Francis 🇾🇪 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @francis@greenplenty.social

A few days ago I posted about the case of Nicola Packer accused, tried but found not guilty of having an illegal abortion....

If you thought the details of that post was horrific, the further details of her treatment revealed in this interview are both heartbreaking & disgraceful - a women abused by legal process.

Misogyny has no place in the legal system but we can see all too well that its structurally embedded in the law!

#law #feminism

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/13/i-hate-sitting-in-silence-now-nicola-packer-on-clearing-her-name-after-the-trauma-of-her-abortion-trial

Stupid? Evil? The "immigration" thing.

What do reform voters want? They *pretend* they want numbers to go down. Now, this is already a false debate, shifting a debate about rights/benefits/costs to reducing people to numbers.

But it's also a lie. Because what they want is US-style performative cruelty. Which is impossible under the rule of law.

And so, "responding to voter concerns on immigration" is a sure vote loser. --

Vibe coding claims of the "hours instead of weeks" variety are rarely accompanied by an actual example.

But when they are, they sure do look like they would have taken hours - maybe a Wordle clone or a Quote Of The Day app or a TO-DO list thingummy.

Y'know. The kind of stuff you might build at a hackathon.

I need to be very clear, that the push towards "vibe coding" - that is, deliberately deskilling people - is because AI code assistants are an (increasingly expensive) subscription service.

If you know how to code, you can just write Python, C, Java, R, PHP, whatever for free and make things. You may not own the tools of production, but at least you're not renting them.

If you have been deskilled so you only know how to vibe code, you will be paying for that privilege forever.

This also goes, by the way, for researchers who are starting to be convinced they don't need to learn how to be scientists anymore, because "the AI" can just do the science for them. Nope.

Hey Siri, define “lunatic hero”

“The blood of a US man who deliberately injected himself with snake venom for nearly two decades has led to an “unparalleled” antivenom, say”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5d0l7el36o

Here's a great analysis of the Runcorn by-election from @CherylMorgan which seeks to correct various misapprehensions about why Reform won, whose votes they gained, and why Labour (and the media) are drawing the wrong conclusions.

And its admirably concise for a busy Saturday morning.

#politics #runcorn

h/t @Naich

https://www.cheryl-morgan.com/lies-damned-lies-and-the-british-press/

Anti-trans attitudes have existed for years, but organized disinformation campaigns are increasingly driving them https://phys.org/news/2025-04-anti-trans-attitudes-years-disinformation.html #science

It is weirdly jarring to see the Orange Lunatics ranting about how allowing backdoors and exceptions to secure messaging or crypto is a bad idea because "they can also be exploited by bad actors" whilst they are also advocating that the app stores have backdoors and exceptions. Do they think "bad actors" won't rush to exploit those as well?

(Who am I kidding? Most of the Orange Lunatics work for those "bad actors" in the first place. They're almost gleeful at the possibility of being able to shovel their ad-infested malware in front of billions of eyeballs with no constraints on what they can abuse.)

Ghengis Khan just crossed the floor to join Labour and there are rumours that Attila the Hun will follow. Both are dissatisfied with Sunak's policy on employment rights.

I run uBlock Origin or other ad-blockers in every browser I use.

Sometimes I get the "hey, you're blocking ads, we can't make money" popups. From otherwise agreeable news sites.

Then I think to myself, if you just ran the ads yourself, from your own site, without the adsystem trackers involving Meta/Google/Amazon, then the ads would probably get through.

The ads themselves aren't the problem. It's that publishers want to send all the data and most of the revenue to someone else.

#ads

Mom: "It costs nothing to be polite."

Billionaire Techbro: "Actually..."

Me: boo 😒 hoo. The environmental impact of this mess is unbelievable and sad

“Put yourself in their shoes” assumes shoes fit universally. Real empathy is more like: “Acknowledge they’re wearing shoes made for feet unlike yours, walking paths you’ve never trodden.”

#Tesla whistleblower says #Musk wanted to deport her team for raising brake issue https://electrek.co/2025/04/20/tesla-whistleblower-says-musk-wanted-to-deport-her-team-for-raising-brake-issue/

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

Diary of Anne Frank
January 13, 1943

When I was a young child, and a teacher told my class that anyone could grow up to be President, I didn't recognize that as a threat.