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David Eddyshaw

@tacitean.bsky.social
105 followers 30 following 397 posts
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Reposted by David Eddyshaw
Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Having grown up in Wales, I can testify that if you are actually worried about your culture and history being under threat, the thing to do is write poetry and songs, perform plays, tell stories and organise festivals, not just sit around whining.
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Some reasons why you should read about Beja: - Uses more internal morphology than any other Cushitic language; - Earliest recorded Cushitic language (in an ostracon of ~6th c. AD) - Classification still controversial - is it really Cushitic, or a separate branch of Afroasiatic?
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Elisabeth J. Kerr @elisabethjkerr.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
On Tunen being an SOV language - heard a Tunen speaker bitch about someone who grew up in Yaoundé: "and when he speaks Tunen, he uses Subject-Verb-Object word order!! 🙄🙄"
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/10/2026
This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Tfw you're looking for info on a small language of central Chad so remote all that's been published is short wordlists, and you find the speakers are putting up AI-generated tribal genealogy charts where the Arabic spellings contradict the Latin ones www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=...
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Shammai @shammaiintl.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Try our new service, Shamm-AI. The only LLM that generates two answers per prompt and asks you to say which one is more helpful, but then vehemently disagrees with your choice and starts arguing with you about it
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
A nice little Popperian moment today:) My analysis of Mubi verbs, based entirely on data from Jungraithmayr, predicted that verbs of the form BooCa and BeCDeF-e should be possible. J doesn't record any that I could find, but Prickett does, and they're conjugated exactly as expected.
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Will Bennett @wmgbennett.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Little known Snapple fact: Cajuns are not originally from Louisiana, and the clue is in the name. Cajun is a shortening of ‘Akkadian’, which reflects the group’s history of being forcibly resettled from Mesopotamia by the French after the fall of Sumeria. #cuneiformdelafayette
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Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is a dreadful argument from Burnham. Empirically false - almost 6m people were granted settled status; about 4m are currently resident. More importantly panders to racism/xenophobia, and directly contradicts argument made in his speech about migrant contributions.
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
There's a little case study in top-down lexical change for you...
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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
My latest @newscientist.com cartoon. many more here: www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/
Image: A graph with lots of red dots clustered together in a curve. The are all looking upwards at a single red dot wearing sunglasses. 

Caption: Mike was an outlier and would probably be excluded from the study, but all the other data points secretly thought he was really cool.
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
A nice sketch of Hadza, a isolated language with clicks spoken in northern Tanzania journals.flvc.org/sal/article/...
journals.flvc.org
A sketch of Hadza grammar | Studies in African Linguistics
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Johann-Mattis List @lingulist.de · 21/09/2026
First version of the newly created Database of Cross-Linguistic Partial Colexifications (CLIPS) has now been published online. Common work with Katja Bocklage, Thanasis Georgakopoulos, Robert Forkel, and myself clips.digling.org
Logo of the CLIPS database with a directed network combining three nodes.
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The Onion @theonion.com · 18/09/2026
Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming theonion.com/trans-teen-hatches-nef…
Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
what if the rogue ai agent instigates a communist revolution
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Benjamin Suchard @bnuyaminim.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
It's true, you can just say things
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Benjamin Suchard @bnuyaminim.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
when the boss asks if you can copy out the whole scroll again but in Hieratic
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Liberty @libertyhq.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The Govt’s current definition of terrorism is so wide-ranging it captures behaviour most people would never consider terrorism. When it’s not clear what counts as terrorism, public trust collapses and without trust, counter-terror laws simply won’t work.
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
In Algeria, it's common wisdom that family names were (mis)assigned by the French colonial government specifically to break up larger families; almost every family has their own anecdote about this. Just finished reading Brower's _The Colonization of Names_, and it turns out this is correct.
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Matriarchy Now @matriarchy.now · 30/08/2026
Did you know raising feminist boys is proven to reduce the overpopulation of mediocre men?
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
lowkey that's everyone's first impression of americans
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Juliet E McKenna @julietemckenna.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Journalists need to stop describing these incidents in terms implying software has agency and intent. It does not. The people who created a faulty and dangerous product are the ones responsible for whatever happens, and must be held to account, with punitive financial penalties for damage done.
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LarryLegend @bwtrainer.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
if someone tells you you don't need a union, you 100% need a union
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Sam Spinner @samspinner.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Homer was a chant bot whose epic language model was built from the uncredited work of thousands of bards.
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Intenudas @izmarasan.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Yesterday was the Ranar Hausa , the day of hausa language and culture . The hausa language is the most spoken language in west Africa .
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Andrew Fisher @fisherandrew79.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Damaging a golf course is not terrorism. We've lost the plot in this country www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
theguardian.com
Seven charged with damaging Trump’s Scottish golf course accused of ‘terrorist connection’
Course at Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort was painted with words ‘Gaza is not 4 sale’ and clubhouse was sprayed with graffiti
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Apparently, Germaine Tillion wrote a note in Chaoui describing the person who had betrayed her Resistance cell to the Nazis and disguised it as part of her field notes. www.inumiden.com/germaine-til...
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roterote @roterote.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Here is the full suspension letter from UGent that was sent to Nathan Cofnas, it shows ample reason for his suspension and potential termination. Including breach of contract, using the University of Ghent’s name and legitimacy to promote his racial supremacist views and causing reputational damage.
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Rae Radford @raeradford.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
See, you don't need to rush... #BookSky
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 21/08/2026
Well, well, well, I KNEW that the hounding of Arday was gonna get connected back to the TESCREAL bozos somehow. See this "paper" by the guy who hired Cofnas at Ghent University. Reminder "dysgenic" is the opposite of "eugenic," they mean Black people and other undesirables reproducing too much.
The dysgenics objection to longtermism
Bouke de Vries a,b,1
a Department of Philosophy, Ghent University, Belgium
b Department of Philosophy, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

