Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2023-09-01 01:09 pm
silveradept) wrote2023-09-01 01:09 pm
In two weeks, so much still happens. - Later August 02023
Let's begin with an understanding that wuxia is very firmly rooted in the politics of the country that makes it, in the same way that works of art in other countries are often very firmly rooted in their own politics. And that it's not that difficult to turn a previous rebel into a beloved part of the traditional canon.
Also, A 90-minute film of taking a Bay Area Rapid Transit ride, with additional commentary, interviews, and narration as the train follows the Yellow Line, with a camera attached to the front of the chosen train.
Eisner and Ignatz Award-winning The Nib is closing down at the end of August, but plans to keep the material up and maintained on the website, which will involve costs and hopes for donations to keep their material archived and in good working order.
dhobikikutti has resigned from volunteering with the Organization for Transformative Works after the continued lack of accountability and doubling down on not explaining what the specifics were of a disciplinary action that is long on feelings and short on actual actions to be sanctioned.
FIDE, the international chess body, has decided to exclude trans women from women's chess tournaments, because…well, no actual reason. Also contains the fact that the women's tournaments exist in the first place because of rampant harassment and misogyny against women in chess right from the beginning of competitive places.
Outdoor clothing and supply manufacturer The North Face is taking anti-trans flak for featuring Pattie Gonia in an advertisement campaign. Unlike other brands that backed down in the face of the phobia, the North Face is standing firm. Choosing Pattie probably telegraphed that pretty well, since Pattie loves the outdoors and the environment and doing drag things in the outdoors. And would like to see more people doing things in the outdoors, especially people told they don't belong there. Even though there are plenty of queer folk who both work in and enjoy the outdoors, despite what the loud voices demanding everything be exactly like them say. And Pattie is picky about who she chooses to work with, and about the disconnections between capitalist goals and environmental goals, so there was a lot of diligence needing doing before agreements could come to existence.
And if you'd like to see Pattie at work, here's a clapback video against people claiming that drag queens don't belong in nature and that it's all a secret plot by Vladimir Putin to weaken the United States. The U.S. is moving in the direction of things like banning watches with solid colors on them and small rainbow bands, certainly, and when it happens, we'll probably see it in certain states first. Like places that call in bomb threats against places that enforce their rules of conduct that speakers agreed to when they booked a library meeting room. The people directing the harassment campaigns believe themselves persecuted because they're speaking "truth" about trans athletes and decided the correct response to that "persecution" was to retaliate with much greater vituperation and threats of violence. Elsewhere, the state superintendent of Oklahoma endorsed a Libs of TikTok-doctored post against a librarian that led to bomb threats and harassment against the school system she was employed in. The Democrats are calling for impeachment of said superintendent based on this and other actions of his that seem to be both about pushing his agenda on the schools and intentional endorsement of a post meant to intimidate and bring harassment against one of the people in his care.
Noted satirists The Onion created a slideshow of satirical things they believed the last Administrator did in Georgia to attempt to overturn its results. Several are crude. But all of them would probably do better about trying to change votes or prove fraud in an election than the conspiracy theorist who believes that doing a Wi-Fi signal scan with devices attached to drones will somehow expose the election fraud happening by proving the voting machines are Internet-connected and therefore having their votes flipped in real time, or something.
More seriously, a person who claimed that SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations contained compounds that magnetized the humans that received them has lost her license and been fined, primarily for her refusal to cooperate with the investigation into her claims and practices. Pressed, she continued to assert the truth of her statements, rather than cooperate with the investigations and complaints against her practice.
People who are already turning to alternatives to what mainstream medicine is telling them are also being primed to accept conspiratorial thinking about other subjects. And a fair amount of this happens because medicine has often assumed that the patient is a white male of a specific age, rather than learning about how things work with other bodies and other people, such that someone looking for answers or relief, who has found none from a system that refuses to acknowledge them, could be persuaded to many a thing that promises that relief, those answers, or at least progress in some way. Alternative facts and such.
