Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.
George William Herbert
@georgewherbert.bsky.social
IT/Cloud/SRE/PE, rockets & missiles, nukes not going bang, space, CS, ships. YIMBY & amateur transit geek. Part time adjunct @ miis.edu teaching Missiles & Missile Defense. I speak for myself only not $DAYJOB. V95.45XA I do #OSINT against nuclear missiles.
“In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission.” Speech. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against its Critics
Agency says its surveillance program searches for threats to agents, but critics see free-speech infringements.
wsj.com
'You'll choke too' - an aerial embroidery landscape inspired by all the wildfires happening right now... I'm upset every time I smell smoke outside and somehow we have people starting them maliciously too! But we all breathe the same air so they'll choke too (1/2 - see thread for close-ups)
This hasn’t gotten much attention, but it should. While everyone was focused on Schedule F, the administration created something even broader. On July 30, a new OPM rule took effect that creates a second way to fire federal employees outside the normal civil service process.
One like one random DOE/NNSA story 🤷♂️⚛️
Mike Black@mikeblack114.bsky.social · 3d agoOne like one random AF story
“Bowe suffered injuries to her face, head, right knee, right arm and right hand. An MRI identified a kneecap fracture and torn meniscus…” www.newsweek.com/nurse-allege...
US nurse alleges ICE agents broke her kneecap in $500,000 legal claim
Norma Bowe, a nurse and professor, has filed a $500,000 claim against the government, saying ICE agents threw her to the ground.
newsweek.com
We’ve been saying this for a while now many of the people being targeted are just fishermen. Evidence now supports that the United States has killed individuals who were not involved in drug trafficking during its “counternarcotics interdiction operations” in the Caribbean and Pacific.
kaine.senate.gov
Remember when the NFL banished Colin Kaepernick for life for kneeling during the US anthem to raise awareness about police brutality and racial inequality?
W.E.D.em Boyz@leftistwonk.bsky.social · 3d agoJesus Christ. Sophie Cunningham fully embracing the right wing grift.
We can't solve a housing crisis without building more housing. Today we broke ground on the Casanova Residence, which will soon be nearly 100 affordable and supportive homes with on-site services for New Yorkers. Every new home is a step toward a City that everyone can afford.
A 39-year-old El Salvadoran man, who was being held at Delaney Hall, has died, the man's family says. He's the father of a 12-year-old US citizen daughter and has lived in the country for nearly 20 years. www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/08/03/s...
El Salvadoran Man Held by ICE at Delaney Hall Dies, Family Says
The detainee had an extensive medical history, including epilepsy, according to a lawsuit. He had complained about his face and hand going numb just before his death, his mother said.
thecityreporter.nyc
RFK Jr.: “You probably don’t understand this as you’re not a scientist.” Dana Bash: “You’re not a scientist either.”
The pint-sized electric pickup is just 152 inches long, yet its makers claim it can hold its own against industry heavyweights.
Telo Says Its Tiny EV Truck Can Tow More Than A Base Ford F-150
The pint-sized electric pickup is just 152 inches long, yet its makers claim it can hold its own against industry heavyweights.
insideevs.com
Still can’t over the fact that the president of the United States just told an entire state to pound sand after getting cyberattacked by a foreign adversary because they didn’t vote for him and it was treated like a Tuesday lol
Senior Republican congressional staffer on trying to recruit new policy experts: “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Are Young Republicans Too Based to Work for Congress?
Party veterans are concerned that the pipeline of young Republican talent is veering off course — and into terminally online extremism.
politico.com
ME: I can’t find a single decent metal cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart. KEVIN: Yeah, they all go power ballad. ME: I’m not asking for a Cookie Monster growl on “turn around, bright eyes” but… ME: No, wait, that’s EXACTLY what I want. That would be awesome.
The left is getting the Catholic Church in the divorce? That Catholic Church? The Roman one? You sure?? Aight I guess but we need to talk a little about that one internally
Christopher Hale@christopherjhale.bsky.social · 4d agoNEW: Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, facing ethics inquiries for misconduct, has threatened to strip state scholarships from Catholic schools unless the Church rewrites its vaccine doctrine. It is an unprecedented attack by an American state on the religious liberty of the Catholic Church.
This is being widely called a war crime by the BlueSky community but the apparent lack of anything like a legitimate target nearby strongly suggests that this was a guidance failure in the JDAM guided bomb. These are not long distance attack weapons, JDAM are dropped from crewed aircraft.
MeidasTouch@meidastouch.com · 4d agoThe New York Times reports the U.S. dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a family home in Iran, killing a husband, wife, and their 2-year-old son. The paper found no indication of a nearby military target.
The New York Times reports the U.S. dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a family home in Iran, killing a husband, wife, and their 2-year-old son. The paper found no indication of a nearby military target.
Evidence Indicates U.S. Dropped Bomb on Residential Area in Iran, Killing 3 Civilians (Gift Article)
The weapon, one of the largest in the U.S.’s arsenal, struck a house in a heavily populated area, according to a Times analysis.
nytimes.com
Appalling cruelty — and all to fund more tax cuts for the rich.
If your face didn’t look like this in 2020, I don’t really care what you think about Dr Fauci. That man saved millions of lives. We did what we could with the information we had. Florida opened back up too soon, and nearly 100,000 people died, one of highest death rates per capita in the nation
1. 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.
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...
arxiv.org
🎬 39 years ago today, the cult Vampire Horror film "The Lost Boys" premiered in US theatres (July 31, 1987). Directed by Joel Schumacher and an amazing cast starring Jason Patric, the late Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest, Kiefer Sutherland, Barnard Hughes, Edward Herrmann, Jami Gertz and Corey Feldman!
Yep, "you can't just fire people, keep their passports, do brutality, not even a little bit" was in some anti-slavery reforms to the H2A program in 2024. Farmers were outraged at the "gov't overreach & red tape." They went hard for Trump in '24, & he repealed those farm worker regs in June 2025.
Gaius Cassius Longinus@cassius1213.bsky.social · 6d agoI'm also guessing that the farmers in question didn't want their workers to be able to quit and that they wanted the right to "discipline" them for "poor performance" however they saw fit?