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erikr

@erik-the-rau.bsky.social
456 followers 920 following 0 posts

Middle-aged ethnic Minnesotan (he/him)—emergency management & public safety; climate change; civil rights; the labor movement; state-tribal relations; libraries; canoeing; astronomy. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

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Reposted by erikr
More Perfect Union @moreperfectunion.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
HUGE: The Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes have both voted to impose a three-year moratorium on data center construction on tribal lands — temporarily banning dara centers on 8,000 square miles. The Cherokee Nation, Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and the Kickapoo Tribe have all imposed similar bans.
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Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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Popular Information @popular.info · 24/09/2026
“The top donors in American politics have poured in more than $1.7 billion to influence this election cycle so far, and the latest numbers show a last-minute rush of money from benefactors of the GOP.”
washingtonpost.com
Meet the megadonors pouring more than $1.7 billion into the 2026 elections
Billionaires and Elon Musk, who recently temporarily achieved trillionaire status, make up the top individual donors.
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Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) @drspacejunk.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
2027 is a huge year! 70th anniversary of the IGY, 60th anniversary of the Outer Space Treaty, 50th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1 and 2, and 100th anniversary of the famous/infamous Solvay conference! 🧪 🔭 WomenInSTEM
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Maryn McKenna @marynmck.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fake. USDA. Seals. Used by an NC meat processing plant on 83.5 TONS of meat. Produced entirely outside the federal inspection system, according to news reports. We are pretty close to The Jungle (second ed.) now, no? www.scrippsnews.com/life/recalls...
scrippsnews.com
Interactive: Meat recall linked to fake USDA labels
Pork, beef and goat products are being recalled after a company allegedly used fake USDA inspection labels. Explore our interactive guide to see which products are affected and what to look for.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
... and much, much more from MANY voices. When the EA claim "no one has been warning you about this stuff" they are doing a double erasure: 1) Of the people doing the warning 2) Of the actual harms they are warning about bsky.app/profile/emil... >>
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Le Ca-ghoul @lecagle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
you are *not* prepared for what this technology company is called, nothing can prepare you
wkyt.com
UK installs AI facial scanning technology at residence halls
The University of Kentucky is installing artificial intelligence facial scanning technology on several campus buildings.
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 11/06/2026
> This becomes utterly damaging pedagogically when we assume the ‘output’ of an assignment, the essay or horrifically the grade, is the essence. The point is for students to engage with the subject matter and sharpen their writing skills... doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 12/09/2026
How did he pass is job interview? The same reason he's all over the press & everyone in the "left" is captured by these people. I'm gonna call it like it is, once again, its ******RACISM********* Y'all can't imagine that WE are the experts.
100GB+ frontier models aren’t  50KB virus you could pass around by emails. As if there are tons of H100 sitting idle with inference stack ready everywhere. 

How did this guy pass the job interview at Anthropic as a “researcher”?

Quote tweeting a tweet that says: 
Rohan Paul
@rohanpaul_ai
Jacob Coxon's next interview on CBS News (ex Anthropic+Open AI researcher who resigned)

"We can't just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers. Like it's not that difficult to find yourself because an AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place and then you unplug it here, but it's actually still over there and maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they're all cooperating."

