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ML2

@ml2.bsky.social
874 followers 1.8K following 1.7K posts

Mathematics doctorate with a cybersec degree. 32 || Male || Somewhere in Upstate NY Discord handle: ml2 Matrix handle: @mathlover2:matrix.org (not active right now)

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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
Ah. There is something in the statement Discord made to TMZ about that as well. Discord claims the messages between Tyler and his roommate were not on Discord, but that the roommate discussed those messages with a third party after the shooting.
The statement goes on ... "The messages referenced in recent reporting about planning details do not appear to be Discord messages. These were communications between the suspect's roommate and a friend after the shooting, where the roommate was recounting the contents of a note the suspect had left elsewhere."

Authorities say Robinson's roommate showed them Robinson had made "a joke" on Discord and then showed investigators the messages, which included "'Tyler' stating a need to retrieve a rifle from a drop point, leaving the rifle in a bush ... and a message referring to having left the rifle wrapped in a towel." Discord seems to be saying these communications were not on its platform ... rather on a note that Robinson had written, off the site, to his roommate.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
I never said anything about the roommate. I was saying that the Discord statement implies that he wasn't promoting violence on Discord, which implies he wasn't in an Antifa group. The only source I have found for the Antifa group claim is Tim Pool, and he is as unreliable as Taylor Lorenz.
A Discord spokesperson tells TMZ ... "In the course of our investigation, we identified a Discord account associated with the suspect, but have found no evidence that the suspect planned this incident or promoted violence on Discord."
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Hasan Piker is a couch fucker like JD Vance. Change my mind.
Photo of Hasan Piker reclining on a hapless white couch. The couch is draped in a white quilted cloth. His right hand is suggestively positioned near the crack between two couch cushions.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
FIRE is not happy with the administration at all, actually. (Screenshot from Xitter).
BREAKING: FIRE statement on Trump administration revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification

The Department of Homeland Security’s decision to escalate its assault against Harvard University by revoking its ability to enroll international students is retaliatory and unlawful.

Secretary Noem’s letter warns that the Trump administration seeks to “root out the evils of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in society and campuses.” But little is more un-American than a federal bureaucrat demanding that a private university demonstrate its ideological fealty to the government under pain of punishment.

The Department’s demand that Harvard produce audio and video footage of all protest activity involving international students over the last five years is gravely alarming. This sweeping fishing expedition reaches protected expression and must be flatly rejected.

The Department is already arresting and seeking to deport students for engaging in protected political activity it disfavors. Were Harvard to capitulate to Secretary Noem’s unlawful demands, more students could face such consequences. The administration’s demand for a surveillance state at Harvard is anathema to American freedom.

The administration seems hellbent on employing every means at its disposal — no matter how unlawful or unconstitutional — to retaliate against Harvard and other colleges and universities for speech it doesn’t like. 

This has to stop.

Since 1999, FIRE has fought for free speech and academic freedom at Harvard and campuses nationwide, and we will continue to do so. We know there is work to do. Whatever Harvard’s past failings, core campus rights cannot and will not be secured by surveillance, retaliation, and censorship.

No American should accept the federal government punishing its political opponents by demanding ideological conformity, surveilling and retaliating against protected speech, and violating the First Amendment.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
I heard that there was last minute work on the tariff levels by the administration prior to this. The formula they used is literally the first thing one gets when asking ChatGPT about this. I honestly think a staffer used an LLM to solve this.
ChatGPT prompt. 
Question: What would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the US is on even-playing fields when it comes to trade deficit? Set minimum at 10%. 


Answer: Calculating tariffs to balance the trade deficit is a complex economic problem and cannot be accurately reduced to a simple formula. However, if we are looking for a basic approach, one way to conceptualize it is by considering the trade deficit ratio between the US and a trading partner. 

Simplified Approach: 1. Calculate Trade Deficit Ratio: Trade Deficit Ratio = Trade Deficit with Country / Total Trade with Country 
1. Tariff Calculation: 
Tariff = max(10%, Trade Deficit Ratio x 100%)
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
So Vanity Fair recently published an interview with Jason Stanley, at www.vanityfair.com/news/story/t... I found some of his responses questionable, particularly this last one.
Interview Question: "I think an anxiety for many people is, will we only really realize how bad things are once it becomes too late to do anything about it? How would you counsel people who are wondering how you know that it’s time to try to get out?

