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Kevin Kortum

225 posts

Posts by Kevin Kortum

The Merlin Bird ID app is now the Merlin Fight ID app

mcsweeneys.net

Whether you’re a frightened child wondering if your parents are teetering on the precipice of divorce, a hard-of-hearing person worried about missing the nuances of under-the-breath barbs, or simply fed up with listening to your coworkers bicker, our app will do the work of listening to and analyzing any argument for you. We plan to add more categories of arguments, culturally specific approaches to conflict resolution, and, eventually, a Polymarket feature that lets users live-stream a fight in progress while others gamble on the outcome in real time.

As I've gotten older and gotten into birds a bit, this does an excellent job at breaking down the moment we are in as a society.

Instagram and Facebook are about to be filled with affiliate content

theverge.com

The new shopping features come a few weeks after a dustup in which influencers caught Instagram adding shopping links to their content without their permission. The “Shop the look” feature added links to cheap lookalike products and not the actual items, an influencer who discovered the feature said. Meta said at the time it was a limited test and that the company was “exploring various changes” to the feature.

I don’t really care about the actual meat of this. It’s already flooded with ads and affiliates and people just trying to make a buck. I think the consistent abuse, exploitation, and misleading of customers is shameful and paying $375m in New Mexico isn’t enough of a punishment.

Pentagon’s ‘Attempt to Cripple’ Anthropic Is Troublesome, Judge Says

wired.com

Hamilton acknowledged that Hegseth has no legal authority to bar military contractors from using Anthropic for work unrelated to the Department of Defense. When asked by Lin why Hegseth would have posted that, Hamilton said, “I don’t know.”

It’s 100% punitive. You don’t go from using the product and negotiating a new contract to expand capabilities to declaring they are a supply chain risk and can’t be used by any government contractor. It’s ridiculous.

Netflix’s One Piece Showrunner Adapting Monstress Into Adult Animated Series - Reactor

reactormag.com

Amazon MGM Studios is adapting the comic book Monstress into an animated series, with Steven Maeda (One Piece, Lost, The X-Files) helming the project.

Monstress is one of those books I've had on my bookshelf for years that I haven't gotten around to actually sitting down to read. I need to rectify that soon. It's one of the longest running comics going on outside of the Big Two and for good reason, I imagine.

Donald Trump’s latest climbdown suggests he wants to end the war

economist.com

On Monday Mr Trump did the rounds of American business television channels, repeating his claims of “great conversations” with Iran. Iran has firmly denied the existence of such talks in public and rejected offers from America in private, according to a Gulf official. The war’s unexpectedly long duration, as well as Mr Trump’s latest climbdown, undermine the idea that Iran’s regime is fragile and that regime change is possible. Instead, it is looking more likely that the ill-judged campaign will either drag on or end messily, with an Iran that is battered but defiant, and still able to inflict considerable damage on the region and the world.

This is what happens when you have power hungry buffoons in power. Make no doubt about it, America are the bad guys. Despite how bad things might've been in Iran or Venezuela, bombing indiscriminately because they don't do things our way should sound some alarms—especially since they are basically just trying other get the Iran nuclear deal back that Trump threw out during his first term; and now he's just lying out of his ass all over the place even more than normal, which .