The company that produces Taser electroshock weapons has a corporate culture that you might expect from people who manufacture these kinds of weapons, including pressuring people to be shocked by them, to get tattoos of company logos on their bodies, and to invest their own salaries in aggressive stock plans that tie a person's fortunes to the company for nearly a decade. It's the same kind of bro stuff that you might expect from the kinds of places that are interested in buying and using such weapons, not because they are potentially less lethal, but because they like to demonstrate their power.
A broadcast station owned by FOX has had its Federal Communications Commission broadcast license renewal challenged by a group that argues the company has already demonstrated they are unworthy of the license due to their repeated airing of misinformation, disinformation, and their involvement in bringing insurrectionists to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. This will be interesting to watch, honestly. The First Amendment offers broad protections on speech, so the argument that this particular speech and the harms it caused, and the settlements made about claims of defamation will probably help shape the contours of what kind of speech aired might be grounds for a removal of a license, if that speech can be proven to fall within a category that would involve license revocation.
The leader of an abortive coup against the dictator of the Russian Federation is presumed dead after a plane carrying him and others was downed quite suddenly. Which seems like one of those bits where the relevant wisdom is a variation on the idea of "if you aim for the leader, best not miss."
Doing a random act of kindness is good. Deciding you want to pay for a woman's lunch and get her flowers without revealing yourself and then filming her reactions is creepy as fuck. But, of course, the person doing it doesn't appear to believe that anything has gone wrong and that the "sad" person eating alone should be happy to have had such things done for her by an anonymous stranger who refuses to reveal himself to her.
The origin of "Stockholm Syndrome" appears to be more in trying to silence a woman who was unhappy with the police response to a hostage situation than anything that has a grounding in psychological practice, which probably should put it on the list of phrases that completely fall out of usage, even casually. (Which does seem to be happening in my experiences, which is good.)
The concept of monotropism, a theory of autism, that focuses on the focus aspects of the experience and combines itself with the double empathy problem and neurodiversity to try and paint a more complete picture of the autistic person and their relationships with society (and how their dealings with the neurotypical can very easily become a cavalcade of misunderstandings.) These theories try to avoid "othering" and pathologizing autistic people and to instead present them as people whose brains work differently and who need both explicit help in understanding the neurotypical and explicit effort from the neurotypical to understand them.
The person fired over missing items from the British Museum was one of the senior curators of the exhibits that had the missing items. Innocence is being maintained about the thefts. It's not unheard of for museum staff to make off with objects from the collections, unfortunately, so even though it's only allegations at this point, there have been enough thefts in the space that it would not be hard for someone to do so. (Although I do wonder how many of the artifacts in question were themselves stolen from other places.)
When dealing with physical artifacts, even things that have the same text and are designated "duplicates" or "multiple copies" may still have things worth studying in the differences between the copies, even if most of the things themselves are generally the same.
Former staffers of Vice Media have formed an independent group, 404 Media, hoping to provide a sustainable, user-supported model of technology reporting, which includes advertisements on Instagram for Telegram services that are quite clearly illegal in several jurisdictions, and which Meta seems very slow to try and remove and very quick to disclaim responsibility for and a company that tried to make things easier for other crypto operations to get off the ground and running filed for bankruptcy after it found it no longer had the requisite access keys to a wallet containing assets valued at nearly approximately forty million USD. It must be nice wanting to have an unregulated market, where such a decision as this can result in the loss of assets and no recourse to get them back from the company unless, of course, you are wealthy enough to be able to afford the lawyers needed to make them pay you back and stiff others.
Lise Meitner was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission, a key process that would eventually lead to the development and use of atomic weaponry. However, Meitner wanted nothing to do with the bomb while alive, and refused to have her likeness or self portrayed in films or other matters regarding the development of atomic weaponry. As someone who had managed to escape the horrors of the Nazis, she still did not want to visit more mass death on others.
Paramount Pictures, the current holders of the Star Trek Intellectual Property, sent a DMCA takedown demand to the Wolf 359 project, a large fan fiction about one of the costliest battles of the Star Trek Universe that has not been explored in great detail by the canonical materials. Which is their right to do, of course, in the current legal landscape, but is another one of those actions that ignores the history of the franchise and how the fans have been instrumental in keeping things alive for so long. Paramount appears not to have learned much from the examples of the Annes and others who actively pursue fans and demand they stop being fans in the ways they know how. If there's an official Wolf 359-set novel or similar coming out, then at least they would be replacing a fan project with an official one. Still a bad idea, but one that would make their actions more understandable.
