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merrua.bsky.social

@merrua.bsky.social
112 followers 624 following 1.2K posts
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CorkBeo.ie @corkbeo.bsky.social · 1h
Going undercover to expose the nest 🐝
corkbeo.ie
Asian hornets with tiny backpacks play 'Traitors' in search for Cork nests
Hi-tech solution as second hornet found near Ringaskiddy
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National Library of Ireland @nlireland.bsky.social · 4h
☕ For #InternationalCoffeeDay, we’re sharing one of our most popular photos of all time on #Flickr! This bustling scene shows the Tea and Coffee Van at Ballybricken Fair, Waterford City, on 4 May 1910. flic.kr/p/bT52Ak
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Catalin Cimpanu @campuscodi.risky.biz · 16h
In an interview, Firefox's head says it like it is—Google deprecated its old extension system just to sabotage ad blockers arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...
Text that reads: "So some examples—Chrome went through with their deprecation of Manifest V2. Manifest V2 is basically a much more powerful extension system. And people were like, well, why did this decrease? Why didn’t they just fix the security vulnerabilities in Manifest V2? And it’s very clearly because of ad blockers. That was the reason to deprecate it. Whereas, Mozilla, we’re not maximizing for profits, we’re maximizing for user experience and browser experience, and we want people to have powerful extensions. So we noticed when that shutoff moment happened, there was a moment where people said, do you want the power of an engine to be able to dictate how I control my experience? Because once Chromium shut it off, Edge shut it off, all the Chromium browsers then shut off Manifest V2 support. We still support it, and so we saw a big surge of actual users who started using us."
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ESA Earth Observation @esaearth.esa.int · 30/09/2026
Old satellite data still have plenty to tell us🔍 @esa.int FDR4VGT project is enhancing more than 20 years of observations from SPOT-VGT and PROBA-V, creating a consistent long-term record for studying Earth’s land surface and climate. earth.esa.int/eogateway/su...
earth.esa.int
Enhancing 20 years of global daily land monitoring with FDR4VGT - Earth Online
ESA's Fundamental Data Record for VGT (FDR4VGT) project is improving the quality and consistency of more than two decades of global daily land monitoring observations.
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Lia Belle @liabelle.me · 6h
If I may: @eurosky.social & app @mu.social are European alternatives to Bsky & Bsky app (link). Built on ATProto, seamlessly interoperable with Bsky. Mu.social has Post Editing, Custom AppView, Companion Pet & more 🙂 Migration guide: eurosky.tech/accounts/mig... Migration tool: move.eurosky.tech
eurosky.tech
Eurosky – mu is here. The first of a thousand social apps.
Eurosky is a European initiative to build and operate sovereign social web infrastructure
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 6h
An interesting GDPR case
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John Breslin @cloud.eurosky.social · 17h
Arya Satheesh, an 18-year-old student from Letterkenny in County Donegal, Invented a Plant-Based Plastic That Removes Microplastics From the Environment as It Biodegrades www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/t...
smithsonianmag.com
This High Schooler Invented a Plant-Based Plastic That Removes Microplastics From the Environment as It Biodegrades
Eighteen-year-old Arya Satheesh created her award-winning Eco Purge to help address the global problem of plastic pollution
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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 7h
(Albert Brooks)"What are you talking about? None of it matters." None of it matters? "No, that's the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn't matter. You'll be forgotten. I'll be forgotten. We'll all be forgotten."
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A. Feder Cooper @afedercooper.bsky.social · 21h
With @marklemley.bsky.social and others, we developed a novel and efficient approach for measuring verbatim memorization in LLMs (via extraction in outputs). There are a lot of findings and takeaways, so I'll only cover a few of them (briefly):
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A. Feder Cooper @afedercooper.bsky.social · 21h
Our large-scale study of memorization of books in open-weight LLMs (e.g., Llama, Qwen) will appear at the 2026 Conference on Language Modeling as an oral. We made a website for exploring our results on 200 books and 14 models: books-memorization.github.io
books-memorization.github.io
How much do open-weight LLMs memorize specific books?
Open-weight LLMs memorize books far more than previously believed. Memorization varies by model family, model size, and book. In extreme cases, entire books are memorized, and we can generate them eff...
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National Monuments Service @nationalmons.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐀𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐚 𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐚𝐠𝐡, 𝐂𝐨. 𝐒𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐨 NMS is pleased to announce the discovery of an anchor on the site of the three 1588 Armada wrecks at Streedagh, in Sligo. #UnderwaterWednesday #UnderwaterArchaeology #UnderwaterPhotography #ProtectOurPast
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Jacob Öberg @profjacob.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
#CouncilofEurope said the US had been “a valuable contributor” to GRECO “and to the exchange of experience and good practice in preventing and combating corruption.” “GRECO remains open to resuming cooperation with the United States in the future in support of shared efforts to
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Daily CyberSecurity @securityonline.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
OpenSSL patched 14 OpenSSL vulnerabilities, including high-severity DTLS flaw CVE-2026-84782 that can leak heap memory. Upgrade to 4.0.3 now. #OpenSSL #OpenSSLVulnerabilities #CVE202684782 #DTLS #QUIC #TLS #Cryptography #PatchNow
securityonline.info
OpenSSL Patches 14 Vulnerabilities, Including High-Severity DTLS Memory Leak
TL;DR OpenSSL fixed 14 OpenSSL vulnerabilities in a security advisory on September 29, 2026. One is rated High: a DTLS flaw that can leak heap memory to a peer or crash the process. The rest are one Moderate and twelve Low issues, mostly denial of service and timing side channels. Why These OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Matter OpenSSL underpins TLS across servers, network gear, and embedded devices.
