NEW from me in @pnas.org on the risks of data sharing with qualitative research: "Today, confidentiality risks are amplified by social media, surveillance, and AI tools, which make ample data about people publicly available, thus making deidentification less effective" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Just to be clear, social media ‘bans’, age verification, ‘device-level’ control over sexual images etc. all *increase* the power of the tech giants and the tech bros. They hand over enforcement and monitoring to the tech giants. They all give more data and more control to the tech giants.

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

Sometimes you find an especially perky ancient little guy and you need to make a gif to express it, ok?

I know any TU historians reading this might laugh but all the pictures of apprentice dinners, company social events, away weekends, & family competitions makes you think how sad it is that when people talk about losing working class British culture, they should mean that, not being white & born here

bisexual final boss

I'm one of those people who has a lot of skulls in their home decor, but they are all fake because if you are actually interested beyond surface aesthetic you know just how awful the trade in human remains is and was.

Right about now (BDST) W/C L.E. Healy, the AAEAF armaments officer, received a call from the Air Ministry reminding him that the 1000 lb bomb had not been cleared for use on the Hawker Typhoon. Healy replied with one of the finest memos of WW2. RCAF Typhoons had dropped 48 of them that morning.

The ever-essential @polphilpod.bsky.social makes a solid case for how the structure of the anti-trans panic in the UK's establishment provides a template for going after other small minority groups, and shows how it's happening to British Sikhs. It's as eerie as it is infuriating.

Delighted that my Roman Camps in Scotland (2011) is now Open Access! Thanks to Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and Ordnance Survey

"It is an important function of the courts to protect minorities, in particular small and perhaps unpopular minorities, since their interests may sometimes be... even deliberately violated by the majority," said the Court of Appeal, but not of trans or disabled people but of kids at private schools.

worth bearing this in mind with the recent restrictions on NSFW content on social media/online storefronts

Ok so i get challenged in a bathroom. I pull out my id card that says female. Now what? You gonna call up the Dutch to get my birth certificate? The one thats classified like secret service docs when i changed it? Ngl pretty hype to cause an international incident when i go for a slash

I’m not crying; you’re the one who’s crying. 🫶

Stuff like this emphasises the real and pressing need to tax wealth. Not to raise money, not to fund services, simply because there is too much money in too few hands and oligarchy is incompatible with democracy. Tax the rich so they have less money.

This is actually an amazing visual explanation for why established parties and governments are so willing to support social media bans for under 16s

I’m reminded of Sandie Peggie, whose persistent well-documented racism is glossed over by most on the anti-trans side, who‘d otherwise have to make the case that someone with a storied history of being abusive and bigoted intermittently became sensible and enlightened.

Marjane Satrapi 1969-2026

Hackenschmidt was 5'9" (175cm) and 220lbs (100kg) A good rule of thumb is to distrust anyone who claims to be steroid free, who is more muscular and has a lower body fat percentage than him. Compare him to literally any YouTube fitness influencer or marvel celebrity or such.

The WHOLE thread! Fascism wants to take everything from us and give us backbreaking poverty and endless toil in return. This is just classic authoritarianism. You owe your body to the state! and it has no other purpose, how dare you think you have a right to art or pleasure

And we love them both #pride #transgender

Collecting critical accounts of Scottish illumination & I have a new winner 'The decoration is brutal..full of barbaric audacity' 'the whole attains a frightening grandeur by its absence of restraint.' 'more goodwill than decorative taste led him to this weird imitation.' Oh this is gold for the 📖!

Police are so well protected when they handcuff a dying man, their superiors want to blame anti racism guidelines, not their absolute cruelty and fucking idiocy. None of the officers involved should have jobs right now. But we're discussing paperwork they prob haven't even read

Every crime in which an ethnic or cultural minority is the perpetrator used to justify repression or worse of minorities. Every crime in which a minority is the victim used to argue for the idea that ethnic diversity is inherently unstable and should be reduced or eradicated.

How can publications run articles like "Gen Z aren't shagging cos they're deeply boring" alongside ones explaining "Gen Z are living with their parents cos they can't afford to rent" and not connect the dots? How many randoms would YOU bring back to your parents' place and bonk next to their room!

And on that basis, I don’t think the current zebra fashion is going to have much effect at all. It’s basically psychological camouflage at best. A criticism, funnily enough, laid at the door of the original dazzle by some of its more sceptical contemporaries.

