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silveradeptLet us begin with Johns Hopkins University is looking for persons to describe their experiences with COVID-19. Whether you've not had it at all or you've had it a few times, they are looking for your input.
Another very recent item that is getting a lot of play: Jurors in New York State returned a guilty verdict for 34 of the 34 counts charged of falsifying business records in service of covering up another crime. In this case, the crime alleged is election fraud, as the payments were made so as to catch and kill a story that (theoretically) would have been damaging to his reputation and his electability as a candidate. The convicted felon proclaimed the prosecution was politically motivated, that he had not done any crime, and also sent fundraising letters proclaiming such so as to try and fund his Presidential campaign. Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, after which the convicted felon may begin the appeals process. There are still several other state and federal crimes and trials that should be underway or will hopefully start getting underway shortly, but none of them are likely to conclude before the election in November.
The reality of living with ME/CFS, from Elana Hashman, whose name you ma recognize from other places, especially if you're in the Open Source Software world. There's not usually a lot of resources devoted to long-term conditions such as ME, and as more people join the post-exertional malaise club, we can hope they'll put more resources into it, but for the moment, there seems to be the belief that things aren't actually common enough (they are) to need devoted resources.
GLAAD has released their Social Media Safety Index for 2024, looking at major social media platforms, and unsurprisingly, all of them but Tiktok got a failing grade. Tiktok got a D+. The index takes into account how poorly anti-queer hate is moderated, how much queer positivity gets over-moderated, and other factors into creating a final grade, and those grades mostly look at whether or not a policy exists and a little about whether or not they're effectively implemented and enforced correctly.
An overview of the increasing amount of scapegoating of the queer population worldwide, including the United States, and the ways that this scapegoating is deliberately being used to advance authoritarian goals. It's certainly not a coincidence that so many of the people who claim to be for protecting children and letting parents make decisions are also the kinds of people who will welcome the return of government by strongman, because those strongmen and their stooges (and their plants in the judiciary) will suddenly snap to efficiency and "getting things done" once they don't have to worry about things like an opposition or a democracy or any meaningful way of having the political process stop them from doing the things they definitely want to do to everyone who isn't a straight, white, appropriately Christian man.
The University of South Dakota has threatened that any public university employee who lists their pronouns or their Native affiliations in their e-mail signature blocks (and presumably anywhere else) is to be suspended or fired. The University claims they need to ban such things because pronouns and tribal affiliations are incompatible with their branding requirements, making it sound like someone's identity and affiliations are inconveniences for marketing and thus can be controlled so as to present uniformity. Given the current Governor is someone who feels that it is a good anecdote to include in her writing that she shot a dog because she didn't want to train it, fabricated encounters that did not happen between herself and other world leaders, and very clearly wants to erase both the idea that there might be people who exist outside the gender binary and that there are multiple Native nations in her state, this gets filed in the "novel approaches to erasure" folder. We can only wait and see how many other entities decide their style guide is more important than someone's full self.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for both those responsible for the 7 October attack in Israel on civilians and those responsible for the disproportionate response from Israel that followed that attack. Who is brought to the jurisdiction of said court will depend, of course, on who "wins" the current war, as I somehow doubt that anyone will willingly appear before the ICC on the charges of crimes against humanity.
In the way of Orwell, although not nearly as overtly as the requirements of the Memory Hole, the politics of this time is asking people to forget what they have experienced and are still experiencing. Not just that one of the candidates is demanding that the population forget all of what happened during his first four years in office (and that you not take him at his word when he declares what he intends to do with a second term), but the current administration wanting us to forget what we knew while we admitted a pandemic was happening, about taking care of each other, of the world we suddenly decided was possible and then demanded was impossible as soon as capitalists got tired of it, to forget that the U.S. government is providing money and materiel for Israel to prosecute a war against civilians, to forget that much of the cruelty done by law can be similarly undone by law, and to forget that we saw clearly how policing works and who it is called down on, again and again and again, so that we don't keep drawing the line all the way through to the way the police is being used on campus protesters now, and is still being used on people who oppose the idea that white people should be allowed to rule over everyone without question and use whatever means of violence they have at their disposal to enforce that desire.
