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silveradeptLet us begin with the garderobe of the Internet, 4chan, going offline after being hacked thoroughly by a rival garderobe.
A bookstore owner in Chelsea, Michigan, got the community to come out and help move the books from an old location to the new one. The volunteers formed a human chain and passed each of the books in stock down the line from the old space to the new one. The community did the owner a solid and showed that having a community around you is one of the best things for anyone.
On the importance of a sport bra, and the things that it actually needs to do to be effective, none of which necessarily have to do with how it looks to an observer.
I fear for the slush pile of an imprint that believes that young men just can't find anything they want to read, and is so inviting a focus on young and middle-aged men's writing about being young and middle-aged men, mostly because I think it will be sorely disappointing to many who believe themselves gatekept by all the women to find out that no, really, friend, the novel is not actually that good.
Pope Francis is dead at 88 years of age, and we can only hope that his successor continues to take the Catholic Church in many of the directions he was pulling them, toward greater tolerance and more Christian behavior.
The toady currently in charge of the Institute for Museum and Library Services is now demanding information from IMLS grantees to prove they're using their funds in ways defined by the flurry of executive orders against accurate history, the diversity of people, and acknowledging that the world is set up to benefit rich white men and that other people may need structural assistance in defeating that impediment, as well as asking how they're using their funds to teach media literacy (which they don't want, either.)
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has decided to adopt a sex-based definition of people, in defiance of reality. In their rush to exclude trans people, the ruling also provided a strict and mostly wrong definition of what a lesbian is.
Not wanting to waste an opportunity given to them, persons who want to make sure their transmisia is included in guidelines have demanded that the NHS change their guidelines to reflect their transmisia. Several politicians welcomed the ability to make transmisic statements in public and demand that trans people use incorrect bathrooms, and also that they have such developed observational powers that they can simply know who qualifies as a woman and who does not. Interim guidance from the people tasked with implementing the decision follows the same tack and insists that people should not be allowed to enter toilets if they have biology deemed incompatible, but also that trans people should not ever be in a situation where they have no toilet to use, and therefore, there will be an awful lot of complaining and trying to figure out how to thread that particular needle, since the obvious and correct solution ("stop trying to police where trans people pee") has been rescinded.
The British Medical Association called the ruling "scientifically illiterate," which seems appropriate and apt for a large amount of the trans panic going on and the justifications that people make for their transmisia. Disability Rights UK stood in solidarity, recognizing quickly that if one marginalized group is allowed to be picked off and harmed, that makes it that much easier for the next group. And also, possibly, because the government also intends to screw disabled people and cut massive amounts from the system that allows the disabled to live more independently.
Reasonable Access offers a page of advice on how to approach the necessity of asserting yourself during an episode of discrimination, especially if it's a regular thing that happens.
And, if you are so inclined, there is a myriad of possible protests to express your displeasure at this ruling and the people who have been hustling to try and stuff as much bigotry into public life while they have the opportunity. If you do, you'll be in good company from all the other people who have been expressing their displeasure. Calls are already underway to prevent any political party who endorses this ruling or their transmisia from taking part in Pride.
Those calls annoy the people who take offense to the idea that someone might disagree with the ruling or think that it's foolish and a terrible idea, and want to express that displeasure. They'll likely also be unhappy with the attempt to take the government to court in the European Court of Human Rights over the matter.
It would behoove other countries to enact refugee programs for transgender individuals trying to escape hostile regimes. Given how many of them there are, and that their number currently includes both United States and United Kingdom, it would be a good decision for any country that were willing to accept persons being persecuted for being trans. People are already looking for safer places to be.
Because, as one might expect, anti-trans venom is spreading to cis women who don't conform to someone's expectations of what a woman is, and therefore the person who got verbally assaulted got fired from her Wal-Mart job, because she apparently didn't report the incident to the right person. Wal-Mart says it was an error and have offered her to come back with back pay, but they've just demonstrated they are not trustrworthy and do not have the backs of their workers on something like this.
Retirement, as the concept is popularly known in our time, is a very recent invention - only a select few people were able to stop work entirely in their lives. Which still leaves a significant portion of the population as aged and either trying to or unable to work - the poor laws were meant to help them, but they could be widely-variable in who got relief, how much, and what conditions were applied to it, so it isn't necessarily a precursor to a pension system, either.
The ancient world of the Celts routinely had women in positions of power and wealth, according to the spate of burial artifacts unearthed in the area and dated. As the article points out, the fact that it keeps turning up this way has managed to finally get past those who would characterize women in power in the ancient world as a fluke, despite the Romans themselves making commentary on it regularly in their writings.
Our current era is one where people of wealth and power seem more than willing to bring about the end of the world so they can work through it in comfort and luxury and then rebuild to expand out their vision of what a post-apocalypse is. They're not interested in common people except where they have to be, and they'd rather replace common people with robots and artificial intelligence where possible, just to make sure there isn't any solidarity among humans.
A person who has never known the toll that student loan debt puts on people has said that she intends to start collections proceedings and other such punitive measures against those who haven't been able to pay their loans, and has the gall to say that it's something the taxpayer should be thankful to her about. These are also the people, however, when faced with the opportunity to forgive those debts and therefore help regular people out, kept insisting that it couldn't be done and that they had no intention of making it possible after the courts that favor the rich ruled that it couldn't be done by executive action. They do not have compassion for others, only greed for money, money they intend to extract from others to enrich themselves.
The rampage against right speech continues, as we now find the Agriculture Department may not refer to such anodyne things as "safe drinking water" and other such things that the current administration believes are a specific kind of unacceptable ideology, one that suggests rapacious capitalism and planetary destruction isn't an alloyed good. And the Education Department insists all the states must certify that they don't have anything to do with hiring and retaining the best people, teaching accurate history, and ensuring their students have the best environment to learn in, or they won't receive any already-appropriated funds.
