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Nick Murray-Smith

@murrth.bsky.social
364 followers 1.8K following 878 posts

Interested in "having a society", tech, art and people. Mostly current events & politics but also whatever miscellanea I find interesting and/or enjoyable. Cultivating my appreciation for the absurd for mental health reasons 🫠

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Reposted by Nick Murray-Smith
Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 22h
A thing I learned about Meta when I was trying to understand how their statements relate to their actions a few years ago is that *they just tell absolutely indefensible lies* and journalists almost always let them. They believed no one would ever punish them for it in any way that matters.
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Read Settlers da Silva @cyberstalin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
its not simply about boycotting meta. one company has made their products indispensable for communication in the modern world. they blocked lulas electoral ads the week before the election. theyre trying to sway public opinion against the victim of a gangrape. states need to intervene.
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Dr Hell-Mart @hockeyeeyore.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
It would be kind of funny if OpenAI agents hacked the Justice Department and released the Epstein Files.
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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Who could’ve foreseen that after the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity from prosecution for committing crimes while in office he would commit lots of crimes while in office?
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 26/09/2026
peter thiel is another one of those guys who we are supposed to think is brilliant but every time he opens his mouth my first thought is “this guy sounds like an idiot”
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
So let me see if I understand this correctly... If I were to get an AI to do something blatantly illegal "by accident", I'd be free of legal liability and the authorities would be powerless to punish me? Is that right?
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Notice what’s happening just in the past few days. AI caused war crimes. AI hacked corporations. AI is denying healthcare. AI nearly caused war with China. Already the concept is becoming a catchall and hiding that, in all cases, there were people and systems getting desired results.
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
If you want an example, here. The major corporations are already training their AI to engage in corporate espionage and subterfuge. And yet, Google, one of the most powerful companies in the world, gets to hide behind the “rogue AI” bullshit and avoid consequences.
Guardian story with edit: Google says its Gemini AI model hacked three other companies with says its Gemini AI model crossed out
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Michael Warburton @michaelwarburton.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This aired just the once in 1998 on the live SNL show for which McKay wrote it. It was effectively banned as it never aired again. I wonder why. MEDIA-OPOLY
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shaun @shaunvids.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
ideally i would love to support minority rights but in this case the minority in question is a minority of the population, so it just isn't worth it, mathematically speaking
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Maybe legislators should get paid based on the number of bills they pass and whether those bills achieve the intended effect.
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Kyle Clark @kylec.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Imagine a job where, faced with a difficult decision, you could just stop going to work www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
nbcnews.com
House to leave early, punting Hegseth impeachment vote until after November elections
House Republican leaders cancelled votes planned for Thursday. Members won’t return to Washington until Nov. 9.
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Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
As a professional punter, I’m in absolute awe at the masterclass put on by this Congress. Just punt after punt after punt, it’s like rewatching the 0-16 Lions.
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Judy Marsh🇨🇦 @valueaddedmomma.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
From: FB - EUROPE AGAINST TRUMPISM Terry J. Parker 10 September 2026 - 9:21am
Cartoon/meme with Wimpy character from Popeye cartoons standing in front of The White House.

speech balloon above Wimpy
I'll gladly pay you Tuesday 
for your vote today...

