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silveradeptThis should be no surprise to anyone, but study says immediate access to testosterone to those seeking masculinization is strongly correlated with a drop in gender dysphoria, depression, and suicidality. Amazing how having supportive care toward creating your desired presentation really helps get rid of those problems and the psychic damage that comes about from having a presentation incongruous with your self-identity.
A perfect example of the latitude a private entity, such as a publisher, has to choose to publish, not publish, rescind offers, and otherwise choose who they want to platform and what reasons they choose to platform or deplatform someone, as opposed to the usually much more limiting strictures imposed on public spaces and persons, like the library, who often would like to refuse to platform people antithetical to their communities and the people who use them, but are forbidden to do so by laws because a library having an opinion that looks like a political one is usually expressly forbidden.
Jimmy Buffet, known for island tunes and tours and an empire of cashing in on the merchandising of some of his biggest hits, passed on to the next part of his career at 76 years of age. Screw cancer. One of the founding vocalists of Smash Mouth died at 56, which is far too young for so many things. Smash Mouth of this era provided some earworms like All Star and Walkin' On The Sun, as well as some less well-known materials. (Admittedly, I'm partial to Padrino, because a funny song about the Mob is pretty classic.) Gary Wright, known primarily for his work with synthesizers and the song "Dream Weaver," has left life at 80 years of age, having been battling both Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia.
To cover the thefts of cultural artifacts as a matter of money and value rather than of inquiry and learning showcases a disconnect between what the people who made the items were thinking and what the people who were viewing and taking care of the collection were thinking. Then again, we're also in a world where, much like the locals did, we like leaving graffiti of our presence on the most permanent things we can find, and we find monuments useful and all, but not when they make our travel times longer.
A different strain of historical disinterest comes from the difficulties thrown at people who are trying to find the truth about their history, especialily when that history means acknowledging the horrors of the past and finding out the complicity of one's ancestors (or the ancestors of the people around you) in those horrors. Or knowing what we know now about things like the HIV epidemic, realizing that the treatment of people during the intiial waves of understanding and gaining knowledge was not particularly good. And, then, what happens when the truth of your history contradicts what's been taught in your schooling.
The Rats In Our Walls, an examination of H.P. Lovecraft's narrators, contemporaries, and his own beliefs, and how reading the narrators in different ways offers up different ways of seeing the story and seeing the context of the story, but also a very large lot about who the people are that Lovecraft is making allusions to and the ultimate failure of eugenics in a time before (even as it seems to be coming back more strongly with the concurrent rises in overt fascism and embraces of conspiracy theories.)
The long history of drag performance in the United Kingdom makes some people look like fools when they claim that it's never been family-friendly, when it's been used both during wartime and peacetime contexts. (There surely is a similar history in the United States, including some of those wartime contexts for soldiers.conuly provides the link in timely fashion, thank you.)
The United Auto Workers' opponents in the boardrooms of Ford, GM, and Stellantis are people with close ties to other union-busting corporations, weapons manufacturers, and oil companies, all of whom are pretty dedicated to getting rid of or starving out their union employees and making the world a worse place to live, while they rake in compensation packages that strain both credulity and morality.
Visual effects artists working at Marvel Studios have voted to form a union associated with IATSE, which is a just and proper response (or one of many) when your employer is treating you unfairly or callously.
A pension fund is suing Amazon, telling them the corporation did not do its fiduciary duty to shareholders by excluding SpaceX from consideration as a launch partner for putting up satellites. The fund alleges that Bezos excluded Musk's company from consideration because of animus, rather than because of business considerations. This suit, I suspect, showcases some of the ridiculous decisions that can be forced upon a company by their shareholders because the corporation is obligated to be as profitable as possible, rather than anything else.
In similar matters where the shareholders, driven by pension funds, are demanding action from a corporation, pension funds representing the states of New York and Oregon have sued the FOX Corporation, nothing that the behavior that has led to the settlements and suits against the company for their continued peddling of misinformation has resulted in significant loss of profits to the company, which triggers the complaints from the shareholders because corporations aren't allowed to be unprofitable.
The headline asks why so many women are turning away from doctors and birth control pills to other methods of attempting to regulate their fertility. That would be because of a lack of education and conversation about vaginal and vulval health for both those who have them and those trained to practice health involving them, such that people peddling probiotic pills seem more trustworthy than the medics. And because the medics themselves are being pushed into not giving full attention to their patients and what their patients are describing as the effects of what is happening to them on the pills.