A company that started providing logistical support to music festivals is now soaking in government contracts to provide tent cities for the people taken by ICE and those who are attempting to get asylum status in the United States. Which, in this era, definitely would qualify as profiting off the suffering of others.
And because they don't care about accuracy, or even whether or not their attempts are rightly pointed out as the frauds they are, the Administration is now trying to pass off a crudely doctored photo claiming a man detained in El Salvador has gang affiliation tattoos. As in "they have applied Microsoft Paint to a picture and are trying to pass it off as real." Even with obvious evidence to the contrary coming from a Senator visiting the person in question and photographs being taken of the real person's hand. It's about the power to do it, not about the accuracy or convincing-ness of the fake.
Several people who claim to be on the side of law enforcement are looking for whatever excuse they can find to detain and then arrest people for the crime of driving, working, or existing while brown, then turning them over to be deported for the crime of being brown, although the people doing the deporting usually dress it up as "re-entered the country after being deported at least once already." These are, of course, the people they want us to believe are violent gang members or invaders at the direction of a foreign power. Yes, even the doctoral students disappeared without due process, likely for the "crime" of being opposed to U.S. foreign policy in Palestine. And that includes the citizen arrested and detained on suspicion of being undocumented, who the immigration officials tried to say brought it upon himself for being brown and without obvious documentation of his citizenship, and then further tried to claim that the citizen declared himself to be undocumented and tried to turn himself in. Which is to say, the real reason is something that would get them in trouble, so the people doing the arresting told an obvious lie and expect us to believe them.
The people doing the arresting choose to break car windows and drag people from vehicles in the process of their arrests, while covering their identities and claiming they don't have to show anyone the legal orders that provoke these behaviors. Even when they don't have the correct person, they resort to violence and the assumption that they are correct. They do not care whether they have the correct person or not, nor do they care to stop when evidence that they have the incorrect person is easily available to them, instead choosing to continue terrorizing and stealing from those persons they are sent after. Even when the evidence proving them wrong is easily accessible and can be shown to them, they resort to violence on the assumption they are correct and any action taken is resistance that justifies their violence. (And, in this story, the local law enforcement officials are making up a reason to make someone appear at a certain time and day at a courthouse, where the immigration officials will arrest them and take them away.) The people trying to prevent the disappearance of others by masked and unidentified persons are being threatened with retaliation for their attempts to stop extrajudicial rendition, even though it's a feature of this entire situation that the people who claim to be agents of the government do not show their identification and do not show their faces, either.
Despite the argument that there's no way that this Administration could find and return a specific person from an El Salvador prison, there's plenty of opportunity for Republican lawmakers to go to that prison and make photo opportunities of themselves looking tough and strong with the backdrop of cruelty and inhumanity.
Persons seeking asylum in the United States from Afghanistan for reasons of religious persecution and their Christianity, or because they assisted the United States military in their time in Afghanistan, are being told they have to leave the country. Because the people pulling the levers are not actually Christian, despite what they may profess, but are instead the followers of TurboJesus or any number of heretical false visions of Jesus. They are willing to condemn people to death at the hands of a foreign government so that they don't have to do anything about the teachings regarding how you treat strangers in your midst.
An Australian with a valid visa to enter the country was accused of several things that have nothing to do with him or his work and was deported back to Australia, without any due process or ability to contest whatever reality-free charges were leveled against him, and now he has to stay in Australia for five years, while his entire life was in the United States. The people handling the detention and eventual deportation are characterized as thugs high on their own power (although not directly described as such), which is probably a kind description for them. Another person who was backpacking through the United States was refused entry to Canada and then held in immigration detention for significant time in the United States, and got to meet and draw many of the others in the same facility. A Canadian was detained for reasons that were not adequately explained and then wrote about the experience after she was released about all the other people who were still there, and the flimsy and unclear reasons they were still in immigration detention. Tourists who hadn't fully booked out their accommodations were arrested and then deported, on the incorrect accusation that they intended to work on a travel visa. Despite having the correct documents obtained that they could obtain that should have made them an easy case to grant entry to. As you can see, the people who have been hired to enforce racism as their primary job seem to be expanding outward into power-tripping against everyone they encounter, including people that the ones who want them to enforce racism would say are solidly part of Us instead of the Them they're supposed to be targeting. The obvious consequences is that not all that many people will come to the United States who otherwise would do so with the intent of seeing the sights and spending some money on tourism.
Canadians are being advised to do as much immigration work as they can while still in Canada, and not to travel to the U.S. without significant documentation and a phone that is not their regular one.
A United States-born lawyer who is definitely a citizen of the country has received a letter telling her to leave the United States because her 'parole' has been revoked. She works in immigration law, so it could either be a mistake, or an attempt at intimidation, and in this administration, the attempt at intimidation is the more likely action. The e-mail she received was like thousands of others, telling people on humanitarian parole in the United States that their parole was revoked and they had to depart immediately, even though many of the people supposedly affected by the order don't have e-mail. And the immigration lawyer was not the only citizen to receive the e-mail demanding their immediate departure from the United States, so once again, we have people flexing their power without regard as to whether they are getting the right people and not caring about the damage they are doing in their ignorance and foolishness. A Harvard scientist who may have new technique for imaging and analyzing those images to spot cancerous cells has been in immigration detention for months, because those who want to grab immigrants and find excuses for them to get deported don't care whether their excuses are flimsy or not.
