If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?

From the official website of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr): "Obedience and the performance of duty are important military virtues, but they have their limits. These virtues no longer apply if they would result in violation of key values of the Basic Law." www.bundeswehr.de/en/about-bun...

The @britishlibrary.bsky.social has got a new website. It claims to be fully compliant with the accessibility regulations (per WCAG 2.2 AA). This is what happens when I try to print their accessibility statement making that claim. None of the site is printable. #a11y www.bl.uk/accessibilit...

Pretty amazing AI-generated item available on Amazon.

13k comments on one tweet is a massive payout. All of the tweets follow a certain formula, so the content is likely automated using AI technology (e.g., AI generated images and text). Basically running it as a money printing machine. But for those in the US, it translates to low simmering rage.

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.

‘“Resistance” spans the hundred years or so during which the photographic print was the primary medium of visual communication. Aesthetically and technically, this makes sense. Politically, however, it’s curious.’ @trillingual.bsky.social on Steve McQueen. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

There will be statue avatar people watching this thinking that going back to the Roman Empire sounds great.

Are we really at a stage in public education where we consider it OK to have literally Google-branded schoolchildren whose learner identities are tied to being "responsible AI" users of private for-profit technologies?

Feeling queasy now I've learned that Google is not only now offering Gemini ambassador certificates to teachers but also awarding students and *children* to be corporate AI mascots. Coercive normalization of commercialized digital education. blog.google/outreach-ini...

I literally could not stop myself from inappropriately laughing out loud for real

Folks, I don’t know how it’s possible, but it gets funnier.

Sentencing remarks in the Nathan Gill Russia bribery case: www.judiciary.uk/judgments/r-... #ReformUK

X has changed their policy and now you can see where the accounts are based. Here’s an “influencer from Texas”

In light of the assault on American science by its own government that launched in January this year, we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook in June to provide some guidance to scholars about how to respond to an emerging autocracy. The handbook is available at: sks.to/autocracy. 1/n 1/4

completely outside of politics, this is so charming

my most butlerian jihad coded belief is that we should probably make it illegal – and more importantly, we should work toward a cultural consensus that it is immoral – to design a computer program whose interface uses the first person

Mike Pence wrote an opinion piece for Fox News. Reading the headline, I was like, "Okay, seems like a normal take." Then I read the subheadline and... bro, what?

If you're heading into the weekend with a pile of Copilot meeting summaries to read, you might find this interesting. Some risks of relying on AI notetakers - and some strategies for dealing with them.

The Russian and Yiddish words for a main railway station or terminus are derived from the place name Vauxhall in London. Russian: Вокзал (vokzal) Yiddish: װאָקזאַל (vokzal) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauxhal...

Home Office: How dare people say we are acting like the far-right? Also the Home Office: These far-right graphics look great, let's copy them.

Shocked.

Key points: Met police say investigation into other politicians is ongoing. Gill sought to recruit multiple MEPs including 4 British ones. The judge gave strongest possible quotes about the gravity of the crime and the damage done to public trust.

BREAKING: Nathan Gill is sentenced to 10 & a half years in prison after pleading guilty to eight charges of bribery from a Russian agent. The "ultimate source" of the funds came from "a close friend of Vladimir Putin," said Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb.

signs of a bubble: news headlines "what even is a bubble really if you think about it"

My 1-Point-#PeacePlan for #Ukraine ©️ Sanna Marin

Yeah, but is that how it came across?

This seems like a good time to remind people that everyone in politics and media knew very well that Johnson was a bent, disastrous imbecile and that he was made Tory leader *specifically because* he was the candidate the Mail, the Sun, the Times, the Telegraph and the Express would all get behind.

The way these questions are phrased is presupposing that the defendant is in fact guilty. These are people _accused of_ stealing or fraud, not people who have been convicted of it. They are presumed innocent in law unless & until found guilty, but presumed guilty by the minister as soon as charged.

Yes, we absolutely do think that those defendants should be entitled to a jury trial. The answer is so obvious that the question should not even be asked. This is just a privileged narrative from someone who thinks they'll never be rightly or wrongly accused of a crime.

Is it against Bluesky's terms of service for the president of the United States to threaten to kill people? I ask because when ordinary people do this they get banned, but when the US Department of Defense threatens extrajudicial executions on here (and actually does them) it's apparently fine.

Trump calls for Democratic members of Congress to be hanged

Given that Grok, X’s AI tool, is now posting holocaust-denial commentary on X, I’d say we should well beyond the casual-review-but-do-nothing stage of investigation and moving swiftly on to legal challenges and all govt accounts/responsible media leaving X immediately.

Among many other things, so-called «generative AI» is a paranoia machine: It quite literally produces plausibility out of hallucinations

This tracks: Cornell researchers: xAI's Grokipedia cites neo-Nazi website Stormfront 42 times, Infowars 34 times, and white nationalist website VDare 107 times www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-mu...

Elon Musk's intelligence ranks among the top 10 billion intellects in history.

This does feel like a major crossing of the Rubicon – the world's best-funded and in many ways most powerful public health agency is now actively pushing disinformation. I know there's a *lot* going on to care about at the moment, but this one really is significant, and matters well beyond the US.

These arguments have been staples of holocaust denial discourse since the 80’s when a Canadian NeoNazi commissioned a pseudoscientific ‘report’ using samples taken from Auschwitz. Grok laundering this in the usual confident LLM tone of authority shows why this tech is so destructive

French authorities are taking X to court because Grok is now doing straight up holocaust denial. Gas chambers intended for disinfection, cyanide residue tiny, ‘story’ persists because of taboo against critical examination. (Full translation in alt text)

How’s it going on the other site?

In 1659, two rabbis in the town of Ruzhany, Lithuania (now Belarus) were executed as scapegoats for a blood libel. An account of those events published in 1897 is below, trans. from the Hebrew. I'm one of the many descendants of one of them, R. Israel ben Shalom. www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/ruzha...

For those unfamiliar with the term 'Blood Libel' @ushmm.bsky.social has a helpful explainer on this allegation of Jewish ritual murder and cannibalism. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/a...

We applaud UCL for taking swift action and look forward to UCL leadership communicating directly to the UCL community to specifically call out ideas and language that will not be tolerated on campus. www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...

Also, serifs are useful.

In England and Wales in 2024 there were 16 boys named just "Al". It was the 1,603rd most popular boy's name that year.

Just as an example, this is the opening paragraph of a 27 page email, with dozens of ChatGPT generated attachments, which begins with ChatGPT writing a story about the author.

Meanwhile, on X - Grok is denying the Holocaust... and all our institutions and politicians and media giants just stay there like that's perfectly OK. What does it take to get people to leave that horror show??? Seriously.

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.

Culture is a conversation among humans about humanity. Computers are not invited.

It turns out that the folks at Anthropic used two of my books to train their Large Language Models. I've gone and submitted my claim via the class action settlement. If you're an author whose work has been stolen, you should too