Chotiner: So you chose to kill your slavewomen as well as the suitors who had taken over your home. Why? Odysseus: Well, I was in a frenzy understandably, plus they had probably slept with the suitors. C: Ah. And as slaves did they do this voluntarily? O: I didn’t ask because C: They were dead?

Reading this from the Geoghegan piece on the TBI, and what leaps out about this is that database guy is describing a database. And 94.7% of all usage cases for LLMs are indeed that: a fuzzy, sometimes inaccurate database that can’t easily modified. www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

Hände hoch, wer sich nicht schon immer für sich einen e-Weimer gewünscht hätte

I wonder if a lot of this isn’t downstream of routine painkillers being branded? “Paracetamol causes condition x” is a much harder sell than “marketed commercial brand causes condition x”

So I was @stabiberlin.bsky.social stabikatting and the catalogue showed me what could possible be the most @alexdrace.bsky.social book ever written

Only time I met the garage, I was struck by: i) the beery stench ii) the girlishly simpering entourage iii) the intimidating air of menace None of this made it into the story. I now realise that's cos iii) worked

"My only option is to keep getting dopamine shots from the site that algorithmically boosts 1488 content, but don't worry, not to me personally, I have super tight controls. That shit don't work on me" is completely unserious

So many parts to this, but the one that painfully echoes 2016 the most is the absolute desire to renege on existing social agreements, no matter the cost to ordinary people.

This. Everyone has been trying for a decade to win with this One Trick (it's illegal, it's immoral, it's harmful for muh bond yields, etc) because they're afraid to take the fight to the core argument: we are a country of agreements, and you need to have a process to rip them off

They’ve already blown up the economy once. Why wouldn’t they do it again? (Obviously morality, legality and economic harm are all arguments to deploy, no disagreement here, but at some point you just have to be able to say: no, not allowed, and you are bad people)

Has to be said that in 2016, the media, UK poli-sci, majority of politicians all endorsed the principle here and argued it was moral. Families being torn apart didn’t stop the call “Will of the People” and “Parliament cannot be bound”

They always start by saying it's legitimate to be concerned about flows, but ultimately the rage is about the stock. Think I've first said this as a silly quip ten years ago, and well, here we are

it's actually really interesting me that no one who goes on about reaching people through social media has even tried to engage on tiktok or instagram.

Don’t wait your turn

Why does it have to stop with Oracle buying TikTok? SAP could buy Instagram and my absolute favourite Workday could buy BlueSky. Social media would be fixed for good!

Wait I know another goverment-backed institution that spends loads of money hiring academics to promote its funder’s narrative! It’s a plague! brussels.mcc.hu/publication/...

Jony Ive, minimalist, choosing the spelling of his name bc it streamlines orthographic inefficiencies, and then being pissed off forever at everyone pronouncing it wrong because he refuses to realize that one of the functions of letters is to inform the pronunciation of other letters is just 😘

it's also how counter-revolution has operated since 1789: wait until progressives go slightly too far, then use this as pretext for devastating over-reaction

You don't choose your parents so this is no genius on my end, but having been raised by people who watched what they said at all times, it was always self-evident that the folks who argued that HR policing you for saying slurs at work (but jokingly, heh) was like the gulag were completely full of it

Not now deadly brain-eating amoeba

Just possibly I’d go for the segment that has Italian, Greek, Levantine, Turkish, Persian, Indian, Korean and Japanese food, perhaps?

The @rosaluxnyc.bsky.social supported poll brought up interesting results. @politico.com reports. @rosaluxglobal.bsky.social

Solidarity in a post-US-allied world. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Very good

treat Twitter like the utility it is

Spoiler: Star sign is an excuse they use to let you down gently

warum habe ich das jetzt erst mitbekommen? das ist das schönste was seit langer zeit über köln gesagt wurde 🥹

Unzoomed in 1, duh

Unironically believe that linguistic diversity is as central to the global immune system as biodiversity: it's important to have firebreaks between different meme pools

Another thing I love about the present moment - Musk regularly goes 'don't worry, we are going to change THAT' whenever Grok produces an answer that doesn't align with his priors, yet the British Labour government thinks that they are going to be able to land an argument on there in 2029.

Is this why my highly thinkful ponderous posts on the North Rhine-Westphalia local election results are not getting the traction they deserve?

Actually slightly shocked to discover that not a single consumptive aesthete has thought to make a Magic Mountain video game

Admittedly, a 1% slip for the CDU is not bad at all given they are doubly incumbent - at federal and state level - and the Wuest, the CDU minister-president, has been there for four years already.

In terms of dynamics, the overall picture is closer to Gelsenkirchen - AfD up, everybody else down, apart from a modest gain for the Linke. (Though they may do better in Cologne, Germany’s other Berlin)

Ok, no consolidation of democrats here. Gelsenkirchen - one of Germany’s poorest post-industrial towns - puts the AfD within a whisker of first place. Punishing losses for everyone else.

AfD making big strides, brutal for the Greens. Striking that of the mainstream parties only the SPD made a measurable gain (the Linke will be disappointed with their +0.5%). Democratic voters trying to consolidate? And as for the FDP, well, charitably, Duisburg really isnt their place

Sharon, I need you to put the lathe of history down for just a second

Clickbait headlines are a major source of misinformation and misrepresentation. Useful headlines would have been: 1. Young men support Reform less than other men. 2. Age is much more important for Reform support than sex. 3. Reform is most popular party among 50+ men and women.

Lot of people on other reaches of the internet have dulled themselves into believing that EU flags at the proms are cringe and horrible and wretchedly petit bourgeois whereas whatever Tommy Robinson and his fans are doing is normal authentic sentiment

By my and @ajvicens.bsky.social’s count 15 people have been fired or suspended for commentary tied to the shootings death of Charlie Kirk. Our story: www.reuters.com/world/us/cha...

Unfortunately one of the problems with covering meme culture is that it's nature means as soon as reporters started learning to do so responsibly, people online would simply add a few more layers of nonsense and irony onto it making it confusing again

Important point this. Reporters had to learn to cover suicide responsibility and to name the victim not the mass shooter. By and large we still haven’t learned how to deal responsibly with meme culture

It feels like they're simultaneously so online they think it's the biggest story every, but not online enough to understand the meme culture around all this so they can cover it responsibly

The events of the last few days have shown how completely the so called Xnty of many on the rt has actually been swallowed up by Xn nati*nalism. The scholars and analysts who’ve been telling us about this are proven completely correct again.

This is the story to complain about. "Kirk's comments on gender, race and politics often drew fierce liberal criticism." Which comments? WHICH COMMENTS, MOTHERFUCKER? [/geese]

the permission structure created for a bloodthirsty maga rampage the last two days by mainstream media, all before any facts were known at all, deserves some real introspection by the entire industry

I’m not the first person to make this observation, but this being the biggest story in the world at present really speaks to how much Twitter still serves as a universal assignments editor for English-language journalists.

Feeling very aware that my old Berlin hood was called Horst-Wessel-Stadt for 12 years