A day after OpenAI revealed its sultry new personal assistant, famed hacker George Hotz kicked the hornet’s nest with his opinion investors and founders are fueling an adjacent hype cycle in humanoid robots. Of course, that hype is following our expectation for the future, which was shaped by a century of science fiction telling us we’d be hanging out with sexy androids by now. In reality, all the huge automation wins have the same thing in common: they don’t look anything like us. Successful automatons built for a specific human function — washing clothes, running blood tests, reasoning — tend to simply look the way they need to look, which tends to be weird (and in the case of robots that think, not embodied at all). The kind of wannabe iRobot stuff we generally see out of China was interesting 50 years ago, in Disney’s animatronic Hall of Presidents. But that’s the aesthetic of our past, not our future.

Yesterday, continuing the years-long tradition of unmasking popular anonymous online voices for purposes of political warfare, the Guardian doxxed L0m3z, a well-known Twitter personality and niche publisher who is apparently a lecturer at UC Irvine and — according to RateMyProfessor — a beloved easy grader, who also happens to be quite hot. As doxxing technically violates X’s terms of service, thousands of posters have demanded the Guardian be banned from the platform. And while they do have a point, I can’t help but reflect on how depressing a use of investigative skills this whole thing is. Journalists could devote the energy they spend doxxing into viral exposés of organized crime or government corruption. I mean, my God, we still don’t even know who killed Epstein. Why settle for a few minutes of Twitter infamy? Play the long game, you spineless lemmings — there’s a thing called “glory” to be had.

President Biden issued an order Monday against Chinese crypto firm MineOne, blocking its continued ownership of land just a mile away from a Wyoming nuclear missile base, while stating that the firm had “equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities.” Apparently, MineOne bought the land back in 2022 but never reported the purchase, and it only popped up on the U.S. government’s radar after a public tip (reassuring). This brilliant surveillance operation — harmless litecoin mining, conveniently right next to the military base — is brought to you by the same savvy foreign power that literally flew a surveillance balloon directly over the United States. The sad part? Both of these tactics actually almost worked because our government is literally that stupid. We’re definitely at risk here, but I’m increasingly skeptical it’s from any other government more than our own.

on this week’s pod, the pirate wires crew discusses why the former twitter ceo left bluesky’s board

jack dorsey on his exit from bluesky, how twitter lost its way, jack’s strategy for ending censorship forever, new background on the elon saga, and the death of social media as we know it

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