The Donnelly Public Library in Idaho is being forced to exclude children and teenagers from the building, thanks to an Idaho law that requires any book that gets complained about be removed to an "adults-only" area upon pain of fines and damages if the library doesn't immediately obey the complaint. Yet another reason why laws that presume the guilt of the accused should be stricken as soon as they are signed into existence. In Donnelly's case, the building itself is too small that there's no place to put a segregated "adults-only" area, and the budget of the library is too small to have an attorney on hand to fight back against any complaints demanding the censorship of materials. Donnelly will do their best to continue to provide programming and other child-focused activities, but the building housing the collection will not be browsable by children or teenagers.
There is a reasonable belief that much of this hulabaloo about certain kinds of books (and certain kinds of populations) comes at least in part from the way that library workers have been avoidant of collecting, understanding, and answering questions about sex and sexuality, which in turn allows people with malice to challenge materials that will further push marginalized identities out of the collection and out of spaces where they would otherwise be recognized. The urge to censor is extremely old, and almost always comes out when the privileged feel threatened and that their power might be taken away from them, or someone else might be given power other than them, so the privileged turn to censorship as a way of attempting to erase the existence of what they see as a threat, and they will attack anyone they perceive as opposing them, including institutions they have previously believed were on their side or who they expected to be able to persuade. So what you're seeing in the wave of anti-library legislation is the privileged grabbing at any lever of influence within reach. Taking over a board is one way, defunding a library is another, and passing hostile legislation that removes protection and/or that presumes any complaint about the collection is valid and must be obeyed is a third, and this one seems to be the one that's coming into favor at this point, since it's the most effective one so far. When faced with the choice between endless fighting in court with still possibily losing at least one of the cases and allowing the censorship to happen, most institutions will pick censorship to save their staff and budgets. Which then results in locations being closed to audiences or queer and not-white materials being put in an "adults-only" area, regardless of whether they are actually meant for adults, and the hope that the next crop of legislators elected will realize the error of the last ones and reverse course. Or there will be a Board that decides the budget is worth spending on a fight. (Or the appropriate civic entity that files suit on behalf of the library wins their challenge and those laws are enjoined.)
A user noticed they were getting targeted ads potentially based on their library borrowing habits, and wanted to know what the hell was going on. People looked into it, and couldn't point to anything definitive, but there's a good chance that there were enough Google-things in various places that Google was able to do the association, even across devices from different manufacturers, running different operating systems. The user was incensed at the possibility that their reading and borrowing history was being shared with commercial interests, because that was the obvious conclusion. As with anything that involves multiple middle-entites between content and end-user, there's a good chance that some middle-entity that doesn't have a library's privacy focus shared the data, even if only internally, so as to facilitate the targeted advertising. And because the library has to go through these middle-entities, instead of being able to do things directly, we also take the blame when those middle-entities decide to do things that are profitable to their business and damaging to the library's reputation for privacy. Even if those middle-entities claim they don't sell data or they won't leak data.
Sticking with library things, Minnesota has codified that you cannot remove materials from library collections "based solely on the viewpoint, content, message, idea, or opinion conveyed." Which is a win against all of the people who want to get rid of queer, Black, historically accurate, or effective education materials from library collections. Unfortunately, it also means that you can't get rid of a book from a library solely for being transphobic, racist, white supremacist, or similarly unsuitable for collections outside of specific research interests. The language in the statute mirrors the language in ALA Code of Ethics materials that say "partisan or doctrinal disapproval" is not an acceptable reason to remove materials from a collection, which is probably why it passed. The statute upholds "neutrality" as a value, and doing so probably makes it hardier against challenges of partisanship or singling out only certain viewpoints for exclusion or immunity from exclusion. (Even though we do have precedent in law to create protected categories of people, at least.) Admittedly, many materials that might be excluded for their bigotry have other reasons not to carry them or keep them, so there are more acceptable ways of doing things, especially through the proxy of reviews, which are presumably allowed to talk about the content of the material. In this environment, though, I wonder how long it will take for certain entities to start accusing librarians of removing their viewpoints unacceptably while continuing to put up pressure that other things should be removed because of their viewpoints.
Outside of the specific realm of materials challenges, public libraries continue to be abused by civic authorities and entities who are unwilling to properly fund social services, but instead believe that the library can both navigate people to those services and provide those services themselves. This piece centers on a licensed social worker who keeps office hours in the Central Library in Minneapolis, a place that gets good library funding and has some reasonable policies about use of the library. The piece also, however, points out that many of those reasonable policies are in relation to how the libraries have often become the single remaining place in town that's open during the day, doesn't require a purchase, membership, or entry fee to access, and generally doesn't believe that police are the first solution to use if there's someone existing in the same space as you are.
