jwz

When they weren't rolling through fireworks they were trapping people near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Waymos were a key reason for the traffic snarl in the Presidio after Saturday night's foggy fireworks display on the Golden Gate Bridge. Videos and social media posts from people stuck in traffic show Waymos locked in giant lines, randomly blocking the road, and stuck in a roundabout.

A number of Waymos had to be towed after they lost battery power; the vehicles that could hold a charge made errors on the road that backed traffic up for blocks, bystanders said.

Fellow drivers acted like, well, drivers. "We realized people were getting out of their cars, yelling and screaming at these Waymos because there were no drivers," Dave Guingona, who was stuck in Presidio traffic for two hours, told NBC News. [...]

In the Mission, meanwhile, one Waymo drove into an intersection despite a large lit firework sitting in the middle of the road. Video taken inside the car by passenger Rose Peterson shows the firework's sparks flashing all around them as the Waymo takes a lazy left turn. A second angle shows Peterson's Waymo tip the firework over, which then shoots projectiles at cars, homes, and bystanders on the sidewalk. [...]

A second Waymo that encountered a firework was a different story, though: A vehicle that drove into a firework near the 1200 block of Connecticut Street in Potrero caught on fire, Waymo said. The Waymo was unoccupied and there were no injuries; the vehicle had to be removed by the San Francisco Fire Department and other city authorities, according to Bonelli.

These incidents raise serious concerns about autonomous vehicles, especially those operating during unusual traffic patterns that may require real decision-making by drivers. "Human drivers don't just drive. They are the captain of the ship and anything that can happen to it," AV expert Phil Koopman told Gazetteer in 2024. "Well, if you put a computer in charge and it's not capable of doing anything other than navigating traffic, who's the real captain of the ship?"

The office of San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins did not respond by press time to Gazetteer's questions about legal mechanisms that might hold Waymo accountable when its operational failures, including parking and moving violations, lead to blocked roads and other forms of extended congestion. Jenkins recently attempted to prosecute seven members of the so-called "Golden Gate 26" who blocked the bridge in 2024 during a protest and were charged with felonies for false imprisonment (for keeping people stuck in traffic) and obstructing a thoroughfare.

Meanwhile, Mayor Daniel Lurie, who has been a major ally for Waymo in its San Francisco expansion, did not mention the company in his statement regarding the July 4 pileups.

Mirroring these videos that were posted on oligarch-controlled social media sites for posterity...

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I have so many posts about Waymos on fire that it almost deserves its own tag:

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As our "Cyberdelia" series has seen a bit of success at branching out from being only the "Hackers" party, we've decided to try and screen roughly one cult movie a month! I hope you will join us. Our bill through the rest of the year: Conan the Barbarian (this Sunday!), Evil Dead 2 + Army of Darkness double bill, Hackers (the main event), The Crow, and Batman Returns (the greatest Christmas movie).

Update: We just added Scott Pilgrim!

And you can get a discounted seated "Season Pass" ticket that gets you a seat at all five events through the end of the year!

Conan:
Sun Jul 12

Evil Dead 2 + Army of Darkness:
Sun Aug 2

HACKERS:
Sun Aug 30

The Crow:
Thu Oct 29
(Devil's Night Eve)

Scott Pilgrim:
Sun Nov 22

Batman Returns:
Sun Dec 20

You may be wondering what our criteria is for selecting movies for this odd mini-festival of ours. You probably think you have some great suggestions. I gotta say, it's a tough line to walk. First of all, just thematically with the Cyberdelia origins, my pitch is that they should be movies that Zero Cool and the gang would have watched over at Nikon's house. So: cyber, scifi, fantasy; not romcoms. Second, we're doing this in a bar, not a movie theatre, so they have to be heckle-able, movies you can gleefully and drunkenly yell at. We're not doing an "Alamo" thing here, no polite applause, no sensible chuckle; we want rowdy.

As just a few examples of "great movie, but bad fit": Aliens, Strange Days, The Thing. They're great movies! But they aren't party movies. They're too good.

On the other end of the scale is the obscurity problem: I'd love to do Barbarella, Danger Diabolik, Dr. Phibes, but nobody's heard of them. The 6 people who would show up (8, counting me and Kingfish) would love it, but it would be a flop.

Anyway, we've got a list, and if these next five movies go well and we start getting some regulars, maybe we'll be able to dip into the backstock as well. So if you want us to keep doing this kind of thing... vote by showing up.

Better title: "cheaters outraged that they got caught."

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) -- which is slated to take place in Sydney, Australia, in December 2026 -- bans peer reviewers from uploading papers they referee to AI chatbots, as the practice breaches confidentiality. [...] To enforce the policy and catch illicit AI use in peer review, the event's organizers have included deliberately concealed instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review.

