smith

smith

@protanope.bsky.social

Ok, maybe I'd prefer to.

1K followers1.5K following2.1K posts

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again, Democratic leadership has sucked shit for years. But that is NOT THE STORY. That’s the story the NYTimes sells over and over and over to an anxious PMC class. It does not explain what is happening, The conservative billionaire take-over of American news media does help explain.

ah yes why should voters care about election results in other countries, wonders the pundit

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social

WASHINGTON (AP) — State Department says it will give US visas to defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro and his family.

Public relations experts who have dealt w/ celebrity scandals, usually involving drugs and alcohol, said that it would take a long time for Ms. XXX to recover professionally from her arrest, if she ever does.

The experts said that making it especially hard were….vague allegations involving children, allegations that Ms. XXX will have to confront somehow if she wants to restore her career

why should anyone on Bluesky care? i really don’t get it. like not even meta-ironically or sardonically or dark-earth anti-attention. talk to your friends about this?

is this funny? only if meant to be sardonic take on folks disliking tesla-owning dummies slapping a “don’t blame me” thing on bumpers. but that it makes it seem like anyone caring abt corporate ownership is stupid or naive ill-informed abt Ford is this Gen X “no one cares, asshole”?

John Garrison Marks@johngmarks.com

Thank you to the driver of this Ford Explorer for making my day.

“We have to admit that a daisy is more highly developed than a fern, even if it be a tree-fern” let me stop you right there

who cares let her get appreciation any which way. if she’s a performer she’s awesome. if she’s not she’s awesome

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lol doesn’t seem like respect, seems a Bluesky desire to dunk on tiny frame of his larger take. also serious misreading (partly bc of difference btw biology & maths) what actual empirical vs provable line is. shorter Q: would you take the medicine in a test yourself without any non-AI check?

Hélianthe@helianthe.net

much respect for Professor Tao, but there are so so so many medical therapies that work without anyone really understanding how or why they work one of the great things about science is that we can use empirical knowledge in practice far ahead of when theoretical frameworks catch up to refine it

Day late, dollar short @nytimes.com Thank you @404media.co for breaking this

404 Media@404media.co

NEW: A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the hacking group told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.

Every sentence jaw-dropping. There is no fix for this. ICE is evil. The country that allows it to continue must be judged as well.

Eric Umansky@ericumansky.bsky.social

When a few men -- Cubans -- refused to get off ICE plane in *Liberia* yesterday, agents *pressed knees into their necks,* forced them back on the plane and banished them... to Equatorial Guinea. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/w...

Bluesky is reaching an edge on LLMs/AI. both pro & con. not even understanding what other people are tying to say. Really dire vibes.

like so much else, no one is arguing the same thing when they say they hate or find useful LLM/AI, as everyone is defining it differently & everyone is uninterested in how someone else is defining it, and just want to push how they think. complete discourse & cognitive breakdown just as LLMs want.

newto(n) isn’t a journalist looking to uncover the truth he’s a marketing executive running SEO his friends are podcasters doing the same It’s wild this is the best protection folks think we can do

to expand: beyond the boyfriend working at Anthropic, the bizarre rationales about Hard Fork podacst leaving NYTimes, the distasteful yak-it-ups w/ PJ Vogt, he’s just got his bobbling huge head everywhere… wild how many who are pro-AI and don’t see what it’s like when mainstream journalists cash in.

Dems need to take this chance-of-a-lifetime & abolish not just ICE but everything Reps have done since Reagan Remake 21st c 🇺🇸 politics. Well past time & only thing that offers hope & chance to keep this level of support 26-27: investigations into everything 28-29: tear it down; new states, courts

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump has lost 38 points of white working class support in under two years

We’re all trying to find the guy who hampered this.

Mark Jacob@markjacob.bsky.social

The NY Times writes that “Trump’s promises to restore fiscal order and reduce the amount of America’s debt burden have been hampered by spending on the Iran war, tax cuts and tariff refunds.” As if it’s just a run of bad luck instead of an ongoing con job against the American people.

jesus christ: Sky & beans & Mace; his friends: no data, no data; gods: like old Ulysses in Ithaca? friends: I dare say her sleeves do brace. sky: how be your 👉👈 wordplay…quite gay? mace: I’d do’t again in heartbeat, not fey. sky: u meant to say…”anyway”? mace: **maces everything in her way.**

“A double space after a sentence-ending period isn’t needed,” they said. “Double-spacing is redundant in the modern age, a hold-over from typewriting days.”

‘At a certain point, when the torture became unbearable, she begged her captors to stage an escape attempt and to shoot her in the process. They refused, because, she recalled, “Yevdokimov said I had to suffer.”’

happening now: ‘When she lost consciousness, he revived her by shoving a cotton ball doused in ammonia up her nose. “Afterward,” she went on, “they chained me up overnight in a narrow standing cell with my arms raised.”’

The day she was taken prisoner, on a battlefield near the village of Petrivske, she was raped by a Russian soldier. Three had initially approached her. “You have to understand,” one of them told her. “We’ve been in the field for three months.” Russia’s New Gulag www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

newyorker.comInside Russia’s New GulagHuman-rights groups estimate that more than ten thousand Ukrainian civilians have disappeared into the Russian prison system. This is the story of one cell in the new Gulag.
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“Give a knock when he dies,” one of the guards answered. The next day, Tekin looked through the peephole of her cell door and saw guards dragging out a corpse.

Mohitych, one of the Azov cooks, told me, “We were rotting alive.” She begged for a doctor to visit the cell. A nurse on staff at the jail told her to forget about it. “Doctors aren’t provided in a concentration camp,” she said.

The day she was taken prisoner, on a battlefield near the village of Petrivske, she was raped by a Russian soldier. Three had initially approached her. “You have to understand,” one of them told her. “We’ve been in the field for three months.” Russia’s New Gulag www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

newyorker.comInside Russia’s New GulagHuman-rights groups estimate that more than ten thousand Ukrainian civilians have disappeared into the Russian prison system. This is the story of one cell in the new Gulag.

They told new arrivals to quickly memorize words to Russian national anthem. Guard’d soon return & demand everyone stand & sing. A single mistake, cellmates warned, & guards would strike the offender w/ steel-reinforced rubber batons: “It didn’t matter if you had been there one hour or one month”

this is such a weird thing to say, isn’t it? the reason it’s a bit in here is because Sky made these trip-ups part of his persona on here? posts literal messages he sent to people? many many many people are lonely so it’s not like he’s alone in feeling that. So what gives?

“Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” By Samuel Moyn and David Priestland Aug. 11, 2017

Samuel Moyn@samuelmoyn.bsky.social

“As Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. It doesn’t justify making anti-populism the measure of all things.” . www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/o...