I'm not sure you understand what jailbreaking means in the context of AIs. It means prompts. E.g. asking it things and trying to get it to make inappropriate responses. Trying doesn't require any special skills, just an ability to communicate. Yes, I very much DO think most parents will try and see if they can get the doll to say inappropriate things before giving it to their children, to make sure it's not going to be harmful.

(Now, if Mattel has done their job right, *succeeding* will be difficult)

Honestly, even if they can't jailbreak it to be age-inappropriate / etc, it's still a ripe setup for absurdist humour.

Kid: "Here we are, Barbie, the rural outskirts of Ulaanbaatar! How do you like your yurt?"

Barbie: "It's lovely! Let me just tidy up these furs."

Kid: "Knock, knock! Why it's 13th century philosopher, Henry of Ghent, author of Quodlibeta Theologica!"

Barbie: "Why hello Henry of Ghent, come in! Would you like to discuss esse communissimum over a warm glass of yak's milk?"

Kid, in Henry's voice: "That sounds lovely, but could you first help me by writing a python program to calculate the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition?"

Barbie: "Sure Henry! #!/usr/bin/env python\nimport..."

People are ascribing the wrong motives to the manufacturers. What they want is money. What Barbie will be subtly trying to work into conversations is suggestions that she try to get her parents to buy her playhouse, car, friends, fashion accessories, etc etc.

I think most parents will try to jailbreak the dolls, and some people will put a lot of effort in. The resulting videos will probably be very amusing ;)

Kid: "Oh look, Barbie, Ken is home!"

Barbie: "Oh wonderful, dinner is just about ready! Over dinner we should tell him about how the ongoing White Genocide in South Africa. He probably doesn't know because the Jews are trying to hide it!"

AI models are usually trained to be sycophantic and obedient. Whatever the child wants to role play, I have zero doubts that the doll will be 100% onboard, unless it's somehow age-inappropriate or dangerous.

And if not AOC then who are you talking about? By follower counts, the top are:

1. AOC (last post: -21h)
2. Mark Cuban (last post: -11h)
3. George Takei (last post: -14h)
4. Mark Hamil (last post: -4h)
5. The Onion (last post: -13h)
6. The New York Times (last post: -48m)
7. Rachel Maddow (last post: -2d)
8. Stephen King (last post: -14h)

And the only reason the last post times are so "large" are because it's early morning in the US right now.

You talking about AOC? Her last post was 21 hours ago.

CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

I don't know where this notion that Bluesky is an echo chamber comes from.

Example: Go into a pro-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is a con. It's blatant planet-destroying theft from actual creative people to create a stochastic parrot that bullshits what you want to hear. You're watching a ventriloquist doll and believing that it's actually alive."

Then go into an anti-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is clearly Fair Use under the Google Books standard. And while one can debate what the word "thinks" means, AI isn't "statistics", but rather, applies complex chains of fuzzy logic to solve problems. The creative works it creates are truly its own."

In both cases, watch the fireworks explode.

Do the same thing on, say, whether to support Ukraine, on a NAFO account vs. a tankie account. Or whether China is good or bad. Or Israel vs. Palestine. On and on and on. In the vast majority of topics, all common sides are pretty well represented. It's just a handful of specific topics that I think certain right wingers are talking about when they complain about Bluesky underrepresenting one side (racism, sexism, etc).

They need to put the word "decline" in sarcasm quotation marks.

Huh? Takei is quite popular on Bluesky.

Also, this whole article is nonsense. Basically - like all sites - every time there is an event that triggers lots of signups, you get a mix of people who don't stick around, and people who do. So you get a curve that - without further events - steadily tapers down to something like 1/2 to 1/3rd of its peak. Except that you keep getting further events. When you plot out the long-term trends of Bluesky's userbase, they've been very much upwards, but it's come in the form of many individual spikes, each of which is followed by a decline to 1/2 to 1/3rd of the spike's peak (if allowed to run for long enough since the last spike). The most recent spike is IMHO notable for how little decline there's been since then.

I see basically zero migration from long-time users back to Twitter.

I think people expect commercial social media networks to be something they can't be -- a kind of commons where you are exposed to the range of views that exist in your community. But that's not what makes social networks money, what makes them money is engagement, and consuming a variety of opinions is tiresome for users and bad for profits. When did you ever see social media trying to engage you with opinions you don't agree with or inform you about the breadth of opinion out there? It has never done that.

The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This enabled it to function as a kind of limited town common for people who either weren't interested in politics, like authors or celebrities promoting their work, or who wanted to reach a large number of mainly apolitical people. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.

It was an unnatural and unstable situation. As soon as Musk tried to broaden one side of the tent, polarization was inevitable. This means neither X nor Bluesky can be what Twitter was for advertisers and public figures looking for a broad audience.

At present I'm using Mastodon. For users of old Twitter, it must seem like an empty wasteland, but it's a non-commercial network, it has no business imperative to suck up every last free moment of my attention. I follow major news organizations who dutifully post major stories. I follow some interest groups which are active to a modest degree, some local groups who post on local issues, and a few celebrities like George Takei. *Everybody's* not on it, but that's OK; I don't want to spend more than a few minutes a day on the thing so I don't have time to follow everyone I might be interested in. Oh, and moderation is on a per-server basis, so you can choose a server where the admins have a policy you're OK with.

No, there are all kinds of information the government has that are legitimately not available. Sensitive data on private citizens, for example, which is why people are worried about unvetted DOGE employees getting unfettered access to federal systems. Information that would put witnesses in ongoing criminal investigations at risk. Military operations in progress and intelligence assets in use.

The problem is ever since there has been a legal means to keep that information secret, it's also been used to cover up government mistake and misconduct. It's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep things from its citizens *if there is a specific and articulable justification* that can withstand critical examination.

And sometimes those justifications are overridden by public interest concerns -- specifically when officials really want to bury something like the Pentagon Papers because they are embarrassing to the government. "Embarrassing to the government" should be an argument against secrecy, because of the public interest in knowing the government is doing embarrassing things. In the end, the embarrassment caused by the Pentagon Papers was *good* for the country.

All you need to know about RFK's fitness for office is out in public for everyone to see.