Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 11h

I really love small airports

Reposted by ajdecon

Katie Mummah, PhD @nuclearkatie.com · 1d

Tell us the DOE site you cowards
www.404media.co/man-stores-a...

Man Stores AI-Generated ‘Robot Porn' on His Government Computer, Loses Access to Nuclear Secrets

A man who works for the people overseeing America’s nuclear stockpile has lost his security clearance after he uploaded 187,000 pornographic images to a Department of Energy (DOE) network.

www.404media.co

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 1d

fwiw I really don’t want to have chatbots have any personality, except perhaps “very mildly passive-aggressive”

think the enterprise computer in star trek tng

Reposted by ajdecon

Philo @opfuchs.gay · 3d

The top 5 in descending order are:

1. Go car-free
2. Fly less
3. Shift to renewable home energy
4. Switch to an EV or hybrid car
5. Go vegan

And 1 is the most impactful by a large margin.

WRI Climate @wriclimate.bsky.social · 3d

🚲🥗🚗 Small choices matter, but big change happens when systems support them.

WRI Climate ranked 19 climate-friendly behaviors to show which ones cut the most emissions and why policies & businesses must make them accessible.

See the list 👉 bit.ly/4q0pWvC

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Reposted by ajdecon

Funranium (AKA Phil Broughton) @funranium.bsky.social · 3d

I am very tired of this, but a quick review.

In America, it is legal for you to own your bullshit laser, no matter how it got into the county.

How you use your bullshit laser matters. Most jurisdictions escalate to felony for lighting up any law enforcement. Doing to them in the sky is ++Felony.

Jake @jakeythesnakey.bsky.social · 3d

This is such an astoundingly bad idea that I kinda think it’s a false flag or an op of some sort

Merits aside, it is insanely easy to be caught if you do this and the punishment for doing this is much more severe than you’d guess.

(@faineg.bsky.social often writes on stuff like this)

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Reposted by ajdecon

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 4d

For any Catholic, the sight of a Eucharistic Procession being turned away at the gates of the destination is the embodiment of Jesus being denied entrance. You don't have to be Catholic to get the symbolism in that!

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 4d

I do kinda suspect “bully one of the alternatives into just being Twitter 2” is always going to be a losing strategy

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 4d

Many people explicitly want a site that is just “Twitter 2 without the fascists”

But AFAICT none of the alternatives were ever actually launched to be that. All the founding teams had their own visions different than “be a new Twitter, exactly the same but better”.

Maybe someday someone will? 🤷‍♂️

Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 12d

Bluesky is a site explicitly founded by cryptocurrency libertarians with the idea that it would be a decentralized platform where users would be free to choose the open-source moderation and algorithmic feed tools they wanted, and by accident acquired a power userbase that hates all of those things.

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 12d

Are people mad at the Bluesky ceo for a real reason or an internet madness reason?

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Reposted by ajdecon

rain 🌦️ @sunshowers.io · 5d

reminder: the primary goal of most enterprises is to produce goods and services for its customers. the primary goal of meta is to evaluate its employees

Erik Meijer
@headinthebox
"... Guido van Rossum: I honestly think the importance of the GIL removal project has been overstated. It serves the needs of the largest users (e.g. Meta) while complicating things for potential contributors to the CPython code base (proving that new code does not introduce concurrency bugs is hard) ...". [0]

It does not even sever the needs of Meta; the actual reason was simply to do something impressive sounding ("until now every previous attempt failed miserably") allowed a few engineers at Meta to claim "industry wide impact" during their performance review.

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 7d

Feels accurate to the most places I’ve lived, and I like having finer distinctions than just “the Midwest” or “the Southwest”

William Hazen @williamhazen.bsky.social · 8d

This is the most accurate depiction of the Midwest to date. Wichita has always felt like the last Midwest city while also being the first plains city.

