Update on Jan 7: the channel has been scrubbed from YouTube. I suppose they finally got around to evaluating all of the many reports submitted!
As of right now (Jan 6), there’s a deepfake AI clone of Rachel Maddow on YouTube called “Maddow’s Brief”. It’s apparently fooling lots of people, because overnight it’s grown from 20K subs (when I first found it) to 38K. Just one of the slop videos, posted less than 24 hours ago, already has a million views.
I reported two videos to Google last night. So far, nothing has yet been taken down. Many people in the comments are saying things like “Right on, Rachel Maddow! Telling it like it is! Screw Trump!”
This is all generated slop. It is clearly not actually Rachel Maddow, and even if what “she” is saying happens to be true when evaluated, it is still nonsensical. It is not grounded in any real truth claims by any verifiable human sources. It is a con job. It is spam.
Why is YouTube allowing this sort of thing to take place at all? From an ML standpoint, it should be relatively trivial to flag such deepfakes in an automated fashion and immediately escalate to human review—especially for a new channel like this (it only started on Jan 1, 2026!) sporting a deluge of videos in a brief period of time.
This is not some sort of “oh gosh, now what do we do?” problem. This is intentional. YouTube & Google have intentionally decided they don’t care about deepfakes and slop. Because if they really wanted to do something about it, you wouldn’t see this happening. Period.
Without a significant change to the policies of platforms like YouTube around this stuff, it is the beginning of the end of the Internet as we have known it. We cannot allow this madness to continue.#GenerativeAI is an existential threat to knowledge and truth.
What happens to a man when he wakes up in the morning, listens to a meditation app, does a quick workout, takes a shower, and looks in the mirror…and also he’s a trillionaire?!
Way to go, my dude! Attaboy! You’re crushing it today! 💪
Seems completely ridiculous. 😂
My sense is that money, fame, power, success, art, family…none of it means a damn thing anymore. It’s like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. The forces of gravity will turn nature as you know it inside out. Nothing will make sense, because how could it; after all, if light cannot escape, how can your sanity?
Now it’s true nobody on earth is a trillionaire…yet. But it’s starting to feel like that day is coming soon. And to whet your appetite melt your brain, here are some crazy stats about crazy money:
“If you had saved $10,000 every day since the first pyramids were built in Ancient Egypt, you would still only have a fifth of the average fortune of the world’s five richest billionaires.” (Global Citizen)
“$1 trillion is roughly the same as the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Netherlands or Türkiye. It is enough money to buy up all the shares of ExxonMobil (XOM), McDonald’s (MCD), and Coca-Cola (KO)—and still have millions left over.” (Investopedia)
“Twelve people under the age of 30 made Forbes’ 2022 list of the World’s Billionaires, including four Stanford dropouts, two food delivery magnates and a cryptocurrency whiz. Together, this rarefied group is worth $25.8 billion.” (Forbes)
“In 2022, around 13.05 percent of all billionaires in the United States were female. In total, there were 735 billionaires in the United States in that year.” (Statista)
“The odds of becoming a millionaire for middle-aged, college-educated Black Americans is 6.4%. For White Americans, it’s 21.5%.” (Financial Samurai)
I can’t claim to know much about the world of high #finance, but I’ll come right out and say it: I agree with people who believe it should literally be illegal to become a billionaire (let alone a trillionaire!). For that to have happened, many immoral and unethical things had to have happened to get you to where you are. Is it your fault or the system at large? A bit of both perhaps. All I know is that a world in which the middle-class is disappearing while the mega-rich get richer at a staggering rate is a world primed for societal collapse.
But don’t worry, Mr. Trillionaire. Your meditation app says with a few deep breathes and a purposeful, calm demeanor, you are ready to face the day and tackles any challenges which many lie ahead. Attaboy!
Thus child rapist Jeffrey Epstein speaks to us from beyond the grave about the sitting President of the United States.
