Israel destroyed all of the town of Al-Khiam in southern Lebanon within a month.

The Irish Times view on live facial recognition technology:

"The ICCL is right to question whether the technology is necessary or proportionate. [...] The Minister for Justice must make his case that such a significant circumscription of civil liberties is truly in the public interest."

"The far right's big day in Glasgow didn't quite go to plan. 20 to 30 racists, fascists & far right nuts arrived, greeted by a 250 to 300 strong anti fascist resistance
The far right planned to take over Buchanan Gallery steps - already been occupied by us."
via Tayside Against the Far Right

If you are concerned about the government's plans to give gardaí access to facial recognition technology, then sign our petition today and help us fight back.

www.iccl.ie/facial-recog...

This kind of thing at Substack (including their Nazi problem and trans hate problem) are why my newsletter is at Ghost.org and always has been. Andrew Tate is a spectacularly vile human being accused of numerous violent crimes against women and hugely corrosive for young male minds.

yup, and remains relevant as ever

@aerlingus1.bsky.social Please please could you tell me how I can speak to an actual human person about a flight you guys cancelled and haven't rescheduled? So far i have been online for four hours and on hold for 38 minutes, twice. It's kind of urgent. Please ah please #Help #Hellllllp

The Irish Times view on live facial recognition: careful consideration required It is right to question whether the technology is necessary or proportionate

The Irish Times view on live facial recognition: careful consideration required

🎉🥳

FUN FACT. Early image generators, the shit that would eventually become spicy clipart, would consistently whiten or align the features of women with white supremacist beauty norms... when they weren't representing women of color as monkeys.

Seriously, @abeba.blacksky.app has written about this, as have numerous other authors, where early versions of the spicy clipart generator are concerned. It's not like these fucks have somehow magically fixed the problem.

Generated by Make it a Quote User: abeba.blacksky.app Content: you can’t build democracy on a tech stack that is fundamentally anti-democratic

LONDON CALLING!

Join us for a preview before our official UK theatrical tour! @berthadochouse.bsky.social

Bertha's Doc House at the
Curzon Bloomsbury

Sat April 25 @ 18:00
Sun April 26 @ 16:10
Tues April 28 @ 20:30

"Essential viewing amidst vast AI spending" @forbes.com

a picture of the river liffey, Dublin. calm water with a reflection of the blue sky and a little bit of cloud. buildings on each side of the river

good morning #Dublin

Oh my god.

Saudia Arabia has ordered schools to close after severe flooding swept through parts of the country.

Heavy rain swamped roads around Riyadh and in the Al Ahsa governorate.

AI sector is an industry wholly based on “fake it till you make it”. Just completely brazen lies and hype, hoping that there wildest aspirations come to fruition before the population reaches a critical mass of understanding they’ve been full of shit all along.

“We want to live in a free, European Democracy. After 16 years of sorrow, corruption and Russian influence. We have had enough”

The organisers & singers at the massive Budapest concert told me why Orban has to go.

Just periodic reminder that deleting all the Gazans hasn’t led to less spam or less scams- it’s led to more 🤷🏻‍♀️

I'm one of those trans women. I worked ground ops for Artemis I.

I am torn between celebrating the success of my friends and peers and grieving how my dream of working for NASA was shattered by hateful assholes in Tallahassee

We thought we were living in a cyberpunk dystopia but this is actually straight from Warhammer 40K. The machine spirit must be appeased using the proper rituals. Blessings affixed with purity seals will keep the cogitator functioning.

"Rather than letting ourselves be distracted by machines of mediocrity that have been built to capture our preferences and sell them back to us, we should focus our efforts on better understanding and celebrating the astonishing creativity and
flexibility of human sense-making."

#AI #LLMs

reads: Introduction In March 2026, an Anthropic employee released the source code of Claude Code, a wrapper around their large language model that is widely used to generate code in programming tasks. Its thousands of lines of Typescript code contained many hopeful prompts and in cantations to shape Claude’s behaviour. Here are some examples: “Report outcomes faithfully”; “Never characterize incomplete or broken work as done”; “Be careful not to introduce security vulnerabilities ” (prompts.ts in Anthropic 2026) . There is more than a passing resemblance here to the Azande witch -doctor apprentice who, while stirring the medicine, utters: “You medicine which I am cooking, mind you always speak the truth to me. Do not let anyone injure me with his witchcraft, but le t me recognize all witches. … Let me be expert at the witch -doctor’s craft so that people will give me many spears on account of my magic.” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 93). In the case of Claude, the incantation s appeared insufficient: analysis of the codebase, which according to a company executive was “pretty much 100% written by Claude Code ”, revealed severe security vulnerabilities (Townsend 2026).

what an introductory paragraph!!

Paper abstract: The ubiquity and ease of use of large language models makes it easy to overlook the interactional and interpretive processes at play. To understand the attraction of this technology we need to trace its sociotechnical roots. From divination and horoscopes and from ELIZA to present -day large language models, I document how people have been thinking with things, outsourcing judgement, and making sense of interactively presented non-sense. Following the lead of Lucy Suchman to “slow down discourses of the ‘smart’ machines ” , I consider the interactional foundations of our engagement with technologies of language. I make the case that the fluid output, fine-tuned overconfidence, and interactive design of these computational artefacts conspire to exploit our interpretive processes and interactional infrastructure, rendering them irresistible to lay people and researchers alike. This means that a deep understanding of processes of human interaction and sense -making will be a foundational resource for the growing arsenal of methods in critical AI literacy.

"fluid output, fine-tuned overconfidence, & interactive design of llms means that a deep understanding of processes of human interaction & sense-making will be a foundational resource for the growing arsenal of methods in critical AI literacy." @dingemansemark.bsky.social zenodo.org/records/1945...

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

not really. just a personal rant after reading several grant applications on democracy and AI

A group of Muslim women who feed Dublin's homeless week in, week out, attacked by fuel protestors. I think we see who they are now.

Derek Blighe's brother Tommy Murphy got pepper sprayed in Whitegate, as the public order unit attempt to break the blockade.

Read more here... www.thejournal.ie/protest-whit...

First time we have seen this in 5 days of protests - Gardai using an army heavy towing vehicle to move blockade tractors off the road at Whitegate - vid Brian Connolly

Defence Forces units arrive at Whitegate protest Follow live as blockades and traffic disruption continue, with further meetings between ministers and organisations representing the haulage, contractor, and farm sectors due to get under way later.

Defence Forces arrive at Whitegate oil refinery in Cork as gardaí deploy pepper spray and push back protesters | Follow updates