silveradept | Disgorgement of another ball of neat things.

Hello! Let us begin with a method for styling pride flags into your dividers, using some neat CSS technique in-line.

Also, a

dw_news post welcoming people moving to Dreamwidth from Reddit, since Reddit decided that it wanted to charge ludicrous amounts of money for API access, and doing so essentially kills third-party tools and other ways of accessing Reddit (including several methods intended to make the site more accessible.)

A reminder that financial entities like Venmo and PayPal are not incorporated as banks or credit unions and do not have deposit insurance in case of financial difficulties. They're convenient, yes, but they don't have the full protections you would need if the companies collapsed. Some of their items do, because they're actually held and transacted with banks, but not all of them, and not necessarily by default. Treat them with the same amount of trust you would treat cryptocurrency.

A helpline for people with eating disorders fired all of its human staff and replaced them with a chatbot, which was stupid both in the labor parts of it (they had just unionized), but also because LLMs aren't actually people who understand context and know how to respond appropriately, and what they've been trained on is not a corpus that I would trust to be able to handle sensitive situations and information. Lo, and behold, the chatbot failed utterly at providing correct contextual information to people with disorders, instead affirming choices that would have made them worse and was taken offline to be fixed. Not that this would have been all that effective to start with, anyway, because eating disorders come in all shapes and sizes, and how you effectively treat them requires understanding the person themselves. (At least the American Medical Association has finally decided the Body Mass Index measurement is not actually any good and is distancing themselves from it.)

If you would like a little bit of understanding about how LLMs and chatbots can be so easily and terribly manipulated, Gandalf is a chatbot with a password that you need to manipulate into giving you the password. Even though Gandalf has been told not to give you the password, it can be convinced to do so with some lateral thinking or some indirect instructions. Lakera, the company promoting their own LLM protection models and software, put out a post with spoilers of the passwords, but also the protection methods used on each level of the Gandalf game, with the exception of level 8, Gandalf the White, which is the actual model with all of the protections they've put in place and are then trying to get people to still break it so they can make it better.

The Organization for Transformative Works gave an update on their progress toward making the Archive of Our Own a less racist space. The comments ask about why the process is so slow and also would like to know about what the organization has done and is doing to protect volunteers from further attacks, some of which included sending child sexual exploitation material to the volunteers in retaliation for moderation decisions. As further information has come to light,

synecdochic criticized the OTW's handling of Trust and Safety issues and ignnorance of best practices in relation to them and then a follow-up explaining that the criticism of the OTW for its inability to protect volunteers and fans of colors from harassment is still true, and also the criticism of the EndOTWRacism campaign stemmed from a disagreement about what tactics are appropriate and the campaign's over-reliance on someone who has done a fair amount of policing and harassing other fans of color in addition to receiving it. And also that the OTW was remarkably quick in putting out a piece criticizing

synecdochic compared to the glacial pace they have been taking on the more serious allegations leveled against them.

It would be some significant time before the language of intersectionality made it into the popular discourse, but this review of a book about the history of gay men and lesbians in the communist and socialist movements in the past of the United States sparks the questions of why those who were organizing for one principle couldn't also organize to help those who were also being marginalized by their own ideology and thinkers. There's some amount of comparison with the way that Magnus Hirschfeld lived and wrote about gay men, lesbians, trans men and women, and eventually repudiated the eugenics he had been espousing before seeing what the fascists planned to do with it.

An LGBTQ+ professor at Oxford University says that most of the "cancel culture" claims made against universities who let people protest conservative speakers are overblown, and that the current transphobia is on a cycle with roots in the homophobia of the 1980s and 1950s. Which tracks with the historical perspective, as best as I can tell - it's not new, it's just a new target.

Country star Garth Brooks has a no assholes rule for his bar, and asshole includes homophobes and transphobes. Which will shock the part of his listening audience that supports those things. Tennessee attempted to ban gender-nonconforming dress in any place where children were present, and were told "lol, no." by the federal district judge when the laws were challenged. Of course, there are more than enough other bills in the state and other states to take up the slack of the agenda of hate, even as they fall down fairly easily when challenged. Montana, for example, has a similar statue, and it's canceling library-sponsored programming because of a fear of prosecution from broadly-worded bills. And, of course, it's always a ban where children might be present to view someone, because if there's something the reactionaries fear, it's the possibility that a child might find their true selves by seeing what's available to them. Which is why there's so much effort to restrict the available space to a specific view that believes if you can divorce from reality hard enough, and disappear the existence of enough people, you can create a perfect utopia for those who are left.

For that kind of thing, camp exists as both a way to laugh at it and to protest it. And also, on more serious notes, the Human Rights Campaign has issued travel warnings and a state of emergency for queer folk in the United States, and with good reason.

(And it's not always the worst. Nevada's governor, for example, signed a couple bills preventing insurance discrimination against trans people and directing prisons to make sure their trans and nonbinary inmates are safe. (He did veto a bill to also protect medical providers' decisions to provide gender-affirming care and another to protect someone who came to Nevada for a legal medical procedure from being extradited and prosecuted in their home state where that procedure is not legal.)

