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silveradeptGreetings. Let's begin with the free electronic version of the update The End to Policing.
The College Board, administrators of the Advanced Placement curricula and tests that generally allow high school students to take coursework with the rigor of university courses in exchange for the possibility of having that coursework accepted for university credit, folded to the conservative demands that their African American Studies AP course stop talking about African American studies, with reading and concepts related to intersectionality and critical race theory struck from the revised curricula. If the AP course is supposed to have the rigor of a university course, it must include the key concepts and things the students will have to grapple with and understand.
A thread where the answer to the question "Why is something deeply screwed up in the United States where it seems fine elsewhere?" is "Racism." across several different deeply screwed up things of the U.S.
Viola Davis is the newest EGOT, having won an Emmy for How to Get Away With Murder, a Grammy for Finding Me, an Oscar for Fences, and two Tony Awards for King Hedley II and Fences. Congratulations! In addition to the EGOT completed at this year's Grammy Awards, Beyoncé took over the new record for Grammy wins with 32.
Sarah Michelle Gellar on coming back to on-screen acting, on raising children, one of whom seems very interested to get on camera herself, and a lot on trying to make a better working environment for other stars and getting taken seriously for once. Because she's actually got the clout now, rather than trying to do the same on a set where certain people refused to respect her and her co-stars.
(I also find it a bit tonally weird that the article is talking about how she's stayed out of the spotlight and is trying to be a mother and now eventually getting back in and there are these glamour and fashion shots interspersed throughout.)
Remember that saying about the differing fears of men and women? Now, in addition to worrying about being killed, women might have to worry about being sued for not wanting to be an intimate partner.
On the question of whether to engage in compensated dating, the "sugar" lifestyle, or to embrace the title of being a sex worker.
Gillian Anderson announces that, for a book to be published, she's interested in receiving anonymous submissions of women talking about their fantasies, and she talks about a book from the 1970s that was the catalyst for this project, to do it again for the 2020s, with all of the additional everything that the fifty years have done to change our opinions about fantasy and what our fantasies are. Which I'm sticking next to a set of lesbian movies available on a free streaming service to point out that many of the movies on the list are described as bad and terrible, which means we have more work to do to make more good and mediocre movies. (Also, the screenshots there showcase that most of those movies have white people cast as the lesbians.)
Speaking of desires, a study that tries to at least partially answer the question of whether men and women really have different kinds of sex drives, and concludes that it's far more likely that men are equally as variable in their sex drive than they are given credit for. Among other things. It's an interesting study.
Finland has a new gender recognition law that no longer requires a trans person be infertile to receive proper recognition.
A review of Supergiant Games' Hades, with an eye toward how much it hews to the known stories of the gods and how much it interrogates white Western culture's beliefs about them.
An interview with Ray Gibson, a Black trans man, about growing up trans in an era that didn't have the terminology or the open-ness of the current era to be able to talk about it. And an interview with Donald Bell, a Black gay man of the Stonewall generation, activism, and Black Chicago as a progressive place.
The State of New York intends to start providing more housing specifically for older queer people to have community together. Because, after all, when you've made it to elder-hood, it's nice to have other elders around who get it.
Activist Alice Wong on the past and the future, on being a cyborg and the present that rushes as fast as possible to go back to what was, rather than having embraced what is.
The limitations and differences between not feeling like you're living up to (often unrealistic) expectations and trying to forge your way in a world that actively discounts you. Because most people who have been told "you'll never make it" don't have feelings of everyone expecting them to perform effortlessly, knowledgeably, and flawlessly.
The Effective Altruism segments that are using it for their own personal fantasy lives, and the organization that's not reining in the bad behavior. Such that those "cult" accusations are really starting to shape up like the stereotype. And that you get situations where people are using their beliefs as a shield against accusations that they're behaving badly. (Stares in librarian.)
