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Content warning: child murder, transphobia, slurs When primary school children were massacred in Dunblane in 1996, the UK responded with severe restrictions on gun ownership – and when twenty children and six adults were massacred in Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, most people expected the US to do the same. No sane person can [more]
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The latest Garbage Day newsletter, on online extremism, the manosphere and Taylor Swift conspiracy theories, is very good. Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to [more]
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Over the last few days, I’ve read about two people who’ve been the subject of faked sexual images. Such images are typically created by grafting a person’s face onto the body of a porn performer, but increasingly this process is being handled by AI-type apps that can create very convincing-looking fakes with minimal human input. [more]
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Following on from yesterday’s post about bots ruining social media, the excellent Ian Betteridge writes about what we can expect when creating crap is much faster than detecting it. This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources [more]
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Via Joan Westenberg on Threads, here’s ReplyGuy. ReplyGuy is a bot that will find conversations on the internet and promote your product automatically by spamming those conversations while pretending to be people. Every day we take a step closer to the dead internet, where the bulk of online conversations are bots talking to bots and [more]
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There’s an excellent example of how newspapers create and maintain moral panics in the Sunday Times today, when Camilla Long notes with horror that: One school in Wales has written to parents saying it will not be providing “litter trays” for children “who identify as cats”. The reason for the letter was to debunk the [more]
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Somewhat later than planned, I’m delighted to tell you about the new HAVR EP: Love Will Save Us From Sadness. Which perhaps could have been called “Hey, do you guys ever think about dying?” It’s our best work yet, I think, and I’m particularly proud of the lyrics: these are songs from a sad place [more]
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There’s a joke I like about technology companies, first posted by Alex Blechman: Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus Like the best jokes it’s funny because it’s [more]
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England’s buffer zone laws, voted in by an overwhelming majority of MPs, will be deliberately undermined by new Home Office guidance. That’s according to the I Paper, which says that despite legislation banning religious groups from harassing women, the guidance says that forced birthers “would still be able to approach women attending clinics, conduct “silent [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
