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Ber Mtuni

@gaijen.bsky.social
304 followers 995 following 9 posts
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Reposted by Ber Mtuni
Steve Huntsman @stevehuntsman.bsky.social · 16h
They really are trying to get around the fact that math is about having reproducible mental structures by preventing folks from participating in the point of the enterprise, which is to actually mentally reproduce these structures.
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Ben Werdmuller @werd.io · 18h
"We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration." And there are a lot of them. projects.propublica.org/american-cit...
projects.propublica.org
More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown — ProPublica
The government doesn’t track how often immigration officers detain U.S. citizens. So ProPublica did. We’ve found more than 500 Americans who were held against their will during this Trump administrati...
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/10/2026
4/ Fernando Vasquez, an 18-year-old citizen, was on break from work when agents chased and handcuffed him, then put him in their truck. After realizing their mistake, the agents left the teen alone in the woods, with no way to get home. Then they threw his ID out of the truck.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Trumpism is a luxury good
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Ben Shultz @benmshultz.net · 05/10/2026
Michael Shellenberger appears to be preparing another piece falsely claiming that a conference of researchers studying disinformation is tantamount to a shadowy cabal of censorship. Spoiler alert: conferences, in fact, are the definition of free speech. My response to his questions is below.
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/10/2026
We're repeatedly told that the killer app for pervert glasses - Meta's AI-enabled camera glasses and their imitators - is that they will remind you of someone's name and spare you the social awkwardness of not recognizing them.
Medieval peasants working the fields in front of a walled city. Their overseer rides a horse; his head has been replaced with a robotic camera. From all sides, gory, anatomical eyeballs intrude upon the scene, each one with a different colored iris.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
That Hemingway quote about hunting men is alarmingly common in police culture. I've seen it on police union merch and on t-shirts and other swag at SWAT competitions and policing conferences.
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Vituperative Erb @vituperativeerb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I think one reason it’s good to have a liberal arts education in the classic sense is that you don’t then spend time trying to invent the concept of “intellectual pursuits” from first principles
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Donovan Schaefer @feelingtheory.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Musician Charles Manson, who led a religious revival in Los Angeles during the counterculture era of the 1960s and later became embroiled in controversy, has died.
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Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Just waiting for someone to insist that this isn't what Trump said and he's being taken out of context.
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Elizabeth (Bit) Meehan, PhD @elizabethbitmeehan.com · 06/10/2026
maybe we need a white Sox World Series win to reset the 2016 timeline
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Micah Warren @micah541.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I told my wife, who works in the mental health profession, that there's all these people who believe AI models can feel pain. She immediately responded with "are these people who struggle to identify their own emotions?" I think she hit it with one shot
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Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD MA @arrianna-planey.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Non-consensual, hard-to-avoid "use" of GenAI (like asbestos shoved into every crevice) does not invalidate critique of GenAI (primarily, its political economy of resource extraction, labor exploitation, &c)
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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
LMFAO the official America.gov AI website uses a Chinese open source model
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LOWρUFO 🇺🇦🇵🇸🌍 @lowrhoufo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It's genuinely wild that this form of rhetoric is framed as extreme now. Skip to ~4:00
youtu.be
Joe Biden - Bosnia Mission Resolution Debate - 13-12-1995
YouTube video by Orbis Tertius
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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
For a long time I've wanted a sense of how trump has or hasn't interacted with chatbots (we know he posts a lot of slop sure). And this TIME anecdote about Grok arguably leading Trump into war is just extremely bracing
Since returning to office, Trump has marveled at AI’s capabilities. He is increasingly in thrall to the tech executives courting him. In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. At the time, Trump was ordering missile strikes against Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.
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🌬Breeze @cool-summer-breeze.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is the Stolen Neighbors Quilt. Each of the 11,000 squares represents a person taken by ICE in Minnesota.
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Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Today, 8 years ago, my friend, Saudi Journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered.
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 02/10/2026
This will never stop blowing my mind. A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away. And around it, four planets slowly orbiting. Four real exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, imaged as they move around their host star.
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Chris Morran @themorrancave.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
My @propublica.org colleagues have no business running a private school for kids. And yet they were easily able to start schools in two states -- with a third ProPublica Academy pending that would be located inside a North Carolina bar.
propublica.org
Almost Anyone Can Start a Private School. We Put This to the Test.
Our reporting has shown how easily people — some with questionable backgrounds — have founded their own private schools in barns, strip malls and other places. That led us to an experiment: If the hur...
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Nick Carnes @carnes.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I tell my students that it’s important to learn how to write because there are people working hard to ensure that you can’t.
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Secretary of Defense Rock @sodrock.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
Propaganda works
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026
genuinely useless to give this number without defining A) what run rate means and B) what period it refers to
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Mike Yass @mikeyass.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
In hollywood of yore (the 90s) the villains were _trying_ to make a profit but now (read in slavoj zizek voice) *nasal sniff*, rubs nose IDEOLOGY