Dazzle also won’t work - can’t work - on other sensor systems. It doesn’t mess with thermal sensors, for example. Radar was the absolute kiss of death for funky paint jobs as a practical countermeasure.

To do this you needed to measure the target’s speed and direction, and dazzle buggers this ambition up royally. You’re not sure where it’s going, you don’t know how fast, and your eyeballs now feel all fizzy. Good luck!

It’s not always clear where dazzle ends and other geometric camouflages begin, but a good starting point is to ask “does it look like Bridget Riley going to war?”

To take just one example that gets confused with dazzle, Western Approaches camouflage actively helps to obscure the ship itself. It worked so well the first ship to try it was almost immediately sunk in a collision.

The House of Commons yesterday debated the laying of the EHRC code of practice. Functionally, it didn’t do very much, there was no opportunity to dis-apply it, but it was an important opportunity to get oppositional voices into the media and build awareness. No Green MPs turned up.

I have written to my MP. Not sure it did any good, but I'd still recommend doing it.

I saw a transphobe say that humans are "99% accurate" at telling sex assigned at birth. If, say, 15% of cis women in the UK are in some way gender-nonconforming, even if that 99% accurate were true (and it isn't), that's over 50,000 cis women being reported to the toilet police.

Trans adolescents accessing the only NHS route to healthcare (WellBN) have been through a stressful year long transphobic investigation. For a year they have sat under the threat of forced medical detransition. With significant negative impacts. 1/2

Hey, here's the author of this piece, Susanna Rustin, opposing abortion decriminalisation. Don't pretend she's any sort of feminist.

as part of the BBC’s on-going commitment to representing a diversity of ideas, June will be Pride & Prejudice Month

Labour seems to have internalised the Supreme Court judgment as though it was a damning referendum loss that saw the public reject its position, rather than a plainly incorrect reading of a single point of law

And it’s the obvious decision to privilege the emotional safety of some people over the real dangers faced by others *by the very people that are privileged in society* demonstrates how so many people are regularly unhumaned and monstered

Seriously thinking about getting a retro furby on ebay and then the next time someone displays a lack of fundamental understanding re genAI I'll whip it out, let them be enchanted and distracted so we can get on with the business of the meeting.

This is how Leading Aircraftwoman Margaret Horton earned herself a free flight on, and not in, a Spitfire...

The town of Tr*on getting caught in bsky’s profanity filter like it’s 2003 Scunthorpe

I'm one of the signatories to this letter. We note that NHS England's ban on hormone therapy by under-18 was proposed: ● without any clear rationale, ● on the basis of a methodologically-flawed process, ● in the absence of peer review, ● and without plans for monitoring impact or mitigating harm

A reminder that the victims of Unbound's theft are still suffering while the people on charge, who spent their money, have got away scot free.

Subsequent posts in this thread will be hidden to you if you have Bluesky's default "hide adult content" settings enabled. Go to settings Moderation and Content Filters Turn the Enable Adult Content slider on (I think it was designed to discourage clicking) You get settings options: (cont)

Plenty of people who are “in excellent health” are unfit to hold public office. Being a thug, a serial liar, a grifter and lacking any sense of right and wrong should disqualify. These are not *medical* issues.

I’m a climate scientist. Let me fix this headline. “Nearly a century ago, scientists showed that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. Today, we know human emissions account for over 100% of the warming. Yet dark money and disinformation still work to keep Americans addicted to fossil fuels.”

"changing sex shouldn't relegate you to an underclass" is also a broad statement that doesn't need to nail down every dimension of changing sex--social, phenotypic, or otherwise--while being concise about the heart of the issue.

As @jacobtlevy.bsky.social points out in his Annual Review of Political Science article on academic freedom, academic freedom does not require intellectual neutrality or ‘diversity’ but rather intellectual integrity. Intellectual neutrality and ‘diversity’ are antithetical to the academic ethos.

I genuinely feel sick. A company reached out to me on IG, linking me to an AI version of myself. You can even ask "me" questions. They are also advertising it using an AI photo of me. They told me if I like it, they will give me free access... to my own fucking content that they stole. /1

Paramount+ wanted to use the image on the left as a poster for the wrath of Khan, so they used everyone's least favorite technology to generate the rest of the image.