Gráinne Lynch
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gronya.bsky.social
Gráinne Lynch
@gronya.bsky.social
160 followers 180 following 250 posts
Cheese-lover and theatre-goer, living in Dublin 7.
www.gronya.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
vaginamuseum.bsky.social
important: when we said "get a better boyfriend" in our last thread, we are following in the rich tradition of Ernst "G-spot" Gräfenberg who prescribed a better dick on at least one occasion.
"It is not frigidity, if the wife does not reach orgasm in intercourse with her husband, but finds it in sexual relations with another partner. One of my patients, who married early a very much older, rich man and had two children, pestered me persistently with questions as to why she could not experience an orgasm. I explained that physically there was nothing wrong with her. Bored by the repeated discussions with her, I finally asked her, if she had tried sex relations with another male partner. No, was the answer and reflectively she left my office. The next day in the middle of the night, I was awakened by a telephone call and a familiar voice who did not give her name asked "Doctor are you there? You are right" and hung up the receiver with a bang! I never had to answer any further sexual questions from her.
January 9, 2026 at 12:02 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
wendylyon.bsky.social
Banks that don’t hesitate to cancel the accounts of sex workers who aren’t breaking any laws themselves
pantibliss.bsky.social Dr Panti Bliss-Cabrera @pantibliss.bsky.social · 2h
And the banks. Whatever banks X uses are also liable for knowingly handling money that was made illegally
conorom.bsky.social Conor O'Mahony @conorom.bsky.social · 6h
I write in today's @irishexaminer.bsky.social about the laws that are broken when online AI platforms facilitate the production of child sex abuse material. No new laws are needed. Companies (and their executives) are accountable as well as users.

www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...
January 9, 2026 at 12:16 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
patrickfreyne.bsky.social
The bit politicians aren't saying out loud is: "But you don't understand how much hassle it is to treat very rich people equally under the law. Seriously it's HAAAARD. It causes us all sorts of problems for us. If you knew how HARD it was you'd be content with our decision to just leave it."
January 9, 2026 at 10:59 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
siobhanmcelduff.bsky.social
"Patrick O’Donovan said making non-consensual sexual images of people is “reprehensible”, and he encouraged people “in the heaviest possible way” not to do so."

The mind of a malevolent turnip.
January 9, 2026 at 5:55 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
philipoconnor.bsky.social
Grok has not "turned off" its CSAM generator for anyone - it has simply put it behind a paywall.
Stop uncritically repeating the narratives of tech companies.
January 9, 2026 at 8:59 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
jessreid.bsky.social
CSAM by subscription is an incredibly grim new low
newschambers.bsky.social Richard Chambers @newschambers.bsky.social · 6h
Edit and Create Image now a 'premium perk' the AI chatbot says.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
January 9, 2026 at 8:56 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
jphilipboyle.bsky.social
The best time to delete your Twitter account was years ago.

The second best time is right now.

You either want to be part of an ecosystem that enriches a fascist billionaire via deepfake porn, unabashed racism, and now CSAM, or you don’t.

I need to be there for work is no excuse in my opinion.
January 9, 2026 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
lisaocarroll.bsky.social
Erasmus: UK government has just updated its page on Erasmus advising students what they need to do if they wish to participate, now that a deal has been done to return to the EU programme.

www.gov.uk/guidance/stu...
Study in the European Union
What you need to do if you're planning to start higher education in the EU.
www.gov.uk
January 9, 2026 at 10:02 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
broadwaybabyto.bsky.social
Renee Nicole Good was not the first person to be murdered by ICE under Trump.

Keith Porter was a Black man killed by ICE on New Years Eve.

Silverio Gonzalez was an undocumented immigrant killed in Franklin Park.

Marimar Martinez was shot 5 times in Chicago & survived.

No one is safe.
January 9, 2026 at 4:41 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
aljazeera.com
Gaza cancer deaths triple as doctors say Israel allows entry of 'chocolates and chips" but blocks chemotherapy drugs.
‘We just sit and cry': Gaza's cancer patients die waiting for treatment
Gaza cancer deaths triple as doctors say Israel allows entry of 'chocolates and chips" but blocks chemotherapy drugs.
www.aljazeera.com
January 9, 2026 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
tupped.bsky.social
If you haven’t heard our Minister for Communications deliver his analysis of how software works, you may want to brace yourself against the back of a chair, or into the corner of a room, before pressing play here.
tupped.bsky.social Simon McGarr @tupped.bsky.social · 15h
Patrick O’Donovan’s statement here is farcically wrong, grimly idiotic and would be laughable if this were a situation which was capable of ever being a laughing matter.

