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Rafiq

@rafiqcopeland.bsky.social
329 followers 2K following 136 posts
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Reposted by Rafiq
wendy norris @wendynorris.bsky.social · 20h
Are you not concerned with the funders of this "muckraking" initiative? This is like RJ Reynolds funding The Tobacco Institute to support "independent" research. This is a set up.
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Elizabeth Lopatto @lopatto.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
this moist kidult shit is exhausting. snobs are an important keystone species, and if we're not allowed to hunt bad taste, the environment is degraded for everyone
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Andraste Sideyr @andraste.fuckbgp.com · 03/10/2026
Lane || Boot.dev v @wagslane
Holy shit, America is cooked. They were able to perfectly clone the Microsoft Teams experience.


POLTICO
POLITICOEurope
@POLITICOEurope • Oct 1
The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams.
But officials using it aren't impressed, with one describing the tool as "absolute shit."
vist.ly/5kje9
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Jonathan Green @greenj.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Huzzah. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
The bogong moths are back! Perhaps they are a sign that all is not lost | First Dog on the Moon
Remember – these moths are not an inconvenience they are a blessing
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Antoinette Lattouf @antoinettelattouf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
www.ettemedia.com/war-of-words... READ: An exclusive data analysis of 42 interviews conducted on ABC’s 7.30 on conflict zones — and what they tell us about the broadcaster's bias. (No paywall)
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
“Well, you see, I have to stay on the White Supremacist Child Porn Rape Victim Doxxing site because that’s where my community is”
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Erin Cook @erincook.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The increasing collabs between Southeast Asia's governments in enforcing each other's authoritarian streaks looks like it may be coming home for Australians. One to watch here: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
theguardian.com
Melbourne human rights activist disappears in Cambodia as wife urges Albanese government help
Tran Hiep, a 50-year-old Vietnamese Australian anti-human trafficking campaigner, not heard from since 18 September
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BladeoftheSun @bladeofthes.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Google maps has finally updated its Satellite photos of Gaza and it shows the most complete destruction of a city ever. A Genocide.
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Just helping with editing here. These bots aren’t sentient. They’re doing what they’re programmed to do. OpenAI, a private company supposedly bound by laws, committed federal crimes.
Screenshot of BBC article: OpenAI bots (struck through) meddled with multiple US government agency sites
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 26/09/2026
This is another great, approachable explainer on “the rationalist wackos who have managed to take over much of the AI industry, and who now have tons of money and political power.” www.iankduncan.com/personal/202...
iankduncan.com
Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse - Ian Duncan
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking ...
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Oregon 🕎🎲 @oregonthedm.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
That's a headline for you cmarmitage.substack.com/p/big-balls-...
cmarmitage.substack.com
Big Balls Now Exposed to Serious Criminal Charges in at Least Six States
Fired at 17 for leaking secrets. Served a cybercrime ring. Named by the Social Security whistleblower. Now the government's model employee.
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Eoin Higgins @eoinhiggins.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
this doesn't read as "rogue" it reads as no guardrails restricting these actions were in place so the agents completed their task by accessing the information
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WHAT TO FIX @whattofix.tech · 21/09/2026
📣 BIG NEWS: We have filed a #DSA complaint against #Meta with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) for potential non-compliance with Articles 12, 14, 16 and 20 of the DSA.
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Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
More about it—and the stunning revelations today—here: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/tech...
wsj.com
Tech Companies’ Staff Knew Their AI Tools Posed ‘Existential Threat’ to Publishers
Executives and others at OpenAI and Microsoft acknowledged they could undermine their own content sources, according to a new filing in a New York Times copyright lawsuit.
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Sandy Horne @sandyhorne.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Some more Sturt desert pea loveliness. A rare and special flowering event in the outback due to the extreme rain events earlier in the year. These are found in many places but this magnificent display was east of Blinman, Flinders Ranges.
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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
some middle rat history, w/clarifications: 1) I should have titled my previous "AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult In Berkeley, California" so people would stop arguing with me about people who aren't in Berkeley, California. 2) The sex cult part of this is both predatory and integral to what they do.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
NEW: Brown Brothers Media is the most successful media company you've never heard of. For years, its success was fueled by AI, fake writers, and fake reporting. When we started asking questions, BBM started mass-deleting content. Somehow, what came next was even worse. futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 17/09/2026
Nick Beckstead, noted longtermist and "effective altruist,” just comes out and says it: "But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal."
This is precisely why Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the "overwhelming" moral importance of the far future - "millions, billions, and trillions" of years from now - we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future.

