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Sorcha O’Brien

@sorchao.bsky.social

490 followers 200 following 380 posts

design history, technology & other hybrids. also crochet, SFF, gardening badly and occasional dye experiments. she/her. pronounced like ‘portia’.

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Sorcha O’Brien @sorchao.bsky.social · Jan 14

This was a really fantastic audience for a lecture, so happy to see it out and available to the public!

Caitríona Beaumont @caitbeaumont.bsky.social · Jan 14

& if your interest is piqued about #womensgrassrootsactivism you can watch & hear the great @sorchao.bsky.social give her fantastic public lecture on the ICA's craftivism & activism via this link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggrN...
@womensinstitute.bsky.social

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Sorcha O’Brien @sorchao.bsky.social · 23h

And on the other side, in a certain heritage site, we used to get fax spam, which would waste reams of paper and spend half an hour at a time printing out pages and pages of dodgy holiday deals

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Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 2d

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

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Esther Schindler @estherschindler.bsky.social · 2d

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

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Gerard Cunningham @faduda.bsky.social · 1d

I'm old enough to remember when they abolished the college fees that were just reduced by €500

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Sebas @ohlookbirdies.bsky.social · 2d

"but it's everywhere now so we just have to accept it's the new reality" motherfucker we can just stop putting it everywhere! we did it with asbestos and CFCs and lead-based paint or petrol and make-up with arsenic in it! if everyone is using something and it's bad, we can choose to stop!

Sebas @ohlookbirdies.bsky.social · 2d

"anti-AI people should just learn more about it" motherfucker I know so much about it, that's why I'm anti-AI

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Anne-Marie @amflynn.bsky.social · 2d

The GRA was passed in 2015 with very little fanfare following years of courageous campaigning by trans people. We have yet to see any negative ramifications in society - and we won't.

We simply *cannot* have a President of Ireland who speaks about trans women or their human rights in this way.

Reg Coppinger @regcoppinger.bsky.social · 2d

I'm not linking to the article but Heather Humphries thinks the Gender recognition act needs to be looked at, and trans women are not women. #Aras25 #SpeirGorm

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Dean Buckley @deanbuckley.bsky.social · 2d

my bad landlord kept our deposit after letting a leak get so bad that mushrooms started growing in our bedroom and my partner got fungal pneumonia. so yeah, very difficult to relate to people saying "you'd have to feel sorry for Jim Gavin"

Dónal Hassett @donalh.bsky.social · 2d

I'm getting a sense of a generational divide (as well as an obvious class one) on the Jim Gavin story. Older people I've spoken to seem quite sorry for him but everyone my age and younger seems to see this as a kind of vicarious revenge fantasy for all the bad landlords they've had over the years!

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Oisín McGann @oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 2d

Absolutely brilliant news. But can we expand it too?

Irish Literary Times @irishlittimes.bsky.social · 2d

Budget 2026: Basic income for artists to become permanent www.rte.ie/news/budget-...

Budget 2026: Basic income for artists to become permanent

The Basic Income for the Arts scheme will be put on a permanent footing in the Budget tomorrow.

www.rte.ie

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Dr Naomi Jacobs @ladylark.bsky.social · 4d

A wonderful thread involving secret compartments, secret treasures, care and kindness.

Lydia Massiah @lydiamassiah.bsky.social · 4d

This could be a long and rambling thread. Be patient with me.

I bought an old mahogany bureau on Ebay. I didn't really want a bureau as we're meant to be downsizing, but it was a beautiful piece & obviously very old. Google lens suggests the brass chased handles are Queen Anne. That's 1702-1714 😯

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The Scales ⚖️ @shakethescales.bsky.social · 4d

It would take around 1.1 million acres of solar panels to (clean) power the world. That's less than a quarter of the number of acres devoted globally to golf courses. You can see where this is going, right...?

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Matt Ghoulberg @mattgoldberg.bsky.social · 5d

Obviously, this is loser shit, but I think AI has really cemented itself as the visual language of fascism. It's anti-human, flattened, uninteresting, and cheap. It's like looking at a Potemkin Village and thinking that's the same as architecture.

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 5d

Posted by the President of the United States.

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Stephen Blackmoore @stephenblackmoore.com · 6d

Six of my novels and an anthology I have a story in are part of the Anthropic settlement. I just filed my claim. It's easy, they have all the information you need to do it.

You can find the lookup here: secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup

Submit a Claim

secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 6d

The "AI" responses that Google gives about me and my work are consistently error-prone, which I know because I am me. If I know Google's "AI" responses give incorrect answers about things I know about, I can't trust it to give correct answers about things I don't know. So, no, I don't use it.

