Mark Masterson

Published on IWD, my wife did a #BBC Radio 4 Lent Talk, focusing on power & relationships, from the perspective of survivors of sexual abuse. I'm obviously biased, but I think it's well worth 15 min to give it a listen BBC Radio 4 - Lent Talks, Power and Relationships share.google/D4GOxwU6ftnJ...

So... Some jowly cheeked fruitloop reckons Arabs don't produce literature... Instead of giving him more breath, let's instead celebrate Arab literature. Starting with 1001 Nights... Which gave literature the embedded narrative technique & without which, Disney would have made far less money.

Elon Musk has spent more money on American elections in the last two years than George Soros has in his entire life.

I’m seeing people reacting by pointing out that he’s obviously wrong. I appreciate that, but it’s also a pointless exercise. The problem isn’t that he’s wrong. The problem is that this is normal in American politics — and it’s been normal for a while.

Remember when Media & Political Elite promised US that Trump was tapping into “economic anxiety” not racism?

i think if you're paying attention to anything in ai right now it should probably be this. what it's enabling is quite wild and feels like it's going to be further destabilizing to software devs + feel like it's only a matter of time til some company decides to put cloned code on something important

The irony that the BBC blurred out the Protect the Dolls slogan on a Strictly contestant’s tshirt for their social accounts as “political” but will happily dedicate a two-part doc to the woman who uses her billions to fund lawsuits to persecute transgender people www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Many tech EA folks genuinely believe preventing the Basilisk is the most important moral priority in the universe, just as many medieval monks who sold indulgences genuinely believed they were saving souls from eternal damnation

Last week, Badenoch was trying to appeal to the lost liberal/Remainy Tory voters of the South east by distancing herself from Reform. Now this. 1)she hasn't a clue; 2)what a fucked up state the right of politics is in. Fold away your flags, you ain't patriots

Healey's Treasury already faces intense pressure as eg today's report from @theifs.bsky.social reveals - current policies being pursued by his colleagues in Home Office are going to make these problems worse. Would be nice if the linkage of these things was ever recognised www.ft.com/content/6198...

What a weird world we live in - Ukraine hits a data centre deep in Russia - Irish twitter users see racist posts about IPAS centres in Offaly fall off a cliff

Oh, *this* is great news... A bit like the research on aviation emissions etc that fell out the back of lockdown, I certainly hope someone is scrambling to measure the impact of The Bots falling silent across platforms...

Absolute banger of a 🧵

Belfast is wild because you can't get home by public transport after 9pm but the courts are open to adjudicate on parading disputes 24/7

full disclosure: when Publisher's Weekly calls Elon Take The Wheel "enthralling," they mean that reading the book will actually make you the bonded serf of a viking jarl

Great thread 👇🏼

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is human empathy” Except when it’s code! Sums up Elon Musk.

Here's the autism, ADHD and mental health review. I'd recommend at least scanning through the exec summary (20ish pages) to understand what they actually found, which isn't quite what the headlines are saying (though elements are still worrying!) www.gov.uk/government/p...

This 👇🏼 is absolutely fabulous. Try the orientation tour of the sea of stars... 🤯

To those who think literally anything should be published in the name of academic freedom: are you really not concerned about the consequences that will have for your own discipline/industry/The Truth?

so, just to track this you're taking a male character from a notoriously transphobic author, presenting them as a woman, getting publicly horny about them, & then claiming this somehow refutes social liberalism?

there's a lot going on right now, but the ability to buy elections in order to stay out of prison is on the ballot whether you realize it or not

Sigh...

All these guys spent all this effort to get "fuck you" money and can't even bring themselves, even once, to use it to say "fuck you" to Trump. Pathetic.

The ghosts of Adam Smith and Ricardo teaming up for one last job

sometimes I think about the amount of critical theory that’s going to be required to even attempt to make sense of what the fuck has been happening over the last six years and I need to go lie down

Only small pull requests are accepted. Must be 150 lines of code or less. This is still the policy at fin, even with agents writing the code. Pull requests with thousands of lines of code will never be safe, no matter how much you review it. @honeycomb.com Observability Day. Ship small, ship safe.

Anyways a key fault line of the modern right is this kind of bizarro christian male supremacism/hyper traditionalism and Trumpian libertinism.

Why should we fund transit when we see empty buses? Lots of people need this explainer. Pass it on. humantransit.org/2020/04/what...

Found a chart that goes through 2025. This problem has plateaued and isn't returning to pre-pandemic levels.

The "all anti-Zionism is always and forever antisemitism" people and the "all antisemitism becomes fine if we just say it's anti-Zionism, even if we're ranting about the Talmud" people reinforce one another, even if both sides utterly fail to see it.

There used to be a theory - broadly associated with Marcuse I think - that it was better a tactic for authoritarian states to tolerate liberal positions rather than ban and draw attention to them. We will see. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

NEW AD: Listen to this sh*t.

THIS 👇🏼 💯 absolutely THIS I dunno if I've been this every time I could've or should have (cause I'm so fucking blind to my own privilege so fucking often). But THIS IS THE WAY. And it's certainly who I'm trying to raise my son to be

I think one major way you can miss seeing this as a man is all the work women around you are doing to navigate misogyny is invisible to you. There's a minefield that you only see when it blows up, and you wonder, how did that get there. "How did Bob turn into that."

Agreed. Hands down the best thing on television in this century

A goodharting problem 💀

Mandatory morning wood inspections are the kind of thing that can lead to rebellions and dangerous miscalculations (see above).

Why do so many care about inheritance tax when fewer than 5% of estates pay it? Because that statistic counts the dead. Our new model counts living pensioner households instead. 20% have enough assets to face the tax. Over 50% in parts of London. Thread: