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Posts by ray

A refrigerator truck filled with body bags

A refrigerator truck filled with body bags

A refrigerator truck being loaded with multiple, stacked carts of body bags

A refrigerator truck being loaded with multiple, stacked carts of body bags

What an unserious person. I will never be able to unsee the people suffocating in their own bodies because the virus melted their lungs. Whole families showing up together at the brink of death. Myself & my colleagues putting on garbage bags & months-old N95 to resuscitate them in hospital driveways

10 months ago 1582 248 17 8

Please stop saying ICE agents are “wearing masks”

They’re wearing face coverings. Gaitors.

The anti-mask rhetoric has caused untold harm to disabled people.

Mask bans have already been enacted in many places.

We must fight for our right to continue wearing medical masks & respirators.

10 months ago 2044 612 51 26

Between Greta Thunberg and her fellow activists being kidnapped by Israel and Trump turning LA into his personal war zone, I hope people realise that protest, no matter how peaceful, will always be met with violence by dying empires.

10 months ago 7525 3085 10 37
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An Australian journalist was shot with what’s been reported as a rubber bullet while covering immigration protests in LA.

9News US correspondent Lauren Tomasi was hit in the leg by a non-lethal round fired by an officer in riot gear. Footage shows the officer turn toward the cameras before firing.

10 months ago 1859 666 120 101
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Israeli forces take control of Gaza aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg British-flagged yacht operated by pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla Coalition was making symbolic attempt to deliver aid

Greta Thunberg knew that something like this would happen--that she and the rest of the team would be kidnapped by Israeli forces.

But she knew that her presence would increase global awareness of the genocide in Gaza.

That is courage. Brava.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

10 months ago 498 112 15 6

not only do i not support this, i dont support the dutch's right to exist as people outside of zoos

10 months ago 83 4 11 0
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

Re-reading Justice Robert H. Jackson's famous speech on the dangerous discretion of federal prosecutors in light of the dubious indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This section stood out.
www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-w...

10 months ago 1045 345 21 12
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Watch The Great Hack | Netflix Official Site Explore how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolize the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

I stopped using Meta social media

Apart from - annoyingly - Messenger and WhatsApp chats.

Step away from #Meta.

Meta is not your friend.

Meta also is knowingly complicit in the destruction of democracies, as shown by @carolecadwalla.bsky.social in #TheGreatHack

www.netflix.com/gb/title/801...

10 months ago 8 5 0 0
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Meta found a new way to violate your privacy. Here’s what you can do. Even hardened digital privacy veterans said they were surprised by Meta’s scuzzy tactics.

Researchers recently caught Meta using tactics that one expert called similar to those of digital crooks to secretly compile logs of people’s web browsing on Android devices.

Here are a few ways to safeguard your digital privacy:

10 months ago 759 385 78 34
HMS Restructures and Renames Diversity Office, Removes Pledge To Fight Inequities | News | The Harvard Crimson The Harvard Medical School renamed its diversity office and announced changes to several major DEI programs on Wednesday in the latest rollback of diversity infrastructure at Harvard.

Disappointing to see Harvard Med School go even farther than Harvard College in capitulating to the administration by erasing their statement in support of health equity, renaming one of their diversity offices, and absorbing another into the Office of Student Affairs. Shameful.

10 months ago 65 19 1 2
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Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to “Munch” Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health Experts who reviewed the code for ProPublica found numerous and troubling flaws in the system, providing a disturbing glimpse into how the Trump administration is allowing artificial intelligence to g...

This is really brilliant, accompanying ProPublica's story on how AI tagged a bunch of contracts for elimination.

www.propublica.org/article/insi...

10 months ago 363 153 11 10

look, I'm all for weeding but this is fucking unconscionable:

"Even worse: weeks previously, student assistants – part-time hires – had been asked to manually scratch the surfaces of hundreds of DVDs with penknives, rendering all of them inoperable."

10 months ago 2 0 2 0

the president wont see your cheap dunks against jeffery epstein . But your friends who have ties to state sponsored pedophilia will

10 months ago 21262 3994 100 46
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Government 'not prepared' for increasing threat of major outbreaks The UK Government not properly prepared for the growing risk of bird flu, bluetongue and African swine fever, a watchdog has warned

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news...

10 months ago 44 13 0 0

I very rarely say this about my province, but Quebec has passed a good law.

Revenge porn is already a serious criminal offence everywhere in Canada, but it’s still extremely difficult to get images/video removed from platforms. This will help immensely to fix that.

10 months ago 23 5 0 0
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How embarrassing for New Zealand. This was such a great moment in democracy. What a shame.

10 months ago 208 44 4 0
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LINGUIST List 36.1731 Media: Applied Linguistics The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

@danc.bsky.social Just saw this and thought it might be useful to teachers - sharing just in case. linguistlist.org/issues/36/17...

10 months ago 5 2 1 0

5 yr Postdoc at Edinburgh - how and why digital participation is transforming experience of warfare. Data Viz, NLP, text & data mining, principally related to Russian war against Ukraine.

10 months ago 20 28 1 0

I love sites like bsky because they fulfill the basic human desire to say things just to say them

10 months ago 139 13 9 2

The Onion does not use AI in any way. Our newspaper is proudly made by actual living people. AI makes bad, boring shit, and people make art. Subscribe to us instead:

membership.theonion.com

10 months ago 4905 933 80 18
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Hiring a dream team in linguistic diversity and social participation Visit the post for more.

We are hiring a dream team of doctoral and post-doctoral research fellows in applied sociolinguistics, education and related fields to work on "Linguistic Diversity and Social Participation across the Lifespan" @uni-hamburg.de

www.languageonthemove.com/hiring-a-dre...

11 months ago 33 29 0 6

I'm biased, but this report is a must-read for anyone looking to understand the state of AI in 2025.

It explains how AI is entrenching power for big tech and the oligarch class, speeding deregulation, dislodging human expertise and threatening workers—and how there's still time to refuse all that.

10 months ago 591 251 7 7
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Deadlifting in Your Nineties, in “Strong Grandma” An elderly powerlifter trains for competition, in Cecilia Brown and Winslow Crane-Murdoch’s short documentary.

At 95 years old, Catherine Kuehn became a world-record-holding powerlifter. The short documentary “Strong Grandma” follows her as she prepares for what may be her final competition. Watch here.

10 months ago 775 130 19 15
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"GenAI can simulate all of the steps: it can summarize readings, pull out key concepts, draft text, and even generate ideas for discussion. But that would be like going to the gym and asking a robot to lift weights for you."

10 months ago 59 14 2 0
The "Enshittification" has arrived

I asked ChatGPT about the impact of the current tarrifs on inventories over the next few months. It returned a long list of links to toiletries I might want to buy. 

I asked it why it did that. It replied:

"As of April 28, 2025, OpenAI introduced new shopping features to ChatGPT, enhancing its capabilities to provide product recommendations complete with images, reviews, and direct purchase links. These features are available to all users, including those on Free, Plus, and Pro tiers, and even to users not logged in. The recommendations are generated organically, without paid advertisements or commission-based incentives, relying instead on structured metadata from third-party sources such as pricing, product descriptions, and reviews .

This update aims to offer a more personalized an streamlined shopping experience directly within the ChatGPT interface, allowing users to explore products across various categories like fashion, beauty, electronics, and home goods. If you have any specific preferences or need tailored recommendations, feel free to let me know!"

The "Enshittification" has arrived I asked ChatGPT about the impact of the current tarrifs on inventories over the next few months. It returned a long list of links to toiletries I might want to buy. I asked it why it did that. It replied: "As of April 28, 2025, OpenAI introduced new shopping features to ChatGPT, enhancing its capabilities to provide product recommendations complete with images, reviews, and direct purchase links. These features are available to all users, including those on Free, Plus, and Pro tiers, and even to users not logged in. The recommendations are generated organically, without paid advertisements or commission-based incentives, relying instead on structured metadata from third-party sources such as pricing, product descriptions, and reviews . This update aims to offer a more personalized an streamlined shopping experience directly within the ChatGPT interface, allowing users to explore products across various categories like fashion, beauty, electronics, and home goods. If you have any specific preferences or need tailored recommendations, feel free to let me know!"

It turns out that letting a machine someone else owns do all your thinking for you means that your very process of thought can be enshittified into a glorified ad feed. Who would have guessed this was going to happen, except everyone?

11 months ago 525 175 8 16
Video

Lynda Sayce plays a piece of lute music that was recently discovered in an archival document at the Museum Plantin-Moretus. Since the handwritten lute tablature was folded and reused as scrap paper, it's problaby the first time in 400 years that this music is heard.

10 months ago 1375 525 31 66

Nicht alles ist schlecht in Bayern. Immerhin.

10 months ago 9 2 2 0