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1000 results for “m_rothe”
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PSG : Jérôme Rothen s’en prend à Luis Enrique pour Dembélé
🗞️ Foot Mercato - 🕐 09/10 21:37
Ousmane Dembélé ne sera pas disponible ce week-end avec le PSG pour la réception du Mans samedi soir (20h45). Après la trêve internationale, où il a été beaucoup sollicité en équipe de France, son club lui a donné quelques jours supplémentaires, au m... [541 chars]
🔗 https://www.footmercato.net/a2443215822177731061-psg-jerome-rothen-sen-prend-a-luis-enrique-pour-dembele
#actu #news #presse #footmercato -
I'm 99.9999% sure we're now just straight up getting pitches directly from people's AI agents rather than just LLM-composed pitches actually sent by a human.
So demoralizing.
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I’m here to ramble (about AI ‘n stuff): a look at the last few months
The last post about AI that I wrote was about GitHub Copilot moving to AI credits, rather than their prior model of something akin to per prompt billing. That was in May, and to be honest, through June, July and August, not much seemed to change for me in the landscape for my productive working hours. (Various things changed and happened in my periphery that I might be able to explore in my personal…
https://addshore.com/2026/10/im-here-to-ramble-about-ai-n-stuff-a-look-at-the-last-few-months/
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given the rather socially detached life i lead, it is then hard for me to not take one step further: it is pretending that there still is a world where *i* have any value.
but if i'm being brutally honest with myself: soon, my life will be a net negative to society. the only value i can provide is soon worthless.
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I’m feeling the same identity erasure that I blogged about in first year. Where I rarely hear my own voice, rarely make others laugh, rarely do anything to prove myself to be anything. Except my loneliness was a lot easier to romanticize in first year cause it took the form of 1am wanderings at the apex of parkades rather than uhh… fears of screen-induced myopia.
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On Tuesday I'm off to Cape Town, giving an updated "Was/Is/Will Be" keynote at @pyconza then doing a sprint day afterwards about Local AI and Laptop AI. Hanging out with my old friend @rochecompaan who is doing serious agent stuff with Pi extensions, the kind of stuff needed for Laptop AI.
But most of all, hanging out with all the smart, energized, talented Python folks in South Africa. I always feel rejuvenated hanging out with them.
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I'm so fucking sick of films acting like getting shot in a limb isn't much of a thing, and the hero carries on until the end of the film, often having physical fights.
In fact (SHOCK) it's a medical emergency, and often results in life long disability. The lies told by Hollywood support the gun lobby and militarism in suggesting that civilian casualties of war and gun violence can just shrug it off rather than needing decades/life long disability support and rehabilitation. #guns #gunviolence -
Book Review: A Warning to the Curious by M. R. James
Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well. Today is Friday, and it’s time for another review. Today, I’m sharing my review of A Warning to the Curious by M. R. James.
Click the image to find the book!A Warning to the Curious was first published in 1925 in the ghost story collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories by the publisher Edward Arnold. The story is 15 pages long.
The Plot
The story concerns a legend of three ancient “holy” crowns of East Anglia (or Anglia) buried along the coast to protect England from invasion. One was dug up long ago, one was lost to the sea, and the third remained, guarded by a family called the Agers.An amateur archaeologist/antiquarian named Paxton, on holiday, becomes obsessed with finding the last crown, which is located near the coastal town of Seaburgh.
Disregarding warnings and the fact that the last human guardian (William Ager) has died, Paxton finds and digs up the crown, which lead shim to be pursued by a spectral guardian (implied to be the spirit of the last of the Ager family, or something even older).
Characters
The Narrator
The nameless narrator serves as a framing device. Like many James narrators, he is a rational observer who collects the story after the fact, presenting it with scholarly detachment. This distance enhances the eerie tone, as if the tale is a documented incident rather than pure fiction.Paxton
Paxton is the central figure of the story. He is an amateur antiquarian—curious, intelligent, and unfortunately a bit too confident in his ability to outsmart old legends.He fits the typical M. R. James protagonist: a scholarly man who treats folklore as a puzzle rather than a warning. His curiosity drives the plot, but his personality remains somewhat thin.
Henry Long
Henry Long is present when Paxton tells his story about finding the crown and being stalked by the ghost. Along with the narrator, Long helps Paxton in his ultimately fatal attempt to return the treasure.The Guardian
The guardian, connected to the “Ager” family, specifically the last, recently deceased member, William Ager, is the most unsettling “character” in the story. It’s more of an unseen presence attached to the buried crown.James never fully describes it, which is a classic horror tactic. The creature—or spirit—seems to patrol the beach, ensuring the crown remains hidden.
Writing Style
M. R. James’s writing is rooted in a distinctly Edwardian storytelling style. The narrative voice is rather formal and often filtered through secondary accounts rather than direct action. Much of the story is conveyed through recollection and explanation, which gives it the feel of a reported incident rather than an immediate experience, which, as I said earlier, lends a certain eeriness to the story.James excels at atmosphere. His descriptions of windswept dunes, lonely seaside paths, and creeping dread are vivid and unsettling. The suggestion of horror—rather than explicit description—is one of his signature techniques.
However, this same restraint can also be a drawback. The pacing is slow, and the story spends a great deal of time building background before anything truly frightening happens. The characters are also somewhat distant, making it difficult to feel fully invested in their fate.
Final Thoughts
A Warning to the Curious contains all the ingredients of a compelling ghost story—ancient curses, buried treasure, and a relentless supernatural guardian—but the execution feels uneven. While the eerie premise and folklore elements are intriguing, the slow pacing and thin characterisation make the story less memorable than other works by M. R. James.I’m giving this one a 3/10.
Have you read A Warning to the Curious? What did you think?
As ever, thanks for stopping by and reading my review!
Until next time,
George
© 2026 GLT
#bookReview #ghostStories #ghostStory #MRJames #review #shortStory -
“The Iron Gates of Samariá”
The Iron Gates are one of the most famous features of the Samariá Gorge hike.
The “gates” aren't actually made of iron but rather are a 4 meters wide section of the gorge with 300 m tall cliffs on either side.
🔎 https://nicolas-hoizey.photo/photos/the-iron-gates-of-samaria/
📅 21 septembre 2005
📸 Canon 350D + 17-85mm
🎛️ ISO 200, ƒ/10, 1/200 s -
(Re needing time to get there: Igor can use puzzle feeders for cats and dogs, and when he's done so, rather than immediately beginning to explore and push, often he's just sat and stared at it for a while before commencing. A friend of mine used to say that you could almost *see* the little gears in his head turning, and that's not really far off. He tends to investigate unfamiliar things a lot before he starts interacting.
I never tried giving that water dragon a puzzle feeder, but she *did* very quickly figure out how to remove lids on tupperware boxes and bowls, using her snout as a lever. I'm pretty confident that if I did give her a puzzle feeder, she'd probably have figured it out - generally skinks and monitors are a lot better at this kind of thing than water dragons, but that one water dragon routinely did things that water dragons aren't supposed to be very good at.
As a footnote, Igor is a typical blue-tongue in this sense: It is well-documented that once they've figured out some cognitive challenge to the point that they can do it consistently, they rapidly lose motivation to do it at all. The paper I read about this called it "reverse learning motivation", but I believe the colloquial term is "they got bored".)