Because of the landscape left after the Supreme Court of the United States decided Dobbs and reversed Roe, some private entities are stepping into the void to provide care for those that can't afford or don't qualify for other methods. Some of those organizations are only offering specific things, and because they are sometimes the only thing that a woman can access, those are the decisions that get made for them. Which are often made because they're undocumented and a state is hostile, or the state hasn't accepted expansions because the state is hostile, or other similar situations.
There is a good news piece from Minnesota as well. Minnesota has officially banned the use of "trans panic" as a criminal defense.
For paramedics in Denver, Colorado, in addition to the medical knowledge they need to have, they also must pass a version of The Knowledge for Denver so they can get to anywhere in the city quickly. Denver helps by being mostly organized on a grid, with exceptions, and with naming conventions that make it motly possible to know which parts of the city a call is directing them to, and that much of the history of the city is embedded in street names and designs.
The considerations around whether removing the I-980 freeway in Oakland would be reparations for having a neighborhood destroyed to build the freeway or whether removing the freeway would be the green light for gentrification to come in and destroy the neighborhoods.
Major League Baseball has officially incorporated Negro League statistics and records their statistics and records into the MLB records and statistics books, which means that the leaders of various statistical categories has now changed significantly. It took them 3.5 years to do this, after officially recognizing the Negro Leagues as a Major League, but that means that, for example, Josh Gibson is a better ball player than either Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb in terms of career batting average, slugging percentage, and on base plus slugging (OPS). He also now holds the single-season batting average title as well, the single-season slugging percentage title, and the single-season OPS title (and #2 spot). It's telling that a lot of the people I saw discussing this were all basically bracing for a backlash from white supremacists complaining that there's nowhere they're allowed to be the best in sports any more, or other similar racially-motivated remarks about the achievements of the Negro Leagues and their stars.
For people who claim to be interested in science and data, this profile of "effective altruists" who believe the solution is to have as many children as possible shows they're pretty bad at science and data for both having happy healthy children and keeping them happy, healthy, and alive so they can be productive adults. Most of what they're teaching their children, and the chill of the environment they're putting them in, says they've thought a lot about birth, but like many people who are keenly interested in birth rates, they seem to have discarded the part where there's a child that needs raising from that point forward.
Regarding SARS-CoV-2 and its complications, it's possible that at least fragments of SARS-CoV-2 can remain in the body for up to two years after infection, which is not good for anyone, of course, if it turns out that this particular coronavirus tends to be a reservoir virus or one that sticks around, even after it's been fought off for a particular infection. And we already have it figured out that multiple reinfections increases the risk of serious health consequences, so the possibility that the time between surges is shortening, and that many people either are or are mandated to avoid protective measures against infection is also not good. (I also hear a lot of aggravation about how the enforcement of bringing people back together has not had a corresponding enforcement of requirements to make the air as clean as possible for those people that are being required to gather together.)
A small bit of bright news is that those who have been receiving regular vaccinations as they are eligible for them may be developing antibodies that are effective against other variants or against novel variations and/or coronaviruses that have not yet been widespread.
In technology, we must report the death of Gordon Bell, a major architect of minicomputers at DEC, among other accomplishments, at 89 years of age, and Robert Dennard, who pioneered the technology known as dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that allows our microcomputers to have so much memory in such small sticks, at 91 years of age. (One transistor for one bit. Very impressive.)
The Akatsuki probe orbiting Venus may have gone completely dark. The scientists at JAXA have been trying to get it back into communication, but it may have passed beyond our control.
In the department of "technology companies behaving badly and people trying to fight them," A tool to remove all the embedded advertisements in Windows 11, through the use of registry entry manipulation. Which is extra useful for those who need to continue using Windows 11. Unfortuantely, Microsoft intends to roll out a new "feature" that will take regular screenshots of your desktop and store them on your computer, ostensibly because they think you'll want to review those screenshots to remember what you were doing. (I know one person for whom that might be useful in my life.) As you might expect, there are plenty of people who can see the downsides of this, and the likely amount of abuse this feature will be used for, whether for spousal surveillance or bossware or similar. Supposedly, it will require a fairly beefy machine to activate, and one that has a specific processor in it, so those of us on budget machines may be spared, but still. I have no doubt that when rolled out, it will be turned on by default, and we'll probably need to make registry modificaions to turn it off, if we get the option to do so.