The person who had untreated tuberculosis in Washington State is getting treatment, after finally being brought in and kept in a negative pressure space to prevent further infections.

Remember those "geniuses" who robo-called specific high-minority areas with conspiracy theory nonsense about "mandatory vaccination" and voter records being shared with the police and debt collection companies? They've been fined a touch over 5 million USD for violation of various laws regarding robocalling and been ordered to do community service in registering the kinds of groups to vote that their robocalls were trying to discourage. That's in addition to all the other convictions and penalties levied against them for this stunt.

Contraceptive access is going down even in countries that don't have a rabid political faction trying to hasten the demise of contraceptive access, unless, of course, the Tories are just as rabid about it as the conservatives are here. The use of an 1861 law to jail and prosecute a woman for terminating a pregnancy suggests that things aren't much better in the UK than they are here in the States.

Boris Johnson has resigned as a Member of Parliament to avoid being ousted as one thanks to all the information that's come out about his (and others') terrible behaviors during lockdown.

And, of course, the perceptions we have of our morals declining over the time we have been alive are mostly in our heads, because the people of the past, when they were contemporaries, were usually rating things about the same as the people now do, but they also perceived an illusory decline. Which is very interesting research to be coming out with in an era where it seems like moral decay is in the highest levels of government and business together. Although that may not be fully accurate - there may not have been morality in those sectors to begin with, and so any perception of decay might be more related to our ability to see those bad behaviors as they happen, rather than when they come out in stories many years later.

Lee Me Keyoung's very detailed drawings of the corner stores of Korea, thinking about design implications for a game that's nominally about restoring destroyed spaces to life, criticizing a mindset behind stories that try to separate out the nature stuff and the human stuff, with the underlying assumption that whatever humans do to nature, it's bad, which is not incompatible with all the suffering that's been going on from wildfires burning in eastern Canada, and finding an extraordinarily well-preserved sword from approximately the 14th century BCE.

Trying to find the evolutionary reason for masturbation and its longevity by walking back through the primates who do it over time, a fully formed crocodile fetus from a crocodile that had never had any sex with any male crocodiles, re-rainforseting an area in the UK, the possibility that orcas are doing damage to boats for the memes, rather than any other reason,

At the request of the company making it, and because the current doses are expired and not being reformulated, the Janssen / Johnson & Johnson vaccine is no longer approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.

In technology, a successful trial of transmitting collected solar power from space, although it's at very small power levels and load.

Devices made and marketed as medical tools with the idea of using vibrations to help with various vaginal or prostate issues around sexual function and enjoyment, rather than as devices primarily for sexual gratification and pleasure.

Apple has decided they no longer want to autocorrect "fucking" to "ducking", after significant feedback from users who are fucking well aware of what they want to type.

As a condition of pre-trial release, a man charged with the possession of CSEM was required to have an anti-pornography app installed on all of the electronic devices in the house that would take screenshots and monitor and send all of that information to the police. His wife had visited Pornhub sufficiently that it was a "frequently-visited" space, and the refresh of the "frequently-visited" list tripped the surveillance software and he's back in jail for violating the conditions of his bail, apparently. Because, y'know, even though the app creator says that it's not always possible to determine whether a site was visited intentionally, this was apparently enough. Even though nobody actually did an intentional action, apparently, and even though this was a broad and sweeping requirement imposed on someone because she chose to keep living with someone while he was awaiting trial, instead of leaving him until the conditions of the bail had been fulfilled. But we still believe that computers can be trusted to monitor and manage these kinds of things, or other such things that are related to the carceral system, and we trust things that are explicitly invasive of privacy and used for promoting specific kinds of morality will only return what we want them to, and not act according to their programmed prejudices.

NASA's Europa mission to the Jovian system has a form where you can enter your name to be carried on one of the microchips on the craft, along with a poem that goes with it. Your name in space, etc.

A manufacturer of network security appliances, Barracuda, has advised that certain of its e-mail security gateways should be physically removed due to the presence of extremely difficult malware infections. The company has offered to replace the devices that have been compromised.

The Australian government accused Dell Australia of deceptive business practices by making something supposedly advertised as a sale price sometimes be more expensive as an add-on than it would have been bought separately. One can always hope there's some sort of regulation about discounts and the like, but often times it isn't the case or it turns out that a company isn't interested in following the rules if there's money to be made.

Syracuse University librarians in the 1970s recognized many of the ways in which online searching and database crawling could be improved with free text search, while also recognizing that free text and being able to consult the search patterns of others would not substitute for a subject matter expert. This is still true today, even as we also have to deal with content generation farms and search engine optimization blackhatting on the open Web.

Last for tonight, someone watched the Dungeons and Dragons movie with the audio description turned on accidentally and thought it was a better experience than without.

And a poem about all the things that you don't see when you look at someone. Like how well they keep bees.

(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.)