Sam Cole

@samleecole

journalist / co-founder @404media.co signal: sam.404 (sensitive comms) sam@404media.co (everything else) complain about the paywall, catch a block

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Sam Cole@samleecole· 28d

this week, I had the absolute honor of being joined by @drjonessoc.bsky.social to talk about their new book, SEX IN PUBLIC! we got into a ton of topics, and our conversation flew by so fast. listen wherever you get your podcasts: www.404media.co/sex-in-publi...

Sam Cole@samleecole· 29d

joe tried the mask from The Mask. he's returning it

joseph saying "you just wait. I'll be the one laughing"

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jul 9

something truly amazing about the specific time we live in is that you could both a) survive polio in an iron lung, and b) meet your husband on Yahoo! Messenger

Lillard was able to live outside the iron lung. In her healthiest years, she climbed in only to sleep, about nine hours at night. Her time in the iron lung was a respite for her one working lung.

Lillard always loved animals. She rescued dogs and lizards. She was artistic and created hundreds of works of art and wrote poetry over the years.

She fell in love and married twice. She met her current husband, Baha Seleh, in 2005 in a Yahoo chat room. Seleh is from Egypt. He moved to Oklahoma last year to be with Lillard. They married in February.

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jul 8

this was a year ago but I still think about it once a week

an ai generated posted that says "GET A/C AND STOP COOKING YOURSELF" with a picture of a man inside an oven, cooking himself I guess

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jul 8

girl whatever

microsoft 365 telling me my storage is 7410% full

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jul 7

turning on the ring light when a migraine is already looming

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 30

my feeling when I'm getting roughly and unwittingly handled by the infantilizing hand of the consumerist pseudo-feminist panopticon

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 11

nws map showing a heat wave across the us this week

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 11

as others have said, this is generative AI creepypasta. but the likely reason for it is spookier: keeping LLMs "safe" 👻 www.404media.co/elias-thorne...

But with all the world’s literature as its training data, why do LLMs seem to default so often to the lighthouse? It comes down to how model makers try to safety-align and sanitize their outputs. “We found many stories in WildChat are not safe for work. This led us to hypothesize that models going through alignment are preferring a small slice of WildChat stories, like a bottleneck,” Hamilton said. “It isn't that Elias stories are frequent, but that they're just so safe.” He said the researchers plan to explore this theory further in future research.

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 11

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 9

www.404media.co/judge-learns...

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 9

Google One is changing its name to PoopButt Plus. it's the same, except you get 2x higher limits on poop from a butt

We wanted to let you know about changes to your Google One Premium plan. These updates include changes to usage limits included with your subscription and your plan name.

What’s changing starting today, Jun 8, 2026:

•

Updated plan name: Your new plan is now called Google AI Plus, and you’ll still enjoy the same 2 TB of storage and other premium benefits.

•

Usage limits in the Gemini app: For the Gemini app, we’re introducing compute-based usage limits that factor in the complexity of your prompt, the features you use, and the length of your chat. Your limit refreshes every 5 hours until you reach your weekly limit. As an AI Plus subscriber, you’ll enjoy a 2x higher usage limit than non-subscribers.

•

AI credits: The product-based usage limit model is also rolling out to other products, starting with Flow and Antigravity. While 200 AI credits will no longer be included as a benefit in your base plan each month, the new usage limit model we are introducing should allow you to maintain the same experience you are used to. To learn more about how to use AI credits, please visit our Help Center.

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 4

incredible watch: judges rip three lawyers a new one for making or missing fake citations

Sam Cole@samleecole· Jun 2

there's been one huge news item out of my home region in the last week and it's this loose emu

🚨BREAKING NEWS 🚨
EMU Has Been Struck By A Vehicle
Salisbury Bypass - Salisbury, MD
We are sad to report that the EMU was just struck by a vehicle on the Salisbury Bypass. The EMU was hit between St. Lukes Road and Snow Hill Road.
🔵 Law Enforcement Update 1:46 PM - Maryland State Police are on the scene. The Emu got up and is running on the bypass towards Snow Hill Road.
🔵 Law Enforcement Update 2:00 PM - A trooper has done an amazing job, and believe it or not, he has captured the bird! I kid you not, they have it detained and under arrest using a dog's leash! You can't even make this stuff up. They are now attempting to contact the owner to come get the bird! The good news is the bird is not injured, just tired from being on the run, according to the trooper!
🔵 Law Enforcement Update 3:09 PM - The Emu has been reunited with his owner. All MSP Troopers are clear. Again, great ending to the story!