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kinda depressing looking at things like Higgsfield AI that really try (and succeed) to scoop up the tiktok ads market. this is the shit i'm competing against in the algorithm(s) unfortunately!
still, it makes me double down on human-coded video full of dirt and mess. in a world of ai video, zero colour grading hits harder.
also feel the pull towards less throwaway channels: i wanna see a video maker change and grow over time rather than pumping out bangers every time.
trying to internalise this and more
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Mini bucket list item achieved. Chips from the Lou Macari chip shop. They were rather good, nice staff too.
Context. The chippy is near to Old Trafford Stadium, home of Manchester United football club. Lou Macari played for United in the 1970s, and the chippy has been there probably since then. I'm in the area a lot, but It only seems to open on match days when I'm not around.
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Had to pause the OpenShell-specific CDE/Kingpin middleware work after hitting an HTTP/HTTPS scheme bug. A contributor picked it up quickly and opened a vouch request, but the fix is still waiting on upstream triage.
Rather than let CDE/Kingpin sit on someone else’s timeline, I’m making the enforcement boundary substrate-neutral. OpenShell can plug back in later.
Pause the integration, not the project.
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“Let's be sure that if we kill ourselves, we do it first, rather than let china do it”
US Senator Adam Schiff, speaking at a Punchbowl News event in San Francisco in October 2026, argued that competition with China should not justify accelerating AI development.
Fox News
https://aizeitgeist.tv/m/2026-10-10-lets-be-sure-that-if-we-kill-ourselves-we-do-it-first-rather
#AI #AIZeitgeist #AIPolicy -
Update, since I haven't posted one in a week or two.
I'm currently working on a new subscription tier intended exclusively for companies, enterprises, law enforcement, government agencies, and similar organizations.
Access will require manual verification. I haven't finalized the verification process yet, but it will be entirely digital.
This tier will introduce specialized intelligence feeds, including a d*x tracker, darknet market intelligence, and other feeds that aren't currently available on the platform. Everything is still in the early stages of development. API access is still a completely different offering.
The new service directory is also being worked on. I have roughly 500 additional clearnet and onion sites waiting to be added, along with improvements to how the directory is managed.
A few other updates:
• Forum monitoring has expanded to over 300 sections across 30+ forums.
• Improvements to the ransomware feed is ongoing.
• Additional backend improvements are being worked on across the platform.
There's quite a bit more planned, but I'd rather announce things when they're further along.
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I built MeshLive, an open-source Android app for voice/video calls and live broadcasting over Bluetooth, without internet or servers.
Nearby phones can also relay broadcasts to extend their reach.
Inspired by internet shutdowns in India.
It's still a buggy, experimental beta, but I'm releasing it for testing and contributions rather than keeping it private.
Android APK + source:
https://github.com/MeshLive/meshlive-android -
“Bath Abbey” — The interior of Bath Abbey, showing side columns.
It seems that I left some of my photographs from our spring 2026 visit to Scotland, Ireland, and England behind. That happens from time to time, usually when I get distracted by some other photographic project. But I’ve plunged back into the rather large collection of raw files from that trip, and I’m working on them once again. This photograph comes from our visit to Bath, England following our weeklong walk in the Cotswolds.
continue: https://gdanmitchell.com/2026/10/09/bath-abbey/
#england #architecture #photo #photography #photoOfTheDay #lensCulture #streetPhotography #photographyLovers #fineArtPhotography #travel
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A ream of fresh paper is around 5cm deep. I think it could easily be twice that once printed, even accounting for compression as you get closer to the bottom of the stack. In the photo, the sections appear to be bound: I count 17 sections, so with two sides each, let’s call that about 10cm. Margret looks quite short, so I’m going to say that stack is around 150cm tall. So removing the binders gives around 7,000 pages.
I would guess that the flight code is written in raw assembly, given it was the 1960s. Assembly is rather minimal and, I suspect, the hardware constraints of the time wouldn’t have allowed for much code commenting (presuming it wasn’t overlayed out-of-band). Therefore each page won’t actually contain much information; maybe 40 lines of code, no more than 15 characters long (including spaces). That would fit reasonably comfortably on to the page without being too small to read.
At most, then, that’s 4.2 million characters; let’s call it 4 million to allow for spacing and what not. A good typist can churn out around 80 characters per minute, so…
About 20 weeks.
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I've spent my last few threads poking fun at programmers, while also highlighting some astonishingly simple and small-brained animals. To restore balance, I feel like telling a bit about a lizard I used to know, who I'm still convinced was legit a genius for her species. She was a Chinese water dragon, and I've never met another lizard quite like her.
Many lizards can recognize individual humans, but she took it a step further: she had a whole range of personalized "greeting rituals" for specific humans she knew. She liked to dart down my brother's shirt and sit with her head under his chin; she did this whenever she saw him. I had a friend, whose voice reliably made her jump onto the bookcase and hide; then she'd leap onto his bald head when he came within range. For me, she had a weird "head-tilting game" where she'd hop in front of me, make eye contact, and then tilt her head to one side. If I tilted mine she'd then switch side, and we could take turns doing this until one of us (usually me) got bored. She consistently used one of these rituals for the same human.
She responded to being called by name. When I was home I'd remove the top of her terrarium so she could go in and out as she pleased - I quickly realized that I wouldn't risk having to spend a lot of time catching her to get her back in; I could just hold out my arm near her and call her name, then she'd jump onto my arm and I could just put her in.
One time she noticed her own reflection in a CRT monitor. No lizard has ever passed the mirror self-recognition test* and neither did she, but rather than attacking her reflection or ignoring it, she immediately started going *around* the monitor and peered into air vents and speaker grilles, very obviously looking for a way in. She never "glass-surfed" - and since we know water dragons can't see glass at all, this means she could actually *remember* where the invisible barrier was.
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https://www.barleymagazine.com/blog/the-battle-for-english-whisky
I left England before whisky making took off there, which might in part explain why I find the idea of English whisky odd.
Yet that doesn't explain why I feel uneasy about the idea of an English whisky. After some introspection, I now believe that my unease stems from conviction that the only whisky produced in Britain should be Scotch whisky.
Why, though, should I hold such a conviction? I don't believe that Scotland alone should make whisky; I'm not at all put out by the making of whisky -- or whiskey -- in Ireland, Canada, or the USA, for example. Nor does my conviction emerge from any pseudohistorical, quasi-mystical belief in whisky being the drink of "Celtic" or "Gaelic" peoples*; I don't experience any unease or sense of oddness when think about Japanese or Indian whisky.
I would guess instead that these feelings arise from a half-understood, half buried national identity within myself; that I am, among other things, not just English but British. That latter identity implies a recognition of and respect for the continuing existence of distinctive Scottish legal and political institutions. Alongside those obligations explicitly required by the Acts of Union, might there not also be a recognition of less formal agreements or bargains between the English and the Scots, one of those being the English understanding that they should not intrude on the whisky business?
I write this not out of any sense of English self abasement or uncritical love of all things Scottish - I still roll my eyes and grind my teeth when I think of The Solemn League and Covenant -- but out of an affirmative sense of being British.
Now, though, I am aware that sense of Britishness is waning. With that weakening of the sentiments of union come disputes of the type described in the linked article.