The International Olympic Committee continues to enforce sanctions against the NOCs of the Russian Federation and Belarus, and bars any athletes from competing under the national flags of either of those nations for their continued aggression against Ukraine. Athletes may compete as neutral entities provided they have no doping issues and that they haven't actively supported the war against Ukraine.
A summary of the Robodebt scandal in Australia, and how many people were involved, were aware of its illegality, but did not choose to exercise their power to stop it, especially the people who really could have stopped it.
In a society that invests a lot in trying to rehabilitate rather than incarcerate, prisons are being reworked into other kinds of venues. Which is fantastic, and the US would need a lot of cultural change to be able to start having empty prisons to need to rework. Rikers Island, which is already required to close within the next few years, could become an energy generation space.
Representing an African goddess with the blackness she's almost certainly always had.
Spending significant money to try and revive the extinct dodo, which in addition to several other practical concerns that probably haven't been considered, seems like misplaced priorities and that the money could be used to try and preserve current species,
On the matter of the still-here SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, The US Food and Drug Administration is upset that Moderna withheld data about the effectiveness of their bivalent booster, and while they say it wouldn't have changed the vote to authorize, I think they're right to be upset about it, because withheld data shakes trust in the entire situation, and we already have enough people who disbelieve in the effectiveness or the necessity of vaccination and treatment.
In technology, using electric currents to make taste buds detect subtle flavors more effectively.
On the necessity of choosing tools suitable for purpose when building community, and why Discord may not be a suitable tool for purpose for certain communities.
On the ways in which being under constant surveillance makes people more willing to use other people as NPCs in their "content".
Successful decryption of ciphered letters sent by Mary, Queen of Scots, using a combination of computerized and human analysis to figure out the cipher and compare it to known cleartext items. Which also meant working with the anti-tampering measures collectively known as "letterlocking" present in the material, as well.
Speaking of OPSEC, when following through with a data dump of therapy notes from a practice that was being ransomed, the person allegedly responsible included significant amounts of their own person data, making it easier for authorities to identify and then arrest and charge the person.
Yet more reasons to install and use ad-blockers and Pi-Holes and other such things - malware purveyors are taking out ads so they can get to the top of Google searches, in the "Ad" section, so that people will think of them, instead of the official sites, as the place to get software suites. Which are infected with sophisticated malware that disguises itself and where its command and control servers are.
On matters of learning algorithms sold as artificial intelligence, never underestimate the creativity of a human when it comes to fooling a rule-following machine, or: Metal Gear Solid techniques fool an "AI"-backed monitoring system. Which shouldn't be near as much as surprise, given that chatbots have problems with even basic knowledge, because, well, they're not trained to give answers, they're trained to predict what word would make the most sense in the sentence next at that point. Or they're supposed to always generate novel images, but we find that novel to a machine might be obviously the same as a training image (maybe with some filters) to a human. Or code that looks similar to code that's been explicitly excluded from the training data sets or that has had its licensing requirements stripped from it.
(Unsurprisingly, there are lawsuits about how the training data for these learning models is acquired and used. Including ones about how the requirements of the open-source licenses were not followed by the ingesting entity.
Where text-generation models could get things going is if the simulation were paired with relevant data, you could create a bot that can orchestrate a mass influence campaign against specific strategic targets to get your political way.
The Apple Computer Corporation lost a patent infringement suit brought by Masimo, who claimed the Apple Watch technology measuring blood oxygen level was stolen from Masimo technology.
Using silicone skins to shape UV-cured resins in microgravity to construct objects that Earth standard gravity would prevent, and then sending them down to Earth standard gravity to see if they hold up.
Using satellite technology to send SOS signals when regular cellular phone towers are sparse or nonexistent.
The shiny new drugs advertised on U.S. television are often "of low benefit" and sometimes less effective than the older, cheaper stuff. But someone has to get their money back in some way, and advertising to people who don't know where to find the studies, much less how to read them, is the way to do it in our world.