A man who wrote a book about his time as a sex worker says a fair amount of his work was not actually about the sex part, but instead about intimacy and giving his clients space to be themselves and look after themselves first, with his help and facilitation for getting the things they desired from a man in their life. Which says a lot about how people perceive sex and relationships and how the male persepctive of a physical act still dominates, because it shouldn't be that hard to realize that a lot of clients for sex workers are also looking for empathy and intimacy as well as physical actions.
A person trying to document the large amounts of rats in New York City has found himself with requests from others who want to see the rats, whether onlint or in person, as tourists and enthusiasts, rather than persons appalled at the presence of rats in their city.
The different ways in which Indian women relate to cooking, food, and the kitchen.
And the way that torrential rain in a desert made Black Rock City, the Burning Man site, into a mud pit temporarily, just as the festival was getting ready to close and do the ritual burning.
In technology, Persons representing the estate of L. Ron Hubbard have made a request of the U.S. Copyright Office to oppose exemptions to section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act allowing consumers to bypass DRM and other locks so they may repair their technology. This request seems to be related to trying to protect the Scientoloy E-Meter from being opened and examined for the purposes of trying to repair it, and the claim is that the device is a religious artifact and should only be operated or repaired by those who are trained to do so. Given Scientology's fierce defense of itself and anyone portraying it in anything other than its chosen light, it seems lie it would be a good idea to let the Right to Repair exemption go through so that a little bit more about them can be known and brought out into the public.
Google Chrome is now an ad platform that happens to render web pages, with the rollout of what it is calling a "privacy sandbox" that is instead a way of directly tracking what someone does in the browser and generating a list of "ad topics" and other such things that it will send to pages so they can tailor their ads to what you supposedly want to look at. Nobody else has signed on to this, and they've been doing a decent job at blocking cookies and other things that can track you all over the Internet. So, now would be a good time to get rid of Chrome, and, if you have the option, to get rid of Chromium things as well, since Chromium is also part of Google's things. Firefox and its derivatives may be your best option at this point, both for add-ons that can help you try to maintain privacy where possible, and for a pretty neat slew of possible features to go along with.
An entire set of exploits that can be done to make BlueSky posts say and do whatever you want, regardless of what reality would be. Because new platforms often have issues, but if those issues are also coupled with an unwillingness to take a look at them and fix them quickly, sometimes someone sets up a GitHub repository to showcase how it can be done and to let other people have some fun with such things until those exploits get fixed.
A person attempting to quantize longevity through adherence to a strict set of protocols. Which could be useful for testing hypotheses, if the confounding variables could ever be removed.
Having let developers use their engine and product for free for a good long time, and then having a reasonable licensing fee for developmen for using the more full-featured elements of the editor, Unity has decided to impose a per-installation fee on all developers that meet certain thresholds of revenue and installations using their engine. Which is what an entity does when they're feeling their oats about being used by enough people that they can take their lock-in and turn it into extortion, going back on previous promises of nearly a decade of time.
Stepping into the likely void that will appear from the mass abandonment of Unity are several engines, but Godot touts that it can properly import Unity assets, in addition to being an open-source engine driven by a foundation rather than a corporation. And, of course, to capitalize on the impending collapse of Unity, Humble Bundle is offering a bundle of tutoritals and exercises on how to get started with both versions 3 and 4 of Godot, for those developers who might want to get away from Unity as fast as possible.
The datacenters behind LLMs like OpenAI's ChatGPT are consuming the same kinds of electricity and water-cooling that bitcoin miners and other such wasteful operations were doing, and more, in both electricity and cooling operations. On the fairly blithe assumption, I guess, that the water will be there for them and that nothing else in the Iowa region could possibly have a need for water to do anything important. Or more important than them. The article does go into some detail about how most of the time, the buildings can be air-cooled instead of water-cooled, and that Microsoft is trying to work with the provider of the water to reduce their consumption and improve their efficiency, but I suspect that as more and more people start using LLM-powered materials, whether intentionally or because they've been installed into products and can't be turned off, that consumption rate is likely to increase. And even more as climate issues accelerate.
And they don't necessarily even do a job well - Gizmodo fired all of their human Spanish-language staff, replacing them with machine translation of articles, and the machine translators, of course, have been exactly as good at this as we expect them to be (abysmal).
Malware that infected Barracuda Email Server Gateways also contained backdoor code that would allow for new appliances to be immediately infected with malware to maintain the access of the hackers even after complete replacement of the infected devices. The bakup reinfection method was deployed only on their highest-value targets, but it speaks to a level of sophistication and resources available to the hackers, and the presence of newer methods of persistence that would be difficult to spot without knowing exactly what to look for.