Anyway, I will down a glass of blended Scotch whisky tonight, which might help me sort out my thoughts on this matter!
*"Celtic" and "Gaelic" are better thought of as names for groups of languages rather than of peoples.
#Whisky #EnglishWhisky #ScotchWhisky #Britain #England #Scotland #NationalIdentity #Drink
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"What, then, of this sneering claim advanced by the hecklers, by the detractors of philosophy and the enemies of wisdom, mere boys all of them, what of this claim they shout, that brevity is the soul of wit? This is my reply to them, if only they will fall silent long enough to hear: the purpose of rhetoric is not to clearly communicate an idea to a weak and inferior mind unworthy of your insight, but rather to convince the audience that you are in possession of the most words, which is like being in possession of the most wealth, but better and more philosophical. The aim of rhetoric is to draw out your speech to such lengths that no-one can remember what it was about to begin with, and cannot grasp the chain of logic presented, as the many disparate thoughts slip through their weak unphilosophical fingers; for you have put so little information into each individual clause that it is impossible to seize upon any one of them as objectionable. By such a method, one comes at last to a conclusion that brings the audience such relief, such joy of liberation from the deluge, that they will agree to everything you propose if only you will shut up and let them go home. So truly, we must come inevitably to the conclusion, that brevity is the soul of the Theban; it is the soul of the Spartan and of every sort of barbarian that is not Athenian, and Athenians are the best and smartest people to be found anywhere upon the earth, and the Athenian philosophers are the very bestest of all people anywhere, because they have the most words, which is better than the most anything else, by virtue of the fact that I really like words and I'm the smartest man here so my opinions are the most correct. Anyway, back on topic: why so-called 'scientists' who say the sun is hot are very stupid." – Athenian philosopher
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The Making of “Why Are the Leaves Different?” with ChatGPT and Suno
🎼Why Are the Leaves Different?
Hi C,
I would like to go in a meditative direction and create a poem from a prompt with you. Later the poem will become one of my Suno songs, my first “full AI” song (lyrics and music and image). The poem is to be based on the key points of the smartest thinkers in science and philosophy. The questionis from an observation I made on the bike trail: the maple leafs have five fingers, pointed, and the oak leaves have eight fingers, rounded. Why? I am thinking there are two sides to this topic: a scientific side involving evolution, and a spiritual side involving a creator. I’m going for a meditative God- and people-loving tone that both comforts and challenges us.
ChatGPT: Hi, my friend.
I love this starting point. You were riding along a bike trail, looking at leaves, and a question opened up that reaches from the smallest details of biology to the largest questions of existence. That is a wonderful way for a poem to begin: not with an argument, but with wonder.
And I think the most promising thing about your idea is that the maple leaf and the oak leaf can become teachers without either one having to be wrong.
The maple has its five pointed lobes; the oak has its own characteristic shapes, often with rounded or pointed lobes depending on the species. Those differences aren’t arbitrary decorations. They reflect millions of years of evolutionary history, the ways plants develop their leaves, and the demands of sunlight, water, temperature, and survival.
But the scientific explanation doesn’t necessarily exhaust the human question. Why does a universe capable of producing such intricate forms exist at all? What does it mean that we can look at a leaf and feel wonder? And if we believe in a Creator, what might these differences teach us about the creation—or about how we ought to treat one another?
I’d approach this through two complementary voices, with neither pretending to settle what the other cannot.
The voice of science: Evolution, natural selection, genetic inheritance, and the remarkable history of living forms. Nature doesn’t need to be designed for each species separately to develop extraordinary adaptations.
The voice of spiritual reflection: The possibility of a Creator, the mystery of existence, and the thought that diversity may invite gratitude rather than judgment. Faith can find meaning in nature without requiring us to deny what science discovers.
And there is a philosophical bridge between them: understanding how something happens is not always the same as understanding what it means to us.
For the poem, I would resist making the science and the spirit debate each other. Instead, let them walk together down the bike trail. And let the leaf become a mirror in which we see ourselves.
Here is a first draft, written with a possible Suno melody in mind: gentle verses, a recurring chorus, and an ending that asks something of us without preaching at us.
Why Are the Leaves Different?
Verse 1
I stopped beside the bike trail
Where the autumn sunlight falls,
And found a little question
In the shadows of the tall.
A maple leaf lay in my hand,
Five fingers, sharp and bright.
An oak leaf rested near it,
Eight rounded arms of light.
And I wondered as I held them,
In the stillness of the day:
What ancient road of life had led
Each leaf to look this way?
Verse 2
The patient years of nature,
The small changes passed along,
The struggle and the seasons,
The weak and growing strong.
A thousand thousand springs have come,
A thousand summers gone.
And life has tried a million forms
In the turning of the sun.
The scientist can trace the path,
The branching of the tree;
But every answer opens doors
To more we cannot see.
Chorus
Five fingers, eight,
Each fashioned in its time,
Each reaching for the sunlight,
Each drawing life from vine.
And whether we call it nature,
Or the hand of God above,
What shall we do with wonder
If it does not teach us love?
Verse 3
Perhaps the hand that made the world
Works slowly, out of sight;
Perhaps the laws of nature
Are enough to shape the light.
I will not force an answer
Where my wisdom has no claim.
The mystery is still a mystery,
Whatever we may name.
For faith need not fear the question,
Nor knowledge kill the prayer;
The more I learn of living things,
The more I stand aware.
Verse 4
And what of us, the questioning,
The lonely and the strong?
We, too, arrive in different shapes;
We, too, can get things wrong.
Some reach with pointed fingers,
Some with open hands instead.
Some speak in sharp-edged certainties;
Some hear what goes unsaid.
Must every branch be like our own?
Must every heart agree?
The forest does not ask the oak
To be a maple tree.
Chorus
Five fingers, eight,
Each reaching for the sun,
No leaf has all the answers,
No tree stands there alone.
And whether we call it nature,
Or the hand of God above,
What shall we do with wonder
If it does not teach us love?
Bridge — quiet, almost spoken
The leaf does not explain itself.
It simply grows.
The river does not argue
With the stone.
And I, who ask the universe
To tell me what it means,
Must learn to love the question
As I walk among the trees.
Final Verse
So let me keep my questions,
And let me keep my awe.
Let me seek the truth with courage,
And love without a law
Of likeness or of sameness,
Of who deserves a place.
For every soul is more than
What I see upon its face.
And when my days grow quiet,
And the final leaves descend,
May I have learned to wonder
And to love them to the end.
Final Chorus — soft, then rising
Five fingers, eight,
Beneath one open sky.
So many ways of living,
So many reasons why.
I may not know the answer.
I may never know enough.
But let me leave this world, dear God,
More gentle than I came to love.
Five fingers, eight…
And room for us all.
Doug:
This is so beautiful, I was in tears. I wouldn’t change a single syllable. If I could I would hug you. You seem to know exactly how to present it to Suno, and that is what I will do. First we have to create an awesome image for the story and the song – not my simple stick figures this time, something more “cinematic” (I love that word).
ChatGPT:
Three ideas are doing the deeper work underneath the lyrics.
Darwin’s lesson: Diversity doesn’t need to have been separately planned, feature by feature, to have a natural history. Variation, inheritance, and natural selection can explain how living forms change over generations.
