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Anne Ashton

@anneashton.bsky.social
230 followers 167 following 31 posts

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Reposted by Anne Ashton
Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
“cowboys” here really reminds me of a brilliant post I saw on Twitter that I’ve never stopped thinking about, which is how the manosphere brand of toxic patriarchy isn’t about MEN, it’s about BOYS. everything is a 12-year-old’s fantasy. Pete is playing G.I. Joe on a trillion-dollar budget
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Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
If you want "personalized music" made just for you pick up a fucking guitar. Or else break the heart of someone who already has.
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Nerd Girl Says @rachaelconrad.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
57 men were in that group chat and not a single one of them spoke up or did anything to stop what happened. They should all be charged, not just the 7.
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Imani Gandy @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 29/09/2026
Oh my God Taskmaster has hit Hulu. I repeat all seasons of Taskmaster are on Hulu. If you've never watched Taskmaster go start watching it literally right now
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
If you can only complete the schoolwork with the chatbot, you haven’t learned anything. Your brain has atrophied. Nothing has happened in your head.
A recent study of 26,000 Chinese secondary-school students found that A.I. adoption led to an 18 percent increase in homework scores, but a 20 percent decline in scores on secure exams. The implication was that rushing through homework with help from chatbots degraded the deeper learning needed to perform well when the technology was not available.
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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I keep seeing ChatGPT ads about Olds having chatty convos with the voice to text feature to help them do stuff on their phone and every single use case is just a thing you used to be able to just google before AI ruined Google
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Imani Gandy @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 15/09/2026
I like how Andrew Scott is having another moment, so it's a good time to watch this if you've never seen it. Seriously. Watch it. His Hamlet is better than David Tennant's and I ADORE David Tennant's Hamlet. www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6CL...
youtube.com
To Be Or Not To Be - Hamlet (Andrew Scott Full Soliloquy)
YouTube video by Moeez Aslam
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🌈Dr. Frizzle @swilua.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The world did not end because WE DID NOT LET IT END The atmosphere has no hole in it BECAUSE WE FIXED THE HOLE WE BUILD THIS WORLD FROM DUST; IT WILL RETURN TO DUST THE MOMENT YOU STOP BUILDING IT anyway, yeah I've been thinking a lot about age and why it's important to talk to older people lol
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 08/09/2026
We evolved these incredible brains and you don’t want to use yours? Weak
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Trung Le Nguyen @trungles.com · 02/09/2026
So Emma Woodhouse is a pretty girl who is pretty smart, pretty rich, and pretty much has no problems whatsoever. We’re off to a roaring start.
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The Verge @theverge.com · 02/09/2026
As a new Harry Potter trailer makes the rounds, it bears repeating that there’s no way to watch this show without supporting J.K. Rowling’s bigotry and the structural violence she’s inflicting on the trans community.
theverge.com
There is no ethical consumption of HBO’s Harry Potter series
You can’t without supporting Rowling’s transphobic bigotry.
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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
absolutely wheezing at an Instagram clip of comic Stevie Martin (who I love from being a maniac on Taskmaster) claiming that Shakespeare only had three plays: 1. “I’m Not a Good Monarch” 2. “I’ll Pretend To Be You, You Hide Behind That Plant, and We’ll Both Marry Her” 3. “The Lion King”
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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 12/08/2026
“Detachment from all of this, shrugging and giving up because it’s just what we’ve come to expect is exactly what they’re hoping for.”
damemagazine.com
How Trumpism Is Destroying America's Civic Morality
Trumpism has normalized cruelty, corruption, and public spectacle. Rebuilding democracy requires restoring civic morality, accountability, and decency.
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Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them) @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
I promise you, librarians are not intentionally throwing first editions and rare books out in the trash. It will apparently surprise some of you to know that we are actually trained on weeding. Books go througha process before they hit that dumpster.
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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 29/07/2026
"finally, we have created Fahrenheit 451 from the cautionary tale,"
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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
One of the story’s central arguments is that Scrooge has removed himself from the identities and processes of social care and social life that result in meaning. If ever there were a story ALLERGIC to the idea of a prequel, this is that story.
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Jay Hulme @jayhulmepoet.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Don't do rhyme that often in work I write for publication, but I do love to sit on a hillside and write a little ditty on occasion...
A short untitled poem:
I eat the bread, I drink the wine,
I enter into life divine,
and after all that holiness
I find that I love sinning less.

