silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
[personal profile] silveradept
If you are considering purchasing or repurchasing paid account benefits for Dreamwidth, the month of December provides a 10% bonus to points purchased for the account doing the purchasing, whether for yourself or as a gift for someone else. That's from 1 December 00:00:01 UTC to 31 December 23:59:59 UTC, so adjust to your local time, and if you want to take advantage of the bonus when it's active, don't wait for the last moment.

War is often a story of people who don't want to kill each other going out and killing each other because their leaders demand it. They come back with stories, and only some of them ever get told.

War criminal, Nixon adviser, and generally loathed individual who is likely responsible for deaths in the millions, Henry Kissinger, has finally been caught by Death at 100 years of age. His legacy continues to live on, in deaths, and bombs, and coups, and a grand amount of US foreign policy.

Both the prosecutors and the judge used the incorrect name for Brianna Ghey in the trial of those accused of murdering her, and didn't appear to bother with justifying why they might have felt the need to do so. Especially since this is a case where the allegations suggest that Brianna was killed because of being a trans girl, the use of an incorrect name for her gives the implication that her name and her identity were lesser or otherwise untrue, which is certainly a point that transphobes would love to run with.

The colonial past has to be part of history, because it was part of life, says the new head of English Heritage. Recognition, incorporation, and reflection on the atrocities of colonialism are necessary parts of telling a true history regardless of what the hagiographers would have you believe.

Sweden's unionized workforces are showing collective solidarity and refusing to offload Teslas into the country, clean Tesla showrooms and spaces, deliver materials for Tesla cars, or fix Tesla charging points, because Elon Musk refuses to work with a unionized workforce. And presumably can't buy the government to make them do what he wants. Tesla was able to win the concession that license plates had to be delivered by the postal workers, as that was a government function that could not be covered by a strike.

Preserved and cataloged records from the Yerkes Observatory near Chicago present a significant number of women doing science during the period it operated.

The history of trying to control male ejaculation is at least as long as trying to control who women sleep with, and increasingly, the NoFap crowd and the no freedom for women crowd have the same evangelists.

The Washington Post editorial board is scolding liberal women for not being willing to date an marry men who see them as chattel, who will put on the Murdoch Misinformation Service all the time, and who will willingly vote for someone who intends to ensure that those women will never be able to escape a relationship once they've been dragooned into it. And who will likely try to arrange things so that a woman has to be dragooned into a marriage to such a man to be able to access any kind of power or accounts of her own again. The editorial board should be glad we live in a world where arsenic and other such "accidents" are not necessary to get a woman out of a bad situation.

Even those who did not read or write could still often fashion marks, letters, or other sigils of their identity, and they put them to uses for more than just making marks on legal documents. (Including catching hay thieves.)

A principal decided to bully a child asking for clarification about the policies that he was supposedly violating, and law enforcement decided to go along with the bullying based on an unsubstantiated report saying the child was planning on attacking the principal. Even in Texas, where this happened, there were several laws violated along the way.

Something that is apropos of a lot of stories that will come out: The Al Capone Theory of Sexual Harassment, which generally takes the idea of Al Capone getting busted for tax evasion and points out that people who are likely to commit harassment are also more likely to do things that reflect an attitude of entitlement to others or other people's resources and work - so check them for plagiarism, for inflating their accomplishments, for improper expense accounting, and other misuses that reflect aggressive entitlement.

A volunteer with Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia who was also involved in their outreach to Christians turned out also be a registered sex offender in Illinois and nationally, although his certification came up clean in the Pennsylvania searches. Which says something about the incompleteness of the Pennsylvania search, the incompleteness of the Moms for Liberty search, and the greater-than-coincidental situation where pastors and youth leaders seem to be turning up in places where they are accused of, confess to, or have been convicted of sex offenses, and especially sex offenses against children.

But they would rather have you believe that a single kissing scene in a book make an 11 year-old girl develop a decades-long pornography addiction…while not disclosing at all that this same woman testifying about her addiction is angling to be a direct competitor to Scholastic Book Fairs and is associated with the joke publishing outfit Brave Books. The school board that heard the complaint clearly was looking for any excuse at all to ban the challenged book that they accepted this ludicrous description and deception as something actionable.

The death of a young woman in Italy at the apparent hands of her partner continues to fuel the fire of necessary cultural reform. And the part of "this man was fine in all other circumstances, except that he has now allegedly brutally murdered her" does at least get the pushback of "this is not a problem that can solely be legislated away, it must have cultural change." Because the cultural process of raising boys into men in a patriarchal society intends to reduce the full spectrum of possible expressions an behaviors into a very limited, violence-focused set, with a secondary objective that all boys and men should never be womanish or girly. (A definition that doesn't really carry any bright lines or absolutes, so as to inspire a permanent uncertainty in anyone who doesn't have sufficient power to impose their version of masculinity on others.) This limited, woman-blaming worldview pervades the space that calls itself keepers and promoters of true masculinity, available to those who watch and read, or rather, those who subscribe to the courses and the secret clubs.