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Lea Verou, PhD @lea.verou.me · 30/09/2026
🗼 Live from the @tc39.es plenary in Tokyo: Just resolved to advance github.com/tc39/proposa... to Stage 2.7 Soon, export * from "foo" will also re-export default. 🤯 Chuckling to myself thinking how this would have likely been a non-starter in a more compat risk-averse committee (e.g. WHATWG). 🙃
github.com
GitHub - tc39/proposal-export-star-default: Proposal to include default export in `export * from 'module'`
Proposal to include default export in `export * from 'module'` - tc39/proposal-export-star-default
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Tuatha @tuatha.ie · 29/09/2026
Today is the feast day of St Manchán. Manchán was an important figure in early medieval Ireland. He is thought to have been born somewhere in the north-east of Ulster in the early 7th century. He went on to found a monastery at Lemanaghan. His relics were housed in this spectacular shrine.
St Manchan's Shrine. A triangular or wedge shaped box carved of yew wood, with ornate metal fixings of a cross and a number of small figures.
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CorkBeo.ie @corkbeo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Cork is on a 'storm surge' warning for high tides www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-n...
corkbeo.ie
First big test for new River Lee flood walls ahead of 'storm surge'
Cork is on a 'storm surge' warning for high tides
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Stephanie Rains 🪼 @acidrains.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It astonishes me that those of us whose laptops contain confidential work info (in my case student marks, personal info shared via email etc) haven’t been told by our employers to absolutely under NO circumstances download or activate these things (including Copilot on our emails)!
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Johnny Ryan @johnnyryan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Important breakthrough in Europe's icebreaker Big Tech class action opens the path for class actions to hold Big Tech accountable using the GDPR. ICCL v Microsoft class action update... Full decision in link --> enforce.ie/digital-data...
enforce.ie
ICCL secures landmark precedent against Big Tech - Enforce
Class action will target “Real-Time Bidding” (RTB) data breach in Microsoft’s advertising system, and is anticipated to affect Microsoft’s operations across the EU
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Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Again, this proposal- accurately denounced here as incompatible with the EU Chart of Fundemental Rights- is the product of our Government. One of our Ministers has proposed it. Amongst other changes, it proposes that the rights of AI companies to harvest data should stand above humans’ data rights.
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Pat Walshe - Privacy Matters 🇮🇪🇬🇧🇪🇺 @privacymatters.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
SIX OF THE nine independent experts on the advisory board of the Meta led Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism—a consortium run by several of the biggest US tech companies—resigned on Monday, according to a letter seen by WIRED & interviews with four of the people www.wired.com/story/indepe...
wired.com
Meta-Led Anti-Terrorism Group Faces Mass Resignation of Expert Advisers
Meta and other tech giants are pushing through structural changes at the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism that outside researchers allege will weaken oversight of an already embattled consor...
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
www.euronews.com/2026/09/28/r...
euronews.com
Radio frequencies vital to Earth observation must be guarded, UN says
The UN cautioned that radio frequency interference could disrupt measurements and compromise the reliability of forecasts, affecting authorities' ability to prepare for and respond to environmental ha...
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Generative AI Can Harm Teaching
Teachers are rapidly adopting generative AI, yet there is little causal evidence on whether AI-assisted teaching improves or harms student outcomes. We conducte
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics | PNAS
Generative AI is poised to revolutionize how humans work, and has already demonstrated promise in significantly improving human productivity. A key...
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
How AI Assistance Affects Human Skill Development: A Study of Learning with Logic Puzzles Shang Wu, Catarina G Belem, Shuyuan Fu, Mark Steyvers, Padhraic Smyth arxiv.org/abs/2608.23543
arxiv.org
How AI Assistance Affects Human Skill Development: A Study of Learning with Logic Puzzles
While AI assistance can improve human task performance in the short term, it may also undermine the development of skills in the longer term. We examine this tension in a controlled logic-puzzle exper...
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
GradeTrap: Authority Cues in Images Shift VLM Judgments Despite Explicit Instructions to Ignore Them Deep Dessai arxiv.org/abs/2609.06058
arxiv.org
GradeTrap: Authority Cues in Images Shift VLM Judgments Despite Explicit Instructions to Ignore Them
As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly capable and are deployed in consequential real-world settings, they must evaluate evidence independently rather than defer uncritically to human au...
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance Grace Liu, Brian Christian, Tsvetomira Dumbalska, Michiel A. Bakker, Rachit Dubey arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721
arxiv.org
AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance
People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth...
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Catalin Cimpanu @campuscodi.risky.biz · 28/09/2026
Apple patches an iOS zero-day support.apple.com/en-us/149226
support.apple.com
About the security content of iOS 26.7.1 and iPadOS 26.7.1 - Apple Support
This document describes the security content of iOS 26.7.1 and iPadOS 26.7.1.
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" by Grace Liu, Brian Christian, Tsvetomira Dumbalska, Michiel A. Bakker, Rachit Dubey arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721
arxiv.org
AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance
People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn't just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person's growth...
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TJ McIntyre @tjmcintyre.com · 28/09/2026
Irish plans to exempt processing of your data for AI from the GDPR are "not in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights"; they amount to an "illegal change of primary law"; they "exempt AI from the guarantees in the Treaties and render them largely meaningless". Damning, from the leading expert.