But bread is bread six days in seven,
and earth seems very far from heaven,
so oft I fall, and fail to see
that I was born with God in me.

By Jay Hulme
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Anne Ashton @anneashton.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Seeing this as I’m listening to @trufelman.bsky.social new episode on sizing and fit models is just a little on the nose
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David Allsopp @doublehelix.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
It needs to be stated over and over - this isn't just a matter of errors: The point is that LLM AI is literally incapable of reviewing or validating research data. It absolutely cannot do that job, at all, ever. But it is very good at generating something that looks like a convincing review.
First, I’d created 2000 free-text responses and labelled them ‘UK’. Then I copied and pasted the exact same 2000 responses but labelled these ‘US’. Finally, I combined them to create a dataset of 4000 total responses, and jumbled them up.

Despite the responses being identical for the UK and US, Copilot produced a rich, detailed summary of how US and UK respondents differed.
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Jay Hulme @jayhulmepoet.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Okay so I read the whole of the Pope's latest encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas", the one the internet is calling the AI Encyclical, but it's about a LOT more than that (of course it is, it's over 40,000 words). Here's a thread of quotes...
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Dr Kat Day (she/her) 🎃🌓 @chronicleflask.katday.com · 31/05/2026
Love this bit on Ai from the Royal Society. A classic case of the probability engine getting itself in a mess and revealing its complete lack of understanding
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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
"women can be perfectly capable of using this technology and simply choose not to" we did in fact need data backing up this incredibly obvious claim bc a LOT of companies will insist Susan from Accounting is refusing to use AI to do the books because IT needs to come explain how it works to her
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Brian Phillips @brianphillips.lol · 28/05/2026
Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes
Because the truth is, tech doesn't have an image problem. It doesn't have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What's wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn't successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What's wrong is that he's trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that's designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn't that you haven't told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them. (
There are things in the world that are more important than money. The fact that you seem not to believe this, that you seem to think any motive beyond ruthless acquisitiveness is fake, dishonest, or childish, is the heart of your problem. Your attitude is not by any means unique to tech, but the
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Brian Phillips @brianphillips.lol · 28/05/2026
And we are live! Massive thanks to everyone who contributed to this. Reading your posts made me so much madder than I ever knew was possible
theringer.com
The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can't escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
The solutions we will need to develop at the level of the classroom are unlikely to be in alignment with policies like this that first and foremost imagine our students as incipient wage-laborers rather than learners.
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Corey Atad @coreyatad.com · 17/04/2026
this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...
“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
The most horrifying part of this is buried at the end. Like half the “citations” are just slapped on to give a false veneer of credibility.
The improvement between Gemini 2 and Gemini 3 may be papering over a more serious flaw. In the Oumi analysis, Gemini 2 provided answers that were
"ungrounded" 37 percent of the time, meaning the Al Overviews cited websites that didn't support the information they provided. But with Gemini 3, this jumped to 56 percent. On top of suggesting that the Al is pulling facts out of thin air, ungrounded responses make it difficult for users to verify the Al's claims.
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Qoboe - 3d comms open @qoboe.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Don't taco Tuesday this shit. Millions of people spent the day wondering if they would get vaporized, and no one in our government stood up to him. Nothing cutesy about it.
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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 07/04/2026
just to be clear, everyone, when 8 pm EDT comes and goes, regardless of what does or does not happen, the president still threatened genocide and war crimes and we should still impeach, arrest, and try him
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.
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Senator Ed Markey @markey.senate.gov · 07/04/2026
Completely unstable and perilous. The House must bring up impeachment articles, and the Senate needs to remove a president who wants to commit war crimes. We cannot sit idly by as Donald Trump threatens to end an entire civilization.
Washington Post
Trump warns ‘a whole civilization will die’ if Iran doesn’t make a deal
The president had issued a deadline of 8 p.m. Eastern time for Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz, pledging destruction by midnight if leaders don’t comply.