----

From "CBS News" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)
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Wiep Hamstra @wiep.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Interesting that theft, abuse, pornography, destruction of knowledge, billions burned, women attacked, teenagers killed did not count so much to the privileged. Because ‘AI is the future’. But now a male and white mathematician is robbed of his work (also bad!), some feel ‘betrayed’. 🤔
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 09/09/2026
I really want to hear from the dozens of journalists who wrote glowing profiles of Alpha School in the last few years. Actually scratch that. I never want to hear from them again.
futurism.com
AI School Hooking Children Up to Heart Monitor in Front of Class While Playing Critiques of Their Work
The controversial AI-focused private school Alpha School is making its students do some unusual things before enrolling.
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Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) @drspacejunk.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
NASA's live coverage of the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope begins in about 1/2 an hour, 8.20 pm AEST! Watch here: 🧪 🔭
nasa.gov
NASA Live - NASA
NASA live: Follow live television broadcasts on NASA+, the agency's streaming service, and NASA's social media channels with this schedule of upcoming live events including news briefings, launches an...
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Gabe Ortíz @tusk81.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
This is what the angels sound like when you get to heaven 🦋
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris’ Trio on vinyl
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Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com · 31/08/2026
The belief that you can is why all of those billionaires-built bunkers in New Zealand but climate change is not a SINGLE threat. It is a umbrella of threats - some we are only starting to understand - and some of which are cascading.
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Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com · 31/08/2026
You cannot build a bunker for climate change.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
they dream of dictatorship laundered through (their) digital tools
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Greedling @greedling1729.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Toby Buckle had a great article about this newrepublic.com/article/2042...
newrepublic.com
The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned
Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?
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Equal Justice Initiative @eji.org · 28/08/2026
On this day in 1955, two white men abducted and murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi.
calendar.eji.org
Aug. 28, 1955 | Emmett Till Abducted and Murdered in Mississippi Delta
Learn more about our history of racial injustice.
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I work hard to incorporate Tribal policy into my general public policy classes because too often the field forgets that Tribal Nations exist. Using this and the Miccosukee this semester as useful cases.
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AFL-CIO @aflcio.org · 17/08/2026
Working people, not CEOs, make this country run every day. It shouldn’t be this hard to live and make ends meet. Workers are not asking for luxury. We’re asking for some breathing room. aflcio.org/paywatch
Executive Paywatch: Americans are struggling. CEOs are thriving. 16% of adults cannot pay all their bills in full. 26% skipped medical care due to cost. 23% of renters fell behind on their rent in the past year. CEO pay is exploding while working people fight for scraps. | AFL-CIO
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Sophie Hurwitz @hurwitz.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
This story’s got everything: Spiderman-villain weaponry, Black Hawk Down, vaccine conspiracy theories, weird YouTube videos www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
motherjones.com
The Orwellian Company Behind ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves
“With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” That makes it hard for victims to sue.
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Racket @racketmn.com · 28/07/2026
“We’ve got some of the best fish in the world right in our backyard, and nobody's selling it." racketmn.com/minnesotas-o...
racketmn.com
Minnesota’s on the World’s Largest Lake—Why Don’t We Eat More Lake Superior Fish? - Racket
We posed that verbatim question to fishermen, regulators, fishmongers, historians, documentarians, restaurateurs, and biologists.
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Mary Gillis @marygillis.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Reading about the new X Money account reminded me of this story and how just because a tech company middleman says your money will be in an FDIC-covered account doesn't mean it's actually insured or you'll ever see it again once the shit hits the fan.
youtu.be
How Millions of Americans Got Tricked Into Using a Bank That Isn't a Bank
YouTube video by More Perfect Union
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 26/07/2026
How about that "viewpoint diversity," huh? Wooooo. Anyway. Yeah: just like we told you it was. "White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants" apnews.com/article/cali...
The National Institutes of Health admitted to using an internal search tool to flag UC grants that mentioned “health equity,” “work force diversity,” “structural racism,” and “sexual orientation.” The NIH alone suspended or cancelled more than 1,000 UC grants, including nearly 700 at UCLA, related to vaccines, cancer research and disparities in health outcomes. That figure is newly disclosed in a court filing — last year, UCLA indicated that closer to 500 NIH grants were terminated. The health research agency also declared that it’s possible that DOGE, the short-lived federal office that billionaire Elon Musk led in 2025, used AI to target grants for termination. Lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote to the judge that these admissions show the agencies “identified the viewpoints they wanted to suppress, searched the grants they funded for those that expressed those viewpoints, and terminated those grants on that basis.” That violates the researchers’ First Amendment rights, the lawyers wrote. The Environmental Protection Agency, one of the named agencies in the suit, is in the process of settling with lawyers for the UC professors to avoid further litigation.
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ex-Lethality Jane @lethalityjane.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I was on a joint training exercise with the German military in 2008 and was chatting with a German NCO and for some reason World War 2 came up and this 30-something man had actual tears in his eyes talking about the guilt he felt as a German about a war that ended 30 years before he was born.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
This is laughable --- "reporting says", well yes, these reporters did a bang-up job anthropomorphizing the system they are talking about, and obfuscating the responsibility that OpenAI holds here. bsky.app/profile/mims... Some examples:
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DC Public Library @dcpubliclibrary.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
A gentle reminder: libraries are still here, still free, still open to everyone. No appointment required. No subscription fee. Just walk in.
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shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
yeah we’re gonna have to ban prediction markets
cnn.com
People are making wildfire bets on prediction markets. Experts say it could lead to disaster | CNN
As the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires raged last year, people placed bets on how how many acres the fires would consume, which locations they would reach and when they would be contained.
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Kelly Lynne D’Angelo ✨ @kellylynnedang.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Please blow up the public comment (included below): BREAKING NEWS (7/15) — The administration wants to destroy Chaco Canyon without consulting Tribal Nations. It’s an irreplaceable historic & cultural site with 4,700 archeological sites that could be lost to the bulldozers of oil & gas development
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Anna Gifty @itsafronomics.blacksky.app · 14/07/2026
Black women are always always ALWAYS always EARLY.
rollingstone.com
These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI
Rumman Chowdhury, Timnit Gebru, Safiya Noble, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Joy Buolamwini open up about their artificial intelligence fears
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Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) @doctorvive.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
“DAC at the scale needed is mostly a fantasy” It is VERY USEFUL for scientists to say this out loud, as much as possible, since blind faith in carbon removal is one of the baseless ideologies justifying the continuation of fossil-fuel use among global policymakers.
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Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Don’t look away from Memphis. Don’t look away from Houston. Don’t look away at the nationwide ICE surge. The trump administration is counting on you losing interest and falling for its tweak in tactics. zeteo.com/p/trumps-vio...
zeteo.com
🆘 Trump’s Violent Crackdowns on U.S. Cities Are Still Happening. Don't Look Away
Horror in Minneapolis caused a reset of attacks on immigrants and liberals but the administration remains fascistic and lethal. In Maine, meanwhile, Graham Platner confirmed he'll withdraw Monday.
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Meredith Rawls @merrdiff.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Thanks, I *do* hate it www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-app...
pcmag.com
FCC Approves Reflect Orbital's Space Mirror Satellite That Astronomers Hate
The FCC says the most controversial aspect of Reflect Orbital's Earendil-1 satellite, the giant mirror, falls out of its authority since the regulator mainly focuses on radio spectrum.
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Amanda Litman @amandalitman.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Mmmmmmhmmmmm 👀👀👀👀 www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/o...
Goldberg: Part of the problem is the casting-call approach to candidate recruitment; they started by looking at a lobsterman who’d donated to Bernie Sanders, then moved on to oyster farmers.

