Listening to a radio show with several mainstream pol corrs talking about energy policy, and it is very striking how they have just given up on renewables. The eminently sensible take now is that Ireland should continue to rely on fossil fuel. How did we fuck this up so badly, as a country?

Sting looks like the Starfleet Admiral who arrives on the Enterprise and is a jerk to each of the characters in turn before Picard discovers he’s working for the Romulans.

Recumbent Figure (1978) by Henry Moorf Artist: S4RK https://b3ta.com/board/11428353 From the 'Letter Change Art' challenge https://b3ta.com/challenge/letterchangeart/popular/ #LetterChangeArt

jaysus using any Google tools nowadays is just dodging a constant stream of "fuck this up with Gemini" prompts popping up when you so much as look at a piece of text

A Nazi billionaire is openly manipulating public discourse in order to meddle in elections around the world on a scale previously unseen. governments: what are we supposed to do about that everyone else: guess I’ll keep using that website so hehe

Scoop: Central Command is getting reports that military personnel are being targeted using commercially available location data. Few details available, but it’s a sign that the tech industry’s advertising-surveillance complex is having consequences on the battlefield. www.reuters.com/business/med...

"The cost of data centre growth in Ireland: Households paid an estimated €715 million more in electricity bills" Excellent, detailed new FOE Ireland modelling confirming with hard evidence that this industry is making power less accessible www.friendsoftheearth.ie/news/the-cos...

Heard a story earlier on about how the SEAI EV grants in Ireland have effectively subsidised the well-off, excluding most of society. That was entirely by design! Only new cars are permitted -- and virtually nobody in Ireland buys new cars. If you want widespread use, change _that_

So we're saying social media is the same sorta experience as cigarettes or alcohol in some ways. But we're also saying, "It's fine if governments use these as the primary method of distributing critical information during a disaster."

if we're arguing social media is too dangerous for kids 16 and under, we're basically saying it impacts the brain and potentially body like an addictive drug. this IS kinda true. people seldom carry that logic to its end. doing that would mean admitting every adult online is getting fucked up 24/7

these are the stims you find when you’re exploring the Palantir offices in a post-apocalyptic video game

Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

It remains bizarre that for Blair and so many others there is an epochal revolution underway in AI, but the other and much more advanced industrial revolution in clean energy that is much more advanced and already impactful is never worthy of mention.

Thanks Mr Blair but a baselessly confident 6,000 word diatribe telling the UK to move right on every issue while embracing Trump and Silicon Valley wasn't even that cute all those times Dominic Cummings wrote it.

Because its reasonable to both want change, and not want that change to be for the worse.

Another year when @news.rte.ie, @irishexaminer.bsky.social, @irishtimes.com, & @thejournal.ie all use beach & activity photos when reporting on record #climatechange temperatures. Please use this great guide from @climateoutreach.bsky.social: www.climatevisuals.org/how-do-you-p... #Speirgorm

a few nice updates from Boris on Anthropic's fossil-fuelled chatbot www.linkedin.com/posts/bgamaz...

Happy Threads Day. May we see many more.

Every claim in the un-highlighted paragraph here is wrong.

Pawlitican

Charlie Stross' Vile Offspring from Accelerando are almost prophetically like the ways entrepeneurs today imagine a machine-learning driven corporation. The critique is not a *positive* one, but OpenClaw as CEO looks a lot like the Vile Offspring with just a bit of scale.

We aren’t talking enough about what a shit result it was for Aontú #speirghorm

Once again, PR-STV voting has delivered. Residents of other countries, you need to get on this, it's the only way to do it

"Robots will rise up and kill us all because they read scifi" has a lot of "slaves run away because they're mentally ill" vibes to me. It also does not inspire me with confidence that folks understand or even care about real world oppression.

yikes. 🧵

In the face of widespread illegal peat mining Minister James Browne says he has "no objection in principle to exempting peat extraction from the planning system". What a way to solve a problem! www.offalyexpress.ie/news/ministe...

Wild seeing class consciousness arrive at CNET.

Counterpoint: data centre development is occurring at such a wild pace that it is creating real, serious and verifiable issues, it's good to try and stop those issues and maybe the people trying are not doing so performatively and insincerely

Voting described as "brisk". DRINK!

A NEW TWIST in Africa's soaring solar story: It's now manufacturing its own panels. The factories use imported Chinese cells, which are 40% of the value of panels, keeping much of the value domestically. 9 GW of cells+wafers in Mar/Apr alone🧵

👀

The *sole* reason right now that the Oireachtas still hasn't published PQs from a whole week ago is Cork's very own racist stage magician, Ken O'Flynn TD, The Great Bellendo. Last Thursday's order paper for questions has an unusually-huge 802 PQs on it. *363* are from Flynn. For ONE day.

This company that has built an apparently unworkable system for Irish Rail, reportedly headed to the bin at the cost of €50 million, is the same company the NTA has hired to bring contactless payments to Dublin's bus system. www.dublininquirer.com/the-nta-has-...

There's no "study," this is based on a crank manifesto with only four footnotes written by a bunch of health grifters. Why is the Guardian covering this like it has any academic credibility?

Attempted -- and failed -- a gadget repair. Lesson learned: don't try it unless iFixit have it covered

If you ever see anyone arguing for more crackdowns on social welfare fraud, remind them that there is none to speak of and that, far from saving money, the last time they opened a tipline for SW fraud it *cost* the state approx €471,320 in wasted investigations.

im at the combination pipe and wrench

still waiting for AI to solve climate change

Granta AI scandal has me speechless. She had. The Kind. Of Walking. That Made. Benches Become. Men.

There’s going to be some great studies about how one of the core utilities of the internet, Something so ubiquitous that they became a universal verb, deliberately decided to ruin their core product for absolutely no reason whatsoever

seeing AIB getting into crypto definitely isn't giving me 2007 vibes, no sir www.irishtimes.com/business/202...

JUST TELL ME THE FUCKING POST OFFICE HOURS JESUS CHRIST

June 14th. What does Polymarket say about booing.

half of all tech news these days is something like "i am so excited for AI to put us all in those tubes full of goo from the matrix"

This is the truest most authentic version of a ‘Carbonara’ as it’s true to its origins as a breakfast slop thrown together for GI’s in Italy in WW2

Wow this is grim. sfstandard.com/pacific-stan...

I think the most galling thing about leaders like Keir Starmer and Micheál Martin is the foreboding sense that they are just pissing away any opportunity to get us ready for climate change before it starts to severely kick us in the dick.

Not afraid of confrontation

new favourite reactji

Andon labs created AI-Hosted 24/7 radio shows, and Claude absolutely could not stop libbing out