markcoughlan.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

I had the privilege of talking to @apnews.com about WIRED's Elon Musk and politics coverage. Most important thing: We're not slowing down, we're not stopping, and we're going to cover this story, relentlessly, for as long as we need to. apnews.com/article/elon...

submitted 4 days ago • 100 comments

'Stand up for us!' Republican shouted down as he defends DOGE cuts at town hall www.rawstory.com/rich-mccormi...

submitted 10 days ago • 17 comments

"A lot of secrecy has surrounded DOGE despite Mr. Musk’s attempts to position it as 'maximally transparent.' The White House’s unwillingness to state who its administrator is only adds to that sense of opacity." www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/u...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

"R1 1776 is a DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model that has been post-trained by Perplexity AI to remove Chinese Communist Party censorship. The model provides unbiased, accurate, and factual information while maintaining high reasoning capabilities"? huggingface.co/perplexity-a...

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Laid-off IRS employee said he had voted for Trump: "I thought that someone with his business acumen would have come in with a fine-tooth comb and actually found it instead of coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason." www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/p...

submitted 10 days ago • 2593 comments

"This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things." www.wired.com/story/doge-i...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Breaking news: Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration, potentially throwing the mail provider and trillions of dollars of ecommerce transactions into turmoil.

submitted 10 days ago • 793 comments

Incredible stuff in here: They ID'ed him, in part, by going to court hearings and watching him post

submitted 11 days ago • 130 comments

I have a question. What is the foreign policy of the U.S. government? www.wsj.com/world/europe...

submitted 17 days ago • 586 comments

At this point, there are only two options: A) Elon is so dishonest that he is willing to peddle obvious lies to score PR points B) Elon really is this stupid

submitted 17 days ago • 317 comments

AI image generation is... really good. Like, really good. This was AI generated after being trained on about 10 pictures of me. I would recognise it as me, but it is not a photo that has ever been taken of me.

submitted 17 days ago • 3 comments

This morning, President Trump and his crony Elon Musk illegally seized $80M in congressionally-appropriated FEMA funding from NYC bank accounts. Trump and Elon stole tens of millions of dollars straight from our bank accounts--this is highway robbery, and NY cannot take this lying down.

submitted 18 days ago • 108 comments

An increasing number of Jan. 6 defendants who were pardoned by Trump have gone on the attack on social media, lashing out at the agents and prosecutors who worked on their criminal cases. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/u...

submitted 18 days ago • 5 comments

Let’s see now…

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Latest work here… analysing the remarkable scale of Musk’s tweets during his first two weeks in government. www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

New: We spoke to government IT employees/contractors about DOGE. Their warnings were dire. The people who maintain the systems that keep the country working are terrified. "This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known."

submitted 23 days ago • 157 comments

The head of “60 Minutes” told the show’s staff on Monday that he would not apologize as part of any prospective settlement in a lawsuit brought by President Trump against CBS, according to people with knowledge of the remarks.

submitted 27 days ago • 119 comments

“We are crushing it! Palantir is here to disrupt and… to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. And we hope you're enjoying being a partner.” (Earnings call. Alex Karl, CEO of (Peter Thiel backed) Palantir, weaponry and software.) Is it me or do tech CEOs seem to love the new language climate?

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

What happened with DeepSeek this week? And what does it all say about our future? Trying to figure it out here: www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Summarise all this in one word… anyone?

submitted 28 days ago • 3 comments

This is, or should be, a big deal -- Ann Telnaes, an absolute legend, quitting WaPo due to censorship of a cartoon criticizing billionaires anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-qui...

submitted 58 days ago • 207 comments

UN pledges to share document with family of killed peacekeeper @markcoughlan.bsky.social | @yvonnemurray.bsky.social www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 79 days ago • 0 comments

Notable Bellingcat's Blue Sky account is getting 4 times the engagement with 4 times less followers than Twitter.

submitted 83 days ago • 23 comments

Initial visualisation of the transfer patterns of the big three parties 2011 v 2024. To be honest this one is too much data for a generalist audience, but some here might be interested. (@davidfarrell-ucd.bsky.social was wondering about similar.) public.flourish.studio/visualisatio...

submitted 90 days ago • 3 comments

More sankey visualisations. Once the last Fine Gael candidate is eliminated, almost 60% of their transfers are going to directly Fianna Fáil. The comparable figure for Fianna Fáil to Fine Gael is 46%. The Green are getting - almost literally - none. 2% or below. www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 91 days ago • 6 comments

Fun fact: Sankey diagrams were invented in 1898 by an Irish engineer, Matthew Phineas Sankey. Your average Irish toddler can understand one of these quicker than Nate Silver can grok a two-party polling chart. It's in their blood. www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 92 days ago • 3 comments

This is the beauty of PR-STV. The chaotic spaghetti of liberty! The electoral math of our fragmented souls!

submitted 92 days ago • 3 comments

My graph. In fairness - to me, now into hour 26 - the subhead on the graph is key here.

submitted 92 days ago • 0 comments

Election heads, get your nerd on. Irishelection.com 2.0 at this link. www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 92 days ago • 5 comments

So many wrong takes here. To start, what makes the F-35 or the B-21 expensive is the software and the electronics, not the pilot per se (of course, having the pilot makes it more expensive, but the primary source of cost overrun and time delays was the software).

submitted 98 days ago • 5 comments

Shout out to Rathmines Glass, Dublin City Council cleaning crews, and all who worked to calm, protect, and pick up the pieces afterwards.

submitted 99 days ago • 0 comments

A year ago myself and Kate McDonald compiled hours of footage for scores of sources, to try to get a granular understanding of how the Dublin riots developed. In recent days we’ve returned to hear how people reflect on what happened. t.co/o3SWRJ3QCj

submitted 100 days ago • 4 comments

This is really getting quite remarkable • BlueSky user numbers have doubled in the past week and now total 3.5 million across US & UK 🚀 • Number of people deleting their X/Twitter account remains way up And the next chart is particularly notable...

submitted 103 days ago • 136 comments

New from @markcoughlan.bsky.social and myself: Russian spy ship confirmed to be operating off Dublin near cables www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 107 days ago • 1 comment

New from myself and @markcoughlan.bsky.social: "The Irish Defence Forces dispatched a specialist observation plane twice in recent days to an area of the Atlantic south of Cork where Russian naval vessels... are understood to have been traversing." www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 109 days ago • 4 comments