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silveradeptLet us begin with some sad news: the passing of Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel corporation, and the coiner of Moore's Law about transistor density over time. Before Intel, Moore worked at Fairchild Semiconductor with one of the co-inventors of the transistor, just so we all know what kind of computing and electronics pioneer he was.
A grand jury in New York has returned indictments for the previous administrator on matters relating to campaign finance and business fraud, which very much seems to evoke the methods by which authorities were finally able to arrest and convict Al Capone of a crime they could imprison him for. There are still several other juries weighing evidence for other possible charges as well, but this investigation in New York will go forward. Or, perhaps, the time-honored adage about how it is not the crime, but the cover-up, that gets someone in trouble, since many of charges in this case are related to falsification of records and fraud. And, as one might expect, those who seek to curry favor with the previous administrator (or who hope for cover for their own malfeasance) have stepped up their attacks and are trying their best to make the whole thing primarily a political action, rather than, say, necessary actions for the continued enforcement of the rule of law.
An organized group of persons intent on forcing their religious views on all others are trying to hide their influence and desire that all states pass legislation criminalizing gender-affirming care. As with so many things, places that currently have given the theocrats power (or where the theocrats have suborned or taken over the process of government and elections) are acting as the warning for what they intend to do with legislative, executive, and judicial power when they receive it.
Targeting the most visible signs of a changing world and changing views is a standard reactionary conservative tactic, more concerned with the fear of losing hegemony and having to accept that they are not the unquestioned masters of all opinions, public and private than with trying to effectively find and prosecute people who are doing harm to children. (If they were actually concerned with it, a significant number of Christian denominations should be under the microscope because of how many pastors and youth leaders turn out to be the "groomers" they desperately want to find in drag performers and queer people.)
Instead, they make threats that they will use the law to prosecute people for stocking books they don't want to exist, or harass and bully a library for following its policies (and the First Amendment), including stochastic terrorism threats, to the point where the library director is scapegoated and fired in the hopes that it will appease the crowd.
(The neutrality narrative will not save libraries. Nor, as you can see, will trying to remain above the fray, when the fray has been calculated specifically to be super-effective against those historical techniques. And because they often believe they can do better by offering specifically sectarian services. And those in charge aren't shy about wielding their power against who they see as people not getting with their program - Missouri's House, for example, chose to include no money for public and school libraries in their budget because private organizations are suing them over their overbroad laws that demand anyone talking about something they don't like, like queerness, be charged and fined or jailed.)
They are true believers, although they recognize that saying the quiet parts out loud makes them look dangerous, so they always have excuses conveniently available, like how it was about notification, rather than nudity, that caused such an uproar about viewing a famous sculptural nude.
We need a new gender paradigm, because the current one is still rooted in the idea that there is a singular true gender for everyone and the gender journey is about finding that. Which is not all that far away from the idea that gender is immutably tied to biological sex, honestly. Most people have a gender they strongly identify with on any given day, but to mistake a day for a lifetime is a bad idea. And our narratives (and laws) are constructed around the idea that someone who wants to transition has to demonstrate they really, really want to do it, and they want to do it in some way that alters their presentation in a physical way. As opposed to "today, perhaps, I am a girl, tomorrow I will be a boy, and on Friday, I refuse to have a gender."
The hidden curriculum of many professions works to exclude and make those who attain the profession all come from the same background and have the same views, often because the hidden curriculum demands a certain amount of power, resources, and privilege be available to someone before they can succeed in getting the training for, and work in, the profession. The linked item is talking about engineering, but the idea applies much more broadly than just to engineers. (Stares in librarian.)
Formal structures to report harassment and policies about what is and isn't acceptable are one set of tools, but to deal with culture and to get behavior to change, there needs to be more than just formal processes in place. And often, as it turns out, if there's someone who can interrupt the thing when it happens, or who can have an informal conversation that amounts to "Dude, not cool," or if conduct is part of the tenure review process, behavior and the culture can move toward change by aligning goals and outcomes and providing accountability.