Cars are spying on their drivers and passengers and sending that data back to the manufacturers. And like so many other things, you've probably "agreed" to be spied upon as a condition of purchasing the car and/or using its various features. Given how hackable cars have been so far, and how much information they can potentially collect about us, I doubt there's nearly enough security present in any given vehicle to protect all of the information that's being collected in the car. Nor do I think that the manufacturers have sufficient justificatino to collect any of that data. But because they exist in a world that believes corporations are mostly exempt from having to do anything other than what's profitable, here we are.
Elon Musk seems to believe that he can avoid fulfilling obligations and contracts by simply not paying them and forcing people to sue his corporations to get the money they're owed under the contracts that have been signed. This is a bad strategy, as he should know, by looking at some other prominent deadbeat who's running for a political office and keeps getting hit with lawsuits and charges about that kind of behavior, but seeing someone else go down often makes others believe they'll be fine, because they won't make the same mistakes.
A Polish commission has determined the use of spyware from the Israel-based NSO group, like Pegasus, is illegal to use in Poland. Not because it's reprehensible to use or otherwise morally bankrupt, but because it doesn't conform to the requirements of Polish law that means the data has to be secured properly, never leave Polish territory, and that the source code has to be inspected and spproved before use. Also unsurprisingly, rather than being turned outward, the spyware seemed to be used a lot to try and spy on the opposition of the party currently in power. Like we didn't know that kind of tool wouldn't end up being used and abused in that kind of way. If you have an Apple device, there's an update out for it that helps protect against an exploit that will allow for the installation of spyware without the user having to do, accept, or activate anything.
In a related space, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court has said the ICC intends to prosecute war crimes committed in digital realms and infrastructure as well as physical ones, which could see more than a few interesting cases brought about activities happening in different conflicts and contexts.
Satellite insurance becomes increasingly more expensive as some satellites fail and have large payouts associated with them. But the smaller satellite providers, or those that throw multiple small ones into space, are choosing not to insure their satellites. Given the crowding of space, and the increasing likelihood that satellites might collide with each other, or might end up crashing back to earth, or both, I feel like ther's got to be some kind of solution involving these companies making sure they have enough money on hand to pay out any claims against them for damage or failure that their satellite proliferation is causing, but they probably won't have to do anything like that until a Starlink crashes to earth and obliterates a home and most of the people inside.
Battery-powered vehicles are potential fire hazards in flood conditions where the batteries might be immersed or submerged in water. The salt left behind by an immersion could create shorts and those shorts can combust. So vehicles in hurricanes that might have been caught in the floods could spark fires, and it isn't obvious or immediate when the fire might happen.
Large dataset-trained image generators and recombination are now actively trained against generating bodies that actual humans have, because disabled and deformed bodies are now considered "body horror" and forbidden. Because the initial versions of those image generators were quite good at generating body horror, and people didn't like that, and so now they don't, but that means an entire lot of body types can no longer be generated by entities like DALL-E and Midjourney.
A California code enforcement officer discovered a laboratory being run out of a warehouse that contained signficant quantities of highly infectious agents and other contagions. After the discovery of such a lab and the calling in of various federal and state authorities to safely close the lab down and ensure its materials stayed contained, the federal Food and Drug Administration issued warnings that tests manufactured by the company that ran the unlicensed laboratory may not be safe or effective and discouraged their use.
Microsoft has decided to no longer support or allow most third-party printer drivers by 2027, so long as the printers themselves are supported and compatible with the large alliance that has been making standards such that there shouldn't need to be vendor drivers and that all of the printers should behave the same way with one driver.
And a bit of whimsy: A person was arrested by the United States Coast Guard attempting to get from the southeastern United States to the United Kingdom in a foot-powered craft with large amounts of bouyant material on either side. The Coast Guard disbelieved the craft could safely make the journey. Not that frequent run-ins with the Coast Guard have stopped the person attempting to make the journey from setting out multiple times on it.
Last for tonight, a 60 second ad about what other things a person is signing up to know and understand when they choose not to treat their firearms as the deadly weapons they are and to make it as difficult as possible for those firearms to be misused. Contains the implications of accidental shootings, suicide by gun, and the use of a weapon to commit mass violence.
And, to give you something else to think about at the end, the ultimately successful quest to determine who painted the Dell 1976 cover of A Wrinkle In Time, a painting extremely well known for having very little at all to do with the elements of the story contained inside 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.)