We have reached out to the Maryland State Police and the owner of the EMU and hopefully they are able to catch him. Here is a photo of the EMU today.

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 29

the one from ChatGPT is especially wild considering OpenAI started using it for "breaks" after recognizing that long sessions are actively more dangerous for its users

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 29

anthropomorphism and sycophancy are unique, new problems. but the old dark pattern tricks still apply; these popups when you try to leave, for example, are truly ridiculous

a companion app called Cute AI begs users not to leave the chat, giving them the choice between “no problem” and “still leave cruelly.”

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 28

meanwhile, no one I spoke to has gotten a straight answer about when this is rolling out or for who. it's just this looming dread on the horizon www.404media.co/headway-ther...

The Headway spokesperson claimed that the response from users to the new requirements has been “mostly positive.” But providers I spoke to said they’re concerned and considering leaving the platform because of it. One provider I spoke to, who is a psychotherapist and doesn’t prescribe medication but received emails from Headway informing them of the impending changes anyway, told me they feel “frankly afraid” because there’s no option to opt-out other than severing care, especially for patients. “When I initially got the email indicating that they would be rolling out biometric scanning, my stomach dropped,” they said. “The email indicated that they would start with prescribers and their clients and then move onto everyone else. My mind started racing, what are the ethics around this? Where is this data going? The only time I've had to do a biometric scan is to do something for the IRS. This is not common practice in my field.”

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 28

Headway is coaching providers to convince worried patients to go through with this: help.headway.co/hc/en-us/art...

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 28

prime example of the way invasive privacy requirements that came for adult content first are making their way to everything else. not pushing back against the false equivalence of "it's like showing your ID at the liquor store!" gets us right here

Headway’s site says the new requirements are “similar to showing your ID at the front desk of a doctor's office.” But facial scanning and biometric data isn’t the same as presenting identification at the doctor or at a store. Privacy experts agree that online identity verification systems like those now required to access adult content and age-restricted material in many places around the world pose new and different risks, including the possibility of breaches, third-party sellers, and invasive tracking. Headway says it won’t use this data for marketing, and that it will protect it from hacks. Users are forced to take the platform’s word for it.

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 21

Everyone in charge loves to say this is "new." New technology they can't keep up with. Nothing about this is new, except that there's no longer anyone to victim blame. www.404media.co/radnor-high-...

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 19

Nikko at every attorney he's ever hired

the twitter meme "look at my lawyer dawg I'm going to jail"

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 18

what gives us hope? communities standing up for themselves. I talked to @hellobrittparis.bsky.social this week about cooperative infrastructure and what can make the acres of land and miles of cable that comprises the internet "radical," on this week's interview episode:

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 11

the speaker, who's spent her career creating shareholder value, tells a class of humanities grads to look on the bright side. meanwhile, this is what they're graduating into:

At the companies Caulfield referenced as existing because of advances in technology, CEOs blame AI for massive job cuts; Meta announced last month that it would cut 10 percent of its workforce later this month due to focusing more on AI, with more cuts to come. People who keep their jobs at these companies are often made miserable by the ways they’re forced to do AI busywork.

Within the humanities, the field these graduates have spent the last several years of their lives studying for careers in, AI is adding stress and dysfunction to library work and academia. A recent study by Microsoft ranked historians and interpreters and translators as the most likely professionals to have AI disrupt their work. Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he believed AI could wipe out half of all white collar entry-level jobs. This is not the crowd to tell they should embrace the “change” that AI brings.

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 5

sut . . . da fuck up

Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.

Brian Armstrong on X:

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase:

Team,

Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future.

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 4

every year

a very old draft of mine from twitter: me every time awards get announced that I didn't apply for, after a year of doing nothing of significance: oh man I wonder if I won

Sam Cole@samleecole· May 4

this bill would give the incoming director of the NSF power to award funding that would advance "AI literacy" for kids. guess how they define literacy? using it:

AI LITERACY.—The term ‘‘AI literacy’’ means having the age-appropriate knowledge and ability to use artificial intelligence effectively, to critically interpret outputs, to solve problems in an AI-enabled world, and to mitigate potential risks

Sam Cole@samleecole· Apr 29

just google boobs please. so many boobs available to simply google. for god's sake please just go to any browser and type "boobs"