Samsung repair contracts demand that repair techs make copies of data on Samsung devices and send it to them on a daily basis, as well as requiring them to examine devices for non-OEM parts, remove and destroy those parts, and replace them with Samsung materials, so that someone has to pay more while their phone is currently undergoing repair because Samsung demands that only their parts can be used for repair. For this and other reasons related to the way that Samsung wants to be able to dictate to repair shops how they can do their work and what parts they can use, iFixit is terminating the partnership they had with Samsung to get their parts, and will instead, as they do with Apple devices, use aftermarket parts to achieve the same ends. (Which will be removed and destroyed if someone has to take their device into a repair shop with one of those contracts mentioned above.) That's certainly behavior that makes me think about whether or not the next tablet in my future will be Samsung at all. (I'm kind of hoping, honestly, that things like the PineTab will have advanced sufficiently that I can, at least for the tablet, jump ship. Phones are a little more limited, because I'm still playing Pokemon Go.)
Samsung's policies pale in comparison to Google, however, who up until recently, claimed they could keep any phones sent to them for repair that contained aftermarket or non-OEM parts. Recognizing, however, that keeping someone's phone they sent in for repair would be a very bad look (and, in previous iterations, would contradict "Don't be evil."), Google is amending their Terms and Conditions so as not to claim that they can keep any phone sent to them for repairs that contains aftermarket parts, although they continue to make their repair offerings much less attractive than the cost of buying another phone used.
The way that Apple devices calculate location includes having scraped and stored the names and locations of all Wi-Fi BSSIDs that have ever been around such devices, and being able to query the location data of those BSSIDs means that significant amounts of personal location and movement information is potentially being leaked by these systems, including things like the movement of Ukranian troops and refugees. The supposed "solution" to this capture and usage of data is to append "_nomap" to the access point's SSID, and was only implemented very recently, so up to this point, you could not opt-out of having your data scraped and used in this manner.
An event where Google Cloud completely deleted a customer's account managed to avoid being a complete disaster because the customer had multiple backups with different providers and could restore, even though the restore itself took two weeks to happen. A bad configuration was blamed for the permanent deletion of the account and all of the data backups that were associated with the account.
A leak of several thousand documents related to Google's search APIs gives insights into the ways that Google ranks search results and strongly suggests that the Chrome browser is one of the ways that Google gathers significant amounts of data about user and search behavior. With something like that, I'd look into seeing whether Chromium, the browser engine, also does some of that data collection, even though it's supposed to be less Google than Chrome itself.
nVidia is attempting to disclaim any liability for copyright violation because they trained their AI on material made available by pirate book sites, claiming that transforming the material into LLM weights was sufficiently ransformative that it doesn't count as a copyright violation. And, probably, trying to push the blame on to the sites taht made the material available in the first place.
Tesla Cybertruck injures owner trying to use vehicle. Tesla Cybertruck injures owner trying to use vehicle.
There may be Lyme disease vaccinations coming to market soon, to help against the fight of tick-borne disease.
Testing technology meant to help lost hikers be found more quickly if their cell phones are trying to find towers, and which can be used to help send text messages and broadcasts about weather or terrain issues that could impact hiker safety. Pretty neat technological use, and good at spotting someone based on radio signal location, rather than trying to spot them in trees or other places that would cover them.
Windows is integrating tools like git and compression algorithms like tar and 7zip into File Explorer, so that the default Windows tool can handle more things. Which will be nice, I suppose, for those of us who have to use Windows computers regardless of whether we think of them as a good idea.
Last for tonight, Queer Dying, a workbook for making sure that when Death catches up with you, you will be remembered and celebrated in the way that you want to be.
And the increasing proliferation of pages with short slugs after the original slash, so that you now can have not just /about, /info, and /contact but also /nope, /carry, and /til.
(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.)
