andrew ⓕ lyons
@andrewfordlyons.net
NGO boffin. Data packet smuggler. Works on digital safety and information security for media and good orgs. Opinions are my own and subject to drift. NOTE: My skeets are ephemeral and self destruct after a while.
Listening to a BBC radio documentary on westerners who've moved to Russia on the "shared values visa" and getting smacked with a reality check as they face censorship, a big drop in quality of life, and find out that most the Russians they meet don't live according to their weird tradcore fetishes.
"It's a dangerous feedback loop: as sea ice melts, the Arctic reflects less sunlight, and the ocean absorbs more heat. This generates even more sea ice loss. The region is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the world." One job: don't cook the planet. Status: failed.
Trish K@tkaz99.bsky.social · 9h agoNot good
Happy 'there will be no more Rod Liddle shit takes' day for all those celebrating.
"The problem with contemporary culture isn’t that we’re too decadent. We have inherited the surfaces of decadence – luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display – but have surrendered the fin de siècle’s commitment to pleasure." I for one am working on reclaiming classic flavour, full fat decadence.
Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure | Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson
Decadence in our era comes in technologically mediated forms, emptied of desire and obsessed with self-optimisation
theguardian.com
I'm going with the position of the guy who wrote it, not the flack whose job it is to deflect any criticism and pretend like nothing went wrong. Also, what's with all the binders?
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2d agoWhen the allegedly "Democratic party" political strategists keep dumping maga quality memes on X, you can see that things will never be normal again.
piglet42@piglet42.bsky.social · 2d agoThe logic of this picture: since the Muslim fish is the only one big enough to resist fascism, it makes sense that we all become Muslim. It doesn't actually make sense of course but that's what is implied...
Love this puts Count Binface 2nd from top and Farage about halfway down.
Sweary Spider@swearyspider.bsky.social · 3d ago“BINFACE, Count” 🤣🤣🤣
"[Sen. John] Fetterman responded that 'it was a supreme honor of my time' to stand with Israel, which he called a 'miracle' ... [He] joined the GOP in sinking a Democratic motion to bar Trump from waging war on Cuba amid a humanitarian crisis caused by U.S. sanctions and Trump's oil blockade[.]"
Truthout@truthout.org · 6d agoSen. John Fetterman is so unpopular that he would lose his hypothetical re-election by nearly 20 points to a generic “someone else” choice if the election were held today, new polling finds.
Between wars and wildfires there's so much smoke in the news feeds these days. That's the era we've landed in. The Smoke Age. I'm growing prone to agree with Stephen J. Pyne. We're in the pyrocene.
336/ "CENTCOM is actively considering shutting down the bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia outright and shifting those functions to new bases in Israel instead. This is a result of the highly successful Iranian campaign of missile and drone strikes." -- Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la
The U.S. Liberated Kuwait but Now Struggles to Protect It From Iran
Washington is rethinking the wisdom of its large military footprint in the Persian Gulf emirate.
wsj.com
England received only 7% of the long-term average rainfall for July. Southern England, just 1%. Factoid: There has been a weather station in Kew Gardens for 155 years. This July was the first month ever to record 0mm of rain. Tomorrow, London will again hit 30C+ www.theguardian.com/environment/...
July set to be driest on record for England and Wales after relentless heatwaves
Climate scientist urges better planning as southern England had just 1% of long-term average rainfall last month
theguardian.com
"The hangman's noose will never frighten those who struggle for freedom." Chanted today by the brave Iranian community at Place de la République, Paris. We must be the voice of the Iranian people who are being massacred while some people just watching #StopExecutionsInIran
“Today, Saudi Arabia’s tenuous ceasefire with the Houthis is in danger of collapsing – yet another casualty of Trump’s disastrous war against Iran” — my latest for @theguardian.com | www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
"Adams and [FLAG] have engaged in a pattern of questionable financial arrangements, including paying Adams and his mother more than half its recent annual revenue, while raising much of its money through a sweepstakes operation that has ... a prize FLAG's records show no evidence of ever paying."