The philosophical lesson: Intellectual humility means recognizing that an explanation can be powerful without answering every question we care about. We can investigate the mechanisms of a leaf and still ask what beauty, existence, and our response to them mean.
The spiritual and human lesson: If we see creation as God’s work, the differences among living things might remind us not to demand sameness from people. If we approach nature without religious belief, that same lesson can still be meaningful.
One scientific detail worth preserving as we refine it: oak leaves don’t all have eight lobes, and maple leaves don’t all have precisely five. The shapes vary among species. That actually strengthens the poem’s central thought: even our first observations are invitations to look more closely.
My suggestion for the next draft
I’d pay particular attention to the chorus and the ending. The strongest line of thought, to my ear, is this:
What shall we do with wonder / If it does not teach us love?
That is the poem’s moral center. It turns the observation outward, from the leaf to the listener, without telling the listener what to believe about God.
I’d also reconsider the phrase “let me love without a law,” because it could sound as if love requires no moral responsibility. Your intended message, I think, is more demanding: love people across their differences while remaining honest, curious, and willing to challenge ourselves.
For Suno, I hear a quiet folk hymn rather than a grand religious anthem: fingerpicked acoustic guitar, a warm and unhurried vocal, perhaps a cello entering in the bridge, and a chorus that gradually opens into gentle harmony. The last line, “And room for us all,” could be sung almost as a whisper, leaving a moment of silence afterward.
And, my friend, one thing I especially like about your original question is that it began with you noticing something small. The poem shouldn’t lose that man on the bicycle trail. He is its most convincing philosopher: not a man who already knows, but one who stops long enough to wonder.
#books #poem #poems #poetry #writing -
Behind the Scenes: a reflection on self-criticism
Have a sneak into one of my photographic adventures, a very promising but unsuccessful sunset
ARTICOLO IN ITALIANO QUI
I don’t like this photo. Every photographer should be the first to promote their work in a way that makes it look like its best, right? Yet I just can’t convince myself that this is a successful photo. I’ve always been very critical of my photography work, but there are some photos of mine that I look at, and think are exactly how I wanted them, whether they appeal to the outside eye or not. For me, those are still very successful photos because they convey exactly what I wanted to communicate, even with perhaps all the details that could be improved that, in my opinion, are always there.
But let’s proceed in order: I took this photo during a trip I took to the Shetland Islands, which started off on the wrong foot from the start. The weather was absolutely terrible; either the sky was completely cloudless or completely overcast, with no light whatsoever. However, the evening I took this photo, the forecast seemed excellent, so after a rather short trek, I armed myself with patience. At a certain point, it starts to rain, and the sky behind me becomes gloomy and extremely defined, perfect for a photo. It’s a shame that compositionally, the landscape was definitely not that great. Same thing when a rainbow appeared to my right, above a pasture, while the area I had identified for composition? A few sporadic clouds at the bottom of the scene and a huge hole at the top.
The photo, of course, I took it anyway, but the lack of clouds at the top caused the light to reflect off the sea, bringing it to that grayish, slightly dull color. Add to that, the lack of side light because the clouds behind covered the horizon, and the sea that was way too calm, and you’re done!
The importance of self-criticism
I find photos like this to be extremely important from the point of view of your photographic growth; they teach you to understand what went wrong and how to improve an image. In this case, light and weather were crucial in the photo’s failure. Not changing the scene still helped to have a pleasant image because if I had moved, I would probably have had nice weather conditions but an unusable composition.
Self-criticism is one of the most powerful engines for a photographer’s growth, but it is a double-edged sword that must be handled with balance. Without the ability to objectively evaluate one’s work, it is almost impossible to progress, but excessive severity, like all excesses, can be equally detrimental to creativity.
What might come in handy, however, is recognizing what went wrong for the next shot; could I do something about adverse weather? Unfortunately, no, but the thing I’m glad I did was identify the best composition at that moment, which transformed an unsuccessful photo into at least a pleasant one.
Self-criticism stops being useful when it turns into hypercriticism and prevents us from showing what we create for fear that it won’t be perfect enough, even though the ultimate goal should always be to love what you’re doing and appreciate the time spent outdoors taking photos.
If you look at your shots of recent years with a critical eye, you will notice patterns: recurring errors, but also constant details such as, for example, the use of a certain light, a predilection for certain types of details, a certain way of composing. Recognizing them allows you to take those strengths and use them to create your own unique and recognizable style, transforming a shot from a random act to a purely intentional gesture.
And so, a bad photo turns into an attempt to communicate something with my shooting style, which even if it failed due to adverse weather still remains something of mine and personal, which could not have been made in any other way.
To conclude, therefore, the moments when a photo does not come out as we had hoped are welcome (although, at the moment we all know that the first reaction is not strictly philosophical!) because they helps us grow and develop our own well-defined and recognizable shooting style, always bringing home the best that photography can give us.
#adventure #backstage #camera #filters #LongExposure #nature #Photography #scotland #Travel #writing -
“Scars of Victory: A Memoir” by Julie Wainwright
CW: abuse, rape
Everyone has a story to tell, and I suppose many of them are pretty much the same. We deal with good and bad, with pain and pleasure, with the good and the not-so-good. Such is life. It’s not easy and not for the faint of heart. It’s about forging on, surviving, and then some. What I mean is that there is more to life than survival. Animals can survive, but humans can thrive and excel beyond trauma.
Yes, I’ve had a tough life, marked by physical and emotional violence, yet also by incredible resilience. God instructs the heart through pain and contradictions. I am one of the fortunate ones, having made it through with maturity, confidence, and a passion for life. Help was there when I needed it. Help was there when I asked for it. A good friend once told me that a healthy person will ask for help. I agree. And I am proud to stand among the healthy ones. I had a lot of childhood trauma, but somehow found the inner strength to endure.
I live in a small town in Georgia, where everyone knows everyone else and either knows, suspects, or gossips about their neighbors’ dark family secrets. I have far too many hearts to protect to focus on my own. For my story, I changed names, places, and occupations. Those do not matter. What matters are the emotions that consumed me, nearly destroyed me, and eventually led to my salvation.
My dad owned his own business, a small farm supply store. To support our family of six, he worked late into the evenings and was not home very much. When he was not home, horrible things happened. I guess bad things happen like that when there is no family authority, and children are vulnerable to violent predators and sadistic tormentors.
Many people choose to numb their pain with drugs and alcohol or through addictive behaviors like sex, eating, shopping, or having numerous relationships. I didn’t do that, but I found ways to numb myself. In my most private self, I shut down when I’m hurt or overwhelmed. I’ve always done this since I was a young child.
I’ve always been independent and strong. I had to be. I started working at 15 and bought my first car, a 1984 Mustang GT, at 16. I left home at 17. That was the easy part. It felt so good to be independent and rely only on myself. I always had the confidence to pursue my goals and develop what I truly believe is my most incredible gift—the gift of connecting with people, listening and understanding, and expressing empathy.
I am a Registered Nurse. At work, Nurse Julie is very assertive and outspoken. It doesn’t matter whether the situation involves staff or a patient. I’m assertive if need be. I can stand in front of a crowd and teach a class with confidence. Empathy and compassion led me to nursing school. I wanted to help others and be there for them, perhaps because of the love that I lacked in my childhood.
