@sol-cantus.blacksky.app
Formerly Clinical Research. Mod, Politics & Science, RA/QA Evangelist, MENA in B'more. Overthinking TTRPGs. A weird panoply 🏳️🌈. No kings, no castes, no corruption. If I'm wrong, call me out. Missed nuance? Hit me with it. Confused? Just ask.
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This is so fucking funny. It makes me really miss Charlie Kirk*
*photoshops where his face is made smaller and smaller to see at what point people notice
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0z8...
Somewhere, out there in the wilds of the world, there's someone photoshopping spanish moss onto Shapiro's face and we can only hope they have the gall to upload it.
...And though we would all dearly wish it would irritate his face, that's sadly not true.
gainesvillebromeliad.org/the-real-tru...
My favorite part about the logical failures of both TESCREAL and normal megacorp behavior is that they keep forgetting neither AI, nor corpses can consume things.
The line stops going up when people can't pay for your product.
Its positive acceleration stopped the second they decided to be greedy.
Never forget that the reason he left Blackwater was because of government waste and not because he thought it was wrong to collect a paycheck from Erik Prince
Appeal to authority fallacy.
The whole point of a boycott is that people agree with the idea itself regardless of who first announces it.
BDS didn't die because it has logic.
Anti-fascism has a logic.
Why would I change my ethics because of one person's opinion?
Voices of Iranian women: ‘We celebrated, but we cried. We danced, and we mourned’
Facebook post by Nekima Levy Armstrong: "Friends, A Breaking News headline just appeared in the Star Tribune, claiming that the national Target boycott ended today. This is false. The writer of the story, Carson Hartzog, is fully aware that the Target boycott was launched in Minneapolis on February 1, 2025. I have spoken to her several times since then, yet she failed to reach out to me, Jaylani Hussein, or Monique Cullars Doty, the three founders of the national Target boycott for the story. Carson even used the photo from our press conference that includes my daughter, Assata Joy and Ms. Rosemary Nevils, an elder in our community, to try to add legitimacy to a bogus story. I am once again disgusted by the Star Tribune and their attempts to minimize and erase the voices of our community. The nationwide Target Boycott is not over, unless and until Target reverses its decision to rollback Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as we said from the beginning. “Pastor” Jamal Bryant does not speak for us or our community and has zero authority to end the nationwide boycott of Target, a company that is headquartered in Minneapolis. Please don’t believe the hype and these attempts to rescue Target from the effects of capitulating to the Trump Administration. Target rolled back DEI because of Donald Trump. They donated $1 million to the Trump/Vance inauguration committee. Target also allowed ICE to stage in its parking lots during Operation Metro Surge. The nationwide boycott of Target is successful and it will continue. Please continue to shop elsewhere."
Nekima on the Target boycott.
There are individuals and small groups who can be saved from their path into becoming abusive.
However, Dr. Birhane is 100% correct that there comes a point where there is no working with a company.
Installing guard rails at a concentration camp is just killing people more efficiently.
people often ask me about my approach to impact and change. there’s also a common — though rarely stated —assumption that ai auditors or critics should work with developers/vendors to drive concrete changes... product retraction, guardrails, mitigations, etc...
1/
A cartoon by Ron Cobb (1975), showing a shadow of US B-52 bomber above cratered landscape. Two people who look like Vietnamese peasants look up; one says “they’re having problems with their economy again.”
This is from 1975.
A Twitter/X post from BBC Verify's Shayan Sardarizadeh, as copied from Bellingcat's public discord stream: https://fxtwitter.com/Shayan86/status/2031459245686714741?s=20 To reiterate this point, the IRGC's intelligence unit has published two videos today in which they arrest several Iranians for filming and sharing videos of US/Israeli strikes from the windows of their homes. ︀︀ ︀︀Open source investigators have a moral duty to protect Iranians who are trying to document this conflict despite knowing the potential risk to their safety. ︀︀ ︀︀Please refrain from posting the POV coordinates of videos filmed from Iranian homes that could reveal people's addresses. The coordinates you post might be later used by the government to find and arrest people.