To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects

than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more

innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards at

least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards saving and improving lives in rich countries

is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are

improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life

in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things
being equal.
Screenshot from Beckstead's 2013 PhD dissertation, regarded as one of the founding documents of longtermism, one of the main cause areas of EA.
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Rafiq @rafiqcopeland.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This is an excellent summary of several deeply interconnected streams of tech discourse (though it is light on sex cult commentary, possibly for the better?).
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Garth Marenghi's Catbus @catbus.phd · 17/09/2026
great art articulates eternal truths
script of the end of Waiting for Godot which has been modified to read

ESTRAGON: Well, shall we log off?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let's log off.
   [They do not log off]

                                  CURTAIN
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 17/09/2026
As I warned you: the superstar media darling AI quitter is explicitly agreeing with Trump and claiming climate threats are "overplayed". Effective altruism / rationalism is a cult of broken priorities that denies the threat of fossil fuels. This is why Anthropic loves burning gas for power.
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Leena 🌵 @leena.reuben.games · 17/09/2026
we should have a name for that adhd thing where if you have an appointment/meeting later you can’t do anything until it’s over my vote is for “waitlock”
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SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I'm back, I missed you all. Since this is an important subject I know too much about, here's a 🧵 explaining that AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?) (alternative title: Time For Some Cult Theory)
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
seeing all these artists sacrifice money for what they believe in is really quite moving.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/09/2026
Also, these people’s central source text, their Bible, is a Harry Potter fanfic, and I am not kidding. These dorkass weirdos are unthinkably wealthy and powerful now. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_P...
en.wikipedia.org
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Wikipedia
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 15/09/2026
The U.S. AI industry is being run by a batshit rationalist sex cult, and no, I am not being hyperbolic - they’re genuinely Like That:
Erin Redwing
@realizingerin
I went to an rationalist/EA Al doomer event last night with the goal of meeting someone who could calmly explain to me the argument for how they get to the conclusion that Al will kill everyone.
Because these are rationalists, I expected to find people who could lay out a serious extinction pathway, walk through the assumptions and intermediate steps, identify choke points where negative pathways could potentially be regulated, and entertain disagreement about where their assumptions might break down.
My experience was the exact opposite.
The people I spoke to seemed psychologically unable to entertain the possibility that their conclusion (that Al literally kills everyone, which was a point that many would not even budge on) might be wrong.
Their most extreme conclusion was treated as an axiom.
I had multiple people walk out of conversations with me when I questioned their inevitable extinction premise.
At one point during a panel, the moderator asked everyone in the audience who was still skeptical of Al doom to raise their hands. About half the room did. He then told all of the skeptics to leave the panel and go with one of the speakers, who would answer their questions separately. They filtered out all the skeptics, and continued the panel only with the subset who accepted their extreme position.
I genuinely felt like a heretic just for questioning whether superintelligent Al inevitably leads to the extinction of humanity, or entertaining the possibility that the future might actually turn out well.
That does not mean Al safety is fake. Obviously there are serious questions about rapidly advancing Al systems and what happens as they become much more capable. Those are exactly the conversations I went there hoping to have.
But what I encountered was an apocalyptic death cult. These people are not rational. They are deeply afraid, they reinforce that fear in one another, and they have become so emotionally committed to apocalypse
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
when you work at the BPAF but you’re beginning to realize there’s not going to be a successful IPO
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Jessica D. M. 🇺🇦 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇵🇦 🇬🇱 🪃 🟧 @jessicaperthwa.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
www.theguardian.com/australia-ne.... Don't buy a Tesla ladies #news #Aus
theguardian.com
How one woman’s Tesla was remotely controlled – and used to harass her – by an abusive ex-partner
Enrico Pucci was able to control his former partner’s electric car remotely, controlling its speed, temperature settings and lock
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Rick Morton @squigglyrick.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Well, here goes. I tried to keep it contained. Ridicule is what we use to fight institutional hostility. Make no mistake, that's what this is. rick-morton.ghost.io/deliver-us-l...
rick-morton.ghost.io
Deliver Us, Lord, From Ridicule
On Friday, Defence deputy secretary Celia Perkins began her evidence before a senate inquiry into asset sales by the department and Australian military with an embarrassing manoeuvre. 'In closing, I ...
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Kat Z @katzindc.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Never forget juicero
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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
The single most important thing to understand about digital futurism is this: When the tech barons’ predictions about the future fail to come true, they don’t have to give the money back.
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Melissa Gira Grant @melissagiragrant.com · 07/09/2026
A question we could face ourselves: what might we do differently, if we accepted that the police are not failing to protect the public, but telling us who they believe is worthy of protection?
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Guardian Australia @australia.theguardian.com · 06/09/2026
The US now has access to more than half Australia’s military bases – could it drag the country unwillingly into war?
theguardian.com