The continued obstruction and refusal to follow court orders should result in contempt and other such charges against the administrators, but there's also the sign that at least two of the Supreme Court justices are engaging in contempt of themselves as well. A federal judge agrees and finds there is probable cause to hold this administration in contempt for their continued defiance of court orders regarding the movement of people. Since they're also untrustworthy to the point that the Supreme Court is dashing to injunct them against deporting, and they are documented as trying to evade orders and lie about their intentions to try and avoid court orders as well.
The people who are looking for excuses to arrest and deport immigrants have been targeting them when they appear for court dates for other issues, and have now arrested a judge they claim helped one of their targets evade them. Because they don't care that making courthouses places where people get arrested and deported means that fewer people will use the courts or appear for their stated dates and appointments. Which will also likely give those immigration officials convenient justification for arresting someone if they miss a court date. And also, if they're supposedly interested in the violent and the terrible, arresting people at courthouses means less people seeking relief from domestic violence or other such issues, so nice job breaking it, fools.
A scientist who may have developed a novel way to read microscope images that could be better at cancer detection at Harvard University is currently sitting in immigration detention. And because it's this administration, it's entirely possible she may be deported to a hostile country because this one wants to make everyone feel unwelcome.
The moments are here, and the question is who is actually listening to the alarm bells and who is trying to pretend them away or silence those ringing them.
A whistleblower complaint alleges that the unelected rampagers through government offices may have exfiltrated sensitive data from the National Labor Relations Board, while also trying to remove the logs of their work and leaving the security measures in place to prevent mishandling of data turned off., And beyond that, apparently, not that soon after the rampagers were in the system, a foreign IP address kept trying to log into the systems, with the credentials of accounts recently created by the wreckers. It's clear that these folks do not consider any data off-limits to them, and that they can use it for any purpose at all, regardless of what the law says or what protections are in place for them. And instead of fighting them and prosecuting them, the administration continues to hype them and say they're doing the job that they are nominally constructed to do.
Harvard University has decided they will not bow under to threats of having their funding removed for not remaking themselves into a fascism-friendly university. Several other universities are also pushing back against these threats and are organizing themselves into coalitions and mutual defense pacts. It helps to do this when you have significant reserves in your endowments so that you don't have to be dependent on federal funding to continue operations, research, and all the other things that make a university go. Harvard gets the headline because they're a prominent Ivy League school, but plenty of other universities are deep in their own lawsuits and defense mechanisms.
The administration could not keep two H. McMasters separated, and so the administrator called the one-time adviser and most recently punching bag, rather than the South Carolina governor that he intended to get a hold of. Incompetence is at all levels of this administration.
The current Homeland Security spokesmodel had her purse stolen from where she was taking her family to dinner. The purse also apparently contained a large amount of cash in it that was intended as the money to pay for the food and some Easter gifts. I hope the material is returned to her and that nothing befalls her, because it's awful to get things stolen from you. If there is a sense of humor in the world, however, it will turn out to have been a white man that stole from her and an immigrant who managed to find it and bring it back to her.
The Food and Drug Administration is suspending programs it uses to test foodstuffs for contamination and hostile micro-organisms as well as a program it uses to test the quality of milk.
The CDC has suspended a program that allowed them to put employees on cruise ships with the express intent of preventing outbreaks and spread of disease on those vessels where people are in close contact with each other for significant amounts of time.
These kinds of programs are from the wrecking ball of the unelected and the appointed, yes, but also they often betray a belief system that the things that are natural are superior to the things that are not, and that by embracing the natural world of our ancestors, we can provide simple solutions to complex problems. As is noted, most solutions to complex problems are simple, elegant, and wrong, but the people who are solutionists regularly discount the wrong or say that it is disinformation perpetuated by those with financial stakes in defeating their simple and elegant solutions.
Leading autism advocacy organizations, and also Autism Speaks, banded together to release a statement advocating for science, rather than for the pet beliefs of the Health and Human Services secretary, as the guiding principle for how you study and work with autism. This was in response to a proposed study that would reach invasively into the medical records of the people of the United States to find justification for a predetermined conclusion about what causes autism. After having the implications and the risk of data exposure splashed across news pages, Health and Human Services announced they would not be doing what the principal person speaking on the matter said they would do, but there is still the possibility of HHS continuing to try and find data to support a predetermined conclusion. Over in England, there is a proposal to have trans people get a mandatory screening for autism and ADHD, with the pretty clear implications that being trans may be spun as a symptom of neurodivergence, and not as something that needs specific care in addition to the neurodivergence. (Thanks,cosmolinguist, for helping me better understand the scope and the part of the process it is in.)
The Supreme Court of the United States seems poised to rule that the mere presence of queer people in books is sufficient grounds for a parent to pull their child out of a storytime on religious free exercise grounds, with such mere presence in a book considered "coercion" and an affront to religious beliefs. Congratulations, once again, queer people have great power to cause the straights to have a freak out. Which would be funny if it weren't the case that straight people having a freak out usually results in bad things for queer people.
As people who truly believe the conspiracies get elevated to leadership positions on the strength of a base that actually believes the conspiracy theories, the people who pretended to believe the conspiracy theories so as to boost their electoral numbers find once again, that the leopards do not care whose face is offered - they'll eat it all the same.
Those seeking insider access to the administrator were given the opportunity to inflate and pump up the value of his worthless memecoin, with a contest where the prize for holding the most of the worthless memecoin was dinner with the administrator. So there's plenty of personal gain for the administrator and the people managing the memecoin, with access to a government official as quo for the quid of spending money on the memecoin.
Those who have lived through authoritarian regimes have advice for the United States people who are living through their own authoritarian regime, most of which focuses on the need to stay united as a people, to protect those who will be targeted as Other, and to keep your eye on the ball. Among other things, that means understanding that copaganda is everywhere and the police are going to be both used and excused for everything they do with the intention of suppressing people and their ideas.
