Mike

Nazi punks, terfs, and tories fuck off.

Tech won't save us. Join a union.

He/him

[Mike @mdcpepper]

Tsk look at this blocked road, what if an ambulance can't get through? Oh, there's some in there. Who can we arrest for this?

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

I woke up seeing 60+ people are dead, thinking Valencia will be a turning point, will dominate the news, wake everybody up to climate change. It’s not though is it. The budget is dominating reporting in the UK. Public don’t care. We are determined to send our children over a cliff to their deaths without even engaging with this issue.

[NOTimothyLottes @NOTimothyLottes]

Real engineering: this widget has a safety margin of 10x of max load after N operational hours

SW engineering: we achieved 100x the complexity actually required, while missing perf targets by 4x, and inducing random 2 second stalls

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

Then: "Jeremy Corbyn made our party the party of anti austerity and he was right to do. We must retain that. We build on that, we don't trash it"

Now: smiling as they trash it.

[Richard Devine @RichardDevine]

🦑🐙🦑

[Elizabeth Laraki @elizlaraki]

I'm talking at a conference later this year (on UX+AI).

I just saw an ad for the conference with my photo and was like, wait, that doesn't look right.

Is my bra showing in my profile pic and I've never noticed...? That's weird.

I open my original photo.
No bra showing.

I put the two photos side by side and I'm like WTF...

Someone edited my photo to unbutton my blouse and reveal a made-up hint of a bra or something else underneath. 🤨

Immediately, I email the conference host.
(FYI he is a great, respectable guy with 5 kids at home.)

He is super apologetic and immediately looks into the issue.

He quickly reports back that the woman running their social media used a cropped square image from their website.

She needed it to be more vertical, so she used an AI expand image tool to make the photo taller.

AI invented the bottom part of the image (in which it believed that women's shirts should be unbuttoned further, with some tension around the buttons, and revealing a little hint of something underneath). 🤯

—

FYI the conference organizers were super apologetic and took down all of the content with that photo.

[Hend Amry @LibyaLiberty]

Why does Israel get to issue evacuation notices in another country? These are terrorism threats not notices.

[Mike Galsworthy @mikegalsworthy]

What a tricky choice Starmer faces.

Does he support:

A) UN peacekeepers, UN resolutions, the ICJ, moral positions of Ireland, Norway, Spain & France, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives or

B) A monster burning children alive in tents whilst announcing plans to annex Gaza?

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

In years to come, students in university departments around the world will be studying the propaganda embedded in this headline.

As someone who regularly lectures in sociology, journalism and media studies, I could teach an entire lesson on the title alone.

For example:

1. Treating the 4 Israeli soldiers as more important than the 23 Palestinian children (by leading the story with their deaths and just chucking in the others at the end) implies their lives are of higher value.

2. Infantilizing active duty soldiers as "teenagers" while not emphasizing the age of the schoolkids, despite many of them being demonstrably younger.

3. The classic use of the passive voice: Israelis are "killed" while Palestinians merely "die".

4. Putting scare quotes around "23 die" subtly undermines the credibility of that claim. Maybe no one died, and the Palestinians are just lying?

5. Using the word "attack" for Hezbollah actions, but choosing a more neutral, clinical word like "strike" for Israeli aggression.

6. Allowing Israeli sources to dictate the framing of the story ("Israel names teenage soldiers") etc.

7. Actually naming the Israeli soldiers, but not doing the same for the far greater number of Palestinians, again sends the message to the reader that Palestinian lives don't matter nearly as much, if at all.

It's truly incredible how much propaganda has been packed into 16 words. We are swimming in an ocean of propaganda. That's why it is crucial to deconstruct it and critically assess everything you read, see and hear.

[theesnek.bsky.social @thee_snek]

Margaret Thatcher would have been 99 today. But thankfully she died in 2013

[Cara Lisette @CaraLisette]

The Venn diagram of people saying “don’t have kids if you can’t afford them” and “the younger generation are selfish for not having kids” is a circle

[Women Posting W's @womenpostingws]

love when humans create accessibility in the neatest way❤️

[Gareth Dennis @GarethDennis]

The AI overview on @Google is an abomination and the longer it stays in place the more destroyed the internet will be.

Because this answer is complete historical gibberish:

[Naveen Rao @NaveenGRao]

As much as I love my field, it's littered with anthropomorphizing results. We all want to believe that it's reasoning, and if I see evidence that looks like it's reasoning, we declare victory. It was always clear that these models estimate conditional probabilities and don't structure outputs for a specific purpose. With enough examples we can make it pull from the common reasoning steps. But novel situations require something else; we hoped scaling it up would make that quality emerge. But, mammals (look at a mouse) didn't need to scale to have a notion of causation.

[Mike @mdcpepper]

This isn't a fork, it's a fucking supply chain attack

[WordPress @WordPress]

Invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines, we are introducing Secure Custom Fields (SCF), a free fork and drop-in replacement of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin. You can safely uninstall ACF and activate SCF from the #WordPress plugin directory. SCF provides security updates and is a non-commercial plugin welcoming developers to get involved in maintaining and improving it.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

👇Superb new article from @apple AI: “we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models . Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching—so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%!”

𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗻𝗼 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways can give you a different answer.

Strongly encourage you to read the whole thread.

[Dr Philip Lee @drphiliplee1]

You don't actually need to season everything with a blend of 27 spices the way Americans insist you must. Sometimes salt, pepper is all you need if a piece of meat or fish is good quality.

[Casual Geopolitics @Adamemedia]

The best answer to “do you condemn Hamas” was given 13 years ago.

@KenOKeefe1TJP

[Zarah Sultana MP @zarahsultana]

Stop selling arms to Israel then.

[Liv @Liv_Agar]

This is so beautiful I could cry

[fucking every word @fuckeveryword]

fuck thatcher