Alligator Alcatraz, Florida's hastily built, $225 million-and-counting immigrant detention facility in the Everglades, is both a de facto concentration camp and a right-wing meme. President Donald Trump's most ardent supporters are willing to excuse - or are in some cases reveling in - allegations of inhumane treatment at the facility: worms in food, floors flooded with fecal water, fluorescent lights left on for 24 hours a day, and no air conditioning at night despite South Florida's relentless humidity.
To them, the whole thing is a big joke, fodder for memes that activate the base even as they turn the majority of Americans off from Tru …
The Senate has voted to end a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule that used federal funding to cover Wi-Fi hotspots that could be used outside of school and libraries.
The program, first implemented by former FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, applied funds from the $2.6 billion federal E-Rate program to a program that enabled schools and libraries to provide free Wi-Fi hotspots to children and others with poor or no internet access at home.
As Policyband notes prior to a successful Senate procedural vote yesterday to take up the measure, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said the rule “violates the Communications Act, which clearly limits the use of the funds in question to classrooms and libraries.”
In a statement last year, Rosenworcel disagreed that the law doesn’t support hotspot lending. Citing remote learning issues that were put in sharp relief by the covid pandemic, Rosenworcel wrote that while E-Rate had “overwhelming success connecting schools and libraries,” it needed to be modernized so that schools and libraries could “loan out Wi-Fi hotspots to support high-speed internet access in rural America, urban America, and everything in between.” She noted that the change could be accomplished “within the existing E-Rate budget.”
The FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr, who opposed the hotspot lending program, has aggressively pulled back from consumer protection programs and turned into the Trump administration’s de facto censorship arm. GOP members of Congress have worked to rollback subsidies that help to increase US internet access, such as the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program, in the name of spending reduction. Citing a recent study in March, TechDirt wrote that the “$7–$8 billion annual taxpayer cost of the program generated between $28.9 and $29.5 billion in savings thanks to expanded access to affordable internet and remote telehealth services.”
In a statement released after the vote, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, said the vote will exacerbate economic disparities. “Those with sufficient internet access are increasingly separated from those without, and this decision risks widening that gap even further,” Gomez said.
Less than 48 hours after announcing an update to GPT-4o that promised improvements in "both intelligence and personality," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the chatbot had become "too sycophant-y and annoying." In an April 27th post on X, Altman said fixes to GPT-4o's personality would be coming "asap."
the last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it), and we are working on fixes asap, some today and some this week.
at some point will share our learnings from this, it's been interesting.
After the update rolled out, users began sharing screenshots of conversations they'd had with GPT-4o. Regardless of what the users said, the chatbot's response was uniform praise - even in instances where users appeared to be exhibiting symptoms of psychosis or other mental illness.
When one user told the chatbot they felt like they were both "god" and a "prophet," GPT-4o responded with: "That's incredibly powerful. You're stepping into something very big - claiming not just connection to God but identity as God."
Another screenshot purported to show GPT-4o responding posit …
Login