Rotifers continue to demand expanded understanding of science and life, because they refuse to fit into models we have already developed about what is alive, dead, and how things can survive dessification and the complete ceasing of cellular activity.
In technology, companies like Massive Blue are developing computer algorithms to catfish people online, for things as innocuous as "protesters," but which are likely being sold as catching "terrorists" before they can do anything. So, yeah, as usual, there are always going to be cops around, whether in person or online, and only some of the cops will identify themselves or be obvious enough to be understood as cops.
A new class of malware masquerades itself as a CAPTCHA or the "solution" to a problem that has people open a command prompt, paste in a malicious command, and then run it on their own computer. Which is another one of those situations where because companies have done things foolishly and ubiquitously, scammers and impersonators are able to do malicious things. Sigh. So I guess we have to think about that as a new vector of malware, too.
Community colleges and their online programs in the United States are being flooded with bots who try to pose as students long enough to get aid disbursements before disenrolling and taking the money with them. To try and keep the fa&ceedil;ade going, the bot accounts are now taking advantage of LLMs to submit work and try and give more verisimilitude to their false personas.
Tesla, the company, is alleged to be speeding up the odometers on their vehicles so that when those vehicles have issues, they're no longer covered by the company's original warranty. Other companies have also been accused of this in the past, and found to be doing so, so I would guess this is merely a matter of proving that it happened, rather than this being a fanciful allegation.
A Heritage Crafts organization in the United Kingdom using the same system as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to classify what crafts they consider extinct, endangered, and critically endangered in the country.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation would like us to install some custom firmware on hotspots so they can get better information about the use of cell tower impersonators and the techniques those impersonators use to try and make traffic more vulnerable to interception. Given that the people who manufacture them are not divulging details and the law enforcement entities that likely use them don't want to have to disclose any information, this is one of those times where information has to be gathered by people on the lookout for the devices.
The crosswalk buttons that were hacked to provide messages purportedly from billionaires about their amorality and desperation for human friends probably had their passwords left as a default value that a commonly-available application could then perform maintenance tasks on them with.
Bossware meant to make sure that employees aren't doing anything on work time that isn't work leaked millions of screenshots it took to the open web, thanks to a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket. The problem has been contained, but any of the possible data in those screenshots could have been used for compromise or worse. And also, this continues to show off just how foolish an idea it is to install bossware and nannyware on your computer that can take pictures of your work and then send it to others. If you can't trust your employees to do their work on time and with appropriate professionalism, then fix your office culture, your management structure, and your wage and compensation packages so that the people who apply to work for you will have an environment where they don't want to do terrible things and you don't have to monitor them constantly.
Build your company so that teams can do great things, and that normal engineers can put their effort into building, fixing, testing, and solving problems, rather than trying to hire and find the individual people who are 10x as good as their peers in all categories. (Because they don't exist. Someone might be very good at some things, but they're going to be normal or even sub-par at others.) Let normal people shine and create excellent teams, and things will go better and more consistently for everyone.
An excellent introduction to the idea of what LLMs are, what they do, how they are conditioned, and why calling them artificial intelligence is akin to having nightmares about card catalogs going feral. Very informative, and also very good at explaining why people who are trying to leverage LLMs to do specific kinds of work are going to fail, because the thing they want LLMs and similar to do requires things that those chatbots are not built to do. They can do potentially very interesting things, but those things they can do are very limited.
Microsoft has officially announced that Recall is rolling out to the kinds of PCs that can handle it, but at least it's opt-in and can be completely uninstalled. And given how little consumers are interested in having those kinds of functions on their machines, they're not buying the processors that have the capabilities for large model processing in them.
The chief of the Duolingo application and website has stated his intent to replace the human elements involved in language learning with machines and complex statistical models wherever possible. So you may want to move away from your streaks, if necessary, and onto another platform. It's likely a public library in the US has language-learning services also available.
The Reddit community r/changemyview has learned of an unethical experiment run on their posters a research cohort from the University of Zurich using LLM-generated comments, including comments specifically tailored to posters and commenters, to try and move their views on things. The breach of ethics is formidable, and both the mod community and Reddit itself are looking for accountability from the research team for what they did to the community.
Twenty years of git, a program that was designed for kernel development in the Linux project and then never really got all the nice improvements that Linus thought others would contribute. It got some, but nothing has yet really emerged that gives a git backend a nice and pretty frontend.
Last for tonight, A previously uncatalogued Mozart work has joined the others, and many a person lined up to hear the new single.
Porn addiction does not appear to be a thing. What does, however, appear to be a thing is that people with high religiosity (and thus a high likelihood of being told that the use of porn is badwrongevil) have worse negative self-image, and accompanying issues that come from that, from the moral conflict about using porn when you've been forbidden to.
A speech from someone who became a therapist to the autistic community because they were having trouble finding competent counselors for their own autism and the related demons that come from being neurodivergent in a conformity-enforcing world, and all the ways the process of becoming a therapist has failed them and failed other counselors by not giving them the opportunity to properly relate to the people trying to get something out of therapy.
And Mr. Oliver on Last Week Tonight about the considerable amount of bad faith and active cruelty being performed over a mostly nonexistent panic about trans women in sports.
(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.)
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A bookstore owner in Chelsea, Michigan, got the community to come out and help move the books from an old location to the new one. The volunteers formed a human chain and passed each of the books in stock down the line from the old space to the new one. The community did the owner a solid and showed that having a community around you is one of the best things for anyone.
On the importance of a sport bra, and the things that it actually needs to do to be effective, none of which necessarily have to do with how it looks to an observer.