John Gordon 🇨🇦🇩🇰 @johngordon.bsky.social · 6d

I’m surprised you don’t use ai answer engines in research you currently do with Google

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Guillermo del Toro @realgdt.bsky.social · 6d

Physical miniature elements getting ready

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Caitríona Beaumont @caitbeaumont.bsky.social · 8d

So grateful to @sonjatiernan.bsky.social & editors of #Saothar50 for opportunity to write on Irish housewives. By mad coincidence my ma was interviewed about her everyday experiences in 1968 & that features in my new article. #familyhistory #femaleactivism
dublinfestivalofhistory.ie/event/specia...

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Caitríona Beaumont @caitbeaumont.bsky.social · 8d

Looking forward to attending launch of #Saothar50 in Dublin next week 😀. This is a jam packed edition & was delighted to be asked to write article about #Irishhousewives in 1960s & 1970s, featuring a Swedish newspaper interview from 1968 on their everyday experiences, with my mum ❤️. #familyhistory.

Sonja Tiernan @sonjatiernan.bsky.social · Aug 26

Join us for a special event to mark the landmark 50th volume of Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, a refereed journal dedicated to the study of Irish working-class history … Co-edited by myself, Mary Muldowney, John Cunningham and Brian Hanley.
dublinfestivalofhistory.ie/event/specia...

Special Event To Mark Publication Of 50th Volume Of Saothar – Dublin Festival of History

dublinfestivalofhistory.ie

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If you know you know @privatechand.bsky.social · 9d

This would be why I am such a strident critic of digitization as a substitute for actual archival preservation. My sixteenth century documents are far sturdier and likely to survive another 500 years than the detritus on the internet. And digitization is not democratization.

Dan Gillmor @dangillmor.bsky.social · 9d

Google deletes history:

Google just erased 7 years of our political history

Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU; so the last 7 years of ads, of political spending, of messaging, of targeting - on YouTube, on Search and for display ads - for countless elections across 27 countries - is all gone. We had been told

www.thebriefing.ie

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 9d

So this is a very, very desperate move - a very silly app of generative AI slop that will be incredibly expensive for OpenAI to run, and on top of it, they're requiring rights holders to *opt out* once they see violations. You can't do it in advance. They're washed, and trying everything to survive.

OpenAI's New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out
Executives at the startup notified talent agencies and studios over the last week

OpenAI doesn't plan to accept a blanket opt-out across all of an artist or studio's work, the people familiar with the new Sora tool said. Instead, it sent some talent agencies a link to report violations that they or their clients discover.
"If there are folks that do not want to be part of this ecosystem, we can work with them," Varun Shetty, VP of media partnerships at OpenAI, said of guardrails the company built into its image generation tool.
OpenAI released the initial version of Sora last December, allowing users to create high-definition video clips from text prompts.

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Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · Aug 31

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 13d

I honestly don't think everyone talks enough about how amazing it was when the world came together to fix the hole in the ozone layer, so I wrote this:

everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/lets-all-r...

It's a good reminder of what we're capable of.

Let's All Remember When We Saved The World

To remind ourselves we can do it again.

everythingisamazing.substack.com

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Joe Noonan @joenoonan.bsky.social · 10d

Q. Can you vote in the Presidential election next month?

A. Of course I can. I always vote.

Q. Are you on the Register?

A. Why wouldn't I be?

*Checks Register. Name absent*

Q. Who erased me?

*Applies to be registerred*

There are only a few days left to register.

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Michelle Bastian @mhbastian.bsky.social · 10d

Ive seen LLMs pushed a lot to fellow #adhd students and scholarship to "help" them with things like detail work and structuring work. Ive also seen many punished for trusting this offer of help too. Here's what to use instead:

#academicsky

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anfearbui.bsky.social @anfearbui.bsky.social · 11d

Some interesting colour Dublin city views from July 1957. From the Edmund L. Mitchell Collection from the Boston Public Library.

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Dr Satoshi Akima, FRACP @toshiakima.bsky.social · 11d

We found a link between SARS-CoV-2 reinfection & #longCOVID, & a post-pandemic rise in thrombotic events across all populations, regardless of vaccination or prior infection. Findings support continued COVID diagnosis in suspected cases & mask use by healthcare workers treating respiratory patients

www.mdpi.com

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George Penney @georgepenney.bsky.social · 13d

In a library, a woman (30s?) is leading her Mum by the hand down the aisles until they reach the 'M' aisle.
She then pauses, pulls a book off the shelf and holds it up, saying: "That's your book Mum. Right there. You're in the Library!"
Mum bursts into tears.
Happy hugs all around. (2)

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