A perfect example of the latitude a private entity, such as a publisher, has to choose to publish, not publish, rescind offers, and otherwise choose who they want to platform and what reasons they choose to platform or deplatform someone, as opposed to the usually much more limiting strictures imposed on public spaces and persons, like the library, who often would like to refuse to platform people antithetical to their communities and the people who use them, but are forbidden to do so by laws because a library having an opinion that looks like a political one is usually expressly forbidden.
Jimmy Buffet, known for island tunes and tours and an empire of cashing in on the merchandising of some of his biggest hits, passed on to the next part of his career at 76 years of age. Screw cancer. One of the founding vocalists of Smash Mouth died at 56, which is far too young for so many things. Smash Mouth of this era provided some earworms like All Star and Walkin' On The Sun, as well as some less well-known materials. (Admittedly, I'm partial to Padrino, because a funny song about the Mob is pretty classic.) Gary Wright, known primarily for his work with synthesizers and the song "Dream Weaver," has left life at 80 years of age, having been battling both Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia.
To cover the thefts of cultural artifacts as a matter of money and value rather than of inquiry and learning showcases a disconnect between what the people who made the items were thinking and what the people who were viewing and taking care of the collection were thinking. Then again, we're also in a world where, much like the locals did, we like leaving graffiti of our presence on the most permanent things we can find, and we find monuments useful and all, but not when they make our travel times longer.
A different strain of historical disinterest comes from the difficulties thrown at people who are trying to find the truth about their history, especialily when that history means acknowledging the horrors of the past and finding out the complicity of one's ancestors (or the ancestors of the people around you) in those horrors. Or knowing what we know now about things like the HIV epidemic, realizing that the treatment of people during the intiial waves of understanding and gaining knowledge was not particularly good. And, then, what happens when the truth of your history contradicts what's been taught in your schooling.
The Rats In Our Walls, an examination of H.P. Lovecraft's narrators, contemporaries, and his own beliefs, and how reading the narrators in different ways offers up different ways of seeing the story and seeing the context of the story, but also a very large lot about who the people are that Lovecraft is making allusions to and the ultimate failure of eugenics in a time before (even as it seems to be coming back more strongly with the concurrent rises in overt fascism and embraces of conspiracy theories.)
The long history of drag performance in the United Kingdom makes some people look like fools when they claim that it's never been family-friendly, when it's been used both during wartime and peacetime contexts. (There surely is a similar history in the United States, including some of those wartime contexts for soldiers.
conuly provides the link in timely fashion, thank you.)The United Auto Workers' opponents in the boardrooms of Ford, GM, and Stellantis are people with close ties to other union-busting corporations, weapons manufacturers, and oil companies, all of whom are pretty dedicated to getting rid of or starving out their union employees and making the world a worse place to live, while they rake in compensation packages that strain both credulity and morality.
Visual effects artists working at Marvel Studios have voted to form a union associated with IATSE, which is a just and proper response (or one of many) when your employer is treating you unfairly or callously.
A pension fund is suing Amazon, telling them the corporation did not do its fiduciary duty to shareholders by excluding SpaceX from consideration as a launch partner for putting up satellites. The fund alleges that Bezos excluded Musk's company from consideration because of animus, rather than because of business considerations. This suit, I suspect, showcases some of the ridiculous decisions that can be forced upon a company by their shareholders because the corporation is obligated to be as profitable as possible, rather than anything else.
In similar matters where the shareholders, driven by pension funds, are demanding action from a corporation, pension funds representing the states of New York and Oregon have sued the FOX Corporation, nothing that the behavior that has led to the settlements and suits against the company for their continued peddling of misinformation has resulted in significant loss of profits to the company, which triggers the complaints from the shareholders because corporations aren't allowed to be unprofitable.
The headline asks why so many women are turning away from doctors and birth control pills to other methods of attempting to regulate their fertility. That would be because of a lack of education and conversation about vaginal and vulval health for both those who have them and those trained to practice health involving them, such that people peddling probiotic pills seem more trustworthy than the medics. And because the medics themselves are being pushed into not giving full attention to their patients and what their patients are describing as the effects of what is happening to them on the pills.
A man who wrote a book about his time as a sex worker says a fair amount of his work was not actually about the sex part, but instead about intimacy and giving his clients space to be themselves and look after themselves first, with his help and facilitation for getting the things they desired from a man in their life. Which says a lot about how people perceive sex and relationships and how the male persepctive of a physical act still dominates, because it shouldn't be that hard to realize that a lot of clients for sex workers are also looking for empathy and intimacy as well as physical actions.
