Max Soar
maxsoar.bsky.social
Max Soar
@maxsoar.bsky.social
interdisciplinary/undisciplined | Pākehā | he/him

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7509-7861
Reposted by Max Soar
Feeling that a $4 billion motorway project for Wellington that NZTA admits will lose money & is proposing to fund through tolls, a levy on our rates and/or a regional fuel tax isn't a great idea?

Then let's organise together on Tuesday night at St Joseph's: www.greens.org.nz/wlg_event_0212 #nzpol
December 1, 2025 at 3:20 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
Government actors who refuse to be bound by the rule of law are not morally entitled to its protection.
KARL: Did you know about the judge's order when you issued your order for the planes to continue?

KRISTI NOEM: This is an activist judge. We comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding.
December 1, 2025 at 1:45 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
These regulations are being enacted based on politics, not on clinical evidence or best-practice decision making. We won’t let transgender children in Aotearoa be subjected to harm just to ‘win a war on woke'. We’re taking this to court because we know what’s right. The law is on our side.
November 30, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
BREAKING: PATHA has filed an urgent injunction in the high court seeking to prevent the puberty blocker ban from coming into force, as part of an urgent judicial review we are seeking to overturn the ban entirely.
November 30, 2025 at 11:27 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
good news
November 30, 2025 at 2:49 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
ℑ𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪 𝔇𝔞𝔯𝔨𝔫𝔢𝔰𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔉𝔞𝔯 𝔉𝔲𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔢, 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔢 𝔦𝔰 𝔒𝔫𝔩𝔶 𝔐𝔬𝔦
November 30, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
Universities are assembling larger and larger teams to deal with academic integrity issues--mostly focused on AI--while simultaneously holding AI "writing" contests, AI-themed events, "hey, come play with these fun tools!" The messages are so mixed, it's criminal. Because AI is bloated with money.
November 28, 2025 at 10:36 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
Every right-wing “grassroots”organisation in New Zealand is just Jordan Williams, David Farrar, and one randomly-selected Atlas Network apparatchik in a trenchcoat
There's a new "grassroots" website automating supportive emails to Erica Stanford / signatures on an open letter endorsing her attacks on te Tiriti and you have until the end of this skeet to guess who registered the domain name

...

Did you guess Jordan Williams' Campaign Company? Gold star
November 28, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
For those that don't know what this is - the government suppressed this expert report on Clinical Guidelines for Transgender Health 24 hours before it was due to go out, and played politics with the lives of young transgender people.

You can now read the report in full.
Y’ALL. PATHA RELEASED THE NEW GENDER AFFIRMING CARE GUIDELINES. THE ONES THE GOVT SUPPRESSED

GET IN IT

patha.nz/resources-an...
Clinical Guidelines | Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa Inc. (PATHA)
patha.nz
November 28, 2025 at 5:52 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
Labor gaining just the tiniest amount of power relative to capital a few years back absolutely broke employers' brains
November 27, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
my number one piece of advice to people wanting to do a PhD is to pick a topic that makes you so. fucking. angry. truly incredible the level of motivation that unbridled rage can provide
October 28, 2025 at 2:55 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
this is almost certainly connected directly to NZ integration into US military industry and imperial power projection and it’s fucking insane that we get hysterical red scare “reporting” about chinese aggression while this overtly evil corruption gets almost zero interrogation or critique
📢 The new rules will "provide clearer pathways for the sector to test, trial, and grow", says Space Minister Judith Collins.
Govt cuts red tape for businesses developing new drones
www.rnz.co.nz
November 26, 2025 at 6:18 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
Hey you can hire me to tell you not to hire management consultants for half the cost of hiring a management consultant and you’ll save money
November 25, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
"It is against the TOS to be talked into suicide by our LLM" is possibly the most evil tech bro thing I've ever read
Additionally, OpenAI argues its not liable because Raine, by using ChatGPT for self-harm, broke its terms of service
November 26, 2025 at 12:29 AM
"The Deloitte report made note that the council should make more use of AI for tasks such as triaging general enquiries from the public, creating reporting on project management and automate workflows."

How about fuck off? Deloitte dragging is down to their level.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
Deloitte report suggests Wellington City Council has 330 more staff than it should
PSA says analysis from Deloitte, which cost $435k, lacks a basic understanding of what the Council's role is.
www.rnz.co.nz
November 25, 2025 at 10:01 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
University among nation’s first institutions to partner with serial arsonist on fire safety programs.
University of Kentucky among nation’s 1st institutions to partner with Microsoft on responsible AI innovation
The University of Kentucky and Microsoft have formed a strategic partnership to advance the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) and strengthen learning, innovation and care across the Comm...
uknow.uky.edu
November 25, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
NZ has had two major reforms of subnational government so far: 1876 and 1989

As the guy who literally wrote a book on the demise of that first system, *and* as someone who generally supports more unitary authorities, my considered opinion is that this proposal is completely insane
No more regional councils - major shake-up of local government announced
The government says it is not a power grab, but about "making local government fit for purpose".
www.rnz.co.nz
November 25, 2025 at 7:59 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
Just noting which consultancy wrote this report and the history of their reports for public agencies internationally. Anyone check the footnotes of this one?

www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
Hundreds of job cuts proposed in new report to Wellington City Council
Wellington City Council could save tens of millions of dollars through cost-cutting, such as reducing staff, according to a new report.
www.rnz.co.nz
November 25, 2025 at 1:21 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
Regardless of kayfabe comms and Nat equivocation in media, ACT always says the thing to its red-faced griefer audience
November 25, 2025 at 6:08 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
National week of action to bring the public’s attention to boycotting SodaStream

#NZPol
November 25, 2025 at 2:46 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
That every comment in this article is supportive of trans kids right to access puberty blockers tells you everything you need to know. In the medical community, this isn’t even a debate. No one thinks a ban is right.
November 21, 2025 at 5:11 AM
Reposted by Max Soar
y'know, if tech companies weren't so fired up to call every single thing "AI" it would be a lot easier to distinguish "ML spam filter that is well-sandboxed and tuned on your emails" from "giant context and IP-eroding foundation model that makes people paranoid and unhappy"
since the "google is now training gemini on your email contents" thing keeps bumping around here: it's _not happening_. I say this not to defend google but because I know a lot of people that have broken their filtering and made their lives much more annoying from sheer misinformation.
The malwarebytes Google opting-your-emails-into-ai-training thing is not true. The post is based on one bad tweet.

I know anti-tech lamenting is a Bluesky core principle, but please use the same judgement you would for any other clickbait.

www.theverge.com/news/826902/...
November 23, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
from government by consultant to government by consultants using generative AI.

decades of degrading government capacity to actually govern has left it open to further degradation through ai hype and perceptions it enables further cost cutting.
Major N.L. healthcare report contains errors likely generated by A.I. – The Independent
$1.6 million Health Human Resources Plan from Deloitte cites research papers that don’t exist, making it the second major government policy paper called into question in as many months
theindependent.ca
November 22, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Reposted by Max Soar
omg they made Jeffrey Epstein Inbox Simulator '25 jmail.world
Jmail, logged in as [email protected]
You are logged into [email protected], Jeffrey Epstein's email. Sourced from the November 2025 House Oversight Committee data release.
jmail.world
November 21, 2025 at 5:11 PM