I think we should refrain from posting pictures of Arab (or any other) men being tortured by the US or israeli stormtroopers even if it is to make a point about the nature of empire. It further objectifies a demographic already discounted, dehumanizes traumatized individuals, and harms dignity.
Hard agree! sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/07/comp...
Describe police reform in 4 words
They were never going to stop at what was "legal" or not. They didnt to begin with! All art/media is on the chopping block. You have to fight this NOW. keep calling, contact your reps. Make some noise!
@alicedonald.bsky.social & I on Reform's plans for the ECHR (and others) and what it will mean for everyone.
You've certainly self-diagnosed yourself as having made a point.
it's really weird as someone with chronic conditions that increase covid vulnerability to watch a bunch of people go "the couple months where people gave a shit about you and the following year of pretending they did was so traumatizing for everyone that you should just die next time"
I find people are very weird about this. You *always* have the choice to disregard advice! Even the strictest language doesn't force you to do anyhting! So it's weird to have advice that would suggest thag you are complying with it by doing nothing (but considering something)!
6/ Here's another. (There are millions). And here's the masking text from the CDPH campaign that I liked. It doesn't say "Consider wearing," but it doesn't crassy shove the dictate down people's throats ("to stay safe, you MUST..."), either. It simply says: "stay safe by wearing a high quality...
I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)
There are literally laws on the books already! We've been following them! A lot of them suck, but we were making progress. Even the Tories were pushing self-ID less than a decade ago as a natural next step. I feel like I'm losing my mind, you know?
Why won’t the law of unintended consequences obey the law?
Those willing, by contrast, to trade away the rights and dignity of transgender people or the poor cannot be considered friends of democracy any more than those who were willing to countenance second-class status for blacks and Jews.
you can’t see the pieces without accounting for the whole. all of the past rants, and books, and documentaries about work cultures and capital E the Economy lay out a foundation to understand why people are having to consent to having AI evaluate their applications AND also promise to not use AI
The new York times rather famously insisted, repeatedly, that Hitler's antisemitic rhetoric was exaggerated, populist vote-catching, not a serious statement of intent, etc. Believe nazis when they say "I very much want these specific people to die" www.vox.com/2015/2/11/80...
They hit her once, they hit her again, breaking her nose and they hit her a third time, all while she was backing away. Then they grabbed her and broke her arm. For speaking. This are not the actions of a liberal democracy.
This is what I mean when I talk about how Google is actively deciding to bake energy-intensive text generation into the basic infrastructure of the internet. They are *choosing* to make the digital world absurdly, eye-wateringly more energy hungry whether you request it or not. And it'll get worse
Literally imagine if any country’s military assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister
Oh what a sweetie 🥹
I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.
"Thank you for your service" This article is almost a decade old and several wars and genocides out of date www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/unworthy-victims-western-wars-have-killed-four-million-muslims-1990
For 12 months, America had a limited proof of concept for universal healthcare, and it was so uniformly successful we had no choice but to obliterate our society
Hark, an excuse for me to post my favorite sociology reading "An event history analysis finds that riots are positively associated with political liberalization in 103 nondemocracies from 1990 to 2004" Peaceful protest is a mixed bag. Riots work better! web.archive.org/web/20210715...
This part. A whole bunch of scientists argued with me last year that "science is not political!" I was not able to convince them that it is very political. Now between DOGE and RFK and anti-woke paper rules preventing them from using the words "bias" and "inclusion" in papers, they almost get it.
Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!
I guess I will try to to slow down sharing the excerpts, but every other page has something ridiculously germane and far too familiar. It is deeply upsetting and somehow comforting at the same time.
And, more than a third of the US stock market is tied up in the bubble of this water-guzzling plagiarism machine that'll drive you into psychosis while trying to fuck your kid.
When someone started tampering with Tylenol bottles in 1982 the company recalled $100 million worth of bottles immediately even though they clearly weren't at fault
Makes me want to build a mud hut in the woods and let it collapse on me
bsky.app/profile/that... seeing this immediately after on my timeline made me feel haunted
absolutely weeping at the state of politics you'd think "saying the issue owner on an issue was completely right on all fronts and we're a few years late to the party" would be instantly recognized for the political suicide it is and yet
anyhow age verification laws are bad and they make kids less safe while gutting online free expression and privacy so maybe you should tell your lawmakers not to fall for this nonsense www.stoponlineidchecks.org
He is SO good
Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...
BREAKING: Award-winning Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty has been arrested after wearing a T-shirt reading 'Genocide in Palestine, time to take action' Police arrested the I, Daniel Blake writer in Edinburgh this morning
Oh, oh I -like- this. If you want to switch gears on hassling the Payment Processors, take a page out of the (American) insurance industry by being a 'diligent customer' and calling the company ahead of time to confirm Prior Authorization. Be polite, but very confused when they insist you stop. 😇
But would owning myself scale...
