Paul Konstant

New folks on Bluesky, I *beg* you to fill out your profiles with enough info we can tell you're a real person. I get dozens of new followers a day. At least half are scams and bots. If your avatar isn't personalized, you never post, but follow thousands, you're getting blocked.

The Pentagon has quietly created a secretive agency, the Technology Support Office, to develop cyberattacks, supply-chain sabotage and deception tactics aimed at slowing adversaries’ military technology programs, Politico reports. No doubt to be used against Europe and Canada

🙄 “Bolsonaro refused to concede defeat, calling the move to extend voting hours unprecedented — though BOTH HE and Lula made the request…” (Emphasis added.) share.google/qD6fuXschfo1...

The war on science with pseudoscience continues

“Neurodivergents are too early with their warnings and that’s the problem” is often portrayed as the intellectual interpretation of why normies go into overshoot and mass collapse. “Normies are too slow and too dumb to realise what’s happening” is never portrayed as the problem. Chop chop normies.

After much speculation about whether he or Donald Trump made the final call, Musk is now simply owning it. trib.al/QoCKzeN

❗️Zelensky says Starlink and Starshield speed restrictions are still in place and interceptor deliveries needed against Russian ballistic missiles remain delayed. “This is a real problem, because the Russians attack us almost every day,” he said. #Ukraine

It sounds like hyperbole to suggest the current administration WANTS measles to become common again but I can’t think of much they’d be doing differently if they didn’t want that. (I think some of them really are eugenicists who legit prefer disease spread to prevention; others just don’t care)

Trump has made more stock trades in his second term than all 535 members of Congress combined.

Aphrodite revealed: major new exhibition opens at the Ashmolean | Oxford University www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-10...

wrote about "Black October," the PHP vulnerability, and the AI-fueled dread and panic I'm seeing among almost all of the cybersecurity experts I've ever known. I think people w/ LLMs are brute forcing software the same way they brute forced social media w/ slop www.404media.co/php2shell-bl...

This is what I need denialists to understand: the AI evangelists' wildest fever dreams (sentience, the singularity, whatever-the-fuck) don't need to be real for the tech to be hugely consequential. A machine gun doesn't need to be superintelligent.

DOJ-as-sovereign-citizen level of bullshit.

The election fuckery begins. [gift link] wapo.st/4yH53su

So much this ... long ago, polluting companies turned environmental causes into personal choices, not matters of policy. And welp... that took environmental causes off the political table for a generation. Let's not repeat that mistake, eh?

Exactly!

Russian hackers teamed up to wipe data at Ukrainian grain firm The Russian state-linked hacking group Sandworm collaborated with another threat actor to carry out a destructive cyberattack against a Ukrainian grain logistics company last year, researchers said. therecord.media/ukraine-hack...

Why is this student so upset about the mushroom, though? What could it have done to make her protest across the whole continent

RFK Jr’s unethical experiment on African babies is officially canned, thanks to public backlash driven by Stand Up For Science 🎉 ✊️ 🧵 🧪

One of you recommended this article. Thank you.

📊 Nearly 6 in 10 Americans agree that Trump has dictatorial ambitions and could destroy U.S. democracy, a new poll has found. But partisan splits over election integrity remain strong, with Republicans and Democrats disagreeing on the biggest problem U.S. elections face: https://demdock.com/4siMvxc

Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be www.nature.com/articles/d41... - I have to say I find these arguments (by @anilseth.bsky.social, @neddo.bsky.social and G. Tononi) unconvincing... 🧵

A compact summary and analysis of the implications:

And this is the English version of the cybernews article linked above:

BREAKING WSJ: Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of the military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine relied on.

If we accept as a given that the US cannot be trusted by the rest of the world, can the world define international public ownership? Or can we at least lament the lack of global collaboration for a moment?

Trump administration's cuts to next generation weather satellite program could set back forecasting by a decade, experts warn. Note the lack of the lightning mapper on the new GeoXO constellation... www.cnn.com/2026/10/19/w...

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Whoa... watch his face, the way he snarls. Total abuse.

‘Are You a Sick Person?!’ Trump Growls at Reporter and Scolds Him 3 Times in Jaw-Dropping Oval Office Moment

SCOOP: 'Tommy' from the now-viral exchange with Abdul El-Sayed is Thomas Teepell, a former staffer for Republican Senator Josh Hawley with close ties to Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht. He's the son of a former Bobby Jindal staffer whose consultant work was instrumental in getting Hawley elected.

you have to watch every second. i…wow.

They also capped the number of 5s & require supervisors to rank their staff. This fosters competition vs. collaboration among teams. It also suggests supervisors aren’t capable of building strong teams, hiring the best people, aligning tasks based on staff strengths, and helping staff grow.

Russia's defense ministry claims its air defenses shot down 610 Ukrainian drones overnight across its regions.

Consequences of the attitude that anything not explicitly illegal is acceptable

PS: also relevant h/t @markdingemanse.net > I argue that prediction is not primarily a technological means for knowing future outcomes, but a social model for extracting and concentrating discretionary power. Prediction is a ‘relational grammar’ that governs this allocation of discretion

Reading your thread this article came in my mind. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I listened to this yesterday and they talk about this at 25 minute mark: > the rate of thyroid-cancer diagnoses in the Republic of Korea was 15 times that observed in 1993, yet thyroid-cancer mortality remains stable[:] the problem is overdiagnosis [due to] screening. doi.org/10.1056/NEJM... 🧵👇🏼

For the first time, the British government has acknowledged that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum. So who did BBC Newsnight invite on to discuss what happened? Sergei Markov, Putin’s former spokesman. Par for the course, says Nerve co-founder @carolecadwalla.bsky.social 1/

Last night, Starlink was reportedly restricted in Ukraine due to a political decision made in Washington. Europeans should be aware that it is dangerous to depend on a partly hostile government for your security, as they could blackmail you at any time. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...

Bruselas teme ataques híbridos de Rusia en el superciclo electoral europeo que se abre con España. Europa advierte de que el Kremlin busca desestabilizar a la UE y testar la capacidad de respuesta de la OTAN en un momento clave

If I built an AI lab and it went rogue and deleted all student loan information, I'm betting they'd suddenly figure out how to prosecute me.

Today in ai failscape, Amazon released a new “about you” feature by letting loose their ai on your spending record (there was no opt in/out). When I looked at mine it said that due to my spending habits I have a dog… so i thought, ok it’s confused my rabbit purchases with dog purchases?

what

Looks like everyone at the White House (or their families) were getting their beaks wet in Republika Srpska www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-...

Universities bring in foreign students ... to undercut the wages of American residents? What? This is exactly backwards. Foreign students subsidize the tuition of American students. I wonder why the VP who follows Nazis online has this all wrong. Probably an innocent, non-racist mistake.

Neanderthal Wood Tools Almost Never Survive — A Spanish Cliff Has Preserved Spears, Bowls and a Club With No Known Match www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/10/n...