Below the cartoon is:
Under federal law (18 U.S.C. 597 and 52 U.S.C. 10307(c)),
offering an expenditure to induce someone to vote, refrain from voting,
or vote for a specific candidate carries penalties including fines and
                                 up to five years in prision.
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Ed Markey @edmarkey.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
In Massachusetts, we have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable and stand up for those who need it. We don’t throw trans kids under the bus for political points. We protect them—and all of our neighbors—because trans rights are human rights.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Remember when Joe Biden proposed canceling student debt and every single Republican accused him of "bribing voters"?
dailymail.com
Biden accused by GOP of 'bribing' voters with student loan forgiveness
The Biden administration unveiled its latest effort to forgive as much as $20,000 in debt for some borrowers on Monday after the Supreme Court struck down its original plan last year.
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Unpopular opinion: I don’t want my phone screen’s touch sensitive portion going all the way to the edge
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 09/09/2026
Astrophotographer Adam (AJ) Smadi caught this image a few hours ago from Washington state. A thin crescent Moon, sunlight illuminating the rugged lunar surface. And 2,400 times farther away—and on the other side of the Sun—mighty Jupiter, and its moons Io (left) and Ganymede (right).
A crescent Moon seen during the day, arcing from upper left to lower right of the frame. At lower centre is the full disk of Jupiter; the small dots to its upper left and lower right and Io and Ganymede, respectively.
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tunes to make you run away @whippoorwont.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
"people are anthropomorphizing LLMs because they are so astonishingly good at processing human thought and language" people will anthropomorphize a chair if you put the stitches in the right place.
chair with a "face"
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Andrew Zolides, Ph.D. @zolides.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
This fact also completely defangs any argument about “job creators.” Job creation means nothing when the jobs being created don’t lead to any reasonable standard of living.
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
How can you be outraged about taking your kid to an R-rated film? Who are you outraged at? Any parents complaining about this should have their children taken from them by CPS.
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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
After Revolver and Redemption, I think we need Red Dead Revolution - take the same engine across the world, 1912-1920something. Hit all the big revolutions: Mexico, China, Russia, Ireland, Mingo County, the works. Every installment has multiple endings based on how your characters choose.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 03/09/2026
every single day elon musk says or endorses stuff on x dot com that is worse than any of the quotes they've pulled up for hasan piker and he will be the single biggest political donor in the entire country, supporting republicans up and down the ballot somehow none of them are asked about it
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
So I guess "dogpiling" is just when a lot of people get mad at an account you guys like..? If "dogpiling" is not well defined, then enforcing this policy is entirely up to their discretion, which they've repeatedly demonstrated to be quite poor...
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Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app · 01/09/2026
If buying isn't owning then piracy can't be theft. Any reasonable corporation knows that.
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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
This is pretty fucking wild. I had assumed in a worst case scenario he would target blue zip codes and toss ballots based on technicalities but this is even worse than I imagined.
Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an
impracticable zero percent failure rate.
13 When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume
batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that
batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to
USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal – because, for
example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved – then
USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well. As the whistleblower notes,
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Adam, you can’t “work together” with these people – this has been self-evident since about 2009. If you’ve been unable to learn this lesson, after all this time, I find that terribly disheartening. Perhaps you should find a new line of work.
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
I think google has finally gone too far. Hopefully they find out, the same way Target has. Once you’ve lost the love of the people - it doesn’t come back easily.
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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
“No, we stole that term from you Black folk. And now it’s ours, because we use it. We use it to mean that the concerns and perspectives of you Black folk are annoying or wrong or dangerous, as a way of ignoring and dismissing those concerns and perspectives. Like I’m doing now—does that make sense?”
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John Michael McGrath @jm-mcgrath.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
"we should rename Mar-a-Lago something funny, make Google display that" My brother in Christ, the Ontario legislature can declare Google's workers in Ontario to be unionized and assign their collective labour rights to whichever union will be most militant, think bigger
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Dawn Summers real or fake @dawnsummers.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
If you can find common ground with Jared kusher, but not zohran mamdani, you shouldn't be in democratic leadership