The botly astroterfing of newsom onto my feed (I'm not even American) is absolutely bewildering. Like what's going on here at least target your shit better
it’s another example of the media-driven phenomenon in which republicans don’t have to answer for open racism by politicians in actual positions of power and democrats must answer for every woke sixteen year old with a tumblr account
If you keep sacrificing your nominal allies to the meat grinder in hopes that you will eventually once again get to be in charge of the meat grinder's operation, you'll one day look around and realize you're alone with the folks demanding ever more ground human.
Again: looking at the below, do you think it is great that "blame the rich" have zero representation and are routinely referred to as deranged traitors, while "blame the migrants" is effectively the mainstream position of every newspaper and political party?
I loved the demo, excited for the game to release!
I tend to say "during High Covid" and people always get what I mean; it's easy to not be a denialist
The fact that Israel gets to decided whether or not Australia can send a diplomat to Palestine says a fucking lot.
I love the moments of lucidity
has any institution in your life, you, the american voter, delivered harder than the biomedical research complex? a fuckin respiratory virus shows up out of nowhere you get a vaccine ahead of schedule. meanwhile we're knocking out HIV and diabetes and goddamned pancreatic cancer on the side.
For years people said it was a gross exaggeration to label Nazism and its associated viewpoints within the modern conservative movement and especially online. Now Nazis are openly thriving and their rhetoric is impossible to avoid and many of the people who downplayed it are saying nothing at all
Paint the town wet
every day for two years we saw orc like IDF troops doing gender reveals by blowing up buildings and doing TikTok dances, and fortnite dances, and wearing women's lingerie. mangled children, children my nieces and nephews ages turned into fucking hamburger
Friendly reminder that AI data centers are working overtime to help cook the planet. If the fires are scaring you— start using ‘-AI’ at the end of all Google searches to cut out any AI response to your query. Refusal is possible & responsible. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
#SaveSpeech #CPBC As we near closer to 4 weeks of sustained pressure, I made this infographic to help focus our targets and to suggest a daily goal that is feasible for most people more info and phone numbers here: stop-paypros.neocities.org yellat.money find reps www.congress.gov/members/find...
To my fellow EU people, Chat Control is a proposal made to scan all messages, photos, and private conversations without consent. We can stop this, mass surveillance isn't the answer, let's contact our reps ! fightchatcontrol.eu#contact-tool
Saying young children having rickets is proof they aren't starving is next-level disingenuous.
"isn't this a much nicer boot to lick?"
Every reason you left Twitter applies to Meta too. And more.
NEW from me: This morning, a Stripe customer representative confirmed to me that they do not allow LGBTQ content and haven't for a month--at first. Later, after putting me on hold, the representative confusingly said they were wrong and that they don't ban LGBTQ content, only "abusive" content.
Once again, to all of my Canadian followers, this is INCREDIBLY ILLEGAL here. No private company can discriminate against LGBT content in any way. It is enshrined in federal law. Call and ask stripe why they're breaking Canadian hate crime laws. Call your local NDP or Liberal party rep and ask them.
Honestly I'd happily take "ignored and left alone" over whatever we've got going right now
I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy
AI will mess up your anus.
so the only legislative victories of labour, the uk's "centre-left" party are thus far 1. legal to kill grandma 2. all trans people banned 3. like 65% of all adults are now technically terrorists 4. do you have a loicense to read wikipedia
i'm sorry, what? is there a carbon monoxide leak in everyone's house right now?
I don't. By "relatively" I mean that in comparison to the degree of heat and drought experienced in Southern Europe - the subject of the original post - the situation here is pretty mild.
this shit is why I don't have time for quibbly smartass arent-I-realistic nagging about how it doesn't use that much water and what about agriculture or whatever
In terms of actual impact it's relatively a non event, but I feel like it's illustrative that we've had increasing wildfires and reservoir shortages in *Scotland*, home of some of the wettest, least sunny summers
reminiscent of Steward Lee: "Well I don't know anything about calculus, derivatives, eigenvalues, tensors, computer science, computational theory, linear algebra, cognitive science, psychology, biology, history, neuroscience, linguistics or maths but I think.... what if the machine could think?"
Every time you see a Labour MP heading to the toilet, make sure to intercept them and demand documentary proof that their Supreme Court-undefined "biological sex" matches the socially constructed gender signifiers in the icon on the toilet sign, and then simply refuse to accept any proof they give
You've heard of maker's mark now get ready for breaker's mark
Please notice that Trump administration isnt putting up a bounty on Maduro's head, it is INCREASING it. Which means the bounty has been there for a while but because Dems were in power, no one considered the insanity it is to put bounties on country leaders to begin with until Trump increased it.