But the bigger problem — besides the truly egregious absence of vetting — was not taking the time to do candidate development. Compare Moraff’s approach with that of Amanda Litman, head of Run for Something. She’s also supporting unconventional figures to run for office, some of them white men! (James Talarico was a Run for Something alum.) But Run for Something isn’t throwing neophytes into high-profile national races. They’re helping people run for local and state office, and those who shine there can move on to bigger things. That process is a lot more laborious and time consuming, but far more effective in building a Democratic bench.
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Lora Kolodny @lorak.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
headline game is strong at the reg.
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 08/07/2026
Compare this to how long form pieces on trans people have been written, mostly scornful pieces on trans people.
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More Perfect Union @moreperfectunion.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
In a hearing where residents grilled officials on data centers, a resident of Tyrone Township, Michigan, asked a simple question: Have you signed an NDA with any party regarding developments that could affect the town? The majority of the township's officials refused to answer.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
All of this. Adding: HR is also code for the state. if you are an affluent man with inherited entitlement Mark describes here, you simply don’t encounter the state very often. Maybe the DMV. But most of these dudes work. HR translates state power by managing regulations and risk.
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Reuters @reuters.com · 08/07/2026
Fatal ICE shooting in Houston sparks demands for transparency, independent investigation reut.rs/3QIzezN
reut.rs
Fatal ICE shooting in Houston sparks demands for transparency, independent investigation
There were growing calls on Wednesday for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of a man in Houston by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, the latest in a string of deadly encounters involving American immigration officers.
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
No. Refusal is a perfectly rational response to gAI, and I’m quite fed up with the argument that ‘it’s here you have no choice’. There are many technologies that ‘are here’ and I do not use.
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
This is a fantastic conversation on exactly what the risks and pitfalls are "AI" in teaching, with Jessica Grose and Tressie Cottom. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | A.I. Is Fueling a ‘Poverty of Imagination.’ Here’s How We Can Fix It.
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Yvonne Lam @yvonnezlam.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
I'm sorry, but the CEO of Meta has a very strange idea of what constitutes a problem that requires a solution.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
When people ask me what the phrase "artificial intelligence" means, my short answer is, it means "venture capitalists, give me some money". But OUP asked me for a longer answer, given here and summarized in the section headings: doi.org/10.1093/9780...
Screencap of page for linked article, reading: 