The sense of belonging to a team and the cues that teams often give to indicate whether someone is going to feel like they belong, and how that might be a workable and measurable item. In that same orbit, the continued need to recognize, value, and reward people who do glue work that makes sure that projects succeed, along with the various problems that can come from working in a place where you're expected to do glue work, but rewarded only for the non-glue work that gets done. And the problems that always develop when an organization deliberately shorts their employees the ability to make things right in favor of funding the ways to enforce compliance with the policies as written, or as predatorily enforced.
Hurricane Idalia and several others like it are becoming more intense thanks to the energy they can feed off of the hot water. You know, the water that's been heated because of climate change and the warming. And the same thing helping contribute to the wildfires everywhere, some of which involves travel and tourism wanting to put people in specific places, even while they're burning or otherwise experiencing disasters.
A rare sea turtle found in the north Atlantic will be flown back to Texas and the environment she came from, UNESCO World Heritage sites contain about 20% of known species on planet Earth, even as those sites are threatened by the interests of capital.
In technology, Congratulations to the Indian Space Research Organization for successfully landing on the moon and the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
The death knell may have sounded for Human Immunodeficiency Virus and other viruses that maintain viral reservoirs, as a successful gene editing technique appears to have cleared out both active infections and the viral reservoirs of SIV in rhesus macaques. If the technique can be adapted to human viruses, not only will the infections die, but the codes to replicate them that integrates into the host genome will be excised, so there's no chance of the virus returning without a reinfection. And thus, the nightmare that killed a generation might be finally defeated.
A Texas company has rolled out an app that is supposed to help schools beseiged by laws and policies demanding the removal and banning of books be in "compliance" with the demands of those fools, as well as giving parents the ability to monitor and deny the checkouts of their students from the school library in real-time. I have a feeling that there's going to be a push to make these apps compulsory so as to make absolutely sure no student ever checks anything out under their own name and everyone knows whose parents will be the ones that approve of their child not only reading for themselves, but checking out books for their friends to read without alerting their parents.
A lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee alleging that Google deliberately uses its spam filters to discriminate against RNC fundraising e-mails was dismissed, although the RNC was given leave to amend two of its seen complaints to see if they could do a better job the second time around. Given the other reports I have seen about how RNC pleas for funding often mislead, or tick boxes by default and then use small print to say what they actually do, and other such scammy tactics, it should be no wonder at all that spam filters are more likely to catch their e-mails and trash them.
The complicated mechanisms used to compute the date of Easter in mechanical methods and algorithms, as opposed to the use of program disks or other fixed elements. Which is to say, no wonder we need transistors and tiny devices to make computers anything other than room sized.
A suggestion that the use of large language models and other generative models could produce steganography that would be sufficiently undetectable for most methods, and possibly something perfect, in the theoretical sense, even though the practicals of generating such would be too computationally expensive to achieve.
In the annals of "we do not give fire to WiFi, nor WiFi to fire," Bambu 3D printers that were using their cloud services started printing on their own due to a failure in that cloud service's servers. They do have less cloud-y modes available, as well as local file printing, but see above maxim about fire and WiFi.
Creators of Large Language Models brought them and their best safeguards to DefCon and let the attendees sign up for sessions where their instructions were to try and break the things as best as they could. None of the companies who attended and let the DefCon folks mangle their bots likely came to the conclusion that the concept itself was unworkable and they should abandon their efforts, I'm sure, but I'll bet the attendees had a good time roughing up the bots.
A follow-on from a previous bit: The Dell Australia division that made monitors look discounted but actually charged higher prices for them than they would be found elsewhere on the site were fined for costs that were more than what they made from their scam, which is rare in the way of fines. (They probably could have upped the fine significantly more to discourage pulling the stunt again.)