I fear for the slush pile of an imprint that believes that young men just can't find anything they want to read, and is so inviting a focus on young and middle-aged men's writing about being young and middle-aged men, mostly because I think it will be sorely disappointing to many who believe themselves gatekept by all the women to find out that no, really, friend, the novel is not actually that good.
Pope Francis is dead at 88 years of age, and we can only hope that his successor continues to take the Catholic Church in many of the directions he was pulling them, toward greater tolerance and more Christian behavior.
The toady currently in charge of the Institute for Museum and Library Services is now demanding information from IMLS grantees to prove they're using their funds in ways defined by the flurry of executive orders against accurate history, the diversity of people, and acknowledging that the world is set up to benefit rich white men and that other people may need structural assistance in defeating that impediment, as well as asking how they're using their funds to teach media literacy (which they don't want, either.)
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has decided to adopt a sex-based definition of people, in defiance of reality. In their rush to exclude trans people, the ruling also provided a strict and mostly wrong definition of what a lesbian is.
Not wanting to waste an opportunity given to them, persons who want to make sure their transmisia is included in guidelines have demanded that the NHS change their guidelines to reflect their transmisia. Several politicians welcomed the ability to make transmisic statements in public and demand that trans people use incorrect bathrooms, and also that they have such developed observational powers that they can simply know who qualifies as a woman and who does not. Interim guidance from the people tasked with implementing the decision follows the same tack and insists that people should not be allowed to enter toilets if they have biology deemed incompatible, but also that trans people should not ever be in a situation where they have no toilet to use, and therefore, there will be an awful lot of complaining and trying to figure out how to thread that particular needle, since the obvious and correct solution ("stop trying to police where trans people pee") has been rescinded.
The British Medical Association called the ruling "scientifically illiterate," which seems appropriate and apt for a large amount of the trans panic going on and the justifications that people make for their transmisia. Disability Rights UK stood in solidarity, recognizing quickly that if one marginalized group is allowed to be picked off and harmed, that makes it that much easier for the next group. And also, possibly, because the government also intends to screw disabled people and cut massive amounts from the system that allows the disabled to live more independently.
Reasonable Access offers a page of advice on how to approach the necessity of asserting yourself during an episode of discrimination, especially if it's a regular thing that happens.
And, if you are so inclined, there is a myriad of possible protests to express your displeasure at this ruling and the people who have been hustling to try and stuff as much bigotry into public life while they have the opportunity. If you do, you'll be in good company from all the other people who have been expressing their displeasure. Calls are already underway to prevent any political party who endorses this ruling or their transmisia from taking part in Pride.
Those calls annoy the people who take offense to the idea that someone might disagree with the ruling or think that it's foolish and a terrible idea, and want to express that displeasure. They'll likely also be unhappy with the attempt to take the government to court in the European Court of Human Rights over the matter.
It would behoove other countries to enact refugee programs for transgender individuals trying to escape hostile regimes. Given how many of them there are, and that their number currently includes both United States and United Kingdom, it would be a good decision for any country that were willing to accept persons being persecuted for being trans. People are already looking for safer places to be.
Because, as one might expect, anti-trans venom is spreading to cis women who don't conform to someone's expectations of what a woman is, and therefore the person who got verbally assaulted got fired from her Wal-Mart job, because she apparently didn't report the incident to the right person. Wal-Mart says it was an error and have offered her to come back with back pay, but they've just demonstrated they are not trustrworthy and do not have the backs of their workers on something like this.
Retirement, as the concept is popularly known in our time, is a very recent invention - only a select few people were able to stop work entirely in their lives. Which still leaves a significant portion of the population as aged and either trying to or unable to work - the poor laws were meant to help them, but they could be widely-variable in who got relief, how much, and what conditions were applied to it, so it isn't necessarily a precursor to a pension system, either.
The ancient world of the Celts routinely had women in positions of power and wealth, according to the spate of burial artifacts unearthed in the area and dated. As the article points out, the fact that it keeps turning up this way has managed to finally get past those who would characterize women in power in the ancient world as a fluke, despite the Romans themselves making commentary on it regularly in their writings.
Our current era is one where people of wealth and power seem more than willing to bring about the end of the world so they can work through it in comfort and luxury and then rebuild to expand out their vision of what a post-apocalypse is. They're not interested in common people except where they have to be, and they'd rather replace common people with robots and artificial intelligence where possible, just to make sure there isn't any solidarity among humans.
A person who has never known the toll that student loan debt puts on people has said that she intends to start collections proceedings and other such punitive measures against those who haven't been able to pay their loans, and has the gall to say that it's something the taxpayer should be thankful to her about. These are also the people, however, when faced with the opportunity to forgive those debts and therefore help regular people out, kept insisting that it couldn't be done and that they had no intention of making it possible after the courts that favor the rich ruled that it couldn't be done by executive action. They do not have compassion for others, only greed for money, money they intend to extract from others to enrich themselves.
The rampage against right speech continues, as we now find the Agriculture Department may not refer to such anodyne things as "safe drinking water" and other such things that the current administration believes are a specific kind of unacceptable ideology, one that suggests rapacious capitalism and planetary destruction isn't an alloyed good. And the Education Department insists all the states must certify that they don't have anything to do with hiring and retaining the best people, teaching accurate history, and ensuring their students have the best environment to learn in, or they won't receive any already-appropriated funds.
A company that started providing logistical support to music festivals is now soaking in government contracts to provide tent cities for the people taken by ICE and those who are attempting to get asylum status in the United States. Which, in this era, definitely would qualify as profiting off the suffering of others.
And because they don't care about accuracy, or even whether or not their attempts are rightly pointed out as the frauds they are, the Administration is now trying to pass off a crudely doctored photo claiming a man detained in El Salvador has gang affiliation tattoos. As in "they have applied Microsoft Paint to a picture and are trying to pass it off as real." Even with obvious evidence to the contrary coming from a Senator visiting the person in question and photographs being taken of the real person's hand. It's about the power to do it, not about the accuracy or convincing-ness of the fake.