A Twitter/X post from BBC Verify's Shayan Sardarizadeh, as copied from Bellingcat's Public Discord stream: A kind note to fellow open source researchers: Do not post the coordinates of videos from Iran that reveal the home addresses of people, particularly if they're chanting anti-government slogans or showing dissent. It could put them at risk of being identified and detained.
A post from BBC Verify's @shayan86.bsky.social on Twitter.
It's imperative that anyone sharing material about the war, regardless of which side you're rooting for (if any), contact groups who can keep individuals safe from government abuse. I trust @bellingcat.com among others.
Simple Roast Potatoes:
Clean any number of potatoes of dirt and growths ("eyes"). Split them so that they're no thicker than an inch.
Place in an oven safe glass or ceramic dish.
Just enough olive oil to thinly coat them. Salt and fresh cracked pepper.
Bake 425°F for 40 min.
Yes, I know, potatoes at 425°F isn't as healthy and acrylamides are a problem, but counterpoint...tasty. They're really tasty. So tasty a toddler will devour them instead of waking up at 3 in the morning because she's hungry.
@govwesmoore.bsky.social suggestion for the legislature. All future Maryland data centers must be net zero and use only renewables for their power consumption.
"Isn't net zero and renewables the same thing?"
No, that's just emissions. We need to account for all system inputs.
Lubia bi zeit isn't magical, and yet it's the sort of "ratatouille-esque" thing that defines comfort and home for me. Fresh green beans at Costco and I had to make it.
Similarly ash-e jo and mushroom barley soup, especially in the colder months or when illness strikes.
And I'm not even vegetarian!
You're correct that propagation of too many data centers, too quickly, and without sufficient environmental concerns are an issue, however that's not inherent to all machine learning and is more of an issue associated with megacorps looking to race to Generative AI.
In order to prevent too many page load requests all at once to any given website or application, and just like physical traffic management, different types of machine learning helps organize traffic.
The same is even true for cell phone towers and text messages.
Just as a quick example of how machine learning is different, any time you opened up an app for navigation (e.g. Google Maps), you were technically using something based on machine learning. We also use it to handle Internet traffic across the web.
I'm not a machine learning expert by any means, but I'm well versed enough in the general concepts that I'm happy to walk through your concerns with you (in public comments or via direct message) to help differentiate Blacksky's proposal from other forms of automation.
This has technically already done the rounds, but I really want to highlight the video version in terms of his behavior.
Text alone doesn't sufficiently showcase his deliberate ignorance and banal desire to conform to abusive decision making.
youtube.com/shorts/U6_NV...
“We are fearful that this is a prototype for other studies,” said @cdelawalla.bsky.social. My latest on the unlikely researchers at the heart of US vaccine policy:
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
From separate professional experience, I know how damningly hard it is to do project management on a good day, much less keep up with all the issues that have to be handwaved away while handling the infinite cascade of crisis.
Absolutely and one of the reasons I'm happy to pay in to Blacksky!
That said, it was mostly a comment on the future ratio of paid moderation staff vs. peer staff. Not a "mistrust" statement, more of an understanding how temporary plans can accidentally become permanent problematic solutions.
Wikipedia has the benefit of being extremely minimal in how it acts in a social media context. On the other side, Reddit is proof that even with machine learning and peer moderation, abusive trends can still slowly grow so problematic that their metastasis turn the community against itself.
That said, I cannot stress enough that this should be a stepping stone towards more overall professional/paid moderation on top of machine learning, because peer moderation leaning systems will never sufficiently handle all aspects of this process in social media.
Speaking from personal experience where I didn't have access to machine learning systems and had to moderate traumatic material that wasn't caught by basic database check systems, it was incredibly harmful and I was lucky that others could step in when it became too much.
I'm all for a hybrid approach and feel it would both avoid the worst trauma for moderators and keep peers comfortable that their comments aren't being moderated in ways that machine learning cannot handle.
Based on the People's Assembly feedback we are sharing 3 proposals for Blacksky-Only Posts. The blog contains 3 possible options and a link to vote on what you feel is best! Let's make this decision together and get Blacksky-Only posts launched!
blackskyweb.xyz/moderation-o...
Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages:
Ecommerce giant says there has been a ‘trend of incidents’ linked to ‘Gen-AI assisted changes’
www.ft.com/content/7cab...
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