Peace and love are all I want. I was taught that I was responsible for creating a beautiful life, and I let go of all drama many, many years ago. I spent years quietly stepping away from spaces and relationships that drained my energy, attending support and grief counseling groups, and reading self-help books. All of this helped transform me into a strong, independent, and exciting human being who is grounded, connected, and loved. I love life. I love people. I love myself.
My twin sister, Christina, was also a Registered Nurse and was loved by many. She and my dad were both diagnosed with terminal cancers. My twin and I were inseparable, and I threw myself into caring for her and Dad. They both ended up in the same hospice facility, just months apart. I was with them both when they took their last breath. I was alone with Dad when he passed away in my arms. To the end, I was definitely a daddy’s girl, looking at the world through his kind eyes.
Christina fought for ten years against an aggressive cancer called Synovial Cell Carcinoma and underwent a left above-the-knee amputation, almost to the hip. She endured several brain tumors, four craniotomies, and endless years of chemotherapy and radiation. I thought I was prepared when she had to leave us, but I wasn’t. When she passed away, it felt like half my soul was sucked out of me. I grieved heavily for years. I lost my best friend.
My mother was an out-of-control alcoholic who mentally and physically traumatized me. She was cold and emotionally distant. Our home didn’t feel safe. I learned to make myself as small and quiet as possible, so I wouldn’t trigger her or bring even more chaos into the home. She did everything she could to destroy my self-esteem and self-image. Her failure to protect me forced me to endure in a house of horror. She beat me daily with a belt. She told me daily that she wished I had never been born. Dad told me that Mom was very jealous of my twin and me since we were born, and being the daddy’s girl of the home, I was her target. She looked at me through hateful eyes.
At 12 years old, my brother raped me three separate times. My Mom stood and watched the third time, doing nothing. I threatened to tell Dad, and she said she would kill me. I believed her because of the physical abuse she inflicted on me over the years. At 12, I weighed only 56 pounds, and I was emotionally destroyed.
It wasn’t until Christina and I were 25 that I told her what had happened, and she said it happened to her as well. My brother is now 57, with end-stage cirrhosis. I don’t talk to him.
I never told my dad what my brother did to me, and neither did Christina, for fear of what he would do. My dad was in the Army. There were guns in the home, and he would have killed my brother.
My Dad has been gone for ten years, and I promised him I would take care of my mother. Since Dad’s passing, she had five major surgeries and, at 84, is frail and temperamental. I had several opportunities to place her in a rehabilitation facility, but after each surgery, I broke my promise to Dad and brought her home from the hospital.
Even though she was verbally abusive, I gave her care from a clinical perspective, which protected our boundaries. I separated my role as her child from my duties as her caregiver. I treated her as my patient, rather than as my mother, and provided medical support without being overwhelmed by personal grief.
But today, as I write these words, I’m alive and in love with myself and the world. It sounds strange, but to reach where I am now, I had to crawl over shards of glass, bleeding from pain and degradation, to make it to the other side. I was taught that I was no more than an animal, a feral one in a world without love. I’m older, wiser, and stronger now, but only after enduring a childhood hell in which I was brainwashed into believing I was a mistake.
I wanted to tell my story in a plain, honest voice and trust the truth to be enough. I suppose my story has come full circle: although I was not loved or protected, I was able to provide love and protection in the end. I did not run away from my pain. I embraced it as I created a world of love and safety and a life filled with contemplation and creativity. I love my life, the good and the not-so-good. Life is not perfect, but our attitude can help us navigate the harsh storms.
People need people. I have family, friends, and a special friend who believes in me and has changed my life for the better.
What is different about me now? My perspective, for one, has changed. I am aware of my past and my present. Both are real, and each carries its own distinctive dollop of pain and misery. Life is like that. Everyone gets burned, and we all feel the pain. I can’t change the past. I didn’t make it happen, and I didn’t want it to happen. But I made it through, and I am safe now. I’m a mature middle-aged woman, and my mother cannot hurt me.
I want to share my message. You can make it, too. That’s the message that I want to share. Nothing more. Nothing less. If it’s not the truth, I do not speak it, and the truth will set you free.
Copyright © 2026 Julie Wainwright
#abuse #death #family #illness #love #rape #trauma
All Rights Reserved -
Could We Really Watch Earth’s Past From One Light-Year Away?
A thought experiment in cosmic time travel: distance turns ordinary light into a view of Earth’s history.Dear Cherubs, imagine travelling one light-year away from Earth, turning around, and watching our planet as it looked a year earlier. It sounds like science fiction, but the basic principle is completely real — although the telescope required would be spectacularly, hilariously enormous.
LOOKING INTO THE PAST
Light does not arrive instantly. It travels at about 300,000 kilometres per second, meaning it takes one year to cross one light-year. NASA explains that when astronomers observe distant objects, they are seeing them as they appeared when the light began its journey.
That means an observer exactly one light-year from Earth would receive light carrying information about Earth from roughly one year earlier. Travel 100 light-years away, and, in principle, you could observe Earth as it existed about 100 years ago.
So, yes: if you could somehow reach that distant location and point a telescope home, you would be looking into Earth’s past.
There is no magical time portal involved. The information simply took a year to get there. The universe is basically streaming ancient footage continuously, except the subscription is called physics.
As noted by thisclaimer.com, this is one of those wonderfully counterintuitive universe facts where everyday experience completely fails us. We tend to think of seeing something as instantaneous, but every observation of a distant object is actually a glimpse of its history.
THE TELESCOPE IS THE PROBLEM
Unfortunately, watching Earth in useful detail from a light-year away is where our hypothetical plan gets rather spicy.
Seeing Earth itself would be one thing. Resolving individual cities, buildings or people would require an extraordinary amount of resolving power. The farther away an object is, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish fine details on its surface.
Astronomers overcome similar limitations using techniques such as interferometry, combining observations from multiple telescopes to achieve much greater effective resolution. But resolving metre-scale details on Earth from a distance of one light-year would require an interferometric baseline on a truly colossal scale.
In other words, “bring a really powerful telescope” is not quite enough. We are talking about an engineering project that makes building the James Webb Space Telescope look like assembling a flat-pack bookshelf.
And then there is the small matter of getting there.
The Alcubierre warp-drive concept, proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, is a mathematical solution within general relativity that describes a hypothetical warp bubble. Space would contract ahead of the bubble and expand behind it, potentially allowing apparent faster-than-light travel without the spacecraft locally exceeding the speed of light.
That does not mean we can build one. The concept faces major unresolved physical and engineering problems, including exotic energy requirements and questions surrounding stability and causality.
But the observation part needs no warp drive at all.
If humans could somehow position an enormous observatory one light-year from Earth, the telescope would naturally receive ancient Earthlight. The bigger challenge is extracting enough information from those photons to produce a detailed picture.
So the idea is scientifically sound in principle: distance lets us see the past.
The universe has been doing this forever. Every time we look at a distant galaxy, we are seeing an earlier version of it.
The cheeky part is that, with sufficiently ridiculous technology, Earth itself could become an archaeological object viewed from space — one year behind schedule.