A B S T R A C T
Strong longtermism maintains that how we should act morally is determined almost entirely by
the expected effects on the welfare of our descendants existing thousands if not millions of years
into the future, who might include both other humans and any artificial agents with a comparable
or higher moral status that we end up creating. It is based on three key assumptions: (i) that our
descendants will have a moral status that is at least as high as ours and therefore should not have
their welfare discounted by us; (ii) that there is a good chance that these individuals will vastly
outnumber us; and (iii) that we can do things here and now that can be expected to positively
shape the long-term trajectory of humanity. The aim of this contribution is to suggest that authors
such as Will MacAskill and Hilary Greaves have been too optimistic about all these assumptions as
a result of having ignored evidence that the populations of post-industrial countries are becoming
less intelligent due mostly to the negative relationship that has emerged within these societies
between intelligence and fertility and to the proclivity of intelligent people to delay parenthood.
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Sumita Pahwa @sumitapahwa.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
When I first moved to SoCal and took my child to the city library (as one does, first thing), this book title had me confused for several minutes.
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euobserver — EU news that matters @euobserver.com · 18/08/2026
"People with an Islamic background ... do not want an open, free European society," Frederiksen told MPs, in reaction to a humanitarian crisis in Morocco.
euobserver.com
Denmark’s ‘socialist’ leader is a race-baiting fake, not an EU model
"People with an Islamic background ... do not want an open, free European society," Frederiksen told MPs, in reaction to a humanitarian crisis in Morocco.
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Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
So often what are called “culture wars” are one set of people saying “please can we live without perpetual persecution” and another saying “no, f*** you” but the press considering the latter group have “legitimate concerns” and must be perpetually platformed
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Maarten Kossmann @maartenkossmann.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Prefab Punic! I love it! (from Jongeling, handbook of Neo-Punic inscriptions, Hr. Maktar N 1, p. 91)
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Tired of Sartre's cliché about how "Hell is other people"? Try this Kabyle proverb instead, which might be loosely rendered as: "To Hell with Paradise if I have to be all alone in it!"
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
your boyfriend? the one who thinks value is determined by marginal utility?
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Crow @abbyjane.cloverdalelane.com · 14/08/2026
I think about this a lot.
Tim Henke
@TimHenke9
eat shit, René Magritte
Translate Tweet
Mauv @ThatsMauvelous • 1d the machine refused to recognize my humanity until i professed to believe that a sign painted to look like a traffic light is indeed a traffic light.
Show this thread
Select all squares with traffic lights
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Abubakar @yodoumi.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
It seems like UFPR started a major assault on Nigerien army posts in northern Niger this morning. UFPR’s leader’s Mahmoud Sallah have been released and armed by Libya’s LAAF last June. According to RFI, Macron urged Haftar to release Mahmoud Sallah during their meeting in February 2025
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Isaac Samuel @rhaplord.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Bronze statue of the goddess Isis Kawa, Sudan Napatan period (750-300BC) -Ashmolean Museum #randomxt
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Biggie @biggienotsmalls.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Should be reposted every month like clockwork...
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God @thegodshow.com · 07/08/2026
The president is a money laundering pedophile and adjudicated rapist who supports wife-abusing men for Congress but 34% of Americans don’t care because they’re bigots.
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Isaac Samuel @rhaplord.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
One reason why even a relatively small region like "West-Central Africa" cannot be considered a single Culture Area or Cultural Sphere is the sheer size of Africa Imagine a study of "Western culture" that includes everything from Portugal to Belarus to Turkey Yet that's just two African states
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Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
1/3 Strip away the theatre and Reform UK is a billionaire-backed project to dismantle the public realm, shred regulatory protections and hand what remains of state power to capital. It’s plain to see – just follow the money.
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Christian Odendahl @codendahl.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
The tweet saying "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of those 57 who have died trying to reach Ceuta" was part of this thread but got lost?
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Dónal Hassett @donalh.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Looking at something else in the archives but came across this map documenting the revolt against conscription and French rule in the Aurès région of Algeria in late 1916. It was brutally repressed by the French, mainly using West African troops.
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Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
But Burnham deserves credit for -unlike Starmer - immediately realising that Mahmood's proposals to effectively expel hundreds of thousands of care workers would not win a single vote back from Reform at the same time as alienating anyone with a shred of decency.
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Lameen Souag @lameensouag.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
When I started fieldwork, several first-language speakers of Korandje told me they were glad their kids couldn't speak it. Teachers had told them raising their kids in (dialectal) Arabic was the key to letting them succeed in school, and they believed the results bore this out.
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
re-upping this for no special reason
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Liberty @libertyhq.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Hugely concerning. This highlights flaws in UK counter-terror laws which sweep up activity most people would never consider to be terrorism - and confirms fears that those laws would increasingly be used to target direct action www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
theguardian.com
Palestine Action activists face being sentenced as terrorists over bank damage
Exclusive: Judge intends to consider ‘terrorist connection’ after convicting five for damage to Barclays in Burnley
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Wil Eelsing @wileelsing.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
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