The US now has access to more than half Australia’s military bases – could it drag the country unwillingly into war?
Exclusive: US-controlled weapons corporations and forces have control or access to more than 100 facilities across the continent, which some analysts describe as a ‘colonisation’ of Australia’s military. Find a map of them here US military interests control or have access to more than 100 defence facilities on Australian soil, in what some analysts describe as a “saturation” – even a “colonisation” – of the Australian continent. New data compiled by the Nautilus Institute and published by Guardian Australia maps the extent of US militarisation. The US military controls 17 facilities on mainland Australia and has access to 75 more Australian-run military installations. US defence corporations have access to an additional 18. Gathering intelligence, accessing satellite data for targeting information and communications intercepts. Training, including for 2,500 marines on dry-season rotation in the Northern Territory. Pre-positioning warfighting assets such as Osprey aircraft. Logistics hubs holding weapons, munitions and fuel, stored in case of a war in the Pacific. Continue reading...
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jae (hallowed) @fubarchitect.com · 03/09/2026
"it's a textcremental!" "a what?" "a shitpost demon!"
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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Text Elemental is the best neologism I've heard in quite a while.
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Nils Gilman @nilsgilman.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Nepal is responsible for ~0.05% of historic CO2 emissions. Now, in order to clean up from this disaster, it will likely have to take out high-interest loans from the countries responsible for the lion's share of CO2 emissions. This is like a criminal getting paid to clean up his crime scene.
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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Bleak
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Nick Evershed!? @nickevershed.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
‘Scary’: how misinformation and AI hallucinations are infiltrating Australia’s parliament - Guardian analysis reveals that dozens of policy submissions from across the political spectrum incorrectly summarise real research and invent or wrongly cite sources www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
theguardian.com
‘Scary’: how misinformation and AI hallucinations are infiltrating Australia’s parliament
Exclusive: Guardian analysis reveals that dozens of policy submissions from across the political spectrum incorrectly summarise real research and invent or wrongly cite sources
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
2016: all apps are Uber for dogs 2026: all apps are Merlin for cops
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
"Besides being deeply cynical, Chomsky’s supposed pragmatism has not stood the test of time...We may have manufactured consent once upon a time, but America has long since transitioned to a post-manufacturing economy." Very harsh but worthwhile read. strangematters.coop/noam-chomsky...
strangematters.coop
Chomsky After Epstein - Strange Matters
Noam Chomsky – friend of Epstein, defender of dictatorships – was no model anti-imperialist. Can we do better?
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Jack Copley @jackcopley.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Stunning: 'Results strongly suggest that between AD100-300 the population of the Aquiry [civilization] was approx 1.25–3 million' 'The density of earthwork openings in the forested landscape became such that the concept of forest urbanism...can be adequately applied' www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Over 20,000 precolonial earthworks in the Southwest Amazonia - Nature
Using canopy-penetrating LiDAR data, the northern part of southwestern Amazonia appears to contain as many earthworks as previously estimated for the whole of Amazonia.
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John Birmingham @birmo.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
That imagery of the Himalayan tsunami smashing into the multi-story building in Nepal was horrifying, but then murder always is, isn’t it? That’s what happened at that border crossing: mass murder
aliensideboob.substack.com
The Reckoning
That imagery of the Himalayan tsunami smashing into the multi-story building in Nepal was horrifying, but then murder always is, isn’t it?
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
really spot-on stuff from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social
hamiltonnolan.com
Never Apologize For Being a Class Traitor
All rich kids should be socialists.
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Akshat Rathi @akshatrathi.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
This is the context that ought to feature in some form, as @davidfickling.bsky.social explains it in his column. 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 27/08/2026
In case you wanted about 3,700 words on the problems with today's "settlement" that gives Meta way more power over how the internet works than it should have.
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Rafiq @rafiqcopeland.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
After reading this I immediately put the book on request from City of Melbourne libraries and there are already 18 people ahead of me in the queue. The Streisand effect in action.
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Rafiq @rafiqcopeland.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
The time to take action was immediately after they murdered her. This is just more theatre.
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CAMERON WILSON @cameronwilson.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
btw this group, which earns income from accrediting age verification technology, is now asking the government to force the companies to hire companies like them to do a "mandatory audit" of the social media companies: www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07...
abc.net.au
Warning social media giants might wear fines to help sink the age ban
In a damning submission, an age-check firm warns big fines may be seen as a "small price to pay" if copping them allows Australia's ban to be "wrongly" be portrayed as a failure.
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Rafiq @rafiqcopeland.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Sloppy work.
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Saritha Rai @saritharai.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Meet some of the millions of factory employees, recycling unit & warehouse workers whose newest side hustle could be ... AI & Robotics research! A Deep Dive into the robotics race to collect videos of humans working to teach machines worldly skills www.bloomberg.com/news/feature... #AI
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