Several people who claim to be on the side of law enforcement are looking for whatever excuse they can find to detain and then arrest people for the crime of driving, working, or existing while brown, then turning them over to be deported for the crime of being brown, although the people doing the deporting usually dress it up as "re-entered the country after being deported at least once already." These are, of course, the people they want us to believe are violent gang members or invaders at the direction of a foreign power. Yes, even the doctoral students disappeared without due process, likely for the "crime" of being opposed to U.S. foreign policy in Palestine. And that includes the citizen arrested and detained on suspicion of being undocumented, who the immigration officials tried to say brought it upon himself for being brown and without obvious documentation of his citizenship, and then further tried to claim that the citizen declared himself to be undocumented and tried to turn himself in. Which is to say, the real reason is something that would get them in trouble, so the people doing the arresting told an obvious lie and expect us to believe them.
The people doing the arresting choose to break car windows and drag people from vehicles in the process of their arrests, while covering their identities and claiming they don't have to show anyone the legal orders that provoke these behaviors. Even when they don't have the correct person, they resort to violence and the assumption that they are correct. They do not care whether they have the correct person or not, nor do they care to stop when evidence that they have the incorrect person is easily available to them, instead choosing to continue terrorizing and stealing from those persons they are sent after. Even when the evidence proving them wrong is easily accessible and can be shown to them, they resort to violence on the assumption they are correct and any action taken is resistance that justifies their violence. (And, in this story, the local law enforcement officials are making up a reason to make someone appear at a certain time and day at a courthouse, where the immigration officials will arrest them and take them away.) The people trying to prevent the disappearance of others by masked and unidentified persons are being threatened with retaliation for their attempts to stop extrajudicial rendition, even though it's a feature of this entire situation that the people who claim to be agents of the government do not show their identification and do not show their faces, either.
Despite the argument that there's no way that this Administration could find and return a specific person from an El Salvador prison, there's plenty of opportunity for Republican lawmakers to go to that prison and make photo opportunities of themselves looking tough and strong with the backdrop of cruelty and inhumanity.
Persons seeking asylum in the United States from Afghanistan for reasons of religious persecution and their Christianity, or because they assisted the United States military in their time in Afghanistan, are being told they have to leave the country. Because the people pulling the levers are not actually Christian, despite what they may profess, but are instead the followers of TurboJesus or any number of heretical false visions of Jesus. They are willing to condemn people to death at the hands of a foreign government so that they don't have to do anything about the teachings regarding how you treat strangers in your midst.
An Australian with a valid visa to enter the country was accused of several things that have nothing to do with him or his work and was deported back to Australia, without any due process or ability to contest whatever reality-free charges were leveled against him, and now he has to stay in Australia for five years, while his entire life was in the United States. The people handling the detention and eventual deportation are characterized as thugs high on their own power (although not directly described as such), which is probably a kind description for them. Another person who was backpacking through the United States was refused entry to Canada and then held in immigration detention for significant time in the United States, and got to meet and draw many of the others in the same facility. A Canadian was detained for reasons that were not adequately explained and then wrote about the experience after she was released about all the other people who were still there, and the flimsy and unclear reasons they were still in immigration detention. Tourists who hadn't fully booked out their accommodations were arrested and then deported, on the incorrect accusation that they intended to work on a travel visa. Despite having the correct documents obtained that they could obtain that should have made them an easy case to grant entry to. As you can see, the people who have been hired to enforce racism as their primary job seem to be expanding outward into power-tripping against everyone they encounter, including people that the ones who want them to enforce racism would say are solidly part of Us instead of the Them they're supposed to be targeting. The obvious consequences is that not all that many people will come to the United States who otherwise would do so with the intent of seeing the sights and spending some money on tourism.
Canadians are being advised to do as much immigration work as they can while still in Canada, and not to travel to the U.S. without significant documentation and a phone that is not their regular one.
A United States-born lawyer who is definitely a citizen of the country has received a letter telling her to leave the United States because her 'parole' has been revoked. She works in immigration law, so it could either be a mistake, or an attempt at intimidation, and in this administration, the attempt at intimidation is the more likely action. The e-mail she received was like thousands of others, telling people on humanitarian parole in the United States that their parole was revoked and they had to depart immediately, even though many of the people supposedly affected by the order don't have e-mail. And the immigration lawyer was not the only citizen to receive the e-mail demanding their immediate departure from the United States, so once again, we have people flexing their power without regard as to whether they are getting the right people and not caring about the damage they are doing in their ignorance and foolishness. A Harvard scientist who may have new technique for imaging and analyzing those images to spot cancerous cells has been in immigration detention for months, because those who want to grab immigrants and find excuses for them to get deported don't care whether their excuses are flimsy or not.
The continued obstruction and refusal to follow court orders should result in contempt and other such charges against the administrators, but there's also the sign that at least two of the Supreme Court justices are engaging in contempt of themselves as well. A federal judge agrees and finds there is probable cause to hold this administration in contempt for their continued defiance of court orders regarding the movement of people. Since they're also untrustworthy to the point that the Supreme Court is dashing to injunct them against deporting, and they are documented as trying to evade orders and lie about their intentions to try and avoid court orders as well.
The people who are looking for excuses to arrest and deport immigrants have been targeting them when they appear for court dates for other issues, and have now arrested a judge they claim helped one of their targets evade them. Because they don't care that making courthouses places where people get arrested and deported means that fewer people will use the courts or appear for their stated dates and appointments. Which will also likely give those immigration officials convenient justification for arresting someone if they miss a court date. And also, if they're supposedly interested in the violent and the terrible, arresting people at courthouses means less people seeking relief from domestic violence or other such issues, so nice job breaking it, fools.