Another very recent item that is getting a lot of play: Jurors in New York State returned a guilty verdict for 34 of the 34 counts charged of falsifying business records in service of covering up another crime. In this case, the crime alleged is election fraud, as the payments were made so as to catch and kill a story that (theoretically) would have been damaging to his reputation and his electability as a candidate. The convicted felon proclaimed the prosecution was politically motivated, that he had not done any crime, and also sent fundraising letters proclaiming such so as to try and fund his Presidential campaign. Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, after which the convicted felon may begin the appeals process. There are still several other state and federal crimes and trials that should be underway or will hopefully start getting underway shortly, but none of them are likely to conclude before the election in November.
The reality of living with ME/CFS, from Elana Hashman, whose name you ma recognize from other places, especially if you're in the Open Source Software world. There's not usually a lot of resources devoted to long-term conditions such as ME, and as more people join the post-exertional malaise club, we can hope they'll put more resources into it, but for the moment, there seems to be the belief that things aren't actually common enough (they are) to need devoted resources.
GLAAD has released their Social Media Safety Index for 2024, looking at major social media platforms, and unsurprisingly, all of them but Tiktok got a failing grade. Tiktok got a D+. The index takes into account how poorly anti-queer hate is moderated, how much queer positivity gets over-moderated, and other factors into creating a final grade, and those grades mostly look at whether or not a policy exists and a little about whether or not they're effectively implemented and enforced correctly.
An overview of the increasing amount of scapegoating of the queer population worldwide, including the United States, and the ways that this scapegoating is deliberately being used to advance authoritarian goals. It's certainly not a coincidence that so many of the people who claim to be for protecting children and letting parents make decisions are also the kinds of people who will welcome the return of government by strongman, because those strongmen and their stooges (and their plants in the judiciary) will suddenly snap to efficiency and "getting things done" once they don't have to worry about things like an opposition or a democracy or any meaningful way of having the political process stop them from doing the things they definitely want to do to everyone who isn't a straight, white, appropriately Christian man.
The University of South Dakota has threatened that any public university employee who lists their pronouns or their Native affiliations in their e-mail signature blocks (and presumably anywhere else) is to be suspended or fired. The University claims they need to ban such things because pronouns and tribal affiliations are incompatible with their branding requirements, making it sound like someone's identity and affiliations are inconveniences for marketing and thus can be controlled so as to present uniformity. Given the current Governor is someone who feels that it is a good anecdote to include in her writing that she shot a dog because she didn't want to train it, fabricated encounters that did not happen between herself and other world leaders, and very clearly wants to erase both the idea that there might be people who exist outside the gender binary and that there are multiple Native nations in her state, this gets filed in the "novel approaches to erasure" folder. We can only wait and see how many other entities decide their style guide is more important than someone's full self.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for both those responsible for the 7 October attack in Israel on civilians and those responsible for the disproportionate response from Israel that followed that attack. Who is brought to the jurisdiction of said court will depend, of course, on who "wins" the current war, as I somehow doubt that anyone will willingly appear before the ICC on the charges of crimes against humanity.
In the way of Orwell, although not nearly as overtly as the requirements of the Memory Hole, the politics of this time is asking people to forget what they have experienced and are still experiencing. Not just that one of the candidates is demanding that the population forget all of what happened during his first four years in office (and that you not take him at his word when he declares what he intends to do with a second term), but the current administration wanting us to forget what we knew while we admitted a pandemic was happening, about taking care of each other, of the world we suddenly decided was possible and then demanded was impossible as soon as capitalists got tired of it, to forget that the U.S. government is providing money and materiel for Israel to prosecute a war against civilians, to forget that much of the cruelty done by law can be similarly undone by law, and to forget that we saw clearly how policing works and who it is called down on, again and again and again, so that we don't keep drawing the line all the way through to the way the police is being used on campus protesters now, and is still being used on people who oppose the idea that white people should be allowed to rule over everyone without question and use whatever means of violence they have at their disposal to enforce that desire.
The Donnelly Public Library in Idaho is being forced to exclude children and teenagers from the building, thanks to an Idaho law that requires any book that gets complained about be removed to an "adults-only" area upon pain of fines and damages if the library doesn't immediately obey the complaint. Yet another reason why laws that presume the guilt of the accused should be stricken as soon as they are signed into existence. In Donnelly's case, the building itself is too small that there's no place to put a segregated "adults-only" area, and the budget of the library is too small to have an attorney on hand to fight back against any complaints demanding the censorship of materials. Donnelly will do their best to continue to provide programming and other child-focused activities, but the building housing the collection will not be browsable by children or teenagers.
