You would think that Britain would be one of the places that remembered that kowtowing to dictators doesn't work. You would be wrong. #resist #dictatorship #authoritarianism #fascism #politics #unitedstates #unitedkingdom #us #uk #news […]

The Nation pulls NO punches, from @espiers.bsky.social "There's no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign. Refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

One of the more frustrating aspects of getting older, but having a stupidly vivid memory of things that went before, is that nearly all the current policy discussions on tech regulation remind me of mistakes made in the past, often in the face of dire warnings issued at the time about all the […]

I really do love Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 ❤️

“The UK government’s continued complicity in Israel’s atrocities is unconscionable, and I do not want to spend another day operating on children who have been shot and starved by a military our government supports. History will judge not just those who committed these crimes, but those who stood […]

“You got away with it this time, human!” #caturday #catsofmastodon

Cat sitter gave the monsters double the usual portion of food for the two weeks I was away. We are now on Day 3 of the resultant de-calorification programme and morale is low. #caturday #catsofmastodon

Sitting on German regional train in First Class Carriage. Conductor comes in and makes a beeline for young Turkish couple and without even checking their tickets tells them that this is First Class and that they need to move. So they did. He has just passed me for the fifth time without […]

This may be my advanced age talking, but I’m losing a lot of respect for the oh so progressive, radical left, community-oriented, everything organic, fight climate change, “But I’m a vegan” Glasgow Southside when walking through Queen’s Park after a hot summer weekend and it looks like somebody […]

Looking at what’s going on in the US right now, it’ll be a cold day in hell until I next allow an American to lecture me on free speech and civil rights. I genuinely hope that the EU takes this opportunity to promote its much proclaimed values, rather than just following suit.

Hello hive mind. I’m just marking a student essay, which quotes from page 4 of “Cory Doctorow’s 2024 book “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What to Do About It”. I was under the impression that the book was only going to be published in October 2025. Am I wrong and is […]

This about sums it up.

[Long thread/1 How algorithmic content curation changes our brains and our expectations] With the teachjng semester fjnally over, my brain goes into reflective mode over all the things that happened in UK HE in general and my Uni in particular this year. But the thing that is currently […]

Oh look! The ICO issued a fine against someone. Miracles DO happen. https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/2025/03/advanced-computer-software-group-limited/

New idea for an app to help my US friends when traveling: translates “I did not vote for him” into any language at the press of a button.

I need a news podcast called The Daily Horror Show that just summarizes the last 24 hours of American madness and human rights abuses as stable and calmly as possible, with maybe a small call to action at the end in the form of something like "check on your neighbors"

I just received a 4-page leaflet from Anas Sarwar MSP through the door, which does not mention that he is a Labour politician anywhere. No red rose, no Labour logo, no reference to anything Labour has “achieved” either in Holyrood or Westminster. Absolutely nothing…!

So, it looks like the Guardian in the UK has moved over to pay or consent. I have the choice of either being tracked and targeted via cookies or having to sign in to a paid for account and being tracked under my real life identity. I‘m not sure how much more tone deaf it can get in the current […]

Dear Universe! For my next birthday I’d like a t-shirt that reads “If you must do this incredibly stupid thing, can you please not do it in this incredibly stupid way?” that I can wear to any meeting with senior management between now and retirement.

AI is fundamentally about colonialism. At its roots, what makes GenAI work is currency and hourly wage arbitrage. Pay data workers in Africa and Asia very low amounts of money to basically put the raw materials together. There’s no surprise why @timnitGebru, @abebab and others have called […]

Sooo, … anyone else in my age group have flashbacks to that time in the late 80s when they showed us “When the wind blows” in School during that last week before the holidays?

I find Trump as repulsive as most people here, but as a German, one thing I want to push back on is focusing on one man. Hitler's rise was possible because he was able to exploit the racial hatred and conspiratorial thinking that already existed. It's MAGA acolytes that see Trump as an […]

Watching the “Trump Gaza” video, I am increasingly certain that my comatose body is lying on a gurney somewhere and that all of this is a drug-addled hallucination. I mean, I know, “flood the zone” and all that. But there is “flood the zone” and there is this ABSOLUTE HELLSCAPE OF INSANITY […]

Watching Macron and the Orange Tyrant it occurred to me that there is really no good English translation for the German word ”Bauchpinseln”

[German election] I had not planned to be in Germany, it just turned out that way, but listening to the Conservative leader celebrating 29% as a “historic result” is not without entertainment. My 80s self tries to imagine what Kohl and Strauss would have to say to him.

Has anyone ever looked at John Perry Barlow’s Declaration, visualised Elon Musk reading it and paid attention to how this changes things? It kinda feels like we’ve come full circle. Or maybe it was always thus and I just didn’t notice..l

Dear game developers and ad execs. I have a rule that I will never in a month of Sundays download your game if your ad for it switches off the music I’m listening to while I’m playing the game I actually want to play. Bonus points, if your settings don’t allow me to turn down your inane drivel […]

Remember four years ago, when the first thing we did in the morning was to check if we were at war with North Korea yet? Good times…

Telling all my non-Info Sec US friends to get a Signal account while they still can wasn’t on my Bingo card for 2025.

In 1933 Hitler's forces invaded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the leading centre of research on trans and gay people at that time) and burned all of the books and records (after taking care to note down the details of all the patients to round up […] [Original post on mastodon.green]

I am constantly amazed how many of the Americans I follow on various social media still seem to work on the assumption that this is a four-year thing that they just somehow have to get through. Where do they get the confidence that there will be another free election? One of the thought […]

[German politics] One can only hope that the Conservatives have dug their own grave with this with regard to the upcoming election. But given the level of xenophobia in Germany right now, I fear they won’t be punished in the way they deserve. This is the scariest political situation in Germany […]

I once asked my grandma where she had thought all the Jewish people had gone that were slowly vanishing from her small town in Germany. She said, “Well, we were told that they had been asked to resettle in the East.”

Me talking to my cat when he comes for a cuddle but then immediately proceeds to lick every part of his body that my hands have touched, “This is not how connection works. If we want to be close to each other, we have to be ok with smelling a little bit like each other.” And, wow, have I just […]

I have one cat with a hyperfocus on eating bread, cookies, honey, jam, candied almonds and chocolate despite cats’ tastebuds allegedly being “sweetblind”, and another that majors in plastics and styrofoam. I want answers!