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Carlos Rivas

@carlosrivas.bsky.social
49 followers 58 following 70 posts

Sociologist - Venezuelan | Exploring social & cultural themes through digital data sources | También en español.

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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
"But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché." Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
Concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, and self-determination no longer carry the same weight in everyday discourse. It is deeply concerning that they have become empty signifiers today, especially considering how much was sacrificed to achieve them.
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Reposted by Carlos Rivas
Block Club Chicago @blockclubchi.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Before federal agents killed a Minnesota mom, they killed a man in Chicago and shot a woman 5 times. blockclubchi.co/4jxafcA
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
What are we looking at here? A protectorate? A mandate? A trusteeship? Perhaps historians can help us make sense of it. www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-new...
premiumtimesng.com
Trump says Venezuela will only purchase American-made products
The US Department of Energy had earlier stated that it will control sales of Venezuelan oil “indefinitely.”
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
"Oversight" is nothing but a vulgar euphemism. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Says U.S. Oversight of Venezuela Could Last for Years
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Sound is one of the sensory dimensions that becomes most distorted after a bombing. Every vehicle, motorcycle, or whistle heard in the distance triggers an involuntary panic response
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
In Spanish for now, while I adapt the main ideas into English. open.substack.com/pub/carlosri...
open.substack.com
Así se rompió la noche: estampas de un bombardeo en Caracas
Más que el ruido, fue la luz.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Tras la experiencia del trauma masivo, la escritura surge como un deber ético y una vía para reconstruir la paz mental arrebatada. Les comparto mi memoria de ese momento. open.substack.com/pub/carlosri...
open.substack.com
Así se rompió la noche: estampas de un bombardeo en Caracas
Más que el ruido, fue la luz.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
In social terms, the city of Caracas appears calm, but remains under a veil of tense expectation. Uncertainty and fear predominate in an environment with few certainties.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Electricity has been restored, though it might only be temporary. Slowly, the neighbors and I are trying to return to our routines. We've been meeting up to provide each other with support.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Once again, we are without electricity. The efforts to restore service have been complicated because the electrical substations were the first to be bombed. When they plunged everything into darkness that night, the horror began.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
A medida que pasan las horas, empiezo a procesar la magnitud de lo ocurrido. Mi mirada se detiene en las prácticas sociales de justificación: en cómo se articulan discursos para gestionar profundas contradicciones; en esa negociación social que pretende, sin éxito, preservar la coherencia del yo
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
There are still some power fluctuations due to the repairs right here where I am, in the areas closest to the heavy bombing
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
The first challenge is: how to narrate an intense lived experience with objectivity? It is, as Jorge Semprún suggests, a perspective tinted by trauma that must reach a certain temporal distance to find some semblance of truth.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
La electricidad ha sido restituida en mi zona después de los bombardeos. Ya puedo compartir detalles de lo que vivimos en la ciudad de Caracas, Venezuela. #caracas #venezuela
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Electricity has been restored. I can now recount the specific details and intensity of the bombings here in Caracas, Venezuela. Please help me share this information. #Caracas #Venezuela
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
40 hours after the bombings here in Caracas, my area is still without power due to the destruction of the electrical stations. The mobile signal is intermittent. Physically we are fine, but emotionally shaken.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Ambiguity, which in literary contexts entrusts meaning to the reader, takes on entirely new dimensions in the era of post-politics.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Does the TikTok feed lean right? Exposure to Political Party Content among non-partisan users during regional and federal elections in Germany osf.io/preprints/so...
osf.io
OSF
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Reposted by Carlos Rivas
Alexander Hoyle @alexanderhoyle.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Evaluating topic models (and document clustering methods) is hard. In fact, since our paper critiquing standard evaluation practices four years ago, there hasn't been a good replacement metric That ends today (we hope)! Our new ACL paper introduces an LLM-based evaluation protocol 🧵
Screenshot of first page of paper. It is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00828

