apparently the mastodon svr I'm on isn't being well-maintained and therefore has a lot of spam accounts. What's a server that (a) has a silly and short name (b) is well-connected (c) still not too aggressive about defederation etc so that we can still participate/observe drama and trainwrecks?
Asad Sayeed (also @asayeed[@zirk.us])
@asayeed.bsky.social
Thought leader, whose main act of thought leadership is to declare myself thought leader. Computational psycholinguist at the University of Gothenburg.
‘Father’ and ‘dad’ are synonyms. ‘Figure’ and ‘bod’ are synonyms. But, a ‘father figure’ and a ‘dad bod’ aren’t exactly the same thing…
📢 ARR May 2026 cycle update We have published a blog post about the increased review assignments in the May cycle, what happened, and what comes next. Please read the full post here: aclrollingreview.org/may26-cycle-... #ARR #ACL #NLProc
An explanatory letter on the ARR May 2026 cycle
For the ARR May 2026 cycle, we had to make the difficult decision to increase the reciprocal service assignments for submitting authors. The reason for this decision was the substantial increase in su...
aclrollingreview.org
Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder and accompanying manifesto represented, in retrospect, the true beginning of violent fascism's return to power in the West There had been precursors (Columbine or the OKC Bombing come to mind), but Breivik crystallized and unleashed a pestilence that now ravages us
Josephine beckbook.com Riesman@josie.zone · 9mo agoThe impact of Anders Breivik and his manifesto is underestimated by nearly everyone Except the fascists, they understand Breivik's importance all too well
for a brief moment a few weeks ago I was using BlueSky more than Mastodon but now my social media usage has settled to X > LinkedIn > Mastodon > Bsky again. There are a lot of people I know on here but for some reason it still feels like a fifth wheel of social media.
naked admission that the point was always left-punching
Ben Phillips@benphillips76.bsky.social · 3mo agoLabour imposes ban on working with Greens, forces Labour councillors to partner with Tories.
"Just asking Questions" revealed to be "Just asking you to disappear"
"This is what made Hinton’s speech so troubling. He presented mathematics as a low-hanging fruit, a “particularly easy” terrain for AI, because it is “a closed system with rules,” “like Go and Chess.” Yet Go and Chess aren’t ordinary closed systems. They are actual games with winners and losers.
David Bessis@davidbessis.bsky.social · 4mo ago
Even by Labour's sickeningly disgusting attitude towards vulnerable individuals, this is a new low by Mahmood. Under no possible criteria could Afghanistan be classed as safe. Labour has already prevented Afghans from seeking asylum. This compounds the inhumanity. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Shabana Mahmood refuses to rule out sending back failed Afghan asylum seekers
Home secretary indicates Whitehall talks about returns programme, a move that would shock humanitarian groups
theguardian.com
Bluesky just sips from the intellectual lineage of crypto grifting, where you gesture meaningfully towards "decentralization" but really, 2-3 powerful players own everything.
A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.
Point 21 is the giveaway, some cultures produce "wonders," others are "regressive and harmful." Once you accept that hierarchy, you've quietly been given permission to apply different standards of verification to different actors. The form of verification stays, but the democratic function doesn't.
Healthy accountability is triggered by evidence, points upward at power, and happens in public. Disordered accountability protects insiders and aims its punishment outward. What the document does is argue for the second while calling it the first.
Points 9, 18 and 19 go after accountability directly. Scrutiny of public figures gets reframed as a kind of cultural sickness driving talent away from public life. The problem becomes the people doing the scrutinising, not the people being scrutinised.
Really? You're disagreeing with my extremely idiosyncratic take on a technology nobody understands?
While I think whale vocalizations are cool, and the inherent structure in them is even cooler, I am not sure that showing that they look like human stuff is nearly as interesting as the tendency for structure
This “-maxxing” and “-mogging” stuff comes from an ugly place and has never been particularly funny. But what about if *I* adopt it, but ironically,
Politics has unexpectedly hit a special interest of mine so here is a quick rundown on the Avignon Papacy.
If you see this I implore you to quote skeet with an unusual image from your posting device without explanation. Still definitely use alt text, though.
Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 5mo agoIf you see this I implore you to quote skeet with an unusual image from your posting device without explanation. Still definitely use alt text, though.
so I don't understand luggage locks. airport security can open them and the key is readily available. why do suitcases even have them?
Universal Grammar? Sorry pal, I think people should have to work for their language
Poetry fans when they hear a bell tolling for them: oh shit oh fuck
If you poll populations, you find that his 5 dimensions collapse into just two: Harm reduction/Justice and Authority/Purity/Loyalty. These are correlated with "support for liberal values" and "support for conservative values", which are broadly independent ideas.