ProPublica@propublica.org · last wk.NEW: Nick Adams’ Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness has brought in millions in donations and helped him land a State Department appointment, but records show there is almost no indication FLAG was spending that money on its stated mission.
Don't think of Reform UK as a political party, it's more of a social and economic strip mining operation.
Cat Neilan@catneilan.bsky.social · 3d agoNew: A business that made a six-figure donation to Reform UK received interest-free loans of £67m from unnamed “related companies” in the months before, raising questions about the possible origin of the funds. observer.co.uk/news/politic...
National diarrhea as one of the 10 plagues for being a country where this crap can happen.
Chad Loder@chadloder.dev · 4d agoThe diarrhea lettuce company, Taylor Farms, uses slave labor contracted from the Arizona Dept. of Corrections. The backbreaking labor is often performed by imprisoned Mexican nationals who would be otherwise ineligble to work in the US. They are paid $1.50 an hour.
Bet he described water as wet in the same call.
Gillian Martin@gillmartin.bsky.social · 3d agoObama is a very perceptive person
"You look down and see a tortoise, Leon. It's crawling toward you..."
MIT Technology Review@technologyreview.com · 3d agoGoogle DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models—such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on—to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability to code or do math.
a republican congressman allegedly broke his two-year-old daughter's collarbone and he somehow hasn't been run out of congress. there really is no bridge too far for these ghouls.
‘Platner on steroids’: Max Miller abuse claims have Republicans silently sweating
The Ohio lawmaker denies the allegations as an Aug. 5 deadline to drop off the ballot approaches.
politico.com
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
JK got her start nicking from Amnesty International, and getting canned for it. Human rights was too boring so she spent her paid time making up pretend little elves that enjoyed being slaves. Truly a vacuous person.
Josephine "beckbook.com" Riesman@josie.zone · 4d agoAlways hilarious to me that the true story of JK Rowling's harrowing and #relatable story of writing while unemployed was actually "she was fired from Amnesty International (!!) for writing her dumb novel on company time" m.economictimes.com/magazines/pa...
I was expecting a literal monkey incident, not an anecdotal analogy, because that would not be surprising with this timeline.
Aaron Parnas@aaronparnas.bsky.social · 4d agoNEWS: Trump allies blast Administration over court embarrassment--"A Monkey having intimate relations with a football." Epstein survivor drops major news about Blanche meeting and urges DOJ to prosecute several names. Iran war rapidly expands. Russia provides intel to Iran. China provides weapons.
What I want to hear is candidates campaigning on regulating AI to STOP it from weaponizing our data against us. Surveillance or dynamic pricing is an ABOMINATION that should have never ever ever been allowed to happen on any level. That shit is INSANE! It should be completely illegal. Period
Rowling knows as much as anyone else that Amnesty's apology was insincere, but that for all her money and power she can't make people respect her or her ideas. I hope that thought feels like a splinter in her eye.
Holl🌞@willows-song.bsky.social · 4d agoThis is why you dont try to compromise or concede anything to these horrors
Doctor Frankenstein shocked and appalled by his creation...
E.J. Fagan@ejfagan.com · 4d agoSenior Republican congressional staffer on trying to recruit new policy experts: “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
I refuse to accept that a guy who maintains a Gordon Gekko style into the 2020s is going to stand up for everyday folks against corporate interests, particularly in their own patch. Call me petty, but it pans out.
David Dayen@ddayen.bsky.social · 5d agoYou're not going to believe this but Gavin Newsom is taking the side of capital over workers. In this case it's tricky because he's backing the very MAGA allies his cosplaying X account claims he's fighting. www.wsj.com/business/med...
Over and over the cycle repeats: Bad tech do bad thing Politicians: make bad tech not to bad thing? Companies: no bad thing make money Politicians: ah okay keep doing bad thing just add more spy
Electronic Frontier Foundation@eff.org · 5d agoThe new CHATBOT Act doesn’t just require parental permission for teens to use AI. It requires AI companies to build monitoring systems that store and analyze entire conversations, creating new privacy risks for entire families. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.
Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts
Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.
nature.com
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