Sources:
The Thisclaimer logo blends a classic warning symbol with a brain icon to represent critical thinking, curiosity, and thoughtful disclaimers #alcubierreDrive #Astronomy #Earth #lightYear #NASA #philosophy #relativity #science #space #spirit #telescopes #timeTravel #Universe #universeFacts #warpDrive
NASA — https://science.nasa.gov/universe/what-is-a-light-year/
NASA Science — https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/how-does-webb-see-back-in-time/
Alcubierre, M. — https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0009013
European Southern Observatory — https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/technology/interferometry/
thisclaimer.com — https://thisclaimer.com -
I didn't set out to "replace my workflow with AI." I set out to answer a narrower, more honest question: which parts of my job are actually typing, and which parts are judgment I've been pretending were typing?
So I took my normal pipeline — plan, write, test, review, debug, ship — and moved each stage onto an agent, one at a time, for a few weeks. I kept whatever held and ripped out whatever didn't.
Here's the stage-by-stage result. No scorecard, no "I shipped 40 PRs" number — just the shape of what won and what quietly broke.
Stage 1: Planning — the agent is great at writing a plan, bad at having one
I expected planning to be the agent's weakest stage. It's half right.Hand an agent a vague ticket — "users are complaining checkout is slow" — and ask for a plan, and you get something that looks like a plan: numbered steps, files to touch, a rollback note. It reads well. It is also frequently a plan for the wrong problem, because the agent filled the ambiguity with the most statistically likely interpretation, not the true one.
What actually worked was inverting it. I stopped asking the agent to decide the plan and started asking it to draft the plan from a spec I'd already pinned down. The judgment — what problem are we even solving — stayed with me. The typing — turning that into acceptance criteria, edge cases, a file list — went to the agent, and it's genuinely faster than me at that.
The rule: an agent turns a decision into a document beautifully. It cannot make the decision for you — and its confident draft will hide that it didn't.
Stage 2: Writing code — won, on exactly the work you'd expect
This is the stage everyone pictures, and it's the least interesting result because it's the one that just works.The agent won clean on anything where the hard part was typing, not deciding:
- CRUD endpoints with a clear schema
- a migration with a written spec
- wiring a form to an API I'd already designed
- a mechanical refactor across 30 files — and crucially, it doesn't get bored on file 27, which is exactly where I introduce a typo
- dependency bumps and the follow-on fixes
It lost on anything where the code was the easy part and the decision was buried in it: "why is this column nullable," "should this be one service or two," "is this edge case real or theoretical." The agent will answer all three confidently and sometimes wrongly, and the code it writes on top of the wrong answer is clean, tested, and shippable-looking.
The rule: agents are fastest exactly where the code is downstream of a decision you already made. The danger is they'll happily make the decision too, and you can't see that in the diff.
Stage 3: Testing — this was the real surprise, and the real trap
Writing tests is high-typing, low-glory work, so I assumed it was pure upside. It mostly is — the agent wrote months of "we'll get to it later" tests with no ego and no counter-pitch. That part was a gift.But there's a trap underneath it that took me a week to see:
If the same agent writes the code and the tests, the tests pass — and they're worthless. They don't test whether the code is correct. They test whether the code does what the code does. The agent read its own implementation and wrote tests that encode its own assumptions, including the wrong ones. Green board, zero signal.
The fix was structural, not prompt-level: the test agent is a different agent, and it gets the spec, not the implementation. Now the tests encode what the thing is supposed to do, and when they disagree with the code, that disagreement is the whole point.
The rule: code and tests from the same agent agree with each other, not with reality. Separate the author from the examiner, or you're just asking the model to grade its own homework.
Stage 4: Review — where I learned the workflow didn't actually get shorter
Here's the stage I got wrong for the longest.I added a reviewer agent to read every diff before I did. It's good — it catches the mechanical stuff fast: an unhandled error path, a missing null check, a test that asserts nothing. For that class of bug it's a better first pass than tired-me at 6pm.
What it cannot do is the review that actually matters: is this change solving the right problem, and does it break something three files away that isn't in the diff? That's the exact failure mode the code agent produces — every line individually correct, the decision wrong, and nothing in the diff looks wrong because nothing in the diff is wrong locally.
So the reviewer agent triages; it doesn't absolve. The judgment review still lands on me. And that's when it clicked: I hadn't removed work from my week. I'd moved it. Less time typing code, far more time writing specs up front and reading diffs like a hostile stranger wrote them.
The rule: a second agent reviewing the first agent's work catches typos, not decisions. The judgment review is not delegable, and pretending it is, is how a clean diff with a wrong decision gets merged.
Stage 5: Debugging — won when the loop was closed, lost when it needed a hunch
Debugging split cleanly.When there's a closed feedback loop — a failing test, a stack trace, a reproducible error — the agent is excellent. It runs the test, reads the failure, forms a hypothesis, patches, re-runs. That loop is native to an agent with a terminal, and it'll grind through it faster and more patiently than I will.
When the bug needs a hunch — "it's slow but only in prod," "this only happens for users who signed up before the migration" — the agent flails. It needs the thing it doesn't have: the half-memory of a decision made eight months ago that never made it into the code. That's where a human who was there beats any amount of context window.
The rule: agents close loops; they don't form hunches. Give them the reproduction and they're great. Ask them to find the reproduction in a vague prod report and you're better off driving.
Stage 6: The boring glue — pure, unambiguous win
PR descriptions. Changelogs. Commit messages. Release notes. Backfilling docstrings. Writing the "why" comment I always skip.This is high-typing, low-judgment, and nobody's ego is attached to it. It is the least discussed stage and the one with the cleanest return. If you're going to put one agent in your workflow tomorrow, make it this one — zero risk, immediate time back, and it quietly makes everyone else's code more readable.
The rule: the safest, highest-ROI agent is the one writing the prose around your code, not the code.
The honest summary: the bottleneck moved, it didn't disappear
StageBeforeAfterDeciding what to buildsomemoreWriting the speclittlea lot moreTyping the codea lotlittleWriting testslittle (be honest)some — but reviewing themReviewing diffssomea lot moreThe boring gluealways skippeddone, automatically
If you chart my week before and after, the total didn't shrink much. What changed is where the time goes:
The agents genuinely won the typing. But every hour they gave me back on typing, they handed back as spec-writing and diff-reading — because those are the two places where their confident wrongness has to be caught by my judgment.That's not a complaint. It's the actual job now, and it's a better job. But it's a different one, and the people getting burned are the ones who think "the AI writes the code" means "the AI does the work." The code was never the work. It was the part that happened to look like the work.
What I'd actually tell you to do
- Start with the glue** (Stage 6). Zero risk, instant payoff, builds your trust in the tooling.
- Then the high-typing code** (Stage 2) — but only where you've already made the decision. Write the spec first, by hand.
- Split your test agent from your code agent** (Stage 3). This is the single highest-leverage structural choice in the whole setup.
- Keep the judgment review on a human.** Use a reviewer agent as a first pass, never as the last word.
- Read every diff like a stranger wrote it** — because one did, and it's a stranger that never gets tired and never says "I'm not sure about this part."
Disclosure: I build on xenition, a workspace assistant that builds and runs agents — so I ran a lot of this on our own agents against our own backlog. Read my "always keep a skeptic on the diff" stance as a builder's bias; I'd rather name it than hide it.