Abstract: Topic model and document-clustering evaluations either use automated metrics that align poorly with human preferences or require expert labels that are intractable to scale. We design a scalable human evaluation protocol and a corresponding automated approximation that reflect practitioners' real-world usage of models. Annotators -- or an LLM-based proxy -- review text items assigned to a topic or cluster, infer a category for the group, then apply that category to other documents. Using this protocol, we collect extensive crowdworker annotations of outputs from a diverse set of topic models on two datasets. We then use these annotations to validate automated proxies, finding that the best LLM proxies are statistically indistinguishable from a human annotator and can therefore serve as a reasonable substitute in automated evaluations
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
This is an interesting article on LLMs as semiotic machines by Vromen (2024) with references to Derrida. arxiv.org/html/2410.13...
arxiv.org
Language Models as Semiotic Machines: Reconceptualizing AI Language Systems through Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Theories of Language
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
It is always worth remembering that Fascism usually has a forward-looking dynamic.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
These kinds of "impulse to demolish," mentioned by Linker, contrast with the affirmative nature of desire as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari. open.substack.com/pub/damonlin...
open.substack.com
Appetite for Destruction
The second Trump administration is primarily animated by an anti-conservative impulse to demolish the institutions and customs of liberal-democratic self-government
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Sociology papers (journals + SocArXiv) @socpaperbot.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Micropolarization: performances of antagonism and struggles for recognition during the Covid-19 pandemic osf.io/czn3a This article theorizes how political divisions permeate social interaction, transforming the political into the personal in everyday life. Drawing on affective po #sociology
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 03/05/2025
Zeitgeist... www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/w...
nytimes.com
America’s Vietnam War Opponents Who Fled to Canada Reflect on the Past and Future
Some of the United States’ Vietnam War opponents found refuge in Canada. Fifty years after the end of the war, they’re still worried about the future.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
"If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society..." 𝘋𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘶𝘻𝘦 & 𝘎𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪. 𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘪-𝘖𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘱𝘶𝘴: 𝘊𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘻𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘢.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
In uncertain times, access to reliable information is more crucial than ever. Revisit this paper by Zachary McDowell and Matthew Vetter to highlight Wikipedia’s community policies and procedures. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
"The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought." Friedrich Nietzsche on 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘈𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘬𝘴.
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Sociology papers (journals + SocArXiv) @socpaperbot.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
Why Do People Avoid Discussing Science and Religion on Social Media? Findings from a National Sample journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… Social media is increasingly important for discussing a myriad of topics, including the sometimes cont #sociology
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Chronicle of a Foretold Warming www.euronews.com/green/2024/1...
euronews.com
2024 will be the hottest year on record, scientists confirm
Last month was the 16th out of the last 17 where global average temperatures have exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial times.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
‘Post-fascism’, or how the far right talks about itself: the 2022 Italian election campaign as a case study
While the mainstreaming of the far right is attracting growing scholarly interest based on its contemporary relevance, the role that far-right self-representation strategies play in this process ha...
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
As a non-native English speaker, I find it difficult to translate Franco "Bifo" Berardi's concept of skin as a "sensitive interface"; instead, I invite you to consider this concept (or its absence) by trying to feel the textures of the attached images. Photos by Jude Infantini on Unsplash.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
While it's not always wise to make extrapolations, it's important to recall that Bourdieu wrote in the 90s: "The political dangers inherent in the ordinary use of television have to do with the fact that images have the peculiar capacity to produce what literary critics call a 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵."
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Reposted by Carlos Rivas
LSE Inequalities @lseinequalities.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Over 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water – and this is set to rise due to climate change. What collective steps need to be taken to address global water insecurity? Jo Trevor & Padmini Iyer of @oxfamgb.bsky.social explore #LSEInequalitiesBlog
blogs.lse.ac.uk
As global water runs dry, how can we make sure the poor don’t get cut off?
Over two billion people lack access to safe drinking water – and the situation is set to become bleaker still due to climate change. How do we build equitable and collective approaches to global wa…
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Reposted by Carlos Rivas
Sociology papers (journals + SocArXiv) @socpaperbot.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
What types of survey questions are prone to interviewer effects? Evidence based on 31,000 ICCs from 28 countries. share.osf.io/preprint/E00C1-195-713 Interviewer effects are a common challenge in face-to-face surveys. Understanding the conditions that make interviewer variance mo #sociology
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
🧵 Netflix's adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a timely reminder of the closeness between Yoknapatawpha and Macondo, not so much for their similar circustances, but more for the importance of ambiguity. www.netflix.com/title/81087583
netflix.com
Watch One Hundred Years of Solitude | Netflix Official Site
In the mythical town Macondo, seven generations of the Buendía family navigate love, oblivion and the inescapability of their past — and their fate.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
With this Spacy plugin, you can easily integrate PDF and Word documents into your Spacy pipelines, and then utilize the full capabilities of NLP techniques. github.com/explosion/sp...
github.com
GitHub - explosion/spacy-layout: 📚 Process PDFs, Word documents and more with spaCy
📚 Process PDFs, Word documents and more with spaCy - explosion/spacy-layout
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Reposted by Carlos Rivas
Nonceptualism @nonceptualism.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
"Every love is an exercise in depersonalization." —Deleuze & Guattari, 1987
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
A palpable sense of nostalgia permeates many Bluesky posts, drawing comparisons to the simpler days of early Twitter. This observation invites us to consider how nostalgia can serve as a form of social expression on digital media.
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Carlos Rivas @carlosrivas.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Bluesky is my social media debut. I've never had a personal presence on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It's a blank slate for me. Even though I've been analyzing and reflecting on their effects.
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