Response: "Not my business. My business is to describe what’s happening. And you can read what I write and decide for yourself, but I’m not going to make other people’s decisions for them. I’m not into moralizing or lecturing; that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free. A lot of Americans don’t care about freedom. If you look at the polls, they say that Americans don’t value democracy at all. I have a different set of values. Democracy comes before the price of eggs. But what I think is particularly foolish and naive and stupid is to give up democracy and raise the price of eggs."
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
Update: Trump's disapproval rate is up and his approval rate is down from the last time I posted.
According to RealClearPolitics' poll aggregator, Trump's net approval is now -1.9%. His disapproval rating has gone from 44% to just under 50%, and his approval rating has gone from 50.5% to just under 48%. 

Keep in mind: we haven't seen the stuff that people who don't watch the news will notice yet, but the effects of tariffs are going to be hard to ignore, as will social security checks not being sent out.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
NYS Dems are on fire here, and it's a welcome and encouraging surprise! www.localsyr.com/news/state-n...
As cited by Ramos, State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli reported that in fiscal year 2022, New York collected $361.8 billion in federal taxes and received $383 million in federal spending. That represented a shift from the pre-COVID era, when New York traditionally supplied more money to the feds to make up financial shortfalls in other states. Ramos said the state now faces a shift back to subsidizing those other states since federal pandemic-related aid has cratered. 

“We are here to say, ‘Not in New York.’ It is not melodramatic, and it is not hyperbolic to say this is the accelerating creep of fascism, and bending the knee is never a good strategy when dealing with fascists,” Lasher said. “Blue states like New York have the power to protect our people and the power to protect our state.”
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Tonight I went to a town hall event in my area. My GOP representative, Claudia Tenney, was invited to attend. She did not respond or show up. They put up a cardboard cutout on the stage.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Yeah, about that...they haven't been rising. Black line is approval.
A chart of Trump's approval and disapproval ratings for the last 30 days from RealClearPolitics. Net approval has gone from +2.8 to -0.2 over that time.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
Given that the Trump voters in my area are turning on him, and given that our representative (GOP in a GOP district gerrymandered to be so) is never doing a town hall again because her constituents are getting angry ... no. No it doesn't. Bernie Sanders said the truth here.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Correction: the image on the left here should be this.
See previous message for share link to text.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
... but if you ask for six decimal places, things get wrong. Conceptually, everything is right. Behind the scenes, ChatGPT is making arithmetic errors. SageMath gets the correct answer. chatgpt.com/share/67c07e...
See share link for text.Calculation in SageMath. Transcript given below:

In [6]: speed_of_light = 299792458 * (units.length.meter / units.time.second)
In [7]: electron_mass = 9.1093837139 * 10^(-31) * units.mass.kilogram
In [8]: def lorentz_factor(v):
   ...:     return 1/sqrt(1 - v^2/speed_of_light^2)
   ...:
In [9]: electron_speed = 0.99*speed_of_light
In [10]: electron_mass/lorentz_factor(electron_speed)
Out[10]: (1.28503670989455e-31)*kilogram
In [11]: electron_mass*lorentz_factor(electron_speed)
Out[11]: (6.45747090399276e-30)*kilogram
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
#chatgptsucksatmath Entry #3: ChatGPT can't do physics calculations Oh, ChatGPT is fine with calculating the mass of an electron at the speed of light if you don't specify much... chatgpt.com/share/67c07e...
See attached share link for text.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
*Correction*: I uploaded the wrong screenshot on the right. This is the multistep problem, along with ChatGPT's response.
Please see the attached link in the parent conversta
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
In contrast, composing the SageMath code took less than a minute, and execution took a millisecond. #chatgptsucksatmath
Input into SageMath:

%%timeit
u = sum([nth_prime(n) for n in [1..1000]])
v = sum([nth_prime(n)^2 for n in [1..1000]])
factor(u + v)