Last out, Whether spiritually or mundanely, if there is something you want to do, start now. Which also points out that it takes time to get good at things, and therefore you have to be willing to do things poorly instead of waiting for perfectly, and that a lot of ideas people have about when something is working are based on impossible ideas of perfection. I do struggle with perfection, and with spending time being bad at something, because there's a lot of pressures, self-inflicted and otherwise, in my life that say I can't mess up, I can't be human, or it's catastrophes all the way down. It's not, it won't be, but part of the work is working through the fears and the issues that have a grounding in experience and finding the way to get them to believe it, rather than just saying it and saying that it's a logical conclusion. (Another part of it is being deliberate about time. VAST makes time not very concrete, so it's easy to want to do things that will take twenty-nine hours in the space of ten without really wanting to have to choose among them.)
That said, doing things badly and getting started on things and building momentum is not something that has to happen publicly, if you don't want it to happen publicly. Having a place and time to be private about something is a reasonable request. And we need to talk about failure, and admit that failure happens, and that we have failures, even with our successes. And that expanding out into new things means risking failure. Which happens. Although, at least in my chosen profession, there's risk-aversion to things that might fail because they might be seen as wasting money by an audience that's always going to be hostile. We could try some things, but that might mean failing.
And if what you are seeing is people with organization of their house that makes my eye twitch that I might get an earful for putting a thing out of place, I can see why someone might not want to start. (Also, the article takes a while to get to it, but I do appreciate that they talk about the gendered-ness of organization and cleaning.)
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
The College Board, administrators of the Advanced Placement curricula and tests that generally allow high school students to take coursework with the rigor of university courses in exchange for the possibility of having that coursework accepted for university credit, folded to the conservative demands that their African American Studies AP course stop talking about African American studies, with reading and concepts related to intersectionality and critical race theory struck from the revised curricula. If the AP course is supposed to have the rigor of a university course, it must include the key concepts and things the students will have to grapple with and understand.
A thread where the answer to the question "Why is something deeply screwed up in the United States where it seems fine elsewhere?" is "Racism." across several different deeply screwed up things of the U.S.
Viola Davis is the newest EGOT, having won an Emmy for How to Get Away With Murder, a Grammy for Finding Me, an Oscar for Fences, and two Tony Awards for King Hedley II and Fences. Congratulations! In addition to the EGOT completed at this year's Grammy Awards, Beyoncé took over the new record for Grammy wins with 32.
Sarah Michelle Gellar on coming back to on-screen acting, on raising children, one of whom seems very interested to get on camera herself, and a lot on trying to make a better working environment for other stars and getting taken seriously for once. Because she's actually got the clout now, rather than trying to do the same on a set where certain people refused to respect her and her co-stars.
(I also find it a bit tonally weird that the article is talking about how she's stayed out of the spotlight and is trying to be a mother and now eventually getting back in and there are these glamour and fashion shots interspersed throughout.)
Remember that saying about the differing fears of men and women? Now, in addition to worrying about being killed, women might have to worry about being sued for not wanting to be an intimate partner.
On the question of whether to engage in compensated dating, the "sugar" lifestyle, or to embrace the title of being a sex worker.
Gillian Anderson announces that, for a book to be published, she's interested in receiving anonymous submissions of women talking about their fantasies, and she talks about a book from the 1970s that was the catalyst for this project, to do it again for the 2020s, with all of the additional everything that the fifty years have done to change our opinions about fantasy and what our fantasies are. Which I'm sticking next to a set of lesbian movies available on a free streaming service to point out that many of the movies on the list are described as bad and terrible, which means we have more work to do to make more good and mediocre movies. (Also, the screenshots there showcase that most of those movies have white people cast as the lesbians.)
Speaking of desires, a study that tries to at least partially answer the question of whether men and women really have different kinds of sex drives, and concludes that it's far more likely that men are equally as variable in their sex drive than they are given credit for. Among other things. It's an interesting study.