A person trying to document the large amounts of rats in New York City has found himself with requests from others who want to see the rats, whether onlint or in person, as tourists and enthusiasts, rather than persons appalled at the presence of rats in their city.
The different ways in which Indian women relate to cooking, food, and the kitchen.
And the way that torrential rain in a desert made Black Rock City, the Burning Man site, into a mud pit temporarily, just as the festival was getting ready to close and do the ritual burning.
In technology, Persons representing the estate of L. Ron Hubbard have made a request of the U.S. Copyright Office to oppose exemptions to section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act allowing consumers to bypass DRM and other locks so they may repair their technology. This request seems to be related to trying to protect the Scientoloy E-Meter from being opened and examined for the purposes of trying to repair it, and the claim is that the device is a religious artifact and should only be operated or repaired by those who are trained to do so. Given Scientology's fierce defense of itself and anyone portraying it in anything other than its chosen light, it seems lie it would be a good idea to let the Right to Repair exemption go through so that a little bit more about them can be known and brought out into the public.
Google Chrome is now an ad platform that happens to render web pages, with the rollout of what it is calling a "privacy sandbox" that is instead a way of directly tracking what someone does in the browser and generating a list of "ad topics" and other such things that it will send to pages so they can tailor their ads to what you supposedly want to look at. Nobody else has signed on to this, and they've been doing a decent job at blocking cookies and other things that can track you all over the Internet. So, now would be a good time to get rid of Chrome, and, if you have the option, to get rid of Chromium things as well, since Chromium is also part of Google's things. Firefox and its derivatives may be your best option at this point, both for add-ons that can help you try to maintain privacy where possible, and for a pretty neat slew of possible features to go along with.
An entire set of exploits that can be done to make BlueSky posts say and do whatever you want, regardless of what reality would be. Because new platforms often have issues, but if those issues are also coupled with an unwillingness to take a look at them and fix them quickly, sometimes someone sets up a GitHub repository to showcase how it can be done and to let other people have some fun with such things until those exploits get fixed.
A person attempting to quantize longevity through adherence to a strict set of protocols. Which could be useful for testing hypotheses, if the confounding variables could ever be removed.
Having let developers use their engine and product for free for a good long time, and then having a reasonable licensing fee for developmen for using the more full-featured elements of the editor, Unity has decided to impose a per-installation fee on all developers that meet certain thresholds of revenue and installations using their engine. Which is what an entity does when they're feeling their oats about being used by enough people that they can take their lock-in and turn it into extortion, going back on previous promises of nearly a decade of time.
Stepping into the likely void that will appear from the mass abandonment of Unity are several engines, but Godot touts that it can properly import Unity assets, in addition to being an open-source engine driven by a foundation rather than a corporation. And, of course, to capitalize on the impending collapse of Unity, Humble Bundle is offering a bundle of tutoritals and exercises on how to get started with both versions 3 and 4 of Godot, for those developers who might want to get away from Unity as fast as possible.
The datacenters behind LLMs like OpenAI's ChatGPT are consuming the same kinds of electricity and water-cooling that bitcoin miners and other such wasteful operations were doing, and more, in both electricity and cooling operations. On the fairly blithe assumption, I guess, that the water will be there for them and that nothing else in the Iowa region could possibly have a need for water to do anything important. Or more important than them. The article does go into some detail about how most of the time, the buildings can be air-cooled instead of water-cooled, and that Microsoft is trying to work with the provider of the water to reduce their consumption and improve their efficiency, but I suspect that as more and more people start using LLM-powered materials, whether intentionally or because they've been installed into products and can't be turned off, that consumption rate is likely to increase. And even more as climate issues accelerate.
And they don't necessarily even do a job well - Gizmodo fired all of their human Spanish-language staff, replacing them with machine translation of articles, and the machine translators, of course, have been exactly as good at this as we expect them to be (abysmal).
Malware that infected Barracuda Email Server Gateways also contained backdoor code that would allow for new appliances to be immediately infected with malware to maintain the access of the hackers even after complete replacement of the infected devices. The bakup reinfection method was deployed only on their highest-value targets, but it speaks to a level of sophistication and resources available to the hackers, and the presence of newer methods of persistence that would be difficult to spot without knowing exactly what to look for.
