Have the @bsky.app folks explained anywhere how Trending works, specifically if everyone sees the same list? There don't seem to be settings for it, but does it use your location or your languages or something to customize? Can enthusiastic Brazil/Japan users make something trend in the US?

It makes me so angry because these are not serious people and we are forced to pretend they are or get scolded for being elitists insufficiently open to new stalls in the marketplace of ideas when we point out a prerequisite for the debate stage should be understanding how literally anything works.

Make something a market that should obviously be a public service, or make something a state-run service that should obviously be a free market: the two types of policy errors.

Ja, ganz wichtiger Punkt: Es ist nicht so, dass Steuerhinterzieher öffentliche Infrastruktur nicht brauchen oder nicht nutzen. Es soll nur bitte jemand anderes dafür bezahlen. Das ist asozial.

Imagine you're a FIFA official who took bribes to hold world cups in Russia and Qatar. You would never guess that the US would end up being an even more controversial pick just a few years later.

I love that we have so many politicians now who constantly make us go, “Well he or she is genuinely very stupid, but also a relentless liar, which is it this time?” It's good and cool.

Simply ignoring any and all prompts that include the word bikini isn't good or sustainable content moderation, but any normal PR team would insist on it just to reduce the size of the immediate fire. But for these people, performative impunity is the point. They want to be seen not fixing it.

This fails to debunk what it's trying to debunk – nobody was claiming that *everyone* using airport assistance is faking it. The constructive suggestions at the end are very good though. There should be options between "no assistance" and "do the whole thing in a wheelchair" available.

“I’m gonna do an evil playthrough this time” [15 minutes of gameplay later] “Being mean is not nice”

Off to see Santa. Technically five minutes behind schedule, but with a 5 am wake-up time I'm allowed to prioritize caffeine.

It remains very funny how the “liberal” media are enabling and normalizing the fash harder than anybody and it buys them absolutely zero favor.

A good illustration of why HR speak around “respect,” “professionalism”, “assume good intentions”, “appropriate tone” etc makes me 🤮. It's almost always profoundly bad faith and only ever used to shield the bullies and abusers.

A lot of the current mess comes down to the collective reluctance to question the security state under “normal” governments. Using phrenology-grade crank science as part of the hiring process was never okay. Too few people were willing to say anything, especially at the top.

Can everyone please stop pretending CU is a quick & easy step towards the EU. Being in the CU without being in the Single Market is a lot more complicated than joining the SM. The SM isn't a weird little continental hobby, it exists because you can't make “no border checks” work without it!

There is an enduring myth that Apple is the tech company that respects its customers. That has always been absurd nonsense, given Apple's open disdain for its users, but this is rough even by Apple's standards.

People who love reading polls have just sort of accepted that approval ratings start at “half the population wants you dead simply for being a politician.” That's now the baseline. We don't ask often enough if that means something has fundamentally broken.

Anyone still alive from the Bush administration groaning at the sudden realization they could have simply said “Potatoes count as WMDs now” instead of digging for nonexistent nerve gas labs for a decade.

I know it's difficult, but there just isn't a shortcut around saying 'sorry, you're wrong and here what the facts are', and in some cases just being quite blunt about the fact the issue is that these guys just have a lot of resentment that they don't have the position they think they 'deserve'.

I keep having to justify why I want to go to conferences outside the USA and the simple answer is "Many of the people it would be helpful to talk to are no longer able to enter the USA"

We all have more material to read than we can get to, and “People whose first instinct is to moan about the bad word probably aren't worth listening to on the issue” is a helpful little shortcut.

Nebeneffekt: Viele Journalisten glauben in einer perversen Umkehrlogik, dass laute, deutliche Kritik nur bedeutet, dass sie besonders gut und neutral waren.

It's stupid and bad for so many reasons, but here's just one: What if the other state has the same policy? Is it a race who kicks them out first? Do you just leave them stateless?

I got the vaccine, and because it's not recommended at that age yet the GP asked why I want it. I said “Everyone I know who had it says it's horrible” and she was like, oh it is, makes sense.

I kinda love how for years people have been trying to explain that Corbyn has fairly boring and normal policies by Western European standards, he's not this Chairman Mao of Islington caricature, and then Sultana walks in all, I will be that caricature, thanks!

