Asad Sayeed (also @asayeed[@zirk.us])

‘Father’ and ‘dad’ are synonyms. ‘Figure’ and ‘bod’ are synonyms. But, a ‘father figure’ and a ‘dad bod’ aren’t exactly the same thing…

📢 ARR May 2026 cycle update We have published a blog post about the increased review assignments in the May cycle, what happened, and what comes next. Please read the full post here: aclrollingreview.org/may26-cycle-... #ARR #ACL #NLProc

for a brief moment a few weeks ago I was using BlueSky more than Mastodon but now my social media usage has settled to X > LinkedIn > Mastodon > Bsky again. There are a lot of people I know on here but for some reason it still feels like a fifth wheel of social media.

naked admission that the point was always left-punching

it's R, obvi

huh

"Just asking Questions" revealed to be "Just asking you to disappear"

"This is what made Hinton’s speech so troubling. He presented mathematics as a low-hanging fruit, a “particularly easy” terrain for AI, because it is “a closed system with rules,” “like Go and Chess.” Yet Go and Chess aren’t ordinary closed systems. They are actual games with winners and losers.

wait what? huh. iykyk

Even by Labour's sickeningly disgusting attitude towards vulnerable individuals, this is a new low by Mahmood. Under no possible criteria could Afghanistan be classed as safe. Labour has already prevented Afghans from seeking asylum. This compounds the inhumanity. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Bluesky just sips from the intellectual lineage of crypto grifting, where you gesture meaningfully towards "decentralization" but really, 2-3 powerful players own everything.

A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.

Point 21 is the giveaway, some cultures produce "wonders," others are "regressive and harmful." Once you accept that hierarchy, you've quietly been given permission to apply different standards of verification to different actors. The form of verification stays, but the democratic function doesn't.

Healthy accountability is triggered by evidence, points upward at power, and happens in public. Disordered accountability protects insiders and aims its punishment outward. What the document does is argue for the second while calling it the first.

Points 9, 18 and 19 go after accountability directly. Scrutiny of public figures gets reframed as a kind of cultural sickness driving talent away from public life. The problem becomes the people doing the scrutinising, not the people being scrutinised.

This “-maxxing” and “-mogging” stuff comes from an ugly place and has never been particularly funny. But what about if *I* adopt it, but ironically,

i agree. ducks ARE a good shape

MULTIPLE ORBAN FAILURE

Politics has unexpectedly hit a special interest of mine so here is a quick rundown on the Avignon Papacy.

If you see this I implore you to quote skeet with an unusual image from your posting device without explanation. Still definitely use alt text, though.

so I don't understand luggage locks. airport security can open them and the key is readily available. why do suitcases even have them?

Poetry fans when they hear a bell tolling for them: oh shit oh fuck

If you poll populations, you find that his 5 dimensions collapse into just two: Harm reduction/Justice and Authority/Purity/Loyalty. These are correlated with "support for liberal values" and "support for conservative values", which are broadly independent ideas.

He's speaking his truth.

your last meme saved is your moral philosophy

your last meme saved is your moral philosophy (what happens to people who don't save memes?)

The conservatives correctly intuited a fairly materialist conclusion that reshaping the technological basis of society was dissolving the social categories that they hold dearer than profit or growth. Science and tech are actually turning the kids into blue-haired activists, which imo is great.

Fortunately, no other sector depends on the energy sector, so this shock will be completely isolated

it's kind of a red flag when a businessman starts getting pissy at you after you politely pass on his product

Population per capita across the United States

Claude is short for Jean Claude Van Damme. Are you saying Jean Claude Van Damme does not have consciousness? Because I agree with you.

« D’après nos calculs, les Israéliens occupent désormais 61 % de la bande de Gaza. Chaque jour, ils déplacent les blocs jaunes et, au réveil, des habitants découvrent qu’ils sont du mauvais côté de la ligne, et sont contraints de se redéplacer » www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

spotted "herbeibomben" in Spiegel

Mom, come pick me up, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Poor families used to own my ancestors. Poor families benefitted from depressing their labor and drowning their communities after they were freed. Misdeeds often are financially attractive; it'd be pointless if they only offered moral compromises. Having integrity isn't a privilege, it's a choice.