Output timing data:
1.6 ms ± 8.48 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1,000 loops each)
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
What's *really* weird is that if you ask it to do simpler problems, it can do them by generating and executing Python code. However, the formatting for this is often broken, and the small multistep problem took several *minutes* to complete. chatgpt.com/share/67bf65...
Please see the ChatGPT share link for the full text.Please see the ChatGPT share link for the full text.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
Entry 2: ChatGPT can't calculate digits of pi squared on its own, though it gives Python code to do so. chatgpt.com/share/67bf64...
Please see the link to the shared result from ChatGPT, as this contains readable text.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
I think I'm going to start an ongoing thread, using #chatgptsucksatmath as the hashtag. We compare ChatGPT's performance to SageMath, which is freely available and open source. Entry 1: ChatGPT can't do generating functions.
ChatGPT is asked "What is the ordinary power series generating function of the cubes of the integers". ChatGPT sets up the initial sum correctly, but then proceeds to make errors along the way, ending up with the incorrect answer of x*(1+x)*(1+4*x+x^2)/(1-x)^5.Inputting "sum(n^3*x^n, n, 0, Infinity).factor()" into SageMath compute the correct generating function, (x^2+4*x+1)*x/(x-1)^4. 

Expanding the function given by ChatGPT as a Taylor series about x = 0 gives x + 10x^2 + 45*x^3 + ... which is not the generating function for the sequence 1, 8, 27, ...
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
You are *literally* just a reply guy.
List of posts and reposts by eye-and-bone.bsky.social. There is nothing in the list.List of replies by eye-and-bone. There are posts here. Since this user has 5 posts and none are in the "Posts" tab, it is safe to conclude he exclusively replies to people on here — a reply guy.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Addendum: Holy shit, how did I miss this?! This is literally a logical fallacy! www.fallacyfiles.org/exclprem.html
Social Media Is Not a Viable Business Model

I could end this column right here. 

But that statement — social media is not a viable business model — isn’t entirely true. It’s actually two different true statements glued together by the transitive property.

    Friendship is not a viable business model.
    Social media is not friendship.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Anyone who says this about Elon Musk running X has no idea what they are talking about. Otherwise, the article seems to be a collection of very superficial arguments rather than anything worthwhile. "Diaspora failed, so everything else will also" in particular is a weird take.
This Is Bluesky’s Red Pill

Elon figured out pretty quickly that if you’re going to productize your users with the digital town square model, you need to be a free speech absolutist for it to work.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
I don't think he has the faintest idea what he's talking about. He seems to assume that one can only run social media with ad money and ad money alone, and then after some other stuff, says this about Musk:
This Is Bluesky’s Red Pill

Elon figured out pretty quickly that if you’re going to productize your users with the digital town square model, you need to be a free speech absolutist for it to work.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
So I've encountered manuelkrazy.bsky.social on Discord and on Mastodon. He's a Black Hebrew Israelite and is vehemently homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and openly racist. He also loves to troll people with right wing nonsense. Feel free to block him.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
More specifically:
Secret Service details, communications vehicles and other support vehicles (including a lot of heavy-duty SUVs) follow the presidential limo, according to The Drive. The rear of the convoy includes vehicles carrying members of the press, an ambulance and more local police to protect the rear of the motorcade. The Secret Service always is in charge.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
@ericblanc.bsky.social posted this on the other site. Thought I would share it here as it's an important insight into what happened this time.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 01/11/2024
His prediction back in 2012 was "we will have instability sometime around 2020 because instability happens in 50 year cycles". It was not specifically"this will happen in 2020 because of billionaires". www.nature.com/articles/463...
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 18/10/2024
If my understanding of Freud is correct, Rundle is not only accusing the Democrats of being "the real authoritarians", but is saying that rule of law is *childish*. Fuck him.
Usually, it’s the fascists who are projecting a notion of order and control, of grim authority, against the wildness from the other side. Here, it’s the left and progressives who have become the party of the fused ego and superego.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 18/10/2024
(I know this pales in comparison to him being a sex pest, but his most recent article is steaming bullshit. This is his description the Trump town hall where he just danced for 40 minutes. No one in the US saw that as "genius". FFS Trump's own supporters there were *leaving*.)
That’s Trump now. To make sense of his speeches, you have to know what the old speeches were like. At that moment, you start to appreciate his weird genius. To vary the comparison, there is a touch of John Ashbery, the poet whose whole technique was to make the poem change topic, scene, etc, so suddenly that no summary of the poem can be made. That’s Trump in his late stage. An hour speech is an hour summary. 

In the past few days, he has gone beyond that. With his decision to stop a town hall Q&A a few minutes in and just play music and have the audience dance, he has reached the Sun Ra free-jazz stage of American politics. 