Finland has a new gender recognition law that no longer requires a trans person be infertile to receive proper recognition.
A review of Supergiant Games' Hades, with an eye toward how much it hews to the known stories of the gods and how much it interrogates white Western culture's beliefs about them.
An interview with Ray Gibson, a Black trans man, about growing up trans in an era that didn't have the terminology or the open-ness of the current era to be able to talk about it. And an interview with Donald Bell, a Black gay man of the Stonewall generation, activism, and Black Chicago as a progressive place.
The State of New York intends to start providing more housing specifically for older queer people to have community together. Because, after all, when you've made it to elder-hood, it's nice to have other elders around who get it.
Activist Alice Wong on the past and the future, on being a cyborg and the present that rushes as fast as possible to go back to what was, rather than having embraced what is.
The limitations and differences between not feeling like you're living up to (often unrealistic) expectations and trying to forge your way in a world that actively discounts you. Because most people who have been told "you'll never make it" don't have feelings of everyone expecting them to perform effortlessly, knowledgeably, and flawlessly.
The Effective Altruism segments that are using it for their own personal fantasy lives, and the organization that's not reining in the bad behavior. Such that those "cult" accusations are really starting to shape up like the stereotype. And that you get situations where people are using their beliefs as a shield against accusations that they're behaving badly. (Stares in librarian.)
The International Olympic Committee continues to enforce sanctions against the NOCs of the Russian Federation and Belarus, and bars any athletes from competing under the national flags of either of those nations for their continued aggression against Ukraine. Athletes may compete as neutral entities provided they have no doping issues and that they haven't actively supported the war against Ukraine.
A summary of the Robodebt scandal in Australia, and how many people were involved, were aware of its illegality, but did not choose to exercise their power to stop it, especially the people who really could have stopped it.
In a society that invests a lot in trying to rehabilitate rather than incarcerate, prisons are being reworked into other kinds of venues. Which is fantastic, and the US would need a lot of cultural change to be able to start having empty prisons to need to rework. Rikers Island, which is already required to close within the next few years, could become an energy generation space.
Representing an African goddess with the blackness she's almost certainly always had.
Spending significant money to try and revive the extinct dodo, which in addition to several other practical concerns that probably haven't been considered, seems like misplaced priorities and that the money could be used to try and preserve current species,
On the matter of the still-here SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, The US Food and Drug Administration is upset that Moderna withheld data about the effectiveness of their bivalent booster, and while they say it wouldn't have changed the vote to authorize, I think they're right to be upset about it, because withheld data shakes trust in the entire situation, and we already have enough people who disbelieve in the effectiveness or the necessity of vaccination and treatment.
In technology, using electric currents to make taste buds detect subtle flavors more effectively.
On the necessity of choosing tools suitable for purpose when building community, and why Discord may not be a suitable tool for purpose for certain communities.
On the ways in which being under constant surveillance makes people more willing to use other people as NPCs in their "content".
Successful decryption of ciphered letters sent by Mary, Queen of Scots, using a combination of computerized and human analysis to figure out the cipher and compare it to known cleartext items. Which also meant working with the anti-tampering measures collectively known as "letterlocking" present in the material, as well.
Speaking of OPSEC, when following through with a data dump of therapy notes from a practice that was being ransomed, the person allegedly responsible included significant amounts of their own person data, making it easier for authorities to identify and then arrest and charge the person.
Yet more reasons to install and use ad-blockers and Pi-Holes and other such things - malware purveyors are taking out ads so they can get to the top of Google searches, in the "Ad" section, so that people will think of them, instead of the official sites, as the place to get software suites. Which are infected with sophisticated malware that disguises itself and where its command and control servers are.