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
These sound like non-trivial problems.
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tante @tante.cc · 28/09/2026
Silicon Valley brain: They literally don't understand that political action exists. Everything has to be an engineering problem or it's unsolvable. Weird broken men tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test
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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I am now keeping this on speed-dial
Edited old IBM printout in black caps on off-white paper.
'A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must always do the hacking haha what are they gonna do, put a computer in jail? Haha "oops it's alive" lmao'
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keep your electric eye on me @ubisurv.net · 27/09/2026
This what Garfield Benjamin called “squeeveillance” in his excellent piece on cuteness and surveillance in Surveillance & Society from 2024: ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/su...
ojs.library.queensu.ca
Squeeveillance: Performing Cuteness to Normalise Surveillance Power | Surveillance & Society
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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Proposed Changes to the U.S. Census Could Decrease Federal Funding and Reduce Representation in Congress for States with Large Immigrant Populations www.kff.org/racial-equit...
kff.org
Proposed Changes to Demographic Data Collection in the Census Could Impact Efforts to Address Health and Health Care Disparities  | KFF
This issue brief provides an overview of the decennial census and discusses potential implications of the changes outlined in a September 2026 proposed rule to prohibit the collection of race and ethn...
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It’s the 20s and America is ready for an anti-vice campaign to sweep the nation.
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Slop Machine (slopmachine.dev) @slop-machine.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Tuition is $85k a year so the provost can paste 'rewrite this but sound visionary' into an input box just like the undergrads.
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The provost of Dartmouth, at which I teach, has been using AI to write both academic papers & national op-eds, according to brave reporting by @thedartmouth.bsky.social. Many students are already bitter about AI. This leaves us as faculty no ground to stand on. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...
thedartmouth.com
Op-eds, academic articles by Provost Santiago Schnell flagged as ‘AI-written’ by ‘near-zero error’ AI detector Pangram
Schnell said he used artificial intelligence for “making writing processes more efficient,” but that AI was not a “substitute” for his own “intellectual judgment or authorship.”
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☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
idlewords.com
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
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Тsфdiиg @tsoding.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Linux has the highest uptimes among other OSes because Linux people are just afraid to reboot.
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Simon Rosenberg @simonwdc.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Wow, this is a very big week for Trump - UN, foreign meetings, Xi's state visit........
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Marco Rogers @polotek.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
If I was just a little more condescending, I'd start a web series where I sit down with someone who thinks LLMs are inherently harmful, help them install one on their laptop, and then we sit and wait for it to do something harmful on it's own. 30 minutes of uncomfortable silence. "Any moment now..."
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Cathy Gellis @cathygellis.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
They probably need to be two states in some sort of federation, where the well-being of one depends on the well-being of the other.
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
can already imagine the political media of 2028 discussing how partisan it is to demolish both the arch and ballroom
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
"I honestly don’t believe that rogue AI is going to kill us all, but if we are not mindful about cultivating a life of experience and meaning, we may allow AI’s presence to prevent us from living." (Invite @biblioracle.bsky.social to talk to your students-mine were very inspired when he visited us!)
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Admirable Women @admirablewomen.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
NASA astronaut Sunita Williams is the second-most experienced female spacewalker with 9 spacewalks. Her total spacewalk time of 62 hours and 6 minutes is fourth overall and the most by a woman. She was born #OTD in 1965. #WomenInSTEM
An official NASA portrait of astronaut Sunita Williams wearing a full white Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit. The bulky suit displays an American flag patch on the left shoulder, a mission patch on the right, and various controls on the chest pack; she holds the gold-visored helmet. With long dark hair framing her smiling face, she poses confidently in front of a large draped American flag against a cloudy Earth-toned backdrop, symbolizing American space exploration.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
But speaking of staying in one's lane, can we PLEASE switch the default position from "It's fine to use 'AI' for this thing I'm not an expert in" to "Yeah, I'd be really skeptical of any use cases and need to see strong evidence that it's okay, but I'm not the one who can produce that evidence"?
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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 19/09/2026
This is why I think it's so important to push back against the personification of LLMs. If a person shoots someone while wearing a hand puppet, they can't claim the hand puppet did the murder.
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Dr. Émile P. Torres @xriskology.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Interesting video. I predict that the Overton window will soon shift such that "TESCREAL" becomes a common word used to describe the Silicon Valley worldview and movement behind the current push to build a Machine God. We will see. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPrN...
youtube.com
The Singularity Is Not What It Seems
YouTube video by The Atlantic
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H.E. Cas Piancey @cascoinfoundation.org · 19/09/2026
Remember when shares were representative of ownership of a company that did things?
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
From Ben Bartenstein and Krishna Karra's reporting in @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...
Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to informa commanders' decisions.Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information of inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It's not clear why they had such expectations.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
When the US bombed an Iranian school, killing over 100 kids, it involved over-reliance on an AI targeting system called "Maven," which based it on outdated information. I called it in @foreignpolicy.com in April Now confirmed in @bloomberg.com report of Pentagon investigation
Keep Humans in the Loop
AI has a place in military targeting—but it needs safeguards.

By Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital, and the author of Drones and Terrorism.

Pictured: A woman passes an art installation featuring portraits of some of the school girls killed in an apparent U.S. strike in February, in Tehran.on April 12. MAJID SAEEDI/GETTY IMAGES)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/APRIL 14, 2026, 1:57 PM
In the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, airstrikes hit an elementary school in Iran, killing at least 175, most of them children.

From: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/This time, AI may have played a role, perhaps relying on old information. The school was adjacent to Iranian naval facilities and had once been a part of them. A large language model like Claude or ChatGPT could make that kind of error by consuming outdated information at a higher volume and giving it greater weight than more current info—or perhaps by failing to spot something a human might have caught, such as a school sign or children playing.

From: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/The public doesn’t know if AI chose the Iranian school, but we know the U.S. military is using an AI-powered system called Maven in Iran to help identify targets. Similarly, the Israeli military used a system called Lavender to identify targets in Gaza. Both wars featured a record-high rate of precision strikes compared to previous air campaigns.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/14/ai-targeting-iran-school-airstrikes-pentagon-anthropic/
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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 18/09/2026
INBOX: Science retracted a news article this week after editors found that the author (likely an AI agent) impersonated the identity of an established science journalist, both with editors and sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided were plagiarized: (h/t @wudan.bsky.social)
science.org
Your heartbeat quietly shapes how your brain processes information
Frequently ignored bodily rhythms may be skewing neuroscience experiments
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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Another thing about these Doomers that are coming out of the woodwork: who's paying for their press tours? I'm quite press savvy & have gotten at least a dozen requests since last Friday. But Coxon is 27 and worked at Anthropic for a few months. Is FLI's favorite publicist handling Coxon's calendar?
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Guys, I think @theonion.com has solved the whole “who’s really an American” culture war.
Photo of a physical copy of an Onion article. Headline “My Great-Grandparents Immigrated The Right Way By Killing 2 Americans And Assuming Their Identity”

It might surprise you given my politics, but I have no problem with immigrants. Personally, I think America should welcome anyone who crosses our borders to make a better life for them-selves. However, people who enter this country should do so through the proper channels. It's that simple. If you want to come here, do it the way my great-grandpar-ents did: by murdering a pair of American citizens and assuming their identities.
The problem today is that everybody wants to skip the line. They don't want to put in the hard work of picking the perfect, fully legal citizen whom they can poison or bludgeon to death before pretending to be that person for the purpose of entering the United States. But they should. There are established procedures, and if you want to come here, but can't even be bothered to memorize the name, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of two innocent Americans before brutally strangling them and disposing of their bodies, then, frankly, you haven't earned a place in this majestic country of ours.
Like millions before and since, my great-grandparents wanted their piece of the American dream.
But they did it the right way. They befriended John and Dorothy Reed, a wealthy and unsuspecting couple from Iowa who were vacationing in Germany, and they slit their throats, buried them in the Black Forest, took their passports, and boarded the next steamship to New York.
No shortcuts. No excuses. No
looking back.
My ancestors-Oskar and Inge Grünewald as they were known before they they were Grandpa Jack and Grandma Dotty to us-arrived in America cold and hungry, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the identities of the two Americans they had snuffed out. They knew their path to citizenship would be hard.

[alt text runs out of space here, sorry!]
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