There is a reasonable belief that much of this hulabaloo about certain kinds of books (and certain kinds of populations) comes at least in part from the way that library workers have been avoidant of collecting, understanding, and answering questions about sex and sexuality, which in turn allows people with malice to challenge materials that will further push marginalized identities out of the collection and out of spaces where they would otherwise be recognized. The urge to censor is extremely old, and almost always comes out when the privileged feel threatened and that their power might be taken away from them, or someone else might be given power other than them, so the privileged turn to censorship as a way of attempting to erase the existence of what they see as a threat, and they will attack anyone they perceive as opposing them, including institutions they have previously believed were on their side or who they expected to be able to persuade. So what you're seeing in the wave of anti-library legislation is the privileged grabbing at any lever of influence within reach. Taking over a board is one way, defunding a library is another, and passing hostile legislation that removes protection and/or that presumes any complaint about the collection is valid and must be obeyed is a third, and this one seems to be the one that's coming into favor at this point, since it's the most effective one so far. When faced with the choice between endless fighting in court with still possibily losing at least one of the cases and allowing the censorship to happen, most institutions will pick censorship to save their staff and budgets. Which then results in locations being closed to audiences or queer and not-white materials being put in an "adults-only" area, regardless of whether they are actually meant for adults, and the hope that the next crop of legislators elected will realize the error of the last ones and reverse course. Or there will be a Board that decides the budget is worth spending on a fight. (Or the appropriate civic entity that files suit on behalf of the library wins their challenge and those laws are enjoined.)
A user noticed they were getting targeted ads potentially based on their library borrowing habits, and wanted to know what the hell was going on. People looked into it, and couldn't point to anything definitive, but there's a good chance that there were enough Google-things in various places that Google was able to do the association, even across devices from different manufacturers, running different operating systems. The user was incensed at the possibility that their reading and borrowing history was being shared with commercial interests, because that was the obvious conclusion. As with anything that involves multiple middle-entites between content and end-user, there's a good chance that some middle-entity that doesn't have a library's privacy focus shared the data, even if only internally, so as to facilitate the targeted advertising. And because the library has to go through these middle-entities, instead of being able to do things directly, we also take the blame when those middle-entities decide to do things that are profitable to their business and damaging to the library's reputation for privacy. Even if those middle-entities claim they don't sell data or they won't leak data.
Sticking with library things, Minnesota has codified that you cannot remove materials from library collections "based solely on the viewpoint, content, message, idea, or opinion conveyed." Which is a win against all of the people who want to get rid of queer, Black, historically accurate, or effective education materials from library collections. Unfortunately, it also means that you can't get rid of a book from a library solely for being transphobic, racist, white supremacist, or similarly unsuitable for collections outside of specific research interests. The language in the statute mirrors the language in ALA Code of Ethics materials that say "partisan or doctrinal disapproval" is not an acceptable reason to remove materials from a collection, which is probably why it passed. The statute upholds "neutrality" as a value, and doing so probably makes it hardier against challenges of partisanship or singling out only certain viewpoints for exclusion or immunity from exclusion. (Even though we do have precedent in law to create protected categories of people, at least.) Admittedly, many materials that might be excluded for their bigotry have other reasons not to carry them or keep them, so there are more acceptable ways of doing things, especially through the proxy of reviews, which are presumably allowed to talk about the content of the material. In this environment, though, I wonder how long it will take for certain entities to start accusing librarians of removing their viewpoints unacceptably while continuing to put up pressure that other things should be removed because of their viewpoints.
Outside of the specific realm of materials challenges, public libraries continue to be abused by civic authorities and entities who are unwilling to properly fund social services, but instead believe that the library can both navigate people to those services and provide those services themselves. This piece centers on a licensed social worker who keeps office hours in the Central Library in Minneapolis, a place that gets good library funding and has some reasonable policies about use of the library. The piece also, however, points out that many of those reasonable policies are in relation to how the libraries have often become the single remaining place in town that's open during the day, doesn't require a purchase, membership, or entry fee to access, and generally doesn't believe that police are the first solution to use if there's someone existing in the same space as you are.
Because of the landscape left after the Supreme Court of the United States decided Dobbs and reversed Roe, some private entities are stepping into the void to provide care for those that can't afford or don't qualify for other methods. Some of those organizations are only offering specific things, and because they are sometimes the only thing that a woman can access, those are the decisions that get made for them. Which are often made because they're undocumented and a state is hostile, or the state hasn't accepted expansions because the state is hostile, or other similar situations.