A police officer pulled someone over for the ostensible purpose of livestreaming the traffic stop on TikTok, and in the process of doing so, exposed the personally identifiable information of the person he pulled over to everyone who was watching the stream. The punishment he received so far is two days of suspension.
The ubiquity of harassment on public transport of women often results in the use of seemingly-innocent weapons when the victims fight back, and that fighting-back often happens in the absence of being taken seriously when reporting or because the culture around is ready to blame the victim and excuse the harasser.
After being pulled from the DirecTV market, Newsmax has returned, thanks to pressure from Republican lawmakers who want to make sure as many sources of disinformation and malice stay on the air and distributed to as many households as possible.
The potential appeal of the three-tatami apartment, from someone who spent a single night in one, and from those who use them as ways of getting a foothold in a place, or as crash space with minimal possessions, or as inexpensive options for living very close to trendy places or their work or schoolplaces.
The historian in me thinks there's a missed trick when talking about how the non-aristocratic women of the 400-1500s CE were doing many of the same jobs as the men of the time and framing it as more egalitarian and equal, given how many of those women were doing such work because the alternative was starvation, and these women were not generally being sought for their opinions or to become political candidates or otherwise be able to influence the society and the situations they were in. These were not people whose opinions mattered, according to the rich and politically powerful, so of course vulgar people would do vulgar things.
A set of apartments designed by the residents of the previous slums has different decisions made about its design and construction than more standard spaces. Things that foster community and togetherness and allow for things like having a space for a stall to sell off of your front door, or to see and talk to the neighbors on one floor up or down.
JPMorgan Chase believed they had bags of nickel. Turns out they were bags of stone, which gives us the rare opportunity to say that Ea-nāṣir was at least able to deliver the promised goods, if at a lower quality than what was requested. The abundance of plastics from fishing nets means the island of Trindade's rocks are starting to use it to hold themselves together. The water reservoirs of California have risen significantly because of the strong out-of-season storms in the area, which is a perverse case of "bad news, good news," the progress of a river revegetation with native plants after the dams were removed, the presences of beavers where they were not expected to be, the presence of a skunk in a place is was not wanted, the rescue and adoption of dogs that were on a plane that crashed into a golf course, the history of the pineapple and its inextricable association with Caribbean peoples, colonization, and "the exotic", and recording the sounds of plants, which happen at frequencies above human hearing ranges.
In technology, night train services are reviving in Europe, as a less carbonizing way of travel, and with sleeper services, saving the cost of lodging for a night, using it as a travel space. A more developed rail service in the United States would be lovely, of course. Especially if there were high-speed and overnight options that could get you to other places reasonably quickly.
Using the waste heat of data center computing to heat swimming pools, which is a good and novel way of shedding the waste heat in such a way that it can be put to use, but also says something about the use of data centers, servers, and the like, where there's enough demand that the waste heat from such things can be viably packaged and used for other purposes. Which we put next to data centers straining the electrical grids of the places they are located in. The story is that an ammunition manufacturer isn't able to do its usual processes because a TikTok data center is sucking up the spare capacity, but I suspect this is not a unique situation by any means.
USB drives mailed to Ecuadorian journalists were rigged with explosives so they would detonate when plugged into computers. Yet another reason not to plug suspicious USB drives into your computers, in addition to all the potential viruses and other malware that could be on the drive itself.
Exploiting a bug in Bitcoin ATM administration software, hackers were able to drain about 1.5 million USD's worth of Bitcoin from wallets linked to the crypto ATMs. And those losses, unlike FDIC-insured deposits or NCUA deposits, are not recoverable through deposit insurance because cryptocurrencies are unregulated and proudly so.
Tesla car systems proved insufficient against security researcher teams, who used their time at the Pwn2Own competition to demonstrate how thy could hack both the charging and the infotainment systems of a Tesla car to disable it or maliciously control it, earning themselves a car and significant cash bounties. The rest of us continue to look at Teslas and wonder whether they're actually worth the price point.
Because everyone assumes they are already technological wizards who know everything, some young people are coming into office settings and having to learn how to use the complex machines that nobody has taught them how to use. And because they feel that expectation of wizardry, young workers often don't ask for help for learning how to do it, either.