Spend a considerable amount of time contemplating what a diabolical and sinister thing it is that we are at a point in our #politics when not only has there been a cover-up at the highest levels of our federal government to hide these macabre testimonies, the stinking rot goes all the way to the very top.
As some of you may recall, I spent the first half of the year #writing and publishing on this blog (or one of my other blogs) every day. Every single day.
And then in July, I declared my “independence” from my daily blogging habit yet claimed I would continue to post very regularly and only give myself a day off here and there.
I completely failed. 🫠
For a while, I did keep a log of the days I didn’t publish. It didn’t go well. Even in July, I couldn’t stick to my “max four days off” plan.
4th of July
10th of July
16th of July
19th of July
22th of July LAST ONE, DAMNIT!
28th of July THIS IS IT, I SWEAR!!
2nd of August
7th of August
10th of August
14th of August
18th of August
23rd of August
24th of August
25th of August
27th of August
28th of August
29th of August
31st of August
2nd of September
…and it only gets worse from there. 😭 (I totally gave up tracking this mid-October.)
Listen: I could give you a laundry list of excuses—many very valid!—why I completely fell off the wagon. But that’s just it: they are excuses. And when it comes to blogging, I’m done with excuses.
So I’ve decided I’m going to schedule my blogging habit. No more squishy “pick a day off” silliness, because obviously that didn’t work. Here’s what I’ll do instead:
EVERY BUSINESS DAY. Monday–Friday. Without fail.
By giving myself the weekend off, like normal people, I will get roughly 8 days off each month which is nice. But now it’s not my choice. I will (metaphorically) flog myself if I stray from this schedule. No room for error. None. 🙅🏻♂️
I watched “Wick is Pain” the other day (a fantastic documentary currently streaming on Netflix), and this is my new motto: Blogging is Pain.
Most disappointing film of the year for me so far; Splitsville is a project which looks absolutely incredible on paper. The “bones” of the story are certainly compelling. And what’s not to love about seeing Dakota Johnson AND Adria Arjona on screen at the same time?! In a madcap screwball comedy about the confusing complexities of modern love, hard breakups, and “open relationships” no less!
Unfortunately, while the execution of the filmmaking is generally quite good (direction, acting, wild antics, laugh-out-loud moments), the story suffers greatly from a sense of self-indulgence (they could have easily trimmed 15-20 minutes off of this…it weirdly felt much longer than Materialists even though it was actually shorter than the latter—a far superior film I might add). But not just that, I found the “sexual politics” of the plot to be shockingly regressive. In an era when I am very sensitive to the rolling back of progressive ideas around relationships, identity, sexuality, and family structures, it is disheartening to watch a film that—again on paper appears pretty bold and envelope-pushing—falls back on oh-so-familiar tropes which are so outdated I felt emotionally manipulated.
So many beats came across as “we don’t understand what makes any of those progressive millennial hippies tick but it seems funny so we’ll riff on that” sort of humor, which ends up making the whole thing feel…ignorant. Without giving too much away, one of the lead characters at one point is temporarily dating someone of the same gender. And at first, I’m impressed to see bisexuality depicted on screen where it’s not immediately the butt of jokes. And yet! That moment is gone nearly as quickly as it began and nobody ever addresses it or references it ever again. Ever. Not even the slightest comment of like “oh, I never realized you were bi” or even “hey, I thought you’d decided that wasn’t for you, but sure OK I’m cool with it.” Nothing.
And that sort of clueless treatment of potentially complex and even contentious topics is rife throughout the whole movie. It’s always how do we get to the next really dumb, completely over-the-top joke (but very cleverly timed and executed so it provides the illusion of being clever). Again, this feels to me like one of those #movies that at its core is culturally conservative and regressive yet wraps itself in a cloak of modern edginess. Which is truly a shame because we need more retro-inspired screwball comedies in cinema that can good-naturedly poke fun at how silly we humans are even in a culture of earnest enlightenment.