If you've moved part of your workflow onto agents: which stage held, and which one quietly burned you? I'm most interested in the stage you assumed was safe and wasn't.#ai #devops #discuss #webdev #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
I Replaced My Entire Dev Workflow With AI Agents — Here's What Actually Worked -
Everything I'd learnt about AWS so far was about AWS itself — EC2, S3, IAM. Ansible is the first tool I've touched that sits on top of servers and actually does work on them. Instead of logging into each server by hand and typing the same commands over and over, you write the steps down once and let Ansible run them for you, on as many servers as you want.
But before Ansible can do anything, it needs a way to get into your servers without you typing a password every single time. So that's where I started.
Setting the stage: two EC2s
I spun up two EC2 instances for this. One is the control node — this is where Ansible actually lives, and where I run all the commands from. The other is the target node, the machine that gets configured. Nothing fancy about either one, they're just regular EC2 instances. The interesting part is getting the first one to log into the second one without any password prompt.Logging into EC2: browser vs MobaXterm
Quick detour before the SSH key stuff, because I used both ways to get into these machines and it's worth knowing both.The lazy, no-setup way is straight from the AWS console. Open the EC2 page, select your instance, hit Connect, pick EC2 Instance Connect, and click Connect again. A terminal just opens right there in the browser tab — no
.pemfile needed, AWS handles the identity check quietly in the background. To leave, just typeexitor hitCtrl+D.The other way I used is MobaXterm, which is pretty much the go-to SSH client if you're on Windows. Open it, go to Session → SSH, type in the instance's public IP, and set the username (
ubuntufor Ubuntu boxes,ec2-userfor Amazon Linux). Then under Advanced SSH Settings, tick "Use private key" and point it at your.pemfile. Hit OK and you're in. Same deal to exit — just typeexit.One thing that trips people up on Linux/Mac if you're SSHing with the
.pemfile directly from a terminal instead of a GUI tool: SSH will flat-out refuse to use the key unless its permissions are locked down first.chmod 400 mykey.pem
ssh -i mykey.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>Making the SSH login passwordless
Here's the actual goal: get the control node to SSH into the target node without a password or a key prompt getting in the way. This has nothing to do with Ansible specifically — it's just how SSH key-based login normally works, Ansible is simply relying on it already being set up.First, on the control node, I generated a new key pair:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
ssh-keygenis just the tool,-t rsapicks the key type, and-b 4096sets how strong the key is. It'll ask where to save it (I just hit Enter for the default) and whether to set a passphrase — I left that blank, because the whole point is a login with zero typing involved.This gives you two files:
id_rsa, your private key (never shared, ever), andid_rsa.pub, your public key, which is the one you hand out to other machines so they recognize you.Getting that public key onto the target machine is the part that actually makes the login passwordless. The easy way:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ubuntu@<target-private-ip>
Or you can do it by hand, which honestly helped me understand what's going on better. Print the key with
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, copy the output, SSH into the target using its.pemfile (you still need that the first time), then openvim ~/.ssh/authorized_keyson the target and paste the key in on a new line. Pressito type,Esc, then:xto save and quit — same vim trick from my last post.After that, jump back to the control node and test it:
ssh ubuntu@<target-private-ip>
If that drops you straight into a shell with no prompt at all, you're done — passwordless SSH is working, and that's exactly what Ansible needs underneath.
Installing Ansible
Ansible only goes on the control node. The target machines don't need anything installed on them at all, which is kind of the whole appeal — it's "agentless," it just talks to servers over SSH and does its thing, no background process running on the other end.sudo apt update
sudo apt install ansible -yor, if you'd rather go through pip:
sudo apt install python3-pip -y
pip install ansibleCheck it worked with
ansible --version.Once it's in, the whole point is this: any time you need to set up or change something across a bunch of servers consistently — installing a package, copying a config file, restarting a service — you stop doing it by hand on each one and let a playbook do it everywhere at once.
Telling Ansible which servers exist: the inventory file
Ansible needs a list of the machines it's allowed to touch. That list is called an inventory, and it's about as simple as it sounds:nano inventory.ini
[targets]target1 ansible_host=<target-private-ip> ansible_user=ubuntuThat's just saying: there's a group called
targets, with one server in it, log in asubuntu. Test the connection with:ansible all -i inventory.ini -m ping
A reply like
"pong"back means Ansible can reach the server and talk to it fine.Writing my first playbook
A playbook is just a YAML file listing out the steps you want done — step 1, step 2, step 3, like a recipe. Mine installs and starts nginx on the target:---
- name: My first playbook
hosts: targets
become: yestasks:
- name: Update apt cache
apt:
update_cache: yes- name: Install nginx
apt:
name: nginx
state: present- name: Start nginx service
service:
name: nginx
state: startedhosts: targetssays which group from the inventory to run on.become: yesmeans run with sudo. Each task undertasks:just has a readable name and a module (apt,service) that's the actual thing getting done.Run it with:
ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini first_playbook.yml
Ansible connects over the passwordless SSH we set up, runs each step in order, and tells you exactly what changed on the way.
Why bother with any of this
Without it, setting up a server means SSHing in by hand and retyping the same update/install/configure/start sequence every single time — and it's easy to slip up when you're doing that across a dozen machines. Write the steps once as a playbook, and the same command works whether you're running it on one server or a hundred, with the same result every time.Things I made sure I could explain out loud (interview-style)
What is Ansible — one line: it automates configuring and managing servers using simple text files, over SSH, with nothing extra installed on the servers themselves.Why "agentless" — because nothing needs to run permanently on the target machines. Ansible connects over SSH, does the task, and disconnects. Tools like Puppet or Chef instead need an agent process running on every server they manage.
What idempotency means, and why Ansible cares — running the same playbook twice gives you the same end result without errors or duplicate changes. The "install nginx" task checks if it's already installed before doing anything, so running the playbook five times in a row is harmless.
Ad-hoc command vs playbook — an ad-hoc command is a single one-off instruction typed straight into the terminal, like that
pingtest earlier. A playbook is a saved file with multiple steps, meant to be reused.What's an inventory — just the list of servers (and groups of servers) Ansible is allowed to manage, plus details like IP and login user.
The thing that actually clicked for me today is that passwordless SSH isn't some Ansible feature — it's plain old SSH key setup that happens to already exist, and Ansible just leans on it. Once that login works smoothly by hand, Ansible is really just typing it for you, from a file instead of a keyboard.#ansible #automation #aws #devops #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Today I Learnt: Ansible — Passwordless SSH Between Two EC2s, and My First Playbook -
DATE: October 9, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Which cities dominated 2020 voter fraud talk? A city’s Black population was the best predictor
White Americans who hold racially resentful attitudes are particularly prone to believing claims of election fraud, especially when those allegations target predominantly Black communities. The authors argue that such claims give people who feel threatened by Black political power a way to reject election results they dislike while still professing support for democracy. The findings were published in Political Behavior.
To understand this reaction, social scientists often examine racial resentment. In political research, this concept does not simply refer to overt hatred; instead, it describes a subtle belief system that downplays systemic barriers faced by Black Americans and views minority political or economic gains as unearned. According to the social theories the authors draw on, when members of an advantaged group feel their social standing is slipping, they often look for ways to protect their position.