Major insulin manufacturers have capped their prices or strongly reduced them, following calls from President Biden to do so. Hooray for life-saving materials being more affordable, whether with insurance or without.
It's worth opting out from your mobile carrier's data-sharing plans, as often and repeatedly as necessary, given how not-great they are about being able to safeguard the data they collect.
The UK government (and others) are setting up fake sites advertising Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) services, then collecting and passing along the data of those who sign up to their law enforcement agencies around cybercrime. I mean, one of the things about the Internet is that nobody knows you're a dog. Or a government agent.
It's entirely possible there's a lot more water on Luna than previously thought, but it will take heating things to boiling before the water can be extracted and collected. One wonders about the energy efficiency of such things.
Last for tonight, the value of a lost tooth has increased significantly from when grownups were getting tooth money.
And very good reasons to prevent the adding of your works to AO3 collections, unless you're me who participates in exchanges that put things in collections...because it's still possible for someone to ad your works to a collection, then un-reveal the collection so your work gets hidden from anyone who wants to see it, because someone else decided your work deserved to be hidden. Yeah. The only way to stop this from happening is to refuse to allow your works to be added to collections and to revoke any permissions you have granted. So, I guess I trust most exchange admins that they're not going to revert all of their collections. It's still a good idea to have backups, though.
There is a process in place now where works holders are notified that their work has been un-revealed, but that doesn't help anyone who's orphaned their works, left the Web because of reasons (or Reasons), or otherwise isn't going to receive the notification or be able to do something about it.
In the absence of an easily-implementable technological solution that will not, apparently, be implemented, the other solution is a social one, where, as fen, we agree that we're not going to do petty shit like adding a work to a collection and then unrevealing it because we hate the work so much that we don't want anyone else to see it. You know, "ship and let ship," and "don't like? Don't read."
Given the current environment of book bans and "parental rights" and so many people believing they should have the individual power to dictate what everyone else is allowed to read and view, I don't have much hope that the social solution is going to get traction and widespread acceptance any time soon.
(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 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.)
A grand jury in New York has returned indictments for the previous administrator on matters relating to campaign finance and business fraud, which very much seems to evoke the methods by which authorities were finally able to arrest and convict Al Capone of a crime they could imprison him for. There are still several other juries weighing evidence for other possible charges as well, but this investigation in New York will go forward. Or, perhaps, the time-honored adage about how it is not the crime, but the cover-up, that gets someone in trouble, since many of charges in this case are related to falsification of records and fraud. And, as one might expect, those who seek to curry favor with the previous administrator (or who hope for cover for their own malfeasance) have stepped up their attacks and are trying their best to make the whole thing primarily a political action, rather than, say, necessary actions for the continued enforcement of the rule of law.
An organized group of persons intent on forcing their religious views on all others are trying to hide their influence and desire that all states pass legislation criminalizing gender-affirming care. As with so many things, places that currently have given the theocrats power (or where the theocrats have suborned or taken over the process of government and elections) are acting as the warning for what they intend to do with legislative, executive, and judicial power when they receive it.
Targeting the most visible signs of a changing world and changing views is a standard reactionary conservative tactic, more concerned with the fear of losing hegemony and having to accept that they are not the unquestioned masters of all opinions, public and private than with trying to effectively find and prosecute people who are doing harm to children. (If they were actually concerned with it, a significant number of Christian denominations should be under the microscope because of how many pastors and youth leaders turn out to be the "groomers" they desperately want to find in drag performers and queer people.)
Instead, they make threats that they will use the law to prosecute people for stocking books they don't want to exist, or harass and bully a library for following its policies (and the First Amendment), including stochastic terrorism threats, to the point where the library director is scapegoated and fired in the hopes that it will appease the crowd.