Ra — the leader of a large collective whose mission, at some point in their endless tours, became the summoning of interplanetary spacecraft — had concluded that what was getting in the way of the pure communion he had sought in music was music itself, and that he should break it apart from within.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 14/10/2024
Article updated: they arrested a man in Rutherford County. Sounds like this guy alone was behind the threats in that county. The fact that it was one person doing so much probably should be talked about a lot more on this site.
North Carolina authorities arrest armed man after threats against FEMA workers

Rutherford County sheriff’s office confirms it made the arrest Saturday after learning of threat to Federal Emergency Management Agency employees working on hurricane relief.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 02/10/2024
FWICT Walz still did better than Vance in terms of being more likeable and getting people to possibly vote for Harris instead of Trump. Like Vance is now less unliked than before but Walz seems to be even more well liked now.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 20/09/2024
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #385,229! Took me a while to figure out that the party emoji was there for a reason...
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 19/09/2024
I know people here have been giving you flak over your bad encryption take, but this take on copyright is also not good.
Probably one of the best examples of this dynamic is the copyright fight. For years, record labels, entertainment companies, and book publishers had pushed to increase copyright terms and worsen the terms of the deals given to artists. When file sharing came along, those companies worked with government to attempt a massive crackdown, but it wasn’t hard to turn public sentiment against them as it became incredibly easy to get access to far more music and media than people could ever imagine. Anti-copyright campaigners sided with the tech companies that wanted to violate the copyrights held by those traditional firms instead of trying to find a middle ground, even defending Google when it began scanning millions of books as part of its Google Books project. At the time, it was very much a David vs Goliath situation, with the tech companies in the position of David. But that fight — and many others like it — helped enable the growth of tech companies into the monopolists they are today.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 07/09/2024
Reminds me of a certain comic from @theoatmeal.bsky.social: theoatmeal.com/comics/relig...
Fragment of a comic (linked in text) showing a man hiding from Mormons going door to door on bikes. While hiding he tells his daughter that he's a fan of Buddhists and Jews because they don't go door-to-door and try to convert people. 

Comic cuts to a different, parallel universe where Jews *do* proselytise.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 06/09/2024
Why the fuck is Peter Shor on RT? Is this another person I'm going to lose all respect for due to being a tankie?!
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/08/2024
This is from Wikipedia's "Cryptography Law" article. France still has export-import restrictions on cryptography.
France

As of 2011 and since 2004, the law for trust in the digital economy [fr] (French: Loi pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique; abbreviated LCEN) mostly liberalized the use of cryptography.

   * As long as cryptography is only used for authentication and integrity purposes, it can be freely used. The cryptographic key or the nationality of the entities involved in the transaction do not matter. Typical e-business websites fall under this liberalized regime.
   * Exportation and importation of cryptographic tools to or from foreign countries must be either declared (when the other country is a member of the European Union) or requires an explicit authorization (for countries outside the EU).
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 21/08/2024
From the FA Discord. Supposedly Network Solution knows the accounts been hijacked but won't do anything. This seems...weird.
Post from FurAffinity Discord, originally from Xitter:

"The reason Fur Affinity went offline around at 12:48am is due to someone hijacking our account with @netsolcares. Even though we worked quickly to correct the situation, their customer support has stated they cannot lock or freeze the account and we have to wait 24-48 hours for proper assistance. We have contacted them multiple times expressing urgency in this matter, and they've responded saying there is nothing they can do even though we have proven without a doubt that we are the proper owner and the account has been hijacked. This is a serious security issue and oversight on their side. Refusal to take this issue seriously has caused undue stress and misinformation to spread. We need action now to get the domain back into our control. This is unacceptable that customer support at @netsolcares can identify a hijack but not stop or freeze the account immediately."
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 10/08/2024
www.reddit.com/r/linguistic... (3/3)
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 28/07/2024
Writing from almost a year later and unfortunately the spirit of dark irony has been steadily turning Robinson's brain into a fine puree too.
Nathan J Robinson: I have this wild notion that Trump might conceivably run to Biden's left on Israel-Palestine in the general election, like he did with Hillary and Iraq. He's been noticeably quiet on this issue since Oct. 7.Nathan J Robinson, on April 1, 2024, quote tweeting the previous tweet I attached: "called it".

