Smart point about Twitter from an excellent post on the same. For the vast majority of people, being in a place where your every post is met with a torrent of hateful, abusive, personal bile does not make you a more open thinker through 'debate', it huddles you in an intellectual defensive crouch.

International Criminal Court judge, "sanctioned" by the USA for doing his job, blocked from using internet services worldwide, credit cards, banking... And nobody cares...

Putin is now putting all his strategic cards on an erratic Trump adminisration that may well end up paralysed and wracked by infighting after 2026 mid-terms and then replaced by forces deeply hostile to Russia after 2028.

Never mind the fact that malign state and non-state actors will find various techniques to deliberately feed disinformation into LLMs

Taps sign, again:

Poland will buy $100 million of weapons from the US and supply them to Ukraine, foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has announced. He says the move is part of Warsaw’s response to the recent Russian rail sabotage in Poland, which Sikorski says was "clearly intended to kill Polish citizens".

It's always the ones you most expect... www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

“We know that the people of Charlotte will be looking to folks like us to be helpful, and we stand ready to do that...” chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

now we're talkin'

The full leaked text of the proposed US-Russia agreement on Ukraine (translated from Russian):

I think the American public has the right to see the secret protocols of the Witkoff-Dmitriev pact. What business deals have been agreed?

“We don’t deserve the trust of the nation if we’re unclear about the divisiveness of swastikas,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to a fear of reprisal. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Is Piggy referring to his attempted coup on January 6th?

I guess one way to distract people from your friendship with a sex criminal is to claim that you are friends with a political murderer.

🇺🇦🇺🇸 Ukraine’s position is not so desperate that Zelensky would agree to this “surrender plan.” Some in the US are using the corruption crisis to force Kyiv to accept concessions, — The Economist Ukraine first learned the details of the plan this week, when Umerov, flew to Miami to meet with Witkoff.

Russian Z-fascist and propagandist Major Половодов Евгений Андреевич (Polovodov Evgeniy Andreevich), officer of the press service of the Russian MoD, was eliminated near Kreminna, 🇺🇦 in an artillery strike on a Vesti TV crew. In 2021, he was spreading propaganda from Syria. [re-post from April 2024]

China is mobilizing civilian ships for potential use in a Taiwan invasion. Recent drills tracked by Reuters show these vessels practicing rapid troop and equipment landings, suggesting China is refining concrete invasion plans. www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Nazis needed a coalition of parties to pass the Enabling Act because they had been unable to win a supermajority in March on their own; major miscalculation on the part of the Center Party and the German National People's Party, both of which were shut down. 2/

The speed of the dismantling: in March '33 German voters had a secret ballot and still had 20 parties/coalitions on the Reichstag ballot--including the Communists, despite intense Nazi pressure. By November the next Reichstag election was a non-secret ballot with uncontested Nazi candidates. 1/

A number of the new IFV Borsuk is being introduced to 15. Giżycka Mechanised Brigade (close to the RUS exclave). The brigade is the first in Poland which will be rearmed with those vehicles. Amphibious capabilities are useful because of numerous lakes in the region. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsWs...

So Russia devastated Polish monuments commemorating the Katyn Massacre. For obvious reasons. Fuck those people.

The people who presently run Texas are afraid of letting their own people vote. Illegal says the court — but let’s add shameful and cowardly.

Damn. My mistake, it is British Terrahawk Paladin. Looks like an actual confirmation of presence of APS's systems will have to wait. Too bad. bsky.app/profile/maks...

Extraordinary that the Texas government would be so corrupt that it would have to black out more than 80% of its emails with Elon Musk.

Today is the day to repost this meme about International Men's Day, one of the most unironically wholesome memes that has ever been made. Shoutout to all my fellow champs, chiefs, and kings. ✊

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad

Finally an official confirmation that anti-drone systems from Polish APS are used in Ukraine. Unofficially we knew there are several in use as well as possibly 100s of radars from this manufacturer in Gdynia.

A group of Chicago-area clergy is suing the Department of Homeland Security, saying it's violating their religious rights by blocking them from ministering inside an immigrant processing facility.

“Nvidia Gives Strong Forecast, Countering Fears of AI Bubble” I very much disagree with this framing. People buying lots of Nvidia GPUs tells us nothing about the eventual ROI on those GPUs. In fact, a bubble effectively <requires> “too many” of these to be bought.

Day 357 of daily #GeorgiaProtests Tonight’s march on the Melikishvili was dedicated to young regime prisoner Mate Devidze, captured by the police exactly a year ago - before the daily nature of the protests emerged. The police tried to force this many people onto the pavements, but failed. 📷 MOSE

Regime police in Georgia this evening. Just grabbing random protester women and arresting them. Why? Because protesting is now a crime. #TerrorinGeorgia #GeorgiaProtests 📷 Publika

Rubio needs to learn that forcing Russia’s ideas on others without asking others for their own is not an exchange of ideas. This plan includes zero concessions from Russia and countless from Ukraine. It is neither serious, realistic, nor fair

Swedish Deputy PM: Sweden needs to pick its friends wisely, and we are choosing Canada… So when we come to America, we come to Canada now.

More footage coming out of the Perm region showing gas tankers on fire. The scale of the blaze is growing and local services are struggling to contain it.

The Kremlin’s primary goal is the regime’s survival, not Russian national security. To secure its grip on power, Russia has adopted Shadow Warfare, using sabotage, covert influence, and violence to achieve its political and military goals. cepa.org/comprehensiv...

As expected Ukrainian President Zelenskyy didn’t even consider the Russian-Trump „proposal“, refusing to even talk to Witkoff. It is basically the same ridiculous wishlist Putin has unsuccessfully put forward again and again.

Having to explain to Americans that for some people the phrase "Live free or die" isn't just a slogan on a bumper sticker, for some people it actually means something

jesus christ, we are run by the literally most incompetent people. (sorry, I don't know who wrote the top commentary, this is via a prominent Ukrainian blogger)

Yes, Zelensky is under huge domestic pressure these days. However, the pressure isn't to "settle the war" but to show he'll accept anticorruption institutions' work. Watch for whether he fires Yermak rather than whether he'll agree to whatever "peace" plan Ru and Witkoff came up with.

We’re watching a shift where AI simulates the cohesion and reinforcement that used to require an entire online community. A single person can now build a complete parallel reality with nothing more than a prompt window. Which seems bad.

I've written about "disordered counterpublics" groups that reinforce shared delusions Here, the LLM becomes a 1 person counterpublic. It mirrors assumptions, absorbs contradictions, & provides the sense of a responsive, confirming audience. It is the architecture of disordered discourse, automated.

Previously, these belief systems tended to collapse under their own weight. Contradictions and memory gaps made them hard to sustain. Now the AI removes that friction, it produces timelines, summaries, and "forensic" explanations on demand.

LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language. It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

Btw, in case you have not noticed it--the last few hours have confirmed one thing. The alliance of dictators and autocrats is no longer notional--it is now up and running. The remaining democratic states in the world have to react now.

Riding the high of Trump's latest tax cuts, corporations are seeing record profits and will make over $1.1T in stock buybacks this year — an all-time high. Meanwhile, layoffs have totaled 1.1M so far in 2025 — the highest level since the pandemic. "New Golden Age" for whom?

Children helping clear the rubble. 19 dead so far

Cosmic fucking horror