(The neutrality narrative will not save libraries. Nor, as you can see, will trying to remain above the fray, when the fray has been calculated specifically to be super-effective against those historical techniques. And because they often believe they can do better by offering specifically sectarian services. And those in charge aren't shy about wielding their power against who they see as people not getting with their program - Missouri's House, for example, chose to include no money for public and school libraries in their budget because private organizations are suing them over their overbroad laws that demand anyone talking about something they don't like, like queerness, be charged and fined or jailed.)
They are true believers, although they recognize that saying the quiet parts out loud makes them look dangerous, so they always have excuses conveniently available, like how it was about notification, rather than nudity, that caused such an uproar about viewing a famous sculptural nude.
We need a new gender paradigm, because the current one is still rooted in the idea that there is a singular true gender for everyone and the gender journey is about finding that. Which is not all that far away from the idea that gender is immutably tied to biological sex, honestly. Most people have a gender they strongly identify with on any given day, but to mistake a day for a lifetime is a bad idea. And our narratives (and laws) are constructed around the idea that someone who wants to transition has to demonstrate they really, really want to do it, and they want to do it in some way that alters their presentation in a physical way. As opposed to "today, perhaps, I am a girl, tomorrow I will be a boy, and on Friday, I refuse to have a gender."
The hidden curriculum of many professions works to exclude and make those who attain the profession all come from the same background and have the same views, often because the hidden curriculum demands a certain amount of power, resources, and privilege be available to someone before they can succeed in getting the training for, and work in, the profession. The linked item is talking about engineering, but the idea applies much more broadly than just to engineers. (Stares in librarian.)
Formal structures to report harassment and policies about what is and isn't acceptable are one set of tools, but to deal with culture and to get behavior to change, there needs to be more than just formal processes in place. And often, as it turns out, if there's someone who can interrupt the thing when it happens, or who can have an informal conversation that amounts to "Dude, not cool," or if conduct is part of the tenure review process, behavior and the culture can move toward change by aligning goals and outcomes and providing accountability.
A police officer pulled someone over for the ostensible purpose of livestreaming the traffic stop on TikTok, and in the process of doing so, exposed the personally identifiable information of the person he pulled over to everyone who was watching the stream. The punishment he received so far is two days of suspension.
The ubiquity of harassment on public transport of women often results in the use of seemingly-innocent weapons when the victims fight back, and that fighting-back often happens in the absence of being taken seriously when reporting or because the culture around is ready to blame the victim and excuse the harasser.
After being pulled from the DirecTV market, Newsmax has returned, thanks to pressure from Republican lawmakers who want to make sure as many sources of disinformation and malice stay on the air and distributed to as many households as possible.
The potential appeal of the three-tatami apartment, from someone who spent a single night in one, and from those who use them as ways of getting a foothold in a place, or as crash space with minimal possessions, or as inexpensive options for living very close to trendy places or their work or schoolplaces.
The historian in me thinks there's a missed trick when talking about how the non-aristocratic women of the 400-1500s CE were doing many of the same jobs as the men of the time and framing it as more egalitarian and equal, given how many of those women were doing such work because the alternative was starvation, and these women were not generally being sought for their opinions or to become political candidates or otherwise be able to influence the society and the situations they were in. These were not people whose opinions mattered, according to the rich and politically powerful, so of course vulgar people would do vulgar things.
A set of apartments designed by the residents of the previous slums has different decisions made about its design and construction than more standard spaces. Things that foster community and togetherness and allow for things like having a space for a stall to sell off of your front door, or to see and talk to the neighbors on one floor up or down.
JPMorgan Chase believed they had bags of nickel. Turns out they were bags of stone, which gives us the rare opportunity to say that Ea-nāṣir was at least able to deliver the promised goods, if at a lower quality than what was requested. The abundance of plastics from fishing nets means the island of Trindade's rocks are starting to use it to hold themselves together. The water reservoirs of California have risen significantly because of the strong out-of-season storms in the area, which is a perverse case of "bad news, good news," the progress of a river revegetation with native plants after the dams were removed, the presences of beavers where they were not expected to be, the presence of a skunk in a place is was not wanted, the rescue and adoption of dogs that were on a plane that crashed into a golf course, the history of the pineapple and its inextricable association with Caribbean peoples, colonization, and "the exotic", and recording the sounds of plants, which happen at frequencies above human hearing ranges.
