I remember when a Canadian court ruled that Air Canada's chatbot was a representative of the company (so the company had to honor commitments it had made) and they yanked it immediately.

Linguist friends: Can anyone recommend some reasonably detailed linguist-friendly overviews of European Portuguese phonology and orthography? (Anything to put this in its comparative/historical context, especially with respect to Latin, would also be cool, though that's a lower priority.)

Oh wow, that's what happened?

[sigh] A lot of y'all seem to think I'm coming to this question as, like, a fan of these things, so allow me to provide some selections from my customary takes over the next few skeets. bsky.app/profile/i-ro...

This was entirely about purging a trans instructor from the school and they succeeded. It was aided by a lot of dumb liberals taking it at face value arguing the minutia of grading rubrics while ignoring the obvious bad faith efforts behind this.

The person who wrote a book entitled “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” is covering up for the creation of American concentration camps in El Salvador.

Just play War Thunder or 40k or something like a normal person and leave the ACTUAL warfare, where practicality matters more than Looking Cool, and people’s actual *lives* are at stake, to the fucking professionals.

this an elderly man using THE ACTUAL US MILITARY as his own personal GI Joe toys

New Forbidden Course at Bari Weiss’s University of Austin: watching bootleg copies of 60 Minutes smuggled in from Canada

🧵 There are a lot of folks out there who seem to be convinced not only are LLMs in their present state are underwhelming, but that nothing like them could ever do anything enough like thinking to be really interesting or worthwhile. Suggest a reading list to convince me of this. 1/

🧵 A lot of folks who are more positive about LLMs insist that detractors simply some necessary background - be it technical sophistication or hands-on experience - needed to really appreciate the potential of this amazing technology. Okay, gimme a reading list or suggest some activities. 1/

The writers for this show have gotten so lazy I can't even.

If the Bible isn’t supposed to be gay, then why is it that every patriarch always says “my fathers” and God tells everyone to be fruity and extra?

There, where we live, there is our country! דארטען, וואו מיר לעבען, דארט איז אונזער לאנד!

Ah yes, Naomi Wolf, known far and wide for her accurate interpretation of texts and for not letting her priors shape her analyses.

The legacy media narrative has been unified in claiming that Jeffrey Epstein abused minors. But how can anyone report that without interviewing Jeffrey Epstein? I asked Alan Dershowitz. —Bari Weiss, today in the New York Times

Weird how The Free Press was able to publish all of these without comment from the Washigton University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

unfortunately

Internet magic, please help me out here: I am searching for the title of an Ursula K. Le Guin short story, notable for the fact that it had no SFF elements that I remember. It was (I think) set in upstate New York in the winter, and one of the characters was a doctor. This is very vague, I realize.

Only one story, in the New Republic, made the direct connection between Kennedy’s repeated peddling of junk science and the effort to end healthcare for transgender minors.

When u know there's 40 lbs of sugar nearby

downside of titmaxxing: my tits are increasingly heavy and i have to carry them around everywhere

This to me is the biggest issue. These men spoke at grave risks to their own safety about being beaten, raped, and tortured at the order of the President of the United States. All of Weiss's odes to free speech and "dangerous ideas" is and has always been horseshit

I love this headline because it shows both vance and the times taking a side

Bari Weiss is killing stories the right way. by Ezra Klein

I know this is controversial because sea otters exist, but I think my favorite otter is an Asian small-clawed otter

they peep and peep like little squeaky toys and they are SO BUSY

This asshole sat next to me at a bar, drinking my beer for over a year and pretending to be my friend, then published this evil nonsense the second I was out of his sight. Few people have abused my hospitality and friendship the way Skylar did.

Apparently you’re only part of “society” if you don’t wear certain things on your face 🙄

Wait, sorry, is the idea that I'm not participating in society if people in indoor spaces can't see my nostrils?

The STI testing discourse is awesome because I'm learning about a whole bunch of people who think STI testing is a moral failing and I can block them all :)

It's always "why did we spend $10m to study grass flu?" and you do 2 minutes of digging and it turns out grass flu destroys $75 billion in crops every year and now we have a new vaccine for that that costs $3 to apply.

“Kale chip eating freaks”

Other things I don't use in my average day as an adult include having read 'Romeo an Juliet', having learned about the Teapot Dome scandal, and any of my education about the Krebs cycle. Hell, I'm having a much easier time remembering cases when I've used the Pythagorean Theorem than any of those.

This seems fine though? As far as I know, it's not like there are a bunch of other medical applications for cadaver fat.

Please share this widely. There have been 13 peer-reviewed critiques of the Cass Review, to the extent that academia regards it as pseudoscience, but so far all have been subject to organised censorship by mainstream media. This is the first time one has broken through. Oz Guardian only still.

People always frame “apple sauce or sour cream?”* as the headline latke fight but for my money the vastly more significant one is about latke texture: do you prefer to be crispy and crunchy, or are you someone who wants a cakey latke with a dense, soft center? * Both at the same time

Matty has negatively polarized himself against the concept of activism to the point where he no longer seems to understand how political parties work at all.

😆🦌🍎 Blacktail Deer contemplating an apple 📸KKPJ Photography

being trans in 2025 is like playing quietly on your game boy in your room not bothering anyone and then your drunk parents kick your door down and start beating the fuck outta you for "ruining the entire family" but all you've done is play game boy in your room without bothering anyone.

Getting a lot more people on this list for sharing antisemitic lies about the Talmud over the past couple of days. Reminders: 1. The entire Talmud is public and freely available online. This Anyone claiming to know about "secret" or "hidden" Jewish teachings from it is lying to you.

Christian Clothing CEO: You finish that sweatshirt about saving as many souls as possible? Christian Clothing Designer: Sure did, boss. Real fuckin’ ominous and with an implied threat of mass murder, just like you asked. Christian Clothing CEO: What.

A small problem in the grand scheme of things, but I feel so bad for these authors, who as far as I know did absolutely nothing to deserve being associated with this monstrous situation.

I feel like I'm going to get a lot of use out of this Pluribus screencap

Tbh “the existence of illegal immigrants is the reason why life doesn’t feel as good as it did when you were 12” really is the perfect encapsulation of The Malaise haunting developed democracies

Not the main problem, but what's the business model for would-be privateers even supposed to be here? I am not an expert in the history of privateering, but what prizes could they hope to seize that had any hope of justifying the costs & risks involved, even just as a personal/business proposition?

'...and then I told him that it sounds to me like you are just feeding 'Warrior ethos' types to the cartels and Pete Hegseth started crying'

Do you notice how, the higher the evidence stacks up that our ruling class is basically just a gaggle of coercive arse-grabbers covering up for each other, the more extreme their terror of foreign sex criminals and transgenders lurking in toilet cubicles grows