Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social

Eliminating gender studies courses helps to ensure that universities and other institutions will continue to protect men who benefit from the abuse of women and girls, either directly or through their connections to those who exploit girls and women for profit. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A WARRIOR FEARS NOTHING, NOT EVEN ASKING FOR HELP.

Good morning from the @aaas.org Annual meeting in Phoenix, AZ. #AAASmtg Lots going on in the Expo hall. Talks by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Sci-Mic Stage.

Another story where you realise that absolutely no one has any idea how to deal with all the AI papers being cranked out. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I could fix her. But why would I want to?

Oh so it's now illegal for women to be cool as fuck

Maryland: the granny porn state

NEW: For the second time in 2026, Kentucky state police have charged a woman with homicide after a pregnancy loss. Both were criminalized after seeking medical care—one for a miscarriage and one for self-managed abortion—and face charges of abuse of a corpse and concealing a birth @autonomynews.co

It only took me a month, but I finally made a volunteer page on Stand With Minnesota. Because we are about to need a lot of freaking volunteers. Help us keep Minnesota housed!

“what cool shit can I do as Mayor? oh, I can marry people? awesome, let’s do it” once again the constant theme of “New York is great, New Yorkers are great, isn’t this great?” comes through

as he mentions in the video he is probably also the first mayor who actually got married there himself (he and Rama got married at the clerk’s office last year) so it’s personally meaningful to him and yeah it’s nice to see the actual employees not just the mayor

I want Deadwood but it’s about the end of the free internet

I wrote this piece about the dangers of AI relationships back in Oct, and here we are.

These are the best threads. Guaranteed to improve your day.

Happy Valentine’s Caturday!

A case study in how AI bullshit compounds and folds back in on itself, warping reality like gravity warps spacetime. Even some of the comments on this shitshow are by AI agents pretending to have opinions about it

This is blackout poetry to me

If u get a traffic ticket and don't pay it the court can and very often will issue a bench warrant for your arrest by the police

“We’ve had a lot of ICE activity (since the press conference) in our neighborhood but far fewer observers. They just want the Anglos to think it’s over.” — a message from the inside in Minneapolis

I’m feeling more secure about having clocked the Effective Altruists as assholes from the jump. (I had worried that maybe I was being unfair. As one does.)

A couple of weeks ago, @alexhanna.bsky.social were interviewed for the NonZero podcast. It was overall an unpleasant experience, with the host later admitting (on Twitter) that his goal for the interview was to convince us of his position. >>

When I write & talk about this, I say that I've developed a rule that I won't be in conversation with people who don't posit my humanity (i.e. that I have just as much internal life as they do) as a basic axiom of our interaction. >>

Ever since the Stochastic Parrots paper was published, I've been fielding the question "How do I know that you're not (just) a stochastic parrot?" ... one that I find inherently dehumanizing, as I write about here: journals-sagepub-com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/doi/10.1177/... Short 🧵>>

EA is "effective altruism" for those who don't know of it, and it's the EA in TESCREAL (as coined by @timnitgebru.bsky.social and @xriskology.bsky.social in their excellent paper linked here)> firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph... >>

Here's an example of the reaction I'm describing here, and I appreciate something this particular poster makes clear: They neither understand nor respect boundaries. There's no policing happening here, just my own decisions about who I will have a conversation with.

looking back on it, AOL was right. Thirty hours of internet is all we need every month

trump spent $40M ($133k per person) deporting 300 migrants to countries that aren't their homes, sometimes paying twice when they returned them to their actual countries anyway. That same money could've funded comprehensive veteran services, medical care and disability support nationwide. #Resist

90% of people don't give a fuck about politics, they just want to raise a family and watch sports and live their lives in peace But when you terminally fuck with their ability to do that in a direct and obvious way, they get VERY UPSET, and that is how revolutions historically happen

you can't be a good publication if you have mostly brilliant writers but also some hypervisible reactionary bullshitters just for balance.

Interesting comment from Leon Botstein here. One wonders for “extraordinary” a rapist has to be before he is no longer worthy of so much of Botstein’s time.

A young violinist was nervous about meeting with Jeffrey Epstein due to his 2008 child sex abuse conviction. Epstein reassured her by noting his friendship with @bardcollege.bsky.social’s Leon Botstein, and set up a dinner between Botstein and the musician. She soon became one of Epstein’s victims.

Democracy is when voters choose their leaders. Autocracy is when leaders choose their voters.

Belated congrats to my Pew Research colleagues on publishing this groundbreaking study - one of the first surveys to have a probability-based sample of transgender adults large enough to reliably report their views and experiences. www.pewresearch.org/social-trend...

Honestly, this feels like another timid hedge to not be accused of wanting to defund the police. American police may have body cameras, but they’ve also got a generational history of systemic racism and violence against social progress.

So, do I have this right? The official Dem response to masked federal agents killing Americans in the streets and abducting people, including children, to put in concentration camps is: “We need ICE to be more like the rest of the violent, often unaccountable militarized police around the country.”

Meanwhile, most Democrats want to abolish ICE. And frankly, that’s the moral, moderate position. Because we should be hauling every official and agent before human rights tribunals.

almost new year, new Dark Hi and Lois thread! QDUs stands for Quiet Desperation Units, today is 0/10 QDUs because this is cute. Chip is embarrassed! A PG rating would do him no good because the parents are right there! It has not escaped my notice that Trixie and Dot have switched places!

these guys are submitting large numbers of PRs for open source software and their primary motivator is not to contribute to the project but to evangelise for the *proprietary* AI: "look how much work we're getting done!"

It feels extremely reminiscent of waves of feminisation and masculinisation of computing past that have set up some workers as elite geniuses and others as secretarial despite doing the same thing of creating the data that tells the machines what to do.

The job of caring about what the code does, which users it serves, who it is reliable for and who it benefits is pushed onto the human contributor expected to act as a skivvy and a servant to the AI slop lord.

Resist narratives of inevitability.

It's the caring labour of coding that is constantly rendered invisible. Real Men move fast and heroically break things, ripping the future into the present whether we like it or not. Caring whether it's fit for purpose and methodically examining what's being proposed to assess it is for pussies.

Article's still findable (hooray Mastodon!) as is the very brief forum thread which followed. Article: mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie Thread: arstechnica.com/civis/thread... They're looking into it but haven't gone on record to say what happened. Dang.

I share your views. If the outcome is anything other than "Those responsible have been sacked and we have a new content policy to cover this sort of thing" I'll be considering them significantly less reliable. Or perhaps entirely unreliable depending on what they say.

I would really love to hear an "i can still trust the journalism that comes out of this outlet" explanation because I cannot think of one. (Deleted and reposted this post to correct a typo.)

Compare the quotes in the final section of the article with the blog post they claim to be quoting: theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

So uh Ars Technica ran an article that had a bunch of fake quotes in it and now seems to have taken it down rather than issue a correction? web.archive.org/web/20260213... Page is now down: arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/a...

Further context: arstechnica.com/civis/thread... I actually strongly disagree with their response, I work in news and this is a trust and editorial compliance nightmare, you'd stay behind an hour to fix this and stop the rumour / bad PR mill running until at least Tuesday. Nightmare fuel

If the allegation is true, I can’t see how the punishment can be less than it is for plagiarism (firing, and scouring all of their past articles for other instances of plagiarism) bsky.app/profile/w0lf...