In technology, night train services are reviving in Europe, as a less carbonizing way of travel, and with sleeper services, saving the cost of lodging for a night, using it as a travel space. A more developed rail service in the United States would be lovely, of course. Especially if there were high-speed and overnight options that could get you to other places reasonably quickly.
Using the waste heat of data center computing to heat swimming pools, which is a good and novel way of shedding the waste heat in such a way that it can be put to use, but also says something about the use of data centers, servers, and the like, where there's enough demand that the waste heat from such things can be viably packaged and used for other purposes. Which we put next to data centers straining the electrical grids of the places they are located in. The story is that an ammunition manufacturer isn't able to do its usual processes because a TikTok data center is sucking up the spare capacity, but I suspect this is not a unique situation by any means.
USB drives mailed to Ecuadorian journalists were rigged with explosives so they would detonate when plugged into computers. Yet another reason not to plug suspicious USB drives into your computers, in addition to all the potential viruses and other malware that could be on the drive itself.
Exploiting a bug in Bitcoin ATM administration software, hackers were able to drain about 1.5 million USD's worth of Bitcoin from wallets linked to the crypto ATMs. And those losses, unlike FDIC-insured deposits or NCUA deposits, are not recoverable through deposit insurance because cryptocurrencies are unregulated and proudly so.
Tesla car systems proved insufficient against security researcher teams, who used their time at the Pwn2Own competition to demonstrate how thy could hack both the charging and the infotainment systems of a Tesla car to disable it or maliciously control it, earning themselves a car and significant cash bounties. The rest of us continue to look at Teslas and wonder whether they're actually worth the price point.
Because everyone assumes they are already technological wizards who know everything, some young people are coming into office settings and having to learn how to use the complex machines that nobody has taught them how to use. And because they feel that expectation of wizardry, young workers often don't ask for help for learning how to do it, either.
Major insulin manufacturers have capped their prices or strongly reduced them, following calls from President Biden to do so. Hooray for life-saving materials being more affordable, whether with insurance or without.
It's worth opting out from your mobile carrier's data-sharing plans, as often and repeatedly as necessary, given how not-great they are about being able to safeguard the data they collect.
The UK government (and others) are setting up fake sites advertising Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) services, then collecting and passing along the data of those who sign up to their law enforcement agencies around cybercrime. I mean, one of the things about the Internet is that nobody knows you're a dog. Or a government agent.
It's entirely possible there's a lot more water on Luna than previously thought, but it will take heating things to boiling before the water can be extracted and collected. One wonders about the energy efficiency of such things.
Last for tonight, the value of a lost tooth has increased significantly from when grownups were getting tooth money.
And very good reasons to prevent the adding of your works to AO3 collections, unless you're me who participates in exchanges that put things in collections...because it's still possible for someone to ad your works to a collection, then un-reveal the collection so your work gets hidden from anyone who wants to see it, because someone else decided your work deserved to be hidden. Yeah. The only way to stop this from happening is to refuse to allow your works to be added to collections and to revoke any permissions you have granted. So, I guess I trust most exchange admins that they're not going to revert all of their collections. It's still a good idea to have backups, though.
There is a process in place now where works holders are notified that their work has been un-revealed, but that doesn't help anyone who's orphaned their works, left the Web because of reasons (or Reasons), or otherwise isn't going to receive the notification or be able to do something about it.
In the absence of an easily-implementable technological solution that will not, apparently, be implemented, the other solution is a social one, where, as fen, we agree that we're not going to do petty shit like adding a work to a collection and then unrevealing it because we hate the work so much that we don't want anyone else to see it. You know, "ship and let ship," and "don't like? Don't read."
Given the current environment of book bans and "parental rights" and so many people believing they should have the individual power to dictate what everyone else is allowed to read and view, I don't have much hope that the social solution is going to get traction and widespread acceptance any time soon.
(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 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: 2023-04-03 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-05 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-05 03:05 pm (UTC)