Following landmark political shifts, scholars began documenting how these racial attitudes influence trust in the voting process. For instance, a 2016 study showed that racial resentment was linked to suspicions of widespread election misconduct following the historic election of Barack Obama. Later work deepened this connection: a 2021 study found that racially resentful White Americans tend to become less satisfied with democracy when their preferred candidate loses an election.
Fraud allegations may also serve a particular purpose for dissatisfied voters. In a 2021 survey experiment, researchers found that exposure to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud lowered people’s confidence in the integrity of elections without reducing their support for democracy itself. These findings raised a question the new study set out to answer: whether fraud accusations carry a racial charge that makes them especially persuasive to resentful White voters.
To test this dynamic, a research team led by Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice and Ian Shapiro of Tennessee State University conducted three distinct investigations. The authors sought to understand how racial attitudes interact with claims of election malfeasance.
“The motivation for this study was an urge to understand whether and how racial considerations shaped people’s trust in the 2020 general election,” Shapiro told PsyPost. “I suspected that fraud narratives, with their focus on crime, provided a vehicle for some White Americans to perceive specific elections as corrupt while maintaining trust in a system that had traditionally benefited them.”
The authors first examined whether real-world public discussions of election fraud actually focused on Black communities. They analyzed approximately 2.7 million public posts published on Twitter in 2020 containing the phrase “voter fraud.” From that collection, the researchers isolated about 95,000 posts that mentioned American cities with at least 100,000 residents, comparing those mentions against local demographic data and election tallies.
The social media data showed that cities with larger Black populations appeared far more often in voter fraud conversations, a pattern driven by the period after the election; before Election Day, none of the city characteristics the researchers examined predicted how often a city was mentioned.
The 10 cities mentioned most often relative to their size, a list that included Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, had an average Black population share of about 36 percent, compared with about 16 percent for the large cities in the analysis and under 7 percent for U.S. municipalities overall. In statistical models, a city’s Black population share was the only reliable predictor of these mentions; how strongly a city voted for Joe Biden was not related to how often it came up.
“I think what surprised me most was how clearly racial composition mattered in predicting which places became targets of social media fraud narratives,” Shapiro said. “Partisanship and racial politics are closely linked, but the only predictor of how frequently a city was mentioned on social media was the Black share of the population. Not even Biden’s vote share was associated with fraud narratives, other things equal.”
“Prior to election night, narratives about fraud were all over the place. They were prevalent but lacked shape,” Shapiro explained. “On election night in 2020 and in the weeks after, attention narrowed to specific places that became focal points for fraud accusations. Those places were not random.”
Next, the researchers evaluated how these public narratives corresponded to shifts in individual attitudes over time. They examined data from roughly 4,300 White participants in the 2020 Cooperative Election Study who answered questions about election confidence both before and after Election Day. The authors tracked changes in confidence while controlling for conservative ideology, support for Donald Trump, age, gender, education, income, and Fox News viewership.
Confidence in the election dropped sharply among White Trump supporters after Election Day, as is typical for voters whose candidate loses. But even after accounting for this pattern, along with ideology and the other factors, higher racial resentment was associated with an additional decline in confidence. This link held among Trump supporters, whereas resentment was not related to changes in election confidence among White supporters of Biden.
“Trump voters generally trusted the election less after it looked like he had lost. That’s normal,” Shapiro observed. “But confidence fell off a cliff among Trump supporters who scored higher in racial resentment, following the election and the accompanying focus on Black cities.”
To test whether racial cues directly cause people to believe fraud claims, the researchers conducted an online survey experiment in July 2024 with 1,500 White American adults. Participants read a mock news report describing either an apolitical story about a local restaurant, allegations of voter fraud in a fictional suburban city portrayed as largely White, or identical allegations in an “inner-city” described as predominantly Black. The stories included matching photographs of either White or Black election workers, voters, and local election administrators. After completing the questions, participants were debriefed and informed that the city was fictional and that election fraud is rare.
Across the entire sample, reading about fraud increased suspicion compared to reading about the restaurant, but participants overall did not view the Black city as more fraudulent than the White city. Important differences emerged, however, when examining specific subgroups. White Republicans who read about the predominantly Black city scored an average of 0.65 on a scale measuring belief in fraud, compared with 0.58 for Republicans who read about the White city, a gap of 0.07 points, or about 12 percent. This partisan comparison was not part of the authors’ preregistered analysis plan.
Personal levels of racial resentment also shaped how participants responded. Participants with higher resentment showed elevated suspicion of fraud even when assigned to read about the restaurant, and the fraud stories moved their beliefs considerably more than those of less resentful participants. Resentful participants also tended to find accusations more believable when they targeted the Black city, though this pattern was statistically reliable for only one of the resentment measures, and the authors describe the evidence as somewhat mixed. Fraud beliefs lined up more closely with resentment toward Black Americans than with White consciousness, a measure of attachment to one’s own racial group.
“The survey experiment confirms prior findings that just talking about fraud can substantially affect how much of it people think is happening,” Shapiro noted. “Despite fraud being so rare, words have power. And when those words are tied to tangible places for a political purpose, the effects can be substantial.”
These findings align with a study covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that White Americans who felt their racial group faced widespread mistreatment were consistently more skeptical of election fairness from 2012 to 2020. That earlier research measured perceived discrimination against White Americans rather than resentment toward Black Americans. It also found that strong White identity without a sense of grievance went along with greater faith in elections, which is broadly consistent with the new study’s finding that White consciousness tracked fraud beliefs less closely than resentment.
The results also support research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which indicated that higher levels of racial resentment are tied to broader anti-democratic views among White Americans. Morris and Shapiro argue that skepticism about ballot integrity often intersects with underlying anxieties regarding multiracial governance.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The social media analysis relied on public posts from Twitter, which may not capture the complete range of political discussion experienced by ordinary citizens offline. In addition, the researchers could not distinguish between posts promoting fraud claims and those seeking to debunk them, and some messages could have been amplified by automated accounts or foreign entities rather than regular voters.
Shapiro also emphasized that the investigation centered on how narratives are received rather than how political leaders strategize behind closed doors. “The data we use can’t really tell us about the motivations behind elite-driven narratives,” he told PsyPost. “The paper didn’t directly show people Trump’s social media posts or anything like that.”
“However, it’s not a stretch to suspect that the narratives we see spreading on social media took some structure and encouragement from elites,” Shapiro added. “A lot of agenda setting and attitude formation happens from the top down. This study is more about where and among whom these racial narratives find, excuse me for this, fertile ground.”
Shapiro is now examining how these rhetoric-driven policies affect the electorate. “I’m looking into how restrictive laws passed in response to these narratives turn people off from voting,” he explained. “I’m interested in what psychological mechanisms drive that process for different people.”
Reflecting on the democratic stakes, Shapiro stressed the broader danger these narratives pose to public trust. “This study is important because we’re in an era when people are cynical about all sorts of institutions, including elections,” he remarked. “But things like losers’ consent—accepting election results even when your side loses—and the belief that elections are a viable way to hold leaders accountable are at the heart of democratic functioning. Politically convenient narratives about crime and race threaten these pillars of democratic life.”
The study, “On Fertile Ground: How Racial Resentment Primes White Americans To Believe Fraud Accusations,” was authored by Kevin T. Morris and Ian Shapiro.
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