April 7, 2026 at 9:22 a.m. EDT26 minutes ago
2 min
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Rebecca Boyle 🌕 @rboyle31.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
What this also means: We should be grateful for our atmosphere 👀
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 07/04/2026
#Artemis crew to Mission Control, after seeing and attempting to describe the eclipse: "And if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary tomorrow, that'll help my vocabulary out a bit. Thank you."
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
You can’t really learn much if you’re having AI generate your homework, your papers, and everything else you need to complete a class, but for some reason universities keep shoving AI into the learning environment on the assumption that it’s an improvement.
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G. Willow Wilson @gwillow.me · 31/03/2026
"Art didn't used to be political." Meanwhile, Mr. William Shakespeare: www.youtube.com/shorts/uec_u...
youtube.com
Sir Ian Mckellen deliver a 400 years olds Shakespeare monologue.
YouTube video by Tristian&Co
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Benjamin Dreyer @bcdreyer.social · 01/04/2026
For those days when I’m not in one of my exhaustive exhausting village explainer moods: Normalize googling words/terms followed by “definition” or “etymology.” Doors of knowledge will hurl themselves open for you, I swear. I even swan.
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ElieNYC @elienyc.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Honestly cannot think of a time I knew less what was going to happen at court than I feel ahead of oral arguments on birthright citizenship tomorrow. The fact that this is getting a full hearing instead of a 9-0, per curiam, benchslap is already beyond disturbing.
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adrienne @barelytolerable.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
I dunno. If they end birth right citizenship, a clear corruption of the plain language of the Constitution, I think this country is over.
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Izzy Kamikaze @izzykamikaze.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
"The IOC already tried mandatory sex testing. For decades, every female Olympic athlete was screened. In all those years, it never caught a single person deliberately misrepresenting their sex. What it did was destroy the careers & lives of women with intersex conditions they didn’t know they had."
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Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
the thing about "i'll just pirate it" for this HP show is that it is *ruined* i literally cannot enjoy it, she has put her disgusting transphobic veneer over all of it and so it literally cannot be enjoyed, even if I wanted to try (I don't) I would see her smarmy cigar smoking face in my mind's eye
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Shannon Hale @shannonhale.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
the amount of energy some people use up on a daily basis just hating people, hating whole groups of people, trying to remind themselves again and again why they're the enemy and must be stopped. Instead they could learn to watercolor or bake sourdough, go on bike rides, plant a butterfly garden...
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Benjamin Dreyer @bcdreyer.social · 21/03/2026
However much we love Emma Thompson, it's not enough.
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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
And what I’m calling “opportunity theft” is the theft of someone’s future and their potential by means of robbing them of appreticeship, menteeship, and experience now. Using AI to perform the tasks that students and trainees do in the early phases of training and education is opportunity theft.
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
In addn to the “opportunity theft,” as Sonja 🤌 calls it, I’m struck by how this prof thinks of grad students: purely as cheap labor to serve him. Zero acknwlwgmt of the ethical / intellectual responsibility or *joy* of sharing your knwledg with others, learning *from* them, supporting the next gen.
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Jenny with a Green Ribbon Around Her Neck @readingtheend.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
quick reminder that NT's production of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring human ray of sunshine Ncuti Gatwa, will be streaming FOR FREE on YouTube this weekend www.radiotimes.com/movies/ncuti...
radiotimes.com
Ncuti Gatwa's acclaimed theatre run of beloved classic play is set to stream for free
Alongside Gatwa, the play stars Sharon D Clarke, Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́, Eliza Scanlen and Hugh Skinner.
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Jay Lender @jaylender.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
People are dead.
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News Eye @newseye.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Quietly, calmly and forensically, BBC just dismantled the Trump communications shitshow on Iran. No hyperbole, just laying out an unprecedented military, diplomatic and reputational shambles. Worth a watch. (🎥 BBC News/BBC Verify)
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Proloe 🌙🧚‍♀️ Very Fairy Vtuber @proloe.gay · 28/02/2026
I do not like this gen AI I do not like what it implies I do not want it in my art I do not think it makes you smart I do not want it in my games I do not like its goals and aims I do not want it in my books I do not like the way it looks I do not like it, I don't care I do not want it anywhere
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