There is a good news piece from Minnesota as well. Minnesota has officially banned the use of "trans panic" as a criminal defense.
For paramedics in Denver, Colorado, in addition to the medical knowledge they need to have, they also must pass a version of The Knowledge for Denver so they can get to anywhere in the city quickly. Denver helps by being mostly organized on a grid, with exceptions, and with naming conventions that make it motly possible to know which parts of the city a call is directing them to, and that much of the history of the city is embedded in street names and designs.
The considerations around whether removing the I-980 freeway in Oakland would be reparations for having a neighborhood destroyed to build the freeway or whether removing the freeway would be the green light for gentrification to come in and destroy the neighborhoods.
Major League Baseball has officially incorporated Negro League statistics and records their statistics and records into the MLB records and statistics books, which means that the leaders of various statistical categories has now changed significantly. It took them 3.5 years to do this, after officially recognizing the Negro Leagues as a Major League, but that means that, for example, Josh Gibson is a better ball player than either Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb in terms of career batting average, slugging percentage, and on base plus slugging (OPS). He also now holds the single-season batting average title as well, the single-season slugging percentage title, and the single-season OPS title (and #2 spot). It's telling that a lot of the people I saw discussing this were all basically bracing for a backlash from white supremacists complaining that there's nowhere they're allowed to be the best in sports any more, or other similar racially-motivated remarks about the achievements of the Negro Leagues and their stars.
For people who claim to be interested in science and data, this profile of "effective altruists" who believe the solution is to have as many children as possible shows they're pretty bad at science and data for both having happy healthy children and keeping them happy, healthy, and alive so they can be productive adults. Most of what they're teaching their children, and the chill of the environment they're putting them in, says they've thought a lot about birth, but like many people who are keenly interested in birth rates, they seem to have discarded the part where there's a child that needs raising from that point forward.
Regarding SARS-CoV-2 and its complications, it's possible that at least fragments of SARS-CoV-2 can remain in the body for up to two years after infection, which is not good for anyone, of course, if it turns out that this particular coronavirus tends to be a reservoir virus or one that sticks around, even after it's been fought off for a particular infection. And we already have it figured out that multiple reinfections increases the risk of serious health consequences, so the possibility that the time between surges is shortening, and that many people either are or are mandated to avoid protective measures against infection is also not good. (I also hear a lot of aggravation about how the enforcement of bringing people back together has not had a corresponding enforcement of requirements to make the air as clean as possible for those people that are being required to gather together.)
A small bit of bright news is that those who have been receiving regular vaccinations as they are eligible for them may be developing antibodies that are effective against other variants or against novel variations and/or coronaviruses that have not yet been widespread.
In technology, we must report the death of Gordon Bell, a major architect of minicomputers at DEC, among other accomplishments, at 89 years of age, and Robert Dennard, who pioneered the technology known as dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that allows our microcomputers to have so much memory in such small sticks, at 91 years of age. (One transistor for one bit. Very impressive.)
The Akatsuki probe orbiting Venus may have gone completely dark. The scientists at JAXA have been trying to get it back into communication, but it may have passed beyond our control.
In the department of "technology companies behaving badly and people trying to fight them," A tool to remove all the embedded advertisements in Windows 11, through the use of registry entry manipulation. Which is extra useful for those who need to continue using Windows 11. Unfortuantely, Microsoft intends to roll out a new "feature" that will take regular screenshots of your desktop and store them on your computer, ostensibly because they think you'll want to review those screenshots to remember what you were doing. (I know one person for whom that might be useful in my life.) As you might expect, there are plenty of people who can see the downsides of this, and the likely amount of abuse this feature will be used for, whether for spousal surveillance or bossware or similar. Supposedly, it will require a fairly beefy machine to activate, and one that has a specific processor in it, so those of us on budget machines may be spared, but still. I have no doubt that when rolled out, it will be turned on by default, and we'll probably need to make registry modificaions to turn it off, if we get the option to do so.