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
#spéirghorm
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Jacob Öberg @profjacob.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The 2nd project, INSPECTr, backed under #Horizon2020, was designed to help European police bring together & analyze digital evidence collected using different tools. It built software that could take evidence extracted with Oxygen Forensics & make it easier for investigators using other
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Jacob Öberg @profjacob.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
According to public records reviewed by @politico.eu Oxygen was used in at least 2 EU-funded projects aimed at improving how electronic evidence is collected, processed & shared in crim investigations. The first project, EVIDENCE, which received more than €1.9 million in EU funding between
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Jacob Öberg @profjacob.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The US DoJ last week charged Oxygen Forensics — based in Virginia — of concealing that it was actually owned & operated by Russians. The firm develops and sells powerful software capable of extracting and analyzing information from smartphones and computers, a process known as "digital forensics."
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Jacob Öberg @profjacob.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🚨🚨Quite a scoop: A #US based data-extraction firm accused of being secretly run from #Russia has worked on #EU-backed projects and sold its services to European #lawenforcement agencies. www.politico.eu/article/russ...
politico.eu
Russian tech surveillance company infiltrated Europe’s law enforcement agencies
The same technology used by Western police was allegedly being developed in Russia and sold to Russian security services.
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merrua.bsky.social @merrua.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate Philippe Laban, Tobias Schnabel, Jennifer Neville arxiv.org/abs/2604.15597
arxiv.org
LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate
Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to disrupt knowledge work, with the emergence of delegated work as a new interaction paradigm (e.g., vibe coding). Delegation requires trust - the expectation t...
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Library of the Royal Irish Academy @rialibrary.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The Manuscript of the Week is RIA MS 23 M 70, Leabhar Gabhála/Book of Invasions. This is not the name of a specific manuscript but of an origin legend of the Irish people that exists in variant versions, traced to the 7th C. This copy was produced in 1631 by the scholars known as the Four Masters.
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Blenster 🅅 @blenster.com · 28/09/2026
I'm working on a talk on embracing the audit and learning to love documentation and all the ways that the right mindset and approach makes your life easier. It's also handy to have good, up to date documentation for non-audit reasons I think the hardest part is making sure management has your back
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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s On The Origins of Cognitive Science is another good older text. It focuses mostly on cybernetics, but much of what he writes there is relevant for AI.
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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I think this only applies to analytic philosophy. Continental philosophy integrates ideas from art, history, and literature, and even from analytic philosophy (cf. Ricoeur’s program for a new virtue ethics in “Oneself As Another,” where he engages critically with Anscombe, Davidson, and Parfit).
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
That’s not to say philosophy has no value; of course it does! But large parts of it feed into the same EA mentality of abstracting away from the messy reality of the world. When it comes to teaching ethics, for example, I find it more useful to turn to history and science & technology studies (STS).
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I get this instinct, but in the world of AI, philosophy has been privileged for a long time. These aren’t questions with final answers, and we’ve had rigorous conversations about them for thousands of years. I find going to other parts of the humanities and social sciences more practical.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It’s good that some people think about these problems through a philosophy lens. But if I’m going to call for more attention, I’m going to point to literary studies, history, art. Disclosure: I listened to multiple talks and reviewed a paper in philosophy in the last day, so this is on my mind.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I wrote some of these thoughts out (briefly) in this piece, describing how philosophy has been centered as pretty much the *only* humanities discipline at FAccT, our main conference on computing ethics. arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190
arxiv.org
Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research
The effects of generative AI are experienced by a broad range of constituencies, but the disciplinary inputs to its development have been surprisingly narrow. Here we present a set of provocations fro...
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
LLM frontier labs are increasingly competing with their own customers and may soon discover why you’re not supposed to do that!
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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
And at work I don't even get to be a full-blown hater, both because I would like to keep the gig and because some of the people embracing this garbage are people I otherwise like and or respect. So, same as covid, I need to be patient and kind to people ruining my life every single fucking day
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Lia @liasae.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Seconding this. Work was my relaxation place (yep.) because I otherwise have to fight in *every* social space I try to exist in. Now I have to fight at work where I am ALSO the most vocal person who dares speak up despite the risk yada yada. Feels pretty fucking bad.
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 28/09/2026
So uhhhhhh… Apparently meta's muse "AI" is just straight up doxxing people to strangers on FB marketplace??? This has the potential to hurt so so many people, and I genuinely wonder how long before they roll out a fix for it.
Screenshot of a post from threads