A scientist who may have developed a novel way to read microscope images that could be better at cancer detection at Harvard University is currently sitting in immigration detention. And because it's this administration, it's entirely possible she may be deported to a hostile country because this one wants to make everyone feel unwelcome.
The moments are here, and the question is who is actually listening to the alarm bells and who is trying to pretend them away or silence those ringing them.
A whistleblower complaint alleges that the unelected rampagers through government offices may have exfiltrated sensitive data from the National Labor Relations Board, while also trying to remove the logs of their work and leaving the security measures in place to prevent mishandling of data turned off., And beyond that, apparently, not that soon after the rampagers were in the system, a foreign IP address kept trying to log into the systems, with the credentials of accounts recently created by the wreckers. It's clear that these folks do not consider any data off-limits to them, and that they can use it for any purpose at all, regardless of what the law says or what protections are in place for them. And instead of fighting them and prosecuting them, the administration continues to hype them and say they're doing the job that they are nominally constructed to do.
Harvard University has decided they will not bow under to threats of having their funding removed for not remaking themselves into a fascism-friendly university. Several other universities are also pushing back against these threats and are organizing themselves into coalitions and mutual defense pacts. It helps to do this when you have significant reserves in your endowments so that you don't have to be dependent on federal funding to continue operations, research, and all the other things that make a university go. Harvard gets the headline because they're a prominent Ivy League school, but plenty of other universities are deep in their own lawsuits and defense mechanisms.
The administration could not keep two H. McMasters separated, and so the administrator called the one-time adviser and most recently punching bag, rather than the South Carolina governor that he intended to get a hold of. Incompetence is at all levels of this administration.
The current Homeland Security spokesmodel had her purse stolen from where she was taking her family to dinner. The purse also apparently contained a large amount of cash in it that was intended as the money to pay for the food and some Easter gifts. I hope the material is returned to her and that nothing befalls her, because it's awful to get things stolen from you. If there is a sense of humor in the world, however, it will turn out to have been a white man that stole from her and an immigrant who managed to find it and bring it back to her.
The Food and Drug Administration is suspending programs it uses to test foodstuffs for contamination and hostile micro-organisms as well as a program it uses to test the quality of milk.
The CDC has suspended a program that allowed them to put employees on cruise ships with the express intent of preventing outbreaks and spread of disease on those vessels where people are in close contact with each other for significant amounts of time.
These kinds of programs are from the wrecking ball of the unelected and the appointed, yes, but also they often betray a belief system that the things that are natural are superior to the things that are not, and that by embracing the natural world of our ancestors, we can provide simple solutions to complex problems. As is noted, most solutions to complex problems are simple, elegant, and wrong, but the people who are solutionists regularly discount the wrong or say that it is disinformation perpetuated by those with financial stakes in defeating their simple and elegant solutions.
Leading autism advocacy organizations, and also Autism Speaks, banded together to release a statement advocating for science, rather than for the pet beliefs of the Health and Human Services secretary, as the guiding principle for how you study and work with autism. This was in response to a proposed study that would reach invasively into the medical records of the people of the United States to find justification for a predetermined conclusion about what causes autism. After having the implications and the risk of data exposure splashed across news pages, Health and Human Services announced they would not be doing what the principal person speaking on the matter said they would do, but there is still the possibility of HHS continuing to try and find data to support a predetermined conclusion. Over in England, there is a proposal to have trans people get a mandatory screening for autism and ADHD, with the pretty clear implications that being trans may be spun as a symptom of neurodivergence, and not as something that needs specific care in addition to the neurodivergence. (Thanks,
cosmolinguist, for helping me better understand the scope and the part of the process it is in.)The Supreme Court of the United States seems poised to rule that the mere presence of queer people in books is sufficient grounds for a parent to pull their child out of a storytime on religious free exercise grounds, with such mere presence in a book considered "coercion" and an affront to religious beliefs. Congratulations, once again, queer people have great power to cause the straights to have a freak out. Which would be funny if it weren't the case that straight people having a freak out usually results in bad things for queer people.
As people who truly believe the conspiracies get elevated to leadership positions on the strength of a base that actually believes the conspiracy theories, the people who pretended to believe the conspiracy theories so as to boost their electoral numbers find once again, that the leopards do not care whose face is offered - they'll eat it all the same.
Those seeking insider access to the administrator were given the opportunity to inflate and pump up the value of his worthless memecoin, with a contest where the prize for holding the most of the worthless memecoin was dinner with the administrator. So there's plenty of personal gain for the administrator and the people managing the memecoin, with access to a government official as quo for the quid of spending money on the memecoin.
Those who have lived through authoritarian regimes have advice for the United States people who are living through their own authoritarian regime, most of which focuses on the need to stay united as a people, to protect those who will be targeted as Other, and to keep your eye on the ball. Among other things, that means understanding that copaganda is everywhere and the police are going to be both used and excused for everything they do with the intention of suppressing people and their ideas.
Rotifers continue to demand expanded understanding of science and life, because they refuse to fit into models we have already developed about what is alive, dead, and how things can survive dessification and the complete ceasing of cellular activity.
In technology, companies like Massive Blue are developing computer algorithms to catfish people online, for things as innocuous as "protesters," but which are likely being sold as catching "terrorists" before they can do anything. So, yeah, as usual, there are always going to be cops around, whether in person or online, and only some of the cops will identify themselves or be obvious enough to be understood as cops.
