No shade to anyone, but I have just realised that most folks don't realise that US govt linking autism to Tylenol doesn't have the getout clause of "just use ibuprofen". Why? Because NSAIDs are contraindicated for pregnant folks. See FDA, and Gov.uK here www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-s...

Covid is gonna shape American politics for years and years because it was the first time most Americans were asked to make sacrifices and they lost their minds because of it.

I have been saying this for 3 years now; it is evident from even a theorerical understanding of these systems' operations. But ppl keep claiming it's not true or not important, or could be patched over, & so I keep hoping each time an "AI" company CEO comes out & admits will be the one that sticks

One of the most used painkillers on the planet (paracetamol, for Brits) going to be a nono for pregnant women cuz...autism. The sheer audacity of the sexism and ableism is...ooof

Very good day. A mini conference where i presented "Fascist Bullshit: How “Generative AI” Enacts & Enables Disinformation, Misinformation, & Authoritarianism (And What to Try to Do About It)," saw great talks on ACT UP, public-facing climate research comms, & more; then we all hung out & ate outside

And, to be clear, BlueSky isn’t immune to this shit. BlueSky has similar issues, but doesn’t struggle with the kind of inherited racism from open source tech communities. It’s got its own problems.

That said, what we’re dealing with as I have said at nauseam is a social problem that people think can be fixed with technology. This is the undercurrent of the “defederate” argument. It was bullshit then, it is bullshit now, and it’s going to keep being bullshit.

To be clear, I didn’t say mastodon was racist (we can do that fucking dance if you want), I said that it maintained white supremacy, that it was hostile to users of color, and I am not the only one:

I could be nice about all this but at this point all i’ve got to say is just do some fucking reading (or use google, such as it is) and spare us all your bullshit.

A nice little story about Rising Stars. comicbook.com/comics/news/...

What is the text saying about those keywords? Is it building on a greater body of work, or contesting it? Are different parts of the text about different things, with only a part of its argument being relevant to what you want to learn? Zero traction. "Text is about topic. I am very intelligent."

There's a very old SF story about an attempt to make children learn via subconscious suggestion; they can repeat the phrase "the Nile is the longest river in Egypt" but not answer "what is the Nile?" or "what is the longest river in Egypt?" This story perfectly nailed how people learn today.

Several academics I know in multiple different countries have been noting this as getting worse with their students too

Keep your head on a swivel & don’t be swayed

Me every day

An amazing number of people didn’t bother to read this story and thus don’t realize the 37 year old man mentioned here was *horrified and reported it* - he is not the problem here! Mark Zuckerberg’s historically evil company is!

If you're uncomfortable with Bluesky owning (and being able to delete) your data but don't want to go the whole way to self-hosted/another service, you should: 1) Register identity recovery keys, which will allow you to point your current identity to a new PDS 2) Backup your PDS periodically

As always, an excellent piece by Laurens I remember drafting a newsletter issue a few months about how Bluesky would become a target for the Trump administration, in part because Bluesky threatens Elon Musk’s incompetent leadership at Xitter I wasn’t expecting the threat to materialize so rapidly

The point I'm trying to make (trust me, I'm getting there for you tl;dr fucks) is that because these elites occupy different worlds, different environments, environments predicated on deferring to them, they never had to develop habits of incorporating the experiences of others into their decisions.

Not only that, but these folks lacked the tools to see past the ratios, the dunks, and the quote dunks to the experiences that prompted getting ratioed or dunked on as a response. Since they didn't have the tools, they took that shit personally and chose to use their immense wealth to demand fealty.

So, you have a bunch of elites raised in elite spaces where deference to their whim was a thing suddenly thrown into a space where no one had to defer to them. Worse, they were thrown into a space where thousands of people could tell them to go fuck themselves without the tools to deal with it.

I'm SO MAD that we don't teach undergrads that there are other ways to do philosophy than through the methods of the western canon. Like, we lose so many promising philosophers because of this shit.

New, up on my blog: "The Looking Glass, just like the obsidian shewstone belonging the coiner of the term “British Empire”, Dr. John Dee, has its own magical potencies, its own daemonic and angelic Powers and Principalities shapeshifting and fluxing through material realities."

Fascism is always about domination. One rule for me, another for thee, which I will apply with boot and gun, cos it makes me feel strong and full of this quality I crave that I call "power".

Now seems like a good time to remind folks that this t-shirt exists and you can buy it for a very reasonable price. www.punx.co.uk/product/bagp...

Replies to this are... not smart. (also a gold mine for the Louvre of Bluesky)

This is brilliant.

“If people are uneducated and stupid, there’s not much you can do. People like being stupid. But don’t make it easy for them. Argue, and argue with them.” -the last letter of Tomáš G. Masaryk, the founder of Czechoslovakia, written 88 years ago, and practically SHRIEKING to the people of today

Recently @eliothiggins.bsky.social appeared on the Democracy For Sale podcast discussing how our information ecosystem is breaking and what steps we could take to rebuild it: youtu.be/ZPSvAS2W3cc?...

happy tron: ares soundtrack release day for all those who celebrate

No, we don’t all have to learn, nor is my history classroom a place where I have to teach students how to use gAI. That is most explicitly not my job. ‘Growth mindset,’ forsooth.

So very excited to share this news

What’s more antisocial: looking at a screen and ignoring your friends or wearing creep specs in public and ingesting total strangers into Meta’s ecosystem.

Weird way to describe Zuck’s creep specs, but “screens.” 🤷🏿‍♂️ techcrunch.com/2025/09/18/m...

This actually happened.

I just exclaimed: "Oh that's *DIRTY*. I love it." Then had to explain what I was listening to to my partner.

The thing I'll note for people to be cautious of is that, as that link outlines, once private data on atproto is added, private data will need to be intentionally private from its creation. there wont be a way to switch all your public content to private or vice versa.

You guys are going to need to brace yourselves to wait over a year for private data on AT Protocol. There have been a lot of design discussions and its clear its incredibly complicated to do (see github.com/bluesky-soci... for a general outline)

the skeleton key to understanding these people is that they genuinely think you are a drone who will do what you’re told if the TV says it

1hr to the new TRON:ARES -- I mean, NIN album -- goes live. AND the govt decided they were underpaying me today? Not bad, Thursday, not bad.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make everyone believe I deserved it...

Pair this with Le Guin's remarks on misuse of language. (See below)

Been thinking about the way gAI is being sold to us is as the universal tool, a kind of Swiss Army Knife—especially in higher ed. What might have a use in Compsci doesn’t have a use/is harmful in the humanities and arts, and there is something coercive about how it’s being forced on us regardless.

He's now been flown from that private estate to another: Chequers. Once again, totally avoiding the British public. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Britain... 3/3

He arrived at Stansted airport & was helicoptered straight to Windsor, which - as well as being a castle - is also a private estate. Everything he has done, including the carriage ride, has been done within grounds of a private estate. Manufactured pomp with nobody there. 2/3

Just a note to all the Americans, no matter what you're seeing over there, we don't like your President. We don't want him here. He has been 100% kept away from the public here in UK & that's why it all looks rosy. They know allowing him to be face to face with British public would be messy. 1/3

That said, a grandson of Oswald Mosely (Leader of the British Union of Fascists) & the fascist sister of Hitler fangirl Unity Mitford runs the UK Palantir operation, so..

I remain deeply concerned that Fascism in the UK will be weirder and more British than Trump, whatever Farage or Musk wants, because our damned histories of authoritarianism & class means that folks like Yaxley-Lennon/Robinson will still be regarded as oiks.