Contents
Introduction
AI Is a Research Field
AI Is an Approach to Cognitive Science
AI Is a Parlor Trick
AI Is an Ideology
AI Is a Way to Hide and Devalue Human Labor
AI Is a Way to Shift Accountability
AI Is a Way to Centralize Power
Conclusion
Notes
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Dan Hon @danhon.com · 23/05/2026
this jackpot, etc etc
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Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 05/07/2026
#OtD 5 Jul 1852 abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a speech about July 4th: "The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me… this Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine" stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1052...
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On the Media @onthemedia.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
"We need to get rid of this talk that we're somehow this exceptional nation chosen by God,” @esglaude.bsky.social told @brookegladstone.bsky.social. “We need to grow up. We can't grow up if you don't admit who and what you are.”
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
The right-wing attack on birthright citizenship is not just about birthright citizenship itself. As MAGA’s reaction to the Supreme Court ruling proves, it is part of their opposition to a broader ideal, that “All men are created equal.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Elsewhere, less tactful conservatives expressed directly what the dissenting justices chose to do in euphemism. Stephen Miller, who runs immigration policy for the Trump administration, told Fox News that “we have people from all over the world, from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel.” He went on: “They can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen? That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones? Can decide who our mayors are? Our governors are? Our presidents are?” Miller’s long-standing view is that what ruined America was the repeal of eugenics-inspired immigration restrictions that had banned immigration from Asia and Africa and from nations in Europe deemed to be composed of lesser white races.

There is very little difference between Miller’s position—if you come from a “Third World nation,” you are inferior—and that of antebellum Democrats and the opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment at the time it was adopted: American citizenship is degraded by having to share it with the biologically inferior. The justices are elite lawyers with the ability to obfuscate this project and ignore its aims, but the rest of us need not pretend. To put it bluntly, Miller’s objection, as articulated here, is not to birthright citizenship. It is to the idea that “all men are created equal.”
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Jennifer Ouellette @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Here’s Why Weather Forecasts Have Seemed So Inaccurate Lately. Meteorologists simply aren't able to gather as much data as they used to, and you're suffering for it. gizmodo.com/heres-why-we...
gizmodo.com
Here's Why Weather Forecasts Have Seemed So Inaccurate Lately
Meteorologists simply aren't able to gather as much data as they used to, and you're suffering for it.
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Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
I now fervently believe this. Relatedly, I think celebrating good news and embracing joy are equally radical. You have to remember what you’re fighting for. We cannot sustainably organize around sorrow.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
NEW — The sentencing of the Prairieland demonstrators shows the brutality of Trump's war on dissent, but it's not without precedent, @kimkelly.bsky.social writes. History shows us the government has always punished anti-fascism. But this time we can change the narrative in real time. Read here:
thehandbasket.co
From Haymarket to Prairieland: How dissent has unleashed the long arm of the law
The Prairieland sentencing has dark historical parallels, Kim Kelly writes. But we can change the end of the current story.
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