Samsung repair contracts demand that repair techs make copies of data on Samsung devices and send it to them on a daily basis, as well as requiring them to examine devices for non-OEM parts, remove and destroy those parts, and replace them with Samsung materials, so that someone has to pay more while their phone is currently undergoing repair because Samsung demands that only their parts can be used for repair. For this and other reasons related to the way that Samsung wants to be able to dictate to repair shops how they can do their work and what parts they can use, iFixit is terminating the partnership they had with Samsung to get their parts, and will instead, as they do with Apple devices, use aftermarket parts to achieve the same ends. (Which will be removed and destroyed if someone has to take their device into a repair shop with one of those contracts mentioned above.) That's certainly behavior that makes me think about whether or not the next tablet in my future will be Samsung at all. (I'm kind of hoping, honestly, that things like the PineTab will have advanced sufficiently that I can, at least for the tablet, jump ship. Phones are a little more limited, because I'm still playing Pokemon Go.)
Samsung's policies pale in comparison to Google, however, who up until recently, claimed they could keep any phones sent to them for repair that contained aftermarket or non-OEM parts. Recognizing, however, that keeping someone's phone they sent in for repair would be a very bad look (and, in previous iterations, would contradict "Don't be evil."), Google is amending their Terms and Conditions so as not to claim that they can keep any phone sent to them for repairs that contains aftermarket parts, although they continue to make their repair offerings much less attractive than the cost of buying another phone used.
The way that Apple devices calculate location includes having scraped and stored the names and locations of all Wi-Fi BSSIDs that have ever been around such devices, and being able to query the location data of those BSSIDs means that significant amounts of personal location and movement information is potentially being leaked by these systems, including things like the movement of Ukranian troops and refugees. The supposed "solution" to this capture and usage of data is to append "_nomap" to the access point's SSID, and was only implemented very recently, so up to this point, you could not opt-out of having your data scraped and used in this manner.
An event where Google Cloud completely deleted a customer's account managed to avoid being a complete disaster because the customer had multiple backups with different providers and could restore, even though the restore itself took two weeks to happen. A bad configuration was blamed for the permanent deletion of the account and all of the data backups that were associated with the account.
A leak of several thousand documents related to Google's search APIs gives insights into the ways that Google ranks search results and strongly suggests that the Chrome browser is one of the ways that Google gathers significant amounts of data about user and search behavior. With something like that, I'd look into seeing whether Chromium, the browser engine, also does some of that data collection, even though it's supposed to be less Google than Chrome itself.
nVidia is attempting to disclaim any liability for copyright violation because they trained their AI on material made available by pirate book sites, claiming that transforming the material into LLM weights was sufficiently ransformative that it doesn't count as a copyright violation. And, probably, trying to push the blame on to the sites taht made the material available in the first place.
Tesla Cybertruck injures owner trying to use vehicle. Tesla Cybertruck injures owner trying to use vehicle.
There may be Lyme disease vaccinations coming to market soon, to help against the fight of tick-borne disease.
Testing technology meant to help lost hikers be found more quickly if their cell phones are trying to find towers, and which can be used to help send text messages and broadcasts about weather or terrain issues that could impact hiker safety. Pretty neat technological use, and good at spotting someone based on radio signal location, rather than trying to spot them in trees or other places that would cover them.
Windows is integrating tools like git and compression algorithms like tar and 7zip into File Explorer, so that the default Windows tool can handle more things. Which will be nice, I suppose, for those of us who have to use Windows computers regardless of whether we think of them as a good idea.
Last for tonight, Queer Dying, a workbook for making sure that when Death catches up with you, you will be remembered and celebrated in the way that you want to be.
And the increasing proliferation of pages with short slugs after the original slash, so that you now can have not just /about, /info, and /contact but also /nope, /carry, and /til.
(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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Date: 2024-06-01 09:12 am (UTC)It's depressing to see how universities demand to control people's gender and ethnicity for "branding" with government backing.
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Date: 2024-06-01 03:28 pm (UTC)It often makes the system easier to use when it dictates to you how to use it, but it makes it correspondingly harder to do anything other than what you've been told to do with it.
Rather than blame a generation raised on the ubiquity of screens and apps, I'm fixing the blame some on companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple who have made business decisions proclaiming it's more profitable to get people to buy and use limited, locked devices than to sell then one general-purpose, unlocked device and let them load the software they need on it. Limited locked devices are easier for corporations and schools to manage, and with a corresponding lack of instruction on what a computer can do when not fettered, and you end up with people who have never been given the option to consider that perhaps they could do things with computers that aren't dictated to them by people with power over them.
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