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bethmacnamara.bsky.social

@bethmacnamara.bsky.social
59 followers 31 following 3 posts
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Reposted by @bethmacnamara.bsky.social
Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Is this what international relations experts mean by ‘strategic ambiguity’?
Lammy has said Vance's book "reduced me to tears"
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Euan @euan.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
i still can’t believe the Supreme Court ruled that when Parliament passed legalisation with the express intention of codifying trans people’s rights, what it was actually doing was bringing in the most draconian anti-trans legislation in the western world
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 08/08/2025
in this week's newsletter! a super cheery essay on why I think I'm no longer in denial about AI shafting us all in the media and creative industries: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/not-half-f...
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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Oh so it does have phd level intelligence
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Em (spooky) @irradiatedmouse.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
I decided I want to go back to not drinking, I use this great app I Am Sober a huge part of which is the community feature where you can make friends and get support and motivation, it’s now unavailable for UK ppl due to the online safety act….in case teenagers are illicitly trying to get sober?
I am Sober app message for UK users when you try to access the community feature:

6 Aug 2025
Custom • Day One
Community access temporarily unavailable.
Due to the UK Online Safety Act, community features are currently unavailable for UK users. Your personal tracking, daily pledges, milestones, and all other app features remain fully accessible. We expect to restore community access soon once we implement the required age verification systems.
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Roz Kaveney @rozkaveney.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Interesting that the Times story seems to indicate that the elimination of trans people from public life seems to be a stalking horse for introducing ID cards by the back door by making it possible for pubic bodies to demand birth certificates as evidence of whether you are allowed to use the loo.
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Baby octopus @mancalled.horse · 08/08/2025
Every time you see a Labour MP heading to the toilet, make sure to intercept them and demand documentary proof that their Supreme Court-undefined "biological sex" matches the socially constructed gender signifiers in the icon on the toilet sign, and then simply refuse to accept any proof they give
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It's Pipes, Mum! Pipes is here! @scriblit.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Just taking my birth certificate with me on the big shop in case I need a piss in the Asda customer toilet and the toilet bouncer doesn't like the shape of my skull
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Kat 💥 @katstark.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
So Trans blokes can't use the men's loos and can't use the women's loos either. Good plan Labour, encourage some al fresco weeing, i'm sure that's a fab idea 🙄
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🦇💀 Rigg-or Mortis 💀🦇 @rigg.lgbt · 08/08/2025
For fuck's sake
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 07/06/2025
I've literally had AI boosters tell me "AI is not biased, you're just bad at prompting" because they don't actually understand how bias works or how an LLM is productized outside of a chatbot. The scariest thing about this tech isn't when you talk to it. It's when you don't see it at all.
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Rhodri Marsden @rhodri.biz · 08/08/2025
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the model as "like having a team of PhD-level experts in your pocket”
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radams @radamssmash.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.
A shitty map created by ChatGPT5.  it purports to be US States with an R in their name, but it's wrong and dumb and worthless just like LLMs.
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Leigh Jones @leighsus.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Local journalism update: this Reach title is trying to cause a run on the banks.
A Facebook post from the Newcastle Chronicle saying: "Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest customers urged to close account within 48 hours" with no other details.
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Hugo Gordon @hugogordon.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
This whole story is the perfect summation of the anti-trans panic. A trans person (if they were even trans!) dares to exist in a public setting. A bigot makes an insane complaint. The press and GC public figures loudly portray the trans person as dangerous. And that's the message the public here.
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Julianna 💎 @batariangal.eurosky.social · 06/08/2025
Oh you absolutely useless wankers
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 06/08/2025
sorry to say this made me laugh out loud the one thing we didn't want to happen!
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Josiah Mortimer @josiahmortimer.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Absolutely mind-boggling that the UK Govt has *still* not reviewed its use of X
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Just today I asked a male (!!!!!!) shop assistant in Boots about maternity pads. This level of proposed segregation by sex is truly Victorian in its morality and moral panic.
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Legally, there isn't the slightest basis to the complaint, even on the most extreme possible interpretation of the Supreme Court judgement. A shop floor is not a single sex space, regardless of whether they sell bras or not. This is just hatred and spite, unleashed.
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 06/08/2025
obviously always reread this whenever it pops up but also: never entirely sure what it says about me that it made me really fancy Tom Hollander
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cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
every Democrat in this country should be using every single ounce of their power to loudly and publicly support these Texas politicians like the 10-alarm fire this is
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 05/08/2025
genuinely what jobs will be left for those of us who like having ideas and discussing them publicly but who do not want our faces to be plastered everywhere, I write and I do radio and podcasts instead of going on television for a reason, please just leave us alone
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Amy @lolennui.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
John mulaney saying, “When a horse is loose in a hospital you gotta stay updated. The updates, they're not always bad, sometimes they're just odd.”