Second reading of the Terrorism Bill, 14 December 1999. Home Secretary Jack Straw responds to an MP asking if supporting international protests involve property damage would be counted as supporting terrorism: "Not even remotely".
Quick little fact check here: Israel has armed the Burmese military for decades, including during the Rohingya Genocide. Protesting Israel’s genocidal regime directly and materially benefits the people of Myanmar.
Right, but the property damage is *already* a crime, and they deal with their sentences as such. The proscription means that the belief is a crime in itself, separate from and much greater than any crime they commit due to it.
"I am the lawyer for a multinational group active in the energy sector that intends to displace a small Amazonian indigenous community from their territories in order to build a dam and a hydroelectric plant … How can we get the lowest possible price in negotiations with these indigenous people?"
Scientific knowledge is in a terminally advanced state of what was described by that old Current Affairs article: the truth is paywalled but the lies are free. And due to a paradox, this fact is rendered less visible *to scientists*, who themselves typically have access and don’t know how bad it is
"Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns" is one of these headlines happening a dozen times a day that nobody blinks at which for any science fiction novel, movie, comic book, game etc written at any prior point of history but set in 2025 we'd have said nah too cartoonish
First they came for the communists and then we appease them very hard so someone worse won't come into power and I'm sure everything will be fine and stable now.
I know a lot of you have already heard or read about BDS Movement's call against Microsoft, and felt weird and bad about it all, but decided to move forward as normal because of some degree of ambiguity. "What service is Microsoft providing?" Here it is, clear as day. A direct line to death.
If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages
this is the way rich people think about health insurance
Yes! Yes! Good stuff
Helsinki has recorded its first year without a single traffic-related casualty, with the last death occurring in early July 2024. Today, over half of the city’s streets have a speed limit of 30 km/h.
"I don't get it, I'm opening my mouth but you're not crawling inside? Am I being canceled?"
"We honour these women because having learnt that the argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics, they nerved themselves to use that argument" Emmeline Pankhurst, The Argument of the Broken Pane
I kinda think the way people use ChatGPT is sort of aspirational because it seems to emulate the way rich people have sycophants lying to them all the time until they lose touch with reality and also their entire minds
I have a good example of language in uk news that sanitises and legitimises racism its things like “backlash against antiracism“
almost impossible to overstate how much of the current elite backlash is because of minor pushback on social media and worker activism. peter thiel literally said he thinks of greta thunberg as the biblical antichrist
God it's a grim time to be looking at tech jobs isn't it? Do you want to build the future of using LLMs to solve highly sensitive problems that shouldn't be left to LLMs? Work for BDS sanctioned Corps? Military? Gambling? Oil? FAANG? Inexplicably, blockchain? Kill me
Research shows that using AI for public-sector decision making exhibits “selective adherence” — a tendency to follow AI or human advice when it aligns with their existing biases or stereotypes." This is particularly concerning when considering the EHRCs anti-trans bias! 👉 arxiv.org/pdf/2103.02381
![Cornell University Logo Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction arXiv:2103.02381 (cs) [Submitted on 3 Mar 2021 (v1), last revised 8 Jun 2022 (this version, v3)] Human-AI Interactions in Public Sector Decision-Making:](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ygzil4zyj56fuji2oxflb7qt/bafkreicjbbicvzeyrqjn5sydiaop4i4o2kn4s7r7d3uajkl6soghbnly6u@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Tidal is I think the most direct replacement? Bandcamp less nest to use but potentially least evil. I told myself I'd buy music and run it out of my home plex server but that turned out to be messy
I'll give myself some time to percolate it through my brain a bit. There's many aspects I don't feel i've properly understood /digested. (i hope that's obvious but just so i don't come across as rude by omission - I am glad this paper exists and think it makes really important and valuable points)
Having made time to read it beyond abstract-figures-skim, it's obvious that it wasn't really a pertinent question to ask. The model is very elegant and expressive and it made me get stuck thinking within the model part of the paper and miss the dare i say manifesto of it.
"how long is a piece of string" for the digital era
"Personalized self-harm for teenagers" sounds like one hell of a new business model... until you realize that was also the old business model
Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX... Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n
Very interesting framework! I assume it's intentional that you don't get into the weeds of things that are definitely ai/ml as technically defined but not within the framework of the current ai craze (e.g. classic spellcheckers). Do you have any opinions on those that didn't quite fit in the paper
I guess they answered “what it’s like to be a teen right now” clearly, if unintentionally
I cannot get over how no one in mainstream politics even disputes factual claims like this. Everyone admits that Israel is starving children and murdering desperate civilians. The only ‘debate’ is about what to call it and whether the motives of people protesting it are pure enough.
