For several years, ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candor that has no precedent, in part because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda. Users are interacting with an adaptive, conversational voice to which they have revealed their most private thoughts. People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems and their beliefs about God and the afterlife. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.
(My emphasis)
From a former OpenAi researcher, in the New York Times

What ICE should have learned from the fugitive slave act

At the same time, the Fugitive Slave Act replaced the more complicated questions about the institution with a single, less complicated one: Were Northerners prepared to watch their neighbors, many of whom had lived in their communities for years, be violently removed from their homes or grabbed off the streets? For many, the answer was no.

From the New Yorker

Gorgeous photos of Melbourne in this gallery by Hussein Abdirahman Mohamud

Why there are so many equals signs in the Epstein files?

Apparently it’s something arcane due to mail servers not liking long strings of text:

The artefact we see here is from something called “quoted printable”, or as we used to call it when it was introduced: “Quoted unreadable”.

…the equals sign is used to say “this should really be one single line, but I’ve broken it in two so that the mail server doesn’t get mad at me”.

Interesting post from Antony Green after One Nation overtook The Coalition for the first time in newspoll

If One Nation is polling 22% in national polls, there are electorates across rural and regional areas where One Nation will be polling above 35%, that is leading on primary votes. The debate about One Nation preferences starts to become irrelevant if the party is topping the poll. We would be back to the 1998 and 2001 Queensland elections when Labor preferences were required to save some of the National Party’s safest seats.

The rise in One Nation support could hurt Labor in some of its own seats, but the record of elections over several decades is that whenever One Nation support surges, it tends to hurt the Coalition. It is too early to make predictions for the next election, but if the trend on this week’s Newspoll continues, Labor could be comfortably re-elected with the biggest change being the Coalition losing seats to One Nation.