Cars are spying on their drivers and passengers and sending that data back to the manufacturers. And like so many other things, you've probably "agreed" to be spied upon as a condition of purchasing the car and/or using its various features. Given how hackable cars have been so far, and how much information they can potentially collect about us, I doubt there's nearly enough security present in any given vehicle to protect all of the information that's being collected in the car. Nor do I think that the manufacturers have sufficient justificatino to collect any of that data. But because they exist in a world that believes corporations are mostly exempt from having to do anything other than what's profitable, here we are.
Elon Musk seems to believe that he can avoid fulfilling obligations and contracts by simply not paying them and forcing people to sue his corporations to get the money they're owed under the contracts that have been signed. This is a bad strategy, as he should know, by looking at some other prominent deadbeat who's running for a political office and keeps getting hit with lawsuits and charges about that kind of behavior, but seeing someone else go down often makes others believe they'll be fine, because they won't make the same mistakes.
A Polish commission has determined the use of spyware from the Israel-based NSO group, like Pegasus, is illegal to use in Poland. Not because it's reprehensible to use or otherwise morally bankrupt, but because it doesn't conform to the requirements of Polish law that means the data has to be secured properly, never leave Polish territory, and that the source code has to be inspected and spproved before use. Also unsurprisingly, rather than being turned outward, the spyware seemed to be used a lot to try and spy on the opposition of the party currently in power. Like we didn't know that kind of tool wouldn't end up being used and abused in that kind of way. If you have an Apple device, there's an update out for it that helps protect against an exploit that will allow for the installation of spyware without the user having to do, accept, or activate anything.
In a related space, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court has said the ICC intends to prosecute war crimes committed in digital realms and infrastructure as well as physical ones, which could see more than a few interesting cases brought about activities happening in different conflicts and contexts.
Satellite insurance becomes increasingly more expensive as some satellites fail and have large payouts associated with them. But the smaller satellite providers, or those that throw multiple small ones into space, are choosing not to insure their satellites. Given the crowding of space, and the increasing likelihood that satellites might collide with each other, or might end up crashing back to earth, or both, I feel like ther's got to be some kind of solution involving these companies making sure they have enough money on hand to pay out any claims against them for damage or failure that their satellite proliferation is causing, but they probably won't have to do anything like that until a Starlink crashes to earth and obliterates a home and most of the people inside.
Battery-powered vehicles are potential fire hazards in flood conditions where the batteries might be immersed or submerged in water. The salt left behind by an immersion could create shorts and those shorts can combust. So vehicles in hurricanes that might have been caught in the floods could spark fires, and it isn't obvious or immediate when the fire might happen.
Large dataset-trained image generators and recombination are now actively trained against generating bodies that actual humans have, because disabled and deformed bodies are now considered "body horror" and forbidden. Because the initial versions of those image generators were quite good at generating body horror, and people didn't like that, and so now they don't, but that means an entire lot of body types can no longer be generated by entities like DALL-E and Midjourney.
A California code enforcement officer discovered a laboratory being run out of a warehouse that contained signficant quantities of highly infectious agents and other contagions. After the discovery of such a lab and the calling in of various federal and state authorities to safely close the lab down and ensure its materials stayed contained, the federal Food and Drug Administration issued warnings that tests manufactured by the company that ran the unlicensed laboratory may not be safe or effective and discouraged their use.
Microsoft has decided to no longer support or allow most third-party printer drivers by 2027, so long as the printers themselves are supported and compatible with the large alliance that has been making standards such that there shouldn't need to be vendor drivers and that all of the printers should behave the same way with one driver.
And a bit of whimsy: A person was arrested by the United States Coast Guard attempting to get from the southeastern United States to the United Kingdom in a foot-powered craft with large amounts of bouyant material on either side. The Coast Guard disbelieved the craft could safely make the journey. Not that frequent run-ins with the Coast Guard have stopped the person attempting to make the journey from setting out multiple times on it.
Last for tonight, a 60 second ad about what other things a person is signing up to know and understand when they choose not to treat their firearms as the deadly weapons they are and to make it as difficult as possible for those firearms to be misused. Contains the implications of accidental shootings, suicide by gun, and the use of a weapon to commit mass violence.
And, to give you something else to think about at the end, the ultimately successful quest to determine who painted the Dell 1976 cover of A Wrinkle In Time, a painting extremely well known for having very little at all to do with the elements of the story contained inside 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.)
no subject
Date: 2023-09-17 11:24 am (UTC)When they blocked 'T' and gave me oestrogen in sensible amounts it was like removing an internal balaclava if that makes sense!
no subject
Date: 2023-09-17 04:32 pm (UTC)