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 9d

I haven’t had a chance to go through this in detail yet, but it looks pretty neat

⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 9d

if you're curious about the architecture and mechanics of LLMs, this site has a really excellent explorable interactive visualization. it helps build intuition for how massive these models are, what 'interpretability' means, and the complexity involved here

bbycroft.net/llm

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

sigh - the metafilter rebuild project always felt a bit ill-considered to me, but it was launched and I think it could have had some neat results

it now appears to have been at least informally abandoned

MetaFilter site rebuild monthly update: October 2025

I'm declaring this project on hiatus until the after new Board is seated. more details inside.

metatalk.metafilter.com

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

My partner and I were recently staying at a hotel with *excellent* furniture choices. We liked it so much, we had a long (frivolous) discussion about whether it was worthwhile to get a different house to match the style of furniture.

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

I may be wrong, but I suspect a new company whose core strategy was “make bsky.app as commercially successful as possible” would also not be responsive to the userbase’s opinions on specific moderation decisions.

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

I mean this might indeed make some bluesky devs happier, but I’d guess it also results in ill-thought monetization strategies and potential worse moderation.

I have some issues with how the site is run, but I think it’s been insulated from some VC failure modes *because* it’s run by protocol folks.

Katie Tightpussy, Editor-In-Chief @katie.bzky.team · 12d

i think i would prefer it if bluesky leadership was honest with how much they loathe having a large social media app that they never wanted, spun it off into separate company, and then went back off to Protocol Land where they never have to think about the opinions of plebeians ever again.

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

I vaguely recall several folks at Lawfare getting excited about third amendment discourse back in Trump 1. Tagging @qjurecic.bsky.social in the hopes that she knows who to send this to. 😁

Chris Goodman @cbgoodman.co · 10d

The third amendment is about to get very relevant.

'Very difficult situation': Kristi Noem whines locals not letting ICE agents use restrooms

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem complained that her agents were not being permitted to use restrooms in Chicago because of opposition from residents.During a Sunday interview on ...

www.rawstory.com

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

Oh absolutely, yes. Folks come up with fascinating ray gun designs 😁

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

This one I know well due to reading too much Niven when I was young, but it does seem to describe reality annoyingly well…

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

I really need to try this out, as well as @dollspace.gay’s appview, and finally get around to setting up a PDS.

I’m pretty sure one of my existing dev servers could stand these up for at least my personal use.

Why @why.bsky.team · 11d

A little proof of concept I've been working on, it's a version of Bluesky that you can run locally, even on your laptop, that pulls just the data you care about from the firehose, indexes it, and provides you an interface to view and interact with posts.

GitHub - whyrusleeping/konbini

Contribute to whyrusleeping/konbini development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Reposted by ajdecon

Leif Hancox-Li, PhD @struthious.bsky.social · 10d

oh look the fears of everyone who understands data privacy are valid

John Scott-Railton @jsrailton.bsky.social · 10d

NEW: breach of Discord age verification data.

Including some users passports & DLs

Age verification is a badly implemented data grab wrapped in a moral panic.

Mark my words, as age verification mandates expand, we'll end up more surveilled and less secure. 1/

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

Not specifically, but it easily could be? 😆 Seriously it feels like folks in my feed are especially fighty the past few days and actively looking for new topics

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

In particular I often remind myself not to get negatively polarized against $GROUP just because I think a few loud members are especially silly

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

Just a note, the reminder is for *me* as much as anyone. I also don’t want to drive myself nuts this way.

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 10d

Seeing multiple overlapping Unhinged Discourses right now, so just a reminder:

The Internet has a lot of people on it, and there will always be some who believe and say truly wild things.

You do not have to care about or respond to every wrong thing online, especially if it upsets you.

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ajdecon @ajdecon.org · 11d

I quite like the Bond of the novels, but he would *absolutely* have decided the mandatory cybersecurity training was beneath him

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 11d

James Bond 2025 *absolutely* gave away every half the UK's secret bases through his Strava app.

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 11d

the best parts of the actual bond novels are bond having a kind vague yuppie ennui that he tries to fill with sex and booze. there’s one bit where he gets really into health food. 2025 bond is a former delta operator who in between working for SOG or blackwater bounces between Pilates, CrossFit, etc

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