I know next to nothing about the filmmakers behind Splitsville, but if they were to ask me how they could have made this better (not that they would ever have reason to!), I would have suggested they spend more time observing real relationships in open marriages, real polyamory, queer relationships, BDSM relationships (learn a thing or two about informed consent ya dorks!), and just basically anything other than he-hawing over who has a bigger dick and which girl is pining for which man now. 🙄
Then last week happened to me…nothing majorly frustrating, merely “death by a thousand papercuts.” I tried to get extra rest on Labor Day (September 1 in the U.S.) and slow-danced into this week hopeful I could turn things around.
And it’s been a slog out of depression every damn day. 🥺
Again, no one major catastrophe. Just feeling like I’m grinding my gears at every turn…both at work and otherwise. I hate weeks like that!
But I went on an extra-cozy scooter ride this evening, enjoying the Portland waterfront and watching people going in and out of bars and strip clubs and donut shops and art galleries and a myriad of quirky interesting places, and that cheered me up tremendously. Being outdoors and seeing humans having a good time IRL almost never fails to set my mood aright.
Better yet, I’ll be attending a dear friend’s wedding this weekend, which I’m sure will be a highlight of summer’s endgame for me. Hopefully this weekend marks the turning point when I can fully get back on solid mental ground again. ☺️
Current mood: strangely optimistic!
I know if you turn on the news, you can point to a wide variety of individual scenarios which seem to indicate that we are all completely and totally fucked.
And yet…I feel like we’re right at that point in the movie when the tide seems to be turning; that elusive tipping point where the good folk seem to be winning.
From slop-infested Big Tech shenanigans to the gross project of converting America into a fascist oligarchy, the people are rising up. Our freedoms and our values aren’t going to be eradicated without a fight. And I’m feeling good about where we’re at in that fight.
I won’t go all Pollyanna on you and say it’s time to relax and stop worrying. Far from it! But I’m far more pumped today about the future than I was six months ago. 💪 We got this. ✊
Recently on LinkedIn (🙄), an AI-pilled tech bro accused me of being a hypocrite because the decades I’ve worked as a web developer had been, supposedly, hurting the environment and taking jobs away from other industries.
So I took a look at all the clients I’ve had over the last ~15 years. And here’s my estimation:
Some projects were what you might call “brochureware”. Websites with public information about the company or non-profit and ways to contact them. Perhaps I took jobs away from Kinkos or the Yellow Pages? I really have no idea. Nobody ever complained to me about it.
Some projects were what you’d call e-commerce. In this case, it’s all upside, because instead of craftspeople and small businesses having to take phone calls or read emails and process credit cards manually, it could be handled quickly and painlessly right on the website. Huge win for everyone.
Some projects took manual business processes and codified them into custom software. Same people involved before and after, it was just a helluva lot faster & easier to accomplish key tasks. Lots less paper or emails required. Again, big win.
Some projects have been community-based: people engaging in conversation and sharing content, files, etc. This is work/play that was literally impossible before the Internet, before computers and networks and data.
Still other projects have been educational: publications and archives which provide culturally or socially-relevant information to help people or enlighten them on a subject. Perhaps these cases served as a substitute for a paper-based book or a magazine? I’m sorry if my work caused a drop in someone’s printing-press business!
That’s it really. The vast majority of the work I’ve done…I never set out to build software to replace taxi drivers, eliminate office workers, devalue artists, and obscure expertise. Perhaps there was general societal fallout I didn’t think much about in the switch from paper to digital. On the other hand, I can guarantee you quite a lot of human-produced knowledge, #creativity, and collaboration ensued which literally wouldn’t have been possible before the Internet age.
If you still want to call me a hypocrite, go for it. All I know is my conscience is clear. I have turned down multiple projects and opportunities over the years because I didn’t feel comfortable about the ethics of the work. Right now, I am literally losing out on opportunities because of my clear no-genAI stance. But that’s fine. I feel more at peace about my career than I ever have before—even if it’s damn hard to make an honest day’s living.
So away with your smug whataboutism! 😛 All it does is reveal the boggy mire beneath your own feet.