Wherever you are afraid, try to explore, and you will find death hiding somewhere behind. All fear is of death. Death is the only fear source. — Osho
tao
@btao.org
working on favs.blue, it's favstar for bluesky cybersecurity, privacy, trust & safety 🔸🇩🇰🏴🌐 previously: trust & safety engineering at https://cinder.ai/
> Learning about the world through 500-character snippets, or 30-second videos, is not a serious way to engage with knowledge. It triggers our worst instincts in terms of tribalism and groupthink and makes us intellectually lazy.
tao@btao.org · 6d agoI don't enjoy the Internet any more btao.org/posts/2026-0...
Anyone know how I can deactivate my Bluesky account, but keep my Eurosky PDS account active?
I don't enjoy the Internet any more btao.org/posts/2026-0...
I don't enjoy the Internet any more
The pale is growing
btao.org
LLMs will likely be the most powerful propaganda tool that has ever existed arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475
AI systems out-persuade expert humans
Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has...
arxiv.org
heuristic: if there are entire companies built around <feature X>, then don't try to build it yourself in-house
substack: “read distraction-free on substack!” also substack: adds social features and ads for itself
@epochai.bsky.social i love that you guys are posting here! did you know that you can set your handle to be @epoch.ai by adding a DNS record to your domain? would look a lot more official! bsky.social/about/blog/4...
How to verify your Bluesky account - Bluesky
Here's how to verify your Bluesky account by setting your website as your username.
bsky.social
one thing that's really important to remember about the luddites is that they lost
Anirudh Oppiliappan@anirudh.fi · last mo.Huh, insane. Codeberg will now disallow vibe-coded projects. codeberg.org/Codeberg/org...
lookaway continues to be a great piece of software; so worth it lookaway.com/blog/2026/07...
LookAway 2.3 - Quieter, Smarter, and More Flexible
This update makes LookAway even less annoying with better idle time prediction and gives you more control with custom on-demand breaks and advance skips.
lookaway.com
i will never love any software as much as i love the Stickies app that comes with macs
you will save yourself a lot of trouble and grief on any text based social media site by simply remembering that a lot of people can't read.
🌤️ Good morning Edinburgh. Tuesday’s headlines: Crags fire risk continues for 'days', plea for Leith trams return, Causey traffic island revamp is closer + bakery forced to change name ⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburg... Photo: @tomduffinphotos.bsky.social
re: tools for thought and AI, the problem is no longer blank page anxiety, but rather generating too much insight and getting lost
To be honest, I think these mindsets are as seductive as they are deeply incorrect. This nihilism of "my work never mattered" assumes multiple things: a final end state to realms of cognition; a world where past work doesn't inform future progress; a world where meaning has a sort of metaphysics.
Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social · last mo.Very worried about this sort of thing hitting more broadly:
that ishowspeed song at the world cup closing ceremony is a lot like what i would come up with if i was satirising how americans act re: football
if you're going to the edinburgh fringe, i made a little website where you can see if a show has audience interaction. hopefully useful to some! isthereaudienceinteraction.com
Is there audience interaction?
Know what audience interaction to expect at Edinburgh Fringe shows.
isthereaudienceinteraction.com
logged into Mastodon for the first time in a long while it’s a lot of software developers egging each other on into career self-harm, I don’t know how else to say it if your career is symbol processing and your response to a new paradigm in symbol processing is “no” that’s a career off-ramp
i can't imagine willingly engaging with the rails community at this point tbh; even if individuals disagree, unfortunately that world is centered around a far-right extremist
Jake Lazaroff@jakelazaroff.com · last mo.apparently DHH just published a blog post *verbatim* calling for remigration, so… shout out to everyone who responded to this crying about how mAyBe He DoEsNt AgReE with the speakers at the far right racism march he described as "heartwarming" and "powerful"
"Older AI didn't work, but it was very efficient."
Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · last mo.“.. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. “.. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.” @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
i joined instagram recently and it's really shocking to see the discourse around data centres on there... and don't even get me started on the conspiracy theorists makes me extremely saddened about our information environment; i kinda don't think it can be fixed
Code is now ~free good software that solves a problem… that’s still much more expensive
I work at Google DeepMind. This won't make me popular. But it's all public reporting: 2014: DeepMind reportedly sold to Google on conditions: no military use, independent oversight 2026: a Pentagon contract for "any lawful government purpose" Not one safeguard survived intact