The instructions tell an LLM to use telltale phrases -- such as "This work addresses the central challenge" and "The claims of the paper" -- in a peer-review report. [...]

"Designing a trap that presumes bad faith corrodes the relationship the whole system depends on," Sören Auer, a computer scientist at Leibniz University Hannover, wrote on LinkedIn. "You do not build a healthy reviewing culture by treating your reviewers as suspects."

But others see merits in the approach. A similar prompt-injection effort has caught hundreds of reviewers misusing LLMs in submissions for next week's 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea, according to Nihar Shah, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and scientific integrity chair of that conference.

Culture of trust, uh huh.

In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed down the "black chamber" -- the State Department's code‐breaking office -- on the principle that the way to make men and nations trustworthy was to trust them. As he later told aide McGeorge Bundy, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

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We replaced our network rack with a slightly larger one. Exciting news, I know, but I'm posting these photos because I know that there is a certain segment of my readership who will be upset by them, perhaps even scarred. Is this what peak performance looks like? Probably.

ICE Tracks Down Woman to Force Her to Delete Instagram Post.

Two ICE agents harassed a poll worker on Election Day, demanding she remove social media posts they claimed threatened federal agents.

Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, said she received a phone call Tuesday from two ICE agents asking to meet with her. Not wanting to meet with them alone, she invited them into her workplace. "I've seen the news, especially in Minnesota," she said. "And I didn't want anything to happen to me at all."

The ICE agents arrived with copies of her social media posts and driver's license, and handed her a warning notice alerting her that they were investigating her for allegedly threatening ICE personnel. "They tried to scare me into signing it while I was working," she said. The agents told her to "remove and/or discontinue" the behavior, according to the notice, which Gonyea shared on Instagram. [...]

Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the head, chest, and arm, faced virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight. It appears that federal law enforcement now view pleas for actual justice as some kind of threat. [...]

Gonyea's experience is just the latest example of how far federal law enforcement is willing to go to silence critics of President Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts. Earlier this week in Texas, a man received a 30-year prison sentence for transporting left-wing zines linked to a protest at ICE's Prairieland Detention Facility. Others involved in the protest received sentences of up to 50 years.

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Please enjoy jwz mixtape 259.

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A few days ago Doris Fish posted this 90 minute video of the full show of Sluts a Go Go All Star Gang Bang, a drag and burlesque show which took place here at DNA Lounge back in the Twentieth Century, in the distant past of January 1990!

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As with the Spencer archives, I hope this trend of people unearthing their 36-year-old VHS tapes continues...

An underground intelligence network uses subterfuge and honey traps to direct drone strikes deep inside Russian-occupied territory.

"Serhiy was great at flirting," his commander told me. "Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice." Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone. [...]

Any phone purchased inside the occupied territories is useless for resistance work. Devices sold there come preloaded with monitoring software developed by Russian intelligence. That app is called Druge -- Друг -- which means "friend" in Russian.

Druge monitors communications, photographs, and location data, relaying all of it back to Russian intelligence. [...] At checkpoints, Russian soldiers examine every phone. Not having Druge installed is a red flag to them; having an encrypted app, such as Signal, guarantees a phone's owner a trip to the basement. [...]

Few resistance agents have professional training. Most learn on the job. Partisans pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals to avoid using vulnerable digital channels. Within Kherson's partisan brigade, one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War. No online version exists, but a well-worn original circulates among the resistance.

"Your CIA was good at this," Dmytro said. "You bastards knew how to use sex."

Several Ukrainian print shops have developed methods for hiding instruction manuals inside best-selling books. A guard at a Russian checkpoint, thumbing through an artificially tattered paperback, will likely have no idea that some of the pages explain how to kill him.

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Millions of Dollars Have Now Been Awarded to People Fired over Charlie Kirk Comments:

All told, at least 600 Americans were fired, suspended, or investigated by their employers (many in academia or public service) in the days following the death of Charlie Kirk, with companies frequently kowtowing to Libs of TikTok-style online pressure campaigns to avoid negative attention, even when their offending employee had posted something truly innocuous. In many cases, people lost their jobs for simply posting quotes from the likes of Donald Trump or Kirk himself. But checking back in now, some 10 months later, many of those people not only succeeded in getting their jobs back -- they've also received hefty settlements following the world's most obvious wrongful termination lawsuits. Millions of dollars have cumulatively been awarded to people fired or even jailed over Charlie Kirk-related comments. [...]

The goal of a mass cancelation campaign is not just to cause the petty loss of a few hundred jobs by way of punishing people for their speech; it's to intimidate everyone else around them into not daring to speak in the future, in order to create the appearance of a culture with no dissent against right-wing domination. [...] MAGA America might consider the court settlements money well spent, if it stops people from the opposite side of the political spectrum from feeling safe in expressing themselves in the future.

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