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Coding interviews from people who left government earlier this year, and this is a fantastic quote in response to a question about what DOGE tech folk don't understand.
And yeah, I think that the DOGE folks at agencies kind of had unilateral decision making authority in a way that's kind of scary because they both had the we should come into government and do common sense things mindset without realizing that the most common sense things are actually the hardest to accomplish for very specific reasons.
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 05/08/2025
for some reason I'm often the person people take for coffee when they launch a media start-up (it's nice! I'm not complaining!) and the one thing I would say is that a lot of people can't really tell the difference between "we found a gap in the market!" and "this gap is clearly here for a reason"
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
What about Mediterranean countries where restaurants are closed until 7pm? Well dear reader, I simply die.
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Alan White @aljwhite.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
New YouGov polling. A monumental failure of our political class to educate, a monumental failure of our media to report fairly, for a generation
47% of people think immigration is primarily illegal. There were 4% irregular arrivals in March
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
!!!
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 05/08/2025
Wrote about how the UK's online age verification requirements are already proving to be a disaster (as UK regulators were clearly warned it would be) and how unhelpful the UK's response to this mess has been, including their tech minister saying anyone who complains supports predators.
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 04/08/2025
is maybe a societal split that didn't use to meaningfully matter at all but now does between people who actually like, read good prose or at least encounter it often enough and people who just don't (this probably sounds like I'm being snobbish but I am being genuine)
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Julianna 💎 @batariangal.eurosky.social · 04/08/2025
Honestly, the mindset behind a lot of British policy-making is best demonstrated by a Spitting Image sketch where Thatcher’s solution to a privatised service being rubbish is to privatise it again
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Micah @rincewind.run · 04/08/2025
the point gets made over and over, but there's an extremely obvious reason the rich complain but don't leave: it doesn't matter how much money you have, you cannot buy Living In New York City in Florida or Texas you can stack a mansion on top of another mansion, but it'll never be the same
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Ed Jefferson @edjefferson.com · 04/08/2025
just completely awful, down to the risible 'derrrrr what's da problem?' response from the police spokesperson.
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Nathan @nwylabour.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Anecdotally trans rights – along with Gaza – is one of the two main things causing us to haemorrhage volunteers in my CLP at the moment
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Nathan @nwylabour.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Our women's officer – a cis woman, to be clear – resigned in disgust at the party's plans to exclude trans women from all-women shortlists
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
also we already have a perfectly good definition of academic freedom, it was established by UNESCO in 1997. university governance hates it because it gives academics "freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work".
unesco.org
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
"controversial or unpopular opinions" is such a stupid phrase to include in a piece of legislation relating to academic free speech. because it encompasses both "hard truths that people don't want to accept" and "things that have in fact been proven incorrect numerous times by research".
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
I mean my boyfriend is 5 inches taller than me and I've got a bigger hand span than him so this also seems just straightforwardly bullshit?
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Jon Loveridge @jonloveridge.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Incredible that this is all the same article. How utterly pathetic
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People's Government of the Pelargir Commune 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @dov.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
This is actually sort of incredible. A country that has already fallen to fascism fantasising about future universes where it unfalls and "gets" to invade a country that, for now, hasn't
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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 04/08/2025
something I keep thinking about and which I can't make up my mind on is: were swathes of the right, centre-right and, in some cases, the centre, full of racists hiding their beliefs for decades, or are these people all incredibly suggestible? neither answer is good!
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Josh Spero @joshspero.ft.com · 03/08/2025
Called whatnow? on.ft.com/3H5oSoL
“I hope SNCF is threatened. That’s the point of competition. The incumbent needs to improve its service,” said Laurent Fourtune, chief executive of a new low-cost operator called Kevin Speed.
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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
The reverse is also true. The world is littered with good writers who are lousy thinkers, good writers whose love of an elegant phrase runs beyond their sense of 'is that even right or true, though?'
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Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 03/08/2025
The shared conviction of everyone running election night coverage that no one staying up all night to watch the election could really actually be interested in the, y'know, election is one of the mysteries of senior TV management.
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Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
Feels a bit like this is also part of a broader trend to centralisation in all news coverage. So few regional (or national!) correspondents in any format. Everything outside London is a quaint curio even during an election where the constituencies are the point.
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