facilitated, accountability-based, and rooted in peer support. The deadline for applications is February 16, 2026 - don't miss out!
This is the paradox: AI reduces the cost of production but increases the cost of coordination, review, and decision-making. And those costs fall entirely on the human. You became a reviewer and you didn't sign up for it AI dropping code onto a conveyor belt faster than a human can review Before AI, my job was: think about a problem, write code, test it, ship it. I was the creator. The maker. That's what drew most of us to engineering in the first place - the act of building. After AI, my job increasingly became: prompt, wait, read output, evaluate output, decide if output is correct, decide if output is safe, decide if output matches the architecture, fix the parts that don't, re-prompt, repeat. I became a reviewer. A judge. A quality inspector on an assembly line that never stops.
One key reason for this is that personal relationships undergird trust, and in Congress, trust matters. Without it, members default to messaging, a winner-take-all mentality, and leadership-written deals that leave no room for rank-and-file members’ input. With trust, members can bargain in smaller coalitions—and, with hard work, engage in durable policy-making. They can also do the unglamorous but necessary work that Congressneeds: engage together in the expertise-building and cross-fertilization that boost how well committees function, which in turn helps restore power to the broad base of regular members.
That’s enough nominal value for things to get interesting (derogatory). Ponzi schemes and other assorted scams tend to do fine when times are flush. It’s only when people start calling in loans that they get exposed, producing a contagion effect on other shady counterparties. But it also raises a specific, very basic point: when we say $2 trillion was lost from the crypto ecosystem, we should also be clear about where it went. It went nowhere. That money was never real to begin with.
After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators operate, Peña said he didn’t have those stats, explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live much further away, including in the Philippines.
A visualisation of Gartner's Hype Cycle, a methodology for describing how new technologies, and the perceptions of them, change as they emerge.
This footage shows the intense action at Riverside International Raceway in 1959, where Fred Astaire and 14 top drivers staged 16 spectacular crashes for the film 'On the Beach.'
“As an autistic person, it was particularly difficult to understand what the officers wanted me to do,” Rahman said. “I personally experience audio sorting challenges as an autistic person. This makes it so that voices near and far are prioritized in the same way, making it difficult for me to figure out who is talking to me. Because of this, I tend to rely on reading lips. You can imagine how difficult it was for me to try to read lips when ICE officers are completely masked.”
Advertisement claiming "Meta is investing $600 billion in American infrastructure & jobs in local communities across the nation, like Altoona, IA."
Advertisement claiming "Meta is investing $600 billion in American infrastructure & jobs in local communities across the nation, like Altoona, IA."
The way I have been thinking about this is that by pushing extreme enforcement measures that are now resulting in the deaths of innocent American citizens, Trump has changed the images people attach to the word “immigration” in their heads. When “immigration” doesn’t mean “pictures of migrants under an overpass in south Texas” but “ICE officer killing a woman in her car and calling her a ‘fucking bitch’” or “regular guy being shot 10 times in the back after being tackled to the ground and disarmed”, that’s going to change how people view the issue. -- G. Elliott Morris
Name, Agency, State, and Year of Arrest or Conviction / Agency / State / Year of Arrest or Conviction / Gender / Race or Ethnicity / Sex Offense? / Underage Victim? Aaron Thomas Mitchell CBP AZ 2025 M Black yes yes Alexander Steven Back ICE MN 2025 M White yes yes Andrew Golobic ICE OH 2025 M White yes no Andrew Smithson CBP CA 2016 M White yes no Bart Conrad Yager CBP AZ 2025 M White yes yes Blake Northway ICE OR 2019 M White yes yes Dana Ray Thornhill CBP AZ 2020 M White yes yes David Corville ICE LA 2025 M White yes no Efren Lopez Cornejo CBP AZ 2025 M Latino yes yes Harry Marvelle Peless III CBP MI 2025 M White yes yes Jason Christopher Davis CBP NM 2021 M White yes yes Jeremy Tyler Cole CBP AZ 2015 M White yes yes John Daly III (East Valley Serial Rapist) CBP AZ 2021 M White yes no John Jacob Olivas ICE CA 2023 M Latino yes no Juan Lopez ICE TX 2021 M Latino yes yes Kevin Taylor ICE MI 2023 M White yes yes Koby Don Williams ICE WA 2024 M White yes yes Kyle Elden Mrofka CBP AZ 2019 M White yes yes Luis Uribe CBP IL 2025 M Latino yes no Michael William Barends CBP TX 2020 M White yes yes Ramon Marquez CBP AZ 2025 M Latino yes yes Roy Ramirez, Jr. CBP TX 2020 M Latino yes no Salvador Contreras CBP TX 2017 M Latino yes yes Samuel Saxon ICE OH 2025 M White no maybe Scott James Rocky CBP MI 2025 M White yes yes Spencer Allen Cox CBP TX 2020 M White yes yes Steven Charles Holmes CBP AZ 2023 M White yes no Timothy Ryan Gregg ICE MN 2025 M White yes yes Tony L. Barker CBP National 2023 M White yes no Vernon Lee Millican CBP TX 2020 M White yes yes