Taras

International Affairs @thehertieschool . Space, security, and whatever else I feel like. All tweets represent me and me alone. 🇸🇪 + 🤍💙🤍 in 🇩🇪

[Taras @Stellaratum]

A poem in two tweets

[James Jackson @derJamesJackson]

Female Irish protester punched clean in the face during Berlin protest for murdered journalists of Gaza

[brianweeden @brianweeden]

AI chatbots tell users what they want to hear, and that’s problematic - Ars Technica

[Nassreddin 🍉 نصر الدين @Nassreddin2002]

The hard right in Denmark is now at a combined 19% (Æ+O+H)

In Sweden the hard right is at ~20%
In Flanders at ~20%
In Germany it got 21% at the election
In the Netherlands now polling at a combined 22%

So what is the gain of the "Danish model" if the hard right scores the same?

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@BronzeBosniak @Nassreddin2002 Your attitude is far less compatible with Swedish society than that of 90% of immigrants. Hejdå!

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@Nassreddin2002 And in a decade they'll claim immigrants are ghettoizing and failing to integrate as a reason to start deporting them

[David Hambling @David_Hambling]

Fiber drones are literally changing the landscape in Ukraine, and brining a new level of threat -- my take for Forbes in comments below

[Adil Haque @AdHaque110]

"The Israeli military has admitted to BBC Verify that it conducted a previously unacknowledged strike on the al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza, which reportedly killed at least one Palestinian and injured 30 others."

Horrible. But credit to the BBC Verify team.

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@peterawolf @tobiaschneider Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to be implying this is some kind of stunt to stay relevant, which frankly strikes me as kind of patronizing. By my reading she decided of her own volition + demonstrably universal commitment to human rights to go out and do this. Why not?

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@tobiaschneider "No way of distinguishing" is just a mildly exaggerated turn of phrase I think. Her broader point strikes me as reasonable - climate and social justice are interconnected issues that mutually reinforce each other in overt and covert ways, some of which she spells out herself

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@mund0sinfin Yeah to be fair the idea of splitting competences hadn't occurred to me, that makes a lot of sense. Still impressive how much people manage to squeeze in, I could never

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@mund0sinfin Fair but don't you still get some kind of priming or at least intuition on what to expect in terms of fields? Or are you genuinely reading about everything from Chornobyl to cepheid variable stars to stone age basket weaving just in case one of those comes up

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@mund0sinfin Though now I want to see University Challenge done with the absolutely most random tidbits of information out there. What's the name of that one background extra in Star Wars V? Which Korean admiral did Togo Heihachiro look up to? What is the record time for Portal speedruns?

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@mund0sinfin Honestly I'd already assumed this to be the case for any quiz show. Asking people to memorize the sum total of human knowledge with no tailoring at all seems like it would basically bring the outcome down to random chance of whoever happened to read a particular factoid before

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@battleforeurope @zakavkaza Even more rational to expend decades of accummulated military equipment on an invasion that has barely achieved a fraction of its stated aims. If Russia is so incredibly scared of NATO it has done a truly fantastic job of weakening itself before any direct confrontation.

[Taras @Stellaratum]

@battleforeurope @zakavkaza Truly a masterstroke of rational planning, invading one country because it's (supposedly, possibly, someday, maybe) going to join NATO and in the process bringing two more countries into NATO.

[Silvia Steininger @silviasteiningr]

in 2024, we have almost weekly seen pictures so brutal, dehumanizing and taking place life - what once triggered a massive international outcry (see Abu Ghraib) seems to have become the new normal that leaves me speechless

[Jeffrey J. Hall 🇯🇵🇺🇸 @mrjeffu]

Viral video in Japan: a stationmaster cat performed a Shinto ritual to mark the end of 2024.
A TV reporter asked the cat, "How was this year?"
The railway company's president translated the cat's angry growling as, "It was a good year, meow!"

[Ilya Lozovsky @ichbinilya]

I find it remarkable that the first-pass NYT story didn't even mention the THEORY that the plane might have been shot down. Just repeated the bird claim.

Meanwhile /r/aviation was full of damning evidence within hours of the crash.

I think reddit is under-discussed.

[Aaron Bateman @aaronbateman22]

An important reminder that NASA’s projects are heavily dependent on a massive set of communications networks both on earth and in space

https://t.co/VEObrKficb

[Haggai Matar @Ha_Matar]

It is a truly important piece in the NYT today about how the Israeli army waged the first few months of the massacre in Gaza.
It is also worth mentioning that many of their findings first appeared in investigations by @yuval_abraham on @mekomit and @972mag - some over a year ago