Postscript Type 1 fonts have lost support in most programs and operating systems at this point, which probably doesn't affect that many people, but might making opening old documents an issue and trying to edit them impossible, unless you spin up something sufficiently old to be able to read them correctly and then convert them forward or copy their text out.
They New York Times is planning on bringing suit against OpenAI for widespread copyright violation for using the Times's reporting and archives to help train the ChatGPT LLM. The penalties of up to $150,000 USD per infringement as well as a potential demand for the destruction of the ChatGPT training models that contain infringing content could be devastating to the company. I will be interested in seeing what OpenAI's defense will be if they can't come to a properly lucrative licensing agreement with the NYT. And how they intend to avoid getting caught up in the precedent set in the Internet Archive controlled digital lending case.
And yet more instances of generative models being deployed without thought about what people with malice or prankish intent might do with them: A New Zealand bot deployed to give meal suggestions from lists of ingredients more than happily produced recipes to create chlorine gas or rat poison sandwiches when non-food ingredients were suggested as things to be used. As we are finding out more and more, people will want to use told for their intended purposes and then an entire raft of unintended ones, either for malice of for lulz.
A proposal to prevent the company with the exclusive contract to provide ice cream machines to McDonalds, machines that don't work a lot of the time and that contractually require expensive service calls to repair, from being able to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent the repair of those machines from people other than company personnel. Because the DMCA makes it illegal to break DRM, the presence of the circuit boards allows Taylor, the company, to try and prosecute people for felony contempt of business model.
Last for tonight, the gamification of our lives does not understand, nor really celebrate, those situations where we rest, or ramp down before doing something important, or listened to our limits and respected them. It understands streaks and "numbers go up" and it encourages pushing past limits or ignoring things and treating counts as minimums, rather than warnings or maximums. The tech and the notifications and the tracking can be designed better, but it isn't, not yet, and in doing so, it excludes and alienates a large swath of people who would otherwise be more interested in using the technology or those specific tools.
And beyond that, the danger of using "taste" as a way of imposing your personal morals or culture on someone else or to make them feel uneducated and stupid. This particular article is about taste in books, but the form of that insult can be applied to almost any aspect of culture.
A zine about the experience of being bipolar, and what the meds can do, and what it can feel like, both on the meds and off of it.
(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, little_details, 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.)
Also, A 90-minute film of taking a Bay Area Rapid Transit ride, with additional commentary, interviews, and narration as the train follows the Yellow Line, with a camera attached to the front of the chosen train.
Eisner and Ignatz Award-winning The Nib is closing down at the end of August, but plans to keep the material up and maintained on the website, which will involve costs and hopes for donations to keep their material archived and in good working order.
dhobikikutti has resigned from volunteering with the Organization for Transformative Works after the continued lack of accountability and doubling down on not explaining what the specifics were of a disciplinary action that is long on feelings and short on actual actions to be sanctioned. FIDE, the international chess body, has decided to exclude trans women from women's chess tournaments, because…well, no actual reason. Also contains the fact that the women's tournaments exist in the first place because of rampant harassment and misogyny against women in chess right from the beginning of competitive places.
Outdoor clothing and supply manufacturer The North Face is taking anti-trans flak for featuring Pattie Gonia in an advertisement campaign. Unlike other brands that backed down in the face of the phobia, the North Face is standing firm. Choosing Pattie probably telegraphed that pretty well, since Pattie loves the outdoors and the environment and doing drag things in the outdoors. And would like to see more people doing things in the outdoors, especially people told they don't belong there. Even though there are plenty of queer folk who both work in and enjoy the outdoors, despite what the loud voices demanding everything be exactly like them say. And Pattie is picky about who she chooses to work with, and about the disconnections between capitalist goals and environmental goals, so there was a lot of diligence needing doing before agreements could come to existence.
