Daragh Ó Briain

My last sentence saying “This is an insight Black Americans and civil rights leaders have often shared with us, and I think it’s especially important now” was clipped off my answer. I asked for it to be added back in, explaining why, but didn’t get a response.

And by "off-balance-sheet debt," they mean accounting fraud

It’s like how the French bakery on the Death Star remembers Darth Vader’s order of 3 baguettes and two apple tarts.

Pain, pain, pain. tarte tatin, tarte tatin.

Pretty sure I have the scariest engineering costume of the day.

Everyone knows that experienced French cyclists travel with a small emergency kitchen, a decent wine selection, some onions, butter, two filet mignon, and a baguette, and some bicycle tools.

It is a Michelin Star Bicycle Repair kit.

The epitome of “headcount reduction”

Opinion | Why Even Basic A.I. Use Is So Bad for Students

I love to see stuff like this because it helps explain to people trapped in tech-sponsored information bubbles the actually obvious fact that universities teach people to know & think things, and AI is a way to produce the effect of knowing & thinking things w/o actually knowing & thinking them.

Did you hear the news from the Dutch election?

Finally, it seems that RW populist Wilders is done. Out of government-building coalition territory. Phew 🥳

It will be a centre left coalition, most likely.

Thank you NL☺️

The Universe Knows How You Die Retrocausality and the Backward Reach of Time

It’s really too bad that my sub-field of quantum foundations research doesn’t have any Halloween-related or spooky aspects, no way that anyone could ever use the season to drum up any... any fake-quoted, overdramatic…

Oh.

Oh dear.

molotovsunsets.substack.com/p/the-univer...

The First Fire of Halloween stacked on a Halloween display of similarly themed books in the shop.

A close-up of The First Fire of Halloween, with a goat-headed púca on the cover, among a bunch of similarly themed books in the window of Antonia's Books.

One of the windows of Antonia's Books in Trim, Co. Meath, with my book, The First Fire of Halloween sitting among their Halloween display of spooky books. Beyond, you can see the interior of the small shop, filled floor to ceiling with books.

Big thanks to Antonia's Books in Trim for featuring The First Fire of Halloween in their window and table displays in the run-up to Halloween and the Púca Festival!

Support your local indie bookshops!

antoniasbookstore.com/product/the-...

#SpeirGorm #SpéirGorm #PucaFestival #Samhain #BookSky

"sale of a database in form of an asset deal constitutes the processing of personal data for which the seller and the purchaser are joint controllers. Therefore, it annulled a decision by the DPA holding only the seller accountable for violations"

gdprhub.eu/index.php?ti...

If you see this, quote with a robot that isn’t from “Star Trek”, “Star Wars”, “Dr Who”, or “Transformers”

Govt should reconsider immigration policies, says Harris Tánaiste and Fine Gael leader Simon Harris has said Ireland's asylum seeker system is not working and that the Government should reconsider existing policies "in a very serious way".

This pile of riot-appeasing baloney can roll right down the beach and cheerfully sink beneath the waves.

www.rte.ie/news/2025/10...

Time to quote @peterhense.bsky.social’s trademark sentence once again: “Was AI uns gebracht hat und wohin" 🙃

This service makes a huge difference to people living in rural areas, and we need more of it. There was no bus service between our small town and the county town until a few years ago, now my teenage daughters can go there on their own.

the amount of academic research now using llms in research (synthetic data generation, to classify, annotate, or analyse large scale data, etc) is astounding. remember, just cus use of llms in research is becoming normalised does NOT erase the fact it degrades the research & undermine your results

If the UK gov. announced today that all of its services and departments will stop using Twitter/X by the end of next week, it would soften Elon's cough dramatically.

Jaysus.. I’m a pasty white Irish man and I have female family-adjacent unrelated people who are my aunts, and males who are uncles. I also have at least one “emergency back up mammy” in case the primary biological mammy is incapacitated or off-line.

And in my culture that is normal.

An Irish hero.

Also: Give Manchán a posthumous vote while you’re there.

Ireland hopes for a discount for missing EU climate goals Ireland will miss its EU climate targets on agriculture, transport and buildings and likely face financial penalties, but can it secure concessions?

Ireland is on the hook for fines between €8B - €26B for not reducing carbon emissions/meeting environmental targets.
Instead of investing in a Green economy FFG are trying to negotiate that our fine is at the lower end of the scale.
Imagine what we could do with €8B
www.rte.ie/news/analysi...

See: EU DG Comp waving through Big Tech mergers like FB/WhatsApp or Google/Fitbit.

Competition law was the tool to prevent monopoly positions. DP can just (at best) mitigate harms.

One of the gnarliest things about data protection is the way it brings to light all the preceding cognitive debt and wobbly dependency stacks. Years - sometimes decades - of half-arsed, just-in-time, reactive, improvisational bodging suddenly becomes visible….and is framed as a DP problem 🙄

I have a very bad feeling about this...

AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All I talked to the scholars who literally wrote the book on tech bubbles—and applied their test.

There's been endless talk about an AI bubble, but less about exactly how, why, and how much it's a bubble. So I turned to the framework put forward by scholars Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch, authors of "Bubbles and Crashes," for assessing tech bubbles.

Spoiler: On a scale of 1 to 8, AI is an 8

Seriously, if someone comes at you with stats about the relative prevalence of certain ethnicities in the population at large, and your response is anything but "no fuck you", then you're no better than they are

I’m sick of finding interesting articles on videos behind a persons head. No Links. And then having to search out that article via a screengrab. Things were better ten years ago. This isn’t just me being an old man. Text based social media with hyperlinks was better. The children are wrong

Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users propaganda from Russian-backed media when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds.

New with @natashabernal.bsky.social:

ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok have all been founding citing Russian sources—including Russian media sanctioned by the EU—in response to queries about the war in Ukraine

this!