Johan Farkas

Tech billionaires fuel Donald Trump’s $429mn haul ahead of midterm elections [FREE TO READ] Executives seeking regulatory relief help make lame-duck president a potent political force with record fundraising

Tech billionaires fuel Donald Trump’s $429mn haul ahead of midterm elections: www.ft.com/content/5038...

YouTube video by Marcio Carrasco Ini Kamoze - Trouble You Trouble Me

RIP Sly Dunbar! What a legend.
Will put on Ini Kamoze's debut album and pay respect.
www.theguardian.com/music/2026/j...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzYq...

It's the famous kettle logic:
- The victim was a terrorist
- The victim was wielding a weapon
- Nobody wanted to see the victim dead
- We already know what happened
- We are currently investigating everything

‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activit...

It's only escalating...
www.404media.co/elite-the-pa...

Resharing this one year later.

CNN video analysis sheds new light on killing of Alex Pretti | CNN CNN analyzed cellphone footage of immigration officers fatally shooting Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Taken together, they appear at odds with the Department of Homeland Security’s claims about the kill...

"CNN video analysis sheds new light on killing of Alex Pretti" www.cnn.com/2026/01/25/u...

DHS Is Lying To You About ICE Shooting a Woman At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.

THREAD: 404 Media has been covering ICE and the technology they've been using to surveil and raid "targets", detain people based on a flawed facial recognition app, and lie about violence on the streets.

They have established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.

To explain authoritarian movements through echo chambers, filter bubbles, and misinformation is to deny their deliberateness.

Why do we still think they don’t know what’s going on? No, people consciously choose to believe what they want. They watch exactly what they choose. Have we considered that they are simply awful people? Or yes, you can say they are traumatized, they had bad childhood, anything can be explained.

Many rightly call out the insane hypocracy of gun rights advocates justifying murder because the victim carried a gun.

Just want to add that authoritarian movements NEVER respect any of the principles they proclaim to follow. It's always only about rights of the in-group to terrorise out-groups.

Our initial analysis is up.

The video footage appears to show that the gun was taken away from the man before he was shot.

He was UNARMED before any of the shots were fired.

Minneapolis Police Chief O'Hara: "The video speaks for itself. We have identified this person - 37-year-old, white male, resident of the city. The only interaction that we are aware of with law enforcement has been for traffic tickets and we believe he is a lawfully gun owner with a permit to carry"

Live: Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning, police chief says A video appears to shows federal agents wrestling a man to the ground then shooting him.

The Star Tribune reports that federal agents "attempted to order local police from the scene" where a man was shot and killed by feds this morning, but Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara refused and "instructed his officers to preserve the scene."

ICE has now carried out two summary executions of innocent people in the streets of an American city.

If you work for ICE, there's no denying that's the mission you're supporting now. You don't get to claim in one year or ten or twenty that you didn't know what ICE was doing. You're complicit.

They’re fucking murdering us, man

My 2-year-old has started saying: "I'm just doing my job" whenever I thank her for helping out. No idea where she picked it up but it feels like social commentary.

I'm definitely missing out on some content I enjoy because of the switch (deleting YT on my phone). But it's definitely worth it for me. And I've also found new creators i didn't know before

Hehe. Yeah, I've almost stopped using YouTube as I felt I didnt get what i subscribed for due to the relentless pushing of short-form content and ads. Nebula is a subscription-based platform owned by creators with no ads. I moved there as many of my favourite creators are there.

Ah don't know if she's on Bluesky 😊. I meant her videos. I get them on Nebula (the creator-owned streaming platform), but she's also one YouTube. And yes, she's a physicist

Highly recommend following Angela Collier 😊. She also has great videos on how tech billionaires are obsessed with pretending to know physics.

I guess it makes sense that researchers studying writing, language, texts, images, and so forth are more critically reflective. Still very surprised that a professor could write such a piece.

Exactly! It's also one thing to use it for final language edits (especially as a non-native speaker). Quite another thing to use it to write your emails and course guides

YouTube video by Angela Collier this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain

Highly recommend Angela Collier's video on the case:
youtu.be/7pqF90rstZQ?...

When two years of academic work vanished with a single click After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.

Imagine being a professor and admitting this on Nature.com:
"I used it [ChatGPT) as an assistant every day — to write e-mails, draft course descriptions, structure grant applications, revise publications, prepare lectures, create exams and analyse student responses"
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Make my brain hurt, baby!

Reading material for a better 2026 (within if not without)
@jfarkas.bsky.social 👍

White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest Guardian analysis shows images are the same, with Nekima Levy Armstrong looking composed in original but sobbing after alteration

"White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest"
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

These so-called "patriotic" 🇬🇧newspapers who brought you Brexit were never really patriotic at all.

They are driven by a disdain for Britain's European neighbours, and a fawning obsession with America.

They do not really want 🇬🇧 to be sovereign. They're content being a 🇺🇸vassal.

Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups Exclusive: Amazon, Meta and X among firms holding hundreds of meetings with people at heart of government, data shows

Important and well researched piece on the extensive (!) lobbying access of big tech platforms and AI companies.

“A government of a sovereign state has a duty to its own citizens, not to the tech bros”

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Screenshot of a data visualization titled “The Cost of American Exceptionalism,” subtitled “What would change if the U.S. matched the OECD average?” The page explains that each card shows how outcomes would change if the U.S. matched the average of 31 peer democracies. Below, a section labeled “Economy & Inequality” displays eight cards comparing U.S. figures to OECD averages. Highlights include: +$19K per household per year in redistributed income and +$96K in redistributed wealth if the top 1% matched OECD shares; a 71% lower CEO-to-worker pay ratio (from 354× to 101×); 50 million more workers with union coverage; 26 million more people with health insurance; $2.1 trillion saved annually in healthcare spending; $691 less per person per year in prescription drug costs; and intergenerational economic mobility being twice as high. Each card shows the U.S. value alongside the OECD average.

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this:

America's problems are solved problems. Just not here.

What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

Global publisher Google traffic dropped by a third in 2025 Google search traffic was down globally by a third in the year to November, according to new Chartbeat data.

Google traffic to publishers dropped by ONE THIRD in 2025 pressgazette.co.uk/media-audien...