Image is of a highlighted New York Times article or op-ed snippet, which, needless to say, proves nothing since it's the New York Times.Excerpt from Robinson's July 23, 2024 article, "The Kamala Conundrum", in Current Affairs, The relevant passage, highlighted: "Given the messianic glow that Donald Trump now projects after having survived an assassination attempt" ...
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 02/07/2024
This law would have required age verification and would have compromised online anonymity. I can't tell if Wu willfully ignorant or willfully dishonest.
"And last summer, after California passed a law to prevent social media companies from tracking and extracting data from children, a federal court blocked it, arguing, in effect, that the surveillance of children is also a form of speech protected by the First Amendment." --- Excerpt from NYT-op ed linked earlier in thread.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/06/2024
I had a thread on Mastodon about ChatGPT being outperformed by open-source math software. I guess I should start one about it being outperformed by Linux shell commands now...
The command is `cat states.txt | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | grep -E '^([a-z]).*\1$'`. 

The four states listed are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, and Ohio (in lower case).
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 24/06/2024
@mmasnick.bsky.social Thought you might have some comment on the article, and in particular the portion in the screenshot below. www.404media.co/has-facebook...
Not all of this can be explained by Elon Musk or by direct political backlash from the right. The existence of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act means that social media platforms have wide latitude to do nothing. And, perhaps more importantly, two state-level lawsuits that have made their way to the Supreme Court that allege social media censorship means that Meta and other social media platforms may be calculating that they could be putting themselves at more risk if they do content moderation. The Supreme Court’s decision on these cases is expected later this week.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 18/06/2024
My biggest problem with the article is that it lumps people who are trying to get moderates to agree with one another in with people who aim to get the DSA and the alt-right to do so. The former is a good idea. The latter is insane, both in equating the DSA with the alt-right and in general.
The problem: The starkest divide — Trump-branded conservatism versus the rising political left — may be the one where no one is interested in reconciliation.

“We have to be focused on what we call the exhausted majority — that’s 65 percent of Americans,” said Stephen B. Heintz, the president and chief executive of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a major financial backer of the proliferating groups trying to promote common ground. “It’s just not an efficient use of time to convince true ideologues to compromise.”For BridgeUSA’s chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, that dominant power is the left. The organization began at Berkeley in 2017, after an attempted visit by the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos had incited violent confrontations. Now, said Lucy Cox, a 20-year-old rising junior at Berkeley and the president of the school’s chapter, the hole in the group’s outreach comes from the left. BridgeBerkeley’s debates, discussions and social mixers attract conservative student groups.

“But we’ve had no luck in getting Cal Dems or the Young Democratic Socialists of America” — the largest political groups at Berkeley — “to any of these events,” she admitted.

Those groups see even listening to Trump-aligned conservatives as “platforming” evil, Ms. Cox added.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 24/05/2024
So I can't find a link to the filing in any of the news articles (an unfortunately common practice). Here's where the suit against Activision and Meta was filed.
The lawsuit against Activision and Meta was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of approximately 45 family members of the victims. It accuses the gaming company of desensitizing young men to acts of mass violence and grooming them to seek out weapons like those featured in Call of Duty. While Instagram prohibits the marketing of firearms on its platform, the lawsuit claims Instagram fails to enforce firearm guidelines while rigorously enforcing other types of content guidelines.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 26/04/2024
I just looked up the Kristi Noem story and all I can say is *what the actual fuck* If a bird-hunting dog kills chickens, you keep the chickens away from the dog and train the dog not to kill chickens. You don't euthanize the dog. You certainly don't *shoot* the dog yourself. What. The. Fuck?!?!?!
Excerpt from https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/republicans-slam-kristi-noem-for-killing-a-puppy/ar-AA1nJGex. Full excerpt won't fit into the alt-text box.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 23/02/2024
Apparently it's being "tested". In contrast here's what happens if I use Google to search a random term. Then again ... I don't normally use Google. I use DuckDuckGo (not perfect, but still better than Google) unless I have a need to use something else.
Google search for "moon". News is one of the options, and there is a spread about the recent private moon mission.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 18/02/2024
Going forward I will double check my understanding of what I am replying to before replying. And just to give a record of my mistake, here is a screenshot my response before I deleted it, along with Josh's original post.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 05/02/2024
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 13/01/2024
Just a heads up: @antifaguerilla.bsky.social is spreading a highly skewed narrative re. Gonzalo Lira/Coach Red Pill's rumored death. He blocked me almost immediately after this screenshot of what he said and my reply. Mute/block at your discretion.
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ML2 @ml2.bsky.social · 13/01/2024
You've been kidnapped. The characters from the last tv show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who is coming to save you?
The sheriff and the deputy from the Andy Griffith Show.
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