And if you'd like to see Pattie at work, here's a clapback video against people claiming that drag queens don't belong in nature and that it's all a secret plot by Vladimir Putin to weaken the United States. The U.S. is moving in the direction of things like banning watches with solid colors on them and small rainbow bands, certainly, and when it happens, we'll probably see it in certain states first. Like places that call in bomb threats against places that enforce their rules of conduct that speakers agreed to when they booked a library meeting room. The people directing the harassment campaigns believe themselves persecuted because they're speaking "truth" about trans athletes and decided the correct response to that "persecution" was to retaliate with much greater vituperation and threats of violence. Elsewhere, the state superintendent of Oklahoma endorsed a Libs of TikTok-doctored post against a librarian that led to bomb threats and harassment against the school system she was employed in. The Democrats are calling for impeachment of said superintendent based on this and other actions of his that seem to be both about pushing his agenda on the schools and intentional endorsement of a post meant to intimidate and bring harassment against one of the people in his care.
Noted satirists The Onion created a slideshow of satirical things they believed the last Administrator did in Georgia to attempt to overturn its results. Several are crude. But all of them would probably do better about trying to change votes or prove fraud in an election than the conspiracy theorist who believes that doing a Wi-Fi signal scan with devices attached to drones will somehow expose the election fraud happening by proving the voting machines are Internet-connected and therefore having their votes flipped in real time, or something.
More seriously, a person who claimed that SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations contained compounds that magnetized the humans that received them has lost her license and been fined, primarily for her refusal to cooperate with the investigation into her claims and practices. Pressed, she continued to assert the truth of her statements, rather than cooperate with the investigations and complaints against her practice.
People who are already turning to alternatives to what mainstream medicine is telling them are also being primed to accept conspiratorial thinking about other subjects. And a fair amount of this happens because medicine has often assumed that the patient is a white male of a specific age, rather than learning about how things work with other bodies and other people, such that someone looking for answers or relief, who has found none from a system that refuses to acknowledge them, could be persuaded to many a thing that promises that relief, those answers, or at least progress in some way. Alternative facts and such.
The company that produces Taser electroshock weapons has a corporate culture that you might expect from people who manufacture these kinds of weapons, including pressuring people to be shocked by them, to get tattoos of company logos on their bodies, and to invest their own salaries in aggressive stock plans that tie a person's fortunes to the company for nearly a decade. It's the same kind of bro stuff that you might expect from the kinds of places that are interested in buying and using such weapons, not because they are potentially less lethal, but because they like to demonstrate their power.
A broadcast station owned by FOX has had its Federal Communications Commission broadcast license renewal challenged by a group that argues the company has already demonstrated they are unworthy of the license due to their repeated airing of misinformation, disinformation, and their involvement in bringing insurrectionists to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. This will be interesting to watch, honestly. The First Amendment offers broad protections on speech, so the argument that this particular speech and the harms it caused, and the settlements made about claims of defamation will probably help shape the contours of what kind of speech aired might be grounds for a removal of a license, if that speech can be proven to fall within a category that would involve license revocation.
The leader of an abortive coup against the dictator of the Russian Federation is presumed dead after a plane carrying him and others was downed quite suddenly. Which seems like one of those bits where the relevant wisdom is a variation on the idea of "if you aim for the leader, best not miss."
Doing a random act of kindness is good. Deciding you want to pay for a woman's lunch and get her flowers without revealing yourself and then filming her reactions is creepy as fuck. But, of course, the person doing it doesn't appear to believe that anything has gone wrong and that the "sad" person eating alone should be happy to have had such things done for her by an anonymous stranger who refuses to reveal himself to her.
The origin of "Stockholm Syndrome" appears to be more in trying to silence a woman who was unhappy with the police response to a hostage situation than anything that has a grounding in psychological practice, which probably should put it on the list of phrases that completely fall out of usage, even casually. (Which does seem to be happening in my experiences, which is good.)
The concept of monotropism, a theory of autism, that focuses on the focus aspects of the experience and combines itself with the double empathy problem and neurodiversity to try and paint a more complete picture of the autistic person and their relationships with society (and how their dealings with the neurotypical can very easily become a cavalcade of misunderstandings.) These theories try to avoid "othering" and pathologizing autistic people and to instead present them as people whose brains work differently and who need both explicit help in understanding the neurotypical and explicit effort from the neurotypical to understand them.
The person fired over missing items from the British Museum was one of the senior curators of the exhibits that had the missing items. Innocence is being maintained about the thefts. It's not unheard of for museum staff to make off with objects from the collections, unfortunately, so even though it's only allegations at this point, there have been enough thefts in the space that it would not be hard for someone to do so. (Although I do wonder how many of the artifacts in question were themselves stolen from other places.)
