Avery Thompson

Satellite proposals threaten the night sky In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for authorizing satellite launches and operations…

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan.
darksky.org/news/two-sat...

Colored pencil drawing of FBI director Kash Patel with big bug eyes

tfw you're getting changed in the locker room and look up to see this face

🧵1/
Student in Quakertown, PA held a peaceful protest yesterday until the police chief showed up in plain clothes and assaulted two students.

#FuckICE #Quakertown #ProudBlue

Carlson does more damage to Christian Zionism consensus by asking a handful of follow up questions than basically any other US journalist— this is an indictment of American journalism. Why is Carlson's the right's D-tier racist Chotiner now?

🔭🧪 Are you interested in having a night sky? (Like at all?)

File comments with the FCC telling them to deny permission to Starlink for “a million satellites” and to Reflect Orbital for their giant sunlight mirror in space.

The American Astronomical Society has info on how 👇

DC Statehood yesterday

guys i am begging y'all please swap to linux, if you're familiar with windows i recommend any distro that uses KDE as the desktop environment please please please

a tweet by mike fossey (mikef): its stupid when girls say they cant find a guy, yet they ignore me. its like saying youre hungry when theres a hot dog on the ground outside

a Free Press headline, Why Is No One Having Sex? https://www.thefp.com/p/why-is-no-one-having-sex

The Free Press is discovering new levels of Telling On Yourself that scientists previously thought could not exist

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Of all the things we are doing in MN, this one is just beyond. Imagine being released from hell alone in the cold. And a total stranger has waited all night with a blanket just to be ready to hug you and carry you home. Every job we do is crucial, but this one is what restores humanity and dignity.

Immigration Authorities Are Cracking Down on DC Restaurants Again Homeland Security Investigations is following up on employment eligibility audits conducted last spring.

“I’ve already spent $17,000 on lawyers to deal with ICE for me... And then I got an email last week to my attorneys saying, basically, we need to let go over two-thirds of our staff.”

washingtonian.com/2026/02/19/i...

poly market on twitter: Polymarket 🤝 Substack We are excited to announce our exclusive partnership with Substack. Starting today Substack authors can natively integrate data from the world's largest prediction market. Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.

leavesubstack.com

how close would it be if I floated on my front

collection of dishonest headlines

Google search, "would the us commit troops to defend taiwan" AI answer: Whether the U.S. would commit troops to defend Taiwan is officially governed by a policy of "strategic ambiguity," designed to deter both a Chinese invasion and Taiwanese independence. While the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act mandates providing defensive arms, it does not legally guarantee direct military intervention.

Deplorable state of U.S. media on display here, deliberately misleading the public. You can literally type into Google the same question @aoc.bsky.social was asked and the AI will give you her same answer because "strategic ambiguity" has been official U.S. policy her whole life.

the overseer of project 2025 is telling you out loud that every inch you cede on trans rights is part of the plan to create a white christian fascist state

We’ve come full circle

what a deeply ominous brand name

there is an extremely simple answer to the "abandon trans rights" folks and it is "no" and also "fuck you"

this is also a political moment where conservatives are less popular than ever and progressives are strongly motivated to run. why is anyone talking about the lesser of two evils? we can have good candidates! you don't have to settle!

yeah they pander to the left in the primary and then tack hard right in the general because they think they won't lose votes. this is how Harris lost, this is how Clinton lost, this is how Schumer sees the electorate and look how that's going.

saying "vote blue no matter who" is just telegraphing that candidates don't have to put in any effort to win your vote. they don't have to even try to represent you. it is HOW WE GOT HERE. have some standards, please.

now, the nyt has a long tradition of compromising on their stated principles to smear the left, but it's not usually so blatant. in a real newsroom, people would be fired for this.

the nyt not doing so in this case is a deliberate choice to eschew journalistic standards in an attempt to make AOC look less eloquent.

if you don't know, this is how literally everyone talks, and standard practice when transcribing quotes is to clean them up by removing filler words, stammers, etc.

the nyt, abandoning even the pretense of doing journalism to attack the left. cancel your subscription.

ah yes of course, rather than not vote at all, we should vote republican to convince the dems to move further left

Screenshot of a BBC News article on a mobile webpage. The text says the vast majority of people in the middle of the debate were silent, while “people at the extremes” and media rhetoric had been “frightening for young people,” according to a clinician. It adds that some trans rights activists had been “so strident” it made life more difficult for trans people trying to “live under the radar,” and that people who believed no one should ever transition had “similarly made it difficult.” The BBC logo and menu icons appear at the top.

On one side, you have trans people asking to be left alone and maintain our access to health care. On the other, a bunch of people who believe we shouldn't exist. But Cass believes both sides are the same.

This whole interview is atrocious.

www.bbc.com/news/article...