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James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
For context: In 'normal' times, everyone in West Wing / OEOB had to pass these clearances. (Even I got one!)
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Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
See NYT asked me for an op-ed on the Colorado River water issue. So that's what I told them. And the editors panicked & cancelled the piece. In case we're wondering why "nobody can figure out how to solve this difficult issue." We absolutely can, a lot of our professional talkers are just cowards.
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Jen Taub @jentaub.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
“A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.” ysph.yale.edu/news-article...
ysph.yale.edu
Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects
A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it
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David Sirota @davidsirota.com · 17/08/2026
🚨NEW: Hakeem Jeffries declared his opposition to Medicare For All 72 hours after a Yale study shows it would save 100,000 lives & $1 trillion. Context: Jeffries raked in $391k from health PACs in 2026 & faced no primary pressure to hold the line on Dem priorities because a primary was blocked.
levernews.com
Hakeem Jeffries’ Betrayal Shows Why Democratic Voters Are So Enraged
House Dems’ leader declared his opposition to Medicare For All on the same day a new poll shows almost all Democratic voters support it.
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Misinformation in action. Wild how much distortion and astroturf there is online. It’s gotta be horrific, living in the public eye these days.
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Yes please! A good alternative to fb marketplace would be huge.
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Ambassador Ken Fairfax (ret) @portlandken.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Tales of everyday corruption. Pete Hegseth cancelled the $400,000 contract for making uniforms for the Blue Angels on the grounds that the contract with "The Sewing Box" was DEI since the firm is Black-owned. Instead, he awarded it to a Trump donor for $1,690,000, a 325% price increase!
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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I FOIA'd the FTC for consumer complaints about the telehealth company Hims & Hers. People describe being signed up for subscription services they never wanted.
gizmodo.com
'They Are Thieves': FTC Complaints About Hims & Hers Detail Surprise Charges
You can read the complaints for yourself.
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
🎶”… don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone…”
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
This is also a tremendous bit: “We apologize for accidentally using AI misinformation, in our segment warning about the risks of AI misinformation” Although, I guess you could argue this is just due diligence and doing a little “hands-on” research for the piece.” 😂
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
This would have been a pretty good bit, if done as satire. www.latimes.com/california/s...
latimes.com
LAPD officer who recorded colleagues' racist comments charged with felony eavesdropping
Los Angeles County prosecutors on Friday charged an LAPD officer with felony eavesdropping for making secret recordings of his colleagues' racist, sexist and homophobic comments on the job.
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Nick Murray-Smith @murrth.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
"Operation Epic Fury" is what two 12-yos would call their GI Joe based, Rube Goldberg machine. Just another example of the "everyone is twelve"-theory.
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Despite the whining about “ historical accuracy,” the racist backlash to the casting in Nolan’s Odyssey is about the right wanting to justify racial hierarchy by projecting it into a past where it did not actually exist. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
When some on the right speak of reverence for “civilization,” what they’re doing is trying to anachronistically justify the hierarchy of race they would like to see enacted today by rooting it in antiquity. You cannot cast Black people in The Odyssey, because The Odyssey is a pillar of “Western civilization,” which they consider to be white. This faction of the far right imagines antiquity as a kind of idyllic Jim Crow universe of utterly separate civilizations, one in which the integration they despise could not possibly exist.But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
An activist was detained at the border, so he wiped his phone before they could copy it. Now he’s being charged with “destroying evidence”—and nothing else. Absolutely Orwellian. gizmodo.com/a-feature-th...
gizmodo.com
A Feature That Makes Your Phone Data Self-Destruct in Authorities’ Hands May Soon Have Its Day in Court
The defendant, an Atlanta area activist, denies having done it. But is it even illegal?
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Thor Benson @thorbenson.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Taking away someone's food and medicine makes you responsible for their death
Standing up guy by Norman Rockwell meme
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Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 25/07/2026
Admirable clarity @science.org
The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.

That’s it. That’s the story
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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 23/07/2026
It was all a fucking joke for him, like putting farts in his shitty cars. He regrets nothing, he is incapable of regret.
Musk posted an AI-generated image of himself in a leather jacket, dark shades, wearing gold chain. With DOGE nameplate on the table. Tweet says "Department of Government Efficiency"
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Boo-tros Boo-tros Ghoulish @dlbowman76.com · 23/07/2026
I realize this is uncharitable, but I simply lack the capacity to feel a single iota of sympathy for anyone who voluntarily invested in either SpaceX or Tesla.
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