When dealing with physical artifacts, even things that have the same text and are designated "duplicates" or "multiple copies" may still have things worth studying in the differences between the copies, even if most of the things themselves are generally the same.
Former staffers of Vice Media have formed an independent group, 404 Media, hoping to provide a sustainable, user-supported model of technology reporting, which includes advertisements on Instagram for Telegram services that are quite clearly illegal in several jurisdictions, and which Meta seems very slow to try and remove and very quick to disclaim responsibility for and a company that tried to make things easier for other crypto operations to get off the ground and running filed for bankruptcy after it found it no longer had the requisite access keys to a wallet containing assets valued at nearly approximately forty million USD. It must be nice wanting to have an unregulated market, where such a decision as this can result in the loss of assets and no recourse to get them back from the company unless, of course, you are wealthy enough to be able to afford the lawyers needed to make them pay you back and stiff others.
Lise Meitner was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission, a key process that would eventually lead to the development and use of atomic weaponry. However, Meitner wanted nothing to do with the bomb while alive, and refused to have her likeness or self portrayed in films or other matters regarding the development of atomic weaponry. As someone who had managed to escape the horrors of the Nazis, she still did not want to visit more mass death on others.
Paramount Pictures, the current holders of the Star Trek Intellectual Property, sent a DMCA takedown demand to the Wolf 359 project, a large fan fiction about one of the costliest battles of the Star Trek Universe that has not been explored in great detail by the canonical materials. Which is their right to do, of course, in the current legal landscape, but is another one of those actions that ignores the history of the franchise and how the fans have been instrumental in keeping things alive for so long. Paramount appears not to have learned much from the examples of the Annes and others who actively pursue fans and demand they stop being fans in the ways they know how. If there's an official Wolf 359-set novel or similar coming out, then at least they would be replacing a fan project with an official one. Still a bad idea, but one that would make their actions more understandable.
The sense of belonging to a team and the cues that teams often give to indicate whether someone is going to feel like they belong, and how that might be a workable and measurable item. In that same orbit, the continued need to recognize, value, and reward people who do glue work that makes sure that projects succeed, along with the various problems that can come from working in a place where you're expected to do glue work, but rewarded only for the non-glue work that gets done. And the problems that always develop when an organization deliberately shorts their employees the ability to make things right in favor of funding the ways to enforce compliance with the policies as written, or as predatorily enforced.
Hurricane Idalia and several others like it are becoming more intense thanks to the energy they can feed off of the hot water. You know, the water that's been heated because of climate change and the warming. And the same thing helping contribute to the wildfires everywhere, some of which involves travel and tourism wanting to put people in specific places, even while they're burning or otherwise experiencing disasters.
A rare sea turtle found in the north Atlantic will be flown back to Texas and the environment she came from, UNESCO World Heritage sites contain about 20% of known species on planet Earth, even as those sites are threatened by the interests of capital.
In technology, Congratulations to the Indian Space Research Organization for successfully landing on the moon and the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
The death knell may have sounded for Human Immunodeficiency Virus and other viruses that maintain viral reservoirs, as a successful gene editing technique appears to have cleared out both active infections and the viral reservoirs of SIV in rhesus macaques. If the technique can be adapted to human viruses, not only will the infections die, but the codes to replicate them that integrates into the host genome will be excised, so there's no chance of the virus returning without a reinfection. And thus, the nightmare that killed a generation might be finally defeated.
A Texas company has rolled out an app that is supposed to help schools beseiged by laws and policies demanding the removal and banning of books be in "compliance" with the demands of those fools, as well as giving parents the ability to monitor and deny the checkouts of their students from the school library in real-time. I have a feeling that there's going to be a push to make these apps compulsory so as to make absolutely sure no student ever checks anything out under their own name and everyone knows whose parents will be the ones that approve of their child not only reading for themselves, but checking out books for their friends to read without alerting their parents.
A lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee alleging that Google deliberately uses its spam filters to discriminate against RNC fundraising e-mails was dismissed, although the RNC was given leave to amend two of its seen complaints to see if they could do a better job the second time around. Given the other reports I have seen about how RNC pleas for funding often mislead, or tick boxes by default and then use small print to say what they actually do, and other such scammy tactics, it should be no wonder at all that spam filters are more likely to catch their e-mails and trash them.
The complicated mechanisms used to compute the date of Easter in mechanical methods and algorithms, as opposed to the use of program disks or other fixed elements. Which is to say, no wonder we need transistors and tiny devices to make computers anything other than room sized.
A suggestion that the use of large language models and other generative models could produce steganography that would be sufficiently undetectable for most methods, and possibly something perfect, in the theoretical sense, even though the practicals of generating such would be too computationally expensive to achieve.
In the annals of "we do not give fire to WiFi, nor WiFi to fire," Bambu 3D printers that were using their cloud services started printing on their own due to a failure in that cloud service's servers. They do have less cloud-y modes available, as well as local file printing, but see above maxim about fire and WiFi.
Creators of Large Language Models brought them and their best safeguards to DefCon and let the attendees sign up for sessions where their instructions were to try and break the things as best as they could. None of the companies who attended and let the DefCon folks mangle their bots likely came to the conclusion that the concept itself was unworkable and they should abandon their efforts, I'm sure, but I'll bet the attendees had a good time roughing up the bots.
A follow-on from a previous bit: The Dell Australia division that made monitors look discounted but actually charged higher prices for them than they would be found elsewhere on the site were fined for costs that were more than what they made from their scam, which is rare in the way of fines. (They probably could have upped the fine significantly more to discourage pulling the stunt again.)
Postscript Type 1 fonts have lost support in most programs and operating systems at this point, which probably doesn't affect that many people, but might making opening old documents an issue and trying to edit them impossible, unless you spin up something sufficiently old to be able to read them correctly and then convert them forward or copy their text out.
They New York Times is planning on bringing suit against OpenAI for widespread copyright violation for using the Times's reporting and archives to help train the ChatGPT LLM. The penalties of up to $150,000 USD per infringement as well as a potential demand for the destruction of the ChatGPT training models that contain infringing content could be devastating to the company. I will be interested in seeing what OpenAI's defense will be if they can't come to a properly lucrative licensing agreement with the NYT. And how they intend to avoid getting caught up in the precedent set in the Internet Archive controlled digital lending case.
And yet more instances of generative models being deployed without thought about what people with malice or prankish intent might do with them: A New Zealand bot deployed to give meal suggestions from lists of ingredients more than happily produced recipes to create chlorine gas or rat poison sandwiches when non-food ingredients were suggested as things to be used. As we are finding out more and more, people will want to use told for their intended purposes and then an entire raft of unintended ones, either for malice of for lulz.
A proposal to prevent the company with the exclusive contract to provide ice cream machines to McDonalds, machines that don't work a lot of the time and that contractually require expensive service calls to repair, from being able to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent the repair of those machines from people other than company personnel. Because the DMCA makes it illegal to break DRM, the presence of the circuit boards allows Taylor, the company, to try and prosecute people for felony contempt of business model.
Last for tonight, the gamification of our lives does not understand, nor really celebrate, those situations where we rest, or ramp down before doing something important, or listened to our limits and respected them. It understands streaks and "numbers go up" and it encourages pushing past limits or ignoring things and treating counts as minimums, rather than warnings or maximums. The tech and the notifications and the tracking can be designed better, but it isn't, not yet, and in doing so, it excludes and alienates a large swath of people who would otherwise be more interested in using the technology or those specific tools.
And beyond that, the danger of using "taste" as a way of imposing your personal morals or culture on someone else or to make them feel uneducated and stupid. This particular article is about taste in books, but the form of that insult can be applied to almost any aspect of culture.
A zine about the experience of being bipolar, and what the meds can do, and what it can feel like, both on the meds and off of it.
(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, little_details, 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.)
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Apparently many of the smaller items stolen ended up on EBay.
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"Why are there pyramids in Egypt?"
"Because they're too big for the British Museum to steal them."
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