By: Revanche

Good Things Friday (347) and Link Love

October 24, 2025

Helping folks:

This family was the target of a hate crime and need a lot of help to heal and get back on their feet.

I send Quiara extra money whenever I can. She may also lose her SNAP benefits on Nov 1 which means even less money to live on when she’s already surviving on a frayed shoestring.

Jack of Oi, Shiny is struggling with a heart condition and the whole mess of the US threw his shop and primary means of income into turmoil for a while. He’s trying to get back on his feet.

In another installment of it’s funny because it’s true (good God I feel like this every single day both as someone getting this message from exec leadership and having to continue to run the business despite ALL THE FASCISM): Don’t Let the Beasts from Revelation Distract You from Your Expense Reports

I may not like the Atlantic much but this is important: Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? “But when the METR team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20 percent slower when using AI than when working without it. The researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome,” Nate Rush, one of the authors of the study, told me. “We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.”

No individual experiment should be treated as the final word. But the METR study is, according to many AI experts, the best we have—and it helps make sense of an otherwise paradoxical moment for AI.”

This isn’t new news but it’s new to me and it’s encouraging to see the work is being done to lay this groundwork now, years out. I actually forgot for a moment that a general strike means people in unions, which doesn’t include me. Also I’m management. But I’m so pro-labor: The Call Is Out for Mass, Simultaneous Strikes in 4 Years

Speaking of jewels: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

It’s hard to believe that any of the higher ranking people ever trusted him but: ‘He lost us’: Generals, senior officers say trust in Hegseth has evaporated

I needed a minute to think about a decent President: Jimmy Carter had a long history with Habitat for Humanity — even pitching in on builds in his 90s He had a rough single term but he was clearly a pretty decent person.

This headline is understating things (if you can’t pass an open book test, you definitely do not understand the material. I suppose that doesn’t matter when you want to work for ICE since they have no intention of following any rules): Some new ICE recruits have shown up to training without full vetting

People are exhausting: A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.