On matters of learning algorithms sold as artificial intelligence, never underestimate the creativity of a human when it comes to fooling a rule-following machine, or: Metal Gear Solid techniques fool an "AI"-backed monitoring system. Which shouldn't be near as much as surprise, given that chatbots have problems with even basic knowledge, because, well, they're not trained to give answers, they're trained to predict what word would make the most sense in the sentence next at that point. Or they're supposed to always generate novel images, but we find that novel to a machine might be obviously the same as a training image (maybe with some filters) to a human. Or code that looks similar to code that's been explicitly excluded from the training data sets or that has had its licensing requirements stripped from it.
(Unsurprisingly, there are lawsuits about how the training data for these learning models is acquired and used. Including ones about how the requirements of the open-source licenses were not followed by the ingesting entity.
Where text-generation models could get things going is if the simulation were paired with relevant data, you could create a bot that can orchestrate a mass influence campaign against specific strategic targets to get your political way.
The Apple Computer Corporation lost a patent infringement suit brought by Masimo, who claimed the Apple Watch technology measuring blood oxygen level was stolen from Masimo technology.
Using silicone skins to shape UV-cured resins in microgravity to construct objects that Earth standard gravity would prevent, and then sending them down to Earth standard gravity to see if they hold up.
Using satellite technology to send SOS signals when regular cellular phone towers are sparse or nonexistent.
The shiny new drugs advertised on U.S. television are often "of low benefit" and sometimes less effective than the older, cheaper stuff. But someone has to get their money back in some way, and advertising to people who don't know where to find the studies, much less how to read them, is the way to do it in our world.
Last out, Whether spiritually or mundanely, if there is something you want to do, start now. Which also points out that it takes time to get good at things, and therefore you have to be willing to do things poorly instead of waiting for perfectly, and that a lot of ideas people have about when something is working are based on impossible ideas of perfection. I do struggle with perfection, and with spending time being bad at something, because there's a lot of pressures, self-inflicted and otherwise, in my life that say I can't mess up, I can't be human, or it's catastrophes all the way down. It's not, it won't be, but part of the work is working through the fears and the issues that have a grounding in experience and finding the way to get them to believe it, rather than just saying it and saying that it's a logical conclusion. (Another part of it is being deliberate about time. VAST makes time not very concrete, so it's easy to want to do things that will take twenty-nine hours in the space of ten without really wanting to have to choose among them.)
That said, doing things badly and getting started on things and building momentum is not something that has to happen publicly, if you don't want it to happen publicly. Having a place and time to be private about something is a reasonable request. And we need to talk about failure, and admit that failure happens, and that we have failures, even with our successes. And that expanding out into new things means risking failure. Which happens. Although, at least in my chosen profession, there's risk-aversion to things that might fail because they might be seen as wasting money by an audience that's always going to be hostile. We could try some things, but that might mean failing.
And if what you are seeing is people with organization of their house that makes my eye twitch that I might get an earful for putting a thing out of place, I can see why someone might not want to start. (Also, the article takes a while to get to it, but I do appreciate that they talk about the gendered-ness of organization and cleaning.)
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2023-02-17 10:07 am (UTC)https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-64644615
no subject
Date: 2023-02-17 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-17 05:40 pm (UTC)"Start now" is a good reminder.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-17 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-17 09:56 pm (UTC)There's absolutely nothing wrong with the process being private. And as you point out, as surveillance becomes more and more pervasive, the privacy we do have is precious.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-18 12:33 am (UTC)Oh hey, Wayback has it. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Part 3 is about it being ok to not manage something every day, etc, but it works better with the first two parts because I've built up some concepts. None are particularly long. It's just my advice, but it's advice built on having a stop-and-start practice for about thirty years now, as a person with ADHD and various chronic illnesses.
no subject
Date: 2023-02-18 05:05 pm (UTC)Yes ...
Date: 2023-02-18 02:09 am (UTC)This is why, when I'm taking pictures in progress of a craft project, I include not only the mistakes but how I fix them. A couple of examples:
https://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/6069203.html
https://ysabetwordsmith.dreamwidth.org/13435312.html