A new class of malware masquerades itself as a CAPTCHA or the "solution" to a problem that has people open a command prompt, paste in a malicious command, and then run it on their own computer. Which is another one of those situations where because companies have done things foolishly and ubiquitously, scammers and impersonators are able to do malicious things. Sigh. So I guess we have to think about that as a new vector of malware, too.
Community colleges and their online programs in the United States are being flooded with bots who try to pose as students long enough to get aid disbursements before disenrolling and taking the money with them. To try and keep the fa&ceedil;ade going, the bot accounts are now taking advantage of LLMs to submit work and try and give more verisimilitude to their false personas.
Tesla, the company, is alleged to be speeding up the odometers on their vehicles so that when those vehicles have issues, they're no longer covered by the company's original warranty. Other companies have also been accused of this in the past, and found to be doing so, so I would guess this is merely a matter of proving that it happened, rather than this being a fanciful allegation.
A Heritage Crafts organization in the United Kingdom using the same system as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to classify what crafts they consider extinct, endangered, and critically endangered in the country.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation would like us to install some custom firmware on hotspots so they can get better information about the use of cell tower impersonators and the techniques those impersonators use to try and make traffic more vulnerable to interception. Given that the people who manufacture them are not divulging details and the law enforcement entities that likely use them don't want to have to disclose any information, this is one of those times where information has to be gathered by people on the lookout for the devices.
The crosswalk buttons that were hacked to provide messages purportedly from billionaires about their amorality and desperation for human friends probably had their passwords left as a default value that a commonly-available application could then perform maintenance tasks on them with.
Bossware meant to make sure that employees aren't doing anything on work time that isn't work leaked millions of screenshots it took to the open web, thanks to a misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket. The problem has been contained, but any of the possible data in those screenshots could have been used for compromise or worse. And also, this continues to show off just how foolish an idea it is to install bossware and nannyware on your computer that can take pictures of your work and then send it to others. If you can't trust your employees to do their work on time and with appropriate professionalism, then fix your office culture, your management structure, and your wage and compensation packages so that the people who apply to work for you will have an environment where they don't want to do terrible things and you don't have to monitor them constantly.
Build your company so that teams can do great things, and that normal engineers can put their effort into building, fixing, testing, and solving problems, rather than trying to hire and find the individual people who are 10x as good as their peers in all categories. (Because they don't exist. Someone might be very good at some things, but they're going to be normal or even sub-par at others.) Let normal people shine and create excellent teams, and things will go better and more consistently for everyone.
An excellent introduction to the idea of what LLMs are, what they do, how they are conditioned, and why calling them artificial intelligence is akin to having nightmares about card catalogs going feral. Very informative, and also very good at explaining why people who are trying to leverage LLMs to do specific kinds of work are going to fail, because the thing they want LLMs and similar to do requires things that those chatbots are not built to do. They can do potentially very interesting things, but those things they can do are very limited.
Microsoft has officially announced that Recall is rolling out to the kinds of PCs that can handle it, but at least it's opt-in and can be completely uninstalled. And given how little consumers are interested in having those kinds of functions on their machines, they're not buying the processors that have the capabilities for large model processing in them.
The chief of the Duolingo application and website has stated his intent to replace the human elements involved in language learning with machines and complex statistical models wherever possible. So you may want to move away from your streaks, if necessary, and onto another platform. It's likely a public library in the US has language-learning services also available.
The Reddit community r/changemyview has learned of an unethical experiment run on their posters a research cohort from the University of Zurich using LLM-generated comments, including comments specifically tailored to posters and commenters, to try and move their views on things. The breach of ethics is formidable, and both the mod community and Reddit itself are looking for accountability from the research team for what they did to the community.
Twenty years of git, a program that was designed for kernel development in the Linux project and then never really got all the nice improvements that Linus thought others would contribute. It got some, but nothing has yet really emerged that gives a git backend a nice and pretty frontend.
Last for tonight, A previously uncatalogued Mozart work has joined the others, and many a person lined up to hear the new single.
Porn addiction does not appear to be a thing. What does, however, appear to be a thing is that people with high religiosity (and thus a high likelihood of being told that the use of porn is badwrongevil) have worse negative self-image, and accompanying issues that come from that, from the moral conflict about using porn when you've been forbidden to.
A speech from someone who became a therapist to the autistic community because they were having trouble finding competent counselors for their own autism and the related demons that come from being neurodivergent in a conformity-enforcing world, and all the ways the process of becoming a therapist has failed them and failed other counselors by not giving them the opportunity to properly relate to the people trying to get something out of therapy.
And Mr. Oliver on Last Week Tonight about the considerable amount of bad faith and active cruelty being performed over a mostly nonexistent panic about trans women in sports.
(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: 2025-05-04 12:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 03:54 am (UTC)Great phrasing.
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Date: 2025-05-04 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 07:24 am (UTC)It's wild knowing that 4chan, already the garderobe of the Internet, gets hacked because they ban a rival garderobe from spamming their lgbt board. Humanity can always go lower
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Date: 2025-05-04 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-05 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 04:24 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for putting all of this together.
One slight clarification: the NHS screening trans kids for autism is only a proposal and only in England (healthcare is devolved, so there are different systems in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales).
Being a proposal means it will (soon, allegedly) go out to public consultation. So I'm preparing to look out for and respond thoughtfully to that consultation.
This proposal is one of those from the infamous and inaccurate Cass Report, btw.
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Date: 2025-05-04 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 05:34 pm (UTC)The bookstore moving is very cool!
One link you might want to fix: the description of LLMs vs AIs, a better link might be
http://bactra.org/weblog/2025/04/16/. Not a terribly easy site to navigate.
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Date: 2025-05-04 08:54 pm (UTC)The bookstore move is one of those "we're not all assholes, no matter what our elected say." items.