Sometimes the difference between heroism and foolishness is whether you actually pull off what you intend to do. Like lifting a sheep with a winch up a cliffside. The reintroduction of native leeches to Scottish lochs and streams, as a way of maintaining ecological balance with the more charismatic fauna and also because they're a critically endangered species.

On the matters of SARS-CoV-2, well, there's still a lot of data out there that suggests being infected with SARS-CoV-2 is not good for your health, and that reinfections are even less good for you. There are mitigations, there are vaccinations, but it's still a better idea to try and avoid infection (or reinfection, if you got one) than the alternative.

In technology, On the ways in which games can be wonderful for people, both in teaching and being taught, but also the ways that gaming is still pretty gendered.

In a move that surprised many, the OpenAI board ousted an OpenAI co-founder and the for-profit company's CEO, claiming a breakdown of communication between the CEO and the Board. While there were rumors that the Board might rehire the one they just ousted, those deals ultimately panned out in the immediate aftermath. Microsoft, a heavy investor in OpenAI, offered employment immediately to the departed CEO of OpenAI, and most of the employees signed a letter saying they would also walk to Microsoft if Sam Altman, the fired CEO, were not immediately reinstated. Eventually, OpenAI rehired the CEO the board had dismissed and then forced out several board members and replaced them, likely with people who will be friendlier to allowing the company to do what it wants to do without any kind of fettering or restraint or possibly even a gesture toward ethical use.

It is possible for cryptographic keys to be derived or exposed when computational errors expose a private key that has been encrypted with the RSA algorithm, and a computer is not running a system that compensates for those signature errors when they happen. By comparing an errored situation with a clean one, there's some information that can be gleaned and used to compute private keys, at which point there's a number of attacks that can be performed. The probability of such an error exposing a key is very small, but very small chances combined with very large numbers means and the understanding that an attacker has to succeed only once means that's still something worth patching against.

A reminder that Google is first and foremost an advertising company subsidiary, and therefore nobody should be surprised that Google will prevent useful ad-blocking extensions from working as well when they roll out their newest Manifest version in June 2024. Which should trigger a mass exodus from Chrome (and Chromium, since I suspect Manifest v3 and its limitations will be imposed upon the browser engine that other browsers rely upon for their own) to something that chooses not to arbitrarily limit the effectiveness of ad-blockers. Knowing, as I do now, that Firefox has managed to implement hardware acceleration for single-board computers, although that version likely hasn't gotten back to the ESRs that many of the Debian-based distributions use, it may be time to move the SBC that I use for actual television things to a different distribution, so that I can retain my ability to defeat malvertising and other intrusive ad material.

Google is currently investigating why some of its users have possibly lost up to six months' worth of data storage on cloud services, which again points out the part where not owning and having the servers yourself can result in some very bad possible situations.

Using LLMs and knowledge graph vectors to generate possible criminal connections in art and antiquities, with a case study of running down one such vector that was determined to be plausible by the domain experts and discovering a wealth of circumstantial evidence that might spark further investigations. This use of complex computing and models is less of an issue, because there's human oversight and refinement of the results, rather than unquestioning acceptance of the output of the model.

Another piece of Infocom has been released - the source codes for the Zork Interpreters that allowed Infocom games to be played on various machines, and their wildly incompatible floppy disk decisions that required the implementation of so many interpreters.

Someone who knows a thing or two about cryptocurrency, the European Central Bank chief, admitted that sometimes children do not take the advice of their parents, and that said child lost a significant amount of investment in cryptocurrency schemes.

The trial commenced for a man accused of breaking into a psychotherapy practice's electronic files and attempting to get a ransom for them, first from the company, which refused, and then from the patients, who also refused. Having struck out in both of those bits, the alleged attacker then uploaded the files to the dark web, but also included by mistake a significant amount of information that made it easier to tie them to the hacks and to other possible crimes.

Faced with declining revenues and increasing costs, bowling alleys are adopting less-complex pinsetting devices that put the pins on strings that can be pulled back into a set configuration. For people who have been bowling for a while, the change makes them feel that the throws are off and the action of the pins is different.

At the end, The vessel you bake in has effects on how the bake turns out, because different materials transfer heat in different ways.

(Materials via [personal profile] adrian_turtle, [personal profile] azurelunatic, [personal profile] boxofdelights, [personal profile] cmcmck, [personal profile] conuly, [personal profile] cosmolinguist, [personal profile] elf, [personal profile] finch, [personal profile] firecat, [personal profile] jadelennox, [personal profile] jenett, [personal profile] jjhunter, [personal profile] kaberett, [personal profile] lilysea, [personal profile] oursin, [personal profile] rydra_wong, [personal profile] snowynight, [personal profile] sonia, [personal profile] the_future_modernes, [personal profile] thewayne, [personal profile] umadoshi, [personal profile] vass, the [community profile] meta_warehouse community, [community profile] 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.)
Depth: 2

Date: 2023-12-02 11:10 pm (UTC)
thewayne: (Default)
From: [personal profile] thewayne

The uni put a weather radar station near the observatory and the radar microwave energy over an extended period of time broke the mirror.  Very tragic.

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silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
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