As a dark blockchain certified full spectrum cybersecurity analyst I want to point out that it's possible to avoid this security issue by simply not putting a camera on your toilet. You're welcome.

At this point hotels need to check kettles and coffee makers between guests and fine you if you put weird stuff in there, like smoking in the room.

But it's not true, though? The lunatics are fully in charge at Tory HQ and have been for a long time. Starmer's main delusion is that everything will go back to "normal politics" if he just pretends hard enough.

“GDPR is an unimaginable burden crushing businesses left and right” update: one company fined 0.05% of revenue after six years of investigation for blatant and obvious violations.

The only number that has ever mattered here is "non-white people who exist", which they want to be zero. No amount of appeasement can deliver that, which is why it's a dumb strategy. You have to tell the racists they're just wrong. It's the only stance compatible with reality.

I'm just some software guy but if someone asked me for a code review and then said, but you can't read the code, you can only listen to me talk for an hour about how I feel about the code, I'd want to know what drugs they're on.

Good example of why I roll my eyes when people complain about the burden of GDPR compliance. It's never “We ran into an exotic edge case.” It's always “We were absolutely not willing to do the bare minimum.” Just write a one-page document laying out why you think something is legal!

Connection to the users and their desire paths is the most important path of working in security and nobody goddamn does it. You are gonna make compromises. And they're all gonna be worth it. Because you understand what they want and you're gonna deliver it and they're gonna stop doing stupid shit.

With another idiotic headline. “So seductive?” There's no audience for this! No one likes it! Not even the racists – they don't believe for a second she's really one of them!

It remains amazing that Theresa May somehow managed to get customs union membership without major concessions and her idiot party went, ew, no, we want a worse deal.

Good news: only really, really dumb people thought they really wanted free speech on campus Bad news: There are a deal-breakingly lot of really, really dumb people

Even if he never gets into power, he does enormous damage to the UK every time he opens his mouth, because what every foreign negotiator hears is “This is an unreliable country that might rip up existing treaties if there's one bad election, so we should give them nothing.”

See also: old paintings of exotic animals by people who've never seen one but had good descriptions.

A hopeful message to finish. The problems with the UK economy are many, but most of them are solvable, because they are the result of sustained poor policy choices. These policy mistakes have left scars, and some of the damage is irreversible, but the majority of it can be recovered.

I've lived under three different European health systems – four if you consider that Germany has two parallel systems for no real reason. I could go on a long rant about what's wrong with any of them, but all of them understand that health insurance needs to cover all treatable health problems.

Proud to announce our next policy: installing a giant meat grinder on Trafalgar Square and slowing feeding migrants into it. There will be a live stream, and you can use the tipping function to vote on who goes next.

They genuinely think it's just so mean and unfair they're supposed to choose and can't pander to fascists and antifascists at the same time.

I love the "Prosecutions for fare evasion on the Tube are at their highest level for six years" bit. I wonder what could have happened 5-6 years ago that would have caused fare evasion to decline so steeply?!?

Anyway: both the state and private developers need to build at far greater rates, the default aim should be 'a dual earner couple on average incomes can live in non-crowded conditions and raise a family', and the model family *for policymakers* should be three for obvious reasons.

Plus naked stock manipulation. They've figured out that any layoffs will give you a quick stock price bump, no matter how unnecessary or irrational.

It's frustrating people don't understand how this works. If you're the far right and you manage to place saboteurs in BBC leadership, you don't ask them to make the BBC nicer to conservatives. You use them to create real cases of crass misconduct so liberals will agree the BBC must be destroyed.

I genuinely think there is a case that anyone using an AI product of this kind should face a short prison sentence. It's vandalism, just like painting on a wall or smashing a bus stop.

Tools so good you have to illegally influence the European Commission to try to force people to buy them!

“I'm not right or left, I'm liberta…” “Okay, ultra hard right, got it. Next!”

Today, we celebrate 75 years of the European Convention on Human Rights. From the right to a fair trial and freedom of expression to freedom of thought, conscience, and belief, the #ECHR has been instrumental in advancing human dignity and liberty. 🧵 humanists.uk/2025/11/04/c...

Honestly thought at first that the joke was that one of these is actually real.