Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Richard Gadsden

@po8crg.gadsden.online

760 followers 250 following 4.2K posts

Three-time Lib Dem Parliamentary Candidate, Man Utd and Red Sox fan, cis man, he/him/his, 83 protons, not a werelabradoodle, in spite of my appearance

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · Sep 24

Pinned post.

My avatar is a piece of original art by John Roberts. I have permission from him to use it unmodified as an avatar on social media.

If you want to debate my position on an issue, you have to know what it is. You can ask but if you don't and guess wrong, you'll just get blocked.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 1h

No, it's normal if they've already laid out that he's a Senator.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 1h

A remarkable fact about human languages is that it is possible to construct entirely new sentences that no-one has ever said before and still be understood.

Also: dude, what the actual fuck are you on and can I have some?

Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · 2h

What www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

POLITICO
"They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map," Sen. Jim Banks, the Republican of Indiana, told POLITICO last month.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 1h

Lyndon Baines Johnson, who liked killing Vietnamese people, was prepared to risk elections for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

Anyone who won't stand up for what is right because they're afraid of losing an election is worse than "hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today".

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 2h

Yes. It's like how most billionaires slowly go mad because no-one ever disagrees with them.

Interacting with something that is deferential when you're out of line will get you into the habit of becoming abusive.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 2h

You said in three words what it took me three skeets to say!

Reposted by Richard Gadsden

Matt Baldwin @thisbrokenwheel.bsky.social · 3h

As a paleontology enthusiast I always find it funny how pop culture constantly describes large herbivorous dinosaurs as "gentle giants" when most of our current living herbivorous megafauna are some of the most physically dangerous and temperamental creatures on the planet.

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · 9h

horses can SERIOUSLY injure you with their jaws - do not ever antagonize enormous animals with opinions

Rivikah @rivikah.bsky.social · 9h

My grandfather was missing a finger and a half from his right hand due to it being bitten off by a horse.

5 31 160

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 6h

There should be regulators that are (a) under a legal obligation to answer your questions and (b) it should be a legal defence that you followed their direction even if they got the law wrong.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 6h

One of mine was a fireman on trains (he got promoted to driver during the war). The other was an officer in the KAR, commanding black soldiers, because he was good at languages and he spent most of 1941 learning Swahili.

He ended up running the transport pool (ie making sure lorries were working).

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 6h

There weren't all that many front-line troops at all - WW2 armies were much more tail than tooth. You were more likely to be a truck driver, or a mechanic, or a guy that loads and unloads trucks, or a cook, or a clerk in an HQ, or a radioman, or an orderly in a military hospital.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 6h

PLUTO - "PipeLine Under The Ocean"

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 7h

It's really funny how every single person who has ever tried to run any sort of online community is on one side and on the other there is Some Guy.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 7h

At that point, you have centralised moderation anyway.

If the default experience for a new user isn't good, then your system will die from lack of new users.

And you can't make it good on a site that's full of assholes.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 7h

But if you have a default blocklist - which you also have to apply to the logged-out experience if you ever want to bring in new users - then you almost might as well just kick them off the website.

The only people who will see the blocked users are those who turn off the default blocklist.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 8h

Also, and more relevantly, I've used systems that are swimming with assholes where you can use a good blocklist and never see them. No-one new joins those systems because they don't have the blocklist yet.

The only way around that is to have default blocklists.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 8h

If you don't block those, you'll have nothing else on your site (and you might well have the police seizing your servers as well). But also, if you don't do something about the asshole carefully going "not touching you", then you'll never be able to enforce the rules.

1 1

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 8h

There's a set of things that are blocked by most but not all sites, like spam, CSAM, snuff videos. There are some people who will post as much content as possible as close as possible to the line, wherever you draw it.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 8h

I'll lend you my shit across the Atlantic so you can lose mine too.

Reposted by Richard Gadsden

Shepherd @neolithicsheep.bsky.social · 8h

If you cisgender motherfuckers put Gavin fucking Newsom in the White House, thus validating the way he has thrown trans people under the bus, I am going to lose my shit.

3 12 110

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 8h

TIRED: Teaching the sand to think was a mistake.

WIRED: Convincing people that we taught the sand to think was a mistake.

The Louvre of Bluesky @thelouvreof.bsky.social · 3d

i think it’s actually completely okay to say an algorithm is not a real person

hailey @hailey.at
if you're writing a sentence that sounds like eugenics but you go "oh that's fine to say because it's not a real person" (whatever that means) you may want to consider what made you okay with saying that

1 5 15

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 8h

There used to be a joke that teaching the sand to think was a mistake. The real mistake was convincing people that what we had done was teaching the sand to think.

2 3

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 9h

There are a number of birds whose attitude definitely betrays their dinosaur origins. Geese (and swans) are firmly on this list.

hoptimus @hoptimusprime.bsky.social · 9h

believe it or not: geese in general (particularly canada geese) make excellent guard animals; they have good eyesight, are insanely territorial, and are stronger than they look

2 1

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 9h

@erininthemorning.com Just seen your new bleached avatar and wanted to tell you how great you look!

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 9h

I very rarely comment on I/P beyond being saddened by the death and suffering because I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough to have my own opinions and do not have the time/energy to become that knowledgeable.

But this seems like a good starting point for someone who does want to engage seriously.

Lux Alptraum @luxalptraum.com · 10h

Fundamentally if you want the situation in I/P to change and you *don't* want all Jewish Israelis either murdered or ethnically cleansed then you need to see a cultural shift in Israeli society, and that starts with engaging with the Israeli left. That's always going to be my position.

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 9h

Oh, right, the problem isn't the bureaucratic hassle of negotiating with thousands of rights-holders, it's the idea of paying other people for their work that you profit off?

Then perhaps the industry should die.

2 9

Richard Gadsden @po8crg.gadsden.online · 9h

Require AI companies to pay one cent per prompt per thousand words of copyright content in their model's dataset to the holder, or to escrow for any holder who can't be identified.

1 3