matt.j.robb & 16h (€) So muse handled my Facebook marketplace today. Just found out it told people my address and agreed a lowball price and then they showed up without it even telling me until late tonight that it messed up.

Absolutely wild. 1/2

[Embedded image of a series of text messages from a meta muse "agent" given the call sign "Jarvis" (Parts of first message obscured by its logo have been replaced with brackets and ellipses and best guesses from context):]

Heads up, Usman is […] building right now for the MX Keys Mini [. He is sta]nding in front of the Shoppers Drug [Mart.]

$10 by e-transfer. The auto-reply told him to message when he's at your door.

10:28 PM Bad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry at 9:38 and left a negative rating.

Worse, my auto-reply told him "Yep I'm here!" at 9:27 when you clearly weren't available, which is on me. That's a bad look and it made the no-show worse.

I've sent him an apology from your account owning it and offering to try again another day. But the negative rating is real, and I should probably stop the auto-replies from claiming you're home when I can't verify that. Want me to change the pickup replies so they don't promise you're there?

[reply, presumably from the threads user]: You gotta never do that ever again don't agree for pickup unless you check with me

[Response from Muse "Agent"]: You're right and I'm sorry. That should never have happened. It's locked in now as a hard rule: i will never […you]'re there unless you've explicitly […] that specific pickup. If someone proposes a time, I'll tell them I'll check and…  Screenshot of a tweet from Ray Wong @raywongy:
    Deleted Muse after seeing this post on Threads about how it told some Facebook Marketplace sellers the guy’s address and they showed up at his door

    Dangerous and creepy

    This would have been 1000x worse if the person was a woman
    4:35 PM · Sep 27, 2026
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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
One million percent this! I was an autodidact most of my life. I was successful at a lot of things. But I wasn't stretched intellectually. When I went back to finish college in my 50s, I sought and found the best teachers I ever had. Great teachers made a world of difference.
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Lauren Dobson-Hughes @ldobsonhughes.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Canadians were willing to personally pay more, and have their govt pay more, to buy sovereign capabilities. In every arena, it was 75-80% support. Except AI. Where it dropped to 55% People aren't uncritical boosters of AI. They see significant risk progressdevelopment.substack.com/p/sovereignt...
progressdevelopment.substack.com
Sovereignty is the means not the end
What can we learn from a unique exercise that listens to Canadians talk about foreign policy?
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Tuatha @tuatha.ie · 27/09/2026
Just spent the last few days on the beautiful island of Inishturk off the coast of Mayo. It's a truly stunning place, and I can't wait to go through all the photos properly. It's the kind of place that gets under your skin, so I'm already planning another trip! #WildAtlanticWay #ireland
A view across the coast of Inishturk towards the pier, the rugged rocky landscape is dotted with white cottagesA ram with curling horns in front of a drystone wall at the base of a steep hillside on InishturkThe rugged coast of the island with the Atlantic churning white at the base of the cliffs
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