It should be quoted, cited or just played at him every time he opens his mouth on any matter, for the rest of his career.
January 8, 2026 at 11:09 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
aidanobrien.bsky.social
Less than 4 days ago, this same Minister said that child protection and online safety are more important than Irish citizens' human rights. Now he's saying, "Child Sexual Abuse Material what are you going to do, amrite?"
Communications Minister Patrick O’Donovan: Photo: True Media “There are key issues here in terms of freedom of expression, freedom to be able to read or communicate with others without being subject to government licensing, intrusive monitoring and the ability of the State to identify what you’re reading or the websites you visit,” Dr McIntyre said. “It’s an extraordinarily intrusive proposal. Nothing like this has ever been done in an EU member state, and to my mind it cannot be done legally.” This weekend, Mr O’Donovan said the Government will bring forward new legislation later this year requiring social media companies to verify the age of users. The system will work in tandem with the Government’s new digital wallet, which will contain a person’s public services card and other state documents that social-media companies can use to verify age. People who refuse to use the new digital wallet would no longer be able to access social-media accounts. Mr O’Donovan was unbothered by data privacy implications and by the issue of people’s online activity being tracked by the new system. “There is no other right that trumps the right of a child to be protected, and no amount of convincing me that data protection is more important than child protection is ever going to win out,” he told the Irish Daily Mail. . “There is no other right that trumps the right of a child to be protected, and no amount of convincing me that data protection is more important than child protection is ever going to win out,” he told the Irish Daily Mail.
January 8, 2026 at 12:14 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
tupped.bsky.social
The US Government have reached the “murdering poets” stage of decent.
January 8, 2026 at 8:10 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
jaycoyle.bsky.social
BREAKING Irish Govt to move Grok to another parish.
January 7, 2026 at 11:05 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
seamas.bsky.social
An excellent thread of historical cases of dangerous info-slop, and how it contaminates through generations. I made similar points in my Gist piece from 2024, below.

www.thegist.ie/the-gist-3/
Let’s take Large Language Models as an example, since they’re the most well-known piece of broadly usable AI tech on the market. Much of their notoriety stems from the fact that its hallucinations are so infamous as to be cliché. We all, I’m sure, have our favourites, like meal planners that recommend putting glue on pizza and eating three rocks a day; mushroom foraging bots which suggest users cook and prepare entirely fatal fungi; or supermarket apps that cheerfully prescribe recipes for “aromatic water” AKA chlorine gas. It should be observed that such examples are not merely failures because they advocate things that kill their users (although this is not ideal) but because they take the place of existing repositories of information which had little-to-no use case for replacement. In so doing, they’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now?
January 7, 2026 at 9:10 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
krveale.bsky.social
Let's talk about generative AI, contaminated information, and rhubarb.

Once upon a time, Europe was at war.

Food was scarce, and the government of the quote-unquote United Kingdom looked for alternatives. 1/
January 6, 2026 at 3:07 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
retrotechdreams.bsky.social
This reflective acrylic sheet shows how 1980s illustrators were able to trace real-life objects on the computer. Once it was aligned, it reflected whatever was in front of it over the monitor's display, allowing artists to trace it in a tool like MacPaint or MS Paint. Simple, low tech and effective.
January 5, 2026 at 5:09 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
lucygobag.bsky.social
Had many questions today - I write about the complexity of identification processes after fire here
Forensic uncertainty, fragile remains, and DNA as a panacea: an ethnographic observation of the challenges in twenty‐first‐century Disaster Victim Identification
This is an account of ethnographic research examining the specialist scientific processes known as ‘Disaster Victim Identification’ (DVI) in three settings: Québec, the United States, and the United ...
rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
January 3, 2026 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
zackpolanski.bsky.social
Spray paint a plane and they'll detain you without trial and call you a terrorist.

Kidnap a foreign head of state - and Keir Starmer will make it clear we've played no part in it but will wait for the scheduled press conference in a few hours before potentially condemning it
January 3, 2026 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
scottythered.bsky.social
Adding screenshots for when this is inevitably pulled down
I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I’ve been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust. Then there is the "Benefit Fee." You’ve probably seen that $1.50 "Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker. In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for "Policy Defense," and that fee feeds directly into it. You are literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep your delivery guy homeless. And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay. If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you’ll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it’s subsidizing us. You’re paying their wage so we don't have to. I'm drunk and I'm angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.
January 2, 2026 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
dansinker.com
You should leave Substack in 2026, because they platform fascists regularly, but even before that I am *begging* you to stop referring to your writing as "my Substack" because why give them that agency. It's your writing, your posts, your words, on their platform.
January 3, 2026 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
davidgerard.co.uk
the AI vendors literally go to court to keep the water usage a secret

bit of a tell, lads
soyweiser.bsky.social Soyweiser @soyweiser.bsky.social · 7d
Also we can assume quite reasonably that the energy/water usage of these data centers is quite high just because they refuse to talk about it. I know the pro AI-people go 'the antis are lying about the water usage!!1!!' (because somebody made a mistake which they corrected), but for some reason
January 2, 2026 at 4:11 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
craigbrittain.com
Lucy Dacus performs "Bread and Roses" - the Labor Anthem - at the Inauguration of Zohran Mamdani.
January 1, 2026 at 7:49 PM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
frankoconnor.bsky.social
What a horrible man Simon Harris is
He really is the pits targeting the vulnerable through his lies & gaslighting
A man whose party policies have enabled homeless crisis, vacancy & dereliction epidemic & housing crisis
He really has no shame

#DerelictIreland #HowIrelandWorks #SpeirGorm
What a horrible man Simon Harris is He really is the pits targeting the vulnerable through his lies & gaslighting A man whose party policies have enabled homeless crisis, vacancy & dereliction epidemic & housing crisis He really has no shame #DerelictIreland #HowIrelandWorks
December 31, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by Gráinne Lynch
tomgauld.bsky.social
Happy New Year, everyone!

This is a @theguardian.com books cartoon from a few years ago.
Title: New year's resolution A man sits at a table with a coffee writing in a notebook: “This year i will devote myself completely to reading serious, improving literature, forsaking easy pleasures and tirelessly seeking out truth and profundity in the work of the greatest writers.” He looks at it Says: Hmm... then “Scratch Scratch Scratch scratch” scribbles out words